Hey, Rebecca

I sit down with the artist who accidentally (kind of) wrote my personal diss track

Not long ago I was on a Zoom call with Pat McGee, frontman of the Pat McGee Band. On that bright, sunny morning, we weren’t meeting to talk about the songwriting process (although we did) or an upcoming album (although we did that too).

We were musing over how he had come to write a diss track about me 30 years ago, which was particularly odd because we’d never met.

If you were alive in the ‘90s and remotely aware of the music scene in the broader mid-Atlantic region, you probably know the Pat McGee Band and you probably know the song. If you’re a Richmonder, you definitely do. In the mid-nineties Richmond was a veritable factory of musical guests for Letterman and SNL – the Dave Matthews Band, Cracker, Seven Mary Three, Everything, Fighting Gravity (whose high-energy ska-pop shows at the Flood Zone were my standing Friday night plans from the moment I could drive to the day I left for college)....My county produced D’Angelo, for fuck’s sake.

It was a scene, and the Pat McGee Band loomed large in it. Pat had started as a solo act, a guy with a guitar playing cover tunes every week at the bars near Longwood College in Farmville. Eventually he penned his own songs, and his first album, From the Wood, featured the very first song he ever wrote, the signature track that would become the band’s most enduring hit. “Rebecca” appeared on the next two Pat McGee Band albums - the indie release Revel (1997) and Shine (2000), the band’s first major label release. It was a staple of live shows too, sometimes the opener but usually the finale or the encore.

“I will never not want to play it,” McGee explained. “It’s very easy on the ears.”

The Longwood bar crowd agreed back then, by the way: “It was like they were hearing freakin’ ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ or something.”

This should have thrilled me when the song first came out. I was always jealous of friends whose names were also song titles. It was the ‘80s, I was an elementary schooler, and my friend Sarah was all over the radio thanks to Starship Enterprise’s smash hit “Sara.” My mom, Gloria, was immortalized in songs by both Van Morrison and Laura Branigan. (She has pointed out that Gloria is a bit of a ho in both, but the songs are straight-up bangers. Worth it.) I was even convinced that my friend Elaine could claim the Beatles - the Beatles! - because I fully believed they were singing, “And then Elaine is in my ears and in my eyes.”

So before I even took the training wheels off my Carebears bike, I knew that hearing your name in a song was…well, whatever the six year-old version of the biggest fucking deal was.

Imagine my squeal of delight when, at 17, I spied my own name on the track list of Revel. My name on a local favorite’s hot new album! It had to be fated.

Then I listened to it.

“Anybody out there wanna help Rebecca find a clue to life?” Pat crooned.

It wasn’t a soaring anthem to the beautiful Rebecca. It was a diss track.

“Everybody knows you can’t read the writing on the wall
So don’t come in
Even you and I know you can’t
And you don’t want to start this thing all over again

Why don’t you just drive on down that line?
‘Cause we don’t have to let you in
Well, you seem to think you know it all
Let me tell you something - you can’t win”

This Rebecca tried too hard, and everyone clocked her from the moment she walked in the room, awkward in stilettos. It was galling to hear – not because he had gotten me wrong, but because I knew he hadn’t. When “Rebecca” played, Pat’s breezy lyric tenor read me to filth. What if he was right?

At some point in my adolescence, I had concocted the idea that I was a cautionary tale. Fated, yes, to be… just average and forgettable. I had watched friends of mine effortlessly excel at sports, hold court in a room full of peers, make everyone laugh, wow audiences with their musical talent, and rise to the top of the class – all while fearing I was bound for the middle. With exceptional people around me, I reasoned, it logically flowed that there must be unremarkable people to balance them out, and I was certain that was me – a high enough class rank to get into the colleges I’d set my sights on, but not enough to be scholarship material; a passion for sports but utterly mediocre skills (see also musical ability); a decent circle of friends but not the girl you think of when you’re thinking of anything at all.

It wasn’t just a song with my name in the title. It was a garish spotlight confirming every negative idea I had about myself. Maybe if someone else thought these things about “Rebecca,” then they were also true of Rebecca. Of me.

It has taken a long time to shed these notions of predetermination rooted in misplaced juvenile existential doom. It’s been my life’s work. At some point I began to call out the critic in my own head, to crack myself open – a process that is not for the faint of heart. Once I heard the awful shit I was saying to myself, I could banish it. Who really tells themselves that they’re destined for mediocrity or failure? I would never have said that to a friend of mine. I probably wouldn’t even have said it to an enemy.

So why did I ever think it was okay to say it to myself?

And what about the other Rebecca, for that matter – the one who had inspired the song in real life, not just in my head? Who the hell was she, and where was she now? Was she alright after being left behind, as Pat McGee and his bandmates, in perfect harmony, had clearly told her they would do? Was she another cautionary tale? Or did she move on just fine from McGee’s harsh read?

There was only one way to find out. I had to talk to Pat McGee. I had to get the full tea on Rebecca.

It wasn’t the story I was expecting.

There was no Rebecca.

“I didn’t want to offend anyone,” McGee explained, “and I didn’t know anyone named ‘Rebecca,’ so I just made her up.”

While McGee was navigating college life, he was observing (as writers do) the people around him. “I felt like I was watching people not be able to handle themselves and having all sorts of drama.”

Rebecca wasn’t a person but a composite – McGee had noticed some group dynamics at play with college girls and given them a name. My name.

“I was just trying to politely tell this group of girls - again, I can’t picture faces - like, get your shit together,” he explained.

The song with my name had nothing and everything to do with me.

I wasn’t one of the girls Pat observed in Farmville, but I absolutely was a college freshman once - just one town over - with no idea what I was doing and no sense of how to get my shit together.

I got shitfaced at parties sometimes. I did stupid, embarrassing things, like accidentally start bar fights in Tampa (which is not hard to do, in my defense). I tried and failed at many things, and I didn’t play it safe.

I don’t regret it at all. I know my demons up close and personally, by name, like a hometown bartender. I’m not afraid of them at all. And you know what? I’d rather have a diss track than a paean to my grace, beauty and charm. In art, villains are so much more interesting than heroes. Love songs are nice, sweet things. Diss tracks are magnetic, memorable. I’m glad I - we, the Rebeccas - made an impression when we were being our messiest selves in the loudest possible way. I’m happy I didn’t shrink myself to seem nice. The last 30 years have been a continual process of finding that feral self again.

I have to confess that this article is something of an exorcism. “Rebecca” landed so hard with me as a teenager because I had already written my own diss track. So the only way to end this essay is with a love letter to my messiest, cringe-iest, hot homemade shit self. The one who peed on a Fiat in Rome two years ago who puked in public after a Thursday football game, who took it too far, who was too damn much. This is for her.

As for the version of Pat McGee who brought his guitar to Longshotz bar every Tuesday - well, what was life like for a college kid with a guitar and a reservoir of talent, about to write his first song?

“I just had to crank out some lyrics,” he explained. “And it’s intimidating and embarrassing when you’ve never done it. What do you say? I tried to keep it vague.“ He might have clocked me from a mile away, but he was a college kid too, trying to figure things out.

Pat McGee now? Well, there is a new album in the works. Does “Rebecca” deserve a reboot?

“Sometimes I don’t even think about these things when I’m singing them. This is going to be good. You’re going to hold me to task when I write these new lyrics for this new record because I’m really going to be thinking about this now,” McGee muses.

“If I have a song on the next record, you’ll have to be like, ‘I made that happen.’”

Maybe I did.