Jacke Wilson's Blog, page 62

Jacke’s back! Some exciting news…

Hello everyone! I’m sorry it’s been so long. I missed you! Thank you all for the comments and emails, they were truly wonderful and sustaining during my break. You are good, good people.

And now… the news!

I’ve been asked to host a pair of brand new podcasts, The History of Literature and The Restless Mind. You can find the introductory episode at historyofliterature.com.

They’re both running on the same feed, The History of Literature. You can subscribe to that in iTunes from the page above or by following this link (opens iTunes).

Our first three episodes of The History of Literature (besides the intro) are The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Old Testament, and Homer. Not too shabby!

The Restless Mind Show… where to begin? GAR is helping me with that one. I think our first episode will involve Kafka and Steve Martin. They’re linked! And Gar… well, Gar is Gar. My best fiend.

Hey, I don’t know what kind of audience these shows are going to attract, but I could use some feedback from my friends here at jackewilson.com. My fellow miserables. The people I trust! Let me know what you think!

Onward and upward!

Excused Absence!

Friends! I’m sorry for the long delay, and thank you for all your kind words and emails. I hope to be back soon. And yes, I’m doing perfectly well – I’ve been bitten by the Long Novel bug, which is dominating my time. I hope to have some updates soon.

In the meantime, please feel free to run through some of the History of Jacke Wilson in 100 Objects Series, or check out one of the others:

The Worst Posts of the Year

Who’s Cheating America?

Writers Laughing

Know Your Inner Beatle

The Jacke Wilson Show

Onward and upward!

The Cane (A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #32)

He was of average height and build, with blond hair and a disconcerting smile: his mouth expanded, his teeth flashed white, but his eyes expressed no joy or excitement. At best they looked nervous and slightly desperate, like those of an animal caught in a trap. At worst they looked dulled over, like the animal resigned to its fate, seconds from death.

With magnanimity I confessed that I hadn’t yet learned his name.

“It’s Kyle,” he said.

I probed for the last name in the time-honored way. “Kyle…?”

“Kyle,” he repeated. His dead-eyed smile sprawled across his face.

“Okay. And you’re the one with the roommate who…?”

“I’m sorry about that, Mr. Wilson. I won’t be late again. My dad was angry, but I told my mom what you said about plugging in my alarm clock even though it has batteries and she said you were completely right. I just didn’t know.”

He looked so crestfallen I apologized for not having cared more, though frankly my heart wasn’t really in it.

“…and I’m sorry your father was angry at you,” I concluded.

“He wasn’t angry at me, Mr. Wilson.”

“Okay, then. Well, what can I–”

“He was angry at you.”

I tried to hide my irritation. Angry at me? Because his kid hadn’t managed to come to class on time? Would excusing the tardiness have been fair to the students who had gotten up when they should have, and who had spent twenty-five minutes in an active discussion that Kyle had missed?

Already I wanted Kyle to leave my office. “What brings you here, Kyle?”

He smiled nervously and said that he would be presenting on Friday. Since he was the first one to present, he wondered if I could tell him what the grade would be based on.

“Effectiveness,” I said grandly. “You have to be able to identify the important points and convey them to your fellow classmates. But don’t worry. I’ll be there to make sure things stay on track.”

“Are we graded on creativity? You said we should be creative.”

“Absolutely!” I said. “The best presentations are the ones with energy. Teaching’s not as easy as it looks, you know, especially on a Friday morning on a campus where the parties begin on Thursday nights. Not all students have learned the trick of plugging in their alarm clock.”

This was meant as an olive branch, but he only nodded seriously. I sensed that he was a little dull, and that he knew that this was one of his weaknesses. Something he would have to overcome.

“Have fun with this,” I said. “Surprise me.”

#

On Friday I launched into some preliminaries to warm up the class. I previewed the Michael Pollan essay we would be discussing on Monday. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Kyle. I didn’t want to stare at him, but he didn’t look too good. He looked gray.

Oh, great. A kid with stage fright for the very first one. Well, this will be good for him. He’ll need to be able to speak in public to advance in this life.

I wrapped up my introductory remarks and turned the floor over to Kyle.

“Kyle’s not here,” a creaky voice said.

I blinked and stared. Kyle had spoken, but it did not sound like him.

“Kyle…?” I said carefully. “Kyle, it’s time for you to…”

As my words trailed off, Kyle finally rose from his desk. He was wearing a robe and holding a plastic pipe. He had some kind of powder in his hair. He shuffled to the front of the room, using a cane for support.

I thought he might have lost his mind.

“Um…okay, everyone, Kyle’s presenting today—the topic is semi-colons, I think.”

“Kyle’s not here!” Kyle said sharply. He had adopted a high-pitched, quavering, old-man’s voice. Air whistled through his teeth as he feigned anger.

He slowly turned toward class, wincing with fake rheumatism.

“My name is Grandpa Grammar,” he said. “And I’m here today to talk about writin’, or as we used to say, one of the good ol’ three Rs. I know I’m an old man now. But listen up kids: if you’re not careful, you just might learn a little sumpin’.”

He chuckled through his nose.

The audience was stunned.

I should tell you that Kyle’s classmates were impressive in the way that college students at that university tended to be. Young, beautiful, healthy, athletic, popular. They sometimes intimidated me. And now they all took in Grandpa Grammar and tried not to laugh, and I couldn’t blame them, because I was standing there, in charge of this whole mess, and I was tempted to laugh myself.

But I couldn’t. I couldn’t do anything. I had to face Kyle and smile warmly and let this play out. If I stopped it now, it would have been worse. I had to let him continue.

There was a moment where I thought he might pull it off. That didn’t last long. Because after his opening speech he paused, and he knew. You could see it on his face. He knew it was all wrong. You could see it in his defiant but suddenly terrified expression: he knew that this was a mistake, that he had gone over the top, that he looked foolish.

But what do you do? You’re wearing a bathrobe, holding a fake pipe. You have powder in your hair. You can drop your stage voice, which he eventually did after some more painfully awkward minutes. But you can’t unpowder your hair. You can’t make your cane disappear.

And throughout this lesson I had to just stand there, watching this bloodbath continue—presiding over it, in fact, smiling and nodding, prompting the class to ask “Grandpa” some questions. All I could do was to try not to start giggling and hope that it wasn’t as bad as it seemed.

But it was! It started awful and got worse. The class had silently agreed not to laugh, and they withheld it, and withheld it, and withheld it, until the first stunning shock started to wear off, and the giggles began and were repressed, and soon the whole class was trembling with the need to laugh out loud, shaking with the need for catharsis, the desire to expunge this feeling that they were spending fifteen minutes listening to a foolish person who had locked himself into a ridiculous position and was now scrambling with all the grace of a circus seal running on top of a beach ball.

In high school I suppose he’d have been skewered. Thankfully these were college students, and most of the laughter was kept inside. But it was there, and it would come out afterwards, somehow. You knew it would. It had to. Forces that powerful do not just dissipate into the universe without ripple effects. It’s the Principle of the Conservation of Shame: in an isolated system, once shame is created, it can never be destroyed without consequences to its target.

I almost felt sorry for Kyle. But I also kind of resented him for having blown up my class like this. The first one! What was he thinking? This ain’t high school, kid. You’re not in Kansas anymore.

When it was finally over and he took his chair, I thanked him abundantly, praising his creativity and the strong points he had made. And then, because I knew I’d be bombarded by questions about costumes and grading and whether Kyle’s presentation had somehow set a standard for the presentation grade, I said something mild about how this was the first time in all my years of teaching that we’d had a “substitute” come in to teach the class.

Everyone looked relieved. Except for Kyle, who sat in his desk, his face red and puffy, staring at me with a plastic grin under dead eyes.

#

That weekend I wondered if Kyle might drop the class. But he was back the next week, his hair brown again. Something in him had faded, it seemed, but now and then he would volunteer some comment and I would think I had been mistaken. Maybe he was more resilient than I’d thought. Maybe he had bounced back.

Teaching is like that: you run down all sorts of imaginary rabbit holes, thinking a student is angry when actually they’re tired, or that someone hates the class when actually she just hates the guy sitting across from her and wishes he would stop raising his hand. All I could do was to put Kyle and his presentation out of my mind.

