I Love The Way You Call Me Baby

Part 1
He's lost, he's tired.  They've been driving for miles.  She's trying to have an intelligent conversation, full of nervous energy.

As usual, with 40 more miles to go. He needs to pee. All his brain energy is focused on keeping the bladder in check.

"Whatever you say, Baby,"

"Wait. Did you just call me 'Baby' ???"

LONG PAUSE.  Careful and considered.

"Whatever it was I didn't mean ta!"

He hopes that by quoting a fragment from a song, he can stop her from exploding.  It's the first thing that comes into his mind really, every time he finds himself dealing with a woman who is about to explode.  Or a drunk guy at a bar who is eager to punch him.  He knows she knows this song.  The problem is that he can't remember what song it's from.  This puzzles takes up much more brain space than whatever it is she is telling him.

"I can't believe I'm riding around with a guy who uses the word "Baby" in an un-ironic manner.  It's like you are trying to infantalize me!"

His ears catch up with his brain: Hang on, did she just say something about an infant?  Could she be pregnant?

He looks over at her, hoping to say something brilliant.  Pull some great joke out of his ass.  He raises an eyebrow.

"You've come a long way? Baby?"

He flashes his characteristic smile.

He breaks her.

She can't help but laugh.

Miraculously, they make it to the gig without him ruining his only clean pair of trousers.  Although it was a close call when the owner wanted an autograph before giving directions to the bathroom.

Mary Mary by the Monkees

==
PART 2

Sometime during their Sound Check, she wants to get back at him.  She tries teasing him, but he is all focus and frustration.  He climbs off the stage to check the balance of the speakers.

She begins to sing tunelessly:
"Don't use that toilet if you have to go to the bathroom during the show. I can hear you onstage"
She manages to whisper it into the mic in a somewhat sultry manner.

He whirls around.

"KEEP SINGING! I need to hear how it sounds!"

Suddenly she's stung, staring back at his words, surprised and suddenly scared, as if he's asked her to strip.

He thinks: She's so stuck up about things. Such a prude.  How am I even on tour with someone like her, so uptight all the time?

"Wait, wait, wait. What-what should I sing?  You usually . . . "

All her bravado is gone. She's lost without him and his guitar.  He knows she HATES singing acapella, and he's being slightly cruel.  But he likes it somehow.  Maybe he'll throw her a note.

"SHUT UP AND SING!"

Or maybe he'll just yell at her.  Sometimes that works too.

With lasers of hatred beaming from her eyes, she begins.

"I'll buy you Rogaine
When you start losing all your hair/
I'll sew on patches/
To all your underwear"

Her eyes.  They look so mean, but she has twisted the lyrics out of shape.  It's some random hit song on the radio.  "Underwear" is clearly her own invention.

"Keep going!'  He yells over his shoulder as he walks into the shadows, trying to hide a smirk. But it's too late.  They were making fun of the real lines in the song while they were in the car, randomly and not nearly this cleverly.  She keeps going until he falls on the floor laughing.  And nearly ruins his pants a second time.

==
PART 3

It's a small crowd, but after a full set, he decides it's a perfect time to do an encore.  As usual, she has no idea where's he's going with this.

"We have a tradition.  MUSICIANS, that is, have a tradition.  Of carrying on a great song, of carrying on the tradition."  He's very serious.  She looks over at him, dubiously. Wondering where her part comes in.  If he has decided to include her at all.

"Are WE serious musicians?" She asks, both to him and to the crowd, neither of which takes any of this patter seriously.

But he plows forward. "We, of course, being SERIOUS musicians, WE have followed in the tradition of hearing a song and wanting to make it our own.  Excuse me, we take it, make it our own, and thereby-we ruin it.  Yes, ladies and gentlemen!  We, in particular, LOVE to ruin songs!"

"I have no idea where this is going, but I like it!" She interjects. The audience laughs.  They are with them, wherever they are going.

"So here is a song, I'm not even sure what it is called or who sings it, but we heard it on the radio, one of the 'commercial' stations, so it must be a hit,"

"So therefore, we hate it!" Gleefully, she can't let him alone.

"No, no, no.  We DON'T hate it.  We only ruin songs we LOVE!  The songs we hate don't get played at all!"

"RIGHT!" She is all cheer and fun and games at this point, "So, what song IS this?  I'm just curious."

"You want to know the song you are going to be singing?"  He strums his guitar absentmindedly, like he's a cowboy loading a gun.

"I'M going to be singing?"  There's that fear again, just behind her eyes.

