BAD SINGING

I listen to music constantly. Everything from Van Morrison to The Boss, from Coldplay to Miles Davis. I listen to rock music when I am exercising my body, and smooth Jazz when I am exercising my brain while doing crossword puzzles. Music is ubiquitous in our household, to the point where our 18 month old daughter Vivienne stands in front of the stereo speakers, swaying back and forth in a semblance of rhythm that is already far superior to what I will ever attain. They say that white men can’t jump, but in my case my totally earthbound state also implies a disturbing inability to match the tempo of whatever is playing on the radio.
I read an article once that claimed that music activated more centers of the brain than any other activity, 6 in all as I recall. But, for me anyway, the center that music seems to activate the most is my memory. I hear the first strains of NORWEGIAN WOOD and I am immediately transported back to Christmas week in San Mateo, circa 1966. My sister got the album RUBBER SOUL for Christmas and she played it over and over as we lay on the floor playing board games. Neither of us ever tired of the album even though we were wearing that vinyl out. We read and re-read the liner notes, memorized the words, picked our favorite songs.
The audacious opening guitar licks of Led Zeppelin’s WHOLE LOTTA LOVE brings me immediately to the smoky confines of a funky turd-brown Ford Fairlane station wagon streaming along Skyline Blvd through the Redwood trees in 1970. I am with my two best high school buddies, John Peterson and Paul Gilleran, and if I didn’t have their friendship I would be a total outcast and loser. But in Peterson’s parents’ station wagon, smoking Panama Red and listening to the blistering rock of Santana, the Zep and so many other great bands, I can almost forget for a time how truly miserable my adolescence is.
Play any song from James Taylor’s MUD SLIDE SLIM AND THE BLUE HORIZON, and I am magically transported to Madison, Wisconsin in the fall of 1971, in love with a terrific girl and holding her hand as we stroll through the University’s arboretum, the sheer glory of the red and gold trees reflecting my own inner fire.
You get the idea. When my teens came along rock and roll was busting out all over, and so music sort of defined my youth, and necessarily, my sense of self. Music was the background to everything that was going on through my life. We played music at parties; we played music when we were mellowing out and when we were all jazzed up. So there is sort of like a movie soundtrack going on in the background of my life.
Now, I don’t consider myself unique in this regard, I assume that everybody who was around at that time had the same experience of music being a quasi-transformative influence on one’s life. And so I am always surprised to meet people who listen to talk radio or NPR. Whenever anybody is talking on my radio, either in an advertisement or with the news, I change that channel lickety-split, and keep changing it until I get some music. I don’t like disembodied voices talking to me –they might say something I don’t want to hear – but I really get off on disembodied voices singing to me.
So you might think that with all this music going on in my life that I would have a real bent towards the musical arts. And alas, fine friend, this would be another case of your begin dead wrong in public. Because it’s not that I am completely tone deaf, it’s just that I am the nearest thing to it. But it’s not my fault; it is genetic. And if you doubt that, I present exhibit A, my older brother Stephen.
When Stephen was fourteen and thought he was going to grow up to be a priest rather than a real estate lawyer he went to Maryknoll Seminary, where choir participation was a mandatory part of the studies. And Stephen loved choir. He loved to sing. The only problem was that his voice was so bad, and so loud, that it stood out among the sweet clarion-like tones of his fellow seminarians like a loud fart in a yoga class.
The choirmaster, Father Junipero we will call him, upon hearing my brother’s dulcet tones, stopped the practice and methodically went from pupil to pupil having them sing a few notes until he came upon my brother. Cringing mightily at my brother’s vocal feats, he informed Stephen that he was excused from practice.
“But I like choir,” my brother said. It was really the only part of the seminary experience he did truly value.
“Yes,” Father Junipero said. “But, nonetheless, you are excused.”
“When can I come back?” Stephen asked.
“Hopefully, never.”
And so my brother’s choir experience was ended, and shortly thereafter his seminary experience as well, for he left Maryknoll to return to the secular life.
Like my brother I can’t sing and I can’t play a musical instrument. And just to prove that point, when I retired from gainful employment I determined that I would take singing lessons. And just to fully realize my inner Billy Joel, I would also take piano lessons.