And then, on the day before Thanksgiving, Kyle surprised me at my office hours.

Everyone else had gone for the holiday; the entire building was empty. I had thought I’d have a chance to catch up on my work, undisturbed. But I acted as if I was thrilled and honored.

“Kyle!” I said. “Hello there!”

“I wanted to talk about my presentation,” he said in a tone that made me shiver.. He smiled; his eyes were as empty as a pair of tiny black holes.

“Grandpa Grammar!” I said with a huge smile. “Five points out of five! Great job. Oh here—you forgot this.”

I pointed at the cane he’d left behind. It had been sitting in the corner of my office for weeks. I hadn’t wanted to bring it to class.

Kyle didn’t look at the cane. He stared at me. “I was the first one to go,” he said.

“Yes! I appreciated it. Always hard to be first.”

“Did I do too much?” Kyle said.

He was still standing in the doorway. Something about his demeanor made me rise from my chair.

“Too much? Five points out of five, Kyle. I’d take the money and run!”

“The others thought it was stupid. Really, really stupid. They thought I was stupid for bringing Grandpa Grammar.”

I paused for a moment, thinking I might have misheard him. Bringing? Or being?

“It happens sometimes,” I said. “I wouldn’t worry about it.”

His smile grew wider. “Did you think it was stupid?”

I forced myself to stay composed. “No, no—how could you have known what was the norm and what was…not the norm?”

“You said, ‘Be creative.’ ‘Surprise me,’ you said. Those were your words.”

“I meant like, do a PowerPoint or something,” I said, with more irritation than I had intended. “But look, you were creative, and you did surprise me. So good job on all that. And listen, you got a four point five overall, which rounds up to five points. Five points out of five, Kyle. You can’t do better than that!”

“I hate Grandpa Grammar,” he said. There was a ragged edge to his voice. “I wish he’d never been born.”

Born?

“It’s a big school, Kyle,” I said. “People here are very self-involved. They’ll forget all about it.”

“You won’t.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “You’ll move on. All my students do. They move on and leave me behind. Who knows where they go? I’m just here. Not with them.”

It was not cheering him up. He swallowed hard, staring at me. He still had not sat down. “I hate Grandpa Grammar. I wish I could kill him.”

I probably should have said that he was overreacting, but for some reason I took a different path.

“You can. You can! Just put him out of your mind. Learn from this and move on, Kyle.”

They were not words he wanted to hear. He stood for a moment, lost in thought. He started to sway, and I had this strange fantasy that I could just push him a little, and he would be sucked out the door and gone forever, as if he were standing in the doorway of an airplane. Just one little tap…wooooosh…

But he was there. He didn’t leave. He was thinking, and what he was thinking was apparently awful.

“I think you should go now,” I said, taking a few steps to the corner of my office. “Here’s your cane.”

Kyle whirled at me, his expression full of anger and confusion. “I don’t want that!”

“Kyle, take the cane,” I said gently. “It’s yours.”

His voice grew louder. “He’s dead!”

“Kyle—”

“He’s dead, remember? I just killed him!”

I shook my head, baffled.

“He’s dead!” he shouted again. “Give that to his widow!”

I paused, knowing I was about to say the wrong thing, but unable to help myself. “There’s a…Grandma Grammar?”

“You’re not taking any of this seriously!” he screamed.

Then he turned and stormed out of my office, leaving me holding the cane. I listened to his footsteps echoing down the hallway. Finally I returned the cane to the corner, because I could not think of another place for it to go.

#

The rest of the semester was uneventful enough. We only had four more classes. Kyle attended all of them, paying attention, not showing any visible signs of anger or frustration. Everything seemed stable.

I thought his final paper would be the last time I saw him. I hoped that would be the case. It turned out not to be.

Just before break, he came to my office once again. I was there late, trying to get final grades submitted before Christmas. Once again he had decided to come at a time when everyone else had already started their holiday. I heard his footsteps coming down the hall, echoing in the emptiness, before he appeared.

The thought flashed into my mind that he had been planning this for days. I didn’t like where it was headed.

“Happy holidays!” I said. “You and I must be the only ones left on campus, Kyle!”

He didn’t acknowledge this. “I brought you this,” he said. “It’s a letter of recommendation. I need you to fill it out.”

“Transferring schools?”

“No. I’m applying for the junior MBA program,” he said sourly.

“Ah,” I said.

He glanced at the cane in the corner.

“You forgot that last time,” I said quietly.

His face scrunched up as if I’d asked him to taste something he knew was poisonous. “Here’s the form,” he said, thrusting a piece of paper toward my face. “It has to be typed.”

“I know how to write a recommendation,” I said.

“Do you?”

He was looming again, breathing through his nostrils, his hostility mounting.

“Yes, I do,” I said.

“Yeah, well, there’s a lot you don’t know!”

“Like what?”

He hesitated. “Things!” he blurted out at last.

“Then perhaps I’m not the right person to write this,” I said, nodding at the paper, which I still had not taken from his hand. “Maybe you need to find someone who knows about things.”

He started complaining that all his other classes were lecture classes, and I was the only instructor who actually knew his name, and he needed two letters, and it wasn’t fair if I didn’t do this, and he might not get into the junior MBA program if I didn’t, and his dad wanted him to get in.

“You need to write this,” he said.

“What does any of that have to do with your performance in my class?” I said. “Why would I recommend you over any of my other students just because you need me to? What have you done?”

“I’ve put up with a lot of shit in this class. You owe me.”

“You’re thinking of this the wrong way,” I said. “This is not something to which you’re entitled. It needs to be something you deserve.”

“I pay your salary!” he said. “That’s what my dad said. He said that if you won’t write it, he’ll take care of it.”

“Is that a threat, Kyle?”

Kyle’s face was bright red. “I was Grandpa Grammar,” he fumed. “You have to recognize that.”

“You gave a presentation that was well-intentioned but somewhat limited in its effectiveness, because your audience was trying so hard not to laugh.”

Kyle’s eyes grew wide. “Here’s the form,” he said, thrusting the paper at my chest.

“And there’s your cane,” I said.

He looked at me with contempt. It was the first time I’d ever seen any kind of life in his eyes.

Then he left my office, and I was alone again.

#

I wish I could say I looked fondly on Grandpa Grammar, the foibles of youth, an earnest misstep. I wish I could say that my student had learned a lesson from the experience, and that gosh darn it, I learned a little sumpin’ about myself too. That’s how these stories go: it would be easy to write. It just wouldn’t be true.

The truth was that I hated Grandpa Grammar as much as Kyle did. I hated how young Kyle was, and how foolish he’d been, and the awful awkwardness of his expression when he’d realized his mistake. I hated all the brilliant ideas that turn out to be horrible, and how you have to live in the aftermath of all that failure—failure made worse by the embarrassing memory of your own optimism. I hated thinking of Grandpa Grammar in my classroom, but I also hated the images of Kyle putting together his costume, finding the pipe, putting the powder in his hair, picking out his cane. As much as I hated having the memories, imagining what had come before was worse. That scene gave me chills.

And I hated all those thoughts because they reminded me of all the times I’d done similar things myself. I hated that they had to exist, that once they were out there, they survived, and they never went away.

After Kyle had left that wintry day, I took the cane and hurled it into the dumpster I passed on my way to the parking garage.

Goodbye, Grandpa Grammar, I whispered. May you rot in hell.

I eventually softened and wrote Kyle the letter of recommendation. I hope Kyle moved on. I’d like to think I have too. Sometimes I tell myself I have.

But the truth is I have no residual fondness. Where that should be, all I feel is regret and relief. I still hate Grandpa Grammar. I still wish he’d never been born.

And I still remember that cane. I remember the cold handle, and the shiver that rippled through me as I grabbed it. The creepy dead feeling as I walked it down the elevator, wondering if Kyle might be waiting for me somewhere in the shadows, if I’d have to use the cane as a weapon to fend off Kyle’s attack. I remember the breathlessness with which I approached the dumpster, and the awkward weight as I flung the cane away forever, and the echoing clang as the handle hit the metal.

