A SOUND INVESTMENT

Huffington Post
07/20/2017

Written By

David S. Simon

Ever listen to a symphony turning up? That’s what my brain sounds like on any average morning. It is not only my own mind-played notes that I hear, though many of those floating-in-my-head-space, good, good good vibrations are precisely that.

I hear voices too. No, I don’t mean the Son of Sam kind.

You, me, we all get bombarded with sounds that come at us like scud misses from all sides often 24 hours a day.

We rarely just turn on the TV or the radio and settle for whatever pops on. We flip. We cruise. And at every stop along the way, instead of simply registering or even identifying the noise we tend to unconsciously bank them for future reference.

It’s like when we watch commercials: how many times have you watched even your favorite ones, before the name of the actual product becomes apparent? I swear, I watched those Flo ads a million times before I could tell you that it had something to do with Progressive Insurance.

Sometimes sounds lull us instead of “branding” us.

You hear a new song and in seconds, you either LOVE or HATE it. Or you are completely indifferent to it and realized that 30 seconds in stopped listening and are thinking about what Kate Upton looks like naked. Oh like you don’t. Liar.

It’s all very subjective of course. I think being Jewish, the music of Gershwin, Sondheim or Berlin draws me in because it all sounds like home to me. The same goes for any great comedian from Jack Benny to Jerry Seinfeld to my loving friend and partner Paul Reiser. Their cadence somehow sounds like Grandma’s matzoh ball soup, sprinkled with salt and wisdom.

I grew up with the sounds of Broadway albums and caged parakeet tweeting in my house of the fifties and probably the silent screams of the next toilet bound turtle.

To me, Broadway music was code for “Hey Jew: listen to this!” Fiddler on the Roof, Funny Girl, anything by Rogers and Hammerstein or Lerner and Loewe was the music of my people which turned us all instantly gay when gay meant happy and ready to dance.

And we plucked singers from other cultures that were not our own too. Somehow Sinatra, Dean Martin, Bing Crosby and Nat King Cole crossed over the border of Israel and were made honorary citizens because of how welcome they always made us feel inside our own, true hearts. Even Liberace was welcome because his outfits matched the jackets of our local torahs.

On the AM New York transistor radio sounds of Cousin Bruce, Herb Oscar Anderson, Murray The K and later on, with the birth of FM radio, Scott Muni, Pete Fornatale, Roscoe and Allison Steel, “The Night Bird,” those nighttime, pillow based transmissions seemed to by-pass my ears and headed directly, like a transfusion, to my heart, whose own native rhythms were highly adjustable and reactive, based on whatever rock and roll song was on at the time.

As I got older, around 12 or 13, the music of the radio seemed to be on the only place on earth that understood my deepest, most private sexual urges. The songs magically seemed to be Leonard Bernstein-conducted from somewhere deep inside my hormone drenched, totally insane and impossible to control genitals. That my friends, was the real Young People’s Concert.

Sounds seemed more spare and selective then. Uncomplicated. We could be thrilled by old time voices too like Al Jolson, who was another patron saint. Since I loved getting dirty, especially in the sweaty summer, I totally identified with his black face. And to a little boy, to watch a grown man sing to his mammy was just heaven. That meant to me, that my own mommy was never, ever going to leave. Ever.

If you think about it, today, here in the soft white underbelly of Modern Times, at any given moment, all the air that we breath is overpacked, like your wife’s vacation luggage, with SOUND.

Traffic is whooshing by like the long distance ocean (unless you live in LA where at any moment, you might as well just get out and walk to wherever you’re going. They call the big freeway the 405 because it takes you 405 days to get from Wilshire to Pico).

Heart monitors beep. Phones ring. Subways rumble. Jets soar. Korean bombs explode. American soldiers fall. And millions of voices around the world introduce the next hopeful song , the next natural disaster, the next frantically breaking news or they simply offer us the next cold and indifferent GPS navigational direction.

Just think of ALL the daily soundbytes nuts that we have to gather. Trump says something stupid, arrogant or bewildering and our mind clap traps his voice and it joins the chorus of voices that buzz around our heads, which is why we turn to beekeepers like Rachel Maddow who will help us make sense out of the hive. Until it returns, hornet’s next style, the very next day.

Our lives (and any panel discussion on CNN, FOX or MSNBC) have become Thanksgiving Dinner with ALL your relatives, who are ALL talking at the same time and the only way that you can be heard is by YELLING over everybody. The world has simply stopped listening and everyone is simply reacting reflexively the SECOND that some usually upsetting information makes it’s way through the moats of our own, personal Game of Thrones castles.

We don’t participate.

We defend.

As for our individual musical soundtracks, we are are our own DJs today. We program ourselves on the fly. The word streaming seems rather Jane Eyre quaint to me. That almost suggests that we are wading through our music, with raised skirts. Personally I don’t think we stream anything. We saturate. We indulge. We deflect and we distract. What we don’t do is connect to ourselves or to each other.

Which leads me to the great isolator, the internet.

The World Wide Web is something that we are just caught up in. We, the spiders did not create this web, the web created us and all it has done is make its sing, talk or masturbate to the equivalent of R2-D2, Gort or the T-800.

Now being the writer guy that I am the internet has become an invaluable tool. Instant reference on demand and spellcheck have long made up for the fact that the only course that I ever flunked at The High School of the Performing Arts, was, ironically, typing.

But here’s the thing: I don’t sleep with my hammer. Okay actually I do, but I live in a very rough neighborhood.

The point is a laptop dance is just not as good as the real thing.

We used to surgically orchestrate our moods. That’s how much we cared about our most vulnerable feelings.

Remember those little diner table juke boxes? You would slowly, lovingly turn each page, like you were reading scripture until you were finally able to narrow it all down to your three songs for a quarter. We were in charge of that hardware and the software that ran through us was full romance. Songs were pure then. There was no auto tune correction. Carol King and Gerry Goffin, Neal Diamond and Neal Sedaka (Jews, Jew, Jew) had the uncanny ability to stuff ALL our most primitive teenage angst and love feelings into one spare three and half minute track, which were recorded in an instant and lasted a lifetime, garments to wear that looks sexy in the evening

We are wide open targets for sound from tweener on and for my generation it was and still is The Beatles. We all continue to pray at the church of Pope John Paul George Ringo on both the Sabbath and Sundays, eight days a week. It turns out that being in our sixties and living in the sixties, is no different.

We are just hippies with fragile hips now. But every single moment of total freedom and blissful impulses is still alive and well and beating like Keith Moon in our communal hearts.

There is a huge difference between going to a stadium concert and going to a political rally. One is a true celebration of the human spirit and the other is a complete manipulation of the human spirit that day, breeds contempt and divisiveness.

Remember when Fleetwood Mac played at the The Clinton Inauguration? Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow indeed,

So I implore you all to become like the Gold Rush miners of 1849 and treat all the sounds of your life as if you were panning for gold. Find the nuggets, celebrate their discovery and then bank them in a very special hiding place. Don’t squander them or use them for instant gratification. Appreciate their luster. Admire the beauty.

And dare to feel.