For the next year I took singing and piano lessons. And I was a really good student, as you can imagine with one of my obsessive nature. I rented a keyboard and played all the time. I sang constantly, I really practiced. But in this case, practice did not make perfect. At the end of a year all I had succeeded in accomplishing was the near destruction of the fragile sanity of my elderly teacher.
I will never forget our last lesson together, in the cluttered studio of my sweet natured teacher, a woman in her 70’s with a slight Viennese accent, a beautiful voice and a rich history of training concert ready singers and musicians.
I was standing at the music stand, booming out discordant notes as she played the piano. After one particularly disturbing note she stared down at the keyboard, completely flummoxed. Though game to continue, I did sort of feel bad having brought this innocent woman to such a state.
“Mister Finn,” she said, very polite as she delivered the bad news. “Perhaps the music is not for you.”
“But I practice all the time,” I told her, sounding disturbingly like my brother at choir practice. If practice was all it took I would have been Elton John by this point.
“Practice is not your problem, Jeffrey. No,” she sighed and looked out the window, no doubt thinking of other, less musically impaired students she had trained in her glorious European past. And now here she was in Sonoma County trying to beat some musical sense into a tone-deaf middle-aged musical Neanderthal.
“You are painter, are you not?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you stick to the painting,” she said as her hands straightened her sheet music, perhaps to keep from pulling her hair out.
“What about my piano playing?”
A visible shudder ran through her slim frame. “No,” she whispered. “No, no piano playing for you, Jeffrey.” She looked me dead in the eye and delivered the grim news. “You stop now with the singing and the piano playing, Jeffrey. It is best for all.” Meaning the rest of humanity, no doubt.
So that is how melodiously talentless I am – a women I paid to give me lessons actually fired me.
One final cap on the Finn melodic epoch.
About ten years ago we were hosting Christmas at our home here in Santa Rosa. As my brother Stephen arrived I pulled him into the den. From the mantle I took down Xeroxed copies of some Christmas music.
“I’ve got a great idea,” I told him. “You and I are going to entertain everybody with some Christmas tunes.”
“You’re right,” he said, his eyes alight. “That is a great idea.”
“And to make it even better, I got these,” and I handed him one of those cheap disposable microphones you buy your kid for his birthday party.
Stephen awarded the plastic and foam mike the same wonder Indiana Jones reserved for the Holy Grail. “I love microphones,” he informed me.
“I thought we’d start off with Adestes Fidelis, you know, Come All Ye Faithful.”
“How did you know that was my favorite Christmas song?”
“Just a hunch. And you know Latin, right, from high school?”
“I love Latin.”
“Well, what I thought was, we’d sing the first verse in English, kind of soft, I think it’s what the Italians call Sotto Voce.” I have no clue what Sotto Voce means, but it sounded good to me.
“This sounds better and better.”
“And then we’d really let ‘em have it with the second verse, sung in Latin. We sing this louder, you know, because they can’t understand Latin, so we have to emote a little more.”
To Finns louder is better.
“I totally get where you’re coming from,” he agreed. “This is going to be great.” And he really believed it. He looked like he had just received the swellest Christmas gift ever.
Later during the festivities I motioned for Stephen to join me at the center of the room, right in front of the Christmas tree, where no one could miss us. Once I’d gotten everyone quieted down we crooned our way through the first verse of the hymn. We thought we sounded like Bing Crosby though it was probably more akin to Rosanne Barr on steroids.
It was gratifying to see the rapt looks on all our relatives’ faces; akin to the jaw-unhinged stare you get when viewing a really bad collision on the highway. We definitely had everyone’s attention. As we swung into the second verse, in Latin, we amped up our vocals. People appeared visibly stunned. They’d never heard anything like this before. And, safe to say, no one had anticipated while making the drive up from the Bay Area, that their Christmas would include such a treat as this!
As we blasted out the triumphal hymn, in Latin no less, my mother gazed out the window with a look that said, Why didn’t I strangle them at birth? My next-door neighbor’s dog began to howl and the car alarm went off on my nephew’s SUV in our driveway.
One of the grandkids began to weep, and put her head in her mother’s lap, sobbing, “Make the bad singing stop, Mommy.”
And when we finished, my dear sister, who is acutely attuned to everyone’s mood, jumped up from her place on the divan and yanked the microphones and sheet music from our hands, spun around and sang out loudly in a false-happy voice; “Time to open gifts everybody!”
And thus ended Jeffrey and Stephen’s Christmas recital.