When I look back upon my life, I will be most proud of two things: 1) my children (I am reasonably sure of this; don’t let me down, kids) and 2) that people actually danced at my wedding.
My wedding to Bessie was an exciting event in my life, an indelible moment to celebrate a meaningful union with people we loved—yeah, yeah, yeah, all that. Mostly what I cared about that humid August evening in upstate New York was whether or not people danced. If people had not danced, I’m not saying it would have jinxed the marriage…Okay, it would have jinxed the marriage.
Everybody has been to a wedding where the guests do not dance, or dance only for a few minutes before wandering off the floor, never to return, and it is a special kind of cruel awkwardness. There is the happy new couple’s pleading, doleful efforts to get people onto the floor—C’mon, everybody, who doesn’t love Christina Aguilera?; there are the sad admonishments of the wedding DJ—How about a little more Christina Aguilera?; and there is the wedding band, hired at not insignificant expense, which knows an alarming amount of Christina Aguilera. There are the moments when you look out upon the floor and there is no one on it except for a second cousin who has had too much white wine. Dancing at a wedding is a hard thing to screw up, but somehow it gets screwed up all the time.
I was not going to leave this to chance. I spent hours and hours developing a perfect, dance-guaranteeing playlist. I worried about the music more than any other part of the wedding. I did not pay attention to invitations or RSVPs. Had the table arrangements been human skulls or the caterer served only stale walnuts and hot cocoa, I would not have noticed. As Bessie’s cousin, Sam, officiated at our ceremony, my brain warred over two competing thoughts. My wife-to-be indeed looked beautiful. And, did the playlist have enough Michael Jackson in the second hour?
This is not a trivial matter. You’re going to go to a wedding soon, or have your own wedding, or have a breakup and a new wedding that you don’t even know you’re going to have, and you’re going to need this advice:
★ Stating the obvious here, but wedding guests want to dance. Like, really shake it. Your Aunt Claire wants to eat two entrées and three pieces of cake and she’s determined she can burn it all off with an hour and thirty minutes of nonstop wild-Aunt-Claire dancing. Do not deny her this privilege. You can hire a string quartet or a bluegrass banjo, but unless those guys can play a rousing rendition of “Brick House,” send them packing to their rental van by 6:00 P.M.
★ Yes, you’re playing “Brick House.” Your wedding is not a moment to be a music snob; it is not a monument to your dense collection of B-sides and obscurities. You have the rest of your life to impress everyone with your knowledge of Berlin art rock and the majesty of Camper Van Beethoven. Today is not that day.
★ Live wedding bands fall into three categories: good, bad, and so-bad-it’s-good. A good wedding band has mastery of its instruments and the principles of crowd entertainment and knows James Brown and a little Donna Summer. A bad wedding band might know all that stuff but insists on playing some of its own compositions, which will clear out the dance floor faster than a fire alarm. A so-bad-it’s-good wedding band plays a slow and a fast version of “Careless Whisper” by Wham!
★ Sometimes a so-bad-it’s-good wedding band is the right choice. Especially if the lead singer can’t actually sing but wears a lime-colored tux and loves, loves, loves Lionel Richie.
★ If you hire a wedding DJ, be careful in your selection. Make sure he (or she) is open to what you want. You hired him; he should listen to you. If he brushes off your requests and says, “I’ve got this,” please know: he does not have this. He is hoping you will like the same old Katy Perry and Electric Slide and Eric Clapton singing “Wonderful Tonight” as much as every other couple does. If a DJ rolls his eyes when you say you need to hear some Kool & the Gang, pick someone else.
★ Everybody loves Kool & the Gang at a wedding. It’s why Kool & the Gang was invented.
★ I know somebody who had the actual Kool & the Gang as the band at her wedding, which I didn’t even think was legal. This is known among reasonable people as the Greatest Wedding of All Time.
★ Be careful about soliciting requests from your guests. It’s tricky. People like to make requests, but if you’re not careful, you’re dancing to five Phil Collins songs in an hour and then Cousin Stu drags the whole thing to a halt with “A Horse with No Name.”
