Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke Page 20

  All this overexposure was out of whack not just in terms of their actual popularity, but also in terms of their potential popularity. For better or worse, these guys weren’t crowd-pleasers—they didn’t fade into the background. Rush provoked a strong reaction, which is why they generated such ill will. It wasn’t Rush’s fault. All these guys wanted to do was keep making cult music for their cult audience. But Rush came to symbolize everything oppressive about corporate radio.

  Rush fans are admirably protective of their heroes and resent everything written or said about them. Despite all the cushy treatment the band got from broadcast media, Rush fans still feel picked on by the rest of the world. I hope (and assume) they will never give that up. Rush fans thrive on that sense of deprivation. It’s like how Christians love the Jesus-fish symbol, so evocative of how early Christians were persecuted by the Roman Empire, despite the fact that Christianity has been running shit since the Roman Empire made it the official religion of the world in A.D. 312. Christians would rather feel oppressed than oppressive; that’s why they decorate their cars with stickers that say “my boss is a Jewish carpenter” instead of “my boss is the Emperor Constantine,” and that’s why they like Jesus fish better than IN HOC SIGNO VINCES decals. Can you blame them?

  But these days, nobody gets forced to hear Rush against their will, so there’s no reason for anyone to resent the music. This changes everything. We are on our way to a world full of people who kinda-sorta like Rush, which might be the most tragic possible fate that could befall this band. When nobody hates Rush anymore, and it’s sad to think the day could ever come, they will be undeniably less Rush-like than they were before.

  ONE OF THE WEIRD THINGS about being a lifelong music fan is how you find yourself starting to enjoy music that used to feel oppressive. My Rolling Stone colleague Alexis Sottile has brilliantly dubbed this “Rockholm Syndrome.” After years of being held hostage by classic rock radio, you catch yourself drumming on the steering wheel and saying, “Hell yeah, Lynyrd Skynyrd,” or “Wow, you’re right—all in all, it is just another brick in the wall! Thanks, the radio!”

  It’s a post-adolescent phase most of us reach, after we get mature enough not to depend on music for all our self-validation. Your fandom gets less dogmatic, as you forgive the bands you used to hate. You might grow up resenting classic rock as The Man. But then you come down with a case of Rockholm Syndrome, and now when you hear “Melissa” in the car, you don’t jam your middle finger into the preset buttons. Instead, you think, “Whoa, Gregg Allman. You catch a free ride on a freight train, then you complain each car looks the same? You are so demanding! How does Sweet Melissa put up with you?”

  In its advanced stages, this can get ugly. For me, it means the shaggy hippie-burnout rock that I inexplicably began loving around the time I hit thirty-three and started buying Moby Grape and Quicksilver Messenger Service records. After years of anti-Grateful Dead hostility, I began musing about how the Europe ’72 lineup was superior to the two-drummer setup of Blues for Allah or Wake of the Flood. My teenage self would be horrified to learn I spend as much time listening to Jefferson Airplane as I do listening to the Jesus and Mary Chain.

  But who ever thought it would happen with Rush? Not me. Ten years ago, I was in Toronto covering a music festival to benefit the city after the SARS epidemic. The big names at SARS-Stock were the Rolling Stones, AC/DC, and Justin Timberlake, but there was no question who the heroes of the day were. There was an unbelievable surge in the crowd when Rush hit the stage, their first local appearance in years, and they began with “YYZ,” their instrumental tribute to their hometown. (It’s Toronto’s airport code.) I was out in Downsview Park, amid half a million Canadians standing in a field, everybody playing air telegraph to the main riff, which Arun had explained to me years ago was Morse code for the letters YYZ. (He also explained why it was pronounced “Y Y Zed.”) I never expected to feel so much joy in Rush’s presence. For that matter, I never expected to see so many Canadians feeling such raw emotion.

  “The Spirit of Radio” is in the karaoke book at Sing Sing, and it has gone from a once-a-year comedy pick to a regular staple. Everyone sings along, which wasn’t the case a few years ago, and the openhearted pro-music sentiment of the lyric really comes across with multiple voices. (Also, it has the same guitar riff as Lou Reed’s “Sweet Jane,” plus the same lyrics as the Pet Shop Boys’ “It’s Alright.” Never noticed before.) The modern machinery of the karaoke room brings out something undeniably personal in the song: emotional feedback on a timeless wavelength.

