Fly, robin... anybody remember the next word?
BURTON W. COLE, Editor
By Burton W. Cole
Music, they say, restores memories. We hear a tune and are transported back to whatever was happening in our lives when that song came out.
Music, however, does NOT restore my memory for lost lyrics.
There are nearly 70 years’ worth of songs crammed into my brain, which wasn’t built for that capacity, not when it also holds onto random phone numbers, eighth-grade locker combinations, the complete statistics from 1970 of my favorite NBA time, and so forth.
With so much jammed and packed into all the swirls and crevices of my gray matter, it’s no wonder I can’t sing along when the songs of my teens play elevators and doctors’ offices.
A lot of words get squeezed out. They leak right out of my ears, where bouncers give them the boot. The bouncers also block any new lyrics from sneaking in so no one’s batting averages get squashed.
I sat in a restaurant absently munching on a burger with extra ketchup, when a song from my youth flew through the store speakers.
“It’s been ages.” I pulled a french fry from the box and tapped it against my temple. “How did those lyrics go? I used to know it.”
Over a disco beat, singers crooned, “Fly, robin, fly.”
That’s it! That’s how it goes. Sing “fly, robin, fly” 117 times. About every 20th time or so, insert “Up, up to the sky.”
When Silver Convention released that song back in 1975, I don’t suspect they knew that it would come in handy 50-plus years later as a blessing for us silver foxes.
Not all of our songs back then were so old-person-memory friendly.
In 1976, Gordon Lightfoot released “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.” As I recall, the epic story song had roughly 63 verses and no chorus. It was hauntingly masterful, especially for those of us who grew up along the Great Lakes with their ore boats. But not even when I was 17 years old, when my brain still boasted a lot of vacancy, could I remember all the lyrics. I have no hope now.
These days, I wait for songs like “Fly, Robin, Fly” before I can sing along.
As a writer, Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” (1973) is the epitome of songwriting. He painted vivid pictures of the imagination in an economy of words.
Fifty-three years later, the economy of words feels like an abundance of storytelling.
I still love “Piano Man,” but I have a better chance of singing along to, say, “The Hustle” (1975).
I bet I still can remember all the lyrics. Let’s see, there’s “Do it,” and “Do the Hustle.”
That’s it. Those two lines get repeated a lot, but whenever it’s time to sing, you know it’s one phrase or the other. Memory barely required.
In a few years, when even more facts are crammed into my head, pushing out a lifetime of song lyrics, I’ll probably be left with only the original version of “Wipeout” (1963). There’s just one word in the whole song — “wipeout.” Sung just once.
If the laugh at the beginning (“Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha”) gets too complicated, I can always resort to “Tequila.”
I’ve never had the drink, but the lyric to the song is easy to remember. It’s “tequila.” One word. Not overly taxing on the brain. Unless, I suppose, you’ve imbibed in tequila before singing.
Or maybe I can bank on something like Earth, Wind and Fire’s “September.” A lot of words, but a good deal of them are made up — “ba-dee-yah” and “ba-du-da.”
It doesn’t really count as forgotten lyrics when the words aren’t real in the first place, right?
“Ba-dee-yah, say do you remember?” No. No I don’t. Not anymore.
Fa-la-la-la-la.
Hum the tune to Burt at burton.w.cole@gmail.com.
