Author's note: This is a long one. It's the first in a series I will be putting in about the various karaoke adventures. I'll mix it up with shorter more "journal" experiences, but anytime you see a location in the title, be forewarned. Also, the numbers you will see in brackets through the piece are actually footnotes. They're humorous (or so I'd like to think), but not that important to the story, so feel free to skip them.
Without further adieu...
July 3rd, 2004
I wonder if my grandfather, my namesake, Paul Daniel Dail the first, Baba, liked to sing. I’m pretty sure my father is a strong baritone, and I remember giggling as a child when he would break out his booming bass voice to sing to my mom. But I’m not so sure about Baba. I have a hard time matching up the polished professionalism that I associated with my grandfather as a child to the relative rambunctious nature that surrounds karaoke, but for some reason many of the places I’ve partaken in the form have been surrounded by restaurants that would be one hundred percent Baba’s type of place. Big booths, stark colors, oranges, reds. The waitresses call you “hon.” Not because they’re flirting or trying to get a big tip, but mostly because they’re a good bit your senior and good at their jobs. The food is heavy, and you usually overeat. And maybe drink a bit too much.
In San Diego, I went out with my Uncle Mike to a steak house. He had introduced it as “a restaurant your grandfather would’ve loved.” Uncle Mike is great. He’s like Santa Claus in a cowboy hat. Mike’s choice of restaurants was Baba’s style, with the color of choice being dark and red. But they also had karaoke at one end of the restaurant, and this was the first I was led to wonder about Baba’s voice. After the surf and turf and a few drinks, I talked myself into joining the singing. In honor of my host, I chose the country fare. Waylon, Willie, and a scorching “Ring of Fire,” if I do say so myself, all the while Mike feeding me drinks.
Nye’s Polonaise in Minneapolis (www.nyespolonaise.com), while vastly different in many ways, was of the same vein. A polish restaurant/bar/polka hall featuring a nightly band with a collective age of probably 700, Nye’s was opened in the late 40’s. Apparently the most recent remodel was sometime in the seventies if my limited knowledge of interior decorating serves me correct. It’s gold in Nye’s. Red walls, I believe (but I’m having a difficult time remembering the first song I did, so I can’t be sure. More on that later.). Hanging next to the entrance was a 3’ by 4’ black and white photo of the owner, a balding and somewhat rotund Al Nye. A subtle grin barely raised on one side of his mouth under the pencil-thin mustache, Al seems to preside over the festivities, including performances carried out at a piano karaoke bar hosted by Lou Snider, who is again probably nearing the century mark.[1]
I was meeting Jennifer Marcy. Jennifer was my first roommate in the house in Missoula, Montana, that would later come to be known as El Rancho Diablo, The Uncommon Commune.[2]
We hadn’t seen each other in probably seven years (or spoken really), almost to the date. All in all, I had twelve roommates (thirteen counting myself) in six years at Diablo, but Jennifer was the only one that I actually wept a little on her parting from Missoula.
Tonight she looks just as great as when she left for Las Vegas that Fourth of July. Conversation comes easy and fast, and I’m once again pleased to find another friend who I can pick up with like it was only yesterday. The other ones are the worst, right? When you visit someone you haven’t seen in years and there’s really nothing to talk about except for what happened years ago.
Anyway, such was far from the case with Jennifer. It was a couple cocktails into the evening before we ordered appetizers and only when they arrived did we order dinner. I ordered the Polish sampler. Probably not the best idea, but damn! was it tasty. With sausage and kraut and a few breaded and fried things including something with the shape of an extra large egg except it was made of some white, thicker-than-cornbread substance with a little clump of something red where the embryo would’ve been. Now keep in mind that we’re about four drinks in at this point, but we both end up in hysterical laugher over the fact that, while it may have been a cabbage roll, it looked a little more like an alien pod and neither of us were sure we wanted to sample. Next thing you know we’d be running around in our underwear with creatures bursting from our chests.[3]
At some point I ventured towards the bathrooms, which were through the polka hall/bar. The band was already in full swing, the five or six of them somehow cramped on a stage that couldn’t have been more than 5’ by 10’. There were a few older couples dancing and I bounced my way through. The bathroom was a strange mix of Vitalis, old cologne and urine. I stand to relieve myself at the first pissing trough I’ve seen since Montana and chuckle at the polka music crooning just outside the door behind me.
