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Perhaps the primary reason I’ve so far avoided writing about Billy Joel is that it would take days, weeks even, to record all the related memories. He was in some ways the defining soundtrack of my early years, thanks to a passion on the part of several family members. We had the albums. We quoted the lyrics at the dinner table. We went to concerts at the Cumberland County Civic Center (which has, by some miracle, avoided the corporate rechristening so common these days — and which also, I just learned, is the same age as me). We were fired up by his token bit of proffered wisdom (“Don’t take any shit from anybody”) and fascinated with his love life. This was long before Christie Brinkley came on (and then departed) the scene, back when he was married to his manager, and I can even now picture the oddly inky drawing I made, at the tender age of 4 or 5, of Billy and Elizabeth together.
Years later, a babysitter and I spent much of our evening together dancing to the songs on “Glass Houses.” She was blonde, and named Heather, and boys liked her, and we played air keyboards, and it was pretty much the epitome of cool.
And years after that, my mother finagled a chance to go to the Civic Center the afternoon before a show, to watch the set-up and the sound check. The two of us sat there happily watching the roadies, but just before Billy himself appeared a security guy came along to inquire just what we thought we were doing there. My mother caved, and kicked herself for it afterwards; we watched the rest of the sound check through a crack in a set of metal doors into the arena.
And the shows, oh the shows. There he’d be, in his blazer and his jeans and his Tretorns. I mean! Was there ever a cooler outfit! Playing the piano and the harmonica, sometimes at the same time, and running around with all that energy. It’s hard to imagine now, with the old, pudgy, alcoholic Billy lodged in our collective minds, but he and his band put on a hell of a display.
This morning, my radio landed on him just as he sang “Turn out the light,” and I was transported right back there, standing in the crowd, the lights going out on that line. Did that happen at every show? Did it even happen at more than one show I saw? I don’t know, but I can’t forget the thrill of standing in the dark with thousands of people, and screaming when the lights came back just in time for Billy’s gruff puppy-dog “Aw don’t try to save me.”
I could go on. And on and on. Maybe some other day.
I spent much of the long holiday weekend in a sickly, weakened state on my couch, remote in hand, weeping at sappy movies. Honestly, between the two monsters — viral and hormonal — battling for evil dominion inside me, I was a sniffly, sobbing mess for a solid four days. Good flocking times.
And, of course, much of my weeping was prompted by music. It began on Wednesday night, with “Glee.” Much of the episode drove me bonkers, as it centered around the increasingly prominent and deeply irritating Quinn, but then there was a stunning musical piece: a deaf choir performing John Lennon’s “Imagine.”
Oh my goodness. I am probably (definitely) just a sucker, but something about the signing, as well as singing, of that song — already an emotional tune — just killed me. I’m getting teary again just typing about it.
On Thanksgiving morning, one of my local radio stations played “Alice’s Restaurant” around noontime, just as one of my local radio stations growing up had done. This made me grin, remembering countless Thanksgiving treks to my aunt and uncle’s house, with my younger siblings hollering at my parents to change the station so they didn’t have to listen to old Arlo ramble on any longer. And then this made me sad, missing my family on Thanksgiving day.
Then, over the course of the weekend, I watched quite a few holiday movies, in whole or in part, and many of them broke me right down again. I mean, I cried at Elf. Elf! Should one really cry at Will Ferrell movies? (Oh wait, I totally cried at Stranger than Fiction too.) But when Zooey Deschanel starts singing? And the crowd sings with her? And they all are filled with Christmas spirit? Oh my goodness. Waterworks.
Also I saw The Family Stone, which I have to say: possibly one of my favorite movies. I mean, come on: Dermot Mulroney! Diane Keaton! Luke Wilson! Claire Danes! Sarah Jessica Parker! Paul Schneider! Rachel McAdams! Craig T. Nelson! What is not to like? Also it has the lovely Elizabeth Reaser, who at one point watches one of my absolute favorite movies, Meet Me in St. Louis, and weeps when Judy Garland sings “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.” And who wouldn’t? Oh so sad. So there I am, weeping at a movie within a movie, getting all caught up in the Christmas spirit — or at least its maudlin stepsister — before Thanksgiving was even fully over.
Today I am, alas, back at work, and operating at about 80% of normal health. I heard nothing worth commenting on during my commute this morning — but my head is full of the weekend’s tear-inducing tunes.
Could be worse.
There was this boy — the one from the other side of the baseball field — who I went out with in high school. And most of the actual going out we did while we were “going out” was riding around in his parents’ red Jeep Cherokee, just driving and driving for hours around southern Maine. I don’t know why we did this, exactly — Maine was short on amusements for teenagers, but not that short — but we clocked a million hours in that Jeep, many of them on roads I had never otherwise traveled.
