One essay + One poem = Poets off Poetry, a (mostly) monthly series where poets write about what they've been listening to lately, and its sometimes ancillary results.
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The Sheer Dazzle of the Vocabulary by Erin Belieu
If you’re wondering whether you’re a dick jockey (also known as a rock blocker or ADH-DJ), here are some questions to ask yourself: do you come to the party with your own mixed CDs, hijack the stereo and force your friends into listening to 30 seconds of a dozen different tracks? Do you not so secretly desire complete control over the car stereo on long road trips? Have you ever spent a ridiculous amount of time ferreting out every cover of a certain song just so you can record all of them back to back and make your own comparisons? Again, have you ever trapped and tortured people with these monuments to your own musical obsessions? Is this sounding familiar?
[EDITOR'S NOTE: YES, VERY FAMILIAR,THOUGH I WOULD PREFER TO BELIEVE THAT IT WAS NEVER, EVER TORTUROUS.]
I’ll call myself a recovering dick jockey—that is, most of my obnoxious tendencies were eventually beaten out of me by the realities of having a grown-up job and a small child to look after. But once upon a time I was that girl who worked at the record store who could talk rare bootlegs and indie bands with the best of them. My record store was one of the great old independent joints, complete with racks of moldering vinyl, a weird older guy in charge of the jazz imports who’s been “finishing” a PhD forever, a place where the employees are tacitly encouraged to abuse the customers for their bad taste (since the only acceptable bad taste is ever one’s own). I found that one of the most peculiar things about working at a record store is that once you’ve worked there long enough your taste becomes so eclectic it’s as if you don’t have any specific taste at all. By the time I left the store in the early 90’s, my music collection exhibited a pointed case of multiple personality disorder—Enrico Caruso meets The Mekons meets NWA meets Martin Denny, so to speak.
I played trombone badly for 7 years. It turns out no matter how I tried I was never able to learn to read music. In my family, discovering this about me was like discovering some hidden birth defect. My secret tail, as it were. And despite my father’s frequent speeches selling the trombone’s unrecognized nobility, I never took to it. Sure, it was kind of fun attempting the long, flatulent slides on “The Tiger Rag,” (possibly the only “trombone moment” anyone could ever name), but who volunteers to be the girl in Jr. High playing the trombone? Let’s see: the badly permed hair, the freaky puberty body, the glasses, the braces. Check. And then the trombone? The break up came when a mean girl in my 9th grade class waited until my back was turned at the bus stop and clocked me with my own instrument, case and all.
But voice. The human voice married to language, raised in song—that most elevated, bodily expression of rhyme and rhythm. That’s what I’ve cared for most passionately in music. And it turns out that while I lack any instrumental ability, the fates decided to give me a reasonably good singing voice. It isn’t a big voice and I have to work hard to achieve any vibrato, still it’s a good-natured alto and very true in pitch. But there’s usually a catch, isn’t there? Because those fairy godmothers of our personal destinies, famous for their bed-side humor, gave me the gifts of inclination and ability, but added to this my history of unpredictable panic attacks when I speak (much less attempt to sing!) in public. Even walking into a karaoke bar makes me feel sweaty. And how deeply I envy them, those unselfconscious boobs fueled on sake and Coors Light, happily butchering electronic drum versions of “Baby Got Back” and “Bohemian Rhapsody". The sad truth is I have been an ardent singer for many years, trapped in the closet of my anxiety, incapable of performing in front of any kind of audience other than my young son (who is in fact the best audience--singing for him has turned out to be one of the most surprising pleasures of motherhood).
So from the beginning, due to a lack of and a little ability, I paid a great amount of attention to singers and what they were singing. My strongest recollections from childhood are infused with the soundtrack of various lyrics, centering mostly on the old, classic era show tunes my father played for me as a small child. On Sunday evenings, after dinner was finished and before bed, my father would haul out his own stack of vinyl, a cache of original cast albums from shows he loved and sometimes played for in touring companies. My mom and brother would eventually wander off, having heard the stories of his swinging bachelor days once too often, but I’d sit there as long as he’d let me, listening to him explain the stories behind each show and detailing the musical performances.
One I remember vividly was from the original 1954 cast album of The Pajama Game,
distinctively the only musical to ever center on a labor dispute. Here the striking pajama factory workers are dreaming hopefully of what they’ll do with their raises if the union wins:
"Seven and a half cents doesn’t buy a hell of a lot/seven and a half cents doesn’t mean a thing. /But give it to me forty hours, forty hours in every week, and that’s enough for me to be living like a king!”
And another fond memory is this wonderfully rhymed lyric from the show Guys And Dolls.