★ I am not saying you need to rent a smoke machine for the dance floor at your wedding, but think about it: how many more times in your life are you going to have a socially acceptable opportunity to rent a smoke machine?
★ “Brick House.” Aunt Claire is asking. Come on.
★ Here is my basic wedding music strategy: follow a timeline. Start with the older stuff for your older guests. This doesn’t mean you have to play Shostakovich or Hoagy Carmichael, but play something recognizable to somebody who may have voted for Nixon. Motown works in this regard. So does “Twist and Shout.” Little Stevie Wonder and adult Stevie Wonder. The Four Tops. Your older wedding guests can move around for twenty minutes and call it a night. That’s all they want. Then, ever so softly, glide into the present. James Brown. Jackson 5. Bee Gees. Prince. Madonna. Wind your way up to the inevitable onslaught of Katy Perry, Beyoncé, and Taylor Swift—don’t be a jerk, everyone wants to hear it. Throw in the occasional hit anthem. George Michael’s “Freedom 90.” “Rock Lobster” by the B-52s. “We Are Family” by Sister Sledge. You can play “Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, but be warned, you can drive halfway across Pennsylvania in the time it takes to play the full version of “Rapper’s Delight.”
★ By the end of the night, the dance floor is just your drunkest friend dancing by him- or herself to “I Will Survive.” (Nobody actually dances with a partner during “I Will Survive”; it’s just a series of solo, triumphant interpretive dances.)
★ As long as I can remember, music has been essential to me. Isn’t it to everyone? I am fortunate to be old enough to have learned about Bob Dylan by finding my dad’s vinyl edition of Blood on the Tracks. I also am lucky to be young enough to know how to get iTunes to work without having to ring a bell in an assisted living facility. I can recall, vividly, standing in my friend Philip’s kitchen as his brother, Wilson (yes, Philip had a brother named Wilson; yes, they have heard all the Wilson Phillips jokes), ran down the stairs with a tape cassette cued to RUN-DMC’s “Rock Box,” which sounded like it came from outer space (and it still does, brilliantly). I remember walking into a stereo store on the second floor of the Garage mall in Harvard Square and watching a guy remove a compact disc from a plastic jewel case and ask me if I wanted to listen to “The Future.” I am old enough to have recently left a crate of “The Future” out on my front stoop with a sign that says FREE.
★ I am suspicious of any music criticism that sounds like nostalgic geezery—In my day bands actually played their instruments, yadda yadda and so on—but something has definitely been lost with the demise of record stores. I know there are a few record stores left, some really great ones, but most of them have been swept away by the Internet and digital music and it’s a serious loss. Record stores didn’t simply sell music, they created an environment that drove the fascination and helped create taste. Walking into a really good record store felt like an audition—for you. The record store wasn’t trying to build your loyalty as a customer; you were trying to convince the record store that you were worthy of its loyalty. I used to worry about what I would wear to shop at the record store. Generally I detest any kind of haughtiness that verges on intimidation, but the kind of haughtiness practiced by good record stores had a certain utility. I am pretty sure that without it I would not have owned any Elvis Costello when I was thirteen.
★ Everyone’s a secret music snob, but I am also distrustful of a person who doesn’t appreciate the particular genius of super-duper cheesy pop, like “The Safety Dance” by Men Without Hats. “Safety Dance” may not be “Yesterday,” but it will live forever. Every time you hear it in the car, you will crank it and sing it at the top of your lungs. This is underappreciated brilliance. You can name a dozen songs by U2, but you’ve never seen a car of teenage girls driving down the boulevard cranking and screaming out a U2 song. Ever.
★ Everybody has embarrassing music on their phone. And listens to it much more than they claim to listen to it. Everybody.
★ I find it very hard to get mad about the “state” of pop music. I feel people have been mad about the state of pop music my entire life. This is not to say there are songs or trends I don’t get, or like, or even have the capacity to listen to. But it is to say that at this point, pop music is not intended for me. The whole business of pop music, in fact, is meant to appeal to something that’s the opposite of me—someone younger, fresher, more eager. This is how it works. When you were thirteen years old, you did not say to yourself, Wow, I’d like to buy this record, but first I need to know what all the fortysomething dads think.