  TWENTY-SIX

  3:46 a.m.:

  Ziggy Stardust

  I am always amazed at the transformative powers of karaoke. A night of karaoke is just like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, except with twice as much Stevie Nicks and 70 percent more Lionel Richie.

  In all those ancient Greek and Roman myths Ovid writes about, people always get warped by engaging in unknown pleasures. One minute you’re having sex with an ox, and then it turns out the ox was Zeus or Apollo or some other god in disguise. And now that you’ve had scrotal knowledge of a god, you get transformed into a tree, so that you may bloom forever beside a fragrant waterfall. A tragic fate, to be sure, but it has to beat sex with an actual ox.

  In the karaoke universe, we can be whoever we want. We express ourselves by turning into colorful and disastrous parodies of pop stars who are already appalling parodies of human beings, and somehow that’s how we end up as our most sincere version of ourselves. When you step into the song, you’re not sure who you’re going to be on the other side.

  But first you have to get past “the guy.”

  An acquaintance with a fairly extensive drug habit once told me that when you’re looking to score while traveling, any country you’re in, you ask around for “the guy.” Wherever you are, it always means the same guy. K-junkies are also dependent on “the guy,” whether that’s the bartender who programs the discs or the KJ who picks your song. But sometimes, the rock star whose song you’re approaching is “the guy.” You do the guy’s song and you want to make the guy proud. You’re not trying to out-sing him or her—you’re just trying to pay a little respect, shine back a little of their light. You have to step to the guy if you want to be the guy.

  For me, the guy is David Bowie.

  I see Mr. Bowie as the patron saint of karaoke singers, because he had no business ever attempting to be a real vocalist. He had nothing special in the natural-talent department: He just decided to be somebody. Dozens of somebodies, and by listening and singing along, we can turn into those somebodies, too. So I always have to do “Ziggy Stardust” at least once per karaoke binge. It's the hymn that returns me to my duties. Right in my tessitura. I sing my first song and turn into Ziggy. It’s like the old AA saying: “You take the first drink, and then the first drink takes the second drink.” Except I sing the first song and then Ziggy sings the second song. Which will probably be TLC’s “Red Light Special,” which means Chilli, T-Boz, or Left Eye will be picking out the song after that.

  It’s usually the one I end with, too. That final “Ziggy played guitaaaar” is like the moment when the priest says, “The mass is ended, go in peace.” Bowie understands how all that works—how music is a place you go to explore the transmutations of personality. I might be a total Ziggy Stardouche, but I can crash Bowie’s world and become a slinky vagabond, shaking my God-given ass. No other rock star has made himself so easy to copy, since he’s just a copy of his own fantasies. For him, the pop glamour of being somebody isn’t something you earn: It’s something you steal from all the other somebodies who’ve caught your eye, whether it’s Andy Warhol or Jimi Hendrix or Marlene Dietrich or that girl you spotted in the ice-cream parlor, the one who smiles at him while drinking her milk shake, not knowing she was going to end up the star of his next song.

  But it all starts for me with “Ziggy Stardust,” just like it all started there for Bowie. This was the song where he turned into a real-life rock s
tar, by pretending to be a fictional one. Pretending to be a singer was his first grand scam, the one from which all the others followed. He makes it seem simple, because it is. He’s the only rock star who ever pretended to be from outer space in order to seem less weird. “I don’t want people looking at me and thinking, ‘I could do that,’” Oasis’s Noel Gallagher mused in 1996, at the height of his fame. “I want them thinking ‘I could never do that.’ When I was a kid I thought my pop-star heroes came from outer space. I didn’t think they were like me. When I saw Bowie on Top of the Pops, I thought he came from Mars. I was disappointed when I found out he was called Jones and came from Battersea.” I feel you, Noel.

  “Ziggy Stardust” is the perfect Bowie theme song: a sex outlaw too cool for this planet, in a tragic melodrama narrated by one of his band members. (All of whom are nicer and smarter than he is. And better adjusted. And more talented. But not as cool.) This was the role that made Bowie a huge international icon, at a time when he was basically a forgotten one-hit chancer who’d scored a few years earlier, with “Space Oddity,” and then disappeared. It’s the last song he sang on the last concert of his last tour, in 2004. (After that, he basically retired until he surprised everyone with his excellent 2013 comeback album, The Next Day.)

