Nile River Groove

"Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" by James Brown
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ogGAiyjMNY

A friend of mine who was not many years ago on a large boat pleasure-cruising the Nile told me he was sneaking a smoke on an upper deck while idly watching some other men sweeping the boat. It was a beautiful day, he told me. There was an outdoor sound system. Without warning (you should always warn people that James Brown is coming), "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" spilled into the placid air, expanding it and the efforts of the men with brooms, whose movements quickly and collectively gained the patterns of happiness. Those men at work hadn't stopped working -- they'd simply added dance to their day. Magically, they had become the joyous, kinetic rhythm system that James Brown would have wanted them to be. (James Brown wanted everyone to dance.) If my friend, despite the African sun and the electrified African-American music, didn't join in the dance, it was only because (I'm assuming) he was probably feeling out of his element. He was, after all, a Canadian guy sneaking a smoke under an awful lot of dazzling warm tropical light, whose sneaky power is enough in itself to keep a northerner's ass planted, and his feet static, and his limbs in place just because he's looking so much and doesn't want to miss anything. (Me? Well, I'm a ham, and so I would've found a broom and joined in.)

But my friend's report proved to me that James Brown's art is universal -- i.e., Papa's bag is always brand new. Give Shakespeare or Mozart or Van Gogh each his due, but the heartbeat is all. Even as everything in this number -- the horns, guitars, drums, the bass, the voice -- contributes to the deep groove, each becomes a slave to that groove's intoxicating and overwhelming steadiness. Those sweeping men on a boat in the Nile River in Egypt were no more able to resist Papa's groove than you or I when we're at home and dancing solo, which is how I know how miraculous "Papa's Got A Brand New Bag" is. If I had a heaven to create, its musical loop would have this endlessly satisfying song in frequent rotation.

(I figure my friend didn't join in because of something else, too: seeing nature unmasked would stop anyone in his tracks.)

Pot Bad Luck

"She Came In Through The Bathroom Window" by The Beatles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3cxkYu4NyA

The lyrics of the opening verse are impossibly 1960s-stupid, and you pretty well need marijuana to get your hair raised by this song. The second and third and fourth verses are just as stupid, but if the marijuana has kicked in, you've started hearing all the nice playing, especially Paul's always inventive bass, and the crisp, patient twang of George's guitar. It's a Paul song all the way: idiotic words and a highly intelligent melody carried out by chimey slick rock-music production, which sounds great when you're high, which is why the Beatles aren't nearly as good as we all want them to be, which is why you should probably stop smoking marijuana.

Heavy Treasure

"Over The Rainbow" as performed by Israel "IZ" Kamakawiwoʻole
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1bFr2SWP1I 
I gotta get out more. Apparently, this version has graced (if you believed in heaven, that's where it would be from) all kinds of movies, TV shows, and TV commercials (the Internet, too, thankfully), but I had never heard it till this morning; nor had I heard of the singer, a Hawaiian icon who died in 1997 at the age of thirty-eight because he weighed several hundred pounds. If you're squeamish about looking at titanic obesity (I'm not, but I get that some might be), you should just close your eyes and listen. (I always close my eyes when I sing anyway.) I promise you that you'll be transported, which is what this innocent song of escape is supposed to do to you. It's innocent because escape is never really possible, and Mr. Kamakawiwoʻole gets the words "wrong" (here, however, subtraction becomes addition), but without his singing the ones he does, the song is just another pretty thrum in the breeze.

Simple is better a lot of the time. Slide a mellifluous voice around a gorgeous, simple melody, add the most simply strummed of ukuleles, and you get, well, heaven. I started loving this slightly goofy song very long ago when I was just a slight little goof myself, and I've heard a lot of singers sing it almost as beautifully as Mr. Kamakawiwoʻole does -- Judy Garland, who broke it in, and others like Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Ray Charles (mmmmmmm . . . Ray Charles). But this imperfect version is, for me, the version Plato would've approved of. (Plato probably liked music, right?)  

The treasure ain't at the end of the rainbow -- it's right here, sung by a very large guy who lived (and used his very large talent) all his very short life in paradisal weather. Who needs God when you've lucked out geographically? As I've already mentioned, I just this morning heard it for the first time, but I'm already into double figures. Hawaii (maybe, some day, if I get out more), here I come.

How(l) To Be Happy (When Your Brain Is A Werewolf) (And An Asshole)

"Werewolves of London" by Warren Zevon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDpYBT0XyvA

Warren Zevon was born before I was, but I'm older than he was when he died, and when he wrote and sang and played this hilariously disturbing song, which is why I keep listening to it. It helps me remember the jumble of lighter times, when more things were possible. 

