Some Background Music

I’m about to tell you my deepest, darkest secret…but first you’ll need some context—some background music, as it were. Although I was a picture-perfect daughter in every other way growing up, I could not abide my mother’s single-minded obsession with the nauseatingly sugary sweet, thank-God-I’m-a-country-boy antics of John Denver’s music. It was literally the only thing she ever played and I found that fact to be not only annoying, but somewhat hypocritical—she who had gone to such great lengths to arrange cultural enrichment for me in the form of classical music lessons on the piano and flute. But perhaps her contradictory nature stems more than anything else from a private compulsion to atone for her own tomboyish refusal to conform to her own mother’s efforts to instill in her a sense of musical heritage when she refused to take piano lessons as a young girl. In fact, I’d say my mother’s guilty recollections of her youthful intransigence was the primary source of many of the things she inflicted on me, but I was (and the operative word here clearly is was) the girly girl my grandma always dreamed of: I was more than willing to patiently endure the long and often painful time that my mother spent intricately weaving bright ribbons through carefully-constructed hair braids and when I was in the sixth grade, my best friend even made a new year’s resolution for me not to play Barbie’s so much.

When I first began taking piano lessons in the second grade, my family was living with my grandparents in Orange County to help reduce costs while my older brother, Chris, was embarking on the first of many years of taking up residence in the pediatric oncology unit of CHOC hospital for his cancer treatment. My grandmother would sit and listen to me practice on her grand piano in her pink parlor (which was heavily bedecked with Lladro ceramic statues and histrionic Rococo paintings), gazing out the window reflectively until I finished, at which point she would sigh, “Promise me that you will one day marry a man who can really appreciate your talent.” As a girl, this sentiment of hers puzzled me in its ambiguity, but my grandma’s earlier laments were clarified further years later when, after Grandpa’s death, she explained that their courtship was characterized by frequent episodes of her begging him to go to the town dances with her, only to be rebuffed by his stubborn refusals in the form of leaving town to go fishing during those weekends. As I reflect back on those moments, I recall where my grandpa most likely was during my grandmother’s frustrated confessions of domestic neglect—running exactly parallel down the length of my grandma’s pink heaven was my grandpa’s den, which was stocked with brown leather couches and featured a TV with a screen the size of a cinema screen for watching football games and my grandpa’s favorite show, Murder, She Wrote. Taxidermied heads of five deer, a moose, a ram, and other poor creatures of the wild that had found themselves face to face with my grandpa’s rifle during hunting season peered out from the wood-panelled walls. In every sense, My grandma and grandpa truly were an odd couple.

When I was nine or ten, my family finally located an affordable home about an hour south of my brother’s hospital home in Orange County—affordable because it was located in what many not-so-endearingly term “the armpit of California,” Riverside County. I found that I could relate to my grandma’s frustrations with men who couldn’t fully appreciate her during one of my earliest recollections of an argument that I had with my father over the subject of who would last longer in the music industry—Paula Abdul or Debbie Gibson. Guess whose side I was on? Well, if I had been truthful, I wouldn’t have set one above the other. I owned only two tapes at the time: Debbie Gibson’s single, Electric Youth and Paula Abdul’s full-length album, Forever Your Girl. While transporting our belongings to our new home in the Inland Empire, we had been listening to Debbie’s single for quite some time, which meant that we were listening to “Electric Youth” and “I Get Lost in Your Eyes” over and over…and over again. Probably motivated more than anything else by a desire to enjoy the variety of ten songs rather than two, my dad suggested that Paula was more talented than Debbie, at which point my defenses went up for Debbie the Underdog. Years later, I had to concede to my dad’s argument of 1988 when, as I was watching Paula in her current role as American Idol judge, a commercial break delivered news that upheld his thesis. FOX was announcing that the Paula Abdul equivalent in its even more dreary and ultimately much less successful spin-off attempt to further degrade our country’s global image in the music industry, Teen Idol, would be…Deborah Gibson! P.S. Don’t mistake my cynicism about the American Idol phenomenon, which dominates the airwaves not one, but two nights a week. You can count on being greeted by one of two extreme emotions on my face every Thursday morning, depending on the results of the Idol vote from the night before: that of self-assured joy or of disappointed, America-hating sorrow.

