HUMAN WRECKAGE
Won’t You Play that Song Again for Me?
Just as a Monday in July must have a
different feel than a Monday in November for a high school student, weekend
mornings have a different vibe around the Crooked 9. The Saturday newspapers
Ann and I receive are fatter. Our coffee tastes a little more robust. The
weekend shows on CKUA, Alberta ’s
listener-supported public radio station, seem more in tune with the dynamic Ann
and I have created in our house, our very, very fine house.
A particular pleasure every Sunday morning
in the sixty minutes between nine and ten o’clock is a CKUA show called ‘Play
It Again.’ Hosted by a British émigré named Tony Dillon Davis, the weekly
broadcast features music that charted from the twenties to the fifties; popular
songs our mothers would know. The hook for me is that a portion of each hour is
devoted to a particular year. Any list of songs within a set of defined
parameters must necessarily range from genius to dire schmaltz but Dillon
inserts these dusty old standards into their historical contexts. His snapshots
are brief, shellac on vinyl, because ultimately the music does the talking.
For a quarter of an hour or so last Sunday
it was 1934 in the Crooked 9. Fascism was on the rise in Europe ;
Hitler declared himself der Fuhrer. Italy won the
FIFA World Cup. British poet, classicist and First World War memoirist Robert
Graves published ‘I, Claudius.’ Stateside, drought-stricken Oklahoma blew away, the ‘Gashouse Gang’ won
baseball’s World Series and Franklin D. Roosevelt was Time’s Man of the Year. If Americans weren’t reading F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s ‘Tender Is the Night,’ it’s because they were watching ‘It
Happened One Night’ in cinemas. Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart wrote a ballad
called ‘Blue Moon.’
A primordial version of their composition
debuted in a film from that year called ‘Manhattan Melodrama.’ The movie is
remembered only because it was the last moving picture criminal and folk hero
John Dillinger saw before gangbusters gunned him down under the marquee of a
Chicago theatre. Box office! This history takes me home, forward to other
places in time.
Blue moon
You saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own
Blue moon
You knew just what I was there for
You heard me saying a prayer for
Someone I really could care for
And then suddenly appeared before me
The only one my arms will ever hold
I heard somebody whisper “Please adore me”
And when I looked, the moon had turned to
gold
Blue moon
Now I’m no longer alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own
The calendar on your kitchen wall or in
your electronic device is a human construct. Imprecise. A lot goes on out there
in our solar system and inside the shield of Earth’s atmosphere. It can be a
challenge to align things the way they really are, orbits, rituals and
equinoxes, with the way we would like them to be. A blue moon is an innocuous
example. There should be twelve full moons per year, three per season. Well,
doesn’t that thirteenth, a fourth in one season, make for a bonus werewolves’
night out?
The recorded version of ‘Blue Moon’ I know
best was waxed by Elvis at Sun Studio in July, 1954. The one I really love was
sung over and over again by my mother. Her vocals are in the ether now but I
can still hear them. The Marcels topped the Billboard Hot 100 with ‘Blue Moon’
in 1961. Though I was alive then it’s unlikely I’ve retained an actual memory
from those first eighteen months. Anyway, we didn’t move into the house I
remember growing up in until 1963. The kitchen floor was probably asbestos
tiles, red interspersed with grey, a crossword grid without a pattern. I spent
a lot of time on that floor while Mom crooned her own interpretations of ‘Blue
Moon,’ likely inspired by covers cut by Frank Sinatra or Dean Martin, perhaps
Mel Torme, although his hit with the number dated from 1949. I remember the
neighbours knocking on the common wall; I believe they were kidding, I hope
they were, our families were good friends.
When Mom began to sing ‘Blue Moon’ I began
to cry like a child. In my defense, I was a child. Mom would always say, “Oh,
Geoffrey, listen to all of the words. There’s a happy ending, everything works
out.”
Der Bingle sang ‘Blue Moon’ as did Billie
Holiday. The most recent version I know of is by Rod Stewart and I’ve been
afraid to seek it out as I’m still down in the grooves of the albums he
recorded for Mercury in the early seventies. Between my ears I can hear Bryan
Ferry circa These Foolish Things and Another Time, Another Place delivering a
suave, slightly off-kilter take. Willie Nelson would strip it to the bone,
arranging ‘Blue Moon’ for accompaniment by just ‘Trigger’ and a brush on a
snare. What is passing strange – as if anything is unremarkable about His
Bobness – is that Dylan did not include ‘Blue Moon’ on either Shadows in the Night or Triplicate, his two albums of American
standards which together comprise four CDs.
My mother has become increasingly infirm
but she is compos mentis and consequently angry with the hand of cards she’s
been dealt late in her long life. Mom prays every day to die that night in her
sleep. The gulf between us is wide enough to include Saskatchewan ,
Manitoba and Ontario . We do not speak as often as we
should. There’s a sort of a tacit agreement between us: Mom won’t call Edmonton because she doesn’t want to phone just to
complain and I won’t call Montreal
because I don’t want to listen to her just complain. There’s always the
weather, two minutes on a topic more suited for engaging a stranger on a train
platform; idle conversation is for other people.
Bless the art of Rodgers and Hart. Late
last March Mom phoned. She sounded excited for the first time in many weeks.
“Geoffrey, I’m looking out my window. There’s a huge blue moon. Can you see
it?” I went outside with the handset to my head and said I could indeed. “Do
you remember when I used to sing and you’d cry? I thought of you. I thought I
should call.”
“Yes, I remember, Mom. How could I ever
forget?”
I was very glad she was prompted to
telephone me about the blue moon, our common satellite. Just like that she’d
changed the pitch of our conversations, erasing a few years of stilted
communication about nothing. I’m in touch with her more frequently now and I’ve
no qualms making stuff up, telling Mom I just heard Sinatra’s version of ‘Blue
Moon’ on CKUA. I tell her about the Marcels, a rhythm and blues vocal outfit
named for a hairstyle that was fashionable around the time I was born. And I
add that she raised a music nut who focuses on the words. I now listen to my
Rodgers and Hart a little more often than I used to.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJ6EGsZdxpE
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