And The Beat Goes On

Travelling back home after dropping my brother off at the Burbank Airport, I was trapped on Hollywood Way heading towards the 101. Blasted rush hour!

I turned on the CD player and The Dell-Vikings’ “Whispering Bells” came ringing in. After that snappy song faded away, a baritone began singing a melody that sounded like the pounding of a huge drum, and off went The Volumes’ “I Love You.” I knew I’d be stuck in traffic for a while, and there’d be nothing but doo wop on the stereo. And I was perfectly fine with that.

So why do I keep a complication of doo wop music in my car? Well, these songs make great vocal warm-up exercises. On my way to gigs, I play the CD full-blast and sing along, usually doing all the harmonies. Also, let’s face it – these songs are so goddam catchy!

Doo wop started, like all great movements, in churches. During the 1930s, singers from the East Coast took what they learned from gospel music and walked over to the street corners. Underneath the glow of a street lamp, they would sing a cappella in three-, four-, sometimes five-part harmonies. Many of the singers at the time were African American, but in the 1950s Italian American doo wop groups started to emerge, again standing under the lamps, singing into the echoes of empty crossroads.

Now I don’t know where the name comes from. I have yet to hear the phrase muttered in a song. I’ve heard plenty of “sha-boom, sha-boom” and “sha-na-na-na, na-na-na-na-na” and “shoo-doo-be doo-be-wah” and even “rat-ta-ta ta-ta-ta too-a-oo,” but no “doo wop.” I guess the name is easier to say than “Bom-be-de-bom-bom, bom-de-de-bom …”

In the still of the night, under the blue moon, feeling a thousand miles away, I was now caught on the 101 North, cars smoking around me, city lights glowing. And I was belting along with The Mystics, The El Dorados, The Hollywood Flames, The Silhouettes, The Crows, The Marcels, The Elegants, The Cadillacs, The Monotones, The Teenagers, The Five Satins, The Jive Fives, The Skyliners, The Dells, The Moonglows, The Velvetones, The Penguins, The Crests, The Heartbeats, The Pastels, The Flamingoes, The Spaniels, and my favorite, Dion and the Bellmonts. And for a moment, I was far away from the Hollywood traffic, and was standing on a New York corner, under a buzzing lamp, singing a cappella with my chums. Oh, what a night!

So how do you kill time in traffic?

The Teenagers

Dion and the Bellmonts

So it went something like this:

A young, doe-eyed folk singer shared songs in a dark empty coffee shop in San Francisco. The songs, passed down to her by her mentors, were popular a decade before she was born and were written three, four, five decades before that. The floor boards creaked as she rocked to the rhythm of her guitar strumming. She didn’t have a great voice, but she meant every word, carrying the weight of the oppressed whom she never really met. “Still she’s overdoing it,” I thought, sipping my third cup of coffee. “But what the hell? It’s a chilly night and the entertainment in here is free.”

She began her second set, explaining the history of her next song. And the history – it went exactly like this:

In 1948, Woody Guthrie, forced to retire from performing due to early signs of Huntington’s disease, heard a radio report about a plane crash near Los Gatos Canyon. The dead were four Americans and 28 migrant farm workers, who were being deported back to Mexico. The radio announcer said the names of the four Americans but reported the others as “just deportees,” as if their names weren’t important. From this report, Guthrie did what every great humanitarian would do – he wrote a poem dedicated to those unnamed victims.

And so this young woman stopped talking and sang Guthrie’s poem, “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos),” set to music by Martin Hoffman in 1958. Her voice shook as she stepped in the shoes of Guthrie, who stepped in the shoes of a lone Mexican worker, saying goodbye to his amigos who were flying back to the border. That flight didn’t make it to the border, but instead headed straight down into the canyon.

“Who are these friends who scatter like dry leaves?” cried the singer. “The radio said they were ‘just deportees’.” And at that moment, I felt the waterworks coming. By the time she sang the final chorus, I could barely hold my tears.

I was so unbelievably touched but I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was the way she was singing, or what she was singing about, or the fact the poet himself cared so much for these “friends” whom he had never met. Or perhaps, as horrible that plane wreck was, the real tragedy was that some people would be so heartless that they would brush off others like they were “dry leaves.” Those immigrants were human beings, for God’s sake, and to describe them as “just deportees,” well it was unspeakable.

