by Steve Almond
It would emerge that Dayna had driven seventeen hours straight to reach this gig, from a festival where she played for seven hundred fans and had the opportunity to share a bottle of wine and a hot tub with the folk god Greg Brown, events that would have marked the zenith of her career to date. Instead, she now stood in the freezing cold on a Cambridge street corner, following the worst gig of her life, her car stolen, with a twitchy Fanatic—hi!—as her sole consolation.
I had some good news, though. Her car had not been stolen. It had been towed. I knew this because my car was towed on a weekly basis. So I drove Dayna to the impound lot, got her aimed back toward Brooklyn, and drove home flush with small-time heroism. It hadn’t occurred to me back then that the life of a musician could be so unglamorous. I had a lot to learn.
Candles, Roses, and Wine
I am still waiting for Dayna Kurtz to become a superstar. I was sure it was going to happen in 2004, when she released the record Beautiful Yesterday, which featured a duet with Norah Jones. But the only song of hers most Americans have heard is the version of “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” in the television ads for Sheraton hotels.
The fortunate part of this unfortunate situation is that Dayna remains accessible to me. We’ve become friends of a sort over the years, which is to say she’s read a couple of my books and I’ve listened to all of her albums five thousand times. In March of 2008, as she prepared to record a new album, she invited me up to her cabin to watch her work. The place was nestled in a valley on the western edge of Vermont, twenty miles from the nearest highway. I arrived in the late afternoon. The bales of hay looked as if Monet had painted them. The mountains were an iridescent green. Little tufts of cloud drifted across the fields. (These were lambs, it turned out.) Dayna appeared on the porch. She is a tall woman with wide-set eyes and a husky voice.
We took a walk through the local farmland. Dayna pointed out a barn where monks made artisanal cheese. The white birches shed elegant scrolls of bark. It was all quite Vermont. Dayna told me she did a lot of her brainstorming on these constitutionals, recording melodies and lyrics onto her iPod. She’d been hiking the area since she was a kid, back when the family cabin was a shack with no running water. It was still a pretty undeveloped area, but the cabin had been updated to “modern rustic” status. You could now listen to the brook babbling out back while lounging in the Jacuzzi.
Dinner was an Italian red sauce with country spareribs whose deliciousness was such that I would have eaten my own arm if covered in this sauce. Dayna had worked as a cook after graduating from UMass Amherst with a history degree. Her parents had hoped she might pursue academia or the law, but she was determined to be a folksinger.
This shouldn’t have come as a complete shock—Dayna did teach herself to play piano at age three. Her early compositions, however, did not augur well. “My songs were highly confessional,” she told me. “I had a lot to say and I said it a lot. The arrangements were self-consciously complex. The first song I wrote, at seventeen, was called ‘Candles, Roses, and Wine.’ I had another one called ‘This Side of Eve.’ I don’t need to play them. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
Dayna eventually settled into a familiar folkie pattern: playing bars to support her coffeehouse gigs. Every few years, the music industry would go through one of its time to sign chicks phases and the A&R guys would show up full of golden promises. The president of the label would blow smoke up her dress. Then the proposed deal would fall through, because the marketing tools had no idea how to get her songs on the radio.
Dayna had started out as a Joni Mitchell devotee, but as she traveled the country, she became increasingly drawn to native musical forms. Her songbook soon ranged from orchestral waltzes to Appalachian nocturnes performed on banjo. There was also the problem of her looks. She was like a scary, grown-up version of Fiona Apple, not an emaciated waif willing to roll around on shag carpet in her underpants, but a sturdy Jewish girl from Jersey who schlepped her own gear.
As her thirties dawned, Dayna had yet to make a studio album. She was approaching what music professionals call an “unsignable age.” Then a strange thing happened. Postcards from Downtown—recorded in the home studio of her drummer—exploded in Europe. Overnight, Dayna could fill a theater in Amsterdam or Barcelona or Berlin. In the Netherlands, she was considered an alt-country artist. In Spain, she played festivals with PJ Harvey and Beck. In Germany, she headlined jazz clubs. She played the same songs in each country, the same arrangements. But each crowd recognized in them the expression of a distinct American musical tradition. And all of them were right.
