So what if I didn’t want to play country? My father said that in business (and music, he assumed) it was important to be flexible. Wouldn’t I learn a lot about being a musician, about being in a band?
We rehearsed three nights a week in a trailer that the husband and wife were living in out in the forest, right on the Alsea River itself. No one had much work then; Oregon was in a recession. The drummer worked the counter at a car parts store, the bassist chopped wood, and his wife, the keyboard player, cleaned houses a few hours a week. Étienne had a straight job too, but no one talked about it. The first night I played with them was at the Waldport Lodge, which had seen better days. But it was a Friday night gig, a good night with a lot of people. The bartender introduced us as “an Oregon Coast institution—the Alsea River Band.” Étienne took the microphone and launched into one of his signature tunes, the Shel Silverstein song “I Never Went to Bed with an Ugly Woman (But I Sure Woke Up with a Few).” I had a few little fills to play, nothing complicated. After a Hank Williams medley, we played “Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys.” The crowd loved us and applauded boisterously after every number.
Then Étienne took off his cowboy hat, held it respectfully in one hand, and started talking to the crowd for the first time. He had never been farther south than Oregon, but he had perfected a sort of Memphis/Mississippi Delta accent. “We sher are happy y’all came out ta hear us tonaht, and we’re a-gonna do are best to give y’all a little comfert at the end o’ yer wee-uk.” Étienne knew that most of the audience were unemployed locals, spending whatever they had managed to scrape together to come out to the lodge, to nurse cheap drinks as long as they would last, and to see an actual live band, a rare occurrence in these parts that would help them get through the drudgery of another two weeks or so without anything to do but look for work. “And tonaht yer all vury lucky, cuz we’re featurin’ somethin’ rully special, our new guitarist, Dazzlin’ Dan.” He had named me that because he never could remember my last name, and even so, he couldn’t pronounce it. I didn’t feel particularly dazzlin’. For one thing, I had shown up wearing the same torn jeans and gravy-stained T-shirt that I wore to work, not being able to afford an actual performance wardrobe. Étienne would have none of that—he fished around in his duffel bag right before we went on and gave me one of his old jean shirts to wear. It was two sizes too big, but at least it was clean, and with the sleeves rolled up I looked almost stylish. Étienne wore a Western shirt with hand stitching on the shoulders and shiny, mother-of-pearl buttons. He had all the dazzle. “And Dazzlin’ Dan,” he continued, “is gonna show y’all a little of what five people kin dew tuh-gether when they’s a-playin’ good music.” This was my cue to begin a little lead part that I had struggled over, a complicated fingerpicking pattern to open another of the group’s signature tunes, “Poison Love” by Hank Snow. I played my bit passably, but the crowd was generous, maybe a little drunk, and applauded as Étienne slid into the first line: “Oh your poison love has stained the lifeblood in my heart and soul, dear . . .”
Standing onstage, surrounded by my new friends, I felt at home. I wished the song would never end. I hadn’t lived long enough to have been done wrong by a woman, but Étienne and the crowd surely had. I started wondering about why the audience would be so happy to be reminded, lyrically, of infidelities and betrayals. It seemed as though there was comfort in numbers, camaraderie in a shared experience. And Étienne was a master at making it all seem okay. He was both a ladies’ man and a man’s man—women of all ages wanted to sleep with him, and men wanted to kick back and tell stories with him. Whatever he had done in his life, whatever he had been, his face and his voice were utterly without guile or deceit. I’ve known dozens of musicians like him, but only a few with his power to make everyone in a room forget about everything that was going on (or not going on) in his or her life, trading it all in for the extended reality of the four-minute song. “Yes,” he seemed to be singing, “we’ve all been hurt, but that’s part of life, and in the end, everything worked out all right and here we all be, together.”
At Sambo’s, the pancake restaurant, we had a little cassette player in the back room that housed the walk-in refrigerator, food preparation area, and dishwashing station. This is where I mixed the pancake batter and the waitresses refilled the Log Cabin brand syrup bottles with a cheaper, no-name substitute. Our dishwasher, Eddie, was a big, overweight, clumsy guy who had never finished the eighth grade. On my first day, several employees went out of their way to tell me to steer clear of him, that he was crazy. No one spoke to him. For reasons I never understood, Eddie took a liking to me, confiding his secrets, telling me his stories. His great ambition was to get a job at the Waldport Lodge of all places because they had a Hobart—a dishwashing machine. “Can you buh-leev it?” he asked me several times a week. “They’s got a machine what cleans the dishes. Theys dishwasher just got to put them dishes in the machine. Set around waitin’ until a li’l green light come on, and den he’s a just gotta take them dishes out. Someday I’m wanna be the green light man. But youse gotta be in the onion to work there, and youse gotta be smart. And I ain’t so smart.”
Eddie was sensitive and kindhearted. He would bring me a muffin every day from the far side of the restaurant. Thinking that he had stolen it for me when no one was looking, he wrapped it surreptitiously in a paper napkin and presented it to me like a prize, singing, “Do you know the muffin man, the muffin man, the muffin man . . .” The ceremony was so elaborate I didn’t have the heart to tell him that muffins were free to employees, and that as a matter of fact, as chef, I had cooked them in the first place.
