the Four Freshman :: It’s a Blue World
We were squealing and giggling in her girlhood room. We were playing, I think, with dolls. Maybe the subject of our pretending got more serious; maybe one of the Barbie moms was fleeing, with her babies, from the police. Maybe teen Barbie was pathologically lonely and admitting it to a Ken that was too old for her. But that’s adult projection. There was no reason for us to feel what we felt next, none in the world. Except quite suddenly, she and I were stricken with that thing—that special childhood terror. You know what I’m talking about. Such a surge that the wallpaper crawls, you hear doors opening and closing everywhere, you hear the panting of somebody, anybody sinister, just outside the door.
I think this feeling is unique to childhood. Adults do not experience fear that way. When we do experience something so abject and meaningless, we call it a panic attack and medicate ourselves accordingly. Being scared that way, for grown folks, means something is profoundly wrong. But kids, they weather that feeling. I mean, all of us remember that shaking, begging fear from nowhere, coming upon us in our childhood beds. That moment when we’re walking home from school and everything is dully, dumbly normal… then suddenly we’re off—running like hell. We look, to adults, like we’re in the midst of some youthful exhilaration, but the truth is we are being chased by something in us, of us, something real that doesn’t quite make sense yet.
The night with the dolls, we couldn’t tamp down the terror. We huddled in her bed with all the lights on, first, then all the lights off, second, so that no one from outside could see where we were lying, awake and vulnerable. We listened to groaning in the walls for what seemed like hours (and might have been). It sounded like human whimpering (and might have been). After much urgent whispering we decided, finally, that our situation was ridiculous. We had to calm ourselves. And our answer was a CD, one of her Dad’s, with a song she liked. A song that promised to be sweet and relaxing.
Of course it took a good bit of pep-talking to convince ourselves it was a good idea to leave the safety of her bed to get the CD. But in the end, we did it together. We found the disc, put the song on repeat, and threw ourselves, breathless, back underneath the covers. It was this song. It drowned out the wall-noises and the breath of imagined killers. It was still on when we woke up the next bright morning to her Mom asking us, “what in the world?”
It’s a Blue World (5.6MB MP3)
the Four Freshman
Van Morrison :: Into the Mystic
A couple of years ago, I started making a playlist. At first, it was called “for nostalgia” As it grew, though, I renamed it “for feeling like a White American.” I realized that was what it was really for.
I’ve done more than a little bit of thinking about what this kind of playlist means. There’s the uncomfortable truth that the music on the list — the music that makes my guts feel nostalgic, melancholic warmth — is less linked to my actual past than to some cliché of a racial-national one. How did something that started with nostalgia end up as a kind of scary white patriotism? Then there’s the fact that I am a White American, and that needing a playlist to feel like what you are says something about White America (and about me). There’s the somewhat embarrassing actuality of what kind of musicians are on the list — Van Morrison, Petty, Springsteen, Mellencamp — all husky-voiced, dirty-shirted dudes (not a woman in the bunch). Plus, I’ve got to face it: these are the very musicians being used in creepy, calculating ways to pump up crowds at political rallies; they’re the musicians that get used to sell America to me. Am I sitting around propagandizing myself with my playlists?
A friend of mine has been bouncing around an idea for a Guilty Pleasures party for years — a celebration of the music that makes us feel bad to feel good about. I figure I’ll appear at the door with a cd-r of my ‘white’ guilty pleasures. I’ll burn the White American playlist; I’ll own up to the songs that make me feel comforted in the involuntary way that only something so deeply inculcated could. And Van Morrsion will feature prominently in that collection.
(side note — for years, I thought his line was: “into the MISTAKE” — not “into the MYSTIC.” Maybe telling on a whole other level.)
Into the Mystic (4MB MP3)
Van Morrison (homepage)
János Starker :: Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello: III. Allegro molto vivace
Zoltán Kodály’s Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello is obscenely, tortuously hard to play. Which means that it is performed, frequently, as a show-piece — a big ‘here I am’ — a pronouncement of “yes, I’ve disciplined myself to this point. Yes, I can grind away this hard. And no, you can’t believe that I am one person, that this is one instrument.” And, of course, you can listen to it that way. But like most virtuosity-proving pieces, this one is more than technically astonishing. It is truly, unreally gorgeous when someone really plays the shit out of it.
So this is János Starker playing the living shit out of the last movement. Starker, at least in my opinion, is the greatest living, smoking, boozing, old school, eastern bloc badass classical musician. I watched him teach a master class with a cigarette hanging from his bow-hand the whole time (ashing irreverently onto his Stradivarius) — then heard him refuse, the next year, to give a master class because the building insisted on enforcing its non-smoking policy (in the end they bent the rules for him). The thing is, the way Starker plays Kodály is just so brutal and so perfect — there’s still a tender ache under the pizzicato, but there’s that unabashed dirtiness, too, that wailing. Whew. Those Hungarians.
Sonata for Unaccompanied Cello: III. Allegro molto vivace
János Starker (cello.org)
Zoltán Kodály (wikipedia)
Dolly, Linda, and Emmylou :: Pain of Loving You
For a few years of my childhood, my Mom sang in a trio. It wasn’t a big deal — just Mom and her two best friends, Bette and Etta, getting together once a week to sing songs in three-part harmony. Except for one hilarious performance of Sister Suffragettes at the Rhodes College student open-mic night, they never sang in public.
In the summer, though, their ‘rehearsals’ at our house were the *best.* Seriously southern: iced tea, fans roaring, the three of them laid out on the front porch laughing hysterically in between ironic renditions of Stand by Your Man and It Takes a Woman (from Hello, Dolly), as well as rousing versions of torch songs like No More Genocide in My Name (Holly Near) and K.T. Oslin’s 80s Ladies. I *loved* it when the trio practiced; I’d run around turning their songbook pages, just to have an excuse to be near them.
What they sang most were songs from Trio, a collaboration between Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt. By osmosis, I learned every word. And then I sort of forgot about all of it — that album, Mom’s trio, the porch rehearsals. Years later, though, in college, I overheard a girl I barely knew humming one of the Trio songs at a party. Almost automatically, I joined in. She freaked out, called her friend over, and the three of us stood out on a snowed-in St. Paul porch singing half the fucking album in drunken three-part harmony.
The Pain of Loving You is one of those brilliant songs about being miserable. And please allow me to admit, in my sentimentality, that I’ve maybe never been happier than when listening to my Mom and her friends laugh through it.
The Pain of Loving You
Dolly, Linda, and Emmylou (homepages, fan site)
Eddie Holman :: Four Walls
Is it even possible that this is the same guy who sang us Hey There, Lonely Girl in that famous (and, in my view, heinous) falsetto? Well, Four Walls is a different species of song.
I think I love this tune because Eddie’s got his heartbroken-but-still-strong balance down so superbly: he’s the perfect degree of desperate, but so damn confident about declaring that desperation. He’s begging, sure, but he’s not pathetic. The pleas come off as firmly as commands. I’ll put it this way: Eddie Holman is not ashamed to want his woman back.
And those cello grunts in the background? And that minor chorus with the major breakthrough? I’ve listened to this song so many times it’s ridiculous. It continues to do me right, just as I suspect Eddie Holman would.
Four Walls
Eddie Holman (homepage, note — autoplays music)