MY BRAIN ON FREDDIE MERCURY

THEME: GOOD INTENTIONS
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be. ~ Douglas Adams

Sometimes I wake up with a song in my head. Often the tune quickly dissipates, like the last wisps of a dream I can’t hold onto, fleeting and forgotten. I may recognize it as part of a commercial jingle (“1-800-588-2300 Empire”) that I hear all the time, or a line from a familiar song (like “This Land is Your Land” which I heard the other day). Its unimportance helps it go away.

But other times, the song stays with me all day long and into the next. My blood seems to pulse to its rhythm, and the words run like a news crawler in my brain, no matter what else I’m doing. When it finally lets up a couple of days later, it’s a relief.

Usually I know exactly where it came from, and that it’s my own fault. It follows a binge of sorts, like when I play the Leonard Cohen Live In London concert album intending to hear “That’s How the Light Gets In” just once, you know, to check on the lyrics and remember exactly how he said it (“Everything has a crack in it/That’s how the light gets in,” that perfect line). My good intentions are then overrun by a need to hear the whole thing, and try to place myself back into the concert I heard at the Chicago Theater a couple of years ago, a better-than-church transcendent night.

And then I play it again, and a few more times over the day, until I have worn a groove into my brain that sleep won’t erase.

But it isn’t just Leonard. My periodic visits to You Tube to see Freddie Mercury and Queen’s Live Aid set, which pundits call “the greatest live performance of all time,” set me off too. Just this fall, I commemorated the 20th anniversary of Freddie’s death by viewing the entire Live Aid performance, let’s just say, more than once.

But then I woke up to an exhausting, sweaty full-tilt version of “Radio Ga Ga” first thing in the day. I’d prefer to listen to Freddie when I invite him, not when he just decides to show up. I guess the truth is that since I invited him in the first place, it’s just that he never left. All right, more truth. It appears I can’t stop my binges once I start. Like all addicts, I believe I can control my conduct, but also like all addicts, I can’t control the consequences.

But it’s not all disturbing. Today I woke up to Temple Grandin, the autistic brilliant animal scientist portrayed by Claire Danes in the movie of the same name, belting out “You’ll Never Walk Alone” during the scene of her college graduation speech. A few days before, it was the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations,” which transported me back to my college dorm room when everything was ahead of me.

My friend Lorraine helped direct my attention to all of this. She seems to have a related and more mysterious version of this song phenomenon. She wakes up every day with a different song in her head, but not one she can pinpoint a connection to. The day we had lunch, she reported that Leon Russell’s “Delta Lady” showed up, not that she can remember hearing or particularly liking it. Her preferred playlist –Beatles, Eric Clapton – never appears and she wonders why. She is on the case, and has learned that this condition has a name, involuntary musical imagery, sometimes called musical imagery repetition or MIR.

Well-known prestigious scientific journal Wikipedia reports research showing that 98% of individuals experience this phenomenon, which it prefers to call earworm. Apparently women find that it lasts longer for them, and are more irritated by it than men.

Clearly, I have a touch of that too. I don’t know where “Good Vibrations” came from for instance, except that I must have a vault in my brain where all rock and roll tunes and lyrics from the sixties and seventies are stored.

I realize now that I was warned of trouble of this sort early in life by one of my favorite childhood stories. Robert McCloskey, the Make Way for Ducklings guy, wrote two Homer Price books, a series of stories about small-town boy Homer and a peculiar bunch of friends and relatives. In one, his Uncle Ulysses installed a shiny new jukebox with changing-color lights that cast a mesmerizing glow on his “up and coming” lunch counter. A mysterious stranger came in, installed a new song on the jukebox, and disappeared. Customers were entranced by the song, but then could not get it out of their heads, no matter what they did. Worse than that, they could not stop singing it. Soon, the entire town was afflicted. (Lyrics: “In a whole doughnut/There’s a nice whole hole/When you take a big bite/Hold the whole hole tight…”) The ultimate solution (spoiler alert) was to go to the library and consult the wisdom of Mark Twain. Why Twain? Because in an essay, he had posed the dilemma of getting something stuck in your head and not being able to shake it. Lorraine and I and Wikipedia are not the only ones to ponder this.

I’m sorry to include this last issue, in case it brings to life some buried demons, but Homer got me thinking about the songs that I take pains to avoid completely, lest they re-infest my brain. First, and worst, Disney’s “It’s a Small Small World” (“It’s small world after all/It’s a small world after all/It’s a small world after all…” until you want to scream). Then there’s Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life” (“to give me hope to carry on/You light up my days and fill my nights with song” – that’s for sure). And, affection for Julie Andrews aside, there’s “Do Re Mi” (“Doe a deer, a female deer/Ray a drop of golden sun…”) ad infinitum. Maybe there are bad song receptors in the brain that bind with such “doggerel” (Twain’s word) and won’t be extinguished.

In fact, maybe that’s the message. While I go around thinking I’m in charge around here, my brain is doing plenty on its own. It plays the songs it wants to hear, thinks the thoughts it wants to think, and lays down its own pathways, at least until I catch on and try to get it in line. Until then, I guess I have a soundtrack all my own, even if I’m not the one holding the baton. 

CBH - 01/12