Turn Around Bright Eyes

by Rob Sheffield

  Gertrude Stein put it best in The Mother of Us All, her opera libretto about Susan B. Anthony. “Men have kind hearts when they are not afraid but they are afraid afraid afraid.” I do think Gert got this one right. I do the best I can to ignore the fears and let them drift past like clouds. But when you marry somebody, you are guaranteeing that you will have real problems, a future full of them, the kind that involve death and disease and grief. As husbands, we have planned on major anguish. We can’t afford to use up our patience all at once, or over things that aren’t all that important. I know other husbands are afraid of this stuff. I have been afraid of it, too, and when bad things really did happen they were even worse than I could have imagined. My nightmare came true and I can’t tell any husband he should be less afraid. Our fears are totally justified.

  Men have kind hearts when they are not afraid but they are afraid afraid afraid. I say they are afraid, but if I were to tell them so their kindness would turn to hate. Yes the Quakers are right, they are not afraid because they do not fight, they do not fight.

  Nobody tells you how scary it is when you become a husband. There’s a strange culture of silence around the whole experience. This is partly because, well, we don’t want to talk about it, do we? And it’s partly because it’s all too scary to talk about. That can make us feel alone with our fears. That’s why I’ve always been obsessive about songs that tap into this husbandly angst, because it’s so taboo to talk about anywhere else. Kurt Cobain and Biggie Smalls wrote great songs about that—both guys my age who’d already left their wives widows by the time I became a widower.

  There’s a great old garage-punk song by the Music Machine, called “Masculine Intuition,” that really nails it. The husband in this song worries about things that never used to bother him. He’s ashamed to fuck up in front of his wife, he can’t live up to all his promises, and the only feeling he can trust is his masculine intuition, which tells him, “Keep coming on strong,” whatever that means. There’s something lonely in that angst, just as there’s something traumatic about loving somebody until death do you part. It rips you up just to feel that intensely, to tell that person, or tell the world. That does savage things to your heart.

  THERE’S A COUPLE I KNOW who’ve been married for more than fifty years—I met them down at my parents’ place in Florida. They were high school sweethearts. He was telling me about her in the pool. “Something she still doesn’t understand about me is that I’m good for about three hundred words a day. When I’ve gone through those, I’m done. Fifty years, and she still thinks I’m holding out on her.”

  He didn’t sound like he was complaining, more like bemused, as if he were describing something funny about her golf swing. She was at the other end of the pool, so I couldn’t hear what she was saying about him. I’m sure they weren’t resolving anything and I’m sure they don’t care.

  Something I really enjoy about the company of older couples is that they really have given up on getting everything right. They don’t sweat the imperfections. Sometimes it seems like they’re good at just plain ignoring things that younger couples get fixated on. They don’t need to keep discussing the relationship—they can’t spare the breath. And I guess that makes sense. Marriages, by their very nature, reward dogged persistence. Marriages involve “counting stats,” not batting average or ERA. The longer you stay married, the more you have to give up on the idea of perfection. And the more you probably relate to rock stars with long and tattered discographies, people like Smokey Robinson or the Kinks or Neil Young who make a hundred messy records rather than a few perfect jewels.

  I have to admit, husbandhood suits me because I like thinking long-term. I like knowing that if today wasn’t so great, tomorrow is another day. I like knowing that if today was glorious, tomorrow will be ordinary. I like knowing that these days will stretch out into a future so long that we will have lost count when we hit the thousandth or the ten thousandth, knowing that our problems will be temporary ones, knowing that there will be more time together. I like ruling out panic as an option. I like knowing that I can count on my wife to stand strong with me when we face the death and hardship and loss that we have guaranteed that we will face. There are always excuses to give up. There are always reasons to draw the line. But we can draw the line some other time.