★ No matter how much you know about music, somebody will always know more. This is okay. You don’t need to know the B-side to every Metallica single; you don’t need to know where Morrissey was born. There’s always going to be somebody who’s a bigger fan, who’s more hardcore, who’s more of a lunatic. Somebody who saw them when, before they were ruined. This is mostly nonsense and not worth obsessing over.
★ Davyhulme. Morrissey was born in Davyhulme, in Lancashire, United Kingdom.
★ A bunch of years ago I was assigned to write a story about the teen group the Jonas Brothers, and this was my first exposure to the innards of teen pop, save for a few interactions more than a decade prior with stalkerish New Kids on the Block fans. At the point I caught up with them, the Jonas Brothers were pretty much the biggest thing on the planet for girls under sixteen; they played reasonably likable pop-rock music that sounded pleasant on a Ferris wheel or an escalator at the mall. But there was an odd purgatory to their success—very few late-teenaged or adult music fans took them seriously. If you saw a person over twenty-one there, chances were they were grumpily chaperoning someone (except for moms. There were some really crazy Jonas Brothers mom fans). But around the band was this anxious whirl of urgency, because people who’d been in the teen pop business for a long time knew that the audience would eventually revolt against them, that this had happened to everyone from Frankie Valli to Shaun Cassidy to those New Kids, and it was destined to happen to the Jonas Brothers too, no matter how gamely they talked about their musical maturation or transitioning to an adult audience or freeing themselves from their prepubescent admirers. In the course of pop history it had been discovered that the period of time from breakthrough to rejection was approximately thirty-six months. Within three years the Jonas Brothers’ rabid, loyal audience would turn on them completely. This was an absurd notion at the time—here they were, selling out Madison Square Garden—and yet sure enough, it happened. Almost thirty-six months on the dot. And it underlined the disposability of pop, that you can’t take it too seriously because nearly all of it fades away.
★ If you’ve obsessed over music, you’ve surely obsessed over what music to play in the bedroom—you know, when it’s an opportunity for the nighttime romances. (“The nighttime romances” is one of those safely neutered terms that cheeky married couples use to describe sex. It also sounds like the next bestseller from Nicholas Sparks.) What you do in your own private business is your own private business, of course, and I do not have deeply strong opinions on the matter other than to say, No Al Green, no Sade. This is not a slight upon either Al Green, who is inarguably one of the great voices in recording history, or the extraordinary Sade, who is kind of the chill female Al Green. It’s just that both have become such cliché bedroom standards that it’s impossible to put them on in the bedroom without looking like you just stripped down to a G-string and affixed a single red rose to your happy parts. If you bring someone back to your apartment and put on Al Green or Sade, he or she is completely allowed to double up on the floor and laugh like a hyena. I’m not saying you have to be counterintuitive—you don’t have to make love to whale songs, or This American Life—but just take it easy on Al and Sade. I am fairly sure Al and Sade would have my back on this.
★ When we’re young and dramatic and have big breakups, we tell ourselves we will never be able to listen to specific artists or songs—That’s it for me and the Captain & Tennille, never again—but by the time you are married with kids you’ve forgotten what all those supposedly hurtful songs and artists are. It is true that everyone over forty has some vague feelings about getting dumped when they hear anything by the still-beloved Tears for Fears.
★ I am mixed on the generation of singing shows—American Idol, The Voice, and so on. On one hand, they’re celebrating actual talent—they’re not another reality show about a blended family of meth-cooking snake kidnappers. Many of the contestants are truly gifted, and a handful have gone on to find actual, deserved fame. But I worry that they’re selling one very static version of singing, which is the extreme, hammy, grandiose version. It’s hilarious to think what these shows would do if, say, a twenty-two-year-old Joni Mitchell showed up on the set. Nice, pretty voice, Joni—would you mind trying to sing a little more like you’re being chased down an alley by a truck?