I remember the horror of knowing that everyone loved teaching and teachers, and that education was a glorious thing because it opened so many doors, and that this was a generally accepted truth, but that that wasn’t how I felt.

This was not a fresh start. This was an ending. A bleak ending with nothing but emptiness on the other side. A winter that would last forever, and not a single evergreen in sight.

The Mirrors of Bergman

Bergman + Plath + Vivaldi = Exquisite:

Gore Vidal’s Great Orson Welles Story

I’ve read a lot of Orson Welles stories, but somehow I missed many of the gems in this fantastic NYRB essay by Gore Vidal. Here’s one of my favorites, where Vidal and Welles are analyzing “like a pair of Talmudic scholars” a draft of Rudy Vallée’s memoirs, which Vidal has managed to get his hands on:

As professional storytellers, we were duly awed by Rudy’s handling of The Grapefruit Incident, which begins, so casually, at Yale.

Ironically, the dean was the father of the boy who, nine years later, was to hurl a grapefruit at me in a Boston theater and almost kill me.

Then the story is dropped. Pages pass. Years pass. Then the grapefruit motif is reintroduced. Rudy and his band have played for the dean; afterward, when they are given ice cream, Rudy asks, “Is this all we’re having….”

Apparently one of [the dean’s] sons noticed my rather uncivil question…and resolved that some day he would avenge this slight. What he actually did later at a Boston theater might have put him in the electric chair and me in my grave but fortunately his aim was bad. But of that more later.

Orson thought this masterful. Appetites whetted, we read on until the now inevitable rendezvous of hero and grapefruit in a Boston theater where, as Rudy is singing, “Oh, Give Me Something to Remember You By,” “a large yellow grapefruit came hurtling from the balcony. With a tremendous crash it struck the drummer’s cymbal…” but “if it had struck the gooseneck of my sax squarely where it curves into the mouth it might have driven it back through the vertebra in the back of my neck.” Of this passage, the ecstatic Orson whispered, “Conrad”—what might have been if Lord Jim had remained on watch.

The ecstatic Orson, whispering  the word Conrad….simply sublime.

You can ask the genie to transport you to whichever historical period you want. I’ll use one of my three wishes to go have lunch with these guys.

Onward and upward!

The Art of the Interview

I’ve praised Marc Maron’s podcast before, and it’s (almost) always worth a listen. This week’s episode is especially good: friend of the blog (and underpraised American treasure) Harry Shearer!

There’s a lot of subtext to this one and I’m not sure exactly what to think. Harry’s a complicated guy. He’s funny and brilliant, and yet he seems not to have too many friends. (How can that be!?) I blame showbiz: he’s spent his life battling the entertainment industry, and the fighting spirit has probably spilled over into his relationships with those closest to him. Like a Roman soldier on a decades-long campaign: how many friends did those guys have? Comrades, maybe, but friends? Maybe not so much.

In any case, you can find it here. And if you’re a little wiped out by the SNL 40 hoopla, this is a welcome cleanser.

Embrace Your Inner Beatle! “I’m So Tired”

Back to coins for this week’s randomizing method. Seven quick flips to allow the gods of genius and creativity to have their say, and…

Oh gods. Excellent choice. But are you feeling okay? Feeling droopy? Has the work of inspiring creativity gotten you down? Or are you just admiring one of John’s favorite songs? In any case, here we go with…

“I’m So Tired” (Lennon-McCartney, The White Album)

Where to begin? This is one of those songs that critics dislike but listeners don’t forget. That voice! Those words! Like so much else on The White Album, it goes straight to our brain.

I know, I know: why is this millionaire tired? He doesn’t haul bricks or drive a forklift, he doesn’t work two jobs, he’s not on the night shift. He plays music and does drugs and eats whatever he wants. Stop complaining!

Let’s recall where John was at this point. We went through much of this before: rocky childhood bottoms out with the death of his mother (1958). He joins a band, spends a couple years (off and on) in Hamburg playing hours a day, seven days a week (1960-1962). They get popular in Liverpool, meet Brian Epstein, and start recording songs (1962), which makes them famous in the UK and in demand (1963). They land in America and Beatlemania is launched (1964). They go on several world tours, write and record over 150 original songs, put out a half a dozen albums, 20 or so number ones, make two movies (John makes three), experiment with drugs, get married and unmarried, buy houses, give interviews, make videos, shoot photos, go to India, come back, believe in the Maharashi, stop believing, endure the death of Brian, etc. etc. etc. (1965-1967)…

Look, I’m not an expert in geniuses. I don’t know what kind of demands there were on Keats’s time, or Shakespeare’s, or Mozart’s. I would imagine Dante, banned from a city in an internecine feud, was not exactly living a life of repose.

But I’m not sure any creative geniuses ever had a seven-year stretch like the ones these guys had. If I have a week filled with travel, my productivity drops. These guys somehow managed to keep up this frenetic pace and still crank out an astonishing body of material.

Tired? John’s marriage was breaking up. He was suffering from insomnia. And yet he kept bringing in song after song to keep up with the hamster named Paul on the wheel next to him. I think he was spent. I think his body was giving out—but it was his mind too, and his anxiety about the exhaustion of creativity. How do you drop yet another bucket into that well? You know what you’ve done. You know the difference between the excellent and the so-so. You’ve been innovating at a frantic pace for years. How do you keep going?

Here he was saying: I don’t know how you do it. All I can tell you is this: it’s damn hard.

Except he’s not just saying that about writing songs or even being a Beatle. He’s saying it about life.

THE LEAD VOCAL

John loved this song. He loved the way the song sounded, and he loved the way his voice sounded in particular.

One of the ironies of John is that—although he was one of the great singers in popular music history—he hated the sound of his voice. He always wanted the engineers to tinker with it. He wanted it to sound “orange.” He liked the reverb, and the delay, and whatever else they did to give it that mellower, faraway sound. This song has that sound. His voice comes through, but it’s the voice of a guru on a mountaintop and not, say, a bandleader in a basement hall shouting over a screaming crowd.

And yet it’s expressive. It feels so full of heart. In fact, listening to it again, I’m not sure there’s another Beatles song that has a more direct link to John and what he’s feeling.

Listen to the word “so” around twenty seconds in:

How expressive is that! Or here of course, at the “I wonder should I call you, but I KNOW what you would do”:

I can still remember hearing that “KNOW” for the first time. I was an adolescent then, starting to be interested in girls, and already I knew the feelings of frustration. When you like someone and you want them to do one thing, and yet they do something else. You don’t get to write the script! They get to improvise their own lines!

I love the way he sings that. I wonder should I call you…but dammit, I know what you would do! Talk me out of it. Ignore me. Laugh it off. SINCE I KNOW THAT ALREADY WHY SHOULD I EVEN BOTHER.

Oh, Jacke Wilson in seventh grade. How hard it was for you to be in love.

I’ve heard other covers of this song. Nobody nails this “KNOW” like John does. Even John himself doesn’t on the demo versions. He had to dig deep for it.

I once stood up from a table in anger. I turned to leave, and I put on my overcoat in a kind of whirlwind flourish. What was I demonstrating? I don’t know. “You don’t want me here, fine, I’ll leave, but only in this theatrical way.” Or something like that. The back of my coat swept across the table and cleared a path for itself through several empty mugs and glasses, which went crashing to the floor.

That’s how John’s KNOW sounds to me. Other people sing it like someone buttoning up their jacket. John sings it with extravagant anger and self-righteousness. His coat flows behind him like a cape of outrage.

And then this line, the most famous in the song (and one of the more famous in all Beatledom):

I’m so tired, I’m feeling so upset

Although I’m so tired, I’ll have another cigarette

And curse Sir Walter Raleigh

He was such a stupid git

Has there ever been a better rant against cigarettes? Sir Walter Raleigh had popularized tobacco in England.) Or the figures in history that we’re all supposed to learn about and revere simply because they did this or that, except they lived a couple hundred years ago and who really cares anyway, they were probably stupid and boring and did terrible things and smelled bad.

