Wrong Note Rag

Tonight I listened to the Stravinsky Ragtime for the first time in 20 years, and for some reason cracked up laughing for most of it: that dour, sour, dissonant cimbalom and complaining clarinet and doomy percussion reminded me of someone striding along with his head down, someone who has given up, and for some reason I found it hilariously funny. 

Then I kept thinking: this piece reminds me of something. Or someone. I've been reading up on Bernstein again, an old hero/obsession, and wondering anew why he wasn't considered a "significant" composer (or significant enough) because he "only wrote for musical theatre" (not true anyway). But this wild and wacky version of Wrong Note Rag, the best I have ever seen/heard, flashed into my head, and it was only when I posted the video that I realized that OF COURSE the two pieces had a spiritual kinship: both were slightly crazed, off-kilter experiments in ragtime. In Stravinsky's case a rag with a wooden leg, and in Bernstein's, a rag breathing flaming helium.

Don't ask why.

I guess I will always be this sixties brat. Except that now I AM sixty, a fact which makes my head spin around. And it's strange that I wasn't a Doors fan then - not much, except that you'd have to be dead not to respond to Light My Fire and the even more hypnotic/seductive Hello I Love You. Morrison just seemed too pretty somehow, and besides, I had my Dylan, whose poetry blew Morrison out of the water. Well, maybe.

Dylan at least had the divine or mortal gift of longevity, didn't fall prey to that awful "27 curse" that even reached into the '90s and beyond with Winehouse and Cobain. I think anyone trying to be a poet while Dylan was on the same earth must have been intimidated and automatically suffered by comparison. So I didn't do the Doors particularly. But when I saw a recent PBS documentary called When You'rs Strange (narrated, wonderfully, by Johnny Depp, a Doors sort of person), I began to dig it, man. Really dig it.

I dug, most of all, or was impressed by, their prodigious outpouring, flood really, of hits, most of real quality and substance. I mean, Riders on the Storm! Touch Me Baby! I was astonished and impressed a few years ago to find out they'd covered Kurt Weill's Alabama Song, an unheard-of choice for a '60s rock group. I knew the song better than most, for it was blasted at me - embarrassingly - on the stereo after school, while I tried to sneak my bewildered friends past all that racket and upstairs to my bedroom so we could listen to Freddie and the Dreamers.

I had a weird upbringing. I am grateful for some of it. I was much, much younger than the eldest child. My sister, it now seems to me, got out of that house like a bat out of hell at the first opportunity and lived in Europe for several years. Munich. She spoke fluent German, did her Masters thesis in German, for reasons that are still not clear to anyone. For you see, nobody is remotely German in our family. You'd have to go back to the Vikings or something, or old pre-Chaucer English with all its guttural sounds.

Anyway, our den, where the TV was so we spent a lot of time there, was lined with books. Books books books books books. My books weren't anywhere to be seen, as they were safely stashed upstairs in my bedroom. But the books, well, I don't know how some of them got there. It was a junkyard, a repository of high culture and slightly tawdry randomness.

I just remember covers. There was a novel called I Should have Kissed her More with a picture of a smarmy-looking older gentleman. There was A Rage to Live by John O'Hara (with passages in it that fascinated me, though I can't say I understood what a "climax" was). There was Don't Get Perconal with a Chicken, a collection of cutely-misspelled writings by children, and Ted Malone's Scrapbook, a book of lamely sentimental poetry designed to be read on the radio. 

Though I thought I imagined it, I just proved to myself that there really was an outright-racy book by Mordecai Richler called, wait for it, Cocksure. Sons and Lovers, by D. H. Laurence, looked promising, though I'll be damned if I could find the dirty parts. A red-leather-bound, fat, falling-apart old book of local history called Romantic Kent had a few flaky old wax-covered pressed leaves stashed in it.

And there were innumerable books in German: Goethes Werke, Schiller Werke, and the complete works of Sigmund Freud. IN GERMAN. 

I just made a connection this second, something that seemed puzzling before, how I always "diss" Germans in a way that is supposed to be humorous, but is in fact kind of mean. My sister posed as a German, wrote her Master's thesis IN German, and as a matter of fact, it was all about The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill. 

With its famous song. Not hummable, but famous: the Alabama Song.