"I hope you sing it.  I certainly don't know it!"  The audience laughs again, a little more uncertainly this time.  "Start by singing it straight, and then do what you were doing before.  When we were doing the sound check,"
"Oh that. Hmm. Okay...."
He strums a vague intro, and instead of jumping in with a brilliant line, she giggles.

"Wait, I don't think I can sing it straight!! Just play and I'll sing . . ."
"Usually I like to introduce the name of the song we're ruining, but here I'll just assume you guys will recognize this famous hit.  Or if we are really lucky, maybe by the end of the night, it'll be a whole NEW song!"

He started again, and this time, miracle of miracles, she came in perfectly.

"I'll knit you Rogaine/
when you stop losing all your hair/
I'll bring you flowers/
for all your underwear"

And it just got worse.  But her voice was lovely, and everyone in the audience was drunk, and happy to stay for their private joke, which expanded to include the entire roomful of drunken customers of the bar.  And those people who were fed up with the music business, or the "Mucus Business" as he called it, being sold crap as their only option.  But it was fun to listen to her, making up endless variations on a theme, vaguely resembling a hit song on the radio, that was too precious anyway.

From that night on, members of the audience would hear the song on the radio and be disappointed that it wasn't her perfect, Dr. Demento version of it.  But they would smile anyway.


OTHER VARIATIONS

I'll sew on patches
When you start losing all your hair
I'll buy you flowers
To match your sweater!

I'll buy you flowers
When you start losing all your hair
I'll buy you Rogaine
For all your underwear

I'll buy you Rogaine
To fix your sweater
I'll buy you flowers
To make it better

I'll knit you Rogaine
When you stop losing all your hair
I'll buy you flowers
For all your underwear

Cause I-I-I Love
The way you call me patches
And you-oo-oo-oh 
Take me the way I am!


The Way I Am by Ingrid Michaelson

May I Suggest /One more hour of Light

And then it happened.

The crash came.  The sound of breaking glass.

He said, "It's over.  It's all over."

The guitar fell, smashing into pieces 6 floors below.

She said, "I don't see any reason to stay, either"

They finally had the fight that consumed the last morsel of their love.

And then she laughed.

And he flashed his brilliant smile.

All the anxieties that had been lingering, unspoken, tension that collects in her eyebrows and shoulders.  So many moments of feeling bad, of beating yourself up. Regrets, lost moments, hours, days, years. All that awful stuff that lasted too long.

And their eyes fell into harmony again.  One simple look, and they could laugh at the world.  And themselves.

Because in those darkest moments, when they had lost everything, a single song of laughter saved them.

Looking in his eyes, she felt him holding her in their tent, looking up at the stars.

(The next morning was their least romantic moment; they awoke clumsily groping each other until they could no longer take the moist heat inside the canvas colored oven. Comedy always flipped over the moments when they took themselves too seriously.)

Every moment was a new beginning and was pulled into the past so quickly, eroding their days until their final moments together.  On their first tour.  Their last moments onstage together.  The last time they sang.  Their last moments together.

==
(Back to the present)

She lay smiling, feeling the strange gravel under her wrist.  Hearing the music playing, thank god the music was still on.  Although it was probably a hallucination.

God, she hated goodbyes.

But she felt a sleepiness approaching. Something like a stage going dark.  Like that afternoon at the valley festival, watching the sun setting over the hillside. Lying down on a camping pad, almost vertical on the hill. His arm around her shoulder for a pillow.

She was dreaming of a harmony, so sweet, so beautiful, she needed to wake up and get it down! But she couldn't move, her limbs had been rearranged somehow and down was up and everything was vice versa.  The parts that she could move felt weighed down and the parts she couldn't feel made her feel free.

God, the harmony was gorgeous.  She couldn't tell if she was tearing up or if her vision was shifting too.  Maybe she was drowning . . . but no, the highway wasn't under water. The gravel under her wrist, the tiny pebbles hurt her wrist as she moved her hand. She was trapped between her rental car and the road.

And wasn't going to get out.

Damn, just her luck to have a fatal accident and not have HIM in the car. HE wanted to die.  She, she was fine with life. So many things left undone  .... well, the thing that was the worst was not being able to write down this harmony that she was hearing.  Or to be able to sing it with him.

With that, the tears came. She opened her mouth to sing.

And that was all.




May I Suggest To You by Susan Werner (video)

Susan Werner and Red Molly (video with crickets)

And never know each other

She was always amazed by the crowds when they were deep in the Magic.

She doubted him at the beginning of every set, but kept the faith as each note was released into the air.

