Ruined Detroit

CORVETTE!

                  You know you waaaaaant it.

Cynthia on the throne

Get up and dance to the music!

Get on up and dance to the fonky music!

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

[Freddie:] Hey Greg!

[Greg:] What?

[Freddie:] All we need is a drummer,

For people who only need a beat, yeah!

[Drummer]

I'm gonna add a little guitar

And make it easy to move your feet

[Guitar]

[Larry:] I'm gonna add some bottom,

So that the dancers just won't hide

[Bass]

[Sly:] You might like to hear my organ

I said 'Ride Sally Ride'

[Organ] 

Cynthia, Jerry!!

You might like to hear the horns blowin',

Cynthia on the throne, yeah!

[Trumpets]

Listen to me

Cynthia & Jerry got a message they're sayin':

[Cynthia:] All the squares, go home!

Aaaaah, yeah!!!

[Trumpets]

Listen to the basses:

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

Written by Sylvester Stewart • Copyright © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc

It took me a while to deal with this song, and it's not because I don't like it. Quite the opposite. I wanted to find the original so I could do a "mondegreen"/lyric clarification on it: none of us ever knew what all the words were, especially not through tinny AM radios in the mid-'60s. And it was intriguing to decipher them at last. The song is an example of soul music at its finest, flamboyant, infectious, full of spangles and stars. Later versions of Dance to the Music, some of them 14 minutes long, really let the band rip, and boy are they good, better than I ever remembered. This version seems tame by comparison.

Listening to a really clear stereo version of this is a revelation. We never had such an option back then. The little "guitar riff" I hear right after "dance to the music" isn't guitar! It's saxophone. Cynthia screams her head off like a banshee, which is great: whereas then, I wasn't sure there WAS a Cynthia. That shows how much I knew. This band not only has women in it (unheard-of in a major rock band), it has women brass players! And everyone knows a woman can't blow a trumpet. Don't tell that to Cynthia.

There was something glitzy about Sly and the Family Stone which would later be transmogrified into the much-slicker Fifth Dimension, but since they had the incredible Marilyn McCoo, all was forgiven in my eyes. I've never heard a voice with greater honesty and clarity, but at the same time, it was plaintive. "Bill!" she keened. "I love you so, I always will. . .Oh won't you marry me Bill, I've got the wedding bell blues." And this was right around the time I met MY Bill. Hey, the pop music of that era is so potent in my mind, so fused with those dizzy times, that I still do a little mental back-flip when I hear Crocodile Rock.

I'm working up to it, I'm working up to it, what I am going to write about. I can feel it coming on like a bad cold. It was the summer this song came out, my sister was home from university or Europe or wherever-the-hell-she-always-disappeared-to, before reappearing with something like an illegitimate pregnancy, a new fiance or a few quarts of very expensive booze. She considered herself to be a Liberal with a capital L, consciously cultivated friendships or at least associations with non-whites and radicals at whatever-the-hell-school-she-went-to, but when she came home one weekend from wherever, I made some reference to Motown music. 

She said, her face puckering in a disdainfully puzzled way: "What's MOW-town?"

I had the radio on CKLW (Windsor/Detroit), like I always did. Hey, this was Chatham, Ontario, with one of the largest black populations of any city in Canada, and a terminating point for the historic underground railroad (which I wouldn't find out about until many years later). Motown music was the pulsebeat of our lives. We were saturated in it. It blasted open the stodginess of this Victorian small town and brought it alive.

So. . . what is MOW-town. I will show you what is MOW-town.

I turned up the radio just as this song was starting. Well, someone on YouTube just pointed out to me that technically it's "soul music" (some might say "funk"), because it was never on the Motown record label. But never mind, it's the spirit of the thing.

To her credit, she did listen to it, all three minutes of it. I don't remember what she said, if she said anything, but her reaction was a sort of puzzled disdain.

The unspoken message was: if it wasn't by Brecht and Weill, if it wasn't by Alban Berg or Rautaavara, it was primitive and declasse and not worth listening to.

You can see why I have trouble with this. Oh, it's not this, not specifically. She was thirteen years older than me, and lived in another universe. I'd go stay with her in Toronto - it was a real treat for me, or at least it was seen that way - and she'd take me (I was fifteen) to adult parties and encourage me to drink heavily, and sometimes smoke pot. Older married men (I mean, in their 30s) hit on me constantly, since I was tender meat and would never say anything. The one time I DID go to my sister, terrified I would get pregnant, she looked at me with an arched eyebrow and said, "Nothing wrong with a little smooch and a snuggle after a date."