The soundtrack for these rides was often one of two things: Earth, Wind, and Fire or the J. Geils Band.
The J. Geils Band was the boy’s favorite, so we listened to that one quite a lot. These days, when I hear “Centerfold” or “Freeze Frame,” my memory is torn between car rides with the boy and visits to the roller rink in (marginally) earlier days.
Earth, Wind, and Fire, on the other hand? Yeah, he liked them not so much for their music but for their name — it was inspiration for him when he was running (which he did a lot). This I found supremely lame, even as I pretended, at the time, to approve. Would you not want the music itself to pump you up, not the band’s name? Whatevs, high school boy.
Sometimes our rides would end with some parking in the bushes off a road in our hometown. (I still giggle a little every time I pass that spot.) The boy once told me that his friend called parking “going to the submarine races.” I had never heard that expression, and never, that I recall, heard anyone else use it. Apparently, though, it’s in reasonably common usage. And it apparently can encompass rather more than ever went down (!) in the red Jeep Cherokee.
I PROMISE, Mom.
Here I had what I thought was a new song from the lovely Kelly Clarkson, and it turns out it’s four years old. So why is it getting played all the time? Hm.
Anyhow, I have quite a soft spot for ol’ Kelly, dating back to her American Idol moment of glory. I didn’t watch the show at all during that first season, but on the night of the finale, I gave in to curiosity. Alone in my apartment, my roommate out for the evening, I flipped on the TV and watched. It was OK, sort of fun, not particularly compelling. And then Kelly was anointed, and the confetti fell, and she belted out the saccharine “A Moment Like This,” and I burst into tears. Just sat there by myself, crying and crying at this woman’s triumph. And at the showiness of it all.
That moment converted me on both the AI and KC fronts, although my approach to them is about the same: I don’t seek them out, but when I encounter them, I thoroughly enjoy. Kelly strikes me as a fairly genuine, hardworking, perhaps-not-overly-talented-but-certainly-graced-with-sticktoitiveness performer. She is, as thoroughly documented on Go Fug Yourself, a woman who doesn’t mind being shaped like a woman and who dresses herself sans stylist. She seems to write or co-write many of her songs, and creates her videos as well. In short, she is not just a pretty face fueled by the AI machine.
She also tends to rely on one of my favorite devices in her songs (including “Because of You,” which I thought was a clever twist on the love song, but turns out in fact to be about dysfunctional families): the key change!
For some reason, certain members of my family have this habit of announcing key changes in a song. This is not a “we’re so musically gifted” habit. It’s more like a … I don’t know. It’s more like “this person is silly to rely on this device” combined with “this is so AWEsome.” It’s hard to explain.
Anyhow, we shout it out jubilantly, usually when singing along equally jubilantly. It’s possible that I’ve forced TGOTS into this habit over the years, but I have never encountered it in other circles, with one exception. Several years ago, I was mildly involved with this boy who was definitely of the No Good variety — unreliable, unfaithful, all the un’s you don’t want in a person. He was fun, and charming, and we got each other’s weird sense of humor right off the bat, but it wasn’t solid. One night, around the time I’d just about let the whole thing go, he yelled out during a song: “Key change!”
OMG, fate speaks. I could barely restrain my glee. Turned out his family has a funny habit of yelling that out during songs, and he couldn’t exactly put his finger on why.
Also turned out, of course, that it wasn’t enough to build anything upon. But it was an awesome moment — almost as awesome as any song in the key of Kelly.
There was a time, round about the beginning of my senior year in college, when I was quite in love with the Dave Matthews Band. I enjoyed the Dave Matthews, I enjoyed the Hootie and the Blowfish, I enjoyed the Blues Traveler – all those kinds of jangly, poppy, only-ever-so-slightly-alt-country-rock bands. They were something really different at the time, remember? It was as if — at least on the Midwestern airwaves that were filling my head — some new wave of gently rockin’, cool music was infiltrating the sickening onslaught of saccharine pop. AND IT WAS GOOD.
Of course, this new wave quickly turned into a flood, and these same bands that had been so refreshing began to feel so tired and derivative. Was it just me? I feel like one day I was blasting “Ants Marching” out the windows of my third-floor dorm room, and the next I was moaning every time a DMB song came on the radio. I still can’t bear to hear that squeaky voice, or Hootie’s, or John Popper’s. Blech.
I suppose this is the mark of a fickle heart. Or at least one that gets caught up in the excitement of the next big thing, only to realize, before too much time has passed, that it’s not really her thing. I dunno.
But OH, I hear those songs from Under the Table and Dreaming, or Cracked Rear View, or Four, and I am transported to the latter days of my college career, so my distaste for the tunes is tempered by my love for the times.
