(13) Kate Bush, “Running Up That Hill”
outdueled
(1) Bill Medley & Jennifer Warnes, “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life”
277-265
and will play in the elite 8
Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls close @ 9am Arizona time on 3/21/23.
SEARCHING THROUGH EVERY OPEN DOOR: JAMES CHARLESWORTH ON “(I’VE HAD) THE TIME OF MY LIFE”
Bill Medley is not a one-hit wonder.
I begin with this clear and obvious statement of fact not because it is a drum I intend to beat incessantly throughout this essay (though I do plan to whack it a couple good ones), nor do I start here because of some beef I have with the committee over the eighty-two-year-old Righteous Brother’s inclusion in the roster of this tournament.
Nope, I’m admitting this here at the outset because it is a concession pertinent to other assertions I intend to make. Namely: that despite the aforementioned incontrovertible truth—and, for that matter, the corresponding verity of the non-one-hit-wonderness of Jennifer Warnes (it is, after all, a duet, people)—the number one seed in the top-right quadrant of your tournament bracket, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life,” which climbed to number one on the Billboard Hot 100 charts in November of 1987 and took home an Oscar, a Golden Globe, and a Grammy the following year, nevertheless deserves your vote in this contest of Fadness.
But the reasons for this have little to do with Medley—and to get there will take a little bit (okay, maybe a lot) of explaining.
I. “LET’S JUST GET THIS PIECE OF SHIT OVER WITH”
In case you’re not already aware, the story reads a bit like a Hollywood script, complete with down-on-their-luck characters and flawed protagonists chasing dreams into dead ends. There are rising tensions and narrative ups and downs, moments when all seems lost and dramatic last-minute salvations—and perhaps there is no better place to begin telling the tale of “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” than with songwriter Franke Previte, who was forty years old with $100 in his checking account when he got the phone call that changed his life.
“Franke, it’s Jimmy. How ya doin’?”
The eponymous former front man of the pop rock band Franke and the Knockouts—who’d achieved fleeting notoriety when their 1981 song “Sweetheart” rose to Number 10 on the Billboard charts and then was promptly forgotten by history—Previte had been selling used cars out of his driveway in New Jersey to make ends meet for the past couple years since the Knockouts broke up. He was therefore thrilled to receive this phone call out of the blue from the president of his former record company—his excitement waned, however, once Jimmy Ienner got around to the reason for his call.
“I’d like you to do a song for a little movie I’m working on called Dirty Dancing.”
Oh no, Previte thought, his flattened palm hitting his forehead. Poor Jimmy’s doing pornos.
This was late summer 1986, and though Ienner had not in fact resorted to doing pornos, he was likely privately regretting the agreement he’d recently signed with a small-time video distribution company out of Stamford, CT, called Vestron Pictures, who—in hopes of saving themselves from bankruptcy—had made the rash decision to begin producing low-budget movies for straight-to-video release. The first script chosen for this endeavor was one that had been floating around Hollywood for years. For a time MGM had held the rights, but a series of managerial regime changes had put the script by the largely unknown screenwriter, Eleanor Bergstein, in production hell for half a decade before MGM finally unloaded it. When Vestron made their offer, Bergstein had been happy to accept, even if it meant a budget of less than 5 million dollars at a time when most films ran budgets of 15-25 million—even if it meant filming not in the Catskill Mountains of upstate New York, where Bergstein had spent her summers as a youth and where she had set her largely autobiographical screenplay, but in the cheapest location the scouts had been able to find and book. Specifically: a former boy scout camp in rural western North Carolina called the Lake Lure Lodge.
Of course, Franke Previte was not yet privy to any of this backstory, and Jimmy Ienner wasn’t inclined to disabuse him of any delusions that might already have begun to bloom in the former Knockout’s noggin. When Previte, grasping for excuses, or perhaps being coy, said he didn’t have time, Ienner told him to make time. “This movie’s gonna change your life,” he said.
“That’s the good news,” Ienner continued. “The bad news is the song has to be seven minutes long. And I need it in two weeks.”
