Deep Cuts, page 11
As it turned out, an upscale piano showroom is actually not the best place to get free use of a piano. It’s too quiet. Joe and I slid quietly onto an antique carved bench and he whispered, “How far away is Guitar Center?”
A salesman who looked like he had been there as long as the building sidled up. Joe explained he was a musician in town on tour.
The salesman nodded patiently. “Signed?”
“Yes.” Joe looked at me, then back at the salesman, who seemed to be waiting for more. “It’s an indie label. We were just hoping to try out your pianos.”
“He wants to play me something,” I said. “We can use your worst piano, it’s fine, just tell us which one.”
He nodded officiously, and led us to a shiny black upright in a back alcove where we had more privacy anyway. “Happy to help a young musician, provided you keep it both pleasant and brief,” he said.
“Can I get some water?” Joe said. “Sir?” he added.
The salesman ignored him and sailed out of the alcove.
Joe and I shared a small laugh. “Okay,” he said, and played a quick F scale, his long fingers rolling easily over the B-flat. “It’s called ‘Bay Window.’ ”
When he started playing I thought their worst piano had a wonderful sound actually, round and bright. Then he sang:
“From the woman I love’s ba-a-a-ay window”—gorgeous melisma on “bay”—“I watch the world begin to end.” He lifted his hands, not bringing them down until the next “bay,” this time on a minor chord: “In the woman I love’s ba-a-ay window…I see the good give up again.” Major.
He looked up at me. “That’s the chorus.”
I had about ten thoughts at once, all of them racing in my mind, elbowing each other out for space. I focused on the least emotional one. “Is this about September eleventh?”
“Yeah. Is that lame?”
“No. I mean, I assume you won’t be too on the nose about it.”
“Right. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be that day—it could be about the night Bush won, any of those cultural tragedies where you feel devastated, and disconnected, and a bit like, ‘Am I allowed to be a person right now?’ ”
I nodded. “It’s great. It’s different for you, so plaintive and direct. It’s that track five or eight that you skip for the first month because it’s too grand and sad, and then later it becomes your favorite. Do you have verses?”
“One, but the lyrics need work.” He turned back to the keys and sang slowly, with long, drawn-out syllables: “It’s a movie, but it’s happening…Eating black beans and avocado.” He made a face at that line. “You said, ‘I know that I want children…It makes me feel like a monster.’ ”
My breath caught. I looked down at my arm, where the hairs were raised. Joe followed my gaze and fought a smile. “What part?” he said.
I exhaled. “ ‘It makes me feel like a monster.’ ”
“Lyric or melody?”
“Both. It really works, Joe.”
He made a victory fist.
“Why does the girl get that line, though?” I said. “Why can’t it be you who said that? We both talked about kids that day. You brought it up, actually.”
He cocked his head, thinking.
“You just wrote it that way because you’ve absorbed giant piles of bullshit your whole life about—”
He held up his hand and sang it again: “I know that I want children. It makes me feel like a monster.”
“Yes. Better.”
“Okay. What else did we eat that day? I want to give that feeling of hunkering down.”
“Chips, but what a terrible-sounding word.”
“Eating black beans…And tortillas,” he sang.
“Eating black beans…Margaritas,” I tried. “Sounds like a party.”
“Eating black beans…From the ca-a-an.”
“Eating black beans…Hours passing,” I sang. “That would sound good with ‘but it’s happening.’ ”
We settled on that. Then we wrote another line, and another. He had produced a small tape recorder and his notebook from his backpack. The whole time it felt like we were moments away from leaving or being kicked out; we never took off our winter coats, even as I felt sweat trickling down my ribs from my bra. “Real quick,” we kept saying. “One more line, real quick.”
When we had a full second verse, he said, “Let me just play the whole thing through.” And he did, and it sounded great, it sounded real, I couldn’t believe it. He looked triumphant. “Done!”
“What about the bridge?”
He sighed. “I’m thirsty.”
“And I need to pee,” I said. “But there’s a larger issue here, which is you always want to skip the bridge.”
“You and your bridges.”
“They’re important, Joe! They’re the release. The emotional center. The climax.”
He looked amused. “Which is it?”
“It doesn’t matter! ‘Creep’ by Radiohead, that’s release.” I scooted my butt to the front edge of the piano bench, leaning over the keys like I was about to play something, which of course I did not know how to do, not without embarrassing myself. I wished so badly that I could break into a rendition of the “Creep” bridge. Instead, I kept talking. “ ‘Dock of the Bay’: emotional center. ‘Just My Imagination’: that bridge is so devastating, it should’ve been a sign that Paul Williams was about to kill himself. It’s going for it, Joe. Without a bridge, your song isn’t up for its own challenge.”
“What about the Magnetic Fields?” he asked. “Stephin Merritt’s songs never have bridges.”
“He’s a genius at writing a half song. He’s emotionally at arm’s length, which is great, that’s his deal and nobody does it like him—but that’s not you. You’re an emotional writer, you just lack guts.”
He flinched so briefly I may have imagined it, then said, challengingly, “You think ‘My Only Friend’ is emotionally at arm’s length?”
