But the not-quite-illusory connectedness hawked by media corporations is still a wispy simulacrum compared to gathering with strangers at a club or concert hall to hear a band. Not long ago, I saw Jason Moran’s trio at the Village Vanguard. He was on his Fats Waller kick—giant papier-mâché mask, looped samples. His version of “Jitterbug Waltz” brought me to tears. I was with a friend, and we had been talking earlier in the evening about our attraction to disparate accounts of the world as broken—Marxism, Christianity. I leaned across to her during the song and said, “The world is broken, but this is one of the things we do about it,” gesturing in awe at the group. She said, “And would it mean as much if the world were whole?” Which is basically the theme of this book. And I’m sure all that sounds ridiculous, but “Jitterbug Waltz” was incandescent and perfect that night. I bought Moran’s record, took it home, put on his studio version of the song. It wasn’t even close.
* * *
I. Eisenberg: “The phonograph always plays it exactly the same way,” unlike a live performer (Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa, 2nd ed. [New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005], 64). My favorite rock guitar solo is Mick Taylor’s at the end of the Stones’ “Sway” on Sticky Fingers. I immediately noticed when one of the several CD reissues cut the fade-out a fraction of a second early, and couldn’t listen to the song on that edition again.
II. Edison also, of course, thought wax cylinders would make better records than flat discs, partly because he didn’t foresee a need for ease of storage: you just shaved down the wax after listening and reused the cylinder. He did include “reproduction of music” fourth on a list of possible uses for the phonograph published in 1878, between “the teaching of elocution” and “the ‘Family Record’—a registry of sayings, reminiscences, etc., by members of a family in their own voices, and of the last words of dying persons.” But he believed the device would be used primarily to reproduce speech, and marketed it accordingly.
III. In 2008, a team of scientists successfully converted an 1860 phonautogram—the wavy lines the phonautograph scored into sooty paper—of Scott singing “Au clair de la lune” into sound.You can hear it on YouTube.
HOLES
2-XL wasn’t a real robot, just a cheap eight-track player, a toy, vaguely shaped like R2-D2. It came with interactive educational eight-track cartridges (if you’re under thirty, your childhood was less technologically exasperating than mine). I mostly played music on it—Billy Joel, the Eagles, Journey. Someone, when I was around eight years old, gave me Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The ones that got me were “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite!” and “A Day in the Life.” Spooky melodies, weird breaks—they reminded me of church music. I’d stare at the cover—on an eight-track, a tiny piece of paper glued to a chunk of plastic—while I listened to the songs. I had questions. Who were the Hendersons? What was a hogshead, exactly? (It couldn’t be what it sounded like—on fire?) But most important: What could it mean to “know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall”? I ran that line through my mind every which way. My dad explained the Albert Hall: big concert hall, London. But the eeriness of the line wasn’t dispelled, because there’s no sense in which “holes” can “fill” anything, and because of the long lilting hole-filled sound of the line: now – know – how – hole – fill – Al – hall.
I don’t even much like Sgt. Pepper’s now. But I’ll never get to the bottom of “A Day in the Life.” Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall. It’s a metaphor: for what, though? You don’t decide to go deep into words; something takes you there—a plastic robot, Lennon-McCartney—something that says I’d love to turn you on.
* * *
A movie on TV. Two men are sitting by a campfire. One of them begins freakishly to intone. The words—I have no idea what they mean, but I’m bewitched. When they finish falling, the speaker turns to his companion and says, “Yeats.”
I don’t remember what the movie was or what lines the actor quoted. I was fourteen or so, and all I knew about William Butler Yeats was that he said things fall apart, and I knew that because I’d read Stephen King’s The Stand. But I hadn’t realized poetry could do this to you—could bind you with a spell and leave you feeling like your dog just died.
I checked out The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats from my high school library in Colorado Springs and never returned it. I started reading at the beginning, so the first Yeats poem I ever read wasn’t “The Second Coming” or “Leda and the Swan” or “The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” it was “The Song of the Happy Shepherd.” I took its principle that “Words alone are certain good” a bit too seriously.
