Detours

by Tim Rogers

  I was talking about the film, and you, just this week with my friend Andrej, who I call Shel Rogerstein because of our physical similarities. Andrej lives in Cleveland, Ohio. He’s a lawyer with four beautiful kids, and a wonderful songwriter and properly aggressive guitarist and singer. Our bands toured together a bit through the US fourteen or fifteen years ago, but we hadn’t seen each other in years before meeting up last year at a show I was doing in his hometown. I drove my hire car up from Fort Wayne, Indiana, revelling in classic rock radio and the absence of a need for communication, and when I arrived at the venue in Cleveland there was my old friend.

  We spent the afternoon in a bar, swapping stories and catching up in the way only middle-aged ‘rock’n’roll’ guys can: vacillating between a mild bravado and an inquisitive affection. I peppered him with questions about baseball and American football, hungry for more folklore and personal stories, while he wanted to know what the hell my secret was to making a living out of this music thing for twenty-plus years. After that night’s gig, we got loose and talked of our divorces, our incredible kids and how the fuck we made it to forty-three. The next day we went to a French restaurant where we whiled away a long afternoon talking of his love of tango, his partner who is a tango dancer, and his deep knowledge of the music. It caught me off-guard as I was a new admirer of the dance. How could Andrej and I have not been in contact for so many years when we have so much in common? And how is it that those things we don’t share are still of interest to us both? And why am I drawing such a long bow with Christopher Plummer, Ewan McGregor and a song and I?

  Well, the film, for me, is about never knowing when or where love, or companionship, will come, or come from. That when I’m ready to shut the blinds and fuse sclerotically with my furniture, something celestial might draw me outside like a nocturnal animal, or to a new shore like the tides. To position myself among the dusty material between the stars and lose myself as I’m careening through its whispered demands.

  When I asked Andrej this week if he knew, and liked you, as a song, he responded in the most perfect way.

  ‘“Stardust”? Oh man . . . what a jaaaaam.’

  I’m a little lost these days. The past year has given me so much to be thankful for professionally, and yet I’m feeling myself slow down and get heavier, more ruminative. I’ve been thinking it’s a sadness, but maybe it’s just a time. Something above or around me whispering in my ear: a warning, or just a voice imploring me to slow down in between all that’s going on.

  Oscar Hammerstein once said, ‘“Stardust” rambles and roams like a truant schoolboy in a meadow.’ Though these days I feel as removed from my school days as I am from Ursa Major, there are still nights when I can lose myself and lose the heaviness, stepping out in expectation, wearing a little cashmere, singing a song to myself as I lightly tie a neckerchief.

  You’re sweet and sad, and you step lightly. But you’re not easy listening. It rankles me when casual listeners regard anything delivered without a lot of force as being so. I’m drawn to you. At times I feel I’m navigated by you. As if I need nourishment to feed my decisions and directions. Especially now, you let me know it’s okay to be alone. To live with a heart that’s full. Full of romance and piquancy, hope and despair. Full enough to be like a companion, as I skulk along the rooftops, slow-footed and stealthy as fog. Guided by the stardust.

  Earworms

  Damn songs, they disguise themselves as excuses

  And a hundred other uses, smoky lullabies

  Damn tunes, they try to justify goodbyes

  Wrap up guilt inside of rhymes

  Pretty sounding lies

  As a music critic I make a great sandwich. I studied music for a few years at school and returned to study theory two years ago, though the terminology and even the vernacular has never stuck, so the time explaining to anyone why I react to a song or an artist is so full of formless exasperations and recommendations that a passing observer may think I’m having a stroke. I take no pride in the potholes of my education, and the next opportunity to fill these holes will be seized. Until then, however, music theory, like plumbing and necromancy, will remain elusive to me. So I preface any criticism on music, be it Ornette Coleman or Napalm Death, with ‘Please, don’t excuse my ignorance, but you are going to have to tolerate it.’