The manager, Victor, had grown up in Las Vegas, and gone to Sambo’s management training school at the corporate headquarters in Carpenteria, near Santa Barbara, California, and to his chagrin (he used words like chagrin quite often), he was sent to this small store on the Oregon Coast, far from the bright lights and big city that he felt were his due after all that training. It was Victor who hired me, on only his second day on the job. None of the locals liked him or trusted him. He drove a Mazda, the only foreign car in town. He wore white patent leather shoes with gold buckles and he used words that the coast-dwellers found strange. “I’m chagrined with you,” he would say to a waitress who had fallen behind in her side work. He sized me up and confided that he’d only be working here until he could put a profit on the books, that he had hopes to be sent by Corporate to Salt Lake or Sacramento, or a “real” city, a place he could make a name for himself. If there was anyone the waitresses felt less comfortable with than Eddie the dishwasher, it was Victor.
The waitresses had made a mixtape for the little cassette player in the back and the six songs that they played most often back there were:1. “My Guy” by the Supremes (a somewhat rare version compared to the Mary Wells version, which was the big hit)
2. “Stand By Your Man” by Tammy Wynette
3. “I Love a Rainy Night” by Eddie Rabbit (“Because he’s so cute,” they said.)
4. “Nights on Broadway” by the Bee Gees
5. “Disco Duck ” by Rick Dees
6. “The Morning After” by Maureen McGovern
Victor tolerated the girls’ tape and had brought in one of his own with his favorite music, and when he was in the back—mostly at the beginning of the morning and the end of the day—he would take out whatever was playing and put in his music. Victor’s top six songs were:1. “Foreplay-Long Time” by Boston
2. “Two Tickets to Paradise” by Eddie Money
3. “Keep On Lovin’ You” by REO Speedwagon
4. “Carry On Wayward Son” by Kansas
5. “Lady,” by Styx
6. “We Built This City” by Jefferson Starship
When “Lady” came on, Victor would cock back the upper part of his body, play air guitar, grimace like a rock star, and mouth the words, looking now and then through squinted eyes all around to see if any of the waitresses were watching this profound
display of his manliness.
Eddie was into heavy metal and had his own mixtape that one of his brothers made for him before being sent to prison for beating up three policemen with their own clubs. Eddie’s tape was:1. “Road Fever” by Foghat
2. “Warrior” by Wishbone Ash
3. “Paranoid” by Black Sabbath
4. “Running Wild” by Judas Priest
5. “Runnin’ with the Devil” by Van Halen
6. “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Ole Oak Tree” by Tony Orlando and Dawn
When any of Eddie’s five heavy metal songs were playing, he would wash dishes with a vengeance, scrubbing them cleaner than the day they were new, and doing a little thing that sort of resembled a dance, with him shifting his considerable weight back and forth from one leg to another. He had worn holes in the thick rubber mats where he stood. But when “Tie a Yellow Ribbon” came on he would stand in place, his head hung over his shoulder, his arms limp at his sides, all the weight shifted to one leg. In Eddie’s understanding of the world, the song was about a prisoner who would one day come home and nothing more.
What began as an uneasy truce between Eddie and Victor over control of the cassette player quickly degenerated. Victor didn’t like Eddie’s heavy metal and thought it was “inappropriate” for the restaurant. He’d substitute his tape, but as soon as he left the room, Eddie would put his tape back in, only to have it removed again by Victor. For more than a month, owing just to chance, Victor never walked in on the sixth song on Eddie’s list, to see Eddie not working, idle and locked in his own thoughts. On this particular busy Sunday morning, Victor put in his mixtape and walked up to the front griddle with me to show me how to prepare a new menu item that corporate was introducing, a dish strikingly similar to one that our chief competitor, iHop, introduced two years later called the “Rooty Tooty Fresh ’n’ Fruity Breakfast Plate.” This proto Rooty Tooty Fresh ’n’ Fruity plate consisted of a pancake with two orange slices and a fried egg on top, and a sausage and slice of bacon below arranged to look like a mouth on the pancake’s face. Victor’s tape ended and after a few minutes of musical silence, I saw through the door into the back as Eddie opened the cassette machine. Victor’s tape flew out from the spring-loaded mechanism, and onto the floor into a pile of sudsy water. Eddie ignored it and put his tape in. He hadn’t rewound from the last time, and it was cued up to the Tony Orlando song.
“I’m coming home I’ve done my time,” the singer began. Victor made a face at me and stormed into the back. “Who put this crap music on?” he demanded. He whipped around and stared at one of the waitresses, Tiffany, who was stuffing napkin holders. “Who?” he asked again. Tiffany shrugged. Victor then noticed Eddie, standing motionless with his head hung low over his sink. “Eddie! Why aren’t you working?!” Eddie just stood there, silently mouthing the words. Victor paused for a second and then something clicked. Hiking up his pants, he leaned forward. “Oh, no! Don’t tell me!” he said in a mocking tone. “You? You put on this crap sissy-boy music? Ha ha ha ha!” Victor didn’t just laugh, but held his stomach, like a caricature of someone laughing, and pounded the side of his leg. “I should have known that stupid Eddie would put on this stupid music,” he stretched his arms out wide, turning his body halfway around, announcing to the nearly empty room.