★ Concerts kind of suck now, because of money. Growing up, rock concerts felt slightly edgy and dangerous, like there was a 70 percent chance you’d see someone in the arena bathroom combing his hair with a knife. Now concerts have been corporatized and sold out to the highest bidder. This is all of our faults, actually; because the business of selling music has cratered so badly, it’s put enormous pressure on live shows to be a profit center. The people who sit closest to the front aren’t the biggest fans; they’re just people who could pay the most, or know somebody who could pay the most. I am saying this as if I went to a lot of cool concerts back in the day, but you should know the first concert I went to was Sting, which is about as edgy and dangerous as a cider festival.
★ Until kids come along, there are not a lot of reasons to pay attention to children’s music, or children’s musicians, and I am not so far removed from being childless that I don’t remember my distaste for the genre and its practitioners. This hostility vanishes upon parenthood. By now I have become accustomed to the mild grades of difference between Kidz Bop and Radio Disney. I have become obsessive, to the point of groupiness, with the kiddie band called Karen K & the Jitterbugs, authors of the hits “(I Woke Up in a) Fire Truck” and “Pancakes for Dinner.” (Please tell me you know the words to “Pancakes for Dinner.”) It’s easy to look down on children’s musicians because it seems so easy, singing about trivial things for a rapt audience, but 1) these are not minor things; pancakes will grow to have a much bigger role in your life than your junior high school girlfriend, and 2) if you watch an audience of kids around the age of two, you know they are anything but rapt.
★ When your child arrives, the books tell you it’s important to sing to him or her, especially at bedtime, and you have visions of these wonderful parental duets, like vintage-era Carly Simon and James Taylor, sending your child into a long, blissful sleep. But what if neither parent is a singer? And what if by “not a singer” I mean can’t sing—like, imagine a person singing, and then imagine a person getting his or her big toe stuck in an escalator and yowling for help. This is what our children must endure. Neither Bessie nor I can sing. We do not sound like Carly Simon and James Taylor. We sound like a pair of cats stuck on a roof.
★ And yet this is okay. It is not dangerous. It’s still you. It’s your voice. And there is something very natural, almost chemical about the way your child reacts to your voice, how familiar and comforting it is, regardless of whether you can hold a perfect C or…sound like a cat stuck on a roof. Do not attempt any vocal pyrotechnics. Hold your lane. You are not Aretha Franklin or Otis Redding.
★ Every parent has his or her closers, the songs you use to seal the ZZZs at bedtime. In our house, “Michael, Row Your Boat Ashore” is a closer, the encore. That’s our “Born to Run.” We don’t play a show without singing it at the end. We’ve occasionally brought it out for a second encore. I used to sing “Wheels on the Bus,” but my wife is convinced that “Wheels on the Bus” is too energizing a song—that there’s something about those wheels, and once they start going round and round, Jesse is up pogoing in the crib like he’s had four espressos. I don’t know what it is about “Wheels on the Bus.” At 3:00 P.M. on a weekday, somebody needs to sing me “Wheels on the Bus.”
★ I have sung in public once in my adult life. At my wedding. Yes, the same wedding where I obsessed over the playlist. It was during the reception, in lieu of a toast. I didn’t want to give a toast. Instead I sang a song by the Lemonheads called “The Outdoor Type” because it reminded me of my relationship with Bessie. When Bessie and I first met, I was not exactly someone who spent a lot of time, well, outside. (Early in our relationship we went on a hike and ended up having a ginormous fight because it was getting dark and I was scared and I wanted to turn around before reaching the top of the climb. Bessie, who would sooner sleep in a bear cave than not reach the top of a climb, nearly broke up with me on the spot.) Here is an example of the “Outdoor Type” lyrics:
I can’t go away with you on a rock climbing weekend.
What if something’s on TV, and it’s never shown again?
I did not sing it especially well or movingly, but I tried. I tried effectively enough to be persuasive, which was all that was really necessary. I didn’t need to arm-tackle the song. I was not brilliant, or in tune, or even close to in tune, but the effort was there. People who were there still talk about it. Music said something words could not. My wife still watches a video of it when she needs a reminder of why she married me, which is fairly often.
And then we went to the floor and played “Brick House,” hell yes. People danced until 4:00 A.M.