Rock and Roll Will Save Your Life (28 page)

This shouldn’t have come as a complete shock—Dayna did teach herself to play piano at age three. Her early compositions, however, did not augur well. “My songs were
highly
confessional,” she told me. “I had a lot to say and I said it a lot. The arrangements were self-consciously complex. The first song I wrote, at seventeen, was called ‘Candles, Roses, and Wine.’ I had another one called ‘This Side of Eve.’ I don’t need to play them. You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Dayna eventually settled into a familiar folkie pattern: playing bars to support her coffeehouse gigs. Every few years, the music industry would go through one of its
time to sign chicks
phases and the A&R guys would show up full of golden promises. The president of the label would blow smoke up her dress. Then the proposed deal would fall through, because the marketing tools had no idea how to get her songs on the radio.

Dayna had started out as a Joni Mitchell devotee, but as she traveled the country, she became increasingly drawn to native musical forms. Her songbook soon ranged from orchestral waltzes to Appalachian nocturnes performed on banjo. There was also the problem of her looks. She was like a scary, grown-up version of Fiona Apple, not an emaciated waif willing to roll around on shag carpet in her underpants, but a sturdy Jewish girl from Jersey who schlepped her own gear.

As her thirties dawned, Dayna had yet to make a studio album. She was approaching what music professionals call an “unsignable age.” Then a strange thing happened.
Postcards from Downtown
—recorded in the home studio of her drummer—exploded in Europe. Overnight, Dayna could fill a theater in Amsterdam or Barcelona or Berlin. In the
Netherlands, she was considered an alt-country artist. In Spain, she played festivals with PJ Harvey and Beck. In Germany, she headlined jazz clubs. She played the same songs in each country, the same arrangements. But each crowd recognized in them the expression of a distinct American musical tradition. And all of them were right.

After dinner, Dayna led me downstairs to the room she was converting into a studio, on whose floor she’d been sleeping the past few nights. (“I’m trying to get my scent into the corners, you know?”) In years past this situation might have posed temptations—the Drooling Fanatic finds nothing sexier than a musician in his or her native habitat. And we were, after all, miles from any seat of judgment. Thankfully, we both recently had married Drooling Fanatics of our own. We settled for getting baked out of our skulls. I’d brought Dayna a bag of something called “Black Widow” grown by a friend of mine who, not incidentally, is a competitive eater.

It was at this point, I believe, that the original plan—for Dayna to “work on the new album”—took a detour. The first part of this detour consisted of us babbling. I did my
Roving Petrol Mobs Are Going to Kidnap My Daughter
rap and my
America Will Die of Its Own Greed
rap, both of which my wife has heard so many times that she will actually ask me to recite one of them when she’s having trouble sleeping. That somehow led to a conversation about which came first as a form of communication, words or music? I’d originally thought music, but then I’d heard a news report in which scientists managed to replicate the sounds produced by Neanderthal Man. Neanderthal Man, in turned out, sounded a lot like Mr. Roboto.

Dayna shook her head. “Lullabies,” she said. “The first noise was some sort of primate humming to her baby. They’ve done studies and lullabies all over the world have the same arc; they all rock like a cradle.”

“Yeah, but at what point did humans switch from getting something across to getting something out?”

“Drums,” Dayna said. “Guys getting together to drum and chant.”

“Iron John
was right,” I observed. “That’s depressing.”

It was around this time I began entreating Dayna to play me some new songs.

“I should warn you,” she said, “I’ve been getting really into rockabilly lately.”

“Rockabilly?” I said. “Really?” As much as I respected Dayna’s musical explorations, I associated rockabilly with the Stray Cats, who played the same annoyingly jumpy song for the entire eighties. I hereby accept the collective animus of Rockabilly Nation, but we all have our taste and to me rockabilly has always exuded a swagger that feels monotonous within two minutes. It’s the Fonzie of rock genres.

Dayna picked up her bass guitar and began playing a melody that was the aural equivalent of a chocolate cupcake. Her strum hand kept a clacking rhythm and her voice tilted up into a Hank Williams half-yodel on the choruses. By the time she was done, I was ready to pomade my hair.

Then, just for good measure, Dayna pulled out her new double-headed lap steel guitar and sang a crushingly sad version of the Replacements’ “Here Comes a Regular.” Listening to Dayna’s voice was like a drug. It wasn’t just her tone or her range or her power, which, if I knew anything about vocal technique, I could praise at length. No, it was something emotional. Her voice sounded like desperation hurled into the world with exquisite control.

The song ended and I set about trying to explain to Dayna how much her voice meant to me, how much, over the years, I’d needed her songs to plumb the dank morass of my own feelings, how without her music, without “Paterson,” I suspected I’d still be alone, without my wife, without my blessed daughter, a lonely Fanatic grinding language into self-regard. I was getting choked up.

Then Dayna did something truly mean—she stuck a guitar in my
hand. Like Boris, she had sensed in my desperate DF energy the longing to make music. Dayna attempted to teach me three chords that, she assured me, would allow me to play the entire Rolling Stones’ catalogue. But my fingers were too runty and weak to hold the finger positions and any talent I had for muscle memory (none) had been eroded by the pot, so Dayna went to Plan B: an open tuning. This would allow me to flail at the strings without worrying about making chords.

