Turn Around Bright Eyes

by Rob Sheffield

  After a late night at the Music Story, we’re a bit hoarse and shaky. But we came out to the East Village tonight for a friend’s birthday party at Planet Rose, or as we call it, Wet Hoes. It’s 6 p.m. on a Sunday, when the place is usually empty, but there are three different crews, each of which was hoping for a private party. There are the Eurotrash girls, who improvise dirty words to show tunes, as in their version of “Summer Nights” from Grease. (“Met a slut with blood on her knees, met a whore with so many STDs,” etc. Ladies, where did you learn English?) There’s an all-male group of eight college bros, which is unusual for any karaoke place. They came to sing “Gimme Shelter” and “Sweet Child O’Mine.” There’s us, distinguished by the goth fashion, the pizza boxes, the cake, and the birthday girl. Nobody goes home until she does her ABBA song. And her Depeche Mode song. And about a dozen Monkees duets with Ally. Face it, the birthday girl is going to keep us here a while.

  There’s also a couple on a date, who look mortified. They sing one Sublime song and make their escape.

  Everyone adapts to sharing the room. We clap for the other parties. The bartender favors the Eurotrash girls, and keeps moving their sticky Post-it notes to the top of his wall, but then, they’re probably the regulars. When the birthday girl’s boyfriend and I sign up for Hall & Oates’s “Did It in a Minute,” the bartender puts on “Say It Isn’t So” by mistake and we roll with it.

  But when our friend busts out the ABBA classic “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” she doesn’t have to wonder whether she’s getting an “uh huuuuuh.” She will get all the “uh huuuuuh” she can handle. The audience knows that part of the karaoke code is giving the singer the sing-along response she needs. We turn into an army of Björns and Bennys. She turns on her Agnetha. (Or Anni-Frid? I never can tell the ABBA ladies apart.) For every “knowing me, knowing you,” she gets a queen’s ransom of “uh huuuuh.” See that girl. Watch that scene.

  That’s the beauty of karaoke. It’s always a little taste of being the star, but a lot bigger taste of being the audience while you wait your next turn to be the star. It’s five minutes of being Agnetha and an hour of Björn and Benny. If you’re so needy you can’t wait around, this isn’t your jam. If you don’t enjoy the listening-to-drunk-strangers element of karaoke, you don’t like karaoke. You can go sing in the shower.

  Hey, we all have a song in the queue. We all have our Post-it note on the wall. We came here to be stars. But it goes deeper than that—we came here to make each other stars.

  IT’S FAIR TO SAY THAT anybody who knew me for the first three decades of my life would be stunned to see me in karaoke mode, because I was always such a shy, bookish lad. Definitely the quiet type. I mean, I liked to think of myself as mirthful and articulate, just because I read a lot of Oscar Wilde. But there’s no hiding the truth—I was just an indie boy who wouldn’t say boo to a goose. I was the kind of kid who grows up watching Animal House and thinks, “Man, I can’t wait till I get to college—so I can argue with Donald Sutherland about Paradise Lost! His reading of John Milton’s poetry is utterly inadequate. And it’s not fair to claim Milton’s jokes are terrible, because there aren’t any jokes in Paradise Lost, although there are some real laugh riots in Areopagitica.”

  Making the transition from quiet to loud is something many of us go through in adulthood. It’s fair to say karaoke was part of that transition for me. Also? It’s fair to say I used to begin half my sentences with “it’s fair to say.” Somewhere along the line, deep into my thirties, I grew up into an adult who cared a lot less about what was fair to fucking say. How did this happen?

  It’s often surprising for me to remember this transition happened. I recently learned that I have a reputation around the Rolling Stone offices for “lacking an indoor voice.” I was stunned to hear this at a drunken office Christmas party, where several of my colleagues agreed I have one of the least-indoor indoor voices around. Me? (True, I get asked to pipe down, but I assumed that was a matter of content rather than volume.)