It took me years to learn that song. I never wanted to play it, because it really hit a nerve. I just didn’t want to go there. But when I began playing at a farmers market here in Los Angeles, I put the song in my repertoire. At the market, I would run into immigrant farm workers and recalled that my own family, like so many Japanese American families at the turn of last century, worked on farms, worked there until the war started and they were placed in internment camps up and down the West Coast. Though they own their own properties, they were, and would always be, aliens in the eyes of the American public.

So I sing this song with a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye. Because at times I do still feel like an outlaw, a rustler and a thief, but I know that on both sides of the river, we die just the same.

“Goodbye to my Juan, goodbye Rosalita/Adios mi amigos, Jesus y Maria/You won’t have your names when you ride the big aeroplane/All they will call you will be ‘deportees’”

So which song makes you cry?

My version of “Deportee”

Richard: Do me a favor. Don’t be silly anymore. Just be yourself.
Jeannie: But I am myself. Who else would I be?
Richard: I’m serious.
Jeannie: Definition of serious: Blah blah blah blah …

– John Cassavetes, “Faces”

A few months after filmmaker John Cassavetes’s death in 1989, someone had the great idea of showing several of his films in theaters throughout the nation. It was a fitting tribute, and a necessary one, since Cassavetes demanded that his works not be shown on television, even after his death. This request was his final attack at Hollywood.

When the retrospective came around Sacramento, I caught his 1968 film, “Faces,” at a small suburban theater in the middle of a summer day. The theater was less than half-full. The audience looked young. Probably like me, they only heard of the director’s name but have not seen any of his movies.

After the house lights dimmed, the projector rolled and the film began. The first 20 minutes were mind-boggling – the black-and-white film was grainy and at times overexposed; the sound was full of echo and … my God, was this movie overdubbed? It seemed parts of it were. The characters on-screen – two middle-aged businessmen (John Marley and Fred Draper) and a 28-year-old blonde (Gena Rowlands) – had just left a bar and were continuing their fun at her apartment. They told bad jokes, ran through horrible college routines, and sang loudly off-key. The scene felt like it’s taking for hours, then suddenly one of the men noticed that he was being left out in the fun. Jealous, he went in for the kill. “So what do you charge, Jeannie?” he asked the woman. Time came to a halt. Suddenly insults were flying and wounds ripped open. Right then the film became interesting, although I felt I shouldn’t be watching it. It was so unsettling, yet my eyes were hooked on the screen.

The first three-fourths of “Faces” are like that scene. They follow the same formula – a drunken gathering is held; there are lots of laughter, dancing, joking around; then suddenly someone says something inappropriate and all hell breaks loose. And the audience members become flies on the wall, witnessing these battles and their bloody aftermaths.

The film’s last act is the hangover. Emptiness settles in. The bathroom mirror reveals the lines on the faces. Someone tries to kill herself, but then again, all of them feel like they need to be saved. So they cling on to the closest person lying next to them.

Gena Rowlands once recalled a preview screening for one of Cassavetes’s film. She and Cassavetes were standing in the theater lobby as the film was rolling. In the middle of the screening, a man storms out of the theater. He is sweating bullets, obviously aggravated by what he was watching on screen. The man stood there in the lobby for a moment. He then wiped his brow, took a deep breath, and walked back into the theater. Cassavetes had a big grin on his face. He knew his film’s magic was working.

I knew how that stranger felt. After seeing “Faces” for the first time, I felt like I fell down a flight of stairs. I picked myself up, brushed myself off and walked out of the theater. The sun was setting, and I never felt more alive. But man, I could have used a drink.

So what film changed your life?

A short look at “Faces”:

I must have been in ninth grade. My mother was driving me to Rio Americano High School in this big-ass baby-shit-tan station wagon. The radio was tuned in to KZAP-FM (98.5) with morning deejay Kevin “Boom Boom” Anderson. Good ol’ “Boom Boom,” who would years later be fired for staging a “Jimi Hendrix choke-off contest” on the air, began the hour with Bob Dylan’s “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35.” The second the band got to the chorus, “Everybody must get stoned,” my mother blew up, cursing under her breath at “Boom Boom” for playing such a vile drug-promoting song. I’ve never seen her so pissed off.

“Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” isn’t even my favorite Bob Dylan song – it probably ranks somewhere to the top 20 – but back then, at that moment, I thought that was the greatest piece of music in the whole wide world. Ah, the power of rock ‘n’ roll.

Years later I realized what the song really meant. Despite its title (whatever the hell it really means) and the way ol’ Bob and those Nashville session players played like drunks in a local tavern (the musicians switched instruments for shits and giggles), the song is really about suffering, the suffering of being constantly criticized for “trying to be so good,” for “playing your guitar,” for “being sent down to your grave,” and for, well, just for being human. The song uses the word “stoned” in the biblical sense, like the way the public used to execute prisoners by stoning them.

During the time he wrote the song, ol’ Bob was in the middle of his infamous 1966 British tour with the Hawks, where he was frequently booed by folk-obsessing folks for plugging in his Stratocaster. There were catcalls and death threats, and I bet Bob and the Hawks felt like the stones were flying every time they went on stage. Of course that tour ended with a concert in Manchester, in which some anti-Semite called Dylan a “Judas.” Bob called the heckler “a liar,” turned to the Hawks to “play fucking loud” and threw out “Like a Rolling Stone” like a cannonball into the protesters.

What’s an artist to do but to follow his muse, whether the public, including my own mother, liked it or not? And why not? Everybody must get stoned sometime in life.

So have you ever been “stoned” (in the biblical sense) before? Tell me about it.

“The tears of the world are a constant quantity. For each one who begins to weep somewhere else another stops. The same is true of the laugh.”

– Samuel Beckett, “Waiting for Godot”

“I started a joke/which started the whole world crying …”

– The Bee Gees, “I Started a Joke”

The press room at the Los Angeles County Building was a ghost town. Decades ago, the place was hopping with nicotine-breath, bourbon-filled journalists finding unseen angles to a story. But in 2007, I was one of a few cub reporters incarcerated in individual glass cages on that floor. No one really talked to each other; we were just floating heads, staring at computer screens and TV monitors and reading endless press releases from politicians.

One October evening, after my article rumbled through the ticker tape machine, a sign that I could take a break for a few minutes, I left my office and headed down to the cafeteria in the basement. Another dead place, at least during the afternoon. The grey vault had nothing but leftover fruits, because seriously, government officials don’t eat fruit. I grabbed the least bruised apple and went to the register. The clerk was too tired to smile as she was ringing me up.

Behind her, a cheap radio was cutting through the cold atmosphere. The song: The Bee Gees’ 1969 minor hit, “I Started a Joke.” I took my apple and headed upstairs.

On the lonely elevator ride back, I stood there, watching the numbers slowly light up. And Robin Gibb’s wavering falsetto echoed in my head. What the hell was he saying?

So Robin starts this joke – is he telling one? And what kind of a joke is it? It must have horrible because it causes “the whole world” to cry. The public weeping makes him cry, which in turn, causes the world to laugh. He recognizes, only too late, that “the joke was on [him].” But what’s the joke? The same joke he told? Or does the joke symbolize Life itself?

The middle-eighth of the song is just as confounding. So he wipes his eyes and looks up. Is he walking up from a dream? Falling out of bed, he “hurts his head.” Does he bump it on, say, a dresser? No, no. He hurts his head “on things that [he] said.” But what did he say? Was it the bad joke? And does this headache lead to his death at the end of the song, a death that starts “the whole world living”? So, what, now he’s Christ?! Is this The Greatest Joke of All Time? “Dying’s easy; it’s comedy that’s hard,” as the old saying goes. But it’s not as hard as deciphering a Bee Gees song.

Okay, I’m over-thinking this. It’s just a pop song. But this song – as well as all of the band’s early works – were performed so Baroque-ly and sung so melodramatically. Before they wore polyester shirts and gold medallions and started jive talking, the Brothers Gibb sang songs about executions (“I’ve Gotta Get a Message to You”), homesickness (“Massachusetts”), suicidal heartbreak (“To Love Somebody”), and of course mining accidents (“New York Mining Disaster 1941”). And Robin Gibb played a great sad clown – the Pagliaccio of the British Invasion.

“I Started a Joke” has been stuck in my head since that October evening. It’s like a little ball bouncing around in my psyche. Even as I’m writing this, the song comes bouncing back – Robin’s cry, the clumsy rhythm section, the joke, the mystery.

I think the joke is on me.

So tell me a joke!