*
“To tell you the truth,” Patrick Swayze would say later of the days he and other cast and crew members spent at the Lake Lure Lodge that late summer of ‘86 filming Dirty Dancing, “at that point we all hated the movie, so we were like, ‘let’s just get this piece of shit over with.’”
By the time Jimmy Ienner placed his phone call to Franke Previte, a litany of problems had already befallen the underfunded production. A relentless deluge of rain had caused heavy flooding to block the roads to the set; a principle cast member had fallen ill and had to be recast; a rehearsal space had been burglarized and, among the cast and crew, there’d been a serious fall from a ladder, a broken toe, a fractured wrist, and several severe bouts of food poisoning. When the rain finally let up it was followed by a sudden cold snap, then a heat wave that sent temperatures over 100 degrees for a week straight, the interior of the Lake Lure Lodge where the final dance scene was being filmed rising to well over 120 degrees, causing ten professional dancers to pass out in twenty minutes on one particularly taxing day.
It was into this maelstrom of misfortune that 26-year-old Jennifer Grey had stepped off a plane from JFK, fresh off a week of waitressing shifts. For this, her first starring role after gaining minor notoriety as a supporting cast member in the previous summer’s biggest hit, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Grey had been paid a flat rate of $50,000. She’d also brought with her a justified disdain toward her co-star, Swayze, based on his behavior during their time filming together a few years previously on Red Dawn, when he had captained the mostly male cast in a midnight hazing ritual consisting of an M80 duct taped to Grey’s hotel room door and set off.
So who could blame her, really, for not trusting Swayze enough to perform the difficult “lift” maneuver that was Bergstein’s script’s culminating moment? Sure, it was a move Swayze, a former professional ballet dancer, had done thousands of times, but that did not mean Grey was enthusiastic to trust the former firecracker wielder to be standing open-armed as she raced across the hardwood floor of the Lake Lure Lodge and leaped into the air, aiming for the chandeliers, at which point he would supposedly grasp her at the waist and deadlift her, balancing her above his head while she held out her arms, crossed her ankles, and pointed her toes. And so, despite the urging of fellow cast members and crew, despite the encouragement of her dance instructor, Kenny Ortega, despite the knowledge that at some point they have to film this scene, Grey will not even rehearse it.
And yet even that is still not the biggest problem. Because although Eleanor Bergstein has already selected nearly the entire soundtrack—composed mostly of old standbys of the 1960s—she is still searching for a song to play over the final scene, something that will evoke the past while still feeling contemporary to the current age. Every night, after long days of shooting, she gathers Swayze, Grey, Ortega, and director Emile Ardolino in her hotel room and pops recently submitted demos into a boombox. “We didn’t like anything,” she’ll say later of the first 149 demos they received. “They were terrible songs … like listening to a drink of water.”
You can see where this is going. As the final day of filming in North Carolina approaches, the heat wave persists. Tension mounts. But in New Jersey, a down-on-his-luck songwriter is hard at work—and it is on the penultimate day of the lease at the Lake Lure Lodge, precisely two weeks after Jimmy Ienner’s phone call, that salvation arrives like a campy first plot point in our saga. A padded mailing envelope is torn open, and a cassette tape containing the very last of the 150 demos they have received is snapped into the sound system. For a moment all is still. And then into the sweaty gloom of the Lake Lure Lodge comes a sleek high-pitched male tenor. (Not Bill Medley’s indelible baritone—that will come later.) For now it is the voice of Franke Previte himself, singing the opening vocals of the song that will change his life and the lives of everyone involved in this small-budget film from a no-name production company.
Now I’ve… had… the time of my life…
The next day, Jennifer Grey races across the hardwood floor, aims for the chandeliers, and leaps into the air.
II. “WE SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THE URGENCY”
According to legend (i.e., Wikipedia), Franke Previte was taking his ticket at Exit 140 of the Garden State Parkway when inspiration struck.
