HELLO AND WELCOME to Chowder’s Poetry Hopalong. I’m your host and in-home chiropodist, Paul Chowder. We’re in my kitchen, and I’m talking into a seven-hundred-dollar microphone. My ex-girlfriend is probably going to have a major operation, and my neighbor’s mother has died. So that’s what’s happening, and it’s serious business.
Out of worry or trouble or despair must come some enlightenment. Maybe that’s what a chord progression can teach us. Out of the shuffling mess of dissonance comes a return to pax, to the three-note triad of something basic and pure and unable to be argued with. Chong: the chord. E flat major. A flat major. C sharp minor. Chords where only the middle finger is down on the flat ground of the white keys, while up on top the pinky maybe can’t resist adding an impish hint of misdirection—an added seventh or ninth. These are just fancy terms for willful blurring—they’re like the times when the attractive magician’s helper in the leotard disappears into the box and the magician plunges all his sharp swords in, and then she reappears with outstretched arms, smiling her E flat major smile, unscathed after her chordal perils. Debussy’s preludes go all over the place, but they’re tonal—they always come back home.
Music notation relies on things called sharps and things called flats. A sharp looks sharp and spiky—it’s the pound sign on the typewriter, the one above the number 3. A flat looks melted, like a droopy wasp’s abdomen with a line sticking up from it. The round side of the flat symbol points to the right on the stave, whereas the water-balloon notes all point to the left, looking back at where they’ve been. If you see a sharp printed in front of a note, you know to look sharp and shift that note’s pitch up by a half step, whereas if you see a flat in front of a note, you know to droop down flat a half step. So if you see a good-boy G on the stave with a wasp in front of it, that’s a G flat. That’s chess notation. It works, and we can thank the monks and the madrigalists for it. But when you’re making up a melody, you don’t think about sharps and flats. You wave them away. You don’t even necessarily think about chord progressions.
There’s a famous chord progression that goes, in Roman numerals, I, V, vi, IV, I. Meaning that if you’re in C major it begins with a major chord based on the first note of the scale, C, then goes to a major chord built on the fifth note of the scale, G, then to a minor chord on the sixth note, A, then to a major chord on the fourth note, F, then back to a C chord. Schumann used this chord progression, Brahms used it, Elton John used it, the Beatles used it in “Let It Be,” Jason Mraz used it in “I’m Yours,” and Alphaville and Mr. Hudson and Jay-Z used it in “Forever Young,” and on and on. A group called the Axis of Awesome made a medley of many songs based on these chords—fifty million people have watched versions of the Axis of Awesome medley on YouTube. It’s worth watching.
You may think you have something extremely useful when you know how to play these four chords, and you do. But when you’re at the point of making up a tune that’s never been heard before, and finding words for it to shoulder, then knowing the chords doesn’t help that much. You still have to feel your way singingly through.
• • •
ROZ’S CELLPHONE WENT right to voicemail, so I called her home number. Her doctor friend Harris answered. I recognized his voice from the radio. I said, “Hello, this is Paul Chowder. Is that—Harris?”
“Yes,” said Harris.
“Hi, Harris. I admire the work you do.”
“Thanks. I’ve read your poems. Roz gave me one of your collections.”
“Really?” I said. “Which one?”
“I think it had a blue cover. Or maybe it was orange. Or green. Was it green?”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said.
“Roz is at a medical appointment right now—can I give her a message?”
“I just wanted to say hello.”
“I’ll tell her you called.”
“Is she doing all right?”
“Yes, I think she is,” said Harris.
Early the next morning it was misty and humid. I went to Planet Fitness and parked next to an empty beer bottle. Inside I listened to another Sodajerker podcast on my headphones. The two hosts, both songwriters with strong Liverpool accents, interviewed a fast-talking writer-producer named Narada Michael Walden. I’d never heard of him, but it turned out that he’d been part of big hits for Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin, after drumming in exotic time-signatures for the Mahavishnu Orchestra. He cowrote Jermaine Stewart’s “We Don’t Have to Take Our Clothes Off.” He came up with Aretha Franklin’s “Who’s Zoomin’ Who” by interviewing her on the phone. Aretha said that when she goes to a club and she sees an attractive man in the corner, she checks him out while he checks her out and she’s like, “Who’s zoomin’ who?” That became the song.
The Sodajerkers asked Narada Michael Walden if he liked working with women. He said yes, because they’re beautiful, with beautiful smiles and nice smells—but because they’re divas, with precious living hearts, sometimes they call for special treatment. For instance Whitney Houston. Once Walden was working with Whitney after she and Eddie Murphy split up. He’d also produced a song with Eddie Murphy, “Put Your Mouth on Me.” So he knew Eddie. He said to Whitney Houston: “Do you want me to go beat up Eddie?” After that, he said, Whitney knew Narada really cared about her, and she sang her loving life out for him in the studio and produced jewels and diamonds of melodic elaboration.
I listened to all this on the elliptical trainer. Walden said he began as a drummer and he still thinks like one. The drummer in him, he said, brings the funk out. “Drumming is so raw. Brutal. Snot. It’s a thing that happens that you can’t get by playing the pretty keyboard. The people who stay popular year after year are funk people who understand rhythm.” Why was that? Because people want to dance. “Even look at a chick like Barbra Streisand, who I adore,” he said. She didn’t have a huge pop hit till she left her Broadway singing style behind and started emphasizing the syncopation: “And we got nothing to be guil—tee—of.” What Walden is always trying for is a hit. “A lot of people don’t talk about that, but I will.” To get a hit, he said, you have to be totally committed. “You have to put your hit hat on.”
