Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (5 page)

Our hero is now clearly located in Africa, a place David Paich would very much like to go. We know this because there are wild dogs that cry out at night. It’s unclear why these dogs would seek “solitary company” or what “solitary company” might be, but never mind—Paich only had six months to work on the words. The dogs remind our hero that he is on a quest. In fact, he has a moral obligation whose looming presence he compares to a famous mountain rising like another famous mountain over a famous desert, although, intriguingly, the
mountain in question does not actually rise above the desert in question because it is several hundred miles away. Regardless, our hero is struck by the realization that he is sick. He’s become a thing of which he is frightened. It remains unclear whether finding “it” “there” will remedy this deep-seated thingdom.

What is clear at this point in the song is that David Paich recognizes the unique versatility of the word “thing,” which here alludes to a person of indeterminate turpitude while elsewhere serving as a noun simultaneously representing activities and possessions.

Our hero now reiterates his spiritual bond to Africa.

Dear Drought-Plagued Continent
, he is saying.
You really remind me of this chick I want to sleep with. Something about you—maybe it’s the wild dogs or the ancient melodies or the starving children I watch on TV-makes me realize I’ve been working too hard. I need to give myself more time to do and consume things with my lady, who I wish would get here already. In return, I bless your rains
.

There are, of course, many muddled romantic fantasies with artificial backdrops in the pantheon of pop music. The remarkable thing about this one is that it expresses so many quintessentially American attitudes at once:

1. The consumption of televised suffering grants me moral depth
   

2. Benevolence begins and ends in my imagination
   

3. Africa sure be exotic
   

4. All this consuming and appropriating is tiring—break time!
   

Rather than exposing us to the hard-won truth of individual experience, the song immerses us in the Karo syrup of an entire culture’s mass delusion. It is the lovechild of Muzak and Imperialism.
²

How I Became a Music Critic

I very much wish I could skip over the part of the story where I take voice lessons and join a gospel choir. You really don’t want to hear about this, especially if you’re me. The short version:

Having failed at piano—and putting aside a disastrous stab at saxophone—I decided late in college that I would follow in my father’s footsteps by singing. The only lesson I can remember in any detail is the week I attempted to sing “Country Death Song” by the Violent Femmes. The tune is about an insane hillbilly who throws his daughter down a well, and is sung in the manner one would associate with insane hillbillies, which is to say not a manner one would associate with formal voice training. I believe this is what appealed to me about the song. My voice teacher’s expression was the sort you see on certain trauma patients.

Did I give up? No. That’s my problem. I don’t give up enough. Instead, I joined Wesleyan’s gospel choir, the Ebony Singers. I was allowed to do so thanks to a shortage of black men willing to sing the bass parts. Our section consisted of me and three other white guys. Picture a barbershop quartet. Now picture them surrounded by black
women howling about the blood of the lamb. Now picture the white guys trying to clap along and stomp their feet. Now stop.

My career as an Ebony Singer was meteoric, in the sense that something large and flaming (my ego) crashed into something larger and unhappy (an audience). This was the result of the choirmaster’s baffling decision to allow me to perform a solo in concert. I settled on a pitch two octaves above my natural range. I also did a little James Brown clinch with the mic. If the Aryan Nation were in the market for a Moment of Supreme Whiteness, I believe I provided one. And nobody got hurt, if you don’t count the crowd.

Having by now established my bona fides as a nonmusician, it’s time to outline my career as a bitter hack, which begins with a summer internship in the sports department of the
Peninsula Times Tribune
, Palo Alto’s hometown daily. One afternoon, the City Editor stood up in the middle of the newsroom and announced that the music critic was sick and he needed someone to review the Bob Dylan concert that night.

There was nobody around, aside from the sports goons and the mushrooms on the copy desk—populations deeply, almost tenderly, committed to the avoidance of discretionary labor. I alone volunteered. As a reminder: I was the intern in the sports department. I had written exactly one story for the paper. It was about luge. The City Editor closed his eyes and pressed the heel of his palms into the sockets. “You know anything about Dylan?” he said finally.

Did I know anything about Dylan? What did I
not
know about Dylan?

The City Editor exhaled through his nose. “Fine.”

Alas, one of the few things I didn’t know about Dylan was who, exactly, he was. So it was off to the library, where people went before
God invented the Internet and where I discovered that Dylan had recorded 150 albums. I had four hours to memorize them.

