Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke Page 13

  Your mom loves the Beatles, too, but she isn’t a rock geek, so she thinks you’re chickening out of giving her a straight answer. You think you gave her the most honest answer possible. But you and your mom can both agree: You’ve just demonstrated why you’re lucky you got someone to marry you.

  5

  1995: You are still in love, though not quite so young. You’re twenty-nine and married and still in grad school. Love is exhausting and it’s hard work. You had no clue it would be so complicated. “She Loves You” sounds different now—when you hear it, it doesn’t seem like there’s such a big difference between the two boys in the song. Sometimes you even notice a warmth in it you didn’t notice before. Maybe the Beatle boy isn’t sneering at the other boy; maybe he’s just trying to help him out. It’s like Paul McCartney is putting a brotherly arm around your shoulder on the bus after school and saying, “Didn’t you know, chum? Nobody told you before? That girls are like this? Well, now you know. Girls are crazy, and they do not get less crazy when you make out with them.”

  “It’s too late, Paul. She doesn’t love me anymore.”

  “Nah, it’s not too late. She loves you. She just thinks you’re a little dim.”

  “I guess I am dim, Paul. Can I call you Paul?”

  “Of course.”

  “I think it’s too late, Paul. I blew it.”

  “She still loves you. I don’t love you, by the way. I think you’re a wanker and she could find six of you for a shilling, but it’s you she fancies and don’t ask me why. I’d say you still have another eighteen to twenty-four hours to apologize before she finds someone else to cry about.”

  “Why?”

  “I have no idea. Girls are like the White Album.”

  “What’s a White Album?”

  “Erm . . . that comes a few years later, but trust my time-traveling perspective here. A White Album is a double-album mess that goes on too long and has all these songs you think should have been done differently. Moments you prefer to skip. ‘Wild Honey Pie’ and ‘Piggies’ and ‘Revolution 9.’ Those songs could give pot a bad name.”

  “Pot?”

  “That comes later, too. It’s a drug. Oh, and then there’s my song about the raccoon, but I like that one.”

  “You’re losing me, Paul.”

  “Girls are the White Album and they all have ‘Revolution 9’s. They have all that stuff you wish you could edit out. There’s this Anthology documentary, many years from now, where everybody complains about the White Album. George Harrison thinks it should have been edited down to a nice, tidy single album. So does George Martin. Hell, even Ringo. And finally I lose me rag and I say, ‘It’s great! It sold! It’s the bloody Beatles White Album! Shut up!’”

  “Damn, Paul, how many White Albums did you make?”

  “There’s only the one, see. When you fall in love with a girl, she’s the bloody White Album. That is what you whisper to yourself, when you don’t understand her at all. You just keep telling yourself, she’s the bloody Beatles White Album and there’s only one of her.”

  “Is that true?”

  “How would I know? That’s what I tell myself anyway. If you can’t deal with a White Album, you’re better off with a girl who is a James Blunt album.”

  “Who’s James Blunt?”

  “Well, here’s me bus stop. We’ll get to James Blunt next time, or not. But we’ll get to the White Album someday. And pot.”

  6

  1997: It’s the late nineties and you are alone. You are sad all the time, which is exhausting (in addition to everything else it is) and boring (ditto) and “She Loves You” is too sad to listen to at all. You are going back and listening to Beatles songs that you ignored in your twenties, like “Strawberry Fields Forever.” You first heard this song one Christmas morning, seconds after ripping open the shrink wrap on The Beatles 1967–1970, aka the Blue Album. You’ve always liked “Strawberry Fields Forever,” but now you’re really hearing it for the first time. John sings like he’s down and he doesn’t want to talk about it. He feels old and used up. So do you. (He’s just twenty-seven, you’re just thirty-one, and yet here the two of you are, arguing over which one is wearier like a couple of old Irish ladies.)

  John sounds sad, but he’s also bored by the dullness and monotony of being sad. He sings about it like he doesn’t want to talk about it because his sadness is the least interesting thing about him, even though at this point in his life it’s practically the only thing about him. Nobody knows if he’ll ever not be sad, including him. And he knows everyone around him feels a little guilty for being bored by how sad he is. (Misery might love company, but it’s rarely mutual.) He doesn’t blame them, because he’s bored by it all, too.