“Now, how I write is through phonetic melody jamming,” the songwriter says. “A G chord will make a certain sound in my mind and an A chord a vowel sound.” On the day in question, Previte was “grunting nonsense” while listening to the instrumental track of the new song he was working on for Jimmy Ienner when a certain phrase came unbidden into his mind. Perhaps it was a call back to Ienner’s comment that this movie would change his life, or maybe—as Previte believes—it was “the man upstairs” reaching down to bestow inspiration. Regardless, Previte seized the moment by digging around on the floorboard of his vehicle until he excavated a pen and an old envelope, upon whose torn-open flap he scrawled the phrase “time of my life.”
It will surprise no one to learn that the remainder of the lyrics were pulled together over the course of an afternoon. These are not sentiments that inspire or deserve a deep textual analysis.
I’ve been waiting for so long, now I’ve finally found someone, to stand by me
Saw the writing on the wall, and we felt this magical, fantasy
Now with passion in our eyes, there’s no way we can disguise, secretly
So we take each other’s hand, cuz we seem to understand, the urgency…
By the second verse, even the AABCCB rhyme scheme loosely employed at the outset has lazed into a simpler AABB. This is not to imply, however, that the song’s composition is without its elements of brilliance. Promptly upon hearing from Ienner, Previte had called up his old songwriting partner John DeNicola, with whom he’d previously collaborated on dozens of songs (including one called “Hungry Eyes” that had been recorded for but not included on the Knockout’s 1984 album, Makin’ the Point). “It’s kind of a boy-meets-girl upstairs-downstairs type story,” Ienner had explained on their initial call, and it was armed with little more than this cryptic synopsis that Previte went to work, envisioning a duet, two voices representing the two main characters. “Let’s start it in half-time,” he told DeNicola, who called up their mutual friend Don Markowitz, proud owner of a 12-track in his tiny Upper West Side apartment and willing to help them pull together the backing tracks. “We’ll put the chorus up front,” Previte brainstormed, “then double-time the verses to give it a dance beat.”
It is, of course, that evocative half-time opening that invites the listener into the intimate world of the song, but “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life’s” primary gift is the way it remains continuously surprising. The arrival of the female vocal halfway through the intro and the sudden movement to the dance beat both succeed in keeping the listener delightfully off-balance. Even the chord progression is subtly deceptive and non-repetitive, a series of unexpected movements that complicate and beguile before coming full circle. It opens with the classic “minor fall”—moving from the root (E) to the relative minor (C#m)—but then counters our expectations by sliding up a semitone to a flattened seventh (D). When the dance beat kicks in, the verse alternates between the seventh and the root before resolving strangely to the sub-dominant (A) as we move to the prechorus, where we then tumble down a full step to a minor third interval (G), despite the fact that we are in a major key. And it is only then, with our expectations unbalanced by all this modal interchange, that the second half of the prechorus hits us with the A to B movement our ears have been unconsciously anticipating since that opening minor fall, a classic IV-V tension builder that resolves cathartically at the root as the chorus opens up triumphantly and we can’t help but sing and dance along. Add to that a resounding saxophone solo that builds to a climax before a sudden and dramatic return to the calm intimacy of the intro and you’ve got a perfectly encapsulated structure, a flawless pop song that also manages to be something a little more convincing, a little more moving.
That day at the Lake Lure Lodge when she heard the initial demo, which Previte recorded with his friend Rachele Cappelli performing the female vocals, Eleanor Bergstein was convinced they’d found their song. What she wasn’t so sure about were the voices. Though Swayze would always maintain that Previte and Cappelli’s original version was his favorite, Bergstein implored Jimmy Ienner to find a voice that would be more recognizable. While principal photography wrapped in North Carolina and then later at a second location in Mountain Lake, Virginia, Ienner again stretched out his tentacles of connection. Donna Summers was asked first to do a duet with Joe Esposito, then Daryl Hall of Hall & Oates for a pairing with Kim Carnes of “Bette Davis Eyes” fame, but neither combination worked out. Maybe what they needed, Bergstein theorized, was a voice that could transport the listener back in time simply through the depth and quality of its sonic profile, a voice that would evoke Bergstein’s own memories of her childhood as the youngest of two daughters of a Brooklyn doctor, who every summer packed up the family and drove them a hundred miles north of the city for weeks of swimming and golf and relaxation at Grossinger’s Catskill Resort—in whose basement night club, the Terrace Room, Eleanor Bergstein as a teenage girl (who happened to go by the nickname Baby) had learned to mambo in the summer of 1963…
When Ienner approached Bergstein with his next idea, she was immediately supportive—though getting it done would take some more Jimmy Ienner magic.