  Just a couple of years ago, I got asked at a West Village coffee shop to take my phone conversation outside, because I was laughing way too loud. This was a totally justified and reasonable request. The sad part is that I wasn’t even on the phone. I was reading a book, one I’d already read like six times (Chuck Klosterman’s Eating the Dinosaur), but apparently I couldn’t tone down the volume. So rather than embarrass the elderly customer who’d walked over to express his understandable request, I sheepishly walked out pretending I was on the phone, hiding the book under my scarf and talking to it. (I have problems. Oh, tell me about it.) I read the rest of the chapter on the sidewalk outside Equinox Fitness Center, where nobody minded my laughing except the models and pigeons. But I do have to admit that the question “how did this happen?” did cross my mind. It often does.

  The quiet-to-loud transition seems to be an Irish tradition. It happened to my grandfather. David Twomey could talk a hole through a brick wall. I spent hours listening to him tell stories, pausing only to puff his pipe, punctuating his pauses with “so” or “and if I did” or “anyway.” Yet he didn’t say a word until 1961, when he was sixty-two years old. The transition was instant. He worked on the New Haven Railroad as a brakeman, and one day, as he told me, they asked him to train two engineers from the Philippines. He spent a day riding up and down the east coast with them, explaining what he was doing. Their English wasn’t so good, so he had to repeat himself. He began speaking and kept it up for the next three decades. Conveniently, this was when my grandmother started to go deaf.

  My Uncle John, never short of words himself, heard a different version of the story. In this version, the transition happened in the Woods Hole railway yards in Falmouth, Massachusetts, on Cape Cod. The guys were arguing, and they decided to settle the debate by asking Dave Twomey, since his sons went to college. “That was his ordination,” Uncle John says. “He started talking that day and never shut up.”

  I love how my grandfather told two contradictory versions of this tale. (Why would he tell one story when two would do?) But in both, the ordination took one day. My mom grew up with him as the strong, silent type; I never met that guy. If he ever asked himself “how did this happen?” that’s one question he kept to himself.

  WITH KARAOKE, WE GET A chance to listen as well as sing. It makes all the difference, really. We can always sing to ourselves when we’re alone, but we go to karaoke for something different. We want to be part of that audience. It’s the call and response. We want to hear the echo. We like that “uh huuuuh.”

  My three sisters were the first voices I sang with, in the backseat of the car on so many family road trips. That’s where we sang “American Pie” and all the songs from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. For a long time, my sisters were the only voices I ever sang with. But I never gave up the fantasy of rocking out and making the world dance. I took piano lessons and clarinet lessons. Right next to my desk, I still have a guitar I’ll never learn to play. Every year, I think maybe this is the year I figure out the whole “chords” thing. As for bands, forget it. I have been failing to bluff my way into bands since seventh grade. Sometimes friends of mine let me sit in for the occasional gig as tambourine boy or backup shouter. But the whole reason musicians form bands is to protect themselves from people like me.

  Yet with karaoke, this fantasy of music communion comes true. There are so many tawdry places I have crawled to get that fix, and I have to admit I remember every one of them fondly. Radio Star in Koreatown, where they give you tambourines and bring you nachos all night. Winnie’s in Chinatown, where they always seem to stiff you on your song after you pay up front. Second on Second, where I wrapped my bones around the stripper pole for the world’s sluttiest version of “Ignition (Remix).” That sketchy basement in Bushwick, where they let people smoke and only enforce two rules: No “American Pie,” no “Stairway to Heaven.”

  My voice might not be a thing of beauty, but so what? It’s like Keith Richards
said: “I don’t have a drug problem, I have a police problem.” Well, me too. I don’t have a singing problem—I have an audience problem. Except not in the karaoke lounge, because there all is forgiven. That karaoke microphone—whoever you are, it just wants to make you happy. And whoever hears you through that microphone, they want to make you happy, too. Karaoke might be the least complicated emotional interaction Americans permit themselves to have. It’s like an airport on Opposite Day. We hang out with randos in a confined public zone, and yet we agree to let everything in that room be awesome. All the flaws are forgiven.

  The karaoke microphones help mask the flaws, because they’re full of echo and reverb. It’s the audio equivalent of the soft-focus lenses they must have used on Dynasty, when it was time to make Joan Collins and Linda Evans look like dewy cantaloupes. Anybody sounds better with these microphones. But it goes much deeper than that. I can always sing to myself in the shower. We all can. So what is it about karaoke that we get together to share?