  ‘Pavane pour une Infante Défunte’ (Pavane for a Dead Princess) is a solo piano piece written in 1899 by Maurice Ravel. I chanced upon it in my kitchen, staring out the window while absent-mindedly spreading CheesyBite on dry biscuits. Though I could eat an entire jar in one sitting of this spread that sounds too good to be true (and invented, surely, by someone with a sense of humour comparable to whoever dreamed up Fruit Loops), I was stopped midstroke, mesmerised by the piece of music playing on the radio. It was like a terse conversation between lovers whose declarations of intent and chastity sound exactly like admissions of the opposite. I was bewitched.

  The piece exists in some impressionistic realm where I’m left emotionally adrift for a time, every time. A repeated phrase of four chords ascends in certainty then plunges into a chord of doubt, leaving my forehead furrowed any time I sing it to myself; but then the same ascending phrase later resolves, as if expected bad news has not eventuated. I have listened to it frequently, on a loop in a queer reverie. I don’t want to move or drink or share my thoughts; I just want to be caught within its soft grasp.

  And so, this spring night in a nautically themed Hamburg hotel, after playing a show that has left me with nothing but a chipped tooth and a nagging unease, I set up a small speaker next to the bed and fall into Ravel’s composition to soothe my thoughts.

  I wake as the music-streaming service switches to an orchestrated version played by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, which gives me a jolt of recognition – but it feels a little like an uncomfortable hug from a relative. Or more accurately like I’m watching the movie dramatisation of a novel I love, when the experience of seeing another’s vision of your internal reverie is invasive, or at least overblown.

  I think back on the gig. Though the tempos, melodies and harmonies had seemed to land in all the correct places, I’d moved as if shod in someone else’s shoes, emerging from water in ill-fitting trunks. The hope that a show is going to be both physically as well as audibly satisfying may be too much to ask when playing to eighty people in a small Hamburg club, but there is always a chance.

  I had played at the same venue eighteen years ago with American band Wilco. That night, I’d sat in the dressing room before the show a little pissed off that Wilco’s gear was taking up all the space onstage and we’d been given so little room – but we were convicts, after all, and they were great people. I asked our sound guy to play the first Rolling Stones record as the audience shuffled in. All the songs on that album are covers and are played so wildly that it seems like it could all fall apart in the middle of one of Charlie’s drum rolls like an excited kid falling down the stairs. The guitars bark and bite, and that singer bloke attacks the words like a starving man at a banquet, simultaneously stuffing his face while savouring every morsel. It was just the tonic we’d needed. After dancing around the dressing room for twenty minutes with cold cans of Astra beer we could have played on a stage the size of a postage stamp. That night I’d abandoned any attempt to represent the songs with nuance or subtlety and gave over to how the songs swung. We swung.

  I often drift back to the memory of that night when shows aren’t ‘happening’ and so had tried last night, but it just . . . didn’t happen. I couldn’t shake the thought of a lad in the crowd who’d repeatedly shouted out that he was from Perth (and there is always someone from Perth, at any show in the world, who wants you to know they are from there, and that you were too), and how I had brusquely retorted that we didn’t fly sixteen thousand miles for such humdrum information. Such an inglorious retort. With a deep sigh and a last slug of warm Astra, I fall into a resigned state of sleep.

  Which makes it all the more prep
osterous that I wake up with ‘We Close Our Eyes’, a pop hit from 1985 by English duo Go West, bounding around in my head. The speakers are dormant, there’s no radio either from the Reeperbahn or the corridors of the hotel. This yapping dog of a tune is running amok entirely within my cranium. That God, she is a prankster. It fills my synapses like a sugary blue Slurpee being sucked greedily through a straw. What the shitting fuck?

