The G Above Middle C

Failing Again, Failing Better

When I was 12, I would play the piano and sing the classic rock canon: The Beatles, The Who, The Stones, The Doors, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin.  I could hit every note and I was told I had a natural voice.  My father, who directed my bar mitzvah, said that there was a Black guy who was on the custodial staff who was stopped in his tracks hearing me chant my bar mitzvah portion.  My father’s musical rotation went mostly from Mozart to Bach to Haydn, though he once told me when he was a kid, he loved tuning in a radio feed in Canada to hear Joe Williams and the Count Basie Orchestra singing “Every Day I Have the Blues.”

Everyday,
Everyday
I have the blues
When you see me
Worryin' baby,

Yeah,
It's you I hate to lose

So much power. So much beauty. The blues could be bigger than anything. The guy had a baritone, a tenor, an alto. He went all the way up, and not just in pitch, but as if he was reaching the blues themselves. The Basie Orchestra was hitting those blues hard. It’s about the blues, but it delivers a rush of pure euphoria.

I didn’t particularly like childhood.  Frank O’Hara pretty much summed it up:

When I was a child
I played by myself in a
corner of the schoolyard
all alone.

I hated dolls and I
hated games, animals were
not friendly and birds
flew away.

If anyone was looking
for me I hid behind a
tree and cried out "I am
an orphan."

And here I am, the
center of all beauty!
writing these poems!
Imagine!

I was waiting for that to happen.  My friends, none of them Jews, put on formal attire to attend this ceremony that must have seemed weird beyond imagination.   One of them was my date to the Christmas dance.   She had scoliosis, but her parents let her take the brace off just for the dance, like Cinderella at the ball.  And I was a bar mitzvah by day, Christmas dance by night guy.  I would be 12 for another week and a half. It was 1985 and I rocked a mullet.

My friends never heard me chant. It was between my dad and me. He gave me cassettes of chanting in his beautiful tenor voice, and I learned by imitation, something I would later learn—from Aristotle and many others—that this is what learning is. But it came suspiciously easy to me. One night, I said, “I feel like I’m not learning a language. I’m just memorizing music.” He said, “That’s what learning a language is.”

I started noticing in the summer of ‘86 that I couldn’t sing the high notes in Zeppelin anymore.   Getting older was a widely advertised phenomenon.  Let it get deeper.  Yet what I was discovering was that I could only hit as high as the G after Middle C.  This put a lot of classic rock out of circulation, at least in its original key.  If my talent was supporting my family, then the castrato route would have been my next logical step, back when that was a thing.  I wanted the deep voice.  I wanted to be a man.  I wanted to get a girlfriend and do all the things that would have made it all worth it. 

By age 14, I had the voice of a man.  And while I developed at the piano, my singing occupied that awkward place that was about an octave deeper than the music I was listening to.  These were hairy guys who got women and could hit those notes that I had left behind with my childish things.  The G above middle C was not a comfortable note. It did not sound good.  And I had this baritone voice where I could sound like Lou Reed.  My vocal cords turned into a mess.  Hormones?  Sinuses?  I have no idea what makes a childhood voice euphonious and an adult voice less precise. 

The songs kept coming in. The voice was made for talking, and for singing as an intimate act.  When someone really loved me, they loved my voice.  I was outsider art, maybe insider art.   I ended up writing about voices that weren’t appreciated by everybody—Dylan, Cohen, Reed—but deeply loved by their most passionate exegetes.  Learning about Leonard Cohen is an extended bar mitzvah of sorts. “Strength, strength, let us renew ourselves,” Leonard told me. Until the final bar.  Learning how to read, learning out to listen, learning how to fail again, fail better.  Leonard told me he panicked in the middle of recording Songs of Leonard Cohen.  “I didn’t know that I couldn’t sing.” 

Much later, a year before I met him, Leonard sang this:

I saw some people starving
There was murder, there was rape
Their villages were burning
They were trying to escape

I couldn't meet their glances
I was staring at my shoes
It was acid, it was tragic
It was almost like the blues
It was almost like the blues

I have to die a little
Between each murderous plot
And when I'm finished thinking
I have to die a lot

There's torture, and there's killing
And there's all my bad reviews
The war, the children missing, lord
It's almost like the blues
It's almost like the blues

Though I let my heart get frozen
To keep away the rot
My father says I'm chosen
My mother says I'm not

I listened to their story

Of the gypsies and the Jews
It was good, it wasn't boring
It was almost like the blues
It was almost like the blues

There is no God in heaven
There is no hell below
So says the great professor
Of all there is to know

But I've had the invitation
That a sinner can't refuse
It's almost like salvation
It's almost like the blues

I think of my father as a boy.   He once got into trouble when he was at someone’s house and, because he didn’t want to eat beets, he stuck them in his pocket, and did not get away with it.  He was the same boy who loved listening to Joe Williams with Count Basie singing “Every Day I Have the Blues.”  Leonard Cohen says, however deep you may think it gets, it’s almost like the blues.  I think of the Black custodian appreciating my bar mitzvah voice.  That guy’s approval still means the world to me. I can picture it, but I was so caught up in getting it right, I couldn’t pay attention.

I have been told I can play the blues, and I try, but with my flawed adult male voice, we make our meek adjustments.  But we try to go as deep as we can, while we can.  The blues, the real blues, are endless.  We can talk about it, we can listen to it, but we can’t really be them.  Not yet anyway. These days, I transpose charts to my voice and make it sound as decent as it can.  It’s rough out here.  Songs always come out of my mouth, I can’t help it.  Sometimes, I sound ok.  Every day I have the blues, and I will never sound like Joe Williams.  I’ll never get there, but the quest is forever, in my way, with what I have. Sometimes, your failure to become something leads you somewhere else.  It’s almost like salvation.  It’s almost like the blues.