Turn Around Bright Eyes

by Rob Sheffield

  Something in Neil Diamond speaks to the boy in you and commands you to answer as a man. Something in Neil’s voice says, “Enough with the small talk, kid. You’ve mumbled at the floor too long. That tongue-tied high school boy thing was cute for about ten minutes. Stand up straight and look that woman in the eye. Knock off the chitchat and say what you mean.”

  Neil’s intensity can be intimidating, so you might accuse him of being excessive and hammy. But that’s when Neil speaks to you again. “Right, kid, James Dean got away with mumbling at the floor and he still got the girls’ attention. You as hot as James Dean? Didn’t think so. Are you a genius? Are you a movie star? No? Then speak the hell up. Give that girl a piece of your mind. That girl will be a woman soon, and if you want to be the man, you need to start getting her attention now. Not tomorrow—today. Tell her something good. Say it loud. Say it proud.”

  So when you sing a Neil song, you can hear Neil coaching you, guiding you, mentoring you. Neil wants to make you a louder person. If you’re a boy, Neil wants you to sing like a man. He gives it to you straight. “Look in the mirror, kid. Or merely behold your image in the reflective sheen of my gaze. You can’t worry about whether you are good enough to sing this song. You can’t hem and haw about whether you are worthy to hold this mike. You must belt. Act like you planned every second of this. Look at the woman when you sing to her and mean it.”

  That intensity is what makes him the ultimate entertainer. His live classic Hot August Night is truly frightening in the way you can hear the rapture he provokes in his audience. There’s a moment where he says, “Tree people out there—God bless you, I’m singing for you, too!” The liner notes explain he means the fans outside the theater, the ones who couldn’t get tickets and had to climb the nearby trees to catch a glimpse of their hero. That’s how much Neil adores his audience—he even sings for the freeloaders. But then, aren’t we all tree people in Neil’s forest? Can any of us claim we deserve him? No, we cannot.

  Maybe Neil was thinking of the Bible story about Zacchaeus, in the gospel of Luke, where the tax collector climbs a fig tree so he can see Jesus preach. (Yeah, but did Jesus ever make a live album?) Either way, you can hear the messianic fervor in his voice. He’s a take-charge guy. Even when the lyrics are pure drivel, Neil sings every line with ferocity.

  And that’s why “Forever in Blue Jeans” might be the ultimate karaoke anthem. It can scarcely be overstated how ridiculous this trifle is. “Honey’s sweet, but it ain’t nothing next to baby’s treat”—Neil not only wrote that line, he kept it in the song. Now, if you or I were trying to write a hit, and we came up with a lyric like that, would we say, “Hey, I think that’s a keeper—our work is done here”? Ah, no. We would immediately crumple the paper, burn the tape, and never mention it to even our closest friends. We would take a hot shower. We would question our major life decisions. But Neil not only held on to that line, he turned it into a massive worldwide smash.

  How did he do that? By singing the whole thing like a man. He attacks “Forever in Blue Jeans” like he thinks Bono is just some drippy-nosed whimpering child. Even when he gets to the “honey’s sweet” line, he comes on like Samuel L. Jackson bellowing, “I hope they burn in hell!” You hear it and you believe. And to sing it, you have to believe, too.

  The karaoke mentality brings out that hammy Vegas over-the-top belter in your soul. Karaoke is not the venue to get mellow or introspective; it’s no place for James Taylor or Carole King or Paul Simon, much as I love them. You have to bring the Neil. It makes you engage with your own emotions on a more extravagant level. And when that spills over into your everyday life, it brings out the sequins in your soul. This is something I get from karaoke, and over time it’s come to be something I need from karaoke.

  IT WAS ONLY AFTER I started singing Neil songs, night after night, that I needed to see the man live for myself. The next time he came to Madison Square Garden for a two-night stand, I had a plan. I talked Ally into coming along to the second night, which was a coup since she’s not really living the soft-rock lifestyle. But I went to the first night by myself, so I could sit alone up in the darkness and cry my eyes out to those songs. I figured Night One would leave me all cried out, so I’d be able to face Night Two bravely and not embarrass my wife.