I paused. ‘My Only Friend’ was a heartbreaking Magnetic Fields song, an elegy for Billie Holiday that made me bawl the first time I heard it.
He let out a derisive laugh and shook his head. “Percy Marks realizes she might be wrong about something. Call the newspapers.”
“ ‘My Only Friend’ could be better if it had a bridge,” I said weakly, but he was still performing that little jerky laugh. It made me want revenge, and with the nightmare fuel still burning in my veins, I knew exactly how to get it. I would write a damn bridge all by myself.
I looked at the piano. I knew we were in F. I spread my left hand over a D chord, then remembered how to make it a minor. The salesman entered our alcove and opened a metal file cabinet in the corner. With my right hand I began picking out a melody on the keys, correcting as I went, my fingers visibly trembling. Joe watched. The salesman left, lingering long enough in the door to make my hands freeze up. I started over when he was gone, whispering over the notes as I played them: “Zoe comes over in the afternoon.”
Joe put his hand over mine and played it slightly differently, making the lowest note lower, much prettier.
I worked out a second line, over a G minor. Again he pulled the interval wider. Then I whisper-sang: “Zoe comes over in the afternoon…sucks the air right out of the room. She’s planning protests with the bitter grin…of a pacifist who knows she won’t win.”
“Write it down,” he said quickly, loudly.
He did more work on the chords as I scribbled in the notebook, then he played the whole song into the recorder.
At that point Joe began to look triumphant and it made me queasy. Was the song good? The bridge could work harder, I thought, especially given my earlier pontificating; I didn’t love how it portrayed Zoe, and the last line was clunky. If Joe had written that bridge, I’d probably tell him it sucked. But my nightmare fuel was sputtering out, and the final chord of “NYC” was starting to buzz in my brain again.
I decided I needed beer. We left the showroom and walked until we found a bar with an old upright in the back, with chipped keys and a questionable middle C. The bar was nearly empty, just a couple construction workers at the counter, probably because the heater seemed to be struggling; even the bartender rubbed his hands together for warmth as he took our order. Joe brought his beer to the piano, and I sat down on a rickety, too-high barstool from which my feet were forced to dangle like a child’s. The beer was bright and light and fulfilled its purpose brilliantly, bringing me back to this thrilling experience, the unfinished work of this song. On the back of two napkins, I wrote out the full lyric again. I felt a fleeting sense of being at home on this island, where it seemed I could find everything I needed—pianos, beer, a fresh blank page—for the mere cost of inserting myself into unwelcoming environments.
Halfway through my second pint I crossed out the bridge and wrote an entirely new one. It came to me quickly, before I began to feel self-aware (look at me writing lyrics on a napkin, do I think I’m Joni Mitchell, etc.). I thought maybe I could cross it out again and write a third version, something better and smarter than the second, but it sat there staring up at me from its napkin like a child refusing bedtime.
I brought it to Joe at the piano. “Instead of ‘Zoe comes over in the afternoon.’ ”
“I liked ‘Zoe comes over in the afternoon,’ but okay,” he said. He propped the napkin up on the piano’s ledge and played the first chord of the bridge. “She tries to—” His voice dissolved into a grunt, and he shot me a stung look. “Guess we’re not talking about Zoe anymore.”
“Why bring a third character into it,” I said. I moved behind him so he wouldn’t have to see me while he sang.
He faced the napkin again and started over. “She tries to kiss me as the sun goes down—I only give her my cheek. I promise friendship and we face the screen again—what a day to be so weak.”
He swallowed the “weak”; I barely heard it. His foot lay heavy on the sustain pedal. Finally he turned his head so I could see his profile. “I’d call that strength,” he said over his shoulder. “Restraint.”
“Use ‘Zoe comes over in the afternoon,’ then,” I said. “It’s your song.”
I walked back to the barstool and started folding up the napkins. He had nailed the phrasing, fit in the extra syllables of the “again” exactly as I’d heard it in my head: muttering, defeated. Even the limp delivery of “weak” had worked. It was a beautiful bridge, and I was proud to have created it. But I was done.
He shuffled over to my barstool, empty pint in hand. He was watching me carefully, sideways. I thought he might be about to make a speech, but he just mumbled something about making it to Brooklyn in time for sound check.
I zipped up my black puffer coat. “When are you back in New York?”
“Two weeks. Boston, then a few stops in Vermont, then here again—just a warehouse party, but they’re putting us up.”
“Mind if I catch that one instead?” I said. “I need to rest, and my apartment and your show are at opposite ends of the city.”
He nodded. He was still looking at me sideways, his body twisted in the direction of the piano.
“You guys must be getting good,” I said.
“Yeah. Got a new drummer, a better one.”
“Cool.”
“How are things going for you, here, anyway?” he said. “Have I not asked that?”
I laughed politely. “I’m fine. Not really sure what I’m doing, as a writer—everyone else in the program is older and seems like they’ve already found their voice. But, you know. Figuring it out.”
He scoffed. “If anyone on this planet knows their voice, it’s you.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “It’s tricky, what I’m writing—not quite music journalism, not quite personal essay. You don’t understand.”
“Ah,” he said.