My mom and my dad aren’t the only members of my family with whom I argued about music, though, and this next historical glimpse of past contention is simply tragic. They involve the disagreements that I merely invented for the sake of forging my own identity, separate from that of my older brother, Chris. I suffered from the classic little-sister syndrome of feeling overshadowed and subdued by my big brother. Since my brother was a hyperactive punk (and not “punk” in the musical sense), I felt that I could mark my own path by becoming the goody-two-shoe bookworm. Although his musical listening tastes included such classic legends as Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, Eric Clapton, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and Nirvana, I could not disassociate them from pain, for together they constituted the soundtrack for humiliating and life-threatening journeys to and from school each day. See, my mom deeded her family-toting suburban to my brother when he got his license and he just loaded that baby down with all kinds of tools of torture, such as ridiculously large speakers with way too much bass that left my ears pounding to the beat of the last song playing for long moments after I was finally released to the silence of the great outdoors. Much worse even than that, he had hooked up a P.A. system to the car, from which he faked police sirens to spook surrounding cars, amplified a honking horn, or blasted this weird hidden track about revolutionary rabbits that featured the sound of bleating sheep from some Primus album. And Chris did not allow the earliness of our departure for Seminary at 5:30 in the morning to keep him from displaying the same level of obnoxious behavior. We moved to the small town of Murrieta before it was even officially incorporated into a city proper, so the roads leading to the high school were in such poor repair that school was frequently cancelled on rainy days due to flooding. On these days, Chris embraced the hazardous road conditions for a little donut action wherever the mud was particularly prime and my shrill screeches against the practice were frequently fodder for heightening the joy of both him and his friends, who enjoyed parroting my complaints back in a taunting manner. One day when Chris’s antics concluded with a swerve into a fence on my passenger side, in the midst of vocalizing my rage at him for placing my life in danger for the sake of some idiotic Beavis-and-Butthead-like laughs, I privately derived momentary pleasure from the thought of what would happen when it came time for him to present his case before my parents. My head held high, my head shaking in a reproachful and dignified I-told-you-so manner, I rather gleefully envisioned what was to come: finally, he would be forced to acknowledge the error of his ways and the superior foresight of my wisdom. But Chris got the last laugh again: he threatened to tell my parents about my off-limits relationship with a non-Mormon break-dancing junior boy in the school choir named Dean if I didn’t take a vow of silence, so I was forced to clench my teeth as he elaborated a ridiculous story about swerving a cow for the sympathetic ears of my gullible parents. Unfortunately, I was too preoccupied with fear for life and dignity to appreciate the genius of those artists who typically reach out and engross the full attentions of frustrated teens who are seeking any form of solace or release that rocking out affords, nor was I able to fully perceive the ground-breaking work of my generation’s artists until long after the angst-ridden period in everyone’s life that smells like teen spirit.

Instead, when it came time for me to assume the role of high school chauffeur, when my parents let me borrow my mom’s white mini-van to take my little brother Jon to seminary and high school, his desires to crank up the rap and hip-hop rhythms that moved his soul were vetoed by my rather unimpressive preferences for Paula Cole, Juliana Hatfield, R.E.M., Stone Temple Pilots, the Counting Crows, Lisa Loeb, and—my favorite—Toad the Wet Sprocket. Rather than purging my troubles through rocking full out or by laying down rhymes with the power to cut, I preferred to bathe myself with woe by belting out the universal truth that “Everybody hurts” with Michael Stipe and by admitting my self-defeating impulses with Paula Cole, who reminded me that “It’s me who is my enemy, me who beats me up, me who makes the monsters, me who stoops my confidence…it’s me who’s too weak, me who’s too shy to ask for the thing I love.” When asked on the senior survey for the high school newspaper for the song that encapsulated my high school experience, I chose Toad the Wet Sprocket’s “I Will Not Take These Things for Granted”—not because I felt grateful for my high school experience, but because I was trying to make myself better by reminding myself that if I couldn’t be grateful for much, at least I could be grateful for “flowers in the garden, laughter in the hall, children in the park…music in the bedroom, laughter in the hall, dive into the ocean, singing by the fire, running through the forest, and standing in the wind in rolling canyons,” so that I could accept that “if I’m lonely here, I’m lonely here” and that “if it’s frightening,” I’ll manage-- “I’ll bear the cold.” Had I been more self-conscious and had I been familiar with the band, I would have chosen the song that I cold-heartedly designated as my mom’s theme song when I first heard it years later—the Indigo Girls’
“The Girl with the Weight of the World in her Hands”:

“She won't recover from her losses,
She's not chosen this path, but she watches who it crosses
Maybe move to the right, maybe move to the left,
So we all can see her pain she wears, like a banner, on her chest.
And we all say it's sad, and we think it's a shame
And she's called to our attention, but we do not call her name,
The girl with the weight of the world in her hands.

