The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Songs that stole our souls

October 1997

"I think we all have this little theater on top of our shoulders, where the past and the present and our aspirations and our memories are simply and inex­orably mixed,' Dennis Potter told film critic Michael Sragow in 1975. Potter, who died in 1994, was the writer of such untouchable TV and movie musicals as Pennies From Heaven and The Singing Detective. His work was about building that little theater, or re­vealing it. In his musicals people don't just break into song—old songs descend on them like visitations, and the songs break them. For as long as it takes them to sing it, a song makes them more alive, more ex­pressive, than ordinary speech could ever let them dare be. "Some of the songs I use are great anyway, but the cheaper songs are still in the direct line of de­scent from David's Psalms," Potter said. “They're saying, 'Listen, the world isn't quite like this, the world is better than this, there is love in it,' There's you and me in it,' or 'The sun is shining in it.’” Potter's visitations were never random. If songs were about aspirations, he was saying, aspirations were nothing but unsatisfied memories: "We can make our lives only when we know what our lives have been."

In Stars Screaming (Atlantic Monthly Press)—a first novel by John Kaye, writer of the movies Raffer­ty and the Gold Dust Twins (1975) and American Hot Wax (1978)—the song that raises the theater is Bobby Darin's "Dream Lover," a number two hit in 1959. Songs, records, concerts, the radio playing, in the present or the past of Kaye's book, almost dom­inate the twisted story he's telling—a story about the past catching up with everyone: those who think they can evade it, and those who have dedicated their lives to turning crimes of the past into the vengeance of the present. But "Dream Lover" is the linchpin, and in Kaye's hands, the song makes it clear that Potter's theater is no little temple of nostalgia.

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In his recent novel, Straight Man (Random House), Richard Russo captures the sense that a song can exact a pound of flesh for the cheap, tinkling plea­sure it once gave you, believing you'd never have to pay for it because, you know, it doesn't cost anything to turn on the radio. His hero has collapsed, he's in the hospital, doped up, having the most wonderful dream about the greatest basketball game of his life: The crowd is cheering, every shot is falling, and then his wife walks into the hospital room and he wakes up. He's thrilled to see her, but, "I was about to achieve glory, and now I never will. Some­one left a cake out in the rain, I think, my dream slid­ing away on greased skids, and I'll never have that recipe again," he tells us, Richard Harris's unfor­gettable (no matter how hard you might try) 1968 "MacArthur Park" reaching out to grab his ankle just before his winning dunk. "I've always feared the day would come when that lyric made sense, and now that day is apparently here."

"Dream Lover" frames the action in Stars Scream­ing. It's like a false beacon in the life of Ray Burk, a man who has allowed his wife to name their son after "Louie Louie" (all the way: "What about Louie with Louie as his middle name?"); a man who almost destroys the deepest tie he has over a record. It's “Daddy's Big Dick,” B-side of "Cool Daddy” by the Thrills, on Proud Dog in 1956, and the pride of his brother Gene's record collection. Ray is broke, and he's about to steal the record; then he remembers how his brother got it. His brother was a cop, and he was busting a drug dealer who had it in his safe along with four kilos of heroin. He let the dealer go in exchange for the disc: "I even let him keep the smack."

The message "Dream Lover" sends is more con­fused. Ray Burk's life has been falling apart; now, with a single phone call to Ernie's Stardust Lounge, an anonymous Hollywood bar, he finds that he's lost his job, that his wife has had a miscarriage, that she's in the hospital. So he returns to his drink; the bartender says he ought to go to the hospital. He snaps at the bartender. Sometimes Kaye's touch is so light, the nat­uralism of his scenes is like an ambush: "Burk usually acted like a normal guy," he writes, "but then so did James Earl Ray, another regular for a while at the Stardust Lounge. Except to order another drink ('Another tall screw, bub'), Ray never uttered a word to anyone, and the only time he left his stool was to play 'Tennessee Waltz' on the jukebox. But one day he didn't show up, and the next time the bartender saw him, James Earl Ray's ice-cold eyes were staring down from the television screen above the bar."

Burk goes to the jukebox, hits P-5, and "Dream Lover" lifts up. Nostalgia seems to settle over him: Yes, it was 1959, the night he lost his virginity in Palm Springs, spring break, everyone telling tales of wild times the year before, like the one about the girl who called herself "Daisy Crazyfuck" and "took on everyone in town." Burk is a teenager, he and Laurel, a girl he's just met, are in the back seat of his friend's car, and on the radio a woman named Daisy is requesting "Dream Lover." "Who do you want me to send it out to?" asks the DJ. "To. . . everyone," Daisy says. The sun is not shining in this song ten years after Burk first heard it; the world is not a better place because he and Laurel, or he and his wife, or he and Daisy, are in it. In Ernie's, the song goes out into the air, and the man who this time paid for the song cracks: "The panic that he'd been holding down swelled and washed over Burk as he whispered the lyrics to the song play­ing on the jukebox"—Dream lover, where are you?—"and for a brief but frightening moment, it seemed that he had made a terrible mistake with his life."

For as long as Stars Screaming lasts, the song is lost to its singer; it's a listener’s life that sings the song or, maybe, finally gets to turn it off. More than anything—more than an old hit, more than a good tune, more than a big moment in Bobby Darin's life—the song becomes part of a little theater on the shoulders of a character an author has made up. By chance I found myself talking to the man who pro­duced the record just as I was finishing John Kaye's book. Ahmet Ertegun talked about how Darin had been discov­ered, the demos he wanted to record, the talent some saw and some were blind to, the date of the recording session, and none of it seemed half as real as the story Kaye tells.

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Originally published in Interview Magazine, October 1997