  It’s always funny that for a rock artiste as gabby and articulate as Bowie, he’s never been able to explain the plot of his big famous concept album. The closest he ever came was his Rolling Stone interview in 1973: “Ziggy is advised in a dream by the infinites to write the coming of a starman, so he writes ‘Starman,’ which is the first news of hope that the people have heard. So they latch onto it immediately. The starmen that he is talking about are called the infinites, and they are black-hole jumpers. Ziggy has been talking about this amazing spaceman who will be coming down to save the earth. They arrive somewhere in Greenwich Village.” Translated into English, this means, “Drugs are fun!”

  But it’s not so hard to hear what’s going on in this song, and most of Bowie’s songs, which is that people look up into the sky for answers, which they have been doing for millions of years. “Ziggy Stardust” doesn’t really tell us anything about Ziggy, just like “Starman” isn’t really about the Starman—it’s about the badly adjusted kids who hear him and get closer together as a result. I love the moment where the kids are talking about the “Starman” and one of them says, “Hey that’s far out—so you heard him too?” It’s a story about the audience, which took not just real imagination for Bowie (who had basically no audience at this time) but real heart, too. He understood that the listeners were the stars, not him, and they were just tuned in to hear a tarted-out, glittered-up version of how they wanted to be.

  That’s part of the reason Bowie is the ultimate karaoke-friendly rock star: He understood how being a music fan means dreaming of being somebody else. He showed how easy it was to slip into other people’s disguises—as Oscar Wilde would say, for him, “Insincerity is just a means by which we multiply our personalities.”

  ONE FUNDAMENTAL QUESTION I GET from David Bowie: Is singing for women? Is singing something women do? Is it something men also do, but for women? If you’re a guy and you’re singing karaoke, there are probably women in the room. It’s more traditional as a girls’ night out than a gang-of-dudes thing. Do women just like music more than men do, and sing it with more commitment, more passion, more realness? When you’re a boy, do you have to fake a bit of that female realness in order to be anyone at all?

  These are questions I’ve pondered all my life, which is probably one of the key reasons I turned out a Bowie freak. He was certainly the rock star who had the most fun pretending to be a girl. He brought out into the spotlight the gender-bending that was always part of rock & roll, going back way before Elvis showed up to his first audition in a pink suit or Jackie Wilson mastered the art of fainting onstage. If you watch the Marlon Brando biker movie The Wild One, the movie that laid down the code of hypermasculinity for fifties kids like Bob Dylan and John Lennon, you see all the biker rebels rioting and brawling and looting. But it isn’t long before they’ve broken into Mildred’s Beauty Salon and started dressing up as girls. One of the bikers wears a mop on his head and says, “That Mildred gives the best perms!” It’s amazing—rock & roll masculinity had existed for barely forty-five minutes before it was already turning into a drag show.

  And it’s stayed there ever since. In fact, if you’re looking for a one-line description of a rock star, it could be “a boy who wears what women tell him to wear.” This is rarely why a young boy dreams of being a rock star, but that’s what the job is. A rock star sings like a girl, wiggles like a girl, emotes like a girl, wears whatever he found on his girlfriend’s floor. (As Slash put it in his memoir, “We borrowed shit from chicks.”) Boys are usually more comfortable when we’re hiding behind machines, but a rock star lets his girlness hang out. Bowie didn’t invent this. He just did it a little sluttier.

  When listening to “Ziggy Stardust,” it’s strange to recall how glamour-starved his audience was. We like to imagine a seventies Bowie show as a glammed-out freakfest—it’s certainly how Bowie wanted his fans to picture themselves. But when you see the amazing 1975 bootleg documentary Cracked Actor, it seems that most U.S. Bowie freaks were in fact bearded, long-haired kids in overalls, not looking so different from any other rock crowd. At one point, one zonked hippie kid in flannel and corduroys raves to the camera about Bowie’s messianic power: “He’s from his own universe! The Bowie universe!” The camera guy asks if the kid is also from the Bowie universe. He replies, “No, I’m from Phoenix.”

