Born To Rock

How a dollar bin impulse taught me to rock.

My friends say I don’t rock. This isn’t particularly controversial. I absorb enough suffering to want my art not to rattle me too much, and want to be romanced a little by a song. In middle school, the hard rock and heavy metal kids seemed asthmatic and undereducated. The punk kids seemed asthmatic and overeducated. Neither group was much fun. Listening to a song is a lot like talking to someone at a party, and I tend to pirouette past that horrible, screeching, enraged guy in the corner.

I do rock and roll, however. The “roll” encompasses the swinging, joyous part, the pink and green chemise in which early Elvis sashayed. It’s Chuck Berry’s gauzy right hand on “Havana Moon.” It’s all of Buddy Holly. Things are hard enough.

This morning, I showed up at my therapist’s office with a guitar. I couldn’t take another hour trying to fix things. I just wanted to feel. And music is the quickest way to get me to feel. There are songs that can make me cry instantly, like Joe Henry’s “Our Song,” the funeral dirge for 21st-century America. Or “Jesus Shaves” by the Roches, where Christ is a regular Joe, a welder, who gets to have a normal life.

I sat and played a few of my songs. There’s one about extinction called “Emerald Ash Borer.” “Song Lyrics” is about how a lot of people I respect don’t fuss much about what a song’s words actually say. The last verse goes like this:

Song lyrics, whispered to

your parents when they were conceiving you

Maybe you’d have turned out less of a fool

if those song lyrics were good

My therapist and I were in tears through the whole session, and I left awake and revitalized. You have to keep feeling.

My session ends just as the local junk shop opens, and I’ll usually toddle over there to dig through their bins most biweekly Fridays. It’s been uninspiring lately. A lot of Marty Gold and New Christy Minstrels. And there wasn’t much today. But back in one stack, I found this.

I didn’t know it, and it looked … dubious; a bit frighteningly 1982, glossy and overpolished. But I liked the punning title, Flat Out, and took a flyer on it. I got in the car and, unlike a lot of what I scrounge, found it streaming. Here’s what happened next:

I was shaken. I felt my heart pumping. I couldn’t not. It didn’t matter that I was driving too fast on snowy country roads. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t going back to the studio to work. I just needed to drive and hear this song, to feel its pulse and its sly, giddy lyrics. Soon, I became aware that Buck Dharma was using the same trope I had in Song Lyrics.

Before I was a man

Before I was a boy

Before I was a baby

Before I was born

Now, my mom and dad

When they got it on

They took their clothes off

They left the radio on

Buck Dharma, of Blue Öyster Cult — a band I’d never listened to (heard of course, on the radio, but never attended to) — was imagining being influenced by the music his parents had heard while he was being conceived. The hilarious, Mad-Max inspired video even depicts his mother giving birth to him while listening to the Top 40.

The song was so joyous, so hopped up on its cleverness, its drive, that I couldn’t stop…bopping…hopping…ROCKING! If this had been the Middle Ages, I would’ve been accused of having St. Vitus’ Dance. Heart rate up, fist pumping, head shaking.

Friends out there, I seem to have learned to rock!!!

That night, when I played the song that night at one of our Hi-Fi Village listening sessions, someone laughed and said, “It’s like we asked AI to create a song Tim Davis could rock to.” He meant, I guess, a rock song with melody, with a rich and sometimes unexpected harmonic texture, with lyrics that don’t lower your I.Q. A song with a bridge that sounds a lot like Nick Lowe, or Tom Petty, or someone you would talk to at a party. Buck Dharma rolls and rocks.

The rest of the record is terrific, too. The lyrics are smart, the production is remarkably unbrittle for 1982. Go find it.