  I guess that’s one of the mysteries I keep coming here to understand better. We all sing to ourselves in the car or the elevator. It chills us out when we’re scared, bored, lonely, doing the dishes. We do it to tap into the elemental hum of the universe, as Wallace Stevens might have put it—he had his poetic vision of the whole earth as “a child that sings itself to sleep.” But something different happens when we sing together.

  That’s why there’s no predicting what kind of emotions are going to come out in the karaoke chamber. The night Teddy Pendergrass died, I sang “Turn Out the Lights” for him; the weekend Clarence Clemons died, we did “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.” The night after we got the terrible news about the late great Adam Yauch, we couldn’t find enough Beastie Boys songs in the book to satisfy us, so we dialed up songs they sampled—“Superfly,” “When the Levee Breaks,” “That Lady,” “Stop That Train”—and tried to rap the MCA parts over them. It’s the Irish wake tradition: singing them on their way. It’s not the kind of emotion you expect to share in a place like this. But it happens.

  Look close at a karaoke microphone sometime. Hold it up to the light. That thing is a disco ball, isn’t it? All these glittery facets, each one beaming starlight around the room. That mirror ball on the business end of the microphone—you sing into it and every facet reflects you and the screaming audience in your head, as the mirror gets jammed up with all your friends. Sometimes you can feel like every voice that ever rocked your soul is flowing out of your lungs tonight and sweeping you along. Knowing me, knowing you? It’s the best we can do.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  3:16 a.m.:

  The Spirit of Radio

  Rush fans have a word for them: Geddycorns. These are the ladies who love Rush, and they are called Geddycorns because they are rare and mythical creatures rarely witnessed with your own eyes. If you spot a female fan at a concert, you will have a story to tell. I have known a few Geddycorns in my life, and part of why they love Rush is being part of that male audience. A friend read my book Talking to Girls About Duran Duran and said the story of her life would be called Talking to Boys About Rush.

  All my life, Rush has been emblematic of the kind of cultural phenomenon that only appeals to testicle-havers, but it’s only in recent years that Rush have come to symbolize maleness itself. Although Rush have been around for more than forty years, they’re more popular and beloved than ever, thanks to the documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage, which is constantly on VH1 Classic in the weekend-afternoon hangover slot. Everybody I know has watched this movie at least six times, whether they like the band already or not. (It’s pretty much impossible to watch it and not like the band.) Guitarist Alex Lifeson has the best line in the movie, on their fan base: “In the early stages, it was very young, almost one hundred percent male. And then, as the years went by, it remained one hundred percent male.”

  But what’s changed is the way people relate to this band and everything it symbolizes in our culture. You might not be able to stand their music, but that no longer matters so much. Somehow, making sense of being a man has come to mean making sense of Rush.

  Female Rush fans tend to have a touch of defensive pride, which is understandable. Among the ones I’ve known, quite a few grew up thinking Geddy Lee was a girl because of his glass-cutter high notes and androgynous name. The indie-rocker Juliana Hatfield once told me in an interview she learned to sing by imitating him—her first band in high school, the Squids, did covers like “Red Baretta.” But the idea of Rush as a three-nozzled spray can of chick repellent is part of the band’s mystique, as well as their stigma. In the movie I Love You, Man, Paul Rudd is trying to impress his fiancée with his ability to bond with other men. So what does that mean? He has to learn to rock out on the bass to “Tom Sawyer” with his bro.

  If you find manhood mysterious, the odds are that you will also find Rush mysterious. But you will find both of them pretty mysterious if you approach them with any kind of honesty. (And after all, isn’t it really just a question of your honesty? Yeah. Your honesty.)

  These days, my main connection to Rush is the fact that my wife is a fan, ever since she heard “The Trees” on the Rock Band video game. We like to sing “The Spirit of Radio” at the karaoke bar. But her main jam is “Free Will.” And every time it comes on the car radio, as I indulge her by not changing the station, I marvel at the fact that Rush has turned into a band I have learned to embrace because of the woman in my life. How did that happen?