Shit, my hit hat! Forget the misery hat, where’s my hit hat? I wanted one. I did a round of the upper-arm machines wanting to write a hit song called “Why Are You Fat?” I have the beginnings of an unpleasant potbelly and I hate it. You’re fat, I wanted to say, because you are a lazy fat fuck. You eat bags of nut snacks that make you fat. You eat peanut butter crackers that make you fat. You sit on your donkey ass smoking Fausto cigars and drinking coffee and eating stale shortbread cookies rather than going outside and mowing the weeds or taking a walk with the dog or eating a carrot and writing a poem. You’re fat because the corn in food is so ridiculously cheap, and you’re too fucking lazy to read the ingredients to see that they’ve put twelve powdered poisons in there. And you’re fat because you’re morally fat. You haven’t taken time to figure out what’s right. You don’t do enough for other people. You failed to have a child.
But at least you’re not fat from taking antidepressants. Roz did a powerful show on weight gain and antidepressants. People start taking Zoloft or Paxil and they blimp out—they put on forty pounds of belly fat immediately. Plus they lose their joy in sex, and they’re addicted to the pills, and if they try to go off them because they don’t like being fat and want to have a few solid orgasms, they experience awful neural symptoms called “brain zaps” or “brain shivers.” Ugh.
Was there a hit song there? “Brain shivers, I’ve got the chills. Brain shivers, can’t get off the pills.” Possibly, with the right bassline.
• • •
I WENT OUT to the parking lot and discovered that I’d locked my keys in the Kia. I could see them dangling below the steering wheel. That’s the second time this year that I’ve locked myself out of my car, plus three dead-battery jumps. It’s pure absentmindedness, fat-headedness, and there’s no excuse for it. I called AAA and told the woman my problem. She said, “I can help you with that.” However, because I’d used up all my free service calls it would cost me forty dollars. I said I understood. She said the truck would be there in half an hour. Triple A works just the way real insurance should work, pooling many payers to help out unfortunate fools like me with their infrequent crises. Health insurance can’t work like that, because, as Prince said, we’re all going to die. Health insurance is doomed, because everyone is doomed and everyone can’t pay for everyone’s needless colonoscopy and preventive polyp removal. This and Obama’s wars may bring down the government. If a collapse comes, followed by hyperinflation, we’ll suffer and get thin and there won’t be so many academic departments of creative writing. Please just ignore this tiresome politicizing.
I went back inside. It happened to be bagel morning at Planet Fitness, and the bagels were going fast. I love onion bagels, and everything bagels, even though it hurts my jaw to chew them. They help me think, and I was famished. I toasted an everything bagel after hacking it apart with a plastic knife, and while I was waiting for it to brown I listened to Whitney Houston sing “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” I carved out a generous wodge of cream cheese and spread it around and went outside to lean against my trunk. I chewed and listened with awe and an odd kind of patriotism to Whitney’s Super Bowl performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” while I admired the unusual Portsmouth mist. The best everything bagels come frozen from New York City, but these were quite good. What makes an everything bagel great, even better than a cigar, is the almost burned bits of onion. The crunchy, sweet, bitter bits of tiny onion asteroids taste beyond-words good. They help a lot if you’ve drunk too much Yukon Jack the night before, but I’m finding that they help even if you haven’t. I haven’t had anything to drink in more than a month and I feel great. Caramelization is the great achievement of cooking.
I sent a text to Roz. “Just hoping you’re feeling okay—also sad news, Nan’s mother (next-door neighbor Nan) died.” Nan and Roz hadn’t been close friends, but they liked each other.
The Triple A man arrived at 7:51. The radio was going in his truck before he shut off the motor. He used a technique I hadn’t seen before. With a rubber bulb he inflated the gap between the door and the car and then he angled a long metal tool in. But instead of trying to get a purchase on the clicker’s indentation to pry it upward, he reached farther. I thought he was going to try to open the door by pulling on the door handle, and I said, “I’m afraid this isn’t a car that unlocks automatically when you pull the inside handle.”
“I’m going to unroll the window,” he said drily.
“That’s brilliant,” I said. I looked in through the window on the other side and watched the clawed chicken foot of his metal tool pushing and pulling the window handle around. It took him a long time, but eventually he got the window open enough to get his arm in, and then he pulled on the lock and opened the door.
“Fantastic,” I said.
He tapped his head. “You’ve got to keep thinking.”
He was a young kid with a beard, retro-hippie-ish but with an official AAA shirt on, recently graduated from the University of New Hampshire. I flipped open my wallet and gave him a twenty from the back of my stash, where the twenties usually hide. I couldn’t afford it, but it’s important to give credit where credit is due.
“What kind of songs do you listen to when you’re driving?” I asked.
“The Cowboy Junkies,” he said. “They’ve got a song called ‘Common Disaster.’ Also I like Ben Taylor. He’s the son of James Taylor and Carly Simon.”
“Thanks for telling me.”
I scribbled “Common Disaster” and “Ben Taylor” on my folded-up piece of paper. Then I wrote “everything bagel” and “You’ve got to keep thinking”—maybe they could be songs.