19 September 2009


Something about their voices

I’m drawn to voices that are never going to win vocalist of the year honors

Hoyt Axton sang with a rumbling voice that spoke of experience on the road. Too many nights spent playing in smoke-filled bars, too much cheap alcohol, and maybe a few close escapes out the back door.

“Della and the Dealer” is another of the songs that I immediately knew I had to learn the first time I heard it.” It grabbed me so intensely that I learned the words after hearing it played only twice. The chord progressions took a bit more work, but that is one of the problems with not really knowing how to read sheet music as I should.

“Snow-Blind Friend,” another Hoyt Axton contribution, has it’s a permanent grip on me. The lyric has its icy talons deeply dug into the back of my brain, causes graveyard shivers whenever I hear it or play it. It is, for me, permanently tied to my brother, who died in 1976. Not “snow-blind” but subject to his own despair, his own loss of will to live. Not dead of drugs, but drug related just as surely as if someone had held him down and injected a lethal dose of something. One of thousands of brothers and sisters, friends, and lovers who succumbed to the cultural, technical, and societal changes that hit this country as the VietNam War shuddered to a bloody halt. Loss of jobs, loss of friends, loss of interest, loss of support; they all had their part to play in the increasing tide of drug-related deaths.

The night after my sister and I emptied his apartment of personal belongings, I sat on the floor through all of the mid watch and half the morning watch, playing the song over and over, never above a whisper, strings barely audible even to me. We’d tried to help him, tried to intervene in the cycle of despair that took him down as surely as a bullet. But he never reached the point where he could accept help from us. It happens like that. There’s nothing one can do about it but sing the song.



Bob Dylan has another such voice. Coming along side his mastery of lyrics, he brought the realization that, in an industry geared to polished voices, there was hope for the person who really had no hope of ever being applauded for the excellence of his voice. The glimmer of hope that singers like Dylan conveyed to young males of my generation was that if we, too, might get lucky enough to get a group of people to listen to us, to convince some young woman that a spark of genius and talent burned within us, sufficient to cause her to grant that favor all young male singers are begging for.

Leonard Cohen, Leon Redbone, Dave Van Ronk, Merle Haggard convey that same hope to every young man that can pick a guitar and mutter through a song in that whiskey and tobacco-roughened voice that we hope conveys authenticity but is actually either a genetic gift or the precursor of self-inflicted damage.

I’ve always wished for a singing voice in that range and with that timber and resonance. But, in truth, I’ve never been able to define what sort of singing voice I have. I know that it changed when I quit smoking. I know that it changed again when I began taking pain meds after my back and neck surgeries. But I’ve also got enough hearing loss to contend with that I’m no longer a good judge of my own voice. It doesn’t matter, really. All male singing voices are just highly stylized mating calls. No matter what the lyric, what the melody, no matter how beautiful or how discordant, they all come down to the same thing:

“Please! Please! Please! Please! Please!

Think I’m imagining this?  Leonard Cohen, highly acclaimed poet and singer-songwriter seems to agree with me.

Here is the bridge lyric from his song, “I’m Your Man.”

“Ah but a man never got a woman back

Not by begging on his knees

Or I'd crawl to you baby

And I'd fall at your feet

And I'd howl at your beauty

Like a dog in heat

And I'd claw at your heart

And I'd tear at your sheet

I'd say please, please

I'm your man”

Then there are those voices that reach out and surround you, wrap you in fascination. Women’s voices that hit you in the solar plexus, prop you up, jerk your head around in their direction, and demand every scrap of your attention. Siren’s voices, bound to lure and allure us. Voices that promise mercy and an answer to that “Please!” that we do well to utter in their earshot.

Every generation has its own prime examples. Voices that attract me include Annette Harshaw from the 1920’s; Lauren Bacall, throaty siren voice of the Bogart era,; Marilyn Monroe, breathy and enticing, singing to JFK. Nina Simone, Eartha Kitt, Bessie Smith, Billy Holiday. From our generation, Janice Joplin, tragedy in blues, Valkyrie screams barely confined; Judy Collins, following the rodeo rider; Little Eva, just exotic enough to stand out; Judy Henske, Mary Travers, sultry, perfect harmony, immense power, flowing around one like deep water.

Then for me, one voice, above all. When I first heard Gloria’s voice she was recovering from laryngitis. Bacall, Travers, a bit of Boston, a tiny tinge of Yiddish, sultry, highly erotic, spinning a web of sound I had never experienced, had no desire to escape. I was immediately hooked, not struggling, hoping that what I thought I heard was what I really heard. Damaged hearing, you know.

I can’t even begin to imagine what caused her to take interest in me. But it apparently translated as “Please, Please, Please!” Some words can’t be improved upon.

Neither can some voices!

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