I understand all this somewhat better from my vantage-point of being about a million years older. I see now she was likely jealous of the fact that I attracted so many men - and I did, though the sloshing drunken atmosphere at these things was a factor, for sure. She once slashed at me for wanting to go sit in the living room: "Oh, so you want to go in there and sit with Derek and snuggle up to him and romance him?"

The really weird thing is, I didn't even know it was emotional abuse for years and years. The reason is, I was supposed to be grateful for this opportunity to have a social life. They were being nice to me by allowing me to drink and dope among them. And the weird thing is: I was grateful. It was a chance, and I was lucky. A chance at what? I probably had nine or ten full-strength hard-liquor drinks at these things, and went home and barfed my guts out.

What about my parents? Did they not have a clue, or what? My parents turned over in bed and went to sleep, telling themselves my sister and older brother were "taking care of me" and protecting me. But they attended some of these parties themselves, and they knew exactly what was going on. They even watched it happen.

So this song is like one of those jack-in-the-boxes, or those things that jump out of a can - you know, like the magicians have. This is but the tip of the iceberg, of course, and the abuse went on for years and years and years, but the very suggestion that ANY of it was abusive would be met with a "whaaaaat?" or a "Well, Margaret. . . you're crazy", said with a dismissive, who-gives-a-fuck shrug. In fact, "I don't give a shit" was one of her favorite expressions.

The thing is, though, my sister not only didn't find lasting happiness, she didn't seem to find any at all. She gave away her baby daughter, went through men (most of them married) like water, then slammed the door and decided she didn't need anyone. Maybe she doesn't. I am not sure.

I'm not big on this forgiveness stuff that is so fashionable right now, nor do I think I'll be consumed with anger and never find any peace unless I forgive her. A lot of people only pretend to forgive because they feel like they're supposed to. It's the thing, nowadays - you see it on television, on Dateline maybe - someone murders someone's daughter and they forgive the killer. Makes them look pretty damn saintly, so there is payoff. 

You know, this is pretty incredible, but I actually found a Facebook page for my sister, though it was established in 2012 and has two posts. I see this a lot, and I am not sure what it means. Why establish something you're not going to use? I also found a Facebook page for one of her old boy friends. I really liked him, and though he was very nice to me and flattered me, he never once made a pass. That was rare. I found a photo of him, and he's just an older version of himself, and you see the goodness shining out of his face.

But she dumped him. He had problems (her being one of them). He wasn't good enough. So fuck him, he was out.

There's a lot on the internet now about narcissism. Back then, I called it "Pat". It was this inchoate mass, this churning in my stomach, this feeling I would never be good enough and I wanted to die and it was my own fault. Now I know my sister was the queen of gaslighting, and she did it due to the sucking void, the great nothing, the three zeroes at the centre of her own life.

"So now you think you've got your whole life solved. Is that what you think?" This is what she said to me, verbatim, at my wedding. After watching me play Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, her reaction when she came backstage was, "You weren't boring." When I looked hurt, she gave me the "whaaaaat?" reaction. It's just incredible. But that's how it was, and maybe still is, or maybe not. Though I think she is still alive now, and living alone. She'd be 75 years old.

This always brings me around to "where we are now", and it does seem like a bloody miracle that my current family brings me such joy, such pride, so many good times, such laughs. But in spite of what she thinks, it didn't land on my head out of the sky. I co-created this situation with my husband, over 40-plus years of commitment and devotion. Some of it was very, very hard. Can you believe there was fallout from all that sexual and emotional abuse? I once told a psychiatrist about it, and halfway through the story I noticed his mouth was hanging open. "Why didn't you tell me about all this before?" "I didn't think it was important."

I was on the track of forgiveness, and got sidelined. What I can manage, at least part of the time, is pity. I just feel sorry for anyone who would feel that OK about slashing and burning and leaving the scene. I don't think she feels this nearly as much as the people in her path, however. Narcissists are good at dealing out cards, poison-dart tarots of death, but lousy at playing the cards they are dealt.