  So what does John think about all this whole sorry state of affairs? “I think I disagree.” In your present mood, this seems like the most brilliantly funny line John ever sang.

  Nobody knows if your present mood is just your present mood—maybe it’s not a mood, maybe it won’t end. It shouldn’t be that way. It’s all wrong. At least you think you disagree.

  7

  Paul loves modern girls the way he loves modern rock & roll. Has any songwriter, male or female, taken so much joy in female company? He just relishes being around girls, whether or not he has any romantic interest, breathing in their presence. It’s all there in the way he sings about the nurse in “Penny Lane,” the one who sells poppies from a tray and feels like she’s in a play. He’s just dreamily noticing her, imagining what it’s like to be her. He wonders what she thinks, and how she feels.

  Who else sang about women this way? Nobody. If Mick Jagger wrote that song, the nurse would have been wearing fishnets. If Lou Reed wrote it, she would have sold him some pharmaceutical groovies. If Bob Dylan wrote it, “nurse” would have rhymed with “her longtime curse drives a velvet hearse.”

  Paul lights up when there are girls around and gets down in the dumps when there aren’t. (Which can’t be often. He’s Paul McCartney.) He wants to hear their voices and learn their stories. He has zero interest in singing about men, unless it’s “Band on the Run,” with the Jailer Man and Sailor Sam. (Can you imagine what a terrible sailor that guy must have been? Sailor Sam lived in the desert. That’s where you go when you have an anchor tattoo but you don’t want anyone asking you to help with a boat.)

  Paul likes to listen to girls, even after they go away. He still wants to think about the things she said and how they fill his head. “You won’t forget her,” Paul sang in “For No One,” not sure whether he was giving good news or bad news. But he was right. You won’t forget her. What you do with that memory is up to you.

  8

  You once had a shrink who went to Shea Stadium. She brought it up during a session and you wouldn’t let her change the subject. She guessed she was around twelve. The helicopter landed on the grass and specks of brown got out; she didn’t remember any of the songs, just the roar of the helicopter. She asked, “Is this really necessary?” You insisted. So, she was a Paul girl. The Beatles played for thirty minutes, you kept her talking for forty-five, then you wrote the check and drove home. Eighty bucks you paid to hear that story, which is stupid, but you still kind of think it counted as therapy.

  9

  When John met Paul, they were both teenage boys who had lost their mothers. It’s something they had in common. Did they ever talk about it? Nobody knows. But they both knew what it was like to love a woman and mourn her after she’s gone. And as soon as they met, it was something they wanted to write songs about.

  Their mothers both get mentioned in A Hard Day’s Night. It’s a strange detail in the movie, easy to miss. But early on, Paul gestures to his grandfather and says, “Me mother thought a trip would do him good.” The road manager warns John, “I’ll tell your mother of you.” Neither John nor Paul flinches when the topic comes up. (Okay, John flinches a little. Paul lowers his eyes to the floor, total poker face.)

  Both scenes are agony to watch, if you h
ave any affection for these two boys. How did this happen? It couldn’t have been the screenwriter’s fault—how was he supposed to know their mothers died? Did the director know? Surely not. If he did, he would have cut the lines. The filmmakers weren’t sadists; they didn’t want to torture the Beatles. They just didn’t know. Nobody told them. Other people around the Beatles knew, though, and they must have thought about saying something, but then got scared and decided to wait for John or Paul to bring it up. Except John and Paul didn’t want to talk about it. So they just played the scene. They were used to that.

  When John and Paul began making music, they already knew about losing women they worshipped. How do you live with that loss? You learn to fill your head with their voices. It’s the theme John and Paul couldn’t shut up about, from “There’s a Place” on their first album to “Let It Be” on their last. You listen to women talk, and when you lose them—when they leave you, or when they die—you replay their voices in your head to keep them close. You lie awake and tune in to those female voices, keep their hum running in your ears. She tells you she loves you. She tells you it’s all right. You never weep at night; you call her name.