III. THE INDELIBLE BARITONE
Among the drive-ins and malt shops of late 50s Orange County, Bill Medley came of age: possessor of a slicked pompadour, clad in a plain white tee shirt with a pack of Camels tucked inside a rolled-up sleeve on his deltoid, a leather jacket slung over the opposite shoulder. “Bill was Fonzie,” a childhood friend said of him. He also happened to boast a baritone as sonorous as some vast canyon of the west. Upon dropping out of high school (or getting thrown out, depending on who tells the story) he joined a barbershop quartet, learned to play a few chords on guitar, and, by the time he was twenty-one, had a lucrative songwriting and recording deal with Atlantic. All this before he joined forces with fellow Californian Bobby Hatfield in Righteous Brotherhood and recorded ten Billboard Top 40 hits between 1964 and 1974, including two that made it all the way to number one.
In the early winter of 1986, when he received a phone call out of the blue from Ienner, Medley was forty-six years old and had been a millionaire for over half of those years. One of the Righteous Brothers’ number one hits, 1964’s “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” was in the midst of a rejuvenation of popularity after appearing in the summer’s highest grossing domestic film, Top Gun. You remember the scene of course: Maverick and Goose and a gaggle of ogling wingmen serenading their ambivalent aerospace-professor-slash-Maverick’s-love-interest-to-be, Charlie, at a douchey bar in Miramar. Though the song was omitted from the Top Gun soundtrack, and was not rereleased in any formal way, it nevertheless reemerged on the radio waves that summer, bringing the long-broken-up Righteous Brothers back into the public eye. It was no surprise that, when Eleanor Bergstein expressed her desire for the final song of her film to be sung by a canonical voice of bygone decades, Ienner soon got around to Medley. The ensuing conversation went something like this: “Bill, we’re doing this movie and I want you to sing the title song for it.” “Oh yeah? What’s the movie?” This, of course, was the moment Ienner had come to dread. He sheepishly whispered the title.
“What??” Medley said. “That sounds like a bad porno movie!”
Medley had other reasons for declining beyond the film’s salacious moniker. In addition to the fact that his most recent foray into movie soundtrack contribution had resulted in disaster in the form of an unsuccessful duet with Gladys Knight for the Sylvester Stallone box-office bomb, Cobra, there was also a certain unbreakable promise he’d recently made to his second wife. “Not only do I not want to do it,” he informed Ienner. “I can’t do it because I promised Paula I’d be there when our child was born.”
Nevertheless, all through the winter, Ienner pushed. Phone call after phone call. Was the kid born yet, or what? But Medley stood his ground.
“Jimmy, listen to me,” he said, hoping for the firm finality that addressing someone by name can carry. “I’m not… gonna… do it.”
*
When Jennifer Warnes was a sad, uncool teenager with glasses and a heavy backpack full of geometry and social studies textbooks, her bus ride home from school took her every day past a dilapidated dance bar called the Flamingo, whose surrounding fields and vacant lots would fill up with Ford Fairlanes and Chrysler Imperials whenever the marquee read Righteous Brothers – Tonight!