Also my annoyance at Dave himself was tempered this weekend by this, which you’ll have to click to, as I am for some reason unable to embed the video: http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/clips/the-mellow-show/1178424/
Dearest MamaKitt, that was quite an entry today. Mine will not have the same power, I’m afraid, both because you’re awesome and because I am sorely under the weather, but I will bring some parallelism: Where you wrote of fire, I’m writing of water. Sort of.
Last night I saw Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert for the fourth time, and this time was a doozy. Word on the street is that this might have been the last we see of Bruce and the full complement of E Streeters for a while, and boy did they make the most of it. Three and half hours of music, with Bruce bouncing and running and crowd-surfing to the bitter end, all of it rocking your socks off.
Toward the end of this tour, Bruce et al have been playing each of their records, front to back, starting with the most recent and ending, last night, with Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J. I didn’t know many of the songs from that record, I have to say — I loooove Bruce in concert, but I am not an expert on his recordings. But last night, man, “Lost in the Flood” tore me to pieces.
They played the shit out of that song, with the fervor and fire and apparently heartfelt enthusiasm I have only before observed at other Springsteen concerts. These fellas (Patti was absent last night) just seem to genuinely love what they do, and to care about putting on a good show. That shouldn’t be such a rare quality in overpaid performers, but it seems to be.
Anyway, I gained a renewed love for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band last night, a new favorite song, and a whopper of a cold. Sorry I can’t do better by the blog, or by Bruce, today, but so it goes. Read the Backstreets entry on last night’s concert for a better report.
The spooky opening notes of “Burning Down the House” grabbed me this morning and forced me to listen. While I don’t have any particular associations with this song per se — other than a Talking Heads phase in college that went hand in hand with an ABBA obsession — I do have associations with houses burning. My mother’s did, when she was a little girl. And my sister’s apartment burned when she was in her early 20s.
In both cases, no one was hurt — physically. But I think escaping and surviving something like that has to be scarring in its way. Beyond the literal effects — possessions destroyed, books and clothes and photos that remain intact but retain the smell of smoke for years, decades even — there has to be a lingering fear, a sort of PTSD. Perhaps a sense of luck or relief, eventually?
It’s odd to be so close to that kind of calamity, but not truly feel it. A close friend and I were talking recently; her brother’s apartment burned earlier this month, and he had come to live with her. She told me how strange it felt, to have his material life so completely altered and hers relatively untouched. How strange it was to talk of everyday things with him while, at the same time, he was trying to figure out how to keep on going.
Fire is a strange thing — I can’t say I know that many people who’ve been through it, but it seems to always hover at the edges of possibility. We are having new windows put in this week, and part of that process involves new insulation in the frames, and all I can think is, does that put us more at risk? As a kid, I used to lie awake at night making a fire escape plan — it was less “stop, drop, and roll” and more which stuffed animals would make the cut after everyone else was safe.
My mother doesn’t talk about the fire unless prompted, and who wants to prompt? But my uncle, her younger brother, once told me all about it. He was little when it happened — 6? 7? 8? — and this was a good fifty years later, but his memories were still vivid. We were in his rowboat on Penobscot Bay, and he rowed along and told his tale, becoming a scared kid whose parents were out for the evening and had to be summoned home, and I wished so much that I had a way to record or memorize it. When we got back on land, I scribbled as much down as I could. But that paper is unlocatable now, stuffed somewhere in a box or a drawer.
So … that’s a pretty perky song, and I’ve now written myself into a screen-staring, sad stupor. I have no tidy ending. I hope I haven’t tempted fate by writing all of this. And I’m so glad that fire, though it has touched my family, hasn’t done more than that.
We have made much of the Bruuuuce in these pages, and now I am going to make a little more. Because when he wakes up with the sheets soaking wet and a freight train running through the middle of his head, I get a funny feeling. In my pants.
Seriously, that song just — well, it cuts a six-inch valley through the middle of my soul.
It was five short minutes ago that I learned he is saying “soul” there. I always thought he said “skull.” Which makes it a very different lyric indeed.
Anyhow, besides imaginary, er, relations with Bruce Springsteen, that song makes me think of two other things: the version sung by Johnny Cash (with whom I’ve never had imaginary relations), and his amazing series of covers late in life. I still remember the first time I played one of those CDs, and my roommate called out from another room, disbelieving, “Is that Johnny Cash singing Depeche Mode?” Oh yes it is, my friend. Yes it is.
The other thing I think of is Elmer Fudd. Also no imaginary relations there. And also two tiny revelations, to wit: All I knew, when having this random association, was that my fella used to reference Elmer Fudd singing “Fire.” Today’s revelations are: “Fire” and “I’m on Fire” are not the same song! And the Elmer Fudd joke comes from Robin Williams (no imaginary relations, although … hm …).
Old and grainy, but a nice diversion for a rainy Friday:
Jason Segel AND Swell Season, all in one place? Hilarious and AWESOME.