“The Rose of Peace” was the first poem I ever memorized. I would chant it to myself while walking in my grandparents’ pasture in Rose Hill, Kansas, petting the horses, not always avoiding their apples. Here’s the opening:
If Michael, leader of God’s host
When Heaven and Hell are met,
Looked down on you from Heaven’s door-post
He would his deeds forget.
Brooding no more upon God’s wars
In his divine homestead,
He would go weave out of the stars
A chaplet for your head.
I didn’t yet know to call this ballad meter, but its cadences rolled through me. I read Yeats’s poems for days, often without understanding a word. It was my first real immersion in poetry, and this auditory intelligence rewired me. Imagine if the first movie you ever saw was Madame de . . . .
Decades later, Yeats’s pitch still seems to me better than any other poet’s I know. And that fact still seems mysterious, though it has something to do with repetition and variation. Often, like Qoheleth, Yeats will build and build until his rhetoric reaches a boiling point, at which point the poem begins to pick up and resituate words and phrases in a way that, at the moment, makes me think of Anna Kendrick playing “The Cup Song” in Pitch Perfect:
Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.
Here, in “Easter, 1916,” the shifts are mimetic of what they describe, the antimetabolic movement from “Minute by minute they change” to “Changes minute by minute,” the incremental recalibrations of stone and stream, horse and cloud. Yeats recurs to these incantatory effects—chiasmus, antimetabole, and simple repetition—again and again throughout his poetry.
When I first noticed this all those years ago—“They came like swallows and like swallows went”; “I call it death-in-life and life-in-death”; “I have a marvellous thing to say, / A certain marvellous thing”—I thought it a great discovery. Later I learned there have been many studies of this crucial feature of Yeats’s rhetoric. I am not sure, though, that anyone has noted a possible provenance in these lines of Lionel Johnson’s, quoted by Yeats in a late essay:
The Saints in golden vesture shake before the gale;
The glorious windows shake, where still they dwell enshrined;
Old Saints by long-dead, shriveled hands, long since designed:
There still, although the world autumnal be, and pale,
Still in their golden vesture the old Saints prevail
Hearing Johnson recite this poem deeply affected the younger Yeats, and I suspect he took from it perhaps more than it contains.
It
was not then my intention to study Yeats, at least not in a scholarly sense, but to listen to him, to repeat his words to myself, dropping them among the horses’ droppings. And though my own work fails to measure up to my great example in every way, this is how I learned to write: read and recite, recite and read, repeat.
JOURNEY FORCE
Amid camera trickery at least as advanced as Louis Lumière’s in Démolition d’un mur, Steve Perry is emoting backward through stacks of shipping pallets. It’s the video for Journey’s 1983 hit “Separate Ways (Worlds Apart).” He lip-synchs over arena-synth bombast: “Promises we made were in vain—in VAY-ay-ay-een, VAY-een!” At about the 2:21 mark, he glances behind him to make sure he’s not about to smack into something. Journey was a band too heedlessly excited about its dumbest ideas to prefer choreography to contusions.
From the fifth through seventh grades, I was a card-carrying member of Journey Force, the band’s official fan club (they issued you a card; I carried it). Every month I devoured the official Journey Force newsletter, Journey Force, which ran hard-hitting interviews with band members:
Journey Force: Congratulations on your Grammy nominations! How does it feel to be nominated?
Steve Perry: God, it’s amazing! I’m so excited. I was nominated for my participation in “We Are the World” and I’m in there for a single (“If Only for the Moment, Girl”), and possibly for the album of the year. I think there’s also a category for “Best Performance By a Group or Duo.”
Journey Force: That must be really exciting. Are you going to the ceremonies?
Steve Perry: Yes! I’ve got my tuxedo coming in, with tails and everything. Speaking of tails, we’re discussing selling a T-shirt at the Journey concerts that has tails . . . it’s black and a T-shirt, but it has tails. We were talking about that at the meeting today.
Now that’s what I call a meeting.
