Songs People Somebody ‘Caught’ Me Singing—as Well as Songs I ‘Caught’ Other People Singing

by rocktrauma

by MIKE MCPADDEN

*

SUMMER 1985

Between junior and senior years of high school, I worked as an elevator operator in a high-rise apartment building on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Upon answering a call on the 37^th floor, I opened the elevator car’s doors just in time to blast waiting tenants with:

“ROCKY MOUNTAIN HIGH!

COLLL-UH-RAHHHHH-DOUGH!”

I offered no explanation, and they asked for none. If pressed, I’d have said: “John Denver rules,” and I would NOT have been lying.

*

DECEMBER 1986

As I wrapped up my first semester at college, unrequited affection dominated my every moment of existence.

I tried to play it cool, but I betrayed myself one morning as I—maybe semi-tearfully—sang along in my dorm room to one of the gloppiest pop hits of the moment.

“AND I’LL BE YOUR FRIEND
AND I’LL BE YOUR LOVER

WELL, I KNOW IN OUR HEARTS WE AGREE
WE DON’T HAVE TO BE ONE OR THE OTHER…”

Just then into my room bopped Dottie—the daffy ballerina nicknamed “The Girl From Mars.” She was EXACTLY who I was thinking about as I was bellowing and almost bawling.

Fortunately, Dottie was whistling along to the whistle part of “Walk Like an Egyptian” so maybe she wasn’t really paying attention.

Regardless I tried to cover by saying I was paying tribute to the song’s composer and co-singer—soap opera star Gloria Loring—based on the stupendous TV sitcom music she’d done in the past in collaboration with her ex-husband Allan Thicke. Together, that powerhouse duo wrote and performed the themes to both Diff’rent Strokes AND The Facts of Life.

Then I showed off to Dottie how I had memorized the words to the almost never heard CLOSING theme of The Facts of Life:

“You’ll avoid a lot of damage
and avoid the fun of managin’
The Facts of Life

They shed a lot of light

If you hear them from your brother
Better clear them with your mother
Better get ’em right

Call her late at night

You got the future in the palm of your hands
All you gotta do to get through
Is understand
You think you’d rather do without
You’ll never make it through without the truth
The Facts of Life is all about YOU!”

Dottie ultimately decided—perhaps at that very moments—that

[SING:]

We would STAAAAAAAY friends
And NOOOOOT be lov-uhs

And I can’t really blame her for choosing that one OH-ver the UHHHHH-ther

*

WINTER 1988

Make no mistake, fellow babies: I am repulsed by the notion of ANY kind of ethnic, national, or racial quote-unquote PRIDE.

In fact, I might be repulsed by the notion of “pride,” period.

That stated, “White Minority” by Black Flag is a song that plays in my head a lot.

And since most of the songs I suddenly sing out loud are the ones that just sort of run on my internal jukebox, “White Minority” is one I make a conscious effort to NOT unconsciously give voice to.

Now, I’m sure I don’t have to clarify that “White Minority,” particularly as sung by Puerto Rican vocalist Ron Reyes, is an ANTI-racist song, but the lyrics, heard at face value, could very well get a cracker violently incapacitated.

So one swell afternoon, I was tooling around the campus of Brooklyn’s decidedly minority-minority-heavy Kingsborough Community College with “White Minority” just blaring on a loop in my skull.

I spend a great deal of every day spontaneously bursting into song but, again, I concentrated on NOT doing that with “White Minority.”

My main strategy, when I felt “White Minority” slip out of my mouth, was to instantly switch it to “White Bird,” an obscure 1968 pop hit by the hilariously monikered hippie ensemble, It’s a Beautiful Day.

So it would sound like:

WE’RE GONNA BE A
… WHITE BIRRRRRD
IN A GOLDEN CAGE

ON A WINTER’S DAY
IN THE RAIN….

But for whatever reason, on that day, on the Kingsborough Campus, I sang:

“WE’RE GONNA BE A

WHITE POWER!

FOR ENGLAND

WHITE POWER!

TODAY!

WHITE POWER!

FOR BRITAIN!

BEFORE IT GETS TO LAAAAATE!”

Instead of turning “White Minority” by Black Flag into “White Bird” by It’s a Beautiful Day, I turned into “White Power” by overtly racist skinhead band Skrewdriver.

