Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love and Karaoke

by Rob Sheffield

  Once we were in a pizza place where the Gwen Stefani song “Hollaback Girl” was blasting on the radio, and Ally asked, “Why is Gwen singing about the Hall effect? She keeps saying, ‘I ain’t no Hall Effect Girl.’” Then she explained to me what the Hall effect is—it has something to do with negative charges moving around in a metal and a magnetic field. I liked the song better Ally’s way. I’d seen the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey dozens of times before I met her, but it was a whole new experience watching it together. They only knew about seven of the moons of Jupiter then? And they thought it had a solid surface? Jupiter has dozens of moons, and it’s made of gas, so it doesn’t have lakes or trees or dinner tables. Was I supposed to know that? Well, now I did.

  Her career as an astronomer has taken her many different places, from telescope to telescope. She lived for a while in Tokyo, which is where she first got into karaoke. She was the first person who ever informed me about the whole “Pluto not being a planet” thing. She pointed out that the sun is going to burn through all its hydrogen in about five billion years, a process that’s already been under way for billions of years so there’s nothing we can do about it, and that the universe might be shaped like a Pringles chip. She also told me about the night one of her astrophysics friends went to a bar trivia contest where the final question was “What does Kelvin measure?” The winning answer was “heat,” but her friend explained that Kelvin measures temperature, not heat, since heat is energy and is measured in energy units like joules or ergs. The astronomer refused to back down, until the battle had to be settled with a chug-off. These astro people are hard-core.

  Ally made everything seem new. So many familiar things about my world were different now that I was seeing them through her eyes. Falling in love with an astronomer made me fall back in love with all the songs I’d ever heard about looking up at the stars, whether it was Hüsker Dü’s “Books About UFOs” or Madonna’s “Lucky Star” or Lois’s “Capital A” or Barry White’s “It’s Ecstasy When You Lay Down Next to Me.” For so long, I’d been in the dark searching for a star; now the search is over, and here we are. Like Boy George says, choose a color, find a star.

  AS A SCIENTIST, ALLY KNOWS a lot about the courtship rituals of different species. It always seems to involve a song. For instance, the male frog has one song that he uses for his mating call, and it’s the same for every frog. They croak the same notes, in the same order. No room for creativity or improvisation. Any frog who tries to freestyle is not getting lucky tonight. When it comes to love on the lily pad, slavish accuracy is the male frog’s game.

  For birds, it’s different. When a bird has love on his mind, he needs a song to separate himself from the flock (or pack or murder or whatever it is). For finches, every male sings his own distinctive courtship song. Every breeding season, he perches in his nest and lures the female finches with his individual love song. (It’s usually the same tune his father sang, and he sings the same one his whole life). The female finch hears him sing, and that’s how she decides whether she wants a piece of his beak. The males and females repeat this ritual every breeding season, no matter how many times they’ve mated before. The song is what seals the deal.

  Other birds have a more varied repertoire. Perhaps the most seductive bird in the forest is the lyrebird, which has an uncanny ability to mimic any sound it hears. It can imitate other birds or human voices; it can even beatbox. In some documentaries about the lyrebird, you can hear the bird mimic the sound of the cameras rolling. Ally’s also into this death-metal band called Hatebeak, who have a parrot for a lead singer. There are two human dudes in this band, plus an African gray parrot named Waldo, who squawks over their guitars. Hatebeak never perform live, of course, because the guitar volume would be too much for a parrot’s delicate ears. But they make records with titles like “Hell Bent for Feathers” and “The Number of the Beak.”

  But whether it’s love or hate, the bird’s song is a crucial part of the way it relates to other birds. Ally and I are birds, not frogs. We knew we belonged together because of the songs we loved. In the karaoke room, we’re lyrebirds, trying on different voices. Ally’s favorite kind of rock star to adopt for karaoke is the swishy mod English rock boy, the same way I love to sing songs by brassy mega-femme sex warriors. She loves to do the hits of Placebo and Pulp and Franz Ferdinand; she’s drawn to the androgynous femme-boy voices like I’m drawn to girlie dames like Taylor Dayne and Chaka Khan and Sheena Easton. It’s probably a mix of lust and identification. She loves to do Prince’s “Darling Nikki,” a song about an androgynous young rock star who meets his match at the well-lubricated hands of Nikki the Sex Fiend. She takes Prince to her castle and grinds him until his eyes spin like a pair of one-armed bandits. That’s the same kind of intensity Ally brings to karaoke. She’ll show you no mercy, but she’ll show you how to grind.

