• • •
I INVITED Nan and Raymond over for a second round of sushi, hoping that Raymond might teach me some tricks with pitch bending, but Nan said no. Raymond was in Boston seeing his girlfriend at Emerson College. I asked Nan how life was treating her.
“Oh, my mother died,” she said softly.
I said how sorry I was.
“I’m going to miss her. She was a real fighter. She just had too many different things going wrong at the same time. My sister was there. She said it was peaceful.” Nan was going back to Toronto briefly, she said, to help sort things out and sign forms, but the memorial service wouldn’t be for several weeks. “Fortunately Chuck has lots of frequent flyer miles.”
“You were a good daughter to her.”
I heard her sigh. After a while, she said, “I hope so. I guess I’ll be needing some help with the chickens, if you could.”
“Absolutely, glad to do it. The rooster seems to like me. And I’m serious about watering the tomatoes.”
“That would be nice, thank you. And ask Raymond about his songs, if you get a chance.”
Twenty-five
HELLO AND WELCOME to Chowder’s Poetry Hopalong. I’m your host and in-home chiropodist, Paul Chowder. We’re in my kitchen, and I’m talking into a seven-hundred-dollar microphone. My ex-girlfriend is probably going to have a major operation, and my neighbor’s mother has died. So that’s what’s happening, and it’s serious business.
Out of worry or trouble or despair must come some enlightenment. Maybe that’s what a chord progression can teach us. Out of the shuffling mess of dissonance comes a return to pax, to the three-note triad of something basic and pure and unable to be argued with. Chong: the chord. E flat major. A flat major. C sharp minor. Chords where only the middle finger is down on the flat ground of the white keys, while up on top the pinky maybe can’t resist adding an impish hint of misdirection — an added seventh or ninth. These are just fancy terms for willful blurring — they’re like the times when the attractive magician’s helper in the leotard disappears into the box and the magician plunges all his sharp swords in, and then she reappears with outstretched arms, smiling her E flat major smile, unscathed after her chordal perils. Debussy’s preludes go all over the place, but they’re tonal — they always come back home.
Music notation relies on things called sharps and things called flats. A sharp looks sharp and spiky — it’s the pound sign on the typewriter, the one above the number 3. A flat looks melted, like a droopy wasp’s abdomen with a line sticking up from it. The round side of the flat symbol points to the right on the stave, whereas the water-balloon notes all point to the left, looking back at where they’ve been. If you see a sharp printed in front of a note, you know to look sharp and shift that note’s pitch up by a half step, whereas if you see a flat in front of a note, you know to droop down flat a half step. So if you see a good-boy G on the stave with a wasp in front of it, that’s a G flat. That’s chess notation. It works, and we can thank the monks and the madrigalists for it. But when you’re making up a melody, you don’t think about sharps and flats. You wave them away. You don’t even necessarily think about chord progressions.
There’s a famous chord progression that goes, in Roman numerals, I, V, vi, IV, I. Meaning that if you’re in C major it begins with a major chord based on the first note of the scale, C, then goes to a major chord built on the fifth note of the scale, G, then to a minor chord on the sixth note, A, then to a major chord on the fourth note, F, then back to a C chord. Schumann used this chord progression, Brahms used it, Elton John used it, the Beatles used it in “Let It Be,” Jason Mraz used it in “I’m Yours,” and Alphaville and Mr. Hudson and Jay-Z used it in “Forever Young,” and on and on. A group called the Axis of Awesome made a medley of many songs based on these chords — fifty million people have watched versions of the Axis of Awesome medley on YouTube. It’s worth watching.
You may think you have something extremely useful when you know how to play these four chords, and you do. But when you’re at the point of making up a tune that’s never been heard before, and finding words for it to shoulder, then knowing the chords doesn’t help that much. You still have to feel your way singingly through.
• • •
ROZ’S CELLPHONE WENT right to voicemail, so I called her home number. Her doctor friend Harris answered. I recognized his voice from the radio. I said, “Hello, this is Paul Chowder. Is that — Harris?”
“Yes,” said Harris.
“Hi, Harris. I admire the work you do.”
“Thanks. I’ve read your poems. Roz gave me one of your collections.”
“Really?” I said. “Which one?”
“I think it had a blue cover. Or maybe it was orange. Or green. Was it green?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Roz is at a medical appointment right now — can I give her a message?”
“I just wanted to say hello.”
“I’ll tell her you called.”
“Is she doing all right?”
“Yes, I think she is,” said Harris.
Early the next morning it was misty and humid. I went to Planet Fitness and parked next to an empty beer bottle. Inside I listened to another Sodajerker podcast on my headphones. The two hosts, both songwriters with strong Liverpool accents, interviewed a fast-talking writer-producer named Narada Michael Walden. I’d never heard of him, but it turned out that he’d been part of big hits for Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin, after drumming in exotic time-signatures for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He cowrote Jermaine Stewart’s “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off.” He came up with Aretha Franklin’s “Who’s Zoomin’ Who” by interviewing her on the phone. Aretha said that when she goes to a club and she sees an attractive man in the corner, she checks him out while he checks her out and she’s like, “Who’s zoomin’ who?” That became the song.
The Sodajerkers asked Narada Michael Walden if he liked working with women. He said yes, because they’re beautiful, with beautiful smiles and nice smells — but because they’re divas, with precious living hearts, sometimes they call for special treatment. For instance Whitney Houston. Once Walden was working with Whitney after she and Eddie Murphy split up. He’d also produced a song with Eddie Murphy, “Put Your Mouth on Me.” So he knew Eddie. He said to Whitney Houston: “Do you want me to go beat up Eddie?” After that, he said, Whitney knew Narada really cared about her, and she sang her loving life out for him in the studio and produced jewels and diamonds of melodic elaboration.
I listened to all this on the elliptical trainer. Walden said he began as a drummer and he still thinks like one. The drummer in him, he said, brings the funk out. “Drumming is so raw. Brutal. Snot. It’s a thing that happens that you can’t get by playing the pretty keyboard. The people who stay popular year after year are funk people who understand rhythm.” Why was that? Because people want to dance. “Even look at a chick like Barbra Streisand, who I adore,” he said. She didn’t have a huge pop hit till she left her Broadway singing style behind and started emphasizing the syncopation: “And we got nothing to be guil — tee — of.” What Walden is always trying for is a hit. “A lot of people don’t talk about that, but I will.” To get a hit, he said, you have to be totally committed. “You have to put your hit hat on.”
Shit, my hit hat! Forget the misery hat, where’s my hit hat? I wanted one. I did a round of the upper-arm machines wanting to write a hit song called “Why Are You Fat?” I have the beginnings of an unpleasant potbelly and I hate it. You’re fat, I wanted to say, because you are a lazy fat fuck. You eat bags of nut snacks that make you fat. You eat peanut butter crackers that make you fat. You sit on your donkey ass smoking Fausto cigars and drinking coffee and eating stale shortbread cookies rather than going outside and mowing the weeds or taking a walk with the dog or eating a carrot and writing a poem. You’re fat because the corn in food is so ridiculously cheap, and you’re too fucking lazy to read the ingredients to see that they’ve put twelve powdered poisons in there. And you’re fat because you’re morally fat. You haven’t taken time to figure out what’s right. You don’t do enough for other people. You failed to have a child.