Allow me to explain. Like most dog owners, I spend many hours every week walking the dog. Often it is early in the morning, before the sun has even risen, or out in the woods or on the beach, some place that can lead to solitude, introspection, contemplation. Now of course, while I am walking the dog, much of the time my mind is focused on immediate, temporal needs, such as “How am I supposed to pick up THAT?”, or even trying to decide the best way to prevent Dooby from dismantling the neighbor’s split-rail fence and using it for a chew toy. But there are still many moments left for my mind to wander, and much of that time I am mentally writing.
And let me tell you, I have written some amazing shit on those dog walks, too. Razor-sharp wit, brilliant turns of a phrase, humour worthy of Oscar Wilde. In my mind I have already left my thankless job as a pharmacy technician many times, to embark on my new thankless career as Brilliant Writer. Book signings at Barnes & Noble, “An Evening With the Brilliant Mind of Paul Halley” selling out to nearly 65% capacity at every community college east of Albany, a thousand Courtyard Marriotts await… But inevitably, somewhere along the dog walk the thread gets lost, overtaken by the Doobster finding a wadded Kleenex on the sidewalk or reminding myself to stop at the ATM on my way to work, and by the time I get home, most of it is gone, like that awesome dream you had about whatever it was before it just became a blur like “The Andalusian Dog”. In an affront to my Holy Trinity of Augusten, Sedaris, and Sloane, my brilliant Virtual Essays never get written, my Virtual Pulitzer never received, and the only book I’m signing is when I buy Sudafed at the pharmacy.
There is another time, though, when my mind tends to set itself free, and I dog-write, and that’s when I’m listening to my music on my Ipod. Now, over my lifetime I have managed to amass a fairly humongous music collection. According to Itunes, I’ve got 455 albums, 4,234 songs, 11 days 17 hours 40 minutes and 40 seconds worth. It covers a lot of decades and a lot of different phases of my own life. So, sometimes when I’m listening to my music, I’m thinking about where I was and what I was doing when I heard that song. Or I might be thinking about the song itself, the words or the melody or the talent of the performer. But my mind is excited, thinking, mentally writing, dog-writing.
So, in an effort to knock myself off of this literary tuffet I’ve been on, I have decided to embark on a writing series. At least three essays, all to be inspired by whatever song happens to pop up on my Ipod at the moment.
Here’s the first one:
“Below the Line” by Josh Groban
Mark and I have tickets to go see Josh Groban in concert in October.
We don’t go to a lot of concerts. The last concert we went to was to see Joan Armatrading in Boston and that was at least six or seven years ago. What I remember most about that concert was that Joan was suffering from a touch of laryngitis that night, not exactly auspicious for a singer on tour. So, she had a bit of trouble hitting some of the notes that night; but anyone who knows Joan Armatrading’s music knows that hitting the high notes isn’t her forté anyway. Hell, she has a hard enough time hitting some of the not-so-high notes. But that’s OK with her fans, like me, because that is how she sounds. And then, when it came time for “Willow”, her signature song, she basically just sat there and let the audience sing most of the song to her. Imagine, being a performer and being able to allow yourself to sit back and let waves of love pour over you from the audience in the form of their singing your song, which you wrote, to you. Must have been pretty awesome for her. The audience enjoyed it for sure. Well, except maybe for Mark, who isn’t exactly a Joan Armatrading fan and probably couldn’t even pronounce her name properly. By the end of the concert he looked exactly like someone who had just lost 90 minutes of their life for the sake of their spouse; 90 minutes which he would never be able to get back.
Of all my complaints about my marriage, and they are thankfully few and mercifully trivial, I would have to say that Mark’s relative disinterest in music is one of the major ones. I have always been the sort of person who would hook up the stereo first on moving day, and pretty much have “tunes” going on all during the day. Mark, on the other hand, is a TV person, a self-proclaimed “boob-tube child”. If he is awake and he is home, you can pretty much guarantee that the television is on, even when he is nowhere nearby, which has always been a bit of an annoyance, not to mention a mystery, to me. I mean, who would rather hear disembodied voices hawking the Sham-Wow! or Debbie Boone’s Lifestyle Lift while vacuuming or washing dishes than a little Etta James or even some Dean Martin? Mark would, that’s who. And it seems that TV trumps Music in this house, so much of my music time is relegated to my time alone at home, or walking the streets of Provincetown with my Ipod playing. In any real relationship, there will be at least half of the time when it’s not about you, but about your partner instead. This, for me, is one of those times and I have learned to accept it.
