In the earliest days of the pandemic, before words like “pre-symptomatic” and “super-spreader” became part of our everyday vocabularies, before we started trading sourdough starters or collecting store-brand two-ply, Roger Bennett was carefully adding song after song to a massive Spotify playlist. He included everything from Pleased to Meet Me-era Replacements, to the suburban Georgia jangle-pop of Guadalcanal Diary, to the hormone-soaked swagger of the early Beastie Boys. He called the playlist “America Sounded Like This to Young Me.”
For Bennett, who is one half of the Men in Blazers soccer podcast-turned-NBC Sports show, those songs sent him back to Liverpool, England, when he was a lonely teen sitting on a city bus, wondering if he’d ever get closer to the United States than pressing play on a John Mellencamp cassette. They also helped him relieve those years as he wrote (Re)Born in the USA: An Englishman’s Love Letter to His Chosen Country, released earlier this week
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“I retreated into the past, because the present was so filled with challenges,” he told VICE. “When I built that huge playlist, I flung in all of the songs that had once thrilled me, and they gave me incredible strength, incredible joy. They were like breadcrumbs scattered in the enchanted forest that I’d walked through to get here.”
The ‘here,’ at the end of that sentence could be the ‘here’ that means finishing the book, or it could be the ‘here’ that means the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where he currently lives. It doesn’t wreck the ending of (Re)Born in the USA to say that Bennett became an American citizen three years ago—which he describes as “the single greatest achievement of my life”— but the book does help to explain why he wanted it so badly.
(Re)Born in the USA is Bennett’s real-life coming-of-age story, about how he grew up in a then-fading English port city, dreaming about moving to America—about being American—and absorbing as much of our exported culture as he could watch on one of Britain’s four television channels, hear on the radio, or have mailed special-order across the Atlantic.
Bennett’s book is cinematic in a way that most memoirs aren’t, and it’s not because he seems to have survived on whatever vital nutrients he could extract from John Hughes movies. It’s largely because of the music references throughout, the way he remembers the songs that played on repeat at the parties that he was invited to, and at the parties that he wasn’t. His love for— and reliance on—music feels both deeply personal and applicable to anyone whose teen years weren’t a well-scripted rom-com. VICE recently talked to Bennett about the songs that mattered to him then, about the records that he still listens to, and about the one that changed his life.
VICE: When you were back there in Liverpool, thinking about America all of the time, sleeping underneath the American flag that you’d painted on your wall, what was this country to you? Did it seem like a real, tangible thing, or just an idea, or a fictitious place like Narnia that you’d only read about in books?
Bennett: It was a survival mechanism, really. It was a place where I dreamt life could be lived in glorious Technicolor, with alternative possibilities to the ones that surrounded me—which didn’t feel like they were possibilities at all.
Liverpool seemed like it was maybe not the best place to be during the 1980s.
Liverpool is the most magnificent city in the world, but I grew up in a terribly hard time, not just for Liverpool, but for the north of England. The South was rising as a financial center, but at the cost of the North. The coal mines closed, the steel mills shut down, the cotton [manufacturing] was slashed, and Liverpool was a port city that no longer had any goods coming through it. We really had no purpose. Unemployment was high, there was a heroin epidemic taking over, and the city was really demonized at the time by [Prime Minister Margaret] Thatcher, who used it as a scapegoat to justify the treatment of the North in General.
So how far did that life feel from the life you wanted?
Manchester, which was just 35 minutes away, felt far away. Going there felt like walking into a Star Wars cantina, a place where life is lived by different rules. London was like…I mean, it’s not like we were medieval, where to go to London you’d go on an ass and it would be a journey that took 11 days, but going to London was a big culture shock. America was like Mars, but we were able to access it through the movies, books, television shows, and the sports that began to trickle over.
But you sought those things out too. In the book you wrote about getting Rolling Stone magazine—
I got Rolling Stone on special order, and it would arrive weeks after it and come out [in the U.S.] with people on the front cover that I’d never heard of. I’d look at Don Johnson, and he’d be wearing a color like teal that hadn’t even been invented in England yet, and I’d have to wait at least a year for Miami Vice to come out [in the U.K]. But I could read these incredible record review sections and the college charts at the back, full of bands I’d never heard of, and the music was the one thing that was really actionable under my own control.
Is that how you ended up getting some of the really obscure stuff from bands like The Windbreakers or Guadalcanal Diary or Jason and the Scorchers?
