Thursday, October 10, 2013

Flat Tire Blues

How do you consume music?  Leaving aside the question of precisely what sort of music you’re digging, what does the context do to impact the things you hear?  You appreciate music in a certain way, if you’re getting the dinner ready.  The wrong, high-spirited tunes could be dangerous chopping squash.  This is quite different from how music sounds when I’m walking around with a pair of big earphones in a crowded (it’s always crowded here) sidewalk.  The right music, and my posture is altered.  How I plant my feat and hold my chin are all transformed.   And, of course, there’s a way that we listen to music in a car.

Music is necessary whether your making up lost time, slowing to a crawl, or broke down on the side of the road.  Remarkably cars and music go back even before Rock n’ Roll.  Paul Galvin, founded Motorola back in 1928 with the novel idea of fitting radios into automobiles, and hence the name.  I worked for that late-great company here in China fifteen years ago, when it still carried some heft.  Impermanence. Music can make you drive very fast, or very slow.  And there is music for both moods.  Most importantly, it takes your mind off of the drudgery and the aggravation of traffic, or something worse like ‘car trouble’.    

Driving my daughter this morning at 5:55 AM Dinah Washington nailed it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinah_Washington  Sometimes the iPod is the ticket in the car.  But we have a ton of CDs lying around in there and at that hour you best believe whatever’s in the player, will have to suffice.  Well, Dinah had me laughing cause she started in on a tune she recorded in 1947, that I’d probably heard before but never paid attention to: “Early Morning Blues”.  

Early in the morning and I can’t get right.
Cause I had a date with my baby last night.
And it’s early in the morning, yes it’s early in the morning        
It’s early in the morning and I ain’t got nothing but the blues.

I went to his house to see him.   He was out.
I knocked on his mother’s door and she began to shout.
Don't’ you know it’s early in the morning, yes it’s early in the morning
It’s early in the morning and I ain’t got nothing but the blues.

Well I went to Jenny Lu’s, to get to something to eat.
The waitress looked at me and said “Dinah, you sure look beat.”
It’s early in the morning, yes it’s early in the morning
Oh it’s early in the morning and I ain’t got nothing but the blues.

I had a lot of money, now I’m beginning to be in doubt
Cause I couldn’t find my baby, now my money’s out.
It’s early in the morning Yes it’s early in the morning
Oh, it’s early in the morning and I ain’t got nothing but the blues.

Two things about that tune, beyond the remarkable meditation on the year that it was recorded and the undeniable applicability one feels listening to it at 5:55AM:  One; when she cries “Don’t you know . . . “ in the voice of her man’s mother, I defy you not to believe.  You see and feel that old woman, and Dinah’s twice as tough for knocking on, regardless.  Two; the local expat super market here in Beijing is Jenny Lou’s, which I talk about in the ‘Invida’ section of Seven Deadly Starbucks, (7DS) in some detail.  So to hear her yelling about getting a bite to eat at Jenny Lu’s, driving around my neighborhood spans a 40’s diner in Chicago with the dusty Beijing morning in manner, simply uncanny.





My kids all know her name.  She has a reputation around our house: she was too bluesy for the jazz crowd and too jazzy for the blues scene, back in that boisterous Chicago world.  I didn’t tell the girls but my wife digs the attributed quote that that is a testimony to her badness: “bring me the bitch who can do what I can do and do it better.”  I don’t think there were any takers.  Every tough gal since right on up to Dominique Young Unique will just need to make way for Dinah, I’m afraid.  I worked as a waiter one summer at the late-and-even-greater, Village Gate back in 1989.  More impermanence.  I got to meet Junior Mance a few times who played there on the terrace, regularly, brilliantly.  He used to be the pianist for her tour band later in her career.  He had some good Dinah stories. 

Last night, I picked my daughter up late.  She is the same one who needs to be there early, living, as she does that twelve year-old Chinese student's life:  早出晚[1]And certainly you can be a twelve year-old student in China with the blues.  There’s a blues out there for everything and there must be a few for coming home late, though I don’t know if Dinah ever sang it. 

What I needed last night though was the flat tire blues.  Setting out to get my older daughter I noticed we were mid-way to a flat on the front left.  Oldsters who drove in the days of Paul Galvin, always said the biggest problem motoring back then was flat tires.  Apparently, in the decades before “steel radials” or whatever it is they equip us with now, tires popped with great regularity.  It’s been a decade or more since I changed a flat.  I figured we’d turn it into a father-daughter(s) moment. 


They were surprised that there was, indeed a spare in the back.  “Baba, where’d that come from?”  We laid ourselves out on the garage floor.  I had them read the manual to me in Chinese to determine if we were going clockwise or counter clockwise on that first, critical thrust of the wrench, (or as my Australian friend says “the spanner.”)  I got them turning bolts and spinning up the jack.  And it doesn’t matter if your 47 or 9 its remains mystifying how a little device like that can lift an enormous car up with simple, easy, repeated turns of the screw.  “Now, if you’re out with mom” I told them “and the car has a flat, you know what to do.” 

We were listening to Dinah there as we hoisted the spare up in and fastened the bolts back on. Appropriately, she was singing out track number eight as we finished up our work: “You Can Depend on Me.”   This left track number nine, “Early Morning Blues” mystically queued up for our murky, morning’s discovery.  



[1] zǎochūwǎnguīto leave early and return late (idiom)


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