Ceremony

Of all the songs I have either in mp3 or CD form, this song, "Ceremony," probably holds the distinction of being represented by the greatest number of bands: Joy Division, New Order, Galaxie 500, and Radiohead. It's one of those rare songs--the only one of its kind that I know of--that's been given a proper studio recording by almost every band to play it except the one that wrote it, especially if you count Joy Division and New Order as separate entities (and you probably should).

Although I'm crazy about all things Joy Division, I actually am not that interested in New Order; thus, I hadn't ever heard "Ceremony" until the Radiohead live in-studio cover on their "Thumbs Down" webcast a couple weeks back. It wasn't like Thom was getting down with "Transmission" or "New Dawn Fades," but I decided to take what I could get, and for the first time I heard "Ceremony," and realized what a fantastic song it actually is. It's in a major key, but in the same way that "Atmosphere" is in a major key; it's the resigned melancholy after rage and frustration have passed, after tension's snapped and hope's been annihilated. It's a funeral on a sunny day. In a way, it's fitting that both "Atmosphere" and "Ceremony" were among the last songs Ian Curtis ever wrote, and have more of a message-from-beyond quality than even anything on Closer with the possible exception of "Decades."

However, while "Atmosphere" exists in impeccably arranged and polished form truly becoming of its name, Ian died before recording an organized studio rendition of "Ceremony," leaving Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris to put the pieces of the song together as New Order. Only two Joy Division versions of "Ceremony" exist and will ever exist, one of which was taken from a rehearsal recording.

The other was from Joy Division's last show on May 2, 1980 at Birmingham University, just over two weeks before Ian Curtis died, which was the first, last, and only time Joy Division ever performed the song publicly. The historical significance of the gig is only a small fragment of the recording's mystique: the Birmingham recording was crude and lo-fi, like most Joy Division live recordings--the recording starts in the middle of the measure; the drums are way too loud; the guitar and bass, while brutal and thrashing, sound like they're in a different room from the drums; Sumner hits a few bum notes, as if he hasn't completely learned the song yet.

But the kicker is this: Ian Curtis' mic is dead for the entire first verse, and during this time one can only hear his voice faintly coming through one of the instrument mics while Sumner, Hook, and Morris rage all around. His mic is apparently turned on during the first guitar solo--Sumner's guitar suddenly gets louder as a result of bleed--and Curtis crashes into the mix, in the same room as the guitar and bass, with, "oh, I'll break them down, no mercy shown" at the beginning of the second verse, and sounds like he can barely breathe, every single shouted word seemingly being borne on the very last breath in his lungs. His voice sounds like it could crack on the next consonant; the sound is so desperate and tense one can hear his throat, his entire body straining to its limits to deliver the lyrics. And the mic apparently goes out again after the second verse; either that, or Curtis was singing the "watching love grow, forever" refrain in nothing more than a whisper, and the rest of the band plows forth through the outro without him.

The effect, 27 years later (enough time for another rock star to have been born, gotten famous, and killed himself, I morbidly observe), is that even on that day, in Birmingham, it seemed Ian Curtis was frozen in media res and already being carried off into the past on the strength of his brief flame, drowned in the din of history, but for less than a minute managed to cry out loud enough to be heard across nearly three decades of mythologizing. For one verse, it's clear even to some punk kid who wasn't even born until six years after Curtis died how much substance was in that music; yet, though we listen to the songs on repeat day after day, letting a shard of history penetrate this deep into our hearts makes the divide between present and past more desolate still.

Rumor has it that when Bernard Sumner was trying to figure out the lyrics to "Ceremony" to sing in New Order after Curtis died, he had to re-equalize the rehearsal tape to figure out what Curtis had been singing. So who knows if Sumner, or Dean Wareham, or the guy from Xiu Xiu, or Thom Yorke ever got it right; the real lyrics to "Ceremony" may be lost, and if they're lost, they're lost for good. "Ceremony" isn't a monument, and it isn't a legacy, of Joy Division; "Ceremony" is the ghost of Joy Division and Ian Curtis, something half-seen out of the corner of one's eye, something that haunts the world and infiltrates the form of the living, and when the likes of Yorke and Wareham give a gentler voice to the words, they're underscored by the shadow of Ian Curtis, and we intersect his stalled trajectory briefly before rushing once again from that static moment in time, as the living do from the dead.