I had several Journey T-shirts, without tails, as well as Journey headbands and Journey wristbands (it was the ’80s). Journey pins adorned my jacket—one depicting the cover of the album Escape (a scarab spaceship exploding from its chrysalis planet), one the disconcerting blue robot head (or whatever it is) from the cover of Frontiers. I tracked down all the albums on cassette, even the pre-Perry waste products—Journey, Look into the Future, and Next—and guitarist Neal Schon’s solo emetic with Sammy Hagar. I had the Journey Escape video game for the Atari 2600, a cynical product of rock corporatism apparently designed to kill Lester Bangs. (After “a spectacular performance,” you have to lead the band members to the scarab spaceship thing while protecting the concert cash from “hordes of Love-Crazed Groupies, Sneaky Photographers, and Shifty-Eyed Promoters,” as the game manual puts it. There was an arcade game, too, but I never played it or even saw it in an arcade—in this version, fans steal the band’s instruments and hide them on various planets. “It’s such a pleasurable experience to meet [our fans],” Perry told Journey Force in 1984.)
All this meant I had negative cultural capital at Woodland Park Middle School. Girls liked Journey. Guys, committed to the masculinist overdrive of football and pushing nerds into lockers, listened to Iron Maiden and Ozzy. Being mocked for liking the wrong bands was part of the natural noise of my childhood, so normal I didn’t question it. Anyway, I bonded with metal girls over Journey (Nikki Wright, get at me).
I must’ve known at some level that Journey wasn’t considered “good”—was, in fact, considered a joke. But I wasn’t aware that such a thing as music criticism existed, so I hadn’t heard of Robert Christgau, whose D+ review of Frontiers would have infuriated me: “Just a reminder, for all who believe the jig is really up this time, of how much worse things might be: this top ten album could be outselling Pyromania, or Flashdance, or even Thriller.” Possessing a nervous system, Christgau loved Thriller, but the other two mentions were digs: Even this crap is better than Journey. (At the time, I owned all four albums, and I still say Def Leppard’s Pyromania is a goddamn masterpiece.)
It was only much later that I began to care what smart writers thought about music I loved—or that I had foolishly believed I loved, but I couldn’t have loved what Greil Marcus called “the self-evident phoniness in Steve Perry’s voice—the oleaginous self-regard, the gooey smear of words, the horrible enunciation,” right? If I loved all that, then I must have bad taste.
Eventually, of course, I did succumb to right thinking. My family moved to Colorado Springs, where I fell in with skateboarders, who turned me on to Black Flag, Minor Threat, Big Black, the Minutemen. From there it was but a short step to the usual constructed ideas of good taste in music. My first thought was to list a bunch of artists here to prove my credentials, which just shows how deeply these identitarian impulses run. For years, my younger sister would, to embarrass me, bring up my preadolescent fandom. I pretended my infatuation with Journey had been an elaborate, ironic gag, which drove her crazy.
So let me make it up to her by affirming now, without irony: I like Journey. Or, at least, I like two Journey songs (not counting Steve Perry’s magnificent solo hits “Oh Sherrie” and “Foolish Heart”). I first heard “Only the Young,” Journey’s second-best song, in 1985, when I bought the matchless Vision Quest soundtrack on cassette at a Sears in Colorado Springs. Later I would learn the band left it off Frontiers in favor of two forgettable tracks. Of course. The song roars to life with Schon’s pick slide, and Perry’s off in the ether, belting needlework-sampler wisdom poetry. “Only the young can say,” because the young see through “promises” and “lies.” The synths and processed guitars swell like a mammoth wheel of Monterey Jack left in the sun.
I’m supposed to be repelled by this, but I find it thrilling. The intervening years of tasteful discrimination haven’t blunted its power. “Only the Young” distills Journey’s message, insofar as the band was coherent enough to have one: the kids are all right, they just wanna be free. It’s there in “Escape,” amid hair-metal riffs avant la leather—a kid’s “breakin’ all the rules” and “gettin’ out from this masquerade.” It’s there in the titles of the group’s best-known records: Departure, Escape, Frontiers. It’s a perfectly generic message, expressed without humor or poetry, but it becomes something more in Journey’s one great song, full stop.