  Music is just one of our fundamental obsessions. And that’s part of what music is for—bringing people together. Every couple has their songs, and they’re not always the songs you’d expect. They don’t have to be goopy love songs, either. I know a couple whose wedding dance was AC/DC’s “Let Me Put My Love into You.” People can turn anything into a love song if it helps keep them together. The artist doesn’t really get a say in the matter—it definitely doesn’t matter what the artist might intend the song to be about. Bono used to complain about people using U2’s “One” as a wedding song, since for him it’s a song about conflict and self-doubt. (“Love is a temple, love’s a higher law”—make up your mind, guy!) Sting used to complain about people thinking “Every Breath You Take” was a romantic ballad, the same way Michael Stipe complains about how people hear “The One I Love.”

  These guys might think the fans are misreading the dark, ironic subtext of their lyrics. But as far as I’m concerned, the fans are right. Anything can be a love song as long as two people care about it. We can twist any artifact to our romantic purposes. Friends of mine, for their first date, saw Dr. Death, a documentary about a guy who makes electric chairs. I thought, That’s a first date? If there’s a second date, there is definitely going to be a wedding. (There was.) And they both owned copies of the album Crispin Glover made in the nineties. That’s a beautiful thing, and it’s exactly why the Crispin Glover albums of the world exist—to help total freakazoids find each other.

  We need those shared obsessions, whether it’s bird-watching or motorcycles or cooking or shoplifting. A friend of mine once told me, “Larry Storch is the guy who saves my marriage.” He and his wife are obsessive fans of the long-forgotten sixties TV comedian. They love Larry Storch so much, they bond by hiring a babysitter and checking into motel rooms where they can stay up all night watching Storch do his thing on their videos of the sitcom F-Troop. Hey, it works for them. I’m not such a huge Storch-head myself, but I knew exactly what my friend was talking about. Every couple needs their Larry Storch or their Crispin Glover.

  For Ally and me, it’s always the song. It was our favorite songs that first helped us notice each other and recognize that we were birds of a feather. Music is a huge part of our lives, with countless songs we think of as our songs. And that’s why Boy George is an essential element in our marriage. He never fails to remind us that we belong together in the church of the poison mind.

  ELEVEN

  10:59 p.m.:

  Heartbreak Hotel

  I get my singing voice from my dad, who got it from his dad, who got it from some other Irish guy with a terrible voice. I come from a long line of these guys. My grandfather, Ray Sheffield, was a president of his local chapter of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America. (My grandmother, Peggy Sheffield, was in the sister organization, the Sweet Adelines.) A barbershop quartet generally consists of a tenor, a baritone, a bass, and a crow, who is the guy they stick in the back because he can’t sing. My grandfather was a crow among crows. We had records of him in the house growing up, dating from the fifties days of private-press
shops where you could make your own ten-inch 78 records.

  My dad sings in church and likes to tell the story of when he was in high school, singing onstage with his local chapter of the Catholic Youth Organization, when they would do their annual show. This involved dressing up as a hobo to sing “That Lucky Old Sun.”

  (Side note: The CYO called its annual production the “Minstrel Show.” This was the 1950s, so it raises the historical question: Did this minstrel show involve white kids putting on blackface? That’s an excellent question. And I have never asked my dad, because I don’t want to know. Irish males are very good at not asking questions when we already know we couldn’t deal with the wrong answer. I suppose it’s a survival strategy for living with Irish females.)

