Prelude
I was in the car the first time music seemed strange: the instruments less distinct, the vocals less crisp. I was driving a lot that year, two hours total on my commute to work and back up the northern New England coast. I kept needing to turn the volume higher, kept straining to make out the words, if there were words, or the melody. At first, this felt like an indictment of my memory: surely the bass was louder? Didn’t the voices come in sooner? I blamed digitization, or my loud car. Something was missing.
Work was Marblehead and home was Boston. On my way south in the evenings I’d pull over at a public beach—or a private beach I could sneak onto—and I’d plunge into the water. Concrete debris cut borders on the sand. Rebar, reassurance of ruins.
Those forty minutes a day gave me an opportunity to clear my head, to let whatever thoughts needed to make it to me arrive safe. The music of the water against the sand clarified my feelings in the way music could, gave feeling a pulse.
It was early September of 2008 when the ocean disappeared. The September sun found its horizon earlier each day and the light was changing as I sloshed out of the water, started toward the parking lot, drying off with the pink towel a woman from Nahant had given me when I asked her where I could buy one. The breeze came from several directions at once—that time of year when the water is perfect and the air’s a little cold.
But I couldn’t hear the ocean. I couldn’t hear bird calls or traffic. All I could hear was a roar inside my head, a noise so aggressive it seemed to blot out the sounds around me.
For months by then I’d been hearing a ringing noise off and on, an engine or a siren in my ears that rose up unexpectedly and then disappeared. Doctors couldn’t explain it, couldn’t say how long it would last or whether it would continue to worsen. One minute I could hear as well as always and the next I’d have to lean too close to people, my ear nearly touching their mouths.
Everyone knows what happens to sound underwater: the full-head echo, slowed-down motors and shore voices. The sound I heard wasn’t like that. It was made of several tones, high and low together, like a lawnmower near your ear and a plane not far away. It announced itself with clicks and whistles, changing the pressure in my ears, a kind of buzzy gravity, a planet made of static.
I turned back to find the ocean. And I saw it, a surface of uneven glass. And once I could see it again I felt as though I could hear it too. As I would learn in years to come, the brain remembers sounds surprisingly well—or convinces itself it does—and so when it wants to tell the story I can hear, it releases its chemicals to help itself mimic noises the damaged ears have lost. You can hear what’s not there, and you can hear what was never there.
I worried the ground would start moving. It had been coming out from under me that last year in sudden vertigo attacks. They seemed connected to the noise, but they didn’t invariably pair with it. I tried to ignore what was happening to me, climbing into my car and turning the music up high to overcome the roar.
Inconveniently, my preferred listening that summer tended to the lugubrious, to music that unfolded slowly with lots of dynamic shifts: all those great ECM recordings of simple and gut-stirring stuff, Gavin Bryars or the Hilliard Ensemble. Repeat the same musical phrase enough and it changes. The softness of the pieces brought me to attention, directed the traffic in my head.
Summer weekends I’d drive to Hartford to visit my old college friend Golaski. He’d sit me in his living room, pour me a drink and walk me through the Led Zeppelin or Smashing Pumpkins that I’d tried and failed to connect with when it was popular, pointing out what had been new (and, so, important) and what I’d missed. After a few glasses I’d forget most of the details he was so painstaking with, but I loved hearing him talk about it, and I loved the sense that I was learning, deepening, better understanding these things that were so loved. Here we were listening to the MTV sound together, the one I’d struggled to appreciate as a kid; I was learning the shibboleths late, at age thirty, carefully filing them away.
On my own, I preferred the blues or pop that didn’t stray far from the blues. Or jazz. Or instrumental stuff that was avant-garde in the 1980s and by 2008 felt full of what the future used to be: Lori Anderson, Robert Ashley. For years I was notorious among my friends for abhorrent taste. It wasn’t just young friends: 60-year-olds hated what I played in the car every bit as much as 20-year-olds did. We’d be driving along and laughing and I’d pop in Congolese rhumba icon Papa Wemba and everyone would be patient for a couple of beats. Then somebody would break in with “Alright, what the hell is this?” and everyone else would second them. The CD would come out and some indie thing slid into its place.