I returned from the restroom to find the obvious regulars starting to take their place around the piano bar. I forgot to mention that Jennifer had arrived a little before me and set us up at possibly the best seat in the house… next to, of course, the Coveted 8 bar chairs wrapping a half-moon around Lou as she belts out another under an oddly stern portrait of Chopin. I won’t lie to you. I was a little intimidated. You see, there were no television monitors with the words conveniently displayed and lit up when you were supposed to be singing them. Luckily I discovered that Lou typed up the words to all of the songs she knew (which was a pretty healthy amount, I must say), but it didn’t help the fact that you had to know when to sing those words and keep up with Lou’s occasionally funny timing. For the first hour, while we finished our dinners, the Coveted 8 held most of the show. They didn’t stand from their raised chairs, and were very cordial to each other.[4]
I don’t know how many other people were putting in requests, but few were getting past the Frank Sinatra’s, Dean Martin’s, and a host of others I wasn’t familiar with but was guessing to be pre-Brat Pack. Oh yeah, another funny thing. Usually karaoke has the little slips of paper where there’s a space for you to write your name, song name, and a number that corresponds with a compact disc compilation of songs. At Nye’s, you write your name, song name, and a page number that corresponds with a book full of Lou’s lyrics. And you write it on a cocktail napkin.
Well, I was getting pretty well familiar with cocktail napkins by this point in the evening and decided I was ready to look at the book. Now most karaoke bars have eight or ten or more copies of their song lists spread throughout the room. Far as I could tell, there was just the one at the right side of the half-moon bar.[5]
It looked to be a tight space, maybe three feet between the wall and a gentlemen probably in his eighties, white dress shirt, dark slacks. He was there with his wife. She was probably in her twenties. Just kidding. Mr. L__ gave me a grandfatherly smile as I walked up and looked at Lou’s lyrics, a compilation of over a hundred songs, if I recall correctly. Mr. L__ had a book in front of him that looked like it had at least 500 pages, all in plastic covers like the smaller books, with a variety of sticky-note place holders at different pages, and when I asked him about it, Mr. L__ patted the book and said, “This is my hymnal.”
I chuckled and didn’t bother reaching for the book. Instead I leafed through the smaller collection until I found one that I thought I could pull off pretty well and would be a crowd pleaser, or at least as close as I could come to pleasing this crowd. I chose Willie Nelson’s “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain.” I conscientiously dropped a dollar in the tip bowl, set my scrawled-on napkin on the bar and waited my turn, figuring the tip might boost the stranger ahead in the ranking.
The night I first was inspired with the idea of a karaoke travelogue, I was in a karaoke bar with mostly college kids. I’m not sure how it happened, maybe one of his buddies signed him up without his knowledge, maybe he just got bumped ahead a song, but for whatever reason, while I was talking with the bartender, I started hearing familiar strains of a song I’d wanted to try for quite some time. I had looked over at the guy on stage who was probably twenty-two. He had come from a table of five, one other nearly-identical looking guy, and three girls. The guy singing had previously butchered a song so I wasn’t paying much attention to his next endeavor, but this particular song caught my attention.
And he was butchering it as well. I looked over as he rambled off the lyrics of one of the saddest country love songs, “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain.” He looked mildly sheepish at the small crowd and said something about never having heard the song at which point I shouted in amazement, and somewhat drunkenly decided to help him out.
I had, after all, just pulled off a scorching “Holly Holy,” by the romance man himself, Neil Diamond, so I was feeling confident. I hopped up and joined him (or rather, took over, even though he wouldn’t just wave the white flag and get off the stage) and was surprised to find that I was the only one in the bar who knew the song.