Everybody Must Get Stoned (Again)
After dinner, Dayna led me downstairs to the room she was converting into a studio, on whose floor she’d been sleeping the past few nights. (“I’m trying to get my scent into the corners, you know?”) In years past this situation might have posed temptations—the Drooling Fanatic finds nothing sexier than a musician in his or her native habitat. And we were, after all, miles from any seat of judgment. Thankfully, we both recently had married Drooling Fanatics of our own. We settled for getting baked out of our skulls. I’d brought Dayna a bag of something called “Black Widow” grown by a friend of mine who, not incidentally, is a competitive eater.
It was at this point, I believe, that the original plan—for Dayna to “work on the new album”—took a detour. The first part of this detour consisted of us babbling. I did my Roving Petrol Mobs Are Going to Kidnap My Daughter rap and my America Will Die of Its Own Greed rap, both of which my wife has heard so many times that she will actually ask me to recite one of them when she’s having trouble sleeping. That somehow led to a conversation about which came first as a form of communication, words or music? I’d originally thought music, but then I’d heard a news report in which scientists managed to replicate the sounds produced by Neanderthal Man. Neanderthal Man, in turned out, sounded a lot like Mr. Roboto.
Dayna shook her head. “Lullabies,” she said. “The first noise was some sort of primate humming to her baby. They’ve done studies and lullabies all over the world have the same arc; they all rock like a cradle.”
“Yeah, but at what point did humans switch from getting something across to getting something out?”
“Drums,” Dayna said. “Guys getting together to drum and chant.”
“Iron John was right,” I observed. “That’s depressing.”
It was around this time I began entreating Dayna to play me some new songs.
“I should warn you,” she said, “I’ve been getting really into rockabilly lately.”
“Rockabilly?” I said. “Really?” As much as I respected Dayna’s musical explorations, I associated rockabilly with the Stray Cats, who played the same annoyingly jumpy song for the entire eighties. I hereby accept the collective animus of Rockabilly Nation, but we all have our taste and to me rockabilly has always exuded a swagger that feels monotonous within two minutes. It’s the Fonzie of rock genres.
Dayna picked up her bass guitar and began playing a melody that was the aural equivalent of a chocolate cupcake. Her strum hand kept a clacking rhythm and her voice tilted up into a Hank Williams half-yodel on the choruses. By the time she was done, I was ready to pomade my hair.
Then, just for good measure, Dayna pulled out her new double-headed lap steel guitar and sang a crushingly sad version of the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular.” Listening to Dayna’s voice was like a drug. It wasn’t just her tone or her range or her power, which, if I knew anything about vocal technique, I could praise at length. No, it was something emotional. Her voice sounded like desperation hurled into the world with exquisite control.
The song ended and I set about trying to explain to Dayna how much her voice meant to me, how much, over the years, I’d needed her songs to plumb the dank morass of my own feelings, how without her music, without “Paterson,” I suspected I’d still be alone, without my wife, without my blessed daughter, a lonely Fanatic grinding language int
o self-regard. I was getting choked up.
Then Dayna did something truly mean—she stuck a guitar in my hand. Like Boris, she had sensed in my desperate DF energy the longing to make music. Dayna attempted to teach me three chords that, she assured me, would allow me to play the entire Rolling Stones’ catalogue. But my fingers were too runty and weak to hold the finger positions and any talent I had for muscle memory (none) had been eroded by the pot, so Dayna went to Plan B: an open tuning. This would allow me to flail at the strings without worrying about making chords.
I did this for a few minutes, while Dayna strummed a guitar of her own and filled the air with all sorts of sweet lies—You’ve got a great ear! Listen to that! You’re totally making music right now!—all of which, by their insistent benevolence, served only to confirm my regret. It was time for bed.
But I had to ask one more question, because my heart was woozy with self-pity. The ensuing exchange should be read with the long, profound pauses of the late-night stoner implied.