Born in 1947 in Seattle and raised in Anaheim, Warnes was offered her first recording contract at age seven, sang in church choirs throughout her early teens, and earned an opera scholarship at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles, which she turned down in favor of a brief stint at a convent. In her twenties she’d recorded four albums, notched a Top 10 hit with 1976’s “Right Time of the Night,” and toured and recorded extensively with her close friend Leonard Cohen. In her thirties she’d won two Golden Globes and Academy Awards for Best Original Song—first for “It Goes Like It Goes” from the 1979 movie Norma Rae and later for her 1983 duet with Joe Cocker, “Up Where We Belong,” for the soundtrack of An Officer and A Gentleman—and became the voice of American after-school evenings by way of her duet recording with J.B. Thomas of “As Long As We Got Each Other,” theme song for the wildly popular television sit-com Growing Pains.
Still, Warnes recalled those after-school bus rides and the young girl who dreamed of the tall, sexy Bill Medley. So when Jimmy Ienner reached out in early 1987 and told her that Medley had expressed an interest in recording a song for a movie they were working on and wanted her to do a duet with him, Warnes immediately requested the demo. Driving in her car with her boyfriend, she popped it into the tape player with a simmering excitement that had settled to lukewarm by the time the song ended. The boyfriend asked, “How much did you say they offered to pay you?”
The answer was: a lot. Somehow, principal photography had come in well under budget and Jimmy Ienner had found himself with some cash to throw around. Reassured by the monetary figure, the boyfriend suggested Warnes take it. “What do you have to lose?” he reasoned. “You get to record a song with one of your idols. So what if the song’s lousy and the movie’s a bust? Probably nobody will ever hear it.”
Having thus secured Jennifer Warnes by implying that Bill Medley had already agreed, Ienner went back to the still-refusing Medley and told him Jennifer Warnes was enthusiastically on board, but only if Medley agreed to do it with her. Plus they could do the recording in L.A., so he wouldn’t even have to travel. Plus they only needed him for an hour, two tops. When his daughter McKenna was born that February, Medley at last agreed.
In the video, embracing in an overexposed sunbeam, backdropped in black and white against an ethereal dance rehearsal space with wide windows, Medley and Warnes seem happy to be there, exuberant even, perhaps almost in love themselves. But it’s an act. By all accounts, the time they spent together recording was limited to an hour in an L.A. studio in February or March of 1987. At Warnes’s request, a rough cut of the film’s final scene was played so she could match the emotion of her vocals to moments from the film. Medley seems not to have concerned himself with such details, though it’s hard to argue with his performance. “I went up to the studio and learned it enough to throw a bunch of stuff on about fifteen tracks,” he recalls. “Jennifer and I were trading melody and harmony lines, answers, shouting lines, lots to choose from. ‘There you go,’ I said. And we left.”
It would be hard to blame them for any perceived lack of enthusiasm. As the spring of ’87 slouches toward summer, as Lethal Weapon and Beverly Hills Cop II dominate the box office, even Vestron Pictures seems less and less committed to making their romantic debut with the smutty-sounding title a priority. “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” is originally slotted for a June release concurrent with the film, but Vestron pushes back the premiere date to August and either forgets or doesn’t bother to let RCA know, so Medley and Warnes’ passionate but anachronistic duet is launched naked and without context into a void and forgotten amidst a Billboard Hot 100 topped by Whitney Houston and U2 and George Michael and Heart. The same rough cut of the film used by Jennifer Warnes for vocal inspiration is circulated for professional consumption with almost unanimously negative responses. Jennifer Grey’s own agent, exiting the Magno screening room in Manhattan, tells her she’s “just going to have to get something else in the can as soon as possible” because “nobody is ever going to see this movie.” One well known director, asked by Bergstein what they could do to improve the film, suggests that they “Burn the negative, and collect the insurance.”
If this essay were a Hollywood script, this would be the second plot point, the moment when all seems lost, when all of our protagonists’ efforts toward a happy ending have left them at the end of their rainbows and their ropes. A music-accompanied montage shows them going their separate ways: Franke Previte returns to his front-yard used-car dealership; Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes forget entirely about the duet they reluctantly recorded in less than an hour and go back to more fruitful endeavors; Patrick Swayze flies to the Namib Desert to film another future flop, Steel Dawn, and Jennifer Grey spends a week in Ireland vacationing with her boyfriend, Matthew Broderick, where they get in a serious car accident and break up.