What I loved about Papa Wemba singing “Awa Y’okeyi,” the piano version anyway, was the controlled, almost ritualistic swings of passion, the way the piano anticipated and then responded to his cries, and of course the fact that—as it was in Congolese—maybe less than five million people on the planet understand the words (nobody not born in Congo speaks Congolese, unless it’s a handful of haggard Belgian contractors who can’t seem to explain to the locals in French why they’re stealing all the minerals. What was that about money? Well, if you want a whole dollar a day we’re always looking for someone to dig through dirt …). Since the language is impenetrable, and any translation iffy, we’re left with pure sound, and we can pour anything into it, any fear or catastrophe or yearning, any warning.
Even if our tastes begin as a pretense they soon become who we really are, and one of the great lessons I’d learned was to periodically try to disrupt that ossification. I’d pick categories of sound and study them, heading off to the library with an empty knapsack and coming home with a dozen CDs of opera or early jazz or whatever was charting. I’d listen to all of them, save favorites, assemble secret playlists: a driving list, a jogging list, a list to send me to sleep.
***
As I ran along the north shore in 2008, I may have resembled a different version of my father. Dad was a jogger too back in the happy days when he was young and full of vigor. He’d run for miles though Mohegan Park and arrive home covered in sweat. He’d chase me though the house, frightening me a little, because he was a strong man and I was a child. Only a few years later he started drinking instead of jogging, then drinking through work, then drinking instead of work, then waking up at 3A.M. to drink. Nights when he drank and lashed out he’d come into my room at midnight with two glasses of coconut rum. I was maybe 14 by then. He’d hand me one and tell me the story of his life, always telling it the same way, always ending when he delivered his last briefing on the Cambodian cross-border operation to General Abrams and stepped onto the plane home at Tan Son Nhut. Sometimes he’d describe the last scene in The Killing Fields, how John Lennon’s Imagine begins to play just as the Cambodian genocide-survivor Dith Pran—played by actual genocide survivor Haing S. Ngor—tells his American colleague, a fellow journalist who’d abandoned him to the Khmer Rouge, “there’s nothing to forgive.”
“And that music picks up,” Dad would tell me as I sipped the rum, “and he sings Imagine all the people, living life in peace.” He never asked for forgiveness for the things he’d said and done while drunk; instead, he’d tell this story. And he’d head off to bed and I’d play the song on my portable CD player with my headphones.
In 2008 I was a hundred miles north of him, running across wet sand by the shore, smooth as beach glass. To make it harder on myself I’d move to the hotter and coarser and whiter sand uphill, or the pebble grade with its seaweed hopping with tiny insects and sharp with shells, just past the reeds, the beach grass, and the arrogant weathered cabins at its edge.
I ran to keep my body sharp, and because I could already tell that body was failing. Not the usual slowing pace of the body aging, but something capricious, that weird noise that blotted voices at work and only confused people when I tried to explain.
I was editing medical newsletters in 2008. Each month I overdrew rent on my account and paid it back in the week that followed. I wandered a wealthy town at lunchtime and listened to NPR voices talking, almost casually, about an economic collapse. I’d had 30 years to make something of myself.
On the drive home I’d try listening to Tom Waits’ “Town with No Cheer,” a song about a real city, Serviceton, that sported a thriving bar and restaurant in the first half of the century, when passengers had to switch rail lines—and drank and ate while they were there—in order to continue their journey from Melbourne to Adelaide refreshed and at their ease. But with the advent of café cars and the joining of the rail lines the town dried up and disappeared.
What makes the song so moving for me is what I strained to hear on those drives, and in the end what I couldn’t hear: the fade-in and fade-out of Waits’ voice in the persona of a dry local. He begins every phrase with something like a shout and then winds down to a defeated whisper, like a drunk lamenting his sobriety. The harmonium and synthesizer sound, respectively, of carnival and defeat; they merge and blur.
When my hearing cut out, beginning in 2008 and increasing with time, songs like that one came to me as though from down the street, as though the speakers were shorting out, as though I didn’t know the tune.