  I have not thought of this song since I was fifteen and even then I’m sure it would have been with disdain at a Blue Light disco while waiting for a song with guitars on it so I could practise my moves in the dark. After a few minutes of incredulous tossing and turning, hoping that a new position in bed might drain the song from my ears, I try to reason with the situation. I am experiencing an earworm, a delightfully graphic term derived from the German Ohrwurm. Considering there are German terms of endearment such as Honigkuchenpferd (‘honey-cake horse’) and Hasenfürzchen (‘bunny fart’), it should come as no great surprise that there’s a word denoting a limbless invertebrate camping on your cochlea and singing exact replicas of four-bar phrases from songs you possibly despise.

  To the gentleman from Perth in last night’s audience, this particular earworm would be delicious Schadenfreude, which leads me to pen this note in the hope that I bump into him on the streets of Hamburg, hand it over, buy him a beer and leave quickly:

  Dear Sir,

  I gotta apologise. I’m a horse’s arse, with accompanying dags and horseflies. Loud rock’n’roll music can make folks do dumb things. I thought it was dumb of you to keep yelling ‘Perth’ at me, but I KNOW it was dumb of me to have a go at you for it. I get that when you’re away from home sometimes you want a little connection with home. Be it a beer or a D-list celebrity singer guy. I do it too. As much as I pretend I’m indifferent, I love home – and there are times on tour when all I wanna do is talk footy with someone from Whyalla.

  Have a good trip in Germany. Gotta warn you, though, Astra beer will leave you with goddamn biblical hangovers. There’s an amazing restaurant in St Pauli called Brachmanns Galeron. Get there. For what it’s worth, I woke up this morning with a Go West song in my head. That’s what you get for bein’ the hindquarters of a stallion. Justice is served. Cold.

  Travel light,

  Tim.

  Like most pop ‘hits’, ‘We Close Our Eyes’ falls and lands in all the right places, as is now acutely obvious to me as I plough through the seafaring corridors of the hotel, with its round windows and navigational ephemera reminding any visitor of Hamburg’s port and call, my feet resentfully unable to fall out of rhythm with the song’s poking, insistent beat. Down the two flights of stairs to reception I chant the mantra ‘Fuck. You. Fuck. You. Fuck. You.’ on every footstep, but as a young couple in the traditional liveries of English tourists in town for a football game pass me, I become very aware of just how unsettling it may be to encounter a scrappy, overdressed gentleman with an attack of coprolalia, especially at this time of the morning.

  I enter the breakfast room. I see the tessellated arrangement of sliced meats, cheeses and breads, and the diners hulking over the spread like water buffalo at a lakeside, craning their necks and, with pendulous bottom lips, deciding what to choose. And still the synthesised stab of the faux-horn line that precedes each verse repeats itself with a maddening velocity in my head.

  Like the warm, consoling hand of a wise uncle on my shoulder, Mark Twain’s short story ‘A Literary Nightmare’ comes to mind. He writes of a jingle that he had read in a morning paper that infects his thoughts. He loses all concentration and is unable to work or even remember what he has eaten, such is the persistence of his ‘worm’. It is only when he ‘passes on’ the offending doggerel to a friend that he is released from its grip.

  I pour myself a coffee from a modular pot (the only inspiring bit of design in the functional dining room) and look around at the other diners. I try to identify a victim I could sidle up beside, into whose ear I can whisper that sinuous melody of the verses, before it gives way to the frenetic punctuated chorus. All of the other diners are older than me by at least a decade. There is definitely an international football game going on in town. There are some large men, red faced with bulging guts, accompanying diminutive women who cluster together. One by one, they gave a brief, unimpressed glance both up and down my now seated figure.

  My puckered cream-coloured dinner jacket and black slacks began to feel less like Warren Beatty at Cannes in 1973 and more like comedian Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack. A magnificent acting performance, indeed, but not the look I need this morning, especially as the current soundtrack between my ears intensifies. The coffee is working, but in concert with my increased heart rate is the brattish bassline – its nagging insistence heightened by being played on a synthesiser with none of the charm of a strung instrument but all the percussive fuckwithery of a beer bottle dragged across your front fence at 4 am. ‘Hiccupping hubris’ I think, and as I stifle a quick chuckle, a monument of a man who has his back to me swivels in his chair (which, as he does so, I fear his huge buttocks will swallow – the grinding motion of his arse turning like a lemon being squeezed on a citrus press) and glowers at me. There will be no passing of the poisoned chalice in this room. My time in the breakfast room is done.