”We're busy with our happiness, busy with our plans
I wonder if alone she wants it taken from her hands
But if things didn't get any harder
She might miss her sacred chance to go a consecrated martyr,
The girl with the weight of the world in her hands.

“…‘Is the glass half-full or empty?’ I ask her as I fill it
She said it doesn't really matter, pretty soon you're bound to spill it.
With the half-logic language of the sermon she delivers
And the way she smiles so knowingly at me gives me the shivers.
I pull the blanket higher when I'm finally safe at home
And she'll take a hundred with her, but she always sleeps alone,
The girl with the weight of the world in her hands.”

It was my discovery of real music during my years of graduate school at UVa that offered me my only hope of escaping my tendency to cultivate the mystique of histrionic self-martyrdom. I had an entire litany of complaints that I won’t bore you with, the most-often articulated one springing from my stubborn refusal to completely relinquish my relationship with an ex-boyfriend who had moved to Virginia after I broke up with myself for him, sensing that he didn’t have the guts to do it himself. Tired of watching me abuse myself and even more fatigued of hearing all about it, my dear friend, Matt Bentley, decided that we would have one day every week in which I would tell my ex to take a hike for the evening so that I could go over to Matt’s, where we would lay on parallel couches and enthuse together over samples of his latest finds at the local Plan 9 music store. Matt was a PhD student in the Spanish department and hosted a Latino music show on the college radio station on the weekends, so he used that as justification for spending all of his spare money on music, just as I justify my CD library with this class. One night when I arrived in tears with my latest tale of emotional abuse, Matt listened patiently and then told me he had the perfect song for me among his new finds, deeming Ryan (NOT Brian) Adams’ “Come Pick Me Up” to be the official theme song for destructive relationships:

“When they call your name
Will you walk right up?
With a smile on your face?
Or will you cower in fear
In your favorite sweater
With an old love letter?

”I wish you would
I wish you would

”Come pick me up
Take me out
[Mess] me up
Steal my records
Screw all my friends
They're all full of [it]
With a smile on your face
And then do it again

”I wish you would

“When you're walking downtown
Do you wish I was there?
Do you wish it was me?
With the windows clear and the mannequins’ eyes
Do they all look like mine?

“You know you could
I wish you would

“Come pick me up
Take me out
[Mess] me up
Steal my records
Screw all my friends behind my back
With a smile on your face
And then do it again

“I wish you would

“I wish you'd make up my bed,
So I could make up my mind.
Try it for sleeping instead;
Maybe you'll rest sometime.

“I wish I could.”

What I recognized in that song was the biggest “pick-me-up” Matt could have offered; I recognized my pathetic tendency to not only put up with, but actually ask for, the abuse that I always complained about and I found a much better substitute for a companion—good music. In those sessions, I met and grew to love Nick Drake, Elliott Smith, Tom Waits, Jeff Buckley, Wilco, Nico, Morcheeba, the Shins, the Flaming Lips, Bjork, Clem Snide, Belle & Sebastian, Dar Williams, Iron & Wine, the Be Good Tanyas, Rufus Wainwright, Grandaddy, Modest Mouse, Ugly Casanova, the Magnetic Fields, Billy Bragg, Hem, Sparklehorse, Mercury Rev, Jim White, Lucinda Williams…the list goes on and on. As my parents were packing up my things to drive them back to California after I graduated, I would say that my Matt Music Sessions were as influential as anything else in my last-minute decision to shoot off resumes to schools on the east coast and I spent numerous weekends flying down to Charlottesville on the weekends for more of them when I first started teaching here three years ago. During one particularly memorable weekend, Matt made his famous salsa and we carefully set up The Wizard of Oz to play in synch with Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. We were so enthralled that we were motivated to then coordinate the four different discs of the Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka project on four different stereos throughout the house so that we could hear how they were meant to be played simultaneously for a slightly unlocked, but parallel and richly multi-layered listening experience. Needless to say, it was hard for us to go back to our classes the next Monday with a straight face, wondering what our students would think if they had known how we had spent our weekends. I find myself feeling some twinges of sad nostalgia as I force myself once again to remember that Matt has graduated and is living in a beautiful, old Victorian home with his partner so he can teach full-time in the Spanish department in Indiana’s Wabash University, but that’s why we have this class! Since the intervention of Matt, music has become a bit of an all-consuming obsession for me, but it truly is responsible for bringing us here today, so I’d say it’s worth it and I hope you feel it is, too.