You can’t listen to “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” now without thinking of Tony Soprano, who punches it on the jukebox before the screen goes dark in the most overanalyzed scene in television history. It’s an inspired choice—a synecdoche for Tony’s lack of sophistication, his humanity. If Scorsese had filmed it, Tony would’ve played “Gimme Shelter” or something. But instead, here’s this very bad guy whom you care about because you’ve been immersed in his life for six seasons—“the most fully drawn person in modern fiction,” David Thomson called him—and you’re never going to see him again, and the poignancy and strangeness of that are wrapped up in a hackneyed corporate-schlock anthem.
At least that’s what you’re supposed to think “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” is. Punk and its aftermath made high school bearable for me, but it also wiped some of the best bands of the ’70s and ’80s and their songs off the board for self-consciously cool kids. I sometimes dream of a world where my generation worshiped Van Halen instead of the Pixies. Journey wasn’t one of those bands, but “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” is one of those songs. It cascades from whoosh to whoosh—it peaks all the way down, closer to a twenty-first-century pop hit like Amerie’s “1 Thing” than to similar-souled stadium ballads like Styx’s “Come Sail Away.” Like its “small town girl” and “city boy from South Detroit”—a section of Detroit that exists only in the mind of Steve Perry (“the syntax just sounded right,” he said)—the song might go anywhere, do anything, as long as it’s somewhere bigger, something gaudier. As Chris Willman wrote for the Los Angeles Times music blog:
Structurally, it’s a mess: Surely one would get tossed out of songwriting school for a tune that follows its opening piano riff with a verse, a guitar arpeggio, a second ve
rse, a bridge, a guitar solo, a third verse, a repeat of the bridge, another guitar solo . . . and then, 3 minutes, 20 seconds in, when the song is ready to fade out, one of the most unforgettable choruses in rock.
Songwriting school? Not in South Detroit, brother. Just as bands like Talking Heads and Buzzcocks were tightening anxiety-wired rock songs, Journey went full-barrel baroque for bliss.
Maybe I wouldn’t hear so much in the song now if I hadn’t lip-synched it into my air-mike so much then. I remember waiting impatiently for the band to play “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” the one time I saw them live, at Denver’s McNichols Sports Arena in 1986. My dad, reluctant chaperone, was more interested in their opening act, the Outfield, who’d ridden the bad vibes of “Your Love” onto an NPR program he’d heard. His interest didn’t survive their first song. I asked him recently if he remembered anything specific about the concert, and he said, “I remember specifically that I was bored.”
Journey did play the song, of course, and I was big with wonder.
In a few years I’d be standing with friends in much smaller and grimier venues, watching bands like the Butthole Surfers, the Replacements, Warlock Pinchers, and Sonic Youth, and Journey would be an embarrassment. In 2000, they paved McNichols Sports Arena and put up a parking lot. But as I listen to “Don’t Stop Believin’ ” today, once again, in the arena of my soul, how high that highest Bic lights the dark.
THE CHILD THAT SUCKETH LONG
They appear to be the names of heavy metal bands: Plague of Fables; Star-Flanked Seed; Serpent Caul; Murder of Eden; Altar of Plagues; Seed-at-Zero; The Grave and My Calm Body; Dark Asylum; Mares of Thrace; Herods Wail; Christbread; Binding Moon; Red Swine. In fact they are phrases culled from Dylan Thomas’s poems—except that I threw two actual metal bands in there. Didn’t notice, did you? The best metal undercuts its portentousness with self-awareness—if your major tropes include corpse paint and Satanism, you’d better not take yourself too seriously. In Thomas’s work, self-seriousness is the major trope. There’s wit, but little humor. All those moons, loves, deaths, Os. Everything is intoned from on high: “Death is all metaphors, shape in one history,” he tells us: “The child that sucketh long is shooting up.” Wouldn’t you?
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