[Rolling Stone journalist] David Fricke would write about whatever new band was great, and I’d write it down on a list, go to Penny Lane Records, put in a special order and like three weeks later, it would be shipped over. I’d be walking through the kind of oily-puddled streets of Liverpool, but when I’d have, you know, the Violent Femmes album, it felt like I had a slice of LA or Chicago, or in their case, Milwaukee, on my cassette player. It felt like I was there, it transported me. And there was something bizarrely important to me, something about the feeling that I was probably the only person to own a Tail Gators album, definitely in Liverpool, probably even the whole of Britain.
Was seeking out some of those bands in any way a defense mechanism? You wrote about feeling sort of lonely and socially isolated, so did you consciously feel like ‘It’s OK that I don’t have anyone to talk about [The Georgia Satellites’] “Battleship Chains” with, because they wouldn’t know what that is anyway?’
Yeah, and you just had that interaction between you and the music, and the fact that you couldn’t talk to anyone was what you wanted. Like “I’m listening to the Georgia Satellites now, it’s just me and the Georgia Satellites, they understand me, you don’t understand me.” I probably put my faith in some pretty misplaced sources, but the fact that these bands weren’t big kind of reinforced my loneliness and longing, and the dreams that I really harbored.
One of the, let’s say, brand-name musicians that you referenced a lot was John Mellencamp.
“Pink Houses” didn’t chart in the United Kingdom, but my God, that was one of the few singles I purchased and loved immediately. Obviously now I know that the song is about the masses who live uncritical lives and follow one another like lemmings, but from the perspective of my bedroom in fairly cruel conditions in 1980s Liverpool, I thought “A vacation down in the Gulf of Mexico just sounds unbelievable. Sign me up!”
I loved that you included “Minutes to Memories” on your (Re)Born playlist. That’s an all-time favorite of mine.
I would listen to that by myself on a bus, so he’s on his Greyhound, and I’m on the No. 68 bus home from school, which was a terrifying place to be. This bus always kicked off, you got on genuinely crapping your pants, because we went to a private school, so we were just prime pickings for the random gangs from other schools. I was just surrounded by the ever-present, ominous sense of imminent violence on this packed bus, and I’d put my headphones on, and Mellencamp would be singing about his bus journey, and I’d put my head against the window and make-believe that I was on that Greyhound bus to Nashville instead. What I got from that song was that you can access wisdom on a Greyhound bus that can be deeply profound and life-changing, and on that 68 bus in which everyone apart from me was aching for a fight, it was probably the life-changing lines that I emotionally connected to the most.
Another album that you described as a “sacred item” was Run-DMC’s Raising Hell.
I’d never really heard hip-hop before, and Raising Hell changed almost instantly the kind of music that I was fascinated by. The witticism, the emotional intelligence of the lyrics, the swagger: it made me realize that so much of the music I had listened to was so deeply passive and kind of wistful. I just listened to the whole album through this morning, and my God, it still sounds unbelievable.
And you got into the Beastie Boys at about the same time, and it seemed like they were quite important to you, at a time when you were trying to reinvent yourself a little bit.
The Beastie Boys and License to Ill just crashed onto our shores at the very time when we, at about 15 or 16, were let loose into the bars, pubs, and clubs of Liverpool. It was really the soundtrack of peak adolescent insanity. To be honest, we didn’t understand the accents properly or understand half the references. When they said “You’re from Secaucus, I’m from Manhattan, You’re jealous of me because your girlfriend is cattin’’ I think ‘jealous’ and ‘Manhattan’ were the only two words we actually understood.
Is that an album you still listen to?
Musically, I much prefer Paul’s Boutique. I listen to that all the bloody time. License to Ill is obviously an album that has aged terribly, but I do listen to it, just to experience sense memory. That takes me back to when I had a Budweiser pork pie hat that I’d sent off for by mail-order from St. Louis, I had a pair of Converse All-Stars like I’d seen them wear in a photograph, and it just takes me back to all the feelings that I was experiencing—good or bad—in that time.
In the final chapter of the book, you wrote that Tracy Chapman saved your life, after a teacher played her first record for you.
It’s true. I’ve talked about Tracy Chapman forever on my show and, to begin with, people used to laugh and think I was being ironic, but that was an album I listened to over and its impact on me was enormous. When you listen to music at that age, you listen through your own singular selfishness, and I believed that in this case, Tracy was singing to me. It was like “Big bold changes need to be made, make them quickly, don’t make excuses why not. Get out why you still can.” “Fast Car” was just the single most human track I’d ever heard, and [the lyric] “We’ve got to make a decision, leave tonight or live and die this way,” when I’d play that, I knew in my mind exactly what my decision was.
Do you think you would’ve ended up learning the same lessons or making the same choices if that teacher had played something else?
I’m a firm believer that you can’t be hypothetical about history. It’s impossible for me to tell, but if he’d been like ‘Rog, here’s some Def Leppard’ it probably would’ve ended very, very differently.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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