A week on the road talking to people

I was out on the road last week doing my one-man stand-up show, enjoying the friendliness of breakfast waitresses, appreciating fresh-made hash browns over the packaged, and sometimes they’re in a mood to talk and I hear about the kids, the autistic daughter, the elderly parents and the absent husband, the stuff of real life, not the amusing tales that I offer. I’m a good listener. I enjoy this.

I had a wretched cold Thursday for the show in Indiana, a cold that felt like percussive dystrophy of the anterior fantods and I was thinking of canceling right up until people started coming into the hall, but I staggered out and then I sang “Key to the Highway” with the verse I wrote:

I am now in the sixth week
Of my vacation from reading the news
And obliviousness is sure a good cure for the blues

The crowd laughed and the laughter was magic. They liked that they weren’t going to hear about the Department of War and the Reflecting Pool and measles outbreaks. A good crowd can pick a person up and carry you through: they came to have a good time so don’t get in their way. It’s just about that simple.

Laughter is a physical sensation, the joke is a bump and the passengers all bounce together, and I try to represent a culture that is passing away in which people told stories and loved jokes and enjoyed singing together. I have my audience sing “My country, ’tis of thee” and they find it rather moving because they haven’t sung it in so many years and yet they sound beautiful. They also do well with “Great Balls of Fire” and “Under the Boardwalk,” songs from the era before songwriters took drugs to make themselves stupid and ambiguity became the sign of artistic ambition. Dylan aimed for surrealism and “Blowing in the Wind” is familiar to people but a hymn to unknowability? Is this something that gets you up in the morning eager to go to school and teach third grade? I say no and I say to hell with it.

I would never say this to an audience but I am the luckiest person in show business because I never had any big hits that my fans expect to hear again and again and again. Dylan is stuck with a bunch of them, including How does it FEEL to be all ALONE like a complete UNKNOWN in a no-parking ZONE with a kidney STONE when you’ve lost your PHONE, and if he omits it he can feel their displeasure, a man who got rich and famous singing about being lonely and broke.

The poor Everly Brothers, Don and Phil, my heroes when I was a kid, their perfect two-part brotherly harmony, but think of how they were prisoners of their hits and what is it like to look at your brother for the 1,000^th time and sing, Darling, you can count on me, till the sun dries up the sea. Until then I’ll always be devoted to you — you sing it robotically, you despise the song, the stupidity of the line about the sun drying up the sea, you loathe your brother, you loathe your fans who are all excited, like chickens in the farmyard being tossed kitchen scraps. I sang bass with the boys once on “Why Worry” and I was thrilled and they were in a twilight zone.

I come from the old days when people didn’t rehash politics but simply told jokes. Those days are gone so I go out and tell some good ones, like How many Unitarians does it take to change a lightbulb? “Unitarians believe that incandescent and fluorescent and neon are equally valid paths to light, and if, in your journey, you feel the need to change your lightbulb, we will come to your home and recite a poem about radiance and perform a dance about the rising of the sun.” A beautiful small prose construction like a paper plane.

My show is easy, I just converse with people. Writing is treacherous, because I use a computer as a typewriter and I don’t understand a tiny fraction of how to work this and strange things happen suddenly, text disappears, Lord know where, I could work half a day on something and lose it, I’m working on the edge of a cliff, but stand-up is simple, I’m just driving a bus full of people over the bumps and I know where the potholes are and I do not avoid them.

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