Me: What’s it feel like when you’re performing?
DK: Being in the middle of an electrical storm.
Me: You see! That’s exactly why I’d be happier as a musician.
DK: Most of the musicians I know aren’t happy.
Me: They have to punish themselves for the ecstatic experience of playing music.
DK: All artists torture themselves—especially Jewish ones.
Me: Yeah, but you guys have so much more to torture yourselves for. You have these moments that are transcendent.
DK: There’s not that many moments.
Me: Yeah, but there’s some, that’s my point.
DK: You have some transcendent moments when you’re writing. You have to.
Me: No, I have moments where I stop hating myself briefly.
DK: You’d feel the same way if you were a musician. That’s just you, honey.
Dayna meant no offense. On the contrary, this is how Jews show affection: the deadpan acknowledgment of one another’s neuroses. She was a very maternal figure, really. It was obvious in how she treated me, and especially in her songs. “Bedtime,” Dayna said.
She led me upstairs and turned on the Jacuzzi. “It’ll help you get to sleep,” she said. No musician wants a stoned Fanatic prowling her house at three a.m. Dayna padded downstairs to sleep on the floor of her studio, while I undressed and slipped into the Jacuzzi on the back deck. The river down below roared softly. The sky was a milky veil. I thought about a comment Dayna had made earlier. “The thing you have to understand,” she said, “is that your relationship with music wouldn’t be so deep or pure if you were a musician.”
Dayna had given this matter plenty of thought. Hell, she’d married a Drooling Fanatic. Then again, maybe she was just pitying me. I thought of my hands struggling to form a G-chord on the neck of Dayna’s guitar. I thought of all the times I’d taken up an instrument and waited for the magic to seize my body. I thought of all the musicians I’d drooled at over the years, and how happy I’d imagined they must be, and how sad so many of them seemed when I actually visited.
I had always fantasized that learning the language of music would grant me passage to a realm beyond sadness, that I’d find some sunny version of myself tucked away inside the current mess. But maybe I had it wrong. Maybe it was in music itself—the sounds as my body and heart received them—that the magic resided. Maybe my failure was some kind of subconscious effort to preserve the joy of being a Drooling Fanatic. I closed my eyes. I could hear Dayna singing, very slowly, very softly. Here comes a regular, am I the only one who feels ashamed? It took me a full minute to realize that I was the one singing; the words were coming out of me.
Drooling Fanaticism in the Age of Actual Drooling
A few years ago my pal Tom Finkel called me up. “You know what’s great?” he asked, not bothering with hello. “Listening to Bob Dylan with your baby daughter.” I’d never heard Tom speak with such contentment. I could hear Dylan in the background. I imagined Tom lying on the couch, the kid curled on his chest. She would have been three months old.
I’ve thought about that phone call a lot recently. It connotes a certain fantasy: that Drooling Fanaticism and parenthood are not only reconcilable, but ideal dance partners. Who better to indoctrinate into the pleasures of song than your children?
It hasn’t worked out quite that way in our household. Our two-year-old Josie does love music. But she does not now, nor has she ever, wanted anything to do with “my music.” She’s got her own music—and woe unto thee who fucks with her playlist. My wife learned this a few months ago when she walked into the child’s room. “I want Dino 5!” Josie shrieked. The Dino 5 is a dinosaur-themed children’s hip-hop album. It is exactly as charming as this description implies.
“Oh, honey,” my wife said, “not The Dino 5 again.”
Josie’s face, her entire being, crumpled.
“She wasn’t upset that I was saying no to her,” Erin told me later. “It was that I’d insulted her music. It was like I’d just done the worst, most hurtful thing in the world. Oh, God.” Erin was herself close to tears.