It was NOT a beautiful day for me then on the Kingsborough Campus, as I immediately walked backward to the parking lot, hopped in my car, and drove off—quickly checking the tape deck to make sure it was clear of any Skrewdriver cassettes.

*

FALL 1995

One that’s not me.

My beloved cousin and, yes, my actual officially baptized Catholic godson Johnnie was a eleven-year-old football star and general moose of a kid, in addition to being quite hilarious and a lifelong devotee of foul humor.

I snuck up on Johnny one afternoon and caught him absent-mindedly crooning:

“And it sounds like CHURCH bells
Or the whistle of a train…”

I recognized the line as coming from the pop love smash “As I Lay Me Down” by Sophie B. Hawkins.

Naturally, I kidded him a bit, but then—being the cool godfather I was, an am—I told him that the nonsensical backup vocals at the end that sort of sound like “TOO-TAH TAH-TAH” were actually saying “TOO-NAH TAH-CO” and that it was code for vagina because Sophie B. Hawkins was into chicks.

I even said that the B. in her name stood for “bisexual.”

Johnny laughed, incredulously, and then said. “Wait—really?”

I just responded: “Ask around at school.”

*

SPRING 1998

I hate rap music. All of it. One hundred percent of hip-hop could—and should—be removed from human history, and I’d be a happier citizen of the world.

Whatever example you want to spray at me as a possible exception that NOBODY could hate—I hate that, too. I promise you. Whitey. AND I’m also right about hating all rap music. But that’s a different tangent.

Now, in general, given my 70s Brooklyn upbringing and my general anarcho-fascist disposition and the first two supremely stupid letters of my last name, I like and tend to be automatically sympathetic to cops out working a beat.

One night, I went out to grab a slice of pizza in Bay Ridge and I passed a parked police car and, inexplicably, I blurted out, full gangsta styleee:

“FUCK DA POE-LEESE!”

And I don’t even miss Eazy-E, despite his Republican sympathies. Which is some achievement.

The cops whose car it was were IN the pizzeria I was headed to, so for fear being subject to a wholly justified nightsticking, I kept moseying up the block and got a roast beef hero.

FUCK DA PEETZ-UH!

*

SUMMER 2005

As I watched the soap drain off my upper appendages in a motel shower, I blurted out:

“YOU WASH YOU HAAHNDS CLEAN OF THIS!”

The line came from an adult contemporary hit that, at that precise juncture, was not even particularly contemporary.

Outside, I heard my waiting companions laugh and somebody yelled, “Hurry up in there, I gotta piss… ALANIS!”

The occasion was an overnight stop while on tour with Gays in the Military, a volcanically obnoxious—and, I might add, AWE-fucking-SOME—psychedelic noise ensemble for whom I abused a rhythm guitar.

And, yes, my fellow avant-garde acid-skronk musicians had busted me singing—while naked—a number titled “Hands Clean” by Alanis Morissette.

And yet I KNEW that the haranguing would never get TOO severe as Gays in the Military frontman Sir Lord Brian Puberty—a Roky-Erickson-type whose vocal technique rumbled somewhere between death metal and death by infectious throat disease—was so huge and so sincere an Alanis Morissette devotee that he took ANY razzing of Ms. Jagged Little Pill as a personal assault.

And so Gays in the Military WAHHSHED THEIR HAAHNDS CLEAN of the entire incident.

*

SOME TIME IN THE EARLY 90s

Another one that’s not me.

During one boozy wee-hour fumble session, I found myself leaning back in bed while a lady fair headed south to attend to the pointed business at gland there.

And to be sure, this lady was quite fair, but she was even more than that completely batso-bugso insane—as evidenced, foremost, by the fact that she happily shared a sleep chamber with me at the Neanderthal height/nadir of my drug and alcohol subhumanism.

Anyway, as she approached to do her spew diligence, I heard her unthinkingly intone:

“MY FAV-OR-ITE VEDGE-UH-TUH-BULLS!”

Now, it was amusing enough that, confronted with the genital reality of the moment, she gave voice to affection for produce. But more amazing is that she was singing the song “Vegetables” from the Beach Boys then-bootleg-only Smile album.

I shall end this vignette by quoting the title of a book on the creation of Brian Wilson’s famously abandoned teenage symphony to God:

LOOK! LISTEN! VIBRATE! SMILE!