To Sleep, Perchance

Someone once wrote somewhere --- oh, who I am kidding, I'm certain it was Updike --- that Americans are reluctant to let celebrities, or anyone, be good at more than one thing. Look at all the shit they gave Bo Jackson, right?

A subset of that rule is that we like to jam musicians into the tiniest creative/genre (generic?) space possible and keep them there for their entire professional lives. Very few people have a successful second career in a different musical genre. Linda Ronstadt did it, thus setting the stage for a variety of pop stars to become lounge singers. The most inexplicably successful of them is surely Rod Stewart, who has probably sold more "American Songbook" records than he ever sold pop ones. Bob Dylan went electric and succeeded, then he went Christian and failed. Miles Davis invented the cool --- but then he invented the concept of "lead electric bass" and "rhythm electric bass". Think about that. His last tour had two bass players on stage at all times. I'm waiting for Victor Wooten to start doing that.

Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, also known as "Sting", gave up a career as schoolteacher to become a pop star. At the height of his popularity he decided, as many do, that he wanted to change direction and become a "smooth jazz" performer. Given that the Police probably had a couple good albums left in them, this was probably a bad thing. But it was a good thing for Mr. Sting, who then got to sell platinum records without the inconvenience of splitting the take.

The resulting stuff was mostly awful, including a version of "Little Wing" that is generally acknowledged to be the worst major-label, multimillion-selling cover song in history. Yet the album that houses that stinker, "Nothing Like The Sun", starts with a brilliant if overly self-important song entitled The Lazarus Heart.

In the liner notes, Sting states that the song came from a dream he had, noting that the dream closely resembles the story of the Fisher King. "Can't I do anything original?" he wonders. The proper response to that question is another one: Can anyone do anything truly original? Regardless, "The Lazarus Heart" is a great song with great production and great musicianship and so what if it takes itself so seriously that Dylan himself would blush.

Although you can find inspiration in dreams, I personally find hearing about other people's dreams to be the penultimately most boring thing in the world. The most boring thing, in case you care, was the play-by-play that my ex-wife would give me about television shows I'd missed. "So," I'd politely inquire, "how was tonight's episode of Friends?"

"Well," she'd reply, "it opens with everyone at Central Perk, except Ross. There's a long shot of the door, which does not contain Ross, and Rachel inquires as to his whereabouts. Then we see the bartender who likes Rachel hanging his head in despair. Then there's an establishing shot of Ross walking down the street towards Central Perk..." I'm exaggerating. Maybe. But you get the idea. Sometimes, it would take her twenty minutes to tell me what had happened in a thirty-minute show. The difference was in the commercials, which she did not describe. It was a real-life version of the "First, the earth cooled" guy in Airplane!.

So with the above in mind, I'll relate this dream I had very quickly, so as not to bore you too much. It was more of a nightmare. I was in a car with someone I used to know who appears in my dreams quite a bit, usually to chastise or criticize me. We were heading somewhere in a hurry, because I'd shot someone. Maybe a few someones. It was way past sundown but there was no chance of getting any sleep any time soon. My dream companion was asking about my father and I told her that he was a terrible, angry man.

"Is that why you feel compelled to solve every problem with violence?" she asked. In return, I only grunted. I felt physically drained. But I wasn't going to stop until I reached my destination, the border of...

"Oh, for fuck's sake," I said, and the car stopped inertialess in the road and my companion's face froze, her dark eyes half-lidded, as the world around us went white and I felt the freefall terror of my impending departure into gasping wakefulness, "this is the fucking plot of Ride Like The Wind by Christopher Cross."