Or a better rant against just…well, life in general? Here you are, looking for some peace, looking for some comfort, alone in the world. And yet…Jesus, nothing works out, and NOBODY UNDERSTANDS what’s going on, and you CAN’T EVEN CALL anyone because they won’t UNDERSTAND, and WHY IS THIS GODDAMN PENCIL SO YELLOW ANYWAY, IT LOOKS SO STUPID AND ARROGANT AND JUST WAITING FOR SOMEONE TO SNAP IT IN HALF.

Crack. The pencil falls to the floor. The pack of cigarettes goes flying across the room. Our genius has captured another moment perfectly.

COVER VERSIONS

This is a great song for a certain type of singer to cover. Elliott Smith has a version, for example. I’m sure there have been others: it’s easy to imagine someone who sings morose, moody music immersing themselves in the lyrics and the semitonal slog of melody. But what if it was sung by a cheery optimist?

That would really be an interesting experiment. What if a smiling, unflappable bundle of love covered this song? Would the song become uplifting? Or would the song’s gravitational pull be too powerful? Would the song become less depressing? Or would the singer find something dark and lonely within them to express too?

Hmmm… If only we knew of some bubbly presence who might let us see how this turns out…well, of course.

Take it away, Mr. McCartney:

And we have our answer. Paul sings it, but he doesn’t feel it. This is the “pretending to be a delta blues singer and giving a huge wink at the audience” Paul. Paul the mimic, Paul the showman, Paul the clown. It’s not right for the song.

THE VOCAL AGAIN

Listen to John at the end here:

I’ll give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind.

I’ll give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind.

I’ll give you everything I’ve got for a little peace of mind.

The guitars cut out, he just gets the drums for punctuation, and that voice, that voice, that voice, telling us the TRUTH. This isn’t a wink. This isn’t a half-smirk. It’s a cry for help. He sings the hell out of it, as we saw in “Hey Bulldog” and “Nowhere Man.” Nothing is more important to him in the world than offering us this trade of everything for a little peace of mind.

Nothing more important, that is, than telling us how he feels, and expressing the state of his mind. He wrote those words when he felt that desperate, and when he sings the words he can conjure up that feeling again. You can hear it the first time he sings it, and the second, and the third.

And Ringo’s right there with him. Those drum fills at the end are like the irregular heartbeats of a desperate man.

When Paul sings those lines on HIS version, you can imagine him wondering where they’re going to eat dinner later.

PAUL’S VERSION AGAIN

It takes about ten seconds to know where Paul’s going with his version: campy, goofy, charming but not authentic. Listen to John trying to steer him back on course:

Do you hear that cry at 1:05 or so? That anguished, primal howl of John’s, interrupting Paul’s shoop-de-dooing?

Come on, man! “Lay off the booze”? Doing your Elvis voice? This song matters.

I’M GOING INSANE HERE PEOPLE.

That’s what I hear John telling Paul: Sing the hell out of this thing or don’t sing it at all. No? You’re going to mess around? Okay, fine, finish it up, we’ll all have a good laugh, although if you’ll notice mine will be more of a sardonic chuckle, but fine. I get it: you’re afraid of the emotion here. So sing it your way—and then get out of my way so I can record this thing properly.

TIME TO REDEEM PAUL

Ringo’s not the only one who comes through on the actual version. Paul’s harmonies here are perfect. And by that I don’t mean pitch or balance or anything like that. I mean tone and mood and feel. He has a way of singing along with John that almost seems like John’s voice splits into two, going in two slightly different directions, in order to get the job done.

It reminds me of “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” Here’s John, singing about his new love. Paul’s got nothing to do with the lyrics of the song, which are all about John and Yoko being chased all over the place, misunderstood by the press, and finally managing to get married in spite of all the chaos. A diary entry, a love note to Yoko. Storywise, Paul’s on the outside looking in.

And yet he shows up dutifully to help John record it. (George and Ringo were unavailable; this one is all Paul and John.)

Listen to the singing here:

Did you notice Paul singing? (It starts around 1:30, then really kicks in at 2:10.)

Listen to “I’m So Tired” again. I’ve cued it up to the final build, and the imploration at the end. Try to tune out John and just listen for Paul (it’s easier if you’re listening on headphones):

Do you hear Paul? Now that you’ve heard this, you won’t NOT hear him. And he’s singing for his mate. Helping him to realize the sound in his head, and to express that sound. It adds to John’s vocal: deepens it, rounds it out. It makes it a little more jangly and disjointed. A doubling. An extra overlay of madness.

Given the chance to sing lead vocal, Paul went jocular. But when John was singing it, when John was tapping into something deep that only John could tap into, Paul knew what to do.

And to further redeem Paul, take a listen to this demo version, where John hams it up just as much. It sounds like he’s on nitrous oxide:

Every time you try to turn those two into a yin and yang, they show you a yan and a ying, and dance away like chuckling butterflies.)

UNLOCK YOUR INNER BEATLE!

This week, set aside everything that people expect you to do. Focus on how you feel, at this moment, today. Let that pour out of you instead. And when you see the results, be honest about what it means, and don’t be afraid to express it. Use your genius to shape it into something worthwhile, but don’t ever lose the essence of its origins.

Happy Monday, everyone! Push through the darkness and let us know how you feel!

See our previous deep dives into genius here:

Lady Madonna
I Am the Walrus
The End
Nowhere Man
Long, Long, Long

The Trailer (A History of Jacke in 100 Objects #31)

It started with the rain. Tammy Wynette refused to perform on the uncovered stage, the foot traffic slowed to a trickle, and my boss Jerry couldn’t stop grumbling about the replacement band.

“The Cheese Boys?” he muttered, as the sounds from Turtle Tap’s house band echoed through an empty grandstand. “This is the best those college idiots can do?”

All week Jerry had been irritated by Riverfest!’s new management, who reminded him of the college graduates who used to boss him around at the factory before his escape to the freedom of owning his own business. A popcorn wagon, an industrial laundry, and now and then the odd miscellaneous hustle. We operated in what you might call the gray economy: not exactly illicit, but not exactly well documented, either. Did we pay all our taxes? That wasn’t a question Jerry asked. He knew he paid enough.

For years we had taken in cash from the fairgoers, our white money bucket filling throughout the day with hard-earned dollars from hard-working people looking to have a good time at the fair.

This year Thurl Albrecht, the chief college idiot, had installed a new system to “address issues of uncaptured revenue.” In order to make sure that the carnies and concessionaires weren’t skimping on the percentage they paid to Riverfest! Inc., fairgoers were now required to buy tickets at an official Riverfest! booth, which they then exchanged for rides and games and food.

Jerry had taken this personally.

I don’t think it bothered him that he was viewed as a cheater, because he knew he sort of was—he even took a kind of grifter’s pride in it.

But the new system—these red tickets—had messed with his relationship to cash, and that was unacceptable.

Something would need to change.

#

Jerry was like no one I’ve ever met, before or since. A religious man, he sat in church every Sunday with eyes closed and his hands gripping the back of the pew in front of him, believing. But at the same time, he could not escape the greed or resentment or adrenaline addiction or whatever it was that had turned him into a con man. A cheerful, charismatic, mostly decent, and mostly respectable con man, but a con man nevertheless. A con man who loved cash.

“It was like the seas parted,” his wife Inga had told me, as she recalled the momentous day that she and Jerry had gone to a carnival and Jerry had realized that being inside a popcorn wagon filling up a money bucket would be better than standing in a factory watching powder pour out of a chute and fill up a barrel. “He just stood and stared at that cotton candy machine for hours.”

“A dollar a bag,” Jerry added with the faraway look of an old man recalling a youthful romance. “Three cents of cost, including the bag and the stick. Ninety-seven cents profit on every bag…and all of it cash…”

The seas had parted; the grifter version of Moses had seen his promised land. An exodus followed. And the commandments for me and all the other employees were handed down:

Thou shalt take all payments by cash and make all payments by check.

Thou shalt take fifties and hundreds and put them into the bottom of the cash box, for those shall be used for trips to Mexico.

Thou shalt not turn down cash. Ever.

Honor thy cash and keep it holy.