  TWENTY-ONE

  2:02 a.m.:

  New York, New York

  As you can probably guess, I do not embarrass easily. My capacity to feel any kind of embarrassment is appallingly absent. I could claim I’m working on developing a sense of shame, but it’s a little late for that, given the hours I have already invested in wearing my Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark tour T-shirt. It’s a flaw in many ways, but it does help with the sangfroid required for karaoke.

  There’s only one karaoke crowd that has ever made me feel truly intimidated. The old people—the Wednesday night crowd at Del Tura in Fort Myers, Florida, the age-qualified community where my parents spend the winter. Or, as the residents like to call it, God’s waiting room. These old people party harder than any of their grandchildren do, and they do not mess around. They cruise around from bungalow to bungalow in their golf carts, looking for any fiesta that appears to be under way. When they say they’re coming by for drinks at four, those bottles are popping at 3:59. When Charo comes by to do a concert in the bingo hall, everybody shows up and gets their coochie-coochie on. And tomorrow morning, the ladies in the pool are going to debate, in rigorous detail, how much work Charo has had done. I pray I will be as cool as them when I grow old.

  And these people love their karaoke. Wednesday night is not for dilettantes. It’s not for the visiting kids or grandkids, either. You better get there early and get your request in. The lounge fills up by seven, everyone putting away their pitchers of Yuengling as the mike gets passed around. The first time I visited my folks down at Del Tura, I couldn’t wait for Wednesday night. I thought I was going to coast, to be honest. I thought everybody would think, “Oh, how sweet, here’s Mary and Bob’s kid, he’s going to sing.” I thought I would reach back, way way back to the mellow gold of the seventies, charm them with some Kenny Rogers and Neil Diamond, as an example of cross-generational outreach. I suspected I might get bonus points for being the youngest person in the room. I certainly expected to get a few pats on the head from my mom’s mah-jongg squad.

  Ah, no. It does not work that way at Del Tura. Their karaoke scene is four hours a week, for however many Wednesday nights they have left. Every minute counts. If you are taking a turn at the mike, you are taking up valuable oxygen that belongs to someone else, and you have to earn every breath of it. Tough crowd. But then, who the hell gets to be old without being tough?

  As for that seventies gold malarkey, think again, rookie. These people are doing the forties and fifties classics—you know, real music. It’s mostly country songs, plus pop standards and a little old-time rock & roll. Nobody gets up on Wednesday night unless they have their Eddy Arnold and Patsy Cline and Johnny Cash down tight. Even Merle Haggard is a little green for them. Try Lady Gaga in this room and you are begging for a poker-faceful of Yuengling.

  Since I’d already filled out my request slip and handed it to the guy, it was too late to back down, especially since I was conspicuous as the only customer who did not recall the Truman administration. I’d quickly detected that my Kenny-or-Neil concept did not fit in with the house rules, and switched to something I thought was foolproof: Frank Sinatra’s “New York, New York.” How do you mess up this song? Everybody likes it. All you do is say, “Start spreading the news,” and the news spreads itself. My mom and dad even saw Frank do this one on the “Ultimate Event” tour of 1988, with Liza Minnelli and Sammy Davis Jr. (Dino dropped out.)

  It worked. I did fine. I took it seriously and made eye contact and respected the song, which was the main thing. I didn’t bust out any jazz fingers, which seemed like bad manners, given how many arthritis-themed conversations I’d had that week. I even got a hands
hake from my folks’ hardest-partying neighbor, the guy who flies a Fighting Irish pennant and decorates his porch with a granite sculpture of a dog wearing shades Spuds MacKenzie–style.

  For the rest of the night, the regulars kept stepping up and singing, reaching back through the decades. They kept the karaoke DJ hopping until eleven, when he had to pack up his laser discs and head out. They sang the songs that they went out dancing to when they were young. They sang the songs that reminded them of courting. They dedicated songs to their spouses, many of whom were dead. They were fearless in facing up to all the memories in these songs, memories that have been building up longer than I’ve been alive. These folks spend all week waiting for this night, their turn, these memories. They’re not waiting around for next week. They don’t have time.