Here the psychosomatic Adelaide diagnoses the result of being unable to coax her low-life boyfriend into marrying her:
"You can spray her wherever you figure the streptococci lurk/You can give her a shot for whatever's she's got, but it just won't work/If she's tired of getting the fish eye from the hotel clerk/A person can develop a cold."
How the rhymes, repetitions and meter delighted the 6 year old me! And the sheer dazzle of the vocabulary made up for the fact that I had no clear idea of what a streptococci was or what a labor union actually did. Those songs seemed to me a direct message sent from the glamorous world of grown ups, an excitingly off-color place, where you could have dramatic affairs, swear with impunity and argue passionately about politics, where life was full of cocktails and nightclubs and all the other good naughty bits that were kept strictly off limits from children.
the most oxymoronically buoyant musical to come out of the Great Depression:
And speaking of Fred Astaire, one of the great song stylists, check out this clip of him singing (and, of course, dancing) Johnny Mercer’s “One For My Baby.”
My on-going fascination with Astaire was forged early when my father told me that, like us, he had been born and raised in
Nebraska. For a girl from Omaha, knowing that this incomparably soigne creature had gone to high school just down the road gave me some small hope for a more interesting future than I could ever see out my door. Astaire’s performance here is from the film version of the 1943 show The Sky’s The Limit for which the tune was written. I know a lot of people would argue that “One For My Baby” is absolutely owned by Frank Sinatra and there’s a case to be made for that opinion. But as a bartender I know says, there are as many kinds of drunks as there are drinks out there. It’s true, Sinatra’s version is superb—his voice and timing embody the air of “metropolitan melancholic beauty” for which the writer John O’Hara praised the song—but what I love about Astaire’s lesser-known version is the many mood changes his performance of the song goes through—Astaire’s stylized precision of phrasing, his attempts to “maintain” (I think many of us know that feeling), his voice walking the limp tightrope of gentlemanly depression. The champagne bubble topping the song’s vocal performance is Astaire’s dancing of it at his absolute finest, angry and elegant, unencumbered by any bedazzled baggage and allowed to act something more complex than his typical role of boyish smoothie.
Probably old songs like these aren’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it seems a shame to me that so many self-proclaimed music lovers, as well as poets, are also total chauvinists about the “show tune.” Maybe it makes sense if all you’ve ever been exposed to is the over-produced goo of Andrew Lloyd Webber and that excruciating ilk. But there’s so much vital word play, wicked innuendo, old school charm (remember charm?) and literary elegance in those old songs. Add to this music being sung by some of the 20th century’s greatest vocalists, performed by some of the hottest bands to ever come together in an orchestra pit, and you’re missing a great deal of pleasure as well as poetic instruction if you’re not willing to give it a listen.
But if you decide you want to give it a try, I just happen to have my own mixed CD of every known version of “I Love You, Porgy” sitting right here…
Manners Are Stronger Than Laws
--for Robert Pinsky
Commit Random Acts Of Kindness is what
the bumper sticker says
on the car that’s just cut me off in traffic
driven by a woman who then
gives me the finger. I think of another incident,
twenty years ago: though then I wasn’t eating
sushi off the passenger seat of my Volkswagen sedan,
late to pick up my son from his private school. Then
I was a community college scrub on the six-years-
and-counting plan, late for the record store
where bong hits were corporate policy and
Christian Death’s Only Theatre Of Pain was racked
under “Gospel.” That time, the finger belonged to a lady
in a new, silver Mercedes who looked pleasantly chilled,
like something served at a benefit luncheon, adorned
with a garnish I wouldn’t know
not to eat. How precisely I still feel it—
the lady in the silver Mercedes offering me
that same casual salute, the privilege etched in the gesture,
the smug slice of her face visible in her rearview.
And I, in my beat Plymouth Duster, muscle of Bondo and
bad intentions, made it my mission to stalk her for
nearly an hour through Omaha’s wealthy suburbs, my
V8 roaring mayhem up her tailpipe at every stop. I’ve had
more worthy moments of satisfaction, but none
quite like that hour, witness to the silent movie of her
unspooling, pantomime of panic, the Wild Kingdom
death scene of her composure as she raced to get away…
But now, ahead of me, the woman and her bumper sticker
are turning left; I think it should be harder to recall
how it felt to be so angry all the time. Lucky
for her, like Auden’s expensive, delicate ship, I have
somewhere to be. I can afford to drive on.
Erin Belieu is the author of three poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press. Her most recent book, Black Box, was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Belieu teaches in the Florida State University Creative Writing Program in Tallahassee and she wept tears of joy when Florida went blue.
