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: 早出晚归[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] zǎochūwǎnguī：to leave early and return late (idiom)
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