  My aunts like to tell stories of my dad’s teen enthusiasm for vocalizing. When he was fifteen, in 1956, he would spend hours in his bedroom singing along with Elvis Presley records. He sang “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Love Me Tender,” and the little-known country weeper, “Old Shep,” which was his special favorite to sing. It’s about a farm boy and his beloved dog. It has a plot with a long spoken-word recitation. (Spoiler alert! The dog dies.) This song was too sad for me to tolerate, even when I was a kid, but I always love the picture of my dad playing that one record over and over, fifteen years old, sneaking cigarettes until his mom had to ask why the shades in his bedroom were turning brown.

  My dad and mom, as fifties high school students, were fond of Elvis and doo-wop, the hits they grew up on. They both used to sing “In the Still of the Night” with their high school friends—my mom sang the melody, my dad sang the “shoo wop, shooby doo” part. My dad still sings along with the radio, and I have always loved hearing him—he would amuse my sisters and me by doing the bass voice from oldies like “Little Darlin’.”

  As his (lucky old) son, I have inherited his enthusiasm for singing. Alas, I have also inherited his talent. I have inherited many of his other traits, which become more mysterious to me the more clearly they emerge. My dad is the kind of Irish male that Irish females call “easy,” or “aizy” as they pronounce it—the biggest compliment we can get from the Irish females in our families. Being called easy means we are easy to please, easy to get along with, easily amused. We’re fine with that, whatever “that” is right now. And my dad is extremely easy, a guy who never gets ruffled, never loses his temper, never seems the least bit awkward or uncomfortable even in the strangest situation. He knows what he likes and it doesn’t take much to make him happy. When we were kids, we took a road trip through Italy, and my dad brought along his little jar of Taster’s Choice freeze-dried instant coffee. He didn’t like the cappuccino or the espresso they offered him. Anywhere we went to eat, my dad would ask for a cup of boiling water and produce his private stash of Taster’s Choice. His children rolled their eyes, but it didn’t faze my dad. Nothing really does. He puts people at ease. People would rather be kind to my dad than mean to him. He gets away with things the rest of us can’t get away with. He gave me unrealistic ideas of what a grown man can charm his way out of. I don’t know how he does it. He won’t tell me.

  I am named after him, except he is Bob and I am Rob. He is the most Bob man who has ever existed. (There is no way we could trade first names.) He has lived in the same town his entire life, except for when he was at Fort Dix in the army, and two years he spent in Boston when he first married my mom. He lives barely a mile from the house where he grew up. Everybody in town knows him. When I first got my driver’s license, I got pulled over by the cops because they wondered why some kid was driving Bob Sheffield’s car. When they saw my license, they said to tell him hi.

  He and my mom have been married since 1964, after meeting at Boston College. The summer of 1989, when it was their twenty-fifth anniversary, he and I went for a walk at Castle Island by the sea in Boston, and I asked him point-blank: How do you keep a marriage together? What’s the secret? How do you do it? He said, “Well, it’s heaven if you marry the right one, and it’s hell if you marry the wrong one, and you don’t find out which one you got until it’s too late.” Oh. Thanks, Dad. I was angling for something a little more useful.

  My mom has a slightly different answer. “I’m only saying this because I’m on the second stinger,” she said. “But the secret is, your father has a short memory.”

  When I try to imagine what their secret is, this is the image that comes to my mind: Sometimes we go out to dinner, just the three of us. I sit in the backseat. A song will come on the radio—Elvis, Neil Diamond, something like that. My parents will be up front singing along. And I have to ask myself, what year is this? It could be 1974, it could be 1996, it could be some other time.

  HOW CAN I EXPLAIN MY dad? Let me put it this way. I have never seen the movie Jaws.

  And I’m not afraid of sharks. If anything, I’m a shark fan. They’re cool, right? I watch them regularly on Animal Planet, and whenever Jessica Alba makes a movie where she plays a shark wrangler. I once favorably reviewed a Great White album for Spin magazine. “Barracuda” will always be my third-favorite Heart song. I have nothing against sharks at all. My soft-on-sharks credentials are solid.

