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.

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