Now that Josie can reach the pink boom box we stupidly placed in her room, she will play the same album, sometimes the same song, up to twelve times in a row. It is for this reason that I know by heart the words to songs such as “Bouncin’ Baby” by Justin Roberts:
Bouncin’ baby bought a bag of blue jeans
Bouncin’ baby bought a big ole bag …
Over which I have puzzled for entire weeks, as to what sort of baby would buy blue jeans in the first place, especially a bag of them, and what would make this baby prone to bounce and whether there’s any correlation between infant elasticity and retail buying power. It is probably fair to say that fatherhood has exacerbated in me certain tendencies toward procrastination. I also know that if we don’t get Josie’s Music Together CD on within five seconds of entering the car, all hell will break loose, as it will if I try to slip on one of my albums. (“No! No papa music!”)
All this has reinforced my belief that Drooling Fanaticism is an innate tendency, something that gets bred out of us as we grow older, like playing with our food. It is certainly true that when I find a song I love—Sam Roberts’s “Detroit ’67,” say—my natural impulse is to play it twelve times in a row. The reason I don’t is because I’ve learned that pop songs have limited durability. They can only surprise us so many times. Once we memorize all the moves—the fills, the solos, the vocal turns—we stop listening in the same way. The song no longer transports us. It’s certainly possible to recapture that spark; classic rock is predicated on this capacity. But it’s never the same as the first time—in love, in music, in anything. And so, over the years, Drooling Fanatics learn to conserve gratification. We’re like those lab rats who parcel out our dope for maximum pleasure.
A Final Lullaby
So Josie and her little brother will learn to conserve gratification. They’ll probably dream of being rock stars, too. Why not? They’ll grow up with two parents who dreamed of being rock stars, in a house filled with instruments those parents can no longer play. And probably (this must be said) they won’t be rock stars. How many of us get to be?
But what they will have, what we all get, is the chance to be Drooling Fanatics. And I hope they feel as I do—a bursting gratitude for those musicians brave enough to speak the first and final language of our hearts. Maybe Dayna Kurtz is right about that: the pleasures of listening to music may be greater, or purer anyway, than those of making it.
If they’re lucky, someday they’ll have children of their own. And they’ll realize that you don’t have to be a rock star to feel like a rock star. All you need is a soft little human with a sweet-smelling head who settles down at night with her bottle and says “Papa sing.”
“What song do you want?” I say.
And Josie says “Corn,” which means “Jimmy Crack Corn,” or “Ring,” which means “Hush, Little Baby,” or, most often, “Comin
g,” which means “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.”
Then she says it again. “Papa sing.”
And I get to say, “Sheesh, I thought you’d never ask.”
Appendix A
The Official Drooling Fanatic Desert Island Playlist
(In no particular order—hey, this list took me fourteen months to settle on, and I’m still in anguish….)
The Best of Gil Scott-Heron, Gil Scott-Heron
Salesmen and Racists, Ike Reilly
When We Were Big, Boris McCutcheon
Postcards from Downtown, Dayna Kurtz
My First Child, Nil Lara
Lonelyland, Bob Schneider
Fuse, Joe Henry
Let Freedom Ring, Chuck Prophet
Rabbit Songs, Hem
The Sons of Intemperance Offering, Phil Cody
Your Official Drooling Fanatic Desert Island Playlist
Appendix B
The Special Offer Hidden at the End of the Book!
In an effort to liquidate my CD collection all over you, I will send a free disc to any reader who sends me a SASE, along with certifiable evidence of his or her Drooling Fanaticism. This offer only good while supplies last! (So say the folks in Legal!) See www.stevenalmond.com for details! Really!
Acknowledgments
Giant Head-Banging Thank-Yous:
To all the musicians who appear in this book, particularly those who made the foolish but kind decision to allow me to invade their lives. Here’s hoping everyone who arrives here will find your songs and consider themselves blessed. I certainly do.
To all those friends whose patient counsel helped rescue this silly book from the muck of my own poor judgments, and who inspired its composition: Billy Giraldi, Pat Flood, Keith Morris, Dave, Pete, and Mike Almond, Clay Martin, Holden Lewis, Tom DeMarchi, Eve Bridburg, Dave Blair, Michael Borum, Victor Cruz, Tim Huggins, Karl Iagnemma, Jenni Price, and Peter Keating.