And on the night before the movie hits screens, Eleanor Bergstein ushers Emile Ardolino and Kenny Ortega out the doors of a party in Manhattan and leads them on an anxious walk north up Broadway. Tomorrow, this story of her childhood that has been her baby for five years will become the property of the world, will be exposed to critics and unforgiving viewers. At a bodega, Bergstein spontaneously buys three yoyos, and for the next twenty blocks, as the city’s bright apartment towers give way to intermittent views of the park, they play with the yoyos. And Bergstein, optimistic in the face of what seems unavoidable failure, veteran of half a decade of disappointment—but remembering now a line her reassuring father used to say back when she was a girl—reminds them: “We’ve had ups and we’ve had downs. We’ve had ups and we’ve had downs. We’ve had ups and we’ve had downs…”
IV. “JUST REMEMBER!”
Of course you know what happens next. You’ve seen enough movies to spot a happy ending coming. You don’t need me to tell you that Eleanor Bergstein’s autobiographical story strikes some mysterious nerve in the zeitgeist of the moment. You don’t need me to inform you that this small-budget film from a first-time production company, produced well under its paltry budget of 4.7 million dollars, hits theaters and conjures an unprecedented word-of-mouth craze. People watch the movie and step outside in a gleeful daze, only to do an about face and walk back into the theater to watch again. You don’t need me to tell you that it grosses over $200 million worldwide during its four months in theaters and becomes the first film to sell more than a million copies to home video (back when that was actually a thing), or that its legacy will inspire a touring rendition and at least two sequels with a third on the way: a collaboration between Eleanor Bergstein and Jennifer Grey—with the latter returning to reprise her role as an all-grown-up Baby—that is slated to hit theaters in February of 2024.
And you certainly don’t need me to tell you that the song, contextualized forever in the emotion of that magical last dance and its cathartic lift scene, will climb to the top position of the Billboard Hot 100 in November and take a clean sweep at the major awards ceremonies, will become over the years the closing song of countless wedding receptions and anniversary parties, will be interpolated by the Black Eyed Peas in 2010 and performed on the hit television show Glee later the same year, will remain a staple on the setlist of Bill Medley wherever he plays, with the female vocals now sung, fittingly, by his daughter McKenna, whose birth he years ago tried to use as an excuse to avoid recording the song in the first place.
“The stars were aligned for this one,” Franke Previte says now of the song that has gifted him with endless “mailbox money,” a check that arrives periodically and has long since kept him from considering a return to the front-yard used-car dealership business. “If you separate anything from the equation, I don’t think you have the same phenomenon.”
And so I guess the only question left to answer then is… why? Why exactly has this song lived on through the years and—more pertinently—why does it deserve your vote in this tournament of one-hit wonders? Maybe the answer lies not in criterial technicalities or chart rankings or sales statistics but in its embodiment of the very spirit of one-hit-wonderness itself, in all of its inscrutable glory and mystery, the intense magic that springs from a combination of circumstances and luck, from dedication and dreaming and hard work and happenstance: a screenwriter holding out hope for her script and its hard-won success over half a decade, a phrase scrawled on the flap of an envelope at Exit 140 of the Garden State Parkway, the very last of 150 demos arriving at precisely the right moment to save a floundering film, and a young yearning actor racing across a hardwood floor and aiming for the chandeliers with faith and hope despite doubts.
For Jennifer Warnes, the answers are simple. It’s not something complex or puzzling but a more fundamental force that has made this song and this movie lasting touchstones of their era. “I've thought about it,” she says, “and I’ve wondered why the whole world loves it so much and I think the answer is because it's real joyful. If you take the joy out of that song, it's not a hit.”
And so now let us come together in service of that joy. Now, as we cast our votes in this tournament of Fadness, let us take each other’s hands. Because we seem to understand.