So when I listen to this song, before I love anything else about it, I love the chunky piano. The beat-stretched joyful mania of all the mock-howled "Ah-hoooos" comes next -- it's just so much fun to sing and howl (you gotta do the howling) those two open-voiced syllables. Stop reading this, listen to the song a few times until you remember when to grunt Huh! the first time (the Huh's are my third favourite thing about this song), and then tell me that isn't the most fun you've had in weeks. I'll let you off the hook if you miss the next two repetitions: by then you're probably off your game, because, just one quick verse ago, you heard Warren Zevon sing in beautifully alliterated syncopation the unthinkable image of a little old lady getting mutilated late the night before. You hear that line and once you get over its jumpy sonic beauty, you start thinking that maybe the ways you enjoy things might not be all that healthy. Which is when you have to force yourself to remember that your ears and your brain are just tissue machines that can't really stop themselves from searching for pleasure and beauty, mutilated little old ladies notwithstanding. Notwithstanding that, don't get into the habit of self-forgiveness every time you listen. The song doesn't really mean anything (late at night), but it's one I can't stop loving. In my defense, little old ladies get mutilated all the time. Forget werewolves -- the bloodthirsty cruelties of old age are the usual culprits (my dead mother sure as hell knew that). For that matter, children get mutilated all the time, too, with old age nowhere near any of those crime scenes. Teenagers and young adults and middle-aged saps like me get mutilated late at night, too -- not to mention all the bloodshed before dawn, through the morning and afternoon, before dusk, at dusk, after dusk, or later in the evening when some of us are searching for the guts to go to bed. Those guts, of course, when we eventually do fall asleep, get absolutely shredded and pierced and sliced up by our mutilating dreams, which aren't really nightmares -- they're night mirrors, and just one more proof that your brain doesn't give a shit about you. Ergo, your brain is a werewolf, a creature that can slash right through your shit for just pretending to be as damaged and as bleeding as a true victim of a true crime. So maybe your brain is just an asshole. Either way, you're shit that he can ignore or boss around as he pleases.

So forget the above. Just listen to this happy, evil song, and feel guilty or don't feel guilty. My list of desert-island songs is in constant revision, but this one never gets demoted.    

Huh! Draw blood while you're meeting the tailor of a werewolf who's been eating Chinese food, and mutilating little old ladies, and planning to rip your lungs out (whether your name is Jim or not), and howling around your kitchen door, and drinking pina coladas at Trader Vic's. Honour the dance, dedicated to the hairy-handed gent, performed by Lon Chaney Junior and the Queen. Stop sitting down, if you can, but don't stop listening, no matter how old you are. If you can, dance. Your hair will be perfect, but you won't feel good about it. Ah-hooooooooooooooooooo. Warren Zevon, that unlucky singing, howling fool, when he was just fifty-six, got mutilated by "peritoneal mesothelioma, a virulent and inoperable form of lung cancer." He had fun beforehand, though, at least for a few minutes.

Oh, Whoever You Are

"Oh! Darling" by the Beatles

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PZWGGkrMCk

Follow the controlled scream of Sir Paul's younger voice (which out-Little Richards Little Richard's) and his loopy bass guitar through this thing: they start out meaning business and by the end of the song, they've made you understand the wretchedness of being loved less than you love. And because you've had no choice but to try to sing along, there's nothing vicarious about it: screaming in agony is hard and exhausting work (especially when you've lost the will for almost everything else). 

Guess what? You've just been beaten up by a gazillionaire choir boy who, because he somehow knows what it's like to nearly break down and die, understands you better than anyone else. This song hurts.

Ella and Me

"Bewitched, Bothered, And Bewildered" as sung by Ella Fitzgerald
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luF8Rx6FYb0
Even though this is a lonely song, it makes me feel less lonely. It convinces me that in matters of erotic love, men and women are essentially the same. Not one of the experiences described or sensations evoked by these words and this utterly female voice does my deepest faction of atoms not understand: wide-eyed hangover, love-dosed insomnia, the addicting music of a lover's easy laughter, happiness, helplessness, sex, the loss of sex (listen to how she sings "very" as she describes how horizontally good he was), the loss of control, the loss of -- well, just the loss. 

Oh, yeah: bewitchment, botheration, and bewilderment, too, lots of all that stuff, too. I'm also convinced, because of this song, that if I could tell Ella Fitzgerald my story, she'd get it instantly. Because we're the same, Ella and I, minus some insignificant chromosomal variation. It would be ideal if I could sing it to her, of course, but that would be like trying to write a sonnet for Shakespeare, or a melody for Mozart.

I don't know who the piano player is, but he is a flawlessly sensitive and accurate punctuator. He's a man, I'm assuming, but as we've already discussed, that doesn't matter at all. When you listen to him and her together, the world disappears.

Blowing Horns Blow Off The Dust

"Fly Me To The Moon" as sung by Frank Sinatra http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K_ib4DRYflM

No matter how many times I listen to this flawlessly played and sung number, as I'm singing along (no one can listen to it and not do that), I always come in a beat too soon at the end, ahead of Mr. Sinatra's final, playful "you" (object of "love", resulting in a supreme match of verb and pronoun). But that's because I'm a musical idiot trying to keep up with a musical savant. He was, as we all know, an idiot without much savant a lot of the time, especially with women. But, oh my, did that asshole know how to tell them he loved them!

You have to admit he wasn't much of a scientist, either. Jupiter and Mars? The stars? He wouldn't last long out there. What am I thinking? Before he could even think about Jupiter or Mars, that cold, airless moon would've laid him low in a few seconds (no matter who was holding his hand or kissing his mouth). But the sky was a lot smaller when Frank Sinatra sang this song, and he's with the woman he loves. Who could blame him for thinking anything's possible? How do we know he's with the woman he loves? Because he thinks anything is possible. 

Not much of a philosopher, either, huh? Doesn't matter, though. He isn't just a singer -- he's a singer whose heart is filled with song. What's especially fortunate for us is that his heart is so connected to his brain and his vibrating vocal components. The best kind of machine you can imagine.  

The players? All of them must have been so happy for at least roughly two-and-a-half minutes of their lives, which is how long it takes them, and Frank Sinatra, to create this brief miracle.