Finally, A Version Of Sultans Of Swing I Can Get Behind

Friend Andy sends along this version of Sultans of Swill, er, Swing, and it’s so much improved from the original that it’s bringing me around to the tune. Of course, in the past, we’ve had a little trouble around here over varying opinions about the original. These variations generally have two types; my opinion, which is correct, and everyone else’s, which is wrong. I take no offense at the general public’s stubbornness in this regard; I’m right, absolutely and indisputably, about so many things, and all alone in this rightness, that I’ve become used to it. Go ahead, ask me if I’m right about everything. I’m typing on the Intertunnel. Of course I’m right about everything. It’s science.

Anyhoo, back to the execrable source material, made magnificent. You see, the real problem with the original SoS (see, the song is an actual cry for help, not music) is the thin, reedy sound that Mike Knoblauch gets with that borrowed guitar and rented amp he’s obviously got. But this guy, in Mom’s basement, learning songs no one wants to hear, that will be performed never, in front of nobody, except the Intertunnel, which at this point is just flunkies at the NSA and grannies looking for additional pictures of cats while being shown hoverround ads on their Facebook page, is really getting that big, beefy sound the song requires. It’s the quality of the instrument that carries the song, really. Only the finest recycled plastic, smelted in the open air somewhere in some Fuking province in China, most likely, will be able to deliver the resonance and tone the song requires. It’s lucky that he was able to string his instrument with that clear plastic wire before his little sister’s orthodontist got hold of it and used it to make her braces, too.

I’m not sure how long the song actually is, because I always turn it off well before the end, but I got the impression that the original song is longer than this gloss on it. I figured that out because occasionally, when I’d turn the radio back on, hoping to hear something… else, the song was always still playing. I think this fine ukelelist, um ukelelier, er, ukeleptic heard his mother calling down the stairs to play Freebird, and stopped. Shame. It could have been epic.

Nothing But Blues And Elvis, And Somebody Else’s Favorite Song

(Author’s note: I have no idea who the fellows in the video are, and mean them no harm)

Someone said something interesting to me the other evening.

At the end of my sons’ performance, my younger son went home, because he’s barely ten, and we don’t keep him up all hours for any reason. My older son and I stayed through all the other acts that followed them. We had to wait until the evening was over to break down the equipment, and it’s not polite to wander out on the other acts in a show like that, anyway.

I never willingly sit in an audience for any reason any more. I’ve long since lost the knack of being entertained for the most part. Back when I was a performer, I had no idea how to act in an audience any longer, and always suffered from the sneaking suspicion I was supposed to be on the stage or tidying up or something; and after I no longer was a performer I always had the impression I was supposed to be on my couch. I doubt this is peculiar to the musical walk of life, either. I don’t imagine plumbers would get much entertainment value out of watching other people installing toilets on their days off, either.

There was a guitar player on the same bill as my boys. He played well. He played Mississippi styled fingerpicked blues, more or less. He was very inventive, and could play leads and rhythm with equal facility, and sing. He had another singer and a fellow playing a rudimentary drum set with him.

He was as nice as all get-out, too. I’d guess he was about my age. As my son and I were breaking down the drum set and amps, he told me how impressed he was with the show the boys had put on. Effusive and generous with his praise. He invited them to go to some sort of open-mike jamboree thing at some roadhouse out  in the landscape that he either ran or habituated, I’m not sure which. I appreciated his enthusiasm for the boys. Then he said something fascinating, and telling, to me.

“It’s obvious your boys don’t get their musical ability from you,” he said, “is their mother a musician or something?”

I know what you’re thinking, but you’re mistaken. You don’t understand what that man was saying to me, and figure it’s a backhanded, unstudied insult, because you don’t understand why Sultans of Swing sucks. I understood immediately what he meant, and took no offense. He was being pleasant, and making small talk, but was truly curious about what sort of Zeus’s forehead might produce the child act that he just saw. It was exactly 180 degrees on the compass removed from an insult.

As I said, he’s a nice man, and he played well, too. But he misunderstands what music is for, and what an audience is for. What he meant by his innocuous comment was that there was no way that he could conceive that I might be able to play any instrument and not go up on the stage with my children– or without them, for that matter. It is never any one else’s turn, not even your own children. There is no reason to worry about what you’re doing, or why you’re doing it, or wonder if the audience will be entertained by what you’re doing. Hell, you shouldn’t even worry too much if there is an audience. Open mike night is just taking turns being the audience, for instance.

Ninety-nine percent of the participants are very confused about the music business. Your job is to entertain the audience. What you want to play, what you want to hear, how you want to look means absolutely nothing. Your job is to figure out what the audience wants, and give it to them. Period. The extra difficulty in that equation is the audience often lies. They’ll tell you they want to hear, oh, I don’t know, Sultans of Swing, and then the room empties out if you’re dumb enough to listen to them and play it.

It was assumed that a person like me — one that could play but wouldn’t — could not exist, and so the question about whose children the two talented kids really belonged to was asked, because if any audience, anywhere, could be cobbled together under any pretext, I was supposed to glom onto it like a cat with a mouse he doesn’t want to kill just yet, and inflict myself on it at all costs. I’m supposed to use my children as human shields, or hostages,  or simply elbow them aside if necessary — or maybe not have them in the first place to keep all my time to myself — to keep the dream alive: Playing Sultans of Swing, inexpertly, one more time, to an audience of no one.