#

“Issues of lost revenue,” he muttered now, as I gave up on the idea of selling another Sno-Cone and packed up the syrups.

“You have to admit, we didn’t exactly report everything last year,” I said.

“We had a lot of expenses!” Jerry cried. He kicked the money bucket, which was barely half-full. A strand of tickets slid to the bottom like a bouquet of wilting flowers.

#

That was how Tuesday night ended. Wednesday morning was completely different.

The morning seemed electric. The sun was shining, the birds were singing, the Ferris wheel rotated and lifted people into the sky. Toddlers tasted cotton candy and squealed with the excitement and joy of new worlds being revealed to them for the first time.

And in our little popcorn wagon, a grown man pushed a paper hat on his head, fired up the popper, and hummed his favorite country songs, which were all about guys on the run.

Synapses were firing. A drumming of cotton candy sticks against the edge of the machine. The spirit of vengeance against the college idiots who ran the planet flowed through the wagon.

God was in His heaven. And the con man had found his con.

#

In so many ways Jerry and I were completely mismatched.

Jerry was the undying rebel, the free spirit, the outlaw at heart who happened to live in a small house in the country with a swimming pool for the kids and a popcorn wagon parked on the side lawn. He was a domesticated Dean Moriarty, a Huck Finn who had lit out for the territory, reached it, matured (a little), put on some shoes, and now made a living in a (mostly) honest way.

When I started working for him I was a straight-laced high school student. Now I was in college, well on my way to becoming one of the idiots he railed against.

I fought him on everything, called his bluffs, exposed the holes in his logic, strongly advised against the things he most wanted to do. I warned him repeatedly that certain problems would land him in trouble, and pointed out that the trouble would rarely be worth the excitement of the game.

And in the end, I watched him do them all anyway.

It had started to occur to me that summer that I might represent some kind of redemption for Jerry. In accepting his scams, or at least by accepting the scam-tainted money as my salary and bonus, I sanctioned them. The fact that I was law-abiding and principled and yet continued to work for him must have meant, in some sense, that the sins were not too great. If they were unjustifiable, I wouldn’t have stuck around.

Or was it something else? Maybe Jerry was the magician who had sought out the most cynical assistant to practice on, because he figured that if he could fool him, he could fool anyone.

Maybe I wasn’t the conscience; maybe I was the dupe.

Or maybe I was both.

#

His Riverfest! con was simple. The take that morning had been higher than he expected, and immediately his great brain figured out why.

“It’s the rain,” he told me. “Those stupid tickets were wet.”

I wasn’t following.

“They weigh the tickets, Jacke. They don’t count them. They weigh them.”

Now I understood the gleam in his eye. It was the conspiratorial look he gave me whenever his accountant showed up to straighten out some minor discrepancy, and we both realized that there were some fairly major ones that the accountant knew nothing about.

“How much moisture do those tickets hold?”

“That dry cardboard? It’s as thirsty as a camel. I think yesterday’s was double.”

“Double? But the rest of the week is supposed to be sunny. Hot but not even humid.”

“Come on, Jacke. You think water only comes from the sky? Don’t we have a hose right out back?”

I was appalled. “The hose?”

“You’re right, too obvious. We’ll just leave ‘em in the ice machine overnight. When the ice melts, there will be plenty of moisture to go around.”

I looked at the pile of ice above the soda spigots. “It just doesn’t feel honest,” I said.

“What’s not honest? It’s their scale. Their tickets.”

“Your water,” I pointed out.

“Water that’s in the air!”

“Your deception.”

He smiled and patted me on the shoulder. “Our deception, Jacke.”

Then he jumped up from his pail and threw a cup of oil into the popper.

#

In spite of myself I couldn’t help but admire Jerry. He was the little guy going up against heavies, beating the odds with wits and guile and a preternatural ability to analyze situations and people.

Jerry owned a dozen or so rental properties, small, neat houses that dotted the neighborhoods surrounding the factory from which he had escaped. Every time we drove to one to fix something or pick up the rent, he would encourage me to become a landlord.

“You could do it,” he said. “You just need to know how to bang on some pipes now and then. And how to find good tenants. That’s the key.”

He told me the secret: he looked for people who would be reliable enough to pay their rent and who would never want to move out.

“They all say they’re just there temporarily,” he said. “I’ve had people telling me that for twenty years, that they’re just renting until they buy their own home. I nod and smile and encourage them. But I know the truth. I can see it in their eyes.”

“See what? Desperation?”

“Weakness. They don’t want to own their own house. That’s just who they are, deep down. Renters.”

“Really? You don’t think it’s society that’s beaten them down?”

He shrugged. “I’m just telling you what I see.”

“Socioeconomic forces that make them live paycheck to paycheck? Make it seem like they’re not worthy of participating in an ownership class?”

“Nope,” he said, shrugging again. “I just see the weakness.”

#

There was a heat wave that day and foot traffic was low. I spent the extra downtime trying to come up with a persuasive argument for why Jerry shouldn’t cheat.

Soaking the tickets felt like it was wrong, like it was stealing somehow, but I wasn’t sure if that was true or, even if it was, how I felt about it. Who was he stealing from? The Riverfest! corporation? But he was right: these were their tickets, it was their scale. The contract Jerry had signed was silent on the issue of tickets and humidity. Riverfest! Inc. must have made a business decision that the precise weight of the tickets did not matter to them. Maybe they had calculated how much it would cost them to hire a few extra people to count the tickets and decided that the savings more than offset any ticket weight issues.

They had increased the percentage of their take this year, and they’d made it harder to fudge the expenses. Maybe they were making so much money they didn’t care if some tickets came in heavier than others.

Or maybe their calculations already assumed a heavy ticket. Who set the scale, anyway? Who had decided how much a ticket weighed? Who did the multiplication? Riverfest! Inc. did, that’s who. Maybe they were actually ripping off everyone except Jerry.

That occurred to me last, but Jerry would have jumped to that conclusion in a heartbeat. It would be just like those college idiots to rip us all off, they’re always going after the little guy, the workers, the poor schmucks who didn’t go to college don’t have a chance in this world…

In the end my best arguments were a) stealing was wrong and b) he could be caught. Neither argument resonated with Jerry.

And so, after we hosed down the concrete in front of our wagon and scoured the sinks with bleach to be ready for that day’s inspection, I walked with Jerry down the midway to the air-conditioned trailer that served as Riverfest! headquarters.

Thurl Albrecht was doing his morning interview on the local radio station that was broadcasting from their makeshift booth on the other side of the Scrambler. Patti and Sharon, two ladies in their fifties, were there to take the tickets and do whatever else needed to be done. Sharon was knitting a cap for a baby. Patti was baking something that smelled like cookies.

They reminded me a lot of the women at my parents’ church who turned up every week to make doughnuts, a fundraising endeavor that had basically kept the struggling church from going under. When there were enough hands, the ladies who had extra time cleaned the church, just because.

“Hi Jerry!” said Patti.

“Hello there!” Jerry cried, dropping his bag on their scale.

Sharon looked up from her knitting. “You had a great night!”

Jerry beamed at her. “Amazing!”

“It’s those nachos—they’re the best nachos at Riverfest!, Jerry!”

“Indeed!”

Sharon piled our bags on top of several others that had already been turned in. The scale’s numbers fluttered back to zero. Patti handed us a check and apologized that the cookies were not yet finished.

“Next time, I’ll try to make sure they’re ready before you get here!” she said, with an innocence that made my stomach fall.

#

“You know that was wrong,” I said on our way back to the wagon. “And now I know why. The problem isn’t that this is stealing. The problem is that you lied to Patti and Sharon.”

Jerry stopped walking. “Lied?” He looked like a puppy that had been ordered out of a room for some reason he could not fathom. “What did I say that was untrue? They said I did well, and I just said ‘amazing.’ It was totally amazing that I did well, even on such a lousy day! The ice machine thing worked better than I thought!”

“And then Sharon attributed it to the nachos, and you agreed.”

“I was agreeing with her that my nachos are the best at Riverfest! You know I believe that. It would have been a lie if I’d said otherwise!”

“You know what I mean, Jerry. You had that whole conversation without ever revealing to them how the tickets were so heavy.”

