Turn Around Bright Eyes (5 page)

Nils had obviously set his mind on karaoke satisfaction, because he rose to his feet abruptly and announced, “We are
leaving
.” He whisked us off to a place in Koreatown where we could get a private room, and we stayed until ten the next morning, rampaging through the songbook. There were mirrors all over the walls, a white shag carpet, brass candelabras, two vinyl couches, and a big glass table, giving off a
Boogie Nights
ambience of shabby indulgence, except the only drug was music—I had never sung so hard for so long in my life and all I could think the next morning, as we dragged ourselves down Sixth Avenue to our respective subway stops, doing the walk of Commodores-induced shame, was that I wanted more.

The next afternoon, I woke up and retraced all those steps in my head, writing down the title of every song I could remember singing. Some of these were songs I’d sung to the bathroom mirror for years; others were songs I had just fantasized about singing. I sang David Bowie’s “Young Americans.” (Not so hard, if you remember most of the words.) I sang Cameo’s “Word Up.” (I was sucking wind by the chorus.) I sang “You Are So Beautiful,” which is easy since it has six words and lots of breathing room in between. I sang Neil Diamond, which felt like home—this,
this
, was the voice I was born to sing with. This was me, or at least some song-sung-blew version of me.

I had tackled “Torn.” I had gotten tackled by the
St. Elmo’s Fire
theme. And I had tonsil-humped the shit out of Electric Light Orchestra’s “Livin’ Thing,” reaching into my voice box for some strange magic that would take me higher and higher, baby. “I’m taking a diiiive!” I had yelled, to the canned cellos on the backing track, with two of my friends clapping in time on the couch. “I am taking a
diiiiive
! Because I can’t stop the
sliiide
!” Yes, truly, I had sung myself some “Livin’ Thing.” And every song I remembered singing just reminded me of a dozen others I wanted to sing
right now
.

It had been a long night. It had been a crazy night. When could I do it again? Where was I going to look for it? Who was going to stop me? Where are all the people singing, and how can I get there? This night has opened my eyes, and I will never sleep again.

One night of song had kicked open a few doors for me emotionally—I could tell that already—clueless as I felt about what was hiding on the other side. It was one of those
and suddenly
s that shove you into the final ten minutes of the Lifetime movie, the part where the heroine makes a bold move to escape out the passenger-side window or hit back with the shoe. It wasn’t the end of a story, just a twist, one of the transitions I dread in advance and resent after they arrive. Except this time there was no resentment whatsoever. Only anticipation.

This was my first time, and other times soon followed. Once I got a taste of what karaoke was, I wanted more, and I began looking into places where this sort of thing happened. Staying out late reminded me how much I loved staying out late. There were still a lot of movies on TV; I just wasn’t home watching them as often. Obviously, singing Natalie Imbruglia songs wasn’t any kind of cure for the blues. It was just a sign of life. Whatever lay outside my room, it was time to go looking for it. I’d kept myself locked up too long.

I felt like Keri Russell in
The Babysitter’s Seduction
, the one where she’s a high school diving champion who gives up her athletic career to have an affair with the dad from
My So-Called Life
, except she doesn’t realize until the last ten minutes that he’s not just a regular Lifetime dad-skank, he’s a
psycho killer bastard maniac
and he is in fact
chasing her through the house with a knife
and
like, right now
so she runs up to the roof where she blinks and gets an
and suddenly
where she remembers that
she knows how to dive
. So she dives. Off the roof, into the swimming pool, out of danger. She always knew how to dive—it just took a while for her to remember.

Once I remembered how to stay out late, I did it every chance I could. I guess I never forgot how to stay out late; I just hadn’t noticed I needed to. There are things we know how to do when we’re on a roof. There are times when we have to remember what they are. If we get lucky, something reminds us to move.

8:59 p.m.:

Let’s get a couple things out of the way right now. One of these things is called “Livin’ on a Prayer,” and the other is “Don’t Stop Believin’.”

These are easily the two most popular karaoke songs. Indeed, as far as many of my fellow revelers are concerned, they seem to be the
only
two karaoke songs. Once, spending a night at Sing Sing with my friend Dave, who works as a wedding videographer, he got stressed by all the believin’ and livin’ we heard through the walls. “These same two songs all night,” he said, shaking his head. “This is like being at work.”

But that’s because these two songs express the karaoke worldview at its most extreme. The idea of a lost and lonely solitary voice, fading into a massive communal chorus, lifted up by all these other streetlight people. We’re all just strangers wandering through the night, with nothing except the song to bring us together. But we’ve got each other, and that’s a lot.