  The glitter was all in their heads, because the Bowie school of glamour was a way of perceiving the world, not really dependent on dressing up at all. Bowie’s glamour hit American kids the way potable water hit medieval peasants; they had no idea how thirsty they were. But he was even more thirsty for them. Bowie was desperate for these kids to like him. Even in 1973, a British reporter for Melody Maker was taken aback by how friendly and sincere he got when accosted by female fans. “They’re the salt of the earth,” Bowie says. “Those girls. They don’t sit each night and compare notes of groups, criticizing lyrics, asking if it’s valid. They just play the record—yeah, and maybe they dance. I love them. I love them dearly.”

  That comes across in songs like “Ziggy.” Bowie aspired to make those girls dance. He kept singing about girls in space, and how the only way he had to communicate with them was making them dance. (He puts it honestly in “DJ,” one of my favorite Bowie songs: “I got a girl out there, I suppose. I think she’s dancing—what do I know?” It takes a rare rock star to admit he’s wondering if the girls are dancing, and an even rarer one to admit he’s too zonked out to know.) With Ziggy, he gave himself over totally to the dancing girls, and let himself go.

  That’s the mood I’m going for when I sing “Ziggy Stardust,” even though it’s usually just in a rent-by-the-hour room. The big ending—“Ziggy played guitaaaar!”—turns us all into David Bowie. It’s not my voice, but it’s a voice I can steal, a voice big enough to crawl into and disappear inside for a while.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  3:55 a.m.:

  About a Girl

  Ally had her bachelorette party at Sing Sing. It was a month after the wedding, which was a shrewd move, and I was invited, which wasn’t. Her girls got a big private room and gathered there at seven. My marching orders were to call at eleven and see if the party was still raging, but the bachelorettes weren’t even close to the final countdown. They were mostly rocking the nineties jams—Nirvana, Hole, Snoop, Pixies, Liz Phair, Whitney, the Beasties. There were so many songs loaded up in the queue, by the time your pick rolled around you’d completely forgotten requesting it.

  These bachelorette bacchantes showed no signs of slowing down until I stepped up to sing Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic.” That’s when everybody said “look at the time” and started rummaging through the coat pile. I didn’t even get up to the line about “ten
thousand spoons when all you need is a knife” before the front desk abruptly switched the sound off. It was 4 a.m.

  Some nights you plan ahead for an exit where everybody goes around and sings one last song, but that’s a relative rarity. Other nights you all just abruptly run out of lung steam. This was one instance where the place was closing down and the staff wanted to go home. Sometimes they’re friendly when they throw you out, knocking on the door to give you a few minutes warning, and sometimes they just cut off the equipment mid-verse. Only once a few years ago did they send the security guy in, and that was probably understandable considering we were on our third “Paradise City” in a row.

  But the end comes too soon, and everybody wishes they had time or energy for a few more. You want to get one last song in, but there’s always more you have lined up in your head, songs that you’ll just have to save for next time. You have to trust there’ll be a next time. You know there’ll always be more songs to sing.

  In September 2006 I asked Ally to marry me. I’d been biding my time while she finished up her dissertation and got her degree; she was back down in Charlottesville the summer before, deep in the lab. Back at home, I was plotting my own kind of endgame, because I wanted to spend my life with her but wanted to do this right. I didn’t know how she felt about marriage. Maybe she was against it as an institution. We’d never discussed it. We’d often shared fond fantasies of what we’d do when we were old together, but for all I knew, she wanted to leave this to chance. While she was in Charlottesville wrapping up her graduate work, I was planning a strong and convincing pitch. As my friend Carrie urged me, “You have to give her a story.” This was no time to be half-assed. Pretending you arrived at things by coincidence and good intentions, bumbling into them without a plan: This is the way of tender-hearted, apple-cheeked youth. Pretending to do things by accident is what you do in your twenties. That pretense consumes a lot of your energy then. And it makes sense in your twenties, because it gives you a degree of plausible deniability in case you fuck it up or get fucked over. It gives you the Pee Wee Herman “I meant to do that” escape clause. But in your thirties, when you’re confident about what you want, it’s harder to talk yourself out of making the bold move that will help you get it. I had no desire to talk myself out of this at all. So I needed a plan.