With two active kids, who consider gymnastics not a sport but a mode of transportation from room to room, even a 3-second moment of quiet, just long enough to hear a newspaper page turning and nothing else, is as close as we get to the tranquility of a heron flapping its wings over the water at dawn from the porch of our waterfront home, which we don’t have.
I’ll always remember how those three seconds of serenity last week ended, with the sound of an uncharacteristically throaty showstopper emanating from the upstairs bathroom where our nine-year-old daughter was in the tub.
“Rock-a-bye you bay-beee...with a Dixie mel-oh-deeeeeeeeeeeeeee!!!"
“Wow!” I said, entering the bathroom. “Where did you get those pipes?”
“I’ve got a little Judy Garland in me tonight,” she said.
This delighted me because, while Judy Garland bared her neuroses, she kept her midriff covered.
Two years ago a family friend gave me a huge Magnavox solid-state stereo high-fi that is "revolutionary new" according to the 35-year-old operating instructions booklet. Big as a coffin, I keep it in the basement, but the bass reverberates earrings from the third floor bathroom vanity onto the floor.
I had allowed my vinyl collection to go nearly extinct. Soon, I pined for records that would fit this decorative record player. I vowed to get only records that cost a buck or less. Also, I liked the idea of playing only records that were released during and prior to this record player’s heyday. I chose 1969 as the cut-off year only so I pick up “Bitches Brew.”
At one thrift store, I thumbed through seventeen Jim Nabors albums in a row. I imagine these albums were among the bones of an estate picked clean by its heirs. These albums, along with some loud ties and plaid blazers, ended up in the Goodwill box.
Perusing old vinyl makes you feel sorry for the likes of Jim Nabors, and other singers who grew up hearing big bands but came of age smack dab in rock & roll, too young for the Make Believe Ballroom, too old for American Bandstand. Ed Ames, Steve Lawrence, Andy Williams, Robert Goulet, and Jerry Vale were all still in their thirties but to the fans just a half-generation younger, they may as well have been vaudevillians. So they sang the old songs and mustered treacley covers of songs by the Beatles, Dylan and Stevie Wonder.
Growing up, I heard so many people from the big band era dismiss out of hand anything to do with rock & roll. I also grew up with dimwitted rockers who couldn’t tell the difference between Lawrence Welk and Benny Goodman.
What makes me think about the Jim Nabors albums I passed by with a smirk is this Amazon.com review of Jim Nabor’s Sixteen Most Requested Songs by Everett Green
:On the surface, this CD appears to be a companion to Mom & Dad's old Perry Como LPs. But what separates Nabors from the rest of the feelgood pack is his ability to add an unorthodox element of anger to tunes like "The Impossible Dream." That said, listen to this album with your utmost attention. Don't just put this set on as background music while doing chores. If you do, you are missing the true experience of Jim Nabor's seething baritone hiss that is the tantrum of a fed up generation.
Nabors’ take on "The Impossible Dream" is the first rendition I've heard that cries the lyrics in anger and despair, capturing the inward pain and assault that results from chasing society's intangible holy grails. The deep focus and subtle collapse of soul in his voice is cutting, painful, raw. I can only compare the pure uncut energy he injects into "The Impossible Dream" to Iggy Pop singing "China Girl."
Our biographies are made up as much by our favorite records as our photo albums and old love letters. I wonder if whoever discarded those seventeen Jim Nabors albums might better understand their deceased parent by listening.
One I did buy was Judy Garland Live at Carnegie Hall. And like rubbing an old tired genie out of the lamp, my Magnavox needle brought to life songs that I'm guessing hadn't gone through a speaker in years.
The kids, playing nearby with dolls, perked up at Garland's energetic sound. I explained who was Judy Garland.
“That’s Dorothy?” my daughter asked, raising her brows in astonishment. “Wizard-of-Oz Dorothy?"
“That’s fishnets-and-fedora Dorothy,” I said.
It’s not accident that the only place some people still sing is in the shower because we all grew up singing in the tub. That’s where kids will sing and babble on about whatever comes to their minds.
If they are given the gift of melody, exposed to something more than the caterwauling vibrato and hard thud-and-thump of bubble gum music, they will know they are part of something larger than their own fleeting times. We're not idiotic zealots who forbid Top 40 radio any more than we would abolish the occasional bowl of Cap'n Crunch.
She will always have the pop culture of her era. But she deserves to have something more to draw from when she is letting her mind fly in the bathtub.
And when the time comes, she shall know to bury me in the old Magnavox, and at my wake play all the music that is before both of our times.
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