  The danger is you can get trapped in this echo chamber, right? You can miss out on the sounds around you, out there in the world. You might miss the voice of the woman who’s standing right in front of you, telling you something new.

  For John and Paul, that meant learning to listen to adult women named Yoko and Linda. But it can be scary to turn down the volume on the past. For John and Paul, it meant breaking up the band. The transition wasn’t clean or painless; it directly affected the lives of millions of people. John and Paul formed new bands with their wives and made records where they invited their wives to sing. No other rock stars ever made such a big deal about loving their wives.

  Now and then, they must have wondered if they made the right decision. They must have had doubts. All men have them, and John and Paul must have felt them deeply, because they felt everything so deeply. Sometimes, late at night, they must have remembered the promises they made to those screaming girls and wondered if they were keeping them.

  10

  2013: By now you’re older than the Beatles were when they broke up, older than John ever got to be. Your wife has gotten you into Sgt. Pepper and Magical Mystery Tour, neither of which you ever liked before you met her. “The goth ones,” she calls them. These are the records that she loved when she was a sullen teen, with their creepy keyboards and lurid colors. Even the song “Magical Mystery Tour,” which always sounded goofy to you, now rocks when you notice the drums. One Sunday afternoon, you sit around your favorite vegan lunch dump Foodswings, munching your soy chicken mozzarella sub, and they put on Abbey Road. It turns out she knows all the songs on side two. You didn’t think anyone liked side two. You have chosen your mate wisely.

  Your Beatles will change all through your life. Your personality changes; your world grows and shrinks and grows again. Your beliefs change. So do your friends. People you love fade away. Some of them fade back in. Your nieces and nephews are into the Rock Band video game of the Beatles, and they all want a turn at “Yellow Submarine.” Your niece calls it “the boat,” as in “I wanna sing the boat again!” When your wife sings “Helter Skelter” at karaoke, she sings the U2 version, with the skin-crawlingly embarrassing Bono introduction. “Charles Manson stole this song from the Beatles. We’re stealin’ it back!” But you start to like that one, too.

  The Beatles remain universally hailed as the greatest thing ever, but somehow, you still think they’re underrated. They’re like Hawaii or Hamlet—even greater than everybody always says they are. For you and your wife, one of your favorite bands to listen to together is the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. You wear a Yeah Yeah Yeahs T-shirt when you ask her to marry you. She says yeah.

  Now you’re not sure how to hear “She Loves You”—it’s so emotionally extreme, which is why it perfectly suited your teen self. You can’t stick it on a playlist between two other Beatles songs without overpowering the other two. It doesn’t fit in anywhere, like the kids in the song. Nobody sings it on American Idol. Nobody tries it at karaoke. The stop-start zigzag melody is too tricky. If this came on in a bar, people would “yeah” in all the wrong spots. Are there any other Beatles hits that nobody knows how to sing?

  You owe this song a lot. You feel like the “She Loves You” guy helped turn you into the “I Want to Hold Your Hand” guy you became later, and the “Strawberry Fields” guy you never wanted to be, and whoever you are tomorrow. Maybe someday (but not today) you will give up trying to understand the song, and just let “yeah yeah yeah” speak for itself. Then it will all make sense.

  And yeah I said yeah I will Yeah.

  SIXTEEN

  12:04 a.m.:

  Debaser

  Have you ever stood in an airport parking lot and breathed in the air? I mean, really breathed it in, all the humid fumes wafting off the asphalt, the exhaust from the cars, the sickly odor of gasoline? Your lungs sucking it all in by the gulpful? Like you’ve been lost in the desert and you have crawled across the sand to an oasis? Have you ever inhaled the aroma of the airport parking lot like it’s the sweetest thing you ever breathed in your respiratory life and thought, I am in trouble?

  I was in trouble. I was at the Charlottesville airport, visiting my old stomping grounds for the first time since I had moved away a couple of years earlier. True, I had not done such a masterful job of building a new home for myself. But I had no idea I was in such wobbly shape until I got off the plane and stepped out into the air. I sat on the parking lot’s smoking-section bench for a couple of minutes, gaping at the rolling hills of the Blue Ridge in the distance. I remembered every crag of that landscape. My head was spinning with memories and I wasn’t even in the car yet. I breathed it all in. Two thoughts hit me—first, This feels like home, and second, This is a parking lot. If this feels like home, I am in trouble.