“They didn’t ask me!”

“Of course not,” I said. “They’re not suspicious, because they’re honest. But that gives us a special obligation to be more honest when we’re dealing with them.”

I had no idea if this last sentence true, but it felt right.

Jerry mulled this over for a minute as we headed back up the midway, the river on our left, a four-lane highway on our right. “Tell me something, Jacke,” he said as we passed the Ferris wheel. Do you tell your parents what you do?”

“Sure.”

“Everything?”

I paused. “If they ask I do,” I said quietly, aware that I was not without hypocrisy on this point.

“I know, I know. You don’t directly lie. But you omit things they’d want to know. I did that with my parents, and my kids did the same thing with me. And you know what? That’s okay. That’s how you survive when other people have power over you.”

I was invested in the argument now, and I had to think this through as we passed the rifle games and the kiddie rides. Was that always true? Was it morally acceptable to deceive anyone in a position of authority?

“What about God?” I asked as we reached our wagon.

“God knows everything! He’s the one guy who can’t be tricked!”

“Well, okay, but isn’t He upset when you deceive someone? Isn’t He angered by the cheating in your heart? The sin in your soul?”

“Nah,” Jerry said. “He doesn’t expect much from me. He knows I dropped out of college.”

It was the sort of joke that would have ended our conversation except we had reached the popcorn wagon. Inga had arrived to help set things up. I knew from Jerry’s greeting that my words had gotten to him.

“Jacke thinks I’m a liar!” he cried.

Inga looked crestfallen. “Really?” she said softly, and it almost looked like she might start to cry. “Why does he think that?”

It was not the response he expected. It made me realize how much Inga trusted me, and how much she distrusted Jerry, although she loved him deeply.

It reminded me of her stipulation that he pay off their house entirely: part of her thought he’d somehow gamble away their life savings through one scheme or another, and she wanted to know at the very least the bank would not be coming to take away her house.

It’s how we all were. We trusted Jerry, we admired him, and we were afraid that at some point, he might go a little too far. Might go a little too far deceiving Inga, and Patti and Sharon, and all the other good people in this world. At some point deceivers deceive themselves, too.

“Nevermind,” Jerry said, firing up the cotton candy machine.

#

It was a busy day. The heat wave died down and the fair bustled with a lot of pent-up energy. By the end we had thousands of tickets in our bucket. Jerry didn’t say a word, but I knew he was thinking about the extra money he would be giving up if he didn’t soak the tickets.

After we closed up I bagged up the tickets. Without saying a word, he took them from me, dumped the bags in the ice machine, and locked up the wagon.

What could I do? They were not my tickets. It was his decision.

But that night I had trouble sleeping. This was not a few extra dollars. This would be hundreds or even thousands. And if it wasn’t stealing, exactly, it sure felt like it. It might not have been money they were entitled to, exactly, but it didn’t feel like it belonged to us either.

My mind ran through the books I’d read in my Political Economy course earlier that year, back at college. The money came out of thin air – thin air plus deception. How could this be justified? What would Smith or Marx say about earning your income through melting ice? About money that accrued to you out of thin air?

But no: there was an act here. It was not a humid day: we actively made the tickets heavier. And our action increased the amount of money we received, without any reference to the amount of goods we sold. This was theft. It had to be. And if it was theft, I was an accomplice.

The next morning I lifted the bags from the puddle at the bottom of the ice machine. One of the bags was so heavy the strap broke.

Patti and Sharon were prominent in my mind. I thought I could smell chocolate chip cookies all the way up here. That was ridiculous and had to be a hallucination of some kind.

“I’m not sure I can be a party to this,” I said to Jerry.

Jerry looked at me for a long moment. “Party to what?”

“To this deception. I think Patti and Sharon should know how you did this.”

Jerry smiled and handed me the bags. “So tell them.”

“You understand what I’m saying, right? If they say it’s the nachos or something, I’m going to tell them the truth, the actual truth. I will not leave that trailer without telling them that you soaked the tickets.”

“I hear you,” said Jerry. “Let’s go.”

My heart skipped a beat. “They’ll probably let them dry out and weigh them tonight. But it could be worse. You understand that, right? They might get upset. Worst-case scenario, they call Thurl, who fines you or takes away your license. He might even call security. The police, even.”

Jerry did not look all that concerned. “Don’t worry, Jacke,” he said. “We’ll do whatever you guys think is best.”

#

I had a ten-minute walk down the midway to decide what I was actually going to say. Jerry was quiet, walking next to me, swinging one of the bags, while I, lost in thought, held the heavier one firmly at my side.

My heart was pounding. All I could think about was that I did not want to do what I was about to do.

I felt like I was watching one of those movies where the sheriff has a showdown against the outlaw you’ve spent an hour rooting for. Your head is with the sheriff, the good guy, the emblem of law and order and justice. But your heart is with the outlaw. You know that when he finally takes the bullet, part of you is going to die with him.

I must have been looking down; the trailer appeared so suddenly I gasped. Jerry had already opened the door and was halfway inside.

I still did not know what to say. I thought my heart might explode in my chest. My feet were tingling with nerves.

I swallowed hard and left the bright morning sunshine for the dingy light of the trailer.

Inside I noticed things I hadn’t ever noticed before. Sharon had brought in a framed photo of herself and her grandchildren. Patti had fastened a picture of her son, who was in the navy to the refrigerator with a pair of American flag magnets.

The sight of these details emboldened me. They viewed this as their home! These were not faceless corporate shills—they were good people, like my teachers, my aunts, the doughnut ladies at my parents’ church, my own mom for God’s sake.

The money was irrelevant. They should not be lied to. They should not be deceived.

At the same time I could barely look at Jerry. What if they overreacted? Called the police without delay? What if they hauled Jerry away in handcuffs?

But the decision was clear. We were not a lawless society. There was a code that needed to be upheld, and every so often people like me were called upon to make sure that it was. I’d given Jerry the chance to confess for himself, and he’d all but begged me to do it for him. It was my duty to turn him in.

“Whoa, look at that one!” said Sharon, pointing at my bag.

“Your dad made you carry the heavy one, eh?” Patti added.

My dad? How many people had assumed I was Jerry’s son? How many dozens or hundreds of people had seen us in our matching shirts, running the popcorn wagon together, and just figured from our proximity and our enjoyment of one another’s company that I must be his son?

How many people thought that Jerry, the man I was about to betray, was my father?

I blinked several times and heaved the bag onto the scale.

“Oooooooh,” Patti cooed. “You’re gonna break our scale!”

“Must be those killer nachos!” said Sharon.

It was the moment to come clean, to confess everything, to expose Jerry for what he truly was. I opened my mouth.

“Yep!” I heard myself say. “It must be!”

My mouth stayed wide open, shocked by its own moral failing. The words I had just spoken resounded in my ears. The “it must be” was particularly ignominious: I had practically sung the sentence, with the rising word “be” lasting at least a three-count.

I turned to Jerry, the outlaw I had just let slip back into the hills. He was trying not to laugh.

“I’m sorry,” I croaked, to absolutely no one, for no discernible reason.

“You don’t look so good, Jacke,” Jerry said merrily.

“It’s hot out there,” said either Patti or Sharon.

“Good for business, hard on workers,” said the other. “I’ll get you guys your check in two shakes.”

There was nothing to do but nod and wait.

“Hang on, ladies, I should tell you guys something,” said Jerry. “I totally cheated your system!”

Neither said anything. Patti’s mouth formed a tight o. Sharon tilted her head. “Wha…?” she mouthed.

“Seriously! I left them in my ice machine overnight. They’re soaked! Really heavy!”

I felt the blood returning to my face. He could not have been more chipper.

“Jerry!” Patti and Sharon both said.

“I did! I did it two nights ago. And last night too! And I’ll do it again tonight if you don’t stop me!”

Patti and Sharon exchanged a look.

“We have to…you’re saying they’re…too heavy?” said Patti. “But we have to use the scale. There’s no way for us to count all these tickets.”

“Absolutely no way,” said Sharon. “It would…it would take us hours. At a minimum.”

Patti nodded quickly.