The show was at the Shoreline Amphitheater, a venue built atop a landfill in Mountain View. Dylan had just released
Knocked Out Loaded
and would soon join the Traveling Wilburys. It was not a good time for him, though I didn’t know that. I found a seat on the grass and started taking notes (i.e. I scribbled adjectives that seemed to bear some relation to the songs he was performing). Only I didn’t know the names of the songs he was performing. I had to lean over and ask my neighbors, though I waited until after Dylan had finished a song because my neighbors were all Drooling Dylan Fanatics, though often Dylan tore through three or four songs in a row which meant I had to get the rundown from my neighbors before the next burst of songs, and frantically scribble arrows (in the dark) to indicate which adjectives applied to which song titles, along with observations of
significant physical detail
, such as, “Dylan stares at crowd” and “Dylan turns away from crowd” and “Dylan appears to need a blood transfusion.”

I will remind the gentle reader that I was nineteen at the time of this review. I did not know who Bob Dylan was. I had no technical training as a musician—if you don’t count the Sosoyev years, which you shouldn’t. Had I been quizzed on the meaning of the word
glissando
I would have answered (with some confidence, I’m afraid) “a type of fancy ice cream.” Not to be confused with
vibrato
, which was a gynecological instrument. And yet, as far as the readers of the
Peninsula Times Tribune
were concerned, I was a professional critic.

If this sounds absurd, consider the proposition that greeted me when I arrived at the
El Paso Times
two years later, fresh from college. Would I like to be the paper’s music critic? Of course I would. It was like being handed a license without having to take any exams, a license that granted me front-row tickets to all the big concerts, and
phone interviews during which I could indulge in the fantasy that, for example, Edie Brickell and I really
were
pals, based on our intense twenty-minute tête-à-tête, and that she really meant it when she urged me to stop by her trailer “to say hey,” and that if things went well in her trailer—which they very well might, thanks to my dazzling prose and chestal pelt—we would wind up engaged in a sweaty duet on top of an amp, an indiscretion she’d obviously try to write off as a fling except that she’d be unable to forget that tall, virile music critic from the West Texas town of El Paso, meaning more breathy phone calls, more visits, an eventual leak to the press, and a clandestine elopement captured by
People
magazine. As it is, Brickell wound up married to Paul Simon, a man much shorter than myself.

Also: I was suddenly up to my eyeballs in free music. I could call any record company on earth and direct them to send me an album. The only downside—and it was a rather large downside—involved El Paso’s unique geography, which can be best captured by the sign that greeted me as I drove into town for the first time:

Which is to say, El Paso is located in a rather remote part of the world from the American perspective, one very few concert promoters book, unless they work with country or heavy metal stars. Because El Paso is on the border with Mexico, a good number of Latin music acts also came to town, in particular Menudo, whom I reviewed three times. (If you have ever tried to make time with a grown woman by offering her a front-row seat to a Menudo concert, I propose we start a support group.)

Every year or so I got to review a band I liked, such as R.E.M. or Concrete Blonde or Steve Earle. But for the most part I was writing about Winger and Alabama and Reba McEntire and Vixen and Poison and George Strait, whom I reviewed four times, making me the only
Jew (that I know of) to have his work excerpted in
The George Strait Newsletter
.

The coolest band I ever got to review was Los Tigres Del Norte. Los Tigres was considered a
norteña
band,
norteña
being that jaunty, synthesized stuff that blares from the storefront speakers of border towns. But Los Tigres played everything: waltzes, boleros,
cumbias
, and their songs were really short stories about immigration and drug trafficking, about the desperation of living in a poor country hard up against a rich one. I can remember sitting high in the bleachers of the El Paso County Coliseum, amid the
viejos
swigging from dented flasks, as down below five thousand couples danced, the women beaming in pink and green dresses, twirling like bright ribbons around their shy mustached men.

I should mention, mostly for the sake of my own embarrassment, that I was called upon to review many other genres about which I knew next to nothing, such as jazz and classical, the latter including a young harpist whom I inevitably compared to Harpo Marx. My central concern as a critic wasn’t the music, but the mechanics of hitting my deadline. Specifically, would the Radio Shack TRS-80 upon which I worked crash before I could attach it to the “modem.” This was a giant rubber phone cuff that somehow whisked the words from my portable computer to the newsroom. It all seemed quite magical back in 1989.

Did it ever occur to me to learn more about music? Not really. Technical expertise could be established by using a word such as “polyrhythms” from time to time, but it wasn’t required. I worked for a Gannett paper. The whole point was to write at a fifth-grade level.

Am I making excuses for being such a lazy and frankly suckass reviewer in El Paso? Yes. But I was also, in my own frankly suckass way, up against an ontological dilemma: the description of one sort of
language (physical, auditory, intuitive) by another (abstract, intellectual, symbolic).

Talented critics can, of course, describe music with sonic precision. Take, for example, this passage from Sasha Frere-Jones’s review of the Canadian singer Feist in
The New Yorker
, a magazine I keep stored in my bathroom for research purposes: