There would be no blues riffing around Mrs. Dyer. She was old and serious, and I thought she talked funny. It was a European accent, Mama said. Her house smelled strange from some kind of weird food. And she was the only one who had dared to torture me with scales, arpeggios, and all that pesky technique. She was just no fun at all.
Beethoven Sonata in G? I grumbled to myself. How about “Cantina Band” from Star Wars instead? I don’t think I like these Europeans. Old people can be so mean.
* * *
—
The entire walk to Mrs. Dyer’s was probably all of a half mile door to door, but the snow made it seem longer. Meanwhile, the thin bike tire began to occupy my imagination.
At first, the line was straight and controlled. Confident. But sometimes it would squiggle a bit and you could see the ghost of its second tire, revealing moments of uncertainty, loss of balance. A story was unfolding, I thought. I wanted to sneak a peek ahead, like glancing at the last page of a book, to see if I could spot the rider or any clues to their whereabouts, but I resisted the urge and kept my head down. This was the kind of entertainment a bored eleven-year-old could get lost in while nearly hypnotized by the sound of crunching snow or the rhythm of his own breathing. It reminded me of the sound at the end of a record before you lift the tonearm. In fact, the tire trail itself, as it passed beneath me, seemed like the groove of a record, and I was the needle. The needle doesn’t know what’s next. It just follows the groove and plays it as it comes.
The more clues I got about the rider, and where he’d stopped, the more interested I became. Maybe I knew him! Or maybe it wasn’t a him at all. Maybe I’d find myself awkwardly face-to-face with some girl! That would be awful. I never knew exactly what to say to girls. I slowed a bit.
* * *
—
I want to laugh at how old-fashioned and easily entertained I must sound to a kid today, who has a lot more seductive electronic shit competing for their attention. But a story is a story, in any era. And the best ones, I’ve always thought, develop from mysteries you want to solve. You just have to take the trip to find out, following a simple line with some clues along the way. I like to think of songs that way. The sequence of the music is like the line in the snow, or the groove in a record. You put your head down, or you put the needle down, and ride it from beginning to end. But something has to propel you forward. A song, like any story, has to hold your interest with clues that are musically paced and poetically ambiguous enough to spark the imagination.
I remember listening intently to “Hotel California” on the radio at about this age. I was sure it was about someone who had died. There were clues. It seemed someone was trapped somewhere, maybe in limbo? The beat, the repetition of the chords, the music itself, was the thread that kept me on the path. And as I followed, listening to the radio in the back seat of the car, I came upon this:
You can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave!
Man! Whoa! That was it! That blew my tiny mind! Of course, there’s nothing that special going on here—just some rock-and-roll poetry as interpreted by a child. But it’s operating outside the literal in a way that sparked my interest, more than it would have had it been stated clearly. It’s a five-minute trail of music with imagery scattered along the way.
I was now certain the singer of this song had passed into the nether world and was trapped in a place he couldn’t escape, called—I didn’t question why—the Hotel California. There was mention of heaven and hell. A spirit. Being greeted and led somewhere. He was witnessing some kind of ritual or play that demonstrated that evil can never be eradicated.
They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast
(By the way, I’ve always used “kill the beast” to cue a drummer to play the kind of fill that accompanies this line in “Hotel California.” “Right before the last chorus, just go ahead and ‘kill the beast’!” I consider that drum fill an institution, equal to the one in “In the Air Tonight” by Phil Collins.)
Who knows what the Eagles meant. The point is that what piqued my interest were the clues I was fed and the rate at which I was fed them. Guided by the line of the song’s groove, and interested by well-timed mysteries, I put together the pieces. Then, of course, there are a bunch of guitar solos with no words, which gave me time to chew on it all. All part of the beauty of a song.
Composers like Maurice Ravel have said that they actually composed one painful note at a time. He said, “I did my work slowly, drop by drop. I tore it out of me by pieces.” I understand that. Philip Glass says he likes to wait to see the tip of a ship come through the fog, while Bob Dylan said, “My best songs were written very quickly. Just about as much time as it takes to write it down is about as long as it takes to write it.” Stephen King puts a few characters in an impossible situation and he follows and reports on them as they find their way out. Whether it’s a sprint or a crawl, we’re always following something. Something simple. A line and some clues. We don’t have to know where it might lead. In fact, your song may end up a question mark, an unsolved mystery.
* * *
—
When I was a couple of blocks from Mrs. Dyer’s house, the line in the snow took a wide swerve to the left, then a jerk to the right, increasing in amplitude and desperation, then violently veering out of control, finally surrendering to gravity, and leaving only a big wide mess of snow, at which I now arrived. Ouch! Not such a subtle clue. I paused to take it in. Seeing a wipeout is a gift from God for any young boy! So, sure, I wanted to laugh, but I was also concerned. I’d made a little connection with whoever’s bike trail I’d been following. I now looked up through the blizzard—North Carolina’s idea of a blizzard—and I saw that the line picked up again, in defeat, I imagined. It was now accompanied by a set of sad footprints, trailing off as far as I could see down the road. Why were they sad? Because I said so.
I wished at that moment that I had a camera to take a picture, to capture it and share it. But would a photograph capture the story? Probably not. It would probably just look like snowy chaos on the ground. But there must be a way of framing this story, I thought. Then again, I didn’t actually know the story. I only had some clues. Oddly, that was part of the excitement.
I couldn’t wait to talk my parents’ ears off about it the rest of the afternoon. Maybe I would even add a few slightly fraudulent details, like how there was blood in the snow too? Or that I saved the day and helped the kid carry his/her bike home? The literal bare-bones story seemed pretty underwhelming, come to think of it. All I’d really seen was a trail, and the trail had become a mess, big deal. So why was it all so real for me? Why was it so much more interesting than if someone had said, Once upon a time there was a bike that went for a while and then fell down? Could I possibly create a story out of just this bike trail as exciting as the one I had followed in the snow, and what would it take to do so? I wondered.