Show me the way to the next whisky bar
Oh, don't ask why, oh, don't ask why
Show me the way to the next whisky bar
Oh, don't ask why, oh, don't ask why
For if we don't find the next whisky bar
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you
I tell you
I tell you we must die

Oh, moon of Alabama
We now must say say good-bye
We've lost our good old mamma
And must have whisky
Oh, you know why.

Show me the way to the next pretty girl
Oh, don't ask why, oh, don't ask why
Show me the way to the next pretty girl
Oh don't ask why, oh, don't ask why
For if we don't find the next pretty girl
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you
I tell you
I tell you we must die

Oh, moon of Alabama
We now must say good-bye
We've lost our good old mamma
And must have a girl
Oh, you know why.

Show me the way to the next little dollar
Oh, don't ask why, oh, don't ask why
Show me the way to the next little dollar
Oh, don't ask why, oh, don't ask why
For if we don't find the next little dollar
I tell you we must die
I tell you we must die
I tell you
I tell you
I tell you we must die

Oh, moon of Alabama
We now must say good-bye
We've lost our good old mamma
And must have dollars
Oh, you know why.

Bertolt Brecht

And it was the soundtrack to this, with Lotte Lenya endlessly wailing in her testosteronic baritone voice, that I tried to hustle my friends past, the endless dark sinister and really life-hating, dystopic, anhedonic sounds of Alabama Song: please show us the way to the next whiskey bar. Oh don't ask why. Oh don't ask why.

I could get into how it was with my sister, that is, when she was actually around. She was a thwarted singer who, when she sang at all, sang very morbid folk songs about rotting horses and death. Her exposure of me to her "friends" was such a disaster that I honestly wonder if I will ever be able to deal with it. But nothing was done because there was "nothing wrong" with what was happening, nothing wrong with an older sister inviting her pudgy, lonely, misfit 15-year-old sister to her parties. Oh don't ask why. 

And don't ask why the whiskey flowed so darkly, and why the men groped and shoved, and why I dared not speak. Why I threw up the next day with my mother pretending not to notice. And don't ask why I was the mascot, cutely topped up and topped up and encouraged and softened up and, I now see, groomed. Even my brother's best friend had a go at it while his wife slept in a room upstairs. But then, we were both so drunk it didn't count anyway.

So when I hear Moon of Alabama in Morrison's smoky, seductive, doomed voice, I see that he is singing the hell out of it as Lotte Lenye with all her strident Nazi bleating never could. Morrison is actually going to die. He was a Rider on the Storm, way out on the farthest edges of acceptability and even sanity. He is gone now, long gone, his molecules have come apart to the point that he no longer exists, not even in the farthest reaches of space. He's an idea now, a sound wave, a song interpretation. I continue, feeling forever strange, and yes, no one remembers my name. 

A few post- thoughts. As usual, it's far too late to be up, but here I am, up. It's been a hard day emotionally. I lost a long-term beloved pet,and now all I can hear is his sweet peeps when I pass his door. That room will always be "the bird room" to us, but with his huge cage moved out, it looks cavernous.

I edited this post because it got a little too honest about my sister, an emotional vacuum on legs who inflicts her bile on everyone by insisting it all originated with you. Bait and switch, or something. She's gone out of my life now, and the little I know about her suggests life in a sort of cave of isolation that she would vigorously justify and defend, unless she's gone completely off her nut. Which would be justice, since she expressed such contempt for mental illness in any form.

I still don't know why she pretended to be German - the connotations really are sort of creepy, now that I look at it, which maybe I haven't up to now. Why she travelled to the other side of the world like that, immersed herself in a language and culture she had no real affinity for. I don't remember any enthusiasm from her at all about Europe, she didn't even talk about it, except to say the men fucked better and had fewer hangups.

Oh, and her sex life. Yes, and. The descriptions were endless, the lovers all married, except for the 20-year-old guy, and then the descriptions were endlessly anatomical. Until she turned her back on the whole thing, and now anyone who even thinks of having sex is beneath contempt. It's damaging to be treated like that for so long, then to have it dumped back in your lap. My sister, if she's alive, has a very deep case of narcissistic personality disorder that has basically poisoned her life and done tremendous damage to anyone who ever cared about her. Her one big genius in life is twisting other people's emotions so bizarrely that they no longer know who or even where they are. Is this evil? I wonder about that. She eats her young without even thinking about it, casually, even with no need for it, just on a whim. If the absence of love isn't hate, then what is it? I think of those shadows on the cement in Hiroshima. A person who isn't there.

