I've been thinking about music and dance this week, as my sister, Julie Johnson, has been rehearsing for a November show she's doing with the dancer Tamara Ober; we've been talking about how music affects the kinds of dances that dancers make, and vice-versa.
When I was newly twenty-one I went to see live bar music for the first time at Whiskey Junction in Minneapolis. I was a student at Augsburg College and I was about to fall in love with a transfer student who had a girlfriend in the Navy. He was a drummer and as good at it as I'd ever seen anyone be at anything.
He came along, if not that first night then soon, and was a part of the feeling I had the first time I held a dark rich beer in my sweaty hand and danced to a young funk/R&B band called Wallace Hartley & The Titanics. I had never heard anything like it, I wanted to scream, I hadn’t ever known that life was going to be so good. My sister and friends and I thought that our dancing and our screams had so much to do with the show that one of us tried to hug the singer, Andra Suchy (more of a country singer now, and a frequent guest on A Prairie Home Companion), in the bathroom.
Part of the spell was that the music created a kind of movement new to me, too. The same thing would happen a few years later when I first heard the fast and rootsy White Iron Band at Five Corners (now the Nomad) and started stomping around. The now defunct Wallace Hartley & The Titanics (named after the bandleader on the ship), had a big fat treble-y sound, no timidity in any of the ten of them, guitars, bass, percussion, blasting saxophones and trombones (Toby Schaan, Pat Phillips, Zac Swanson, Daryk Narum, Brian Lydeen, Matt Darling, Todd Stewart, Jim Erickson). They all played exceptionally well and their sound was so smart and clever and bright and yet when the words were painful Andra and Joel Schaan (now playing with the New Primitives) wailed into the rafters on songs like “If I Stay" and "Get Enough," which they sometimes played back-to-back at the end of the night, an epic kind of fifteen minutes long when one was sappy and drunk. I hadn’t liked grunge music much, popular my last few years of high school. I liked Wallace Hartley so much better because this is the kind of person I wanted to be and how I wanted my life to sound and how I wanted to move through it. You could be brilliant and in tip-top shape for performance but also spectacularly, stupidly passionate.
You could also find a sound that helped you bear all of it, by being true to it. This was how I wanted my writing to sound. The passion should always be nuanced, so that you could believe in it; if you couldn’t believe in it, you wouldn’t really feel it, and it could never help a reader feel she wasn’t alone. Around the same time, I discovered Joyce’s The Dead in Ron Palosaari's fiction class. Gabriel is stricken when he discovers that not only does his wife Gretta’s tender and melancholy mood not have to do with him, but with a lover she knew when she was young; and not only did the lover die from standing out in the rain pining for her, but, worst of all, he sang while he was doing it. How can one compete with the kind of nostalgia that has been set to music?:
“Gabriel felt humiliated by the failure of his irony and by the evocation of this figure from the dead, a boy in the gasworks. While he had been full of memories of their secret life together, full of tenderness and joy and desire, she had been comparing him in her mind with another. A shameful consciousness of his own person assailed him. He saw himself as a ludicrous figure, acting as a pennyboy for his aunts, a nervous well-meaning sentimentalist, orating to vulgarians and idealising his own clownish lusts …”
Throughout the novella Joyce thrusts up against one another two kinds of realities: the spontaneous, welling bursts of emotion the characters feel when the music is just right and presses a vulnerable place in their hearts, and the day-to-day details that are painful, dull, unlofty. When Freddy Malins, a catch in his voice, tells Aunt Julia, “I was just telling my mother … I never heard you sing so well, never. No I never heard your voice so good as it is to-night. Now! Would you believe that now? That’s the truth. Upon my word and honour that’s the truth. I never heard your voice sound so fresh and so … so fresh and clear, never” – Freddy is sincere, but the fact that he is dead drunk and that ancient Aunt Julia is singing a song called “Arrayed for the Bridal” bring a kind of grounding and necessary irony to the transcendent moments, highlighting their rarity.
At one point Gabriel tries to fake such a moment, when, in order to avoid getting cross-examined by Miss Ivors, “he trie[s] to cover his agitation by taking part in the dance with great energy.” But soon we’ll see enough of the real thing to know that this never works.
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