“We did have an idea that there might be sand in the bags,” Sharon went on. “We didn’t think anyone would do it on purpose. But we were thinking about Rick Hathaway, who’s got that beach volleyball thing going down by the bridge. Do you know Rick?”

Jerry smiled. His eyes were twinkling; he rocked back and forth on his feet. You’d think he was watching his first-born grandson on a tilt-a-whirl. “Sure,” he said. “I know Rick. Good guy. Too bad he went to college.”

“Everyone knows Rick,” said Patti, trying to get Sharon back on track. “We check for sand in the bags. But I don’t know how you’d check for water in the tickets. We’d have to…well, I don’t even know how you’d do that.”

“These look just fine to me,” Sharon said, holding up a strand. “I don’t see anything different about ‘em. They’re a little cold, but that seems normal. I mean, this being morning and all. They’ve been sitting around all night.”

“In ice!” Jerry said.

“Maybe they’re a little darker,” Patti said, frowning and peering into the bag. “A little. Maybe. But color doesn’t really matter, does it? They’re all fifty cents no matter how dark they are.”

“I don’t think they’re much different,” said Sharon. She smiled brightly. “I think we’re good, Jerry. Here’s your check.”

“Okay, you guys are the bosses,” said Jerry. But make sure you tell Thurl.”

“We will,” they chimed, smiling again.

They handed us our check and we headed for the door.

“Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” Patti said sincerely.

“It was my pleasure,” Jerry said. “Oh, sorry—our pleasure.”

I smiled feebly as the door closed behind us.

#

“Was that honest enough for you?” Jerry chuckled as we walked through the midway back to the popcorn wagon.

“Too honest. How did you know what would happen?”

Jerry paused. We were about to step over a set of power cables that ran across the sidewalk under a set of metal plates. The plates had come loose; Jerry slid them back into place with his foot.

“I’ve been telling you this for how many years now? You think too much, Jacke. You don’t watch. You don’t listen. And you don’t understand. You see categories and big ideas and all these twenty-dollar words. And right in front of you are just two people. Patti and Sharon.”

He could not have said this in a nicer way. I knew what he meant—it was some version of book smart and street dumb—and yet I could not take offense. It was delivered with a level of affection that always surprised me, given how much he hated people who went to college and how obvious it was that I was the archetype of someone who went to college and still knew nothing about how the world worked.

But this was different. I say “the world” but this was not about machines or anything like that. Not political systems or large socioeconomic forces or anything I learned about in college, all those things that helped me succeed quote unquote, and that Jerry had no time for because he was too busy pounding on pipes with his wrench so he could take a vacation in Mexico for six weeks instead of four this winter.

And I could take tests and get into schools and earn degrees and get set on a path to a decent job that didn’t require me to slide under a popcorn wagon on my back to fix something that had gone wrong. I could pass tests and get accepted to programs and maybe now and then earn a prize or two. That was “the world” too, but it was not the same as this.

No, this one was about people in a room together, reading each other, predicting behavior, knowing what others will be capable of doing and what they will not. Wits against wits, and will against will. People one on one. People eye to eye.

And of course he’d measured me as well. He’d known all along that I wouldn’t go through with it. He had known that about me hours before I’d known it myself. He studied my face, gazed into my eyes, and saw something about me. Something that would drive me, something beyond my power to control or resist. I’d like to think it was loyalty or flexibility. Jerry probably just saw it as weakness, and I was not at all sure he was wrong.

Jerry turned and headed back to the wagon, but I stood still for a moment.

To our left was the river, rolling and free. To our right was the broken-down four-lane highway full of people, shadowy people, fighting traffic on their way to work.

And as the morning breeze rolled in off the river and struck my skinny arms, I couldn’t help but shiver, my mind spinning with everything I had learned, all the books I’d read, and the emptiness of all the things I didn’t know and never would.

Oh people! Another story with Jerry, back by popular demand! You can read more about my work for Jerry at the industrial laundry and a story with a different boss. Those were good years. What else? Hmmm. Maybe one about tickets in a completely different setting. And maybe this pair of college stories, which were from right around the same time. Okay, this one too.

Check out all the Objects at the Objects main page. Take a look at my books (available at Amazon) by visiting the books page, or just shoot me an email to receive a free review copy. Listen to the podcast if you are interested in hearing these stories read aloud, along with some other assorted nonsense. And have a wonderful weekend!

The Tao of the Beatles: “Lady Madonna”

Hail Muse! O ye gods of genius and creativity! Give us a random Beatles song from our randomly chosen random generator… this time we drop an Artemisia stem onto our random Beatles-song selector…and…

Oh boy! Our first real Paul song. Oh, I know, we had “The End,” but this is the first full-blown, get out of the way, a train-of-talent-is-coming-through-and-his-name-is-Paul song.

“Lady Madonna” (Lennon-McCartney, Past Masters Volume Two)

“Lady Madonna” is one of those earwormy tunes that the Beatles cranked out around the time of the Magical Mystery Tour album, that forgotten little period in between the colossal albums Sgt. Pepper and the White Album. Albums are the thing, right? The pinnacle of artistic achievement from, oh, 1965 to whenever iTunes killed them off? A radio hit is great and all, but fans of the artist measure them in terms of albums.

So we critics bounce from Rubber Soul to Revolver to Sgt. Pepper to Magical Mystery Tour (sort of) to the White Album to Yellow Submarine (sort of sort of) and Let It Be and Abbey Road, analyzing and categorizing and comparing…and we forget that in those days, the Beatles released singles too, and that these were not included on the albums. (The idea the Beatles had was that you didn’t want to make your fans pay twice for the same song.)

So as a collector or even just a fan, you have a whole other album’s worth just of songs—songs like “Day Tripper” and “Penny Lane” and and “I Am the Walrus” and “Hey Jude” and “Paperback Writer” and a dozen others. Songs the whole world knows. Not on an album.

Including this one, which is as good as any of them. So much life and energy! Where does all that spirit come from?

MAYBE FROM THE PIANO…

Those pounding chords! You picture a man playing for a big concert hall with no microphones. Just a man and the strings and the strength of his hands on the keys. And the joy in his heart that hits those bluesy chords, turning the blues into something uplifting. Someone like this:

Hmmm…Paul played the piano, sure…but did he INVENT that opening riff?

Nope. Not exactly. Check this out:

Sound familiar? That’s from 1956, a recording produced by…George Martin! That’s a little quirk of history I wish I knew more about. Did George play the song for Paul and ask him if he thought he could do something with it? Maybe George just happened to play it one day in the studio, and Paul overheard it and immediately sat down at the piano and started banging out some chords. That’s very easy to picture.

Or did the teenage Paul hear the song on the radio, then later use it as the inspiration for “Lady Madonna,” and George Martin casually pointed out “I produced that song, you know,” blowing Paul’s mind just as the Beatles were wowed by the fact that George Martin produced the Goons?

George Martin is like a fairy godfather. We could all use a George Martin in our lives. (I was actually lucky enough to have the real George Martin in my life, briefly, but that’s a story for another day.)

But we’re trying to figure out where the energy in this song came from. Maybe it’s the piano. And…

…MAYBE FROM THE VOICE?

So we get some good boogie-woogie piano going, then Paul comes in with that particular voice he used at times, kind of a cross between his narrator voice and his “sitting at the piano bar I’ll be here all week and dammit I’m going to give you fine people everything I have” voice. How many different voices did he have? Take a listen to “Another Day” and “So Bad” and “Kansas City” and “Maybe I’m Amazed.” We’re so used to hearing Paul, we don’t always recognize that he’s singing in about ten different styles. You may have your favorite style, but all of them are excellent. Together they are amazing. And it’s not a gimmick. (Almost never, anyway.)

They fit the song: that’s the important part.

And of course there are some songs where he sings different styles within a single song, like “Band on the Run” and “You Never Give Me Your Money.”

Actually, that last one is interesting. I’ll cue it up here to the part you should listen to:

Well, hello there, “Lady Madonna” voice!