  But it was a different kind of trouble I found that weekend, the sort that turns things upside down and then makes you wonder why you haven’t been standing on your head so things could have gotten this way sooner.

  I flipped for Ally’s voice about twenty minutes before I met the rest of her. I heard her voice on the car radio, from the backseat of a battered Volkswagen stopped at a red light on Route 29. A bunch of my old friends and I were on our way to tour some of the local drinking establishments. But as soon as I heard the DJ’s voice, my priorities for the weekend began to shift.

  DJ Astrogrrl was in charge of the WTJU Friday night shift, spinning a tribute to the Pixies. Yet as she back-announced “Debaser,” I was more intrigued by the DJ’s voice. It was a brisk, businesslike voice, yet low and smoky. She made those Pixies song titles sound more enticing than I ever could have imagined. I casually spoke up from the backseat to suggest to my friends that perhaps, on our way to the tavern for the consumption of sundry frosty liquids, we should stop by the radio station. I had an urgent need to pass on my compliments to the DJ.

  DJ Astrogrrl turned out to be WTJU’s rock director, a grad student in astronomy; she’d moved to Charlottesville in the summer of 2000, two weeks after I’d left town. We chatted for a while in the record stacks, surrounded by all the overflowing shelves of vinyl. It turns out she was doing the Pixies tribute show only because the scheduled DJ didn’t show up, and she needed to whip up a show on the spot; so she just grabbed a handful of Pixies records and went on the air. (I will always be grateful to the jerk who didn’t show up.) She was on her way to an astronomy department function, so she already had her coat on when I popped in to say hello. Lucky for me, she hung out for a few minutes, and we talked some rock-geek talk. I’m not sure how long it took for the Smiths to come up, but it was under two minutes.

  A bunch of WTJU friends went out to dinner the next night at our local strip-mall sushi place, Tokyo Rose. I had spent my twenties at this place, because they hosted bands in the basement—some of the happiest nights of my youth
had been spent bouncing off the walls here. Now I was feasting on pumpkin sushi and miso soup, talking to Ally Astrogrrl. She was a cool rock girl who filled me in on the details about the Milky Way’s impending merger with Andromeda, an event that will form a new galaxy called Milkomeda. It’s scheduled to happen in about three billion years, due to the gravitational attraction between the two.

  I found this news a little startling. “Won’t this have a drastic impact on the sun?”

  “Well, the sun will run out of hydrogen in about five billion years,” she assured me. “It’s halfway through its life span.”

  “How does this affect the earth?”

  “It’ll get engulfed by the remnants of the sun.”

  “So what’s your favorite Pavement album?”

  When she answered Wowie Zowie, I somehow found that even more disturbing than the news about the sun. I thought, “Well, I will never have a chance with this woman. I’m a Slanted and Enchanted guy. We are from different worlds.” But the more we talked, the more intrigued I got. She told me she was coming up to New York in a couple of weeks—she was coming for an Interpol show. We agreed we should hang out, so I jotted down my email address on the wrapper of my soda straw. As the dinner wore on, and more rock-geek conversation flowed, I kept adding to the straw, making notes of bands and song titles I thought she would like. The whole table began to argue about the hottest men in rock & roll. Ally’s nominees were Morrissey (naturally), David Bowie (no question), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore (hey, that could be good news for me), and Depeche Mode’s Martin Gore (that might be bad news). When she capped her top five with Dave Gahan, I decided I needed to reevaluate my personal relationship to white jeans and leather tank tops.

  It was WTJU’s Rock Marathon Weekend—in a music-crazed town like Charlottesville, that’s one of the central events of the year. I had come to town to help out, DJ a few shows, answer the phones, file records, that kind of thing. But all I could think about was the fact that Ally was going to host a Depeche Mode tribute show on Sunday night. My flight home was that afternoon.