I'm not sure how Dance to the Music got me here, and I was sure if I followed this path it would take me into some rough waters. I still feel baffled, and I feel pity - I suppose condescending pity, but that's all right. Hey, feeling anything at all, being above GROUND after going through all that, is quite admirable, I think. 

My sister has always called herself a writer, and when she decided to be a novelist, she took home a hoard of my grandmother's old diaries and believed that if she read them, a novel would appear. She kept talking about wanting to get in touch with Margaret Atwood. They were obvious colleagues and just hadn't met yet. The novel never materialized, nor did anything else. In what world would a person like that ever risk shattering her most cherished illusions?

I've pursued my writing doggedly, written three published novels and keep on blogging, I suppose mainly for myself. But I do the work, that's the thing, I don't just talk about it. For some reason, trying to wind this up, I keep thinking of the setting for a gemstone. It has to be held by something, surrounded by something. In my case it was a sort of molten meteorite hurtling down from a death-planet, but somehow or other, the gemstone, the amber or hematite or whatever-it-is, stayed intact. It didn't really crack up after all.

Post-whatever. It occurs to me that my representation of the lyrics to Dance to the Music sucks raw eggs, because you can't even tell what it SAYS. I was too busy being fancy with the text, playing around with colour, etc. So here are the "real" words. I did change one word, sensing a mondegreen. Instead of "listen to the basses", I substituted "the voices", because I can hear an "oi" sound in there.


Get up and dance to the music!
Get on up and dance to the fonky music!

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm
Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

[Freddie:] Hey Greg!

[Greg:] What?

[Freddie:] All we need is a drummer,
For people who only need a beat, yeah!

[Drummer]

I'm gonna add a little guitar
And make it easy to move your feet

[Guitar]

[Larry:] I'm gonna add some bottom,
So that the dancers just won't hide

[Bass]

[Sly:] You might like to hear my organ
I said 'Ride Sally Ride'

[Organ] 

Cynthia, Jerry!!
You might like to hear the horns blowin',
Cynthia on the throne, yeah!

[Trumpets]

Listen to me
Cynthia & Jerry got a message they're sayin'

[Cynthia:] All the squares, go home!
Aaaaah, yeah!!!

[Trumpets]

Listen to the voices:

Dum-dumm du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm
Du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm - du-du-du-du-du-dum-dumm

[All:] Dance to the Music, Dance to the Music

Written by Sylvester Stewart • Copyright © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner/Chappell Music, Inc

Motor City madness: Bob Seger's East Side Story

Beneath the bare light bulb above
She gazed into the eyes of love
Bathed in the dirty neon lights
She begged him "don't go out tonight"
If we work out somehow maybe
We could find a way out baby
And he laughed and said "I got to go"

And she cried "no"
Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny Johnny no

His arms were warm and strong and young
"I promise I won't hurt no one"
"Oh baby when you gonna learn,
Them folks uptown got bread to burn,

When they see me flash my knife,
They'll be fearin' for their life,
They won't give me trouble this I know"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Johnny Johnny no

[organ solo]

The night passed like a thousand years
The tenemant room had culled her tears
Then came a knock upon the door
Two men she'd never seen before

"Did you know Johnny Brown miss?
We hate to tell you this but
Has he a relative you know?"
And she cried no
Oh Johnny Johnny no
Oh Johnny why'd you go?

In posting this, I'm trying to touch something that is virtually untouchable. When I first heard this song, I was still sleeping downstairs, hadn't yet inherited my sister's room upstairs with its strange artifacts in the bureau drawers (garter belts, a rubber douche bag, rollers, several girdles, a pink angora sweater which I once wore to school, and a hair drier with a puffy plastic hat that you wore like a shower cap).  I had a radio beside my bed and constantly listened to CKLW Detroit: we all did, it was just what you did when you lived in Chatham (within striking distance of Windsor, Detroit's boring younger brother). I remember Chatham days now with a kind of ecstasy, which is strange because I did not have a happy childhood. Maybe it's just the escape to something once known, or revised brilliantly, the grass made of emeralds, and the crickets sounding like something out of Handel's Messiah.

When this song came on the radio, a funny feeling came over me. Electric. It's an opera in 2 minutes, a brilliant lyric really, tightly compressed, laden. The vocals are heartbreaking, the "no, no, nooooooooo" in the slightly choked voice that squeezes all the violence and pathos out of the scene.