  Night One went according to plan. I skipped a Dylan show that same night so I could sit in the nosebleed seats of Section 424, surrounded by nice old ladies who told me stories of how many times they’d seen the man together. (Along with their second-favorite, Sting, and surprisingly, John Mellencamp.) Neil was the master performer I’d always imagined—now this is a star, I thought. Now that’s entertainment. He had a conveyer belt to rotate him around the stage, so he could project to every corner. He dedicated “Forever in Blue Jeans” to the fans who bought tickets behind the stage: “Can you believe they paid for these seats?”

  But he sang to them, too. He sang “Sweet Caroline” three times in a row. (Note: I don’t mean he did a triple-sized version. I mean he began and ended the song, in its entirety, three times.) Then some roadies came out and set up a dinner table at the corner of the stage, with a white tablecloth, silverware, candles, a bottle of red wine. Neil sat down, lifted his wineglass pensively, and sang the first line of “You Don’t Bring Me Flowers.”

  I had a clear view of the hippie guy on the other side of the arena, right across from me, waving his hair to “Crunchy Granola Suite.” I drank buckets of beer and wept like a baby to “Brother Love’s Travelling Salvation Show.” Even the other cheapskates around me in Section 424 must have been a little horrified.

  On the second night, I was sitting with the same bunch of ladies, who looked relieved to see I had a date this time. I figured I had unloaded the tear ducts, so I would be able to face tonight like a dry sponge. Unfortunately, my tears began to gush from the opening bars of “I Am . . . I Said.” I cried all over again, even though Neil did the same songs, with the same stage banter. He busted out the bit where he says, “People always ask me, Diamond, why don’t you retire? Why don’t you quit touring the world and making people happy with your songs?” We all screamed “Noooo!” on cue, even Ally. There was no shame in my sobs.

  If I hoped to pick up any secret tricks I could steal when performing these songs, I went home empty-handed. But that was all right. Everything Neil wanted to say, he’d already taught me in the karaoke bar.

  TWENTY-THREE

  2:35 a.m.:

  Let Me Entertain You

  Karaoke has a lot to answer for, but in terms of its long-term cultural impact, here’s an underrated side effect: It killed the Hollywood slow clap. At some point, the movies gave up on the old-fashioned eighties slow clap scene and replaced it with the inevitable karaoke scene, where awkward characters would express their bottled-up emotions in song. Suddenly, it wasn’t good enough to have Corey Haim open his locker and find a varsity football jacket (clap) and wonder if it’s a prank (clap) only to realize (clap clap clap) his plucky quest to make the team has won the respect of his high school classmates (clap clap clap), including but not limited to Charlie Sheen and Winona Ryder (clap clap clap) and the whole school is giving him a heartfelt round of applause. Woo-hoo! Try it on, Lucas! Way to go!

  Also, in the nineties, people stopped saying “way to go” entirely. This was a good move, nineties.

  It’s amazing how karaoke scenes became such a Hollywood staple so fast, in movies and on TV. It wasn’t a gradual evolution: Once “the karaoke scene” arrived, it was a necessity. Every flick had one, from romantic comedies to crime thrillers. These scenes always work because they combine emotional exposition with the basic pleasures of watching famous people do stupid shit. It’s an easy three or four minutes of filler to throw into any screen narrative, with a guaranteed payoff, whether it’s going for quick laughs or quasi-unironic poignancy. It’s like putting a horoscope in a magazine or cat photos on your blog; it’s so automatically effective, requiring zero effort or ingenuity, it seems stupi
d not to do it.

  The karaoke scene also became a popular trope because there are so many different ways to play it. It can be slapstick, as in Shrek or Rush Hour 2. It can be sensitive, like Ewan McGregor singing “Beyond the Sea” with Cameron Diaz in A Life Less Ordinary, or ominous like Jim Carrey doing “Somebody to Love” in The Cable Guy. It can be romantic, as in 500 Days of Summer. Or it can be totally inane, like Gwyneth Paltrow and Huey Lewis in the “karaoke king by day, serial killer by night” drama Duets. And yes, that one really happened.

  It just goes to show how people were jonesing for karaoke to hurry up and arrive, without even realizing it. (In When Harry Met Sally, they didn’t even have the word karaoke—they had to call it a “singing machine.”) Every teen film of the eighties would have been so different if karaoke had existed. Consider the Duckman. If Pretty in Pink had been made a few years later, when he would have enjoyed access to karaoke equipment, Duckie wouldn’t have to settle for lip-synching “Try a Little Tenderness” in the record store for Molly Ringwald. He could have sung his own version. But karaoke was about to take off like a dirty shirt. And once it did, the slow clap started to look as quaint as a bolo tie with a powder-blue tux.