  IT WAS A WOMAN WHO introduced me to Rush: Miss Blake, my sixth-grade music teacher at Pierce Elementary School. The seventies, obviously. A typical 1978 suburban public school scenario—we studied 2112 in music class, while in English, we spent the whole year studying Lord of the Rings. Our teacher believed that spending the golden hours of our childhood frolicking through the Shire with orcs and hobbits would make us peace-loving members of an agrarian future society. Instead, it gave me a lifelong grudge against wizards.

  Miss Blake always seemed so mild-mannered, with her corduroy smocks and beaded necklaces and straight black hair. I never thought of her (or any teacher) as a rock & roller. She usually brought in classical records. But one week, she happened to ask, “Has anyone heard of a band called Rush?”

  To my surprise, I was the only kid who raised a hand, and even then I’d never heard their actual music: I’d seen the newspaper ad for their latest album, A Farewell to Kings. I was intrigued by how dangerous the band members looked on the album cover, which probably gives an idea of how dangerous I was. The name Rush was also associated with a drug the older kids smuggled into school—bottles of amyl nitrate with a lightning bolt and the word RUSH on the label. So I assumed their music was scary-older-dude stuff, full of drugs and the occult.

  We spent all afternoon listening as Miss Blake taught us to appreciate the “rock opera” format by playing us 2112. These songs had a plot, about a future society where music is banned and Geddy Lee defies the elders by learning to play guitar. His squeak-of-the-damned voice made the whole class giggle, as Miss Blake talked us through the libretto and explained the symbolism in “Temples of Syrinx.”

  I heard tons of Rush in my college dorm, because we all listened to the local rock station WPLR, which apparently stood for “Plays Lotsa Rush.” My Rush friend (every North American male has a “Rush friend”) was Arun, now a neurosurgeon. He explained (Rush fans love explaining things) how the drummer Neil Peart wrote the lyrics, even though bassist Geddy Lee was the one who sang them. Arun could elaborate the Rush philosophy, with the individual’s struggle to choose free will in a conform-or-be-cast-out world. Over the years he has kept me up to date on how Rush have revised their philosophy, as their ideas keep changing in response to a world where changes aren’t permanent, but change is.

  I was officially opposed to Rush at the time, so I enjoyed goading him about the band’s flaws. In all these friendly arguments, I developed a real affection for the band, as well as an admiration for their devotees, so I guess I w
as a casual fan. But casual Rush fans do not really count in the grand scheme of things. Real Rush fans are the hard-core believers, one of the most doggedly loyal audiences in the business. And then there are the people who hate Rush just as passionately, who for lack of a better collective noun we can call “the rest of the world.” The singular thing about Rush isn’t how beloved they are. It’s how hated they are.

  ARE RUSH THE MOST HATED band of all time? The answer is simple: yes. (Not the band Yes, although they’re in the top twenty.) Rush are easily, beyond any rational dispute, the most intensely despised rock band who ever existed. Women famously hate Rush, but most men have hated them just a little less fervently. In a way, that hatred is as impressive as the loyalty of their fans. Hating Rush was a blast. These days I like Rush a lot, but I miss hating them. We will never agree on anything the way we agreed on Rush.

  Rush are not so hated these days, because of Beyond the Lighted Stage, which has to be one of the best rockumentaries ever made. The band members are extremely lovable in this film—lifelong friends who never argue about anything except the keyboard solos. (Apparently certain members of Rush are the only people on earth who think Rush should have keyboard solos.)

  They’re also up front about their lack of appeal to any female audience. Even when they pack a stadium full of fans, the clitoris count will be in single digits. The only person in the movie who mentions sex is Gene Simmons. He tells stories about the seventies, when everybody else was chasing groupies (“you could even be an ugly bastard like me and get laid!”) while the Rush guys went back to the hotel to read books.

  So how did these huggable schlubs get so widely detested? Blame it on the radio. In a saner world, Rush would have stayed a cult band; they could have kept stoking their quirks for their sizable cult audience, while normal people just ignored them. That’s what King Crimson did; it’s what Gentle Giant did. It’s what all the other bands like Rush did. But it was not possible for normal people to ignore Rush, because the radio was shoving them down people’s throats.