  These are old people who love music. They fill me with awe. I am nervous to sing for them. I want them to like me. I want to be them one day.

  WHEN I WAS A KID, I loved that book Watership Down, the one with all the psycho warrior rabbits. I loved how the rabbits can only count on their paws, so in their math system, any number that’s more than four, they just call “hrair.” In the lapine language, it literally means “a thousand,” but these bunnies can’t tell any difference between a thousand or five. Those numbers blur together into one. Hrair has always been a useful number for me, especially when answering questions like “How many beers did you have last night?” or “What time did you get in?”

  Hrair is handy for music fans, because that’s your rock & roll age once you get past twenty-four. After that, it’s all the same age: hrair. If you still love music at twenty-four, you always will. Even if you check out for years at a time, fandom comes back around. You’re stuck with it. You won’t get sick of the songs you already like, but you will always want to hear songs you haven’t heard, whether it’s buried treasures from before you were born, or whatever great new band just plugged in their guitars for the first time last night. And your age will always be hrair.

  When I was twenty-two, just barely old enough to get into rock clubs, I couldn’t believe my older friends when they told me stories about hearing Jimi Hendrix or Television or the New York Dolls live. So lucky, I thought. I was born too late. I met a grizzled British punk guy in a club in Boston who saw the Sex Pistols live, or was at least willing to make up stories for the gullible little American boy he was attempting to pick up. (Sorry I stiffed you, Alex! I thought you just wanted to scam my cigarettes.) I began thinking of these people as “hrair,” because I was just a tenderoni too young to know any better. Anybody older than I was, a little or a lot, their ages mashed into one fuzzy abstraction. But within a couple of years, I was hrair, too.

  Once you reach that point in your life, you may not be the target audience for new music anymore. But that just means you have to scrounge a little harder to find it. You don’t necessarily want to make a religion out of it; you just want to keep participating. Music isn’t an accessory to a lifestyle—it’s part of a life. It’s not a youthful phase you go through. And that’s one of the reasons karaoke got so big. There’s no way to age out of karaoke. It doesn’t recognize time or history. All music, whenever it came from, whoever made it, it’s all right now.

  In addition to everything else it is, karaoke is a way for people to keep connecting to music as they get older. Music responds to a lot of human needs, but one of those is public communication—feeling like you’re part of an audience, connected with other people who care about the same things. That really has nothing to with reliving youth, or prolonging youth, or anything to do with youth at all. (Well, it might have something to do with trying to sleep with youth—but if that’s your goal, I hope you have better luck than the guy who told me his Sex Pistols stories.)

  It’s definitely no coincidence that the karaoke boom of the early 2000s happened alongside the decline of radio and MTV, after the great nineties music explosion ended. For years, new music was in the air, whether you were an active consumer or not. You could dabble in a couple hours of MTV a month and get a free cheat sheet, enough to bluff your way through a chat at the dentist’s. You could participate in music just by turning on your car radio. You didn’t have to chase it down. It came to you.

  When the radio and MTV were on the job, people loved to complain about them. But we all accepted the idea of pop music as a social fact. It was out there, getting airplay, and even if you didn’t like the song, you could respect that at least it was popular. The Top 40 was a place where music fans from different corners of the pop world could check out each other’s styles and see what was worth heisting for themselves. Even if you didn’t consider yourself part of, say, the Pearl Jam audience, or the Snoop Dogg audience, or the Reba McEntire audience, you knew these audiences existed, and that if you overheard their songs on your friends’ or neighbors’ radios, it was (at the very least) something to talk about. I always think of something Beck said in the nineties, when someone asked him why he mixed up all different strains of music on his records: “I’m just trying to connect with the in-laws.”