  You saw Lost in Translation, right? There’s no slow clap in that movie, right? It doesn’t end with Bill Murray kissing Scarlett Johansson dramatically on the sidewalk, inspiring a crowd of bystanders to burst into applause? Of course not. Instead, there’s a karaoke scene, and it’s completely brilliant, possibly the saddest karaoke scene in any movie ever. Bill Murray, who spent all those years on Saturday Night Live mocking lounge singers, plays it straight with the Roxy Music song “More than This,” expressing all the romantic yearnings he can’t share with Scarlett in any other way. Meanwhile, Scarlett dresses up in a purple wig to do the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket.” There couldn’t be a better picture of how karaoke works in the public imagination. It gets at the emotional essence of it: Sometimes you can only confess the truth about yourself when you’re pretending to be somebody else.

  A real historical turning point was the short-lived and soon-forgotten MTV show The Blame Game. You might remember this show, or you might not, but most likely you wouldn’t admit it if you did. It was on weekday afternoons, right after Total Request Live. I’m not ashamed to say The Blame Game kept me chuckling through many a dreary afternoon in the late nineties, as I sat in a catatonic stupor on my couch, caked in despair and Cheetos dust. Somebody besides me must have been watching, right? Maybe not, actually. (Where’s the DVD box set, MTV?)

  The Blame Game was set in a courtroom where supposedly real-life ex-couples would go on trial to see whose fault it was that they broke up. A judge in a black robe presided over trials like “The Case of the Tube Top Tease.” Like most courtrooms, this one had a DJ, plus a live studio audience, all of whom were probably mad they couldn’t get tickets to Singled Out instead. Each of the exes had an attorney (Kara for the ladies, Jason for the gents) as they gave testimony and got cross-examined in the “You Did It—Admit It” section. After the audience voted on the verdict, the loser had to kneel and beg for forgiveness, or else get their mug shot printed in magazine ads with the headline DO NOT DATE THIS BLAME GAME LOSER!

  But the best part of this magnificently cheap and crummy show, the scene that kept me on the edge of my seat, was the scene toward the end where the exes would testify in the Karaoke Chamber. Each litigant would step into the booth and sing a popular song, selected to express their feelings about their side of the breakup. The guys would usually pick something by Pearl Jam or Ugly Kid Joe; the ladies would go for Alanis or Toni Braxton. The only time I ever saw a gay couple on the show, the loser sang Madonna’s “Love Don’t Live Here Anymore.” (It was also the only time I ever saw an actual forgiveness hug at the end, and I would have acquitted that dude, too, just for that song. Oh, the healing power of Madonna.)

  My favorite Karaoke Chamber testimony was the Southern belle who had broken up with her boyfriend because he’d told her he was a virgin (he wasn’t) and because he was a jerk (he was). For his testimony, he picked Green Day’s “When I Come Around.” She stepped into the booth to sing a cheesy nineties soft-rock ballad, Jann Arden’s “Insensitive.” I vaguely remembered disliking this song on the radio, but in the Karaoke Chamber, it was deep soul. This girl wailed it like every line was getting wrenched from her heart, ascending straight to overshare heaven. She wasn’t just off key—she didn’t even drop by the key for a visit. It didn’t matter. Even the judge was wiping away tears. The Green Day dude didn’t stand a chance.

  After The Blame Game, the deluge. Like the brilliant karaoke scene in Britney Spears’s maiden cinematic voyage Crossroads. (Yes, I realize I can’t stop mentioning this film. It is important. What can I say?) In this fine feature film, Brit’s on a cross-country road trip with her high school girlfriends, and their car breaks down in New Orleans, and they need a whole bunch of cash to get it fixed, y’all! So they enter a karaoke contest, which Britney wins easily with the first song of the night, her version of Joan Jett’s “I Love Rock ’n Roll.” The bartender, played by old-school rapper Kool Moe Dee (how ya like him now?), passes a tip jar through the crowd, netting a prize of four hundred dollars for Brit and her cronies. That’s right: A room full of drunks in New Orleans shell out four hundred dollars for Britney not to take her shirt off! See, I told you! Movies are awesome!