What I feared losing—the catastrophe the roaring shadowed forth—wasn’t just a series of structured sounds, but the world those sounds created, a world you could live inside: Bach on a snowy afternoon, hard blues on a long night’s drive, the background mood in a restaurant or at a party (or, increasingly, any public space not yet colonized by ESPN on flatscreen TVs). Music is color. When you’re young you’re the hero of a movie, and the Heifetz you play in your car or the Velvet Underground you first try out sex to isn’t just background, it’s location and weather. You feel it on your skin.
So many of the big, meaningful scenes of my life have become centered, in my memory, around music, and not just concerts. I think of the time I spent every last dollar I owned on a 3-disc set of Einstein on the Beach and put it into the stereo while I drank coffee and thought about finding a real job; from the first notes (the numbers, chanted) I felt like I’d walked into a new life. Or the time Golaski and I spent an hour driving through fogbound Portland, Maine on a bargain book tour and playing Genesis’s “Mama” over and over, not able to get enough of its brutal camp. There was the time Bill and I debated the respective merits of various Johnny Cash records on New Year’s Eve as we apportioned drugs on the back of one of the jewel cases. Or when Jaime and I realized, after seven years, off and on, that it was finished between us, this time for good, but she hung around my tiny apartment all afternoon because neither of us wanted our new lives to start quite yet. I played her Samuel Barber’s “Knoxville, Summer 1914”—she’d never heard it, didn’t know who Barber was—and we listened to every note and were ourselves silent, wholly owned, her cigarette smoke uncurling above us.
Cigarettes, drugs: lots of music seems hopelessly bound-up in cool. But obscure one-upmanship can be cruelly exclusionary. I remember eating dinner with a couple of friends in college when the conversation turned to indie bands and then to bootlegs and then to variants of those bootlegs and I was lost—were they scoring points against one another? Were they bonding? There were no smartphones then, so I took out a book.
But as much as I didn’t care about new music then, by the time I ran along the Swampscott shore I was coming to regard stereos and overhead speakers as one of the major obstacles to human language. Just as I didn’t understand how to share in the fruits of the cool in Bikini Kill and Run DMC when I was younger, now the sounds and rhythms that centered people around me, marked emotional turns, drove the economy, were becoming a kind of aural pain, obscuring the words I needed to understand.
I was worried about becoming no fun, transforming into the joykill who asks that the music—the background sound of good times, Shelley’s “where the spirit drinks until the brain is wild”—be turned low or off. Part of the fun of the music at those parties, or in those restaurants and elevators and supermarkets, is the way it connects us with our past. You hear a bad Billy Joel song in the freezer aisle at Safeway and time is refuted: you’re twelve years old, driving off to football camp, or to dancing class, your mother’s station wagon one major metal antenna.
Back in college my friend Vita gave me an EP cassette she’d found in a free bin at Newbury Comics, from a local group called, I think, Fledgling, and while the A side didn’t do much for me, the B side wouldn’t let go. The name of the song didn’t seem to appear on the tape, but the slow plucking of strings and the sudden rush of a woman’s raw voice and the rhythm kicking in … well, I loved the song. And I carried that EP from apartment to apartment until I no longer owned a means of playing it. One bit of the lyrics always got to me, just as the tune moves to an upswing: “when there’s so much out there you can’t imagine / it’s such a drag but it’s so much better than me …” The way she held out that “so” both times, dug into the “better,” clipped the “me” …
Twelve years later—maybe six months before my ears began to die—I was walking down Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, past the Lizard Lounge, and as I sometimes did on a whim when I had an hour to kill on a weekday night, I walked down to the grotto to hear whoever was playing.
Within a few minutes of my ordering a drink, I heard that deconstructed chord, and the same voice. Eileen Rose and the Holy Wreck was the band’s name, and it was clearly her song, the same song Vita gave me in 1996. I didn’t even know Vita anymore.
Sitting there, listening and longing, my heart fluttered into my throat. Every moment I’d lived with the song compacted, contracted. I felt absorbed and released and excited for hours after. In the days that followed I tried to explain to friends just how emotional it had been, but it’s like trying to tell a dream.