So, now I imagine that you’re asking yourselves something like the following: “You’ve dragged us through this for six pages now and you’ve already actually admitted that you once adored Barbie, Paula Abdul, and Debbie Gibson; you’ve confessed that you now not only like, but love American Idol; you’ve unleashed the bloodthirsty hunter skeletons from your family closet; you’ve had the gall to confess your youthful ignorance of the important alternative revolution of your time, which you exchanged for far inferior bands; and you’ve provided us with a somewhat disturbing mental image of past boyfriends and goofball weekend extra-curricular activities…what possibly can be deeper and darker a secret than any of that?” Well, the moment has finally arrived.

My brother, Chris, the obnoxious one who figures prominently in this “musicography,” passed away during the summer after I finished up school at BYU, just as my emotionally-abusive relationship with my drummer boyfriend that Matt later helped me get over was beginning. I spent a lot of time seeking solace in memories, looking through our baby books, probably listening to Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel” on repeat (remember, this was before Matt introduced me to real music). The photo albums that my mom used for all of us prompt mothers to record early impressions of their children through designating space for them to make lists under categories, like “Some Quirky Early Tendencies.” When I came to that particular page in The Book of Me, I saw something of unfathomable import, prompting a mourner’s lament almost more gut-wrenching than the one I raised when I first learned the news of my beloved, albeit “hyperactive punk” brother’s passing. I threw the book across the room in horror and buried my head in my hands. Finally, after a prolonged moment of silent contemplation, I mustered the energy to get up on my knees. I almost gathered myself together enough to stand and walk, but the news had been too much for me, so instead, I crawled over, very slowly and timidly. Taking one last big and bolstering breath, I peered cautiously over the edge of the page to read the following in my mother’s smug and self-satisfied penmanship, which recorded the following boastful proclamation of talent, among other typical toddler behaviors: “Knows all the words and sings along to John Denver in the car.”

Postscript: A John Denver Medley (Formative Influences)
All of her days have gone soft and cloudy,
All of her dreams have gone dry,
All of her nights have gone sad and shady,
She's getting ready to fly.
Life in the city can make you crazy,
For sounds of the sand and the sea,
Life in a high-rise can make you hungry,
For things that you can't even see.
In this whole world there's nobody as lonely as she,
There's nowhere to go and there's nowhere
That she'd rather be.
She's looking for lovers and children playing,
She's looking for signs of the spring,
She listens for laughter and sounds of dancing,
She listens for any old things.
Fly away, fly away, fly away…

…Some days are diamonds, some days are stones,
Sometimes the hard times won't leave me alone,
Sometimes a cold wind blows a chill in my bones,
Some days are diamonds, some days are stones…

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy,
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry,
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely,
Sunshine almost always makes me high.

If I had a day that I could give you,
I'd give to you the day just like today.
If I had a song that I could sing for you,
I'd sing a song to make you feel this way.

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy,
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry,
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely,
Sunshine almost always makes me high.

If I had a tale that I could tell you,
I'd tell a tale sure to make you smile.
If I had a wish that I could wish for you,
I'd make a wish for sunshine for all the while.

Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy,
Sunshine in my eyes can make me cry,
Sunshine on the water looks so lovely,
Sunshine almost all the time makes me high.

Music makes pictures and often tells stories
All of it magic and all of it true
And all of the pictures and all of the stories
All of the magic, the music is you

Music makes pictures and often tells stories
All of it magic and all of it true
And all of the pictures and all of the stories
And all of the magic, the music is you