  The scene is perfect in its way, because you don’t believe a second of it, which makes it just like the rest of the movie, but you can tell what’s going on and why. Because karaoke is a dip into the unreal, the unrealness of the movie catches up with the unrealness of the scene and they coalesce into a moment of oddly convincing emotional truth. The same thing happens in the David Lynch movie Mulholland Drive, where the torch singer does a Roy Orbison song in Spanish and whispers, “Silencio. No hay banda.” Except even David Lynch is about one-twelfth as creepy and disturbing as Britney singing “I Love Rock ’n Roll.”

  Jennifer Love Hewitt has a similarly great moment in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer, where she sings the bustiest, most foreshadowing-intensive version of “I Will Survive” to appear in any horror movie. She’s singing, to entertain her group of school chums who are on a tropical vacation trying to forget their big guilty secret (the one about what they did last summer). But then the lyrics on the karaoke screen mysteriously flash the words, “I still know what you did last summer!” Eeek! I wouldn’t be too sure about all that surviving you have planned, JLH.

  And yet that’s only my second-favorite bad karaoke scene with Jennifer Love Hewitt. I might be the only person who remembers Time of Your Life, her spin-off from Party of Five. Just like Britney, she’s trying to find herself, which means she wants to go on a long journey, meet her long-lost mother, and bang some hot dudes. (Although instead of Kool Moe Dee, her guardian angel turns out to be RuPaul.) So she moves to New York City and moves in with Jennifer Garner. In the first episode, she gets a job waitressing at the local karaoke bar, the one where all the single hot guys hang out. She gets peer-pressured into making her karaoke debut, with the world’s shakiest version of R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).”

  I have to admit, I loved this scene. I had a copy of the pilot as a VHS screener tape, so I kept rewinding and rewatching that scene for days. The sight of Jennifer Love Hewitt chanting those rapid-fire R.E.M. lyrics was touching despite itself. It dares you to guffaw at how ridiculous it is, and yet I couldn’t. I cried actual tears watching it. (So did Michael Stipe, I bet, although for different reasons.) It was even better than the episode of The Golden Girls where Bea Arthur sings jazz standards for the boys at the Rusty Anchor.

  But really, it all goes back to Natalie Wood in Gypsy, a stage kid who’s been overlooked and ignored all her life, dressing up to do her first burlesque routine, only to be mesmerized by the sight of herself in the mirror, mumbling, “I’m pretty, mama! I’m a pretty girl!” It’s one of the most
wrenching scenes in any American movie.

  Natalie Wood sings “Let Me Entertain You” in the burlesque parlor, completely dazed by the feeling of having people notice her for the first time. She spins around a few times. They’re yelling for her to take some clothes off, but she doesn’t even notice. She gets so wrapped up singing “Let Me Entertain You” that she forgets to take anything off except a glove. Her mother yells, “Sing out, Louise!” Nobody watching can tell how profound this awakening is for Natalie Wood, or why she seems like she’s in a trance. Nobody truly understands her except the song that she’s singing. And for a couple of minutes, it’s all she needs.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  3:02 a.m.:

  Knowing Me, Knowing You

  Bury my heart at Planet Rose. Under the zebra-stripe couches, under the crusty red velvet carpet, under a bar stool. A piece of me will always be there. Where the bartender charges two dollars per song while watching the World Cup on mute. Where the tipsy Eurotrash girls flash their breasts for songs. Where the round mirror-lined wall forces all the different parties to sing to the entire room. No private corners here—it’s a fishbowl karaoke-quarium.

  How did we get here tonight? It started last night when we trucked out to Ding Dong Dang in Koreatown. They give you free Snickers and Milky Way bars and the songbook has tons of 1990s “Ordinary World”–era Duran Duran. But they were full. What’s up with that? They’re never full at Ding Dong Dang! So we motored next door to Music Story, where they give you free bowls of popcorn and cheese-puff balls, and where the sign on the wall promises, YOUR STORY IS ABOUT TO UNFOLD! (Remarkably similar to what Rod Stewart tells his virgin houseguests.) The book offers nineteen different Stryper songs. How is that possible? How could the devil himself know nineteen Stryper songs? It also has Swedish metal-guitar pioneer Yngwie Malmsteen, whose songs barely have any words at all, besides death and/or Viking.