The urgency.
URL for original demo link (hyperlink on page 8): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Knf4nrVGDZk
James Charlesworth grew up eighty miles east of Pittsburgh and lives in Boston. He is the author of a novel, The Patricide of George Benjamin Hill, and three previous March Xness essays.
IF I ONLY COULD: ALISON STINE ON “RUNNING UP THAT HILL (A DEAL WITH GOD”
I was twelve or thirteen when I auditioned for the children’s choir. The director sat my mother down in his office and said very seriously, as if he had been waiting for just this moment, just this child to walk into his mildewy, Midwestern church basement: Everything about your daughter is perfect vocally.
Except there was this one thing. I couldn’t hear.
The moment recalled an earlier time when I had been banished outside to wait as an audiologist explained patiently to my mother, She can’t hear herself. People were always telling my parents things about my body as if I wasn’t living right there in it. Her kidneys will need to be tested, as ears develop the same time as the kidneys. She may have trouble with balance. I was born with no hearing on one side, my left. Due to a congenital issue, the mechanism simply wasn’t there inside my head. At least, that was the way it was always explained. It was called a fluke. I was called abnormal.
With the limited hearing I did have, I did okay. I had to; I was instructed to pass and pretend. No one else in my family is deaf, and I met no other kids or adults like me. I had no access to sign language. I read lips, never disclosing to most people my disability, never even knowing—for a long time—words like disclosure. There was a problem, though. I loved music.
Do you want to feel how it feels?
I was two or three when my father gave my mother a player piano for her birthday. It was a big deal, a surprise. I came in the door with her, having been sent off on some pretend errand. Upon our return, there was a party, people gathered in our house around the cumbersome, glossy wooden instrument, as high-backed as a whale. My babysitter sat on the piano bench. A wicker basket held the key fronts that had fallen off. It was an old piano, bought as much for its value as a historic piece of furniture as for its musical ability. It would have a hard time staying in tune. I would learn some notes because of the dried gray glue stuck to the keys, making patterns like raised scars.
Everyone screamed in delight, my mother cried. She had always wanted to learn to play. But she didn’t, not then. Her practicing would wake my baby sibling up from naps. She couldn’t get through her lessons because I would insist on sitting on her lap and banging on the keys. At least, that was the way it was always explained. No one thought or had the money at the time to get me lessons. Not the deaf girl.
My father says he used to carry me around on his shoulders and I would make up songs about everything we passed, my treehouse which would be crushed by a tornado, the creek below the highway bridge, the dog snuffling at the tulips. We lived in remote Indiana, our white house an island in an ocean of corn fields, but I would sing in the front yard, performing for no one. Every rise of the dirt road gave me hope. Maybe someone was coming, maybe a car from the city would stop. I would sing when we went to fast food restaurants, sing as we waited in line.
My father interested me in female musicians like Laura Nyro and The Bangles. I went to sleep every night listening to my Mickey Mouse suitcase record player. Once I found Tori Amos, it was all over. I started recording the songs I wrote onto cassette tapes via a handheld player, tapes which I gave to my best friends. They traded them like cards.
In college, I sang at open mic nights, but quickly dropped my performance major, switching to English. It seemed safer, better suited to what I believed I was, what I had been told. Half in silence, I dipped my toe into a river of sound but I couldn’t swim it. I didn’t know it or understand it. You write things most music majors wouldn’t think of, my piano professor said, in the same breath childing me again for failing to count, for being so sloppy. Someone so musical should be better, he told me. I couldn’t bring myself to tell him: I heard differently. I heard less. I heard as if I was buried underground, shouting for the living to come find me.
After college, I dated a drummer who had a Fender Rhodes set up in his basement practice space. While he cooked dinner upstairs, I would perform to the darkness. In the shadows, I imagined an audience who didn’t know about my deafness, who couldn’t hear it in my voice, or who didn’t care.