“That came out wrong.”
“Come here.”
He faced me fully and pulled me into a long, tight hug. I tried to relax my head against his chest, but I couldn’t find my usual nook. And the longer he held me the more I felt myself stiffen. It was all the layers of clothing, I thought, muting the effect of the hug—these coats render everyone so sexless, just hordes of blackened marshmallows marching through the concrete jungle. But I knew it wasn’t the coats. My body was petrified. It had made too many mistakes; it couldn’t be trusted.
And then, out of nowhere, I laughed. It was suddenly too much: that he had named me as the woman he loves in a song, that I had helped him finish the song without ever mentioning this fact, that I had responded by calling him a coward for never consummating this love—and that after all this, we were standing in a bar, just hugging awkwardly and small-talking.
He pulled back and looked down at me. “Is something funny?”
“Funny strange, yeah,” I said. “I mean, your chorus—that line—”
He spared me having to say it. “ ‘The woman I love’?”
I nodded.
He shuffled his feet. “Yeah, hah.” He looked right at me briefly, then away. “Sorry about that. It sounded good.”
“Right,” I said. A relief, really. It did sound good, just as “chips” and “margaritas” had sounded bad; you had to choose what worked for the song. I said goodbye and hauled my wooden limbs to a subway station.
A Case of You
Prepare to Bleed
I can’t remember ever hearing the song “Chelsea Hotel #2” by Leonard Cohen without knowing it was about Janis Joplin. I wonder how I’d feel about it if I could, just once, remove that knowledge. Cohen expressed regret later—not about the song itself, but about the indiscretion of naming Janis as its inspiration. But I suspect it wouldn’t matter who inspired it, Janis or just some unfamous gal: I would still despise this song.
I used to love it as much as everyone else. That painful blend of bravado and vulnerability that is always ascribed to Janis, brought to life in such vivid detail. I picture her adjusting her dress at the waist, for some reason, as Cohen observes her from his bed. Shaking her hair over her shoulder, maybe. Such life.
But on a recent listen, the last verse, in which Cohen dismisses Janis as one of countless fallen robins in his life, hit me like a gut punch. Seems a bit unnecessary, I thought. Even cruel. I reminded myself about dramatic irony, but I didn’t believe it—he seemed to mean what he said. Then I skipped back to the beginning of the track and heard the whole thing anew. Oh my god, I thought. This is what men want. For a woman to give them head without caring that they’re not handsome, that she’s late for her own show, that they won’t think of her often after this, even after her own spectacular death. “Chelsea Hotel #2” is what men want.
The only real compliment Cohen gives Janis in the song is that she doesn’t bother him with emotionality. She doesn’t whine about needing him, or not needing him, a presumably female tendency he refers to as “jivin’ around.” That this is about a once-in-a-generation genius who could sing two damn notes at the same time does make it sting a bit extra, but no woman deserves this as her biggest compliment. Because we’ve all done some “jivin’ around”: that endless game of trying to be heard without accidentally saying too much—of daring to express an emotion that might be subject to change, to a man who just wants you to service his parts.
The second verse makes me retch. He and his friends are spending their New York nights chasing money and flesh, a shuddery foreshadow of cokey ’80s stockbroker energy. Then he shrugs it all off with a truly confounding line: “That was called love for the workers in song / Probably still is for those of them left.” First there’s the problem of a poet-musician labeling himself and his friends “workers” as their limousine drivers hold up traffic on 23rd Street, sweating through their polyester uniforms. And the phrase “for those of them left” is just bizarre given that this song was written in the ’70s, a golden era for the industry of the singer-songwriter. Did Leonard Cohen anticipate our current age of nobody profiting from music but Ticketmaster and T-shirt manufacturers? I doubt it. More likely he saw himself as a precious dying breed: the true artist always on the verge of extinction. Retch.
Janis did not write a song about Cohen, that we know of. But she did give this revealing and depressingly relatable confession, published much later in Richard Avedon and Doon Arbus’s book, The Sixties: “Sometimes, you know, you’re with someone and you’re convinced that they have something to…to tell you…. So maybe nothing’s happening, but you keep telling yourself something’s happening. You know, innate communication. He’s just not saying anything. He’s moody or something. So you keep being there, pulling, giving, rapping, you know. And then, all of a sudden about four o’clock in the morning you realize that, flat ass, this motherfucker’s just lying there. He’s not balling me. I mean, that really happened to me. Really heavy, like slam-in-the-face it happened. Twice. Jim Morrison and Leonard Cohen.”
So that’s how Cohen’s room at the Chelsea Hotel felt for Janis. She wasn’t saying she needed him—maybe she didn’t know how; maybe nobody had ever taught her the fine, exhausting art of jivin’ around—but she did. She needed something from him, some kind of connection. And he was just lying there.
Janis may not have written about Cohen, but Joni did: in “A Case of You” she depicts him as a poison for which she has developed such tolerance that she can easily consume lethal amounts. Cohen’s own mother warns Joni about him, in the final verse: “She said, ‘Go to him, stay with him if you can / But be prepared to bleed.’ ” (“All the mothers warn me against their sons,” Joni told her biographer.)