“Don’t call me stupid,” Eddie said, still staring down at the soapy sink, his back to the rest of us. “I ain’t smart. But I ain’t stupid neither.”
Victor wasn’t listening. “Ohhhhhhh,” he said with an exaggerated downward glide, “tough dishwasher man likes to listen to little baby music. Baby music!” He laughed some more and pointed his finger at Eddie.
“Let it go,” Tiffany said softly.
Victor grabbed Eddie by the arm, but Victor’s small hands couldn’t close around Eddie’s large forearm. “Turn around when I’m talking to you, stupid!”
Eddie turned around and he was crying. “The song—the song’s about my brother,” Eddie said.
“Your brother?” Victor mocked him.
“Please,” Tiffany said, a little louder this time, “Victor, please—just let it go.”
“Your brother? I’ve got news for you, stupid. Your brother isn’t coming home.” Victor taunted him. “Didn’t you read in the paper last week?” Victor knew that Eddie couldn’t read. “One of those cops died. Your brother is staying in prison for a long time. He’ll never be tyin’ no yellow ribbons around no tree, oak or nutherwise; the only thing he’ll be tying is his own hangin’ rope. Do you hear me, you big stupid lug? He’s never coming home.”
Eddie furiously grabbed one of the soapy knives out of the washbasin and drew his arm back, tears rolling down his cheeks. Victor sprang backward, smashing his own mixtape where it lay on the floor, and then flew through the back to the griddle area, where I was putting the finishing orange slices on a Proto Rooty Tooty Fresh ’n’ Fruity Breakfast Plate. Eddie followed right behind, the two of them yelling and screaming as our Sunday morning patrons looked on, half-astonished and half-scared out of their wits, while the chorus played jauntily on, “Tie a yellow ribbon round the ole oak tree/It’s been three long years/Do you still want me . . .”
We never saw Eddie again at the restaurant, and I read a few months later that his brother was killed in a knife fight in the state penitentiary. I did see him on the street a few times, standing in line at the unemployment office, and stopped to say hi. He called me “Dan Dan the Muffin Man.” We never spoke of the knife incident. Victor instituted a new rule that only he was to control the music in the back room. He hired another dishwasher, a man who was legally blind, whom he would taunt endlessly. “There’s a spot on this plate,” Victor would say, holding up a perfectly clean plate. “You’ll have to do it again. Be more careful—can’t you feel the spots? I thought you blind cripples had highly developed extrasensory perceptions. Can’t you feel the spots?”
In many of the places I’ve worked, music has been there as a soundtrack to help the employees get through their day. Of course there is no one song that everyone likes and it can be a challenge to please everyone, but when the right balance is struck, music helps to break the monotony, to comfort us through boring or stressful tasks. Many surgeons I know listen to music in the operating room—even brain surgeons! When I worked as an auto mechanic, the radio in the garage was going nonstop, tuned to the hit rock station. In my laboratory at McGill, where eight to ten people all work in a large room together, each computer workstation is equipped with its own stereo speakers and subwoofer. If the different music starts to compete, each computer station also has a set of headphones, and the students are typically found listening to their music as they perform their statistical analyses or analyze brain images. We all hear music in buses, train stations, dentists’ offices, elevators, Wal-Mart, when we’re on hold. The purpose of this is ostensibly to comfort.
Mothers from every culture sing to their infants, and have done so throughout time as far as we know. Singing can soothe and comfort infants in ways that other actions cannot, and this is in part because of how different auditory stimulation is from other senses. Sound can be transmitted in the dark, even when the baby’s eyes are closed. Auditory signals feel as though they come from inside our heads, unlike visual signals, which appear to be “out there” in the world. Before the infant’s visual apparatus is fully formed—before it can make out the difference between its mother and other adults—the auditory system is capable of recognizing the consistent timbre of its mother’s voice. Why is it that mothers instinctively sing rather than speak, and why is it that babies find song especially comforting? We don’t have the answers to this, but neurobiology shows that music—but not speech—activates areas of the human brain that are very ancient, structures we have in common with all mammals, including the cerebellum, brain stem, and pons. Song has repetition built into it—of rhythms, melodic motifs—and this repetition gives song an element of predictability that speech lacks. This predictability can be soo
thing.
The lullaby is the classic song of comfort. Most lullabies that we know of share structural similarities, according to my friend Jonathan Berger. Jonathan is a very highly respected composer and music cognition researcher, as befits his position as a tenured professor at Stanford. We met in his office on the Stanford campus to talk about Six Songs, then wandered down to the Stanford Bookstore, where, surrounded by musical scores in their extensive collection, we continued over lattes.
The World in Six Songs: How the Musical Brain Created Human Nature Page 12