A funny feeling. Electric. Buzzing. I was beginning to come awake. Given that this was 1966, and that The Doors hadn't even happened yet (or not full-on: that was 2 years later), the bridge and keyboard sound remarkably Morrison-like, meaning that Jim and the gang must've been listening to Seger. But didn't all bands listen to all bands back then?

I am convinced now that the first hormones were stirring in me, and probably I wrote a story about this song because I always wrote about everything. I couldn't explain it. It wasn't just sexual feelings, though I am sure they were included. They had to be. I had been sexual ever since falling madly in love with Maynard G. Krebbs in Dobie Gillis when I was six years old. It was something else, an elevation, a lifting of the vibration of my life. An intensification of the frequency.

Johnny, Johnny, noooooo.

I had some sort of a vision of a man killing a rat with a knife. There were no rats in the song, but at about the same time I watched West Side Story on TV, and the two things may have become conflated. The guy who played Bernardo,  he looked something like Johnny, tough, with his long-suffering girl friend begging him not to go. Johnny, Johnny, Johnny, no.

I knew almost nothing then, had not "had sex", not even with myself (though I think that was going to happen pretty soon). I was somehow throwing myself into the centre of the violent scene, smelling the smells, sucking it up. That raw roaring Motor City sound was primal, dangerous, wild. The music came right up out of the core of it, bursting through the scalding pavement, immensely alive, but frightening.

When there was a gang fight, it was a rumble. When there was a biker race, it was a scramble. I had also watched The Wild One, or was soon to watch it, and even though Brando was fat and lethargic and mostly slept through it, there was something about that leather. The danger.

"I promise I won't hurt no one" echoes Brando in another movie, the touchstone movie of my life, On the Waterfront. He says the same thing to Edie when he pulls out his longshoreman's hook and heads over to confront Johnny Friendly and his minions for a final showdown. "And don't worry. I ain't gonna hurt nobody."

That's not exactly what Edie or the unnamed Motor City girl were worried about.

Why was I attracted to this stuff? A shy, introverted, slightly nutty, not-very-well-liked (some things never change) girl with unremarkable looks and way too much intensity for her own good? I wanted to be with that East Side Story guy, tame him down, or else go out with him, wild, my hair like Raquel Welch's in that prehistoric  movie, what was it called? A mane, a mop. I wanted to be with Terry Malloy, walk beside him, shine my light on him like Edie, change him. I wanted to bust out of dull old Chatham with its milk-horses and bread trucks and sugar beet factory and Lloyd's jute bag company and Darling's slaughterhouse that smelled like damnation on a hot day, the museum that should have been in a museum, and the medieval convent where I had to take my violin lessons. I was sick of the nighthawks with their skee-ix, skee-ix, skee-ix, and that bizarre roaring sound that I was later to learn came from air rushing through their flight feathers as they dove to the ground. All that stuff I ache for now, knowing it's gone forever. Most of those old Victorian -era houses would be ripped down, and I happen to know the house I lived in was made into a doctor's office.

My life wasn't, isn't important. Lord knows I've had that jackhammered home since joining Facebook (a handy way to top up your pain when the tank is low). I've felt out of kilter all through my life, and at my age it ain't going to change. I have been told, and I don't believe it by the way,  that "most people" feel like me, feel like they don't belong or fall short in some way. Bull-hoo. All I can say in my own defense is that I have kept my aliveness; even in the midst of howling anguish, experiences you would not wish on someone you loathe, the light has not gone out, I have not opted for deadness or shrinking a size so my shoes will fit. And I can't be around anyone who has made that choice.

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Oh rapture!: New Images of Milky the Clown

It's not every day I find a  new image (new to ME, I mean - these were likely taken 50 years ago) of the source of my childhood nightmares, Milky the Clown. Milky was the surreal symbol of Twin Pines Dairy, sponsor of Milky's Party Time and other lactitious Detroit children's programs.

This one I haven't seen before. Like a nun's habit, Milky's costume covers everything but his face, which is thickly plastered with white greasepaint like something from a movie made in 1917. And his hat. . . his hat isn't like any other clown's hat, unless you look back about 100 years.

Milky wasn't a clown of his times. This was why he was so scary. He seemed like the nightmare reverse negative of an old Betty Boop cartoon, jumping not out of an inkwell but a vat of Twin Pines milk.