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Bob Dylan: the rise and fall

They’re selling postcards of the hanging

They’re painting the passports brown

The beauty parlor is filled with sailors

The circus is in town

Here comes the blind commissioner

They’ve got him in a trance

One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker

The other is in his pants

And the riot squad they’re restless

They need somewhere to go

As Lady and I look out tonight

From Desolation Row

Cinderella, she seems so easy

“It takes one to know one,” she smiles

And puts her hands in her back pockets

Bette Davis style

And in comes Romeo, he’s moaning

“You Belong to Me I Believe”

And someone says, “You’re in the wrong place 

my friend

You better leave”

And the only sound that’s left

After the ambulances go

Is Cinderella sweeping up

On Desolation Row

Now the moon is almost hidden

The stars are beginning to hide

The fortune-telling lady

Has even taken all her things inside

All except for Cain and Abel

And the hunchback of Notre Dame

Everybody is making love

Or else expecting rain

And the Good Samaritan, he’s dressing

He’s getting ready for the show

He’s going to the carnival tonight

On Desolation Row

Now Ophelia, she’s ’neath the window

For her I feel so afraid

On her twenty-second birthday

She already is an old maid

To her, death is quite romantic

She wears an iron vest

Her profession’s her religion

Her sin is her lifelessness

And though her eyes are fixed upon

Noah’s great rainbow

She spends her time peeking

Into Desolation Row

Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood

With his memories in a trunk

Passed this way an hour ago

With his friend, a jealous monk

He looked so immaculately frightful

As he bummed a cigarette

Then he went off sniffing drainpipes

And reciting the alphabet

Now you would not think to look at him

But he was famous long ago

For playing the electric violin

On Desolation Row

Dr. Filth, he keeps his world

Inside of a leather cup

But all his sexless patients

They’re trying to blow it up

Now his nurse, some local loser

She’s in charge of the cyanide hole

And she also keeps the cards that read

“Have Mercy on His Soul”

They all play on pennywhistles

You can hear them blow

If you lean your head out far enough

From Desolation Row

Across the street they’ve nailed the curtains

They’re getting ready for the feast

The Phantom of the Opera

A perfect image of a priest

They’re spoonfeeding Casanova

To get him to feel more assured

Then they’ll kill him with self-confidence

After poisoning him with words

And the Phantom’s shouting to skinny girls

“Get Outa Here If You Don’t Know

Casanova is just being punished for going

To Desolation Row”

Now at midnight all the agents

And the superhuman crew

Come out and round up everyone

That knows more than they do

Then they bring them to the factory

Where the heart-attack machine

Is strapped across their shoulders

And then the kerosene

Is brought down from the castles

By insurance men who go

Check to see that nobody is escaping

To Desolation Row

Praise be to Nero’s Neptune

The Titanic sails at dawn

And everybody’s shouting

“Which Side Are You On?”

And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

Fighting in the captain’s tower

While calypso singers laugh at them

And fishermen hold flowers

Between the windows of the sea

Where lovely mermaids flow

And nobody has to think too much

About Desolation Row

Yes, I received your letter yesterday

(About the time the doorknob broke)

When you asked how I was doing

Was that some kind of joke?

All these people that you mention

Yes, I know them, they’re quite lame

I had to rearrange their faces

And give them all another name

Right now I can’t read too good

Don’t send me no more letters, no

Not unless you mail them

From Desolation Row

Bob Dylan

Desolation Row

with some help from

Lotte Lenya:

Alabama Song

from 

The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny

by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht

Woody Allen sings "September Song"