The drummer said my disability interfered with my confidence, and he was right, though it wasn’t disability so much as it was ableism, how I was described by others as everything from stuck-up to flighty when I didn’t answer them. I lived in fear of my name being called. When I couldn’t follow conversations, which was often, I dropped out. You need a life not in your head was another wise thing he said. But only in my head could I hear music perfectly and be received by the world as if I belonged there.
Tell me we both matter, don’t we
Being drawn to a thing that will never love me back—it’s like a bad relationship, which Kate Bush lays open in “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God).” It’s the bargaining stage in that song, which is a stage of grief. I will reach God, I will deal with him alone. And it’s the definition of empathy. If only you lived in my body, then you would understand. You would not treat me this way.
I moved backward through Kate Bush’s discography, discovering 1996’s The Red Shoes first, the year of its release. I went to the record store specifically to buy that album. A teen, I had read about it in a newspaper review. I have a vivid memory of plucking out the CD, can see its cover of red pointe shoes even now. It rested in the front of the new releases and I drew it from the bin like it was meant for me.
Here was a girl who had started by playing an organ she found in a barn. Here was a woman giving everything, giving her all every time, who didn’t care how she sounded—and who sometimes sounded rough, coarse, ugly. She barks in “Hounds of Love,” snarls (with sword) in “Babooshka.”
And in “Running Up That Hill,” she pleads. It’s vulnerability that comes through. It’s also loss. “If I only could” implies that you can’t. You can’t ever. You tried and didn’t work. You tried and tried and are so tired of trying. You will not make it up that hill without divine assistance—and that kind of help isn’t coming. Not anymore, not for you. You are your first and only help.
There is thunder in our hearts
You talk yourself out of things, but the world talks you out of them too. The older I got, the less it seemed feasible, this music thing, even as an amateur. I had a kid. Parents don’t go to open mic nights, sing in beer-soaked bars. Single mothers definitely don’t. I wasn’t going to waste babysitter money to embarrass myself. I lived in New York and my then-husband thought I was being too loud with my keyboard, so I stopped playing it. We lived in the same building as a professional guitarist and I would sometimes find his guitar picks in my laundry. I collected them like stones. If I could have made a path with them. If I could have picked a quieter instrument. If I only could.
Last December, I got sick. Not with COVID, with another respiratory infection, the kind I’m prone to. But this one settled itself in my ear. I felt the world switch off as the hearing I do have diminished. I lived life underwater, waiting for the steroids and antibiotics to work, and the whole time, I kept thinking, music.
The worst part about getting older is that it feels too late to switch lives. In many ways, becoming a writer was the path of least resistance. You write alone in your room. No one has to see you. No one has to hear you. Many people don’t know about my deafness unless I tell them, and sometimes even still, they don’t believe me, the curse of those whose disability is often hidden. If I only could switch places, not with someone who could hear, but with someone brave. Brave enough to go on stage, not knowing for sure if their name has been called, not able to hear any comments from the crowd, any feedback. Swimming without being able to sense the depth of the water, feeling only its darkness and its pull.
I think of Kate Bush as the bravest artist I know. Going for it with the costumes, the dancing (the miming!) and the openness. To be so raw. To give so much—and then to go away. Fans of her know what it’s like to love someone you probably won’t experience in performance. In a way, that makes the music even more precious. It exists in this form in your hand alone. To sing like a secret. To have the courage to go for it, then to go away back into yourself and the private mystery of your song. I understand it. I do.
I have never heard and likely never will hear “Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)” in stereo. But still in mono, it shines. It gives me a bright flare of hope every time: maybe I can change. Maybe there is still time. Maybe I can run up that hill, over that building, get on that stage, and sing with no problems.
Alison Stine’s most recent novel Trashlands was longlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her first novel Road Out of Winter won the Philip K Dick Award. Also the author of three books of poetry, her next novel Dust, about a partially deaf girl who must convince her remote community a second Dust Bowl is coming, will be published by Wednesday Books/Macmillan in 2024. You can find her on Instagram or playing the keyboard and singing as long as no one is home.