A MUSICIAN AGREES WITH ME

“Lennon, to this day, it’s hard to find a singer better than Lennon was, or than McCartney was and still is. I’m in awe of McCartney. He’s about the only one that I’m in awe of. He can do it all. And he’s never let up. He’s got the gift for melody, he’s got the gift for rhythm, he can play any instrument. He can scream and shout as good as anyone, and he can sing a ballad as good as anyone. And his melodies are effortless, that’s what you have to be in awe of…. he’s just so damn effortless. I just wish he’d quit (laughs). Everything that comes out of his mouth is just framed in melody.”

NICE QUOTE, JACKE. WHO WAS THAT FROM?

Bob Dylan.

ONE MORE TAKE ON THE VOICE

Paul called the “Lady Madonna” voice his “Elvis voice.” I guess that works.

Where else do we get it?

I hear shades of it here:

And here:

And here:

I hear it in some harmonies too, but that’s enough for now. I’ll let you guess at those.

Let’s just cleanse the palate with one non-Elvis song, and recall that the same guy who sings like that can also sing like this:

Astonishing.

WHAT INSPIRED THIS THING ANYWAY?

I know what you’re thinking. Half these lyrics are probably some nursery rhyme Paul heard when he was a kid (Monday’s child has learned to tie his bootlace and all that), and the other half probably comes from some woman he saw waiting for a bus in Liverpool. Liverpool was tough, and poor, and it would be just like Paul to be inspired by glimpsing a woman like that.

Paul lost his mother at a young age, and I think he carried with him an admiration for the caretaking, maternal side of women that bordered on longing—well, bordered is probably not the right word, because it probably WAS longing.

When I find myself in times of trouble

Mother Mary comes to me

Speaking words of wisdom

Let it be

Lennon complained that “Let It Be” was too religious. He criticized Paul for invoking the Virgin Mary, pushing an already angelic melody into some kind of hymn or prayer.

Paul’s response? I was writing about me mum. Her name was Mary.

Mary. Mary the nurse. Paul recalled her as “very hardworking, because she wanted the best for us.”

And there’s this:

A fan from Brazil asked:”What would you do if you had a time machine?” to which Sir Paul simply replied:”Go back and spend time with my mum.”

Heartbreaking. He was fourteen when she died. Remember that the next time you call Paul saccharine. He needed the sweetness.

Throughout his songwriting career Paul has had a soft spot for women who worked, or who struggled, or who endured. And when he saw these real-life Mother Mary’s performing their tireless acts of motherhood, burdened and full of responsibility, this man in his twenties felt the pull of something urgent and unrecoverable. Something heavy and sad, and something beautiful, all together.

So that’s our best guess for the inspiration of “Lady Madonna”? A woman at a bus stop in Liverpool who had six kids or something? A heavy sigh from a woman struggling to keep bellies full and the electric bill paid?

Not quite. It’s even more universal than that. Here’s the immediate inspiration for the song:

Look carefully at those words in the article. It begins “Mountain madonna…” And the story goes that Paul saw this magazine and said, “Mountain Madonna!? it should be Lady Madonna!” And a song was born. A song born from the most universal element there is.

Do you know the Chinese character for good? It’s the character for woman and the character for child, combined together. We’ve known it since ancient times and across cultures: if you’re looking for something good on this earth, something universally and unassailably good, it’s hard to beat motherhood being done well. And when that relationship is surviving in spite of extreme hardship—well, we can all be inspired by that kind of strength:

Lady Madonna, children at your feet

Wonder how you manage to make ends meet

Oh, I know—there’s plenty of nursery rhyme among the rest, which doesn’t really relate to the woman in the photo. I’m sure he transposed the idea to women he knew, and we were probably back in the world of Liverpool, and the nurses who sold poppies from a tray and all that. Making the rent in those hardscrabble post-WWII years, when the men were killed in the war or came home shellshocked and suffering. It’s a Liverpool song, at heart.

But look at that picture again. Those kids. That playful little one on the ground, laughing, and the mother’s unsmiling but not unloving look downward. That look that says: I see you, and I’m glad you’re laughing, and I’m working hard because I want the best for you.

Lady Madonna, baby at your breast

Wonder how you manage to feed the rest

Paul saw the photo, and the divine tuning fork in him was struck. Another framed melody emerged. (Sorry, Bob!)

ANY BONUS TRACKS, JACKE?

How about this for a cover?

Yep. The Queen of Soul, as regal as ever.

And how about THIS?

Fats! This is so good, you would almost think he wrote it, and the Beatles covered it, right? It kind of was…Paul wrote it for someone like Fats, and Fats heard it and wished he had written himself and knew exactly what to do with it, and…don’t you wish you were part of a circle of genius? (Maybe you will be someday!)

Apparently the Fats version was one of Paul’s favorite covers of any of his songs. And his FAVORITE? Hmmm…I’m guessing here, but based on the number of times Paul brings it up in interviews, I think it might be this:

A long story behind that one, which I’ll save until the gods choose to select Sgt. Pepper.

COME ON, JACKE. A WHOLE POST WITHOUT ANYTHING FROM IAN MACDONALD?

Our man MacDonald’s kind of cranky about this one, so I’m not going to quote anything extensive. And since he’s cranky, I’ll be cranky too. MacDonald calls the “See how they run” line a nod back to John’s “I Am the Walrus,” carping that this “amounted to wanton – and perilous – self-mythologizing.”

Oh come on, Ian. Maybe the wanton and perilous mythologizing is something you’ve imagined! “See how they run like pigs from a gun” is a different line altogether! I think Paul may have had a different song in mind. One you may have heard, one that fits better into the nursery-rhyme, mother-and-little-children scheme…

It’s okay, Ian. Even Homer nodded.

UNLOCK YOUR INNER BEATLE!

This week be alert to the things that fire your creative spirit. Maybe it’s a photo that arrests your attention, or a smell from the kitchen that transports you back in time, or a stray sound in your house that’s always been there but you’ve never heard before. Something makes you stop and think. Why? Why is it so compelling? What does it mean in your life? And what can you do with it? How can you turn it into something creative? And what else can you draw upon to make it happen?

Creatively there’s the equivalent of a stone in your shoe. Don’t just toss it out. Figure out why it’s there. And then USE it.

Happy Monday, everyone! Be open to opportunities! Keep your spirits high! And look kindly on others!

It’s The Jacke Wilson Show! Life’s Unanswerable Questions, Part 2 (Episode 2.2)

ONE…ONE ONE…ONE ONE… IT’S THE JACKE WILSON SHOW!!!!!

Our quest for a more professional sheen to the podcast continues with Life’s Unanswerable Questions (Part 2) – Another play for Bryan Cranston and Kate Winslet, the untold story of Joseph the beleaguered father of Jesus, a look at why we love when we know it hurts us, and more!

Hope you enjoy the show!

You can stream the show here:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/jackewilsonshow/The_Jacke_Wilson_Show_2.2.mp3

Or directly download the mp3 file: The Jacke Wilson Show 2.2 – Life’s Unanswerable Questions (part two)

You can also find previous episodes at our Podcast page.

And subscribe to the whole series at iTunes by following this link:

SUBSCRIBE TO THE JACKE WILSON SHOW ON ITUNES

Let me know what you think! Thank you for listening!

Show Notes:

It’s the JACKE WILSON SHOW!

Our quest for a more professional sheen to the podcast continues with Life’s Unanswerable Questions (Part 2) – Another play for Bryan Cranston and Kate Winslet, the untold story of Joseph the beleaguered father of Jesus, a look at why we love when we know it hurts us, and more!

JACKE WILSON is the pen name of a writer whose books have been described as being “full of intrigue and expertly rendered deadpan comedy.” Born in Wisconsin, Jacke has since lived in Chicago, Bologna, Taiwan, Ann Arbor, Seattle, Mountain View, and New York City. Jacke now lives and works in the Washington D.C. area. Like his writings, the JACKE WILSON SHOW takes an affectionate look at the absurdities in literature, art, philosophy, great books, poetry, current events, hard news, politics, whatever passes for civilization these days, and the human condition (that dying animal). For more about Jacke and his books, visit Jacke at jackewilson.com.

Credits:

Danse Macabre Hook, Monkeys Spinning Monkeys, and Tempting Secrets by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0