Bon Jovi really nailed this karaoke ethos in their video for “Livin’ on a Prayer”—the first verse is the band in rehearsal, and the film is in black-and-white. Then, just in time for the second chorus, the audience arrives, and
boom
—it goes from black-and-white to color. That’s the essence of Bon Jovi right there, and it’s also the essence of karaoke. Any of us can sing by ourselves any time we want to, alone in our rooms. We go to karaoke for something more. It’s the crowd that brings the color.

Going out to sing means you have to adopt a staunch pro-believin’ stance. But it also means you have to suspend your rational doubts. “Don’t Stop Believin’” isn’t about actually believing in anything, just as nobody in “Livin’ on a Prayer” prays for anything in particular. The belief is in belief itself; the prayer is just for more prayers; the song is just an excuse for people to make noise. Samuel Beckett could have invented karaoke for one of his existential dramas, except if he had done so,
Waiting for Godot
would have ended with Didi and Gogo linking arms to sing “You Give Love a Bad Name.”

It makes all the sense in the world that in the 2000s, Journey became the first band ever to hire their new lead singer after hearing him do Journey karaoke. The guitarist Neal Schon went on YouTube, looking for people singing his songs, and found one from the Philippines who did a perfect Steve Perry imitation. Does anybody care who is officially singing “Don’t Stop Believin’” or “Livin’ on a Prayer”? The singer can’t own them. The whole point of them is that they’re
our
songs.

It also makes sense that the karaoke state of mind is so perfectly encapsulated in these twin apostrophe-abusin’ anthems from the eighties, pop’s most extroverted and bombastic decade. That’s when songs got big, cheesy, overstated, with long fade-outs and shamelessly contrived group sing-alongs. In other words, songs perfect for a room full of hoarse, rowdy strangers who can scream “Whoa-ho!” on cue. It seems so strange, in retrospect, that karaoke didn’t factor into how Americans heard music back then. We didn’t even know it was coming. But the karaoke train was on its way—a midnight train, going anywhere.

A brief timeline of the dawn of karaoke:

                  (Note: I only found this news item because I was having an idiotic drunken argument over the real reason why the pop group Wham! broke up, and I wanted to prove I was right, so I went searching in the Billboard archives, where I happened to find this article on the same page. Lesson: Talking about George Michael makes you learn things!)

                  Someday, history will vindicate me. Until then, everybody likes “Livin’ on a Prayer” better, and that’s fine with me.

                  On Saturday night we all trek out to the Long Branch Saloon, a country bar down the road in Rock Hill. There’s a cover band onstage doing all the hits of the summer, as well as the regular crowd-pleasers. They play “A Country Boy Can Survive” and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” and “Dumas Walker” three times apiece. It’s the kind of place where last call is 4 a.m., but they reopen the bar at 5 a.m., so they just make announcements that everybody needs to buy extra pitchers of beer for the hour when the bar is closed. To make sure nobody leaves, that’s when the saloon hosts its karaoke contest. People get up and sing, while the house band plays.

                  Aunt Caroline does the family proud with a tear-jerker from the sixties I’ve never heard before, “Don’t Touch Me” by Jeannie Seely. This is easily the best performance of the night. Most of the others are pure tone-deaf drunken bravado. One guy wheezes through Travis Tritt’s “Country Club,” while another does David Allan Coe’s “You Never Even Called Me by My Name.” A blond lassie in the Lucy Ewing/Tanya Tucker mold does “San Antonio Rose,” tossing her skirt ever higher to win over the crowd.

                  But the winner in terms of audience applause is the Elvis Guy. As I will later learn, every Southern karaoke place has the Elvis Guy. A couple of other contestants are doing Elvis songs, but only this man is the true bona fide takin’-care-of-business peanut-butter-and-bananas Elvis Guy. This guy has the shades and the ’burns; more than anything, he has the conviction. He does “American Trilogy,” which I’ve never heard before. He begins with “Dixie,” segues into “All My Trials,” then unites the nation with “The Battle-Hymn of the Republic.” Here is the entire Civil War in five minutes, ending with a pietà of the Elvis Guy holding President Lincoln’s body in one arm and Elvis Aron Presley’s body in the other, sobbing over both fallen kings, yet somehow rising above to proclaim, “Glory, glory, hallelujah. His truth . . . is . . . marching . . . ONNNN!”

                  At our table, nursing our nearly-sixty-minutes-old pitchers of Bud, we all still think Aunt Caroline deserves the trophy. But I’m not really surprised when the Elvis Guy wins.

                  The movie is surprisingly forgotten these days, especially considering how many other movies have copied the karaoke-as-exposition motif. But at the time, it’s a huge crossover hit. Boy George sings the theme song, doing for karaoke what
Casablanca
did for “La Marseillaise.” Karaoke is officially a “thing now,” in the nineties idiom of “that’s such a thing now.” Such establishments in the United States might still be scarce as hen’s teeth, but this movie plays in malls and multiplexes around the country.