Y'know, if you asked me abaht it, I'd have to say this: it's, kind of like a lwoong lwoong time from May to Decembah, which is when my pahrents go to Flahhrida every yeahh and stay there for, like, six months or something, and I haven't gahht time for things like, y'know dating, when I nevah know whethah the gehrl is  going to "dig" me or not, not that I think "dig" is the proper expression for what you'd cwall, amorous attachment to someone that lasts more than, say, two minutes? (pause for laughs and bodily contortions). Speaking of two minutes, I was trying to figure out why my gehrl friend awll-wees calls me "minute man". (pause) I asked my analyst abahht it and he said it had something to do with an egg timer. That I should use one. Becwosse my egg timer lasts at least twice that lwoong,you know? But then she said to me, honey, your time is up and it hadn't even, you know, beeped yet. Am I supposed to be singing a swoong here? Sahrry. I haven't got time for that, y'know, "waiting game" they twoahhk about in the sahhng, because to be hahhnest with you if I wait much lwwoonger I'm going to be dead! (riotous laughter, applause) Being dead isn't exactly conducive to amorous attachment unless you're, y'know, one of "those" people, and I'm nahht, I sweahh! No matter how it looks, I've never been that desperate.  I know it's very stylish right now to be a zahhmbie and all that sort of thing, but most of my gehrl friends have been zahhmbies to begin with! The sahhng says something about the days dwindling down. Reminds me of how I always go over-budget on my pick-chas. You know, the cash dwindles down.  (scattered applause) By the way, if you wondah why I cwaall them "pick-chas", it's becwooahs my cinematic style hasn't really changed since, you know, Take the Money and Run, when wooa-di-ences really appreciated good cinematography and really hot gehrls. I'm kind of an old-fashioned guy, y'know, I don't use a computer, in fact even typewriters are too modern for me, so I use a unique system, maybe you've seen it, it's called a Gutenberg? Run by hamstah, and hand-cranked when the hamstah dies. Most of my budget goes into replacing all the hamstahs that die of ex-woahh-stion after printing out all those pages, and besides, the Humane Society has been getting after me for some reason. So I spend a lot of twoyyme hand-cranking, you know? It's given me carpal tunnel so I can't indulge in my favorite athletic activity. Guess I'll just have to take up synchronized swimming. Thank you very much, good night. 

Lady Day and Sarah: just a coincidence? You decide

As so often happens, a hunt for a decent version of Kurt Weill's September Song turned into something quite else.

I kept playing different versions, 90% of them embedded in those godawful schmaltzy '60s string arrangements (and Frank Sinatra's brilliant version was thus ruined for me), then finally coming upon Billie Holliday. Wow, she aced it: undersinging it with that incomparable throw-away voice that made it sound easy. Here at last was something I could post! But I still had to listen to a few more, and when I heard Sarah Vaughan. . .

It too was magnificent, perhaps even sweeter, if a bit less subtle. But as I listened to it over and over again, I noticed something strange.

These two versions are done with exactly the same arrangement. I mean EXACTLY the same. The smoky slow-dancing tempo, the sax licks, the piano, the soulful guitar. It's as if someone lifted the vocal track out of one song and plunked it down in the other.

So fine, I guess this was a popular arrangement for September Song during that time - when was it, the '40s? My YouTube info is scant. But - identical? That's just so strange. Why would two titans of song decide to do it that way, when all these singers tried so hard not to sound like each other?

Anyway, this is valuable for an example of Billie Holliday before she degraded into a heap of irritating mannerisms. She still had a voice. Sarah Vaughan went on for far longer, not being a heroin addict, but was she ever so poignant again?

Why do I post this? Oh. . . cornball as it is, it's September, the kids are going back to school, and I at last understand that line "one hasn't got time for the waiting game". It's really one of my favorite songs, especially those two melancholy chords in the first line under "em-ber".

I have this memory - surely it must be wrong, but I don't think so - of watching TV eons ago, probably when I was about ten, and seeing Rodney Dangerfield on a variety show. Sometimes comedians stepped out of their normal roles then, with mixed results (and I swear I remember him singing The Fool on the Hill, and he shouldn't have). But I swear, and I may be wrong, I heard him speak-sing this one and it wrenched my heart. What did I know of Kurt Weill then? Well, plenty, since my histrionic sister had come back from Europe speaking German, waving copies of Goethe and singing little ditties from Mahagonny. Moon of Alabama (later recorded, incredibly, by The Doors) was practically my cradle song.

I can't find Rodney Dangerfield singing September Song, but I did find this odd twinning of two of the greatest voices ever, each slotted into the exact same arrangement. I still don't know why it happened that way, but it's intriguing to listen to.

We won't go into the melancholy I feel when I hear this, summer running through my fingers so fast it scares me, fall lifting up hopes that invariably fail. I wonder if I want to live out my 50s or if it might be better to make a graceful exit right now, before real deterioration sets in. I can't quite bring myself to dive in front of a bus, however (not today, anyway): I just hate suicide, too many people I loved have done it, not that I haven't thought about it a few hundred or a few thousand times.

