October 13, 2007: Laura Takes the Walk

Taylor Hanson is Told Off, originally uploaded by Miss Laura M..

There is this moment when it all makes perfect sense. One minute I am walking in the street in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the next, I am watching Taylor Hanson get told off by an angry traffic cop.

He’s barefoot as this happens. He’s barefoot and wearing a Knight Rider-esque butterscotch leather jacket. And Raybans. He’s carrying a bullhorn.

And I want to call all those people immediately, the dozens and dozens who have asked, “Why Hanson?” Because I finally know the answer. The real answer, not the one I’ve been giving for years and years, the helpless shrug, the pointed, “Because they’re good.” And the answer is because they’re crazy because their fans are crazy because they’re crazy because their fans are crazy. It’s that simple. And I will rely on no documentary for this conclusion. I stand agape, hands shaking so hard that I can’t even compose the shot on my camera’s LCD screen, because I saw it rise up strange and obvious, right across the median.

The walk starts behind the busses and we’re on time but not early and the sun is slanted and autumnal but some girls opt for tank tops anyway, all the better to show off their rapidly fading summer tans. I am not at all a Southern girl in my fall coat with the big buttons, my gigantic purse. I have come to seduce no one, or maybe I have just fully come to terms with the fact that there is no one left to seduce, and there may not have been in the first place. Clearly these girls are about seven or eight concerts away from any similar realization.

As always, with anything involving Hanson, there is waiting. Kate and Casey discuss the ever-evolving hotness of Zac. Someone hands me a sticker. And then Taylor Hanson shows up with a bullhorn and a poster and some shoes and the crowd scatters, fast, and surrounds him, and he talks about AIDS in Africa.

The connection between these walks, and poverty and AIDS in Africa, and Hanson, and shoes, is sort of tenuous in my mind, and yet I have trouble criticizing the whole crazy thing because it’s obviously so heartfelt. Taylor means this shit, whatever it is that he means. I’m being partly facetious here: It’s no secret that poverty and AIDS in Africa are deeply interconnected. I still don’t totally get what the shoes have to do with it, though, although I admire and appreciate what Taylor is saying through that bullhorn (it’s red, like his tambourine): Get up off your ass and do something, even if it’s something small. And if you have enough energy and passion to wait for 14 hours on a freezing concrete sidewalk to see Hanson, if you can haul yourself to 36 shows in 12 different states, you have enough to change the world. He’s absolutely right about that, even if the complete mission statement doesn’t exactly fit on an index card.

So we walk. Funny thing, though. Charlotte, North Carolina is not exactly a comfortable city in which to walk. The route is sidewalk-free and full of scrubby weeds and construction signs, and the crowd almost immediately turns The Walk into The Run in an attempt to get some face time with Taylor and Zac, who are at the front. The crowd spills into the street, slowing traffic. Even my companions, who pride themselves on their non-fannish attitude toward both life and Hanson, decide to take a shortcut across a RiteAid parking lot in order to cut Tay off at the pass.

Halfway through, though, Taylor stops at a street corner and asks everyone to take off their shoes so that we might get a sense of what impoverished children deal with every day, but the broken glass at my feet proves more persuasive than JT and my ballerina flats stay put. Plus, this part smacks weirdly of new age-y Christian propaganda to my boundlessly cynical mind, and as a good Catholic Yankee living in an industrialized yet polluted nation, I decide not to increase my risk of plantar warts or typhus or whatever, and I remain sensibly shod on the street of Charlotte. Although again, I get the symbolic intended point. This is when the cop starts yelling at Taylor.

The cop is stopped at a red light in his cruiser and he sees this ginormous straggling business of us, and a kid with a bullhorn, so he gets out. And then he does the awesomest thing ever. He raises his arm and points his finger and goes, “I want to talk to you right now. You. YES, YOU.”

By “you” he unmistakably means Jordan Taylor Hanson.

So Jordan Taylor Hanson goes over, and he is, just to re-emphasize, barefoot. And wearing Raybans. And in a butterscotch Knight Rider-esque leather jacket. And flyaway-haired and huge-headed and so obviously, painfully Taylor Hanson in this moment that, for the first time in my life, I realize how physically strange he is, how his bigness is awkward when stood beside real human people, how he is jangly-limbed and weird on the eyes.

And then something unbelievable happens. Taylor does not apologize to the furious policeman. He does not make any immediate promises about rectifying the problem (getting a permit; clearing people out of the street, which even I can recognize is necessary). He does not even recognize that there is, in fact any problem.

Taylor Hanson starts talking to this buzz-cut, Southern, Charlotte traffic cop about AIDS in Africa.

It is immediately obvious that this whole spectacle is somehow directly related to the fact that Taylor has never been to real school, and yet, in the moment, I can not pinpoint exactly how. All I know is that my instinct is clear: I want to dart out into the street, to put myself between Taylor and the policeman and calmly explain things to both parties, to act as rockstar-police liaison and interpreter. Mostly, though, I want to protect this very clueless boy, not from the cop, but from himself. And then I want to warn him that the fashion police are coming for him next.

By some miracle, no one is arrested. Later, we will discuss at length how cool it would have been to see Taylor stuffed, screaming, into the back of the cruiser, limbs flailing like a day-old doe. An arrest and an embolism in one week? Rock and roll, baby.

By the time Taylor and the good officer part ways, some people in the crowd are shouting some nonsense about the right to assemble and, again, impoverished children in Africa. Taylor uses the bullhorn then to tell people to get out of the street, more or less in those words.

This is when Ike runs in. Somehow a brisk city walk seems ill-advised when you’re still bandaged wrist to shoulder from life-saving cardiovascular surgery, but so does playing guitar for 600 screaming young women, so what do I know. I admire, though, his ability to play it all low-key and subtle. Almost no one sees him as he enters the throng and makes his way to the front.

We arrive back at the venue to find that the officer who spoke to Taylor has called for backup. We’re greeted by three more cops… on Rollerblades. Clearly a riot was expected. They do admonish, however, in the sternest voices they can muster, that we are to stay on the sidewalk and only on the sidewalk.

Taylors offers some parting words to the crowd, including the brazen statement that we “really weren’t being all that unsafe.” Isaac then takes the bullhorn out of his hands and says, very Dad-like, “Get off. The street. Thank you.”

And then someone stamps my hand and it’s over and I’m wondering what in the world I just did and why, but I definitely know, at least, that it involves impoverished children in Africa and shoes and possibly a bullhorn. But somehow, too, I understand it. Because I have watched these boys long enough to understand their mangled, innocent, and ultimately good-hearted and right-headed intentions, even if the way to them is paved with every kind of awkwardness. Is it all that different with their music or their fans?


And if you need to risk arrest for anything, maybe Taylor is right. Better that it’s for something important and huge—a single starving child—than for a traffic violation on sleepy city street.

Posted by That Laura Person | 2:04 PM | 12 comments | link |