I did this for a few minutes, while Dayna strummed a guitar of her own and filled the air with all sorts of sweet lies—
You’ve got a great ear! Listen to that! You’re totally making music right now!
—all of which, by their insistent benevolence, served only to confirm my regret. It was time for bed.

But I had to ask one more question, because my heart was woozy with self-pity. The ensuing exchange should be read with the long, profound pauses of the late-night stoner implied.

Dayna meant no offense. On the contrary, this is how Jews show affection: the deadpan acknowledgment of one another’s neuroses. She was a very maternal figure, really. It was obvious in how she treated me, and especially in her songs. “Bedtime,” Dayna said.

She led me upstairs and turned on the Jacuzzi. “It’ll help you get to sleep,” she said. No musician wants a stoned Fanatic prowling her house at three a.m. Dayna padded downstairs to sleep on the floor of her studio, while I undressed and slipped into the Jacuzzi on the back deck. The river down below roared softly. The sky was a milky veil. I thought about a comment Dayna had made earlier. “The thing you have to understand,” she said, “is that your relationship with music wouldn’t be so deep or pure if you were a musician.”

Dayna had given this matter plenty of thought. Hell, she’d married a Drooling Fanatic. Then again, maybe she was just pitying me. I thought of my hands struggling to form a G-chord on the neck of Dayna’s guitar. I thought of all the times I’d taken up an instrument and waited for the magic to seize my body. I thought of all the musicians I’d drooled at over the years, and how happy I’d imagined they must be, and how sad so many of them seemed when I actually visited.

I had always fantasized that learning the language of music would grant me passage to a realm beyond sadness, that I’d find some sunny version of myself tucked away inside the current mess. But maybe I had it wrong. Maybe it was in music itself—the sounds as my body and heart received them—that the magic resided. Maybe my failure was some kind of subconscious effort to preserve the joy of being a Drooling Fanatic. I closed my eyes. I could hear Dayna singing, very slowly, very softly.
Here comes a regular, am I the only one who feels ashamed?
It took me a full minute to realize that I was the one singing; the words were coming out of me.

Drooling Fanaticism in the Age of Actual Drooling

A few years ago my pal Tom Finkel called me up. “You know what’s great?” he asked, not bothering with hello. “Listening to Bob Dylan with your baby daughter.” I’d never heard Tom speak with such contentment. I could hear Dylan in the background. I imagined Tom lying on the couch, the kid curled on his chest. She would have been three months old.

I’ve thought about that phone call a lot recently. It connotes a certain fantasy: that Drooling Fanaticism and parenthood are not only reconcilable, but ideal dance partners. Who better to indoctrinate into the pleasures of song than your children?

It hasn’t worked out quite that way in our household. Our two-year-old Josie does love music. But she does not now, nor has she ever, wanted anything to do with “my music.” She’s got her own music—and woe unto thee who fucks with her playlist. My wife learned this a few months ago when she walked into the child’s room. “I want
Dino 5!”
Josie shrieked.
The Dino 5
is a dinosaur-themed children’s hip-hop album. It is exactly as charming as this description implies.

“Oh, honey,” my wife said, “not
The Dino 5
again.”

Josie’s face, her entire being, crumpled.

“She wasn’t upset that I was saying no to her,” Erin told me later. “It was that I’d insulted her music. It was like I’d just done the worst, most hurtful thing in the world. Oh, God.” Erin was herself close to tears.

Now that Josie can reach the pink boom box we stupidly placed in her room, she will play the same album, sometimes the same song, up to twelve times in a row. It is for this reason that I know by heart the words to songs such as “Bouncin’ Baby” by Justin Roberts:

Over which I have puzzled for entire weeks, as to what sort of baby would buy blue jeans in the first place, especially a bag of them, and what would make this baby prone to bounce and whether there’s any correlation between infant elasticity and retail buying power. It is probably fair to say that fatherhood has exacerbated in me certain tendencies toward procrastination. I also know that if we don’t get Josie’s
Music Together
CD on within five seconds of entering the car, all hell will break loose, as it will if I try to slip on one of my albums. (“No! No papa music!”)

All this has reinforced my belief that Drooling Fanaticism is an innate tendency, something that gets bred out of us as we grow older, like playing with our food. It is certainly true that when I find a song I love—Sam Roberts’s “Detroit ’67,” say—my natural impulse is to play it twelve times in a row. The reason I don’t is because I’ve learned that pop songs have limited durability. They can only surprise us so many times. Once we memorize all the moves—the fills, the solos, the vocal turns—we stop listening in the same way. The song no longer transports us. It’s certainly possible to recapture that spark; classic rock is predicated on this capacity. But it’s never the same as
the first time—in love, in music, in anything. And so, over the years, Drooling Fanatics learn to conserve gratification. We’re like those lab rats who parcel out our dope for maximum pleasure.

So Josie and her little brother will learn to conserve gratification. They’ll probably dream of being rock stars, too. Why not? They’ll grow up with two parents who dreamed of being rock stars, in a house filled with instruments those parents can no longer play. And probably (this must be said) they won’t be rock stars. How many of us get to be?

But what they will have, what we all get, is the chance to be Drooling Fanatics. And I hope they feel as I do—a bursting gratitude for those musicians brave enough to speak the first and final language of our hearts. Maybe Dayna Kurtz is right about that: the pleasures of listening to music may be greater, or purer anyway, than those of making it.