One hasn't got time for the waiting game. But - for what?

 

 

 

CODA. As usual, I found more just as I gave up. I had this feeling the words were just a little different in the original version from the stage musical, Knickerbocker Holiday (and how a song like this ended up in such a jolly-sounding production, we'll never know).

 

Darker, stranger, and even with certan subtexts which may or may not have been intended.

 

 

When I was a young man courting the girls
I played me a waiting game
If a maid refused me with tossing curls
I'd let the old Earth take a couple of whirls
While I plied her with tears in place of pearls
And as time came around, she came my way
As time came around, she came

But it's a long, long while from May to December
And the days grow short when you reach September
And the autumn weather turns the leaves to flame
And I haven't got time for the waiting game
And the wine dwindles down to a precious brew
September, November
And these few vintage years I'd share with you
These vintage years I'd share with you

But it's a long, long while from May to December
And the days grow short when you reach September
And I have lost one tooth and I walk a little lame
And I haven't got time for the waiting game
And the days turn to gold as they grow few
September, November
And these few golden days I'd spend with you
These golden days I'd spend with you.

When you meet with the young men early in Spring
They court you in song and rhyme
They woo you with words and a clover ring
But if you examine the goods they bring
They have little to offer but the songs they sing
And a plentiful waste of time of day
A plentiful waste of time


But it's a long, long while from May to December
Will the clover ring last till you reach September
And I'm not quite equipped for the waiting game
But I have a little money and I have a little fame
And the days dwindle down to a precious few
September, November
And these few precious days I'd spend with you
These precious days I'd spend with you



Hmmmmm. "Clover ring"? And who are these young men? The line "I've lost one tooth and I walk a little lame" does somewhat take away from the smooth romanticism we've come to associate with the song. It's a bit macabre, in fact: offputting. And those tossing curls (rhymed, of course, with pearls): the antiquated courtly language. And the reference to wine. As with Woody Allen's mother and the boiled chicken, hasn't this song been put through the deflavorizing machine?

You decide.

CODA TO THE CODA. Playing these two versions over once again, I'm embarrassed, because I honestly think they're the same recording. They are just TOO alike to be different renditions, different voices.  I think someone mislabeled one of the recordings. So we're left to wonder, who's Sarah and who's Lady Day? Or are both of them someone else?

Lotte Lenya: We've lost our good old Mama

The Doors - Alabama Song (Whisky Bar)

So. This Alabama song has nothing to do with Alabama, surprisingly, but is the best-known ditty from Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's dark vision of social corruption, Mahagonny. It's not exactly the kind of tune you can tap yer toe to.

When I found out the Doors had done it, I nearly fell over. The Lotte Lenya version isn't exactly what I remember either, but it's close. See, when I was a kid, I was a misfit, an outcast, a square peg (as in another brilliant song by The Doors, "When you're Strange"). I was just odd. But my sister, thirteen years older than me, was odder.

She was always going off to Munich as an exchange student, spoke fluent German (why? No one in our connection was even remotely German or Teutonic or anything), and wrote her Master's thesis in German on this strange, incomprehensible Mahagonny. It was plenty weird, but no weirder than the brick-and-board bookcases in the den that groaned under the weight of Schiller, Goethe and Freud.

In those days, everybody who was anybody had a hi-fi, and you played your hi-fi extremely loud. The louder it was, the more the bass rattled your teeth, the better your hi-fi was. When I brought friends home from school, the Moon of Alabama song would be on the hi-fi, and I'd have to try to explain.

But I didn't understand it myself. There was a lot I didn't understand, because nobody explained it to me. So I concluded that everyone else in the world already understood these things, and I didn't because I was feeble-minded and intellectually inferior (even though I was in a special advanced educational stream, for which I received no family praise at all). As a result, in order to compensate, I became very entertaining.

Things got even more confusing when my sister's drunken married friends groped me at adult parties, at which my glass of gin was always kept topped up. I was fifteen years old and they were something like thirty and it was supposed to be all right. My parents were sure it was all right: my older siblings were looking after me! They were doing me a favor, giving me a social life which I could never have on my own, and I was supposed to be grateful. It nearly destroyed me, but I figured I didn't understand that, either, and kept silent. Just as well, because if they didn't listen to me then, they sure don't want to listen to me now.

Oh, don't ask why. Oh, don't ask why.