The Music Goes Round and Round and It Comes Out Here
One of the oddest things in the absurd world that now
almost completely surrounds me is the way pop music has filled every nook and
cranny of entertainment, news and culture, as though there were nothing else
but this vile clanking-clunky sound—well, except also for sports which has
replaced the news and vacuous actions that fill up big and small and even tiny
screens. When I was young and more
self-righteous than I am now, even arrogant in my adolescence, it made no sense
to me that my coevals or contemporaries (they are not the same thing since the
first is made of people of my own age
and the second of everyone who happens to be alive at the same time as I am)
should define themselves and their relationship to one another and to the world
generally by the music they liked, that is, the what they listened to on radios
mounted on their shoulders and blaring into their ear holes or the 45 rpm they
purchased as often as possible and played in their rooms over and over until
the grooves were worn down. This
phenomenon struck me as odder than trying to memorize all the members of teams
in the baseball teams people rooted for as though their lives depended on it,
or the way my classmates and street pals could identify every make of car that
passed by and passed judgment on the kind of people who drove such
vehicles. More than cars, teams and
everything else was the madness of crooners, recordings and radio DJs.
Not that I had no attachment to music or didn’t like
singing. My mother was a pianist, told
me stories about how she used to give concerts and would have been a
professional if my birth hadn’t forced her to leave Juliard Academy before she
graduated. When I was old enough not to
be a total pest, she started teaching the piano again, something she did until
she had a stroke at an early age and thereafter could not stand to listen to
classical music, or almost any music at all in the house. Yet she did allow me to choose my own
instrument so that I would have an understanding and appreciation of music: I
chose the trumpet. It seemed noisy
enough to limit my parents’ toleration for hours of practice, had only one line
of notes to read, and seemed nice enough to dream of a future in some big band
of orchestra. There were two drawbacks
for me: first, I was not able to memorize tunes and needed written scores to read
all the time, so the world of dances and other popular entertainments was out;
and second, I was not good enough to be more than first trumpet in my high
school band and orchestra, as I learned when confronting the really top
performers at try-outs for all-city and other orchestras. There was not much to
hear in the house and not much I wanted to listen to elsewhere, especially as
that would involve participation in social events with girls and slick boys who
talked about things I had no interest in.
The songs in the family and the house were not like
what was taking over on the radio, school dances, and background to
movies. My grandfather would sing three
songs: “Ida, sweet as apple cider” because his wife, my Grandma Ida, had the
same name; and “Good-bye, my blue belle, farewell my sweet” because that was
popular when he was a young lad in the 1890s.
Sometimes, too, he would sing the George M. Cohan “I’m a
Yankee-Doodle-Dandy” on my birthday, because I too was born on the 4th
of July and therefore “ a real live nephew of my Uncle Sam.”
There was an old songbook in the piano stool in our
living room next to the baby grand with long green-tasseled cover my mother stopped playing on after she became
sick, but which I took up to my room and played on the trumpet as a relaxation
from my music lessons and schoolwork.
These included lyrics I could sing along to in my head as I worked out
the notes on the horn. They set a model
and a standard for songs to which no other—or hardly no other—lyrics could ever
achieve. Why they are not heard these
days, I would tell myself, remains a mystery and can only be because the world
has lost its taste. Thus I would play
and sing along to “The Man Who Broke The Bank At Monte Carlo,” a text whose
meanings took many months for me to understand. Or I would repeat many times a day and
almost every day “Who Put TheOveralls In Mrs. Murphy’s Chowder,” the absurdity
of which tickled my fancy to no end, and still can today, if the melody pops up
into my conscious memory.
In school assemblies, on days when we didn’t listen to
recordings of the William Tell Overture and
everyone bounced their way to the Lone Ranger theme or sang along to The Blue Danube Waltz the mnemonic
lyrics every class passed on mysteriously over the generations so that we could
identify this masterpiece as by “Strauss the Louse who lived in the house of
Mickey Mouse”, on those days we learned to sing world-favorites such as “As We
Go Marching to Praetoria” and “Kukabura Sits in the Old Gum Tree”. Above all, there was “Barnacle Bill the Sailor”
who was admonished by his lady-love when he returned from the sea to announce
that “It’s certainly me” and she insisted “If you love me, say it’s I.” Or we chanted in excited and passionate unison
the “Finnicula Song: finicula-finiculi” or we stomped our feet rhythmically to “Give
me some men who are Stout-Hearted Men and I’ll Soon Give You Ten Thousand More.”
Then to help us learn a little French we would all sing “Vie la, vive la, vive
l’amour, vive la compagnie. Success to
each other and pass it along, vive la compagnie” and many dozens more of the
same ilk.
Yet these are not like the songs my wife and I would
sing when we were on long car rides from one place to another. Surprisingly, on some of those strange radio
shows that take calls from old folks in rest homes or living on their own, some
of these are requested and records are found to play over the air. Who can ever forget “K-k-k-Katie, beautiful
Katie, you’re the only g-g-g-girl I ad-d-d-fore. When the m-m-m-moon shines over the cowshed,
I’ll be aiting at the k-k-k-kitchen door”?
Or the long version of “Be sure it’s true when you say I love you, it’s
a sin to tell a lie:” which segues into a recitative narrative of “Took a
little girl out on a date last night, next to her Gravel Gurdy would have
looked all right” before it comes back
to the melodic bouncy “it’s a sin to tell a lie.” Or the clever and evergreen “Marsy dotes and
doesy dotes and liddle lambs eat ivy, a kiddly dotes too, woodenoo ” that slows
down, explains itself, and then runs out in its jumbled words when you knew
that it “mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. And a kid’ll eat ivy too, wouldn’t you?”
So it should be clear why that neither Elvis Preslie
nor the Beatles or any of the other bizzarely named and cacophonously sounding
singers could ever have a place in my heart, let alone serve as a compass
needle for my ambitions, hopes and dreams.
Yes, at times I was in love with Judy Canova and Dorothy Collins, and
wished to be a partner in the chorus for Snookie Lanson and Roy Rogers, yet
never would I permit myself to stand in a huge crowd, swaying, my upheld hands
swaying to the trance-inducing drumbeats of what passes for music today. At my funeral, please play “Bananas ain’t got
no bonies” or at least “Put another nickel in, in the nickelodeon.”
No comments:
Post a Comment