  But I’ve never seen Jaws and it’s because of something my dad told me one day. I was in fourth grade when this movie came out, and I wasn’t a fan of scary movies, so I declined to go see it. Jaws was the first movie I can remember that people went to see repeatedly—although Star Wars, a couple of years later, would solidify that trend. It was kind of a status thing to brag about how many times you’d seen Jaws, which after all was a PG movie with a sex scene. Hardly any kid I knew didn’t see it. (And our fourth-grade art teacher, Miss Slodden, was said to be an extra in one of the scenes where people in swimsuits are running out of the water in mortal terror.) Most of my friends went to see Jaws multiple times, but I kept saying no over and over. I was embarrassed by this, because it seemed childish.

  One Saturday around noon, when the cartoons were done, even Fat Albert, and the third bowl of Boo Berry had turned to a glob of fuchsia slush, a couple of friends called to invite me to Jaws, which they’d already seen four times. I said no thanks. I hung up the phone in the kitchen, while my dad was sitting with a cup of Taster’s Choice. I told him about the invitation and how I declined. He said, “You know, I’m really proud of you for not letting anyone push you into doing something you don’t want to do.”

  And then . . . well, that’s what I always wonder about. It’s the kind of thing those of us who aren’t parents can only guess. Then what? What did my dad think after saying that? Was it something he planned to say, or did it just slip out? Did my dad even remember saying it ten minutes later? Did he think, “Hey, I just gave my son a major compliment here, one he’ll remember the rest of his life. Now I can rest on my parenting laurels and spend the rest of my weekend on the couch watching Steve Grogan pass to Sam ‘Bam’ Cunningham”? Or did he think, “Maybe I should have pushed him to go see the shark movie and confront his fear? What kind of a creampuff am I raising here?” Did he think, “Uh-oh, I overpraised, I gave him too big a compliment. I gave up some leverage. I have failed as a dad. Is my only son destined to grow up as a spineless ninny who chickens out of everything and blames his parents?” It wasn’t rare for my dad to give his children compliments—in fact it was extremely common. So maybe he wasn’t even that impressed with himself. Maybe he was already thinking, “Any Cheerios left?”

  That’s something I always wonder. What was that moment like for him?

  I could ask, but my dad’s too much of a natural-born diplomat for that, and besides, he’s a lawyer. You can’t ask my dad a question like that about the past. First, he’d ask me how I remember it, and as soon as I told him, he’d claim he remembered it the same way. Then a week later he’d tell me the story as if he just remembered it, except he’d change Jaws to The Towering Inferno or something.

  I could ask my friends who are dads, but it would seem like I was implicitly dropping a hint or critiquing thei
r parenting style, so I can’t ask them, either. So I still have no idea. What did my dad think after he said that, and did he realize he was making a big impression on me?

  I do know this. I still have never seen Jaws. When my dad gives you a compliment for doing something, it very much makes you want to keep doing it. When my dad smiles, which is often, it makes you want to repeat whatever you were saying or doing that made him smile. I thought a lot about what my dad said, so I treated it like a decision I had made and was sticking to, even after I started liking scary movies. I saw Jaws 2 in the theater, having been assured it was about one-third as scary as The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training. I read the Jaws paperback, or at least the opening sex scene. I had a college buddy with the nickname “Mako.” I enjoyed the Dickie Goodman novelty record “Mr. Jaws.” I loved the Bob Hope parody special Joys, starring Vincent Price and Freddie Prinze. It’s not like I don’t get the joke if somebody says, “We’re gonna need a bigger boat.”

  But not seeing that stupid movie everybody else in the country has seen is just a habit I perpetuate, simply because of something my dad spent five seconds telling me thirty-five years ago. In a way, that’s scarier than any shark could be.

  I WAS WELL INTO ADOLESCENCE before I realized that other boys did not necessarily have dads like mine. The summer after freshman year of college, one of my roommates came to visit (we listened to Live Aid on the radio) and when I was off to drive him to the train station home, my dad gave him a hug goodbye. My friend broke down in the car and cried all the way to the Amtrak station—he told me he’d never hugged his own dad.