Well, I Put The Quarter Right In That Can, But All They Played Was Disco, Man

You need to understand right off that I don’t like Bird Dog over at Maggie’s Farm.

What a wan word “like” would be for me to use, so I can’t. I love Bird Dog. He’s my brother fum anotha motha. We’re friends. We get to tell the truth to one another. You can’t tell the truth to strangers.

He’s a fan of my boys’ musical efforts. He links to their videos, and offers a word or two of encouragement for them. But he gets ideas. As anyone that lived in the Soviet Union from 1917 until 1981, or anyone at a prog rock concert with a drum solo pending, ideas can be a dangerous thing. You’ve got to look at ideas a lot before you settle on them. Paw them over. Pick them up and put them down and go back to them. Ideas you treasure without reflection are risky. They can be popped like a bubble in the bath simply by the introduction of competing ideas. That’s why people with opinions I don’t agree with are so closed-minded. They can’t bear to hear the truth.

I risk ruining Bird Dog’s day. Our friendship might be on the line, right here, right now. I can’t help myself. He wants my sons to play Sultans of Swing, by Dire Straits, to perhaps prove their musical chops, their mettle, and mayhaps delight the Intertunnel with their precocious abilities. He wonders if they might be up to the task? Could they do it? Take up the Stratocaster cudgels? What a monumental, notable, and noble undertaking that would be!

I don’t know how to break it to him any other way, so I’ll just blurt it out: Sultans of Swing sucks. Hoover-quality suck. Outer Space with a pinhole in your capsule suck. Weapons-grade suck. Donkey balls. It’s — not good. But there is no way Bird Dog has ever heard that said. Sultans of Swing is one of those hoary old standards like Stairway to Heaven or Green Grass and High Tides or Freebird or Bohemian Rhapsody. The devotees of such tedious anthems never even consider that their love for them should admit the alloy of time and place, and consider that others who weren’t listening to it on their eight track with a girl in a tube top in the front seat of a bitchin’ Camaro when it first came out might not share their high opinion of it. It’s Pauline Kael rock. No one I know doesn’t like it.

It was my business for a long time to tell people that approached the bandstand that their favorite song was of absolutely no interest to everyone else in the room, and we weren’t going to play it. It’s a delicate thing to tell people that the song that contains both the name of their illegitimate children and their pit bulls, and whose album cover is featured on both a tattoo on their chest and painted on the side of their van, isn’t very entertaining. Such information upsets people, like going to the monkey house at the zoo and throwing your poo at the apes. Those monkeys stop in their tracks and stare at you, I’m telling you.

Don’t ask me how I know that.

But I know music. I didn’t even have to ask my son to know what he’d say to the suggestion. I did ask, though, and he gave me a look of surprise and fear and disgust, one that said without words, “Dad, why are you flinging poo at me?” To a kid two decades into this century, Dire Straits is like a Stallone movie starring Richard Simmons. If Eric Clapton was a hairdresser, that’s what he’d sound like.

Now, back when I was luxuriant of hair and bereft of fixed opinions about music, teachers tried to sell me some of theirs. I distinctly remember eighth grade. It was the first year I spent in public school. None of the other students could read or write or add or subtract, and thought the Ottoman Empire was a furniture store. They were fertile ground for any sort of bosh. Me, I was skeptical. My older brother was a musician with very good taste, and I got used to hearing good music, well played.

I had a music class. They call such classes “music appreciation,” because in their hearts the faculty knows they’re incapable of teaching children to play musical instruments or sing and dance, so they sort of shrug and tell the parents, “We meant to do that,” and baste the students with their ill-founded opinions instead. I remember Mr. Sacco like it was yesterday.

He affected a style approximating Englebert Humperdinck, gone to seed. He had Civil War sideburns and high-water bell-bottom pants with garish socks and round-heeled shoes that looked like they were  designed by some unholy agglomeration of Florsheim and Cardinal Richelieu. We slumped in our chairs, while he waved one –just one– 45 record in the air, intoning,”This is the greatest record ever made,” and meant it. He put it on, and played it over, and over, and over again. He’d stop it now and then at odd intervals by yanking the needle up to pontificate on some minor point of interest he found in the noise, a signpost to the entrance of entertainment nirvana that only men like him, attuned to such things, could discern, and then he’d slam it back down and the sound would wash over us again from the tinny speaker in the ancient record player he used.

He did this for weeks on end. He played that record for us a hundred times, maybe more, and never once looked at any face in the small crowd arrayed around him for a glimmer of approbation. It was the greatest song ever written, and that was that. There was no gainsaying it, and no opportunity to gainsay it, either. He’d wave his arms in the air like a conductor with palsy and hum along, and sing tunelessly along with it, and generally stop just incrementally short of soiling the front of his polyester pants with the whole thing every time he heard it. He never played another record that I can recall, and the only test I can remember simply asked a series of arcane permutations of the same question: Why this recording was the ne plus ultra of organized noise.

The song was Crimson and Clover, by Tommy James and the Shondells.

And so I must ask the question. It has been troubling me this morning. I must blurt it out, and exorcise it. Bird Dog, why do you want my son to play Crimson and Clover? You don’t even have sideburns.

Tag: sultans of swing

Find Stuff:

Archives