Was this magic, or a form of sorcery? Was his baggy monochromatic white costume and dead-white face a deliberate attempt to mimic the ancient itinerant carnival clowns depicted by Leoncavallo in Pagliacci?

Well, maybe. Except for the pompoms.

And this one is no less than Enrico Caruso, the most famous tenor of all time. Wearing Milky's costume, or a close approximation of it.

What's the magic word? . . . Twin Pines! ("But that's two words," I used to protest, provoking offended stares.)

And never mind that Pagliaccio, upon whom Milky based his classic white pointy-hatted costume, murdered both his wife and his romantic rival, leaving a pile of bodies on the stage. The little tykes won't know anything about that, will they?

We hope not.

 

Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book

    It took me years to write, will you take a look

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My God, my God: the falling Wallendas

I don't know what it is about me. Just me? Look at reality TV. We all have this instinctive inner urge to ogle, to goggle. Other people's disasters fascinate us.

I was tempted to (but didn't) post a horrific 15-second YouTube clip of the patriarch of the Wallenda family attempting to walk a wire stretched between two high-rise buildings. He lost his balance, slipped, fell and hit the pavement. But even that isn't the worst part. Two guys are just standing around talking. Obviously they saw what happened - wouldn't the whole world be watching this incredible stunt? - and it doesn't even occur to them to try to help.  In the next second, twenty people run frantically toward the now-expired body. But what was up with those two guys?

Just looking at a picture like this makes me queasy.

How could anybody find it enjoyable to watch this? For that matter, why did people used to (and still do, I hear) attend executions of death-row criminals? Why do we go to movies that scare the bejesus out of us, even pay good money for it?

Here are the Wallendas walking the wire at Detroit's Shrine Circus in 1962. They always worked without a net. Nets were for amateurs and sissies.  I never attended the Shrine Circus (I hated that smell of animal dung and the sweaty frightening clowns), but I could have. I lived close enough to Detroit that when the ground rumbled, our teacups began to rattle. In this photo, it's obvious already that things are going perilously wrong. The quivering symmetry of the first shot is coming undone.

What happened? Post-disaster, one of the Wallendas claimed it was the man at the top of the pyramid. Quite simply, he lost his grip. With all that weight on both sides, a deviation of a fraction of a centimeter meant doom. It must have happened that night.

Obviously a few reporters were there, smoking cigarettes, taking swigs from hip flasks as they covered the most boring public event of the year. But suddenly, the cameras couldn't snap fast enough.

An interjection. There's something funny about these two pictures. That banner behind the woman was supposed to be horizontal. Here it's wildly askew. Someone tilted their camera, obviously, to make the shot look more dramatic. Here (below) is the same shot, rotated to normal: obviously the woman wasn't careening down at an angle, but being carefully lowered on a wire. The position of her hands makes that obvious. Like anyone who parachutes, an aerialist would be prepared for an eventual/inevitable fall, and certainly would NOT fall feet-first!

The more I look at this, the more I see the essential phoniness and dishonesty of the press. If the woman were actually falling, she would not be looking down at the ground at this angle. The corrected shot is almost like another picture. Her legs are relaxed and dangling, whereas her arms are flexed as she holds on. For shame, Detroit News.

Call this the Day of the Jackal. The carnage was laid out for everyone to see. The Detroit News went on and on about it, pages and pages. Were there video clips? I think so, but not on YouTube. I've seen a couple seconds of it on documentaries about the Wallendas. It's horrendous.

This catastrophe put Detroit on the map and was the biggest thing to happen to the entertainment industry since Milky's Party Time.

But think of the audience.

Think of the sickening screams, the horror, the disbelief. the bizarre part of the mind that insists, "Oh, it's all part of the act" (like people today, caught in terrorist attacks, who without fail say afterwards, "I thought I was in a movie").

And the children. It wasn't common then to explain anything to them. (Still isn't, if you ask me.)  If we didn't talk about it, it just went away. Imagine the racing heart and overwhelming dread, that little spot of horror deep inside, never healed, just crouching there, while the adult wonders why he has heart disease, why he's so afraid of  heights.

Couldn't that buried trauma, like a tiny earthquake vibration gradually growing stronger and stronger, eventually crumble the core of a human being? Couldn't it? We call it "psychosomatic illness". I call it the human sickness, the thing that might just finish us after all.

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