For any others of you out there, “Blue Eyes Cryin’ in the Rain” is off the “Red Headed Stranger,” a great album about a preacher whose wife leaves him for an old lover, and insane with grief, the preacher tracks them down and kills them both. The title medley (which includes the aforementioned song) is a twenty-six minute masterpiece of storytelling song, and it starts something like this…
“It was a time of the preacher,
When the story began
Of the choice of a lady
And the love of a man.
And how he loved her so dearly,
He went out of his mind,
When she left him for someone
That she’d left behind.
And he cried like a baby.
He screamed like a panther
In the middle of the night.
And he saddled his pony,
And he went for a ride.
It was the time of the preacher,
In the year of ’01.
Now the preachin’ is over,
And the lesson’s begun.”
Certain songs just resonate, you know?
I think tonight at Nye’s Polonaise, had I been able to talk Lou into it, and had she possessed all of the music, I would’ve shot the moon on the full 26 minutes. But all she had was the one song.
I thought I did pretty well, but again, the pressure was on. Unless you’re sitting at one of the Coveted 8 seats, the guest vocalists have to sing from the same narrow spot as the song list at the end of the bar. Without the benefit of the teleprompter, I asked Lou to signal me when it was time to start singing. Once I got going, it was pretty smooth sailing. Mostly I watched Lou for my cues, but a couple times I looked around. The 8 were giving nods and smiles of approval. I even got a pack on the back from Mr. L__ when I finished, and Lou made a comment that I needed a bandana and braids. So I was feeling pretty good.[6]
Just as I sat back down, Bret Gemlich walked in.
Bret is a good guy. He’s a friend of Mike and Britt. A fellow writer, he lives at a cabin in Wisconsin and is basically striving for a similar lifestyle of working repose as I would like to continue pursuing. This visit, he has the look of a rock star, but not the glam rock style. More like a grunge rocker from the 90’s who managed a smooth transition into the next millennium and still managed to hold onto the longer hair.[7]
Bret joined the group and the dynamic changed. For the good, of course. I was riding the high of a successful song and the buzz of a few cocktails, and now I had two good friends who didn’t know each other at the same table. Naturally in such circumstances the first topic of conversation is karaoke, and Bret added his own story of being on a train in China. Apparently it was a long trip, and over the P.A. they started up the singing. As the only American on the train at the time, there was considerable cajoling for Bret to sing “The Star Spangled Banner.”
“And that’s a tough song to sing,” Bret told us in our booth at Nye’s. I thought on some of the slaughters I had heard of our national anthem and laughed.
Bret lit a cigarette and took a sip from his tequila. “So I sang ‘Take Me out to the Ballgame’ instead.”
It wasn’t long before I was called up again, this time for “Crackin’ Rosie.” After I sat down, the karaoke philosophy began. This is inevitable.
[1] The polka hall is reputed to be pretty raucous as well, but I opted to spend the evening with Lou and the coveted eight.
[2] Depending on when this book gets published (knock, knock, knock), you might have already heard of this place in a fictional world. At first, my grandmother was amazed at the string of women housemates that I wasn’t dating, but she soon pawned it off on “Three’s Company.”
[3] Yet another pop-culture reference, but if you haven’t seen the movie Alien, put down this book and go to the video store. Oh yeah, the red stuff turned out to be little pieces of bacon. Now that’s healthy livin’.
[4] Personally, I always stand when I sing. You get better air from your diaphragm that way.
[5] Again, it was later discovered that there was a stack of song listings on the piano bar, but only one book of lyrics.
[6] Later Jennifer told me that while I was singing, Mr. L__ looked back at her and gave her the thumbs up.
[7] When I first met Bret, his hair was buzzed down to nearly nothing. I found out that he is actually of the same school of thought as myself. Haircuts are scheduled about once a year.