The view from the stage was into a canyon of the universe, stars flashing, ablaze, repeatedly, supernovas dying and being reborn within the chaos.

Why were they taking pictures of him? And Them? Aka The Band, aka the Group, aka the Monsters, aka the Cash Cows, they were the same-even after 40 years. Minute differences in shading from one year to the next were unworthy of such careful documentation.

Walking through the crowds at the convention, she saw scrapbooks of their shared histories. Fans taking pictures side by side. A calendar montage from a movie from 1939. And a constant reminder of how the body and the soul age at different rates. Flip. Dorian Gray. Flip. Dorian Gray. Flip. Dorian Gray.

There was a spontaneous gathering and sing along in the lobby of the hotel. She watched from the balcony; bodies not accustomed to dancing freely, voices strong with song. Her camera froze them into rapturous statues.

She ran backstage to show him and the other guys. But he was bored. They were bored.

Even the Pope gets jaded.

The green room was Waiting for Godot.

I'm disappointed in the taste.

Who am I to want something?

"I'm disappointed in the taste?"

So someone will just be summoned by the ring of a bell, and D will get a new cup of coffee. And he will pay them with a smile, and they will see him posing moodily by the glass door, on his boxers.

But that was me in another life. The scared boy, the humble servant. Offering up the item that was desired and of higher value than my own person. And then running away, backing away.

And somehow my special spark, the music talent, got plucked out of obscurity. There are a million other boys with cute smiles that this may have happened to, but it was me.

The cameras will convince you that you are a god. A minor deity. But experience will teach you otherwise. You will find yourself, again and again. In talented guitarists, in shy, beautiful boys, in funny sour loners. Why wasn't it them,

I still have to remind myself that I am the
Rock God. Or at least playing the role.

She, poor girl, she is caught up in the depression too. A sense of general worthlessness, compounded by the feeling of not being effective in the world.

I understand how to emerge from my own, but not to help her out of hers.

Life Was No Prize

He had always believed in not crying during a performance.  Overacting, cheap tricks.  It comes off as insincere, no matter what.

But there was one night, after a long fight, after losing their love and regaining it again.  They were onstage, and she sang an old standard.  He brought it in for the Beatles reference.  (He had mixed it up with "Till there was you", "I never sawr them ringing")  Something about not knowing. It's all the same isn't it?

So she sang it.

And that night, she heard it completely sincerely.  Realizing how wondrous the lyrics were, and she felt everything just at that second.  He wondered if he should stop her, when he saw her trembling.  But his first instinct was to look at the audience.  They were rapt.  Enraptured in her.

He began to cry as well.  At her basic sincerity.  At the idea that it was HIS love she was singing about.  At the idea that he could change someone so fundamentally with the GOOD part of himself.  And of course, how she had influenced him.  How she had sculpted him into a beautiful version of himself.

She taught him how to be generous.  Not the jealous love of his former blond skinny girlfriends, who would resent him talking to anyone (no matter if they were the prettiest in the room, they always had the biggest insecurities over their looks.  As they aged, revenge did not turn sweet.  Only bitter, as they were bewildered by the lack of attention)

She made him feel like everyone around them was in love too. The band, the audience, strangers they'd meet in their travels.  Even when she wanted to keep him to herself, she'd let him go.  He always wanted to come back to her, to be in her presence.  Even more than music, her aura was the one tangible thing to him.  The one clear magnet in his life.

The sheer randomness of love and luck, and how inevitable it all was.

And how scary it was to imagine a life without her.  And how tenuous it was, even at that very moment.  How every moment seemed to be touch and go.  Or touch and stay.  How likely it was that she'd walk out on him any second, so he needed to walk first.

She looked at him, to hand the solo over to him.  And their eyes met, and he turned away immediately.  Tears falling on his guitar.  Damn, he couldn't take it.  But he told her in the solo.  "You are the single best thing that's ever happened to me, onstage or off.  With you, I've hit the lottery."

Driving home that night, she wasn't sure if she knew what time it was yet.  And that it was getting very late, too late to figure it out.  More of her life was spent in that hovering place, just about to figure things out. Maybe.  Maybe it was right next to her.  Maybe it was still out there for her.

How amazing to be sitting next to a man who plays like that.  To sing to him and to the audiences; to be in just the right magic time and space to make that kind of music.  It didn't matter who heard. Even she didn't hear what she was singing. And so took it for granted.  And was distracted by all the gear, setup and breakdown and getting lost in the wilds of New Jersey.

Life was no prize.

Still.

Nancy Lamott-I Didn't Know What Time It Was