  But as the 1990s turned into the 2000s, new music got harder to find. You couldn’t browse at the record store because you couldn’t find a record store. It was easier than ever for a music fan to get stagnant and keep vegetating in the oldies, just because you couldn’t count on the radio for what the sizzurp-sippers or headbangers or line dancers were blasting this week. Even the biggest pop hits weren’t quite inescapable. Something was lost there. And that’s part of why karaoke blew up the way it did.

  Nobody wants you to be an expert on music, or on anything, when it comes to karaoke. You get zero bonus points for having a big record collection or knowing your Sinatra trivia. You do not get extra credit for explaining how “New York, New York” was Liza Minnelli’s jam before Frank swiped it, or how Liza sings it for Robert De Niro in the Scorsese movie of the same name. You don’t need a clever theory about the song’s cultural resonance. You just need to get up there and start spreading the news and sing the damn song.

  The technology may have changed, but that fundamental human need is the same: We need to share music with other people. That’s why karaoke crosses all generational borders, and that’s why Del Tura has the most hard-core crowd I’ve ever seen. Those are lifers.

  None of those people care about my expertise as a music journalist or my collection of Dylan bootlegs. Nobody even gives me a pass based on my mom’s mah-jongg skills. When I get up to sing “New York, New York,” I have exactly three minutes to show and prove I’m worthy to hold that mike in my mind. The only thing that impresses them is what I give to the song, right now. They have no time to waste.

  The Wednesday night folks have been loving music for sixty or seventy years now, and yet their favorite song is always the one they’re singing tonight. However many Wednesday nights they’ve got left, they are going to cram those full of music. They are going to be fans for as long as they breathe. Nothing can take that away from them. It’s too late for that. I feel honored to sing with them.

  TWENTY-TWO

  2:16 a.m.:

  Forever in Blue Jeans

  You can’t talk about karaoke very long before you delve into the topic of Neil Diamond. It just can’t be done. He is the colossus. There are loads of famous singers who inspire legions of karaoke devotees, but Neil has made more converts than any other individual. He is the Colonel Kurtz of the whole karaoke cult, shining his heart-light right into the heart of darkness. You sing a Neil song, and you know what it’s like to kneel before a god. We worship him, we give him thanks, we praise him for his glory.

  Like most red-blooded Americans, I’ve been a Neil fan all my life. His songs were a radio presence; it’s like he was always there. But ever since I got into karaoke, it’s a different level of fandom. Now I wear the man like a velvet suit under my skin. Partly it’s because his songs are so perfect for karaoke, it’s like he scientifically engineered them for that purpose, even though he was a star before
karaoke was even invented.

  Every karaoke singer has a vocal doppelganger, and mine is Neil Diamond. When you start singing, you find out whose voice suits yours and who doesn’t, and you don’t always get to make the decision. A friend of mine has a voice right in the Lionel Richie range, so we always make him do the Commodores songs, even though he was never a big fan before. You follow your voice wherever it leads you, even if it’s against your will. (Or against all odds, if it’s Phil Collins.)

  But whoever it is, you find your voice by reaching for theirs. The voice gets into your soul and this guy means more to you than he ever did before. Your doppelganger becomes your spiritual mentor. And that has turned my personal relationship with Neil Diamond into some kind of obsession.

  It’s not that I actually sound like him. That would require decades of training and a third lung. But his songs are very forgiving for my flaws—slow and low, with lots of dramatic pauses where I can catch my breath. His songs tend to have cool talking parts, heavy on the consonants. But they always explode into louder-than-a-bomb choruses, jumping up an extra key for the final fade-outs. Neil likes to drop one line on your head, wait a beat to let it sink in, and then drop another. He commits to every line with total intensity. You can’t half-sing the Neil, or do it ironically. You have to let yourself become Neil. You can’t sing it like a “warm evening in March,” or even a “toasty evening in June.” Your emotional thermometer has to go all the way up to Hot August Night.

  That’s why it took the karaoke era for Neil to take his true place at the top as a pop legend. He’s the ultimate example of a star who sounded like he was already doing karaoke when he recorded his own songs.