  Strolling the Reeperbahn before the cleaners hose away the last of the vomit from the streets, with the predatory sounds of Go West in my head, persuades me to seek out the less regurgitated-upon Simon-von-Utrecht-Strasse, en route to the Karolinenviertel district. One or two record stores might be open there to help smother and possibly extract my worm. Listening to other music on headphones isn’t an option – I want to will the song away. Pride is now at stake. And now as I march contrapuntally to the rhythms of the song, demanding to be free of its strictures, I can picture the video clip: two English lads earnestly gyrating among – what is it? – automated mannequins? It is as if the worm in my brain has summoned extra friends to supply the images. The video tells of a time in pop history when a young lad with the face and body of a brickie and the hairline of a science lecturer could cavort as if at a country wedding and charm the buying public. He does have a gravelly and appealing voice, if only the surrounding clamour wasn’t so charmless.

  Doesn’t it make more sense to be assaulted by a pop hit ‘of the day’? Some slippery dance track in a minor key that is hypnotising the supermarkets of Europe? Or something wonderful like ‘Peg’ by Steely Dan, a song so full of hooks it should be cast out into the cod fisheries in the Bay of Biscay, a song of joy and buoyancy even before the show-stopping glottal-stop vocals of Michael McDonald? If only I could send in those glorious cynics Walter Becker and Donald Fagan to wage pop wars with my current worm.

  About ten metres ahead of me is a gentleman, walking slowly with his hands clasped behind his back and stooping at a mild angle that resembles a dipping bird toy over the edge of a glass of water. He’s older than me, with shoulder-length, lightly oiled white hair combed back from his face, and he is wearing a three-quarter length black coat. The lower corners of it flap rhythmically even though his movements are without haste.

  As I near him, I begin to hear it. His tremulous whistle. I am in the presence of the Last of the Siffleurs. I could weep with joy. I slow my pace to keep a consistent distance, as if on a leash. My attention is so concentrated I have become similarly bowed. What is the tune? Ah, it is ‘I Could Have Danced All Night’. Julie Andrews, Frank Sinatra and Rosemary Clooney flood my auditory canal as if sashaying into an elaborate dinner party. I feel elevated, released. My pace quickens. I step to the right-hand side of the gentleman and turn my head towards him as I pass.

  ‘Danke schön, sir.’

  He looks at me with a quizzical but not displeased grin.

  I resume my regular pace and head for Marktstrasse, possibly too early still for the record stores to be open, but with lightness in my feet. I could have walked . . . I will walk all day.

  Feardom

  Of all
the utterances delivered to me by strangers, my least favourite after ‘We can no longer, legally, serve you’ would have to be, ‘Well, that isn’t very rock’n’roll.’ It has happened when I’ve been rummaging for the perfect carrot at a fruit and veg store, waiting in line at a supermarket with a three-pack of plain black socks, and peering lovingly at ornately sculpted chess sets in a games store in Greenwich Village. It’s a regular observation that certain folks feel very comfortable throwing around but one I feel I have no right of reply to, because to respond would indicate that I had at the very least the same preconceptions about what it meant to act ‘rock’n’roll’: what the dress code was, where the clubs were where such folk met, and what rhythmic wallop would guarantee your entry.

  Conversely I’ve been complimented with being very rock’n’roll when falling off a barstool or having a beer for breakfast, which is ironic because these are two early signs that the evening’s rock’n’roll performance will likely not go very well, if at all.

  Now that definitions of the musical genre known as rocknbloodyroll have generally been whittled down to talk of clothing and hair and bad behaviour, or employed by comedians and game show hosts as a term of parody, I’ll weigh in, as a fan, and offer up my own thoughts.