So, concerts and the like are a rare occasion in my life now, but it wasn’t always that way. I have some amazing memories which revolve around concerts, from all the other parts of my life.
The first concert I ever went to was to see the Grateful Dead. Talk about jumping right into something with both feet! No pussyfootin’ around for me, no messin’ around goin’ to see Little Feat or Bonnie Raitt; no I’m gonna start right off with Advanced Concert-going. All that meant of course, is that my friend Cindy and I were obliged to smoke as much of the marijuana which was being passed up and down every row and aisle in every direction as we possibly could. Then, when we had smoked our fill and we could sit back, glassy-eyed, I watched the girls in gauze dance around barefoot down on the floor of the Baltimore Civic Center, and let the sounds of Jerry Garcia and “Truckin’" wash over me like waves of Concert Coolness. It was fantastic.
I think the best concert I ever went to was a band called Dépêche Mode, an ‘80s Techno Pop band, back in 1985 or so. Three guys up on the stage, a drummer and two guys with keyboards, and all this music came pouring out of the speakers all over us. The concert was at the Meriweather Post Pavilion, a great outdoor concert arena in suburban Maryland, and they served beer in these enormously huge plastic cups. So there we were, all this Electric Youth dancing around like maniacs with these jumbo beers in hand, to this amazing, angry yet optimistic music. And it was all very intense and liberating because back then people my age weren’t sure if we’d live to see 30, partly because the Commies were going to drop a bomb on us and partly because we were starting to see a lot of people our age dying of a strange new disease. But when the band started the night with “Black Celebration” and the lights slowly went up onstage, the crowd went wild and we just lost ourselves in that awesome intense techno-80s moment.
Then, after that concert, I almost got myself arrested. It’s kind of a long story, but let me put it this way. Among the people I went to the concert with were my best friend and roommate, Tim, and his current boyfriend, whose name I can’t remember but we’ll call him Greg. Greg worked in a trendy clothing store at a pricey shopping center in downtown DC, selling pleated slacks and sweaters with shoulder pads sewn into them to people exactly like Tim and me but with more money. He was kind of cute, and by the end of the concert, he was no longer Tim’s boyfriend. He wasn’t my boyfriend either, but he was definitely my date, at least for the second half of the night.
Now, in the Potomac river which runs alongside DC, there is a tiny little island-slash-national park called Roosevelt Island. It's only accessible from the Parkway on the Virginia side of the river, via a little parking lot and a tiny footbridge which crosses over onto the island. Well, after ditching a not-very-happy Tim somewhere downtown (I paid for that one for weeks), somehow or other “Greg” and I decided that Roosevelt Island would be the perfect place for our hot and sweaty little tryst. Maybe it was the jumbo beers that made us think that scaling a locked fence would be a great idea and that nothing could possibly go awry, or maybe it was our overactive hormonal surges, I don’t know. And believe me, scaling a locked gate on a footbridge is not an easy accomplishment, either. But we did it, we jumped over the fence and made our way into the park, our own little private island where we could frolick, as it were, anywhere we liked. And was it the jumbo beers that had us thinking that the hillside just opposite the parking lot where we’d left the car would be the ideal spot for us to, well, frolick? I don’t know, but that’s what we did. And just as we were getting our Girbauds down around our slouchy-socked ankles, we were horrified to see a pair of headlights turn into the parking area just over a hundred yards away. A pair of Police headlights, that is. And even more horrified when the Police headlights were joined by a Police flashlight, one of those super-bright long range flashlights that they’re always flashing around on "CSI" even when the lights are on. We laid there, frozen in our tawdry embrace, Perry Ellis and Willy Smith accessories strewn about on the grass around us, certain we were about to be exposed and imagining what the next few hours were going to be like in the Arlington County Jail, especially if they ever got wind of what we were in for. But mercifully, we must have been just outside the range of the CSI flashlight, and after a few minutes they gave up and drove away, leaving a ticket on the windshield of Greg’s car.
Now, I would like to tell you that at that point, Greg and I collected ourselves and our belongings, and made it back to the car and away, with dignity. I would like to tell you that, but I’m sure you realize that that’s not what happened. I mean, we were already there.
I never saw Greg again after that night. But it was still the best concert I ever went to.
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