Setting Times stories to music: From Rick James to Soup Dragons
After Elmore Leonard died this week, his 10 rules of good writing were passed around like a favorite memory at a wake. He called this his most important rule: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”
The word “sounds” there is key, because Leonard was a master of the rhythm, the musicality, of language. Does it sound like something you would actually say? Good. Does it sound like you’re showing off? Not so good.
A few days later, I came across a list of the “25 Things Editors Need to Remember When Working With Writers.” I agreed with almost all of them, but two are things I absolutely do. And I bet Leonard did too:
13. Suggest that your writers read out loud to themselves. (In a newsroom setting, this can be done internally, without moving lips.) Help them find the rhythm in the words.
14. Do the same yourself when editing.
So I’m trying to think, what song sounds the most like Elmore Leonard had written it? My first instinct was Elvis Costello’s “Watching the Detectives,” both for its theme and the noirish rhythm of the language. And then I realized that no Brit songwriter, even a brilliant one, could write the Elmore Leonard song. Has to be American. Has to be Springsteen. And although it’s one of my least favorite of his songs, has to be “Jungleland.”
Anyway, in these roundups of the week gone by, I’d like to offer the first paragraphs of each Great Read (or, as they’re known in print, Column One) -- maybe they’ll buy your eye and you can settle in for a good weekend read. And you’ll also get the songs that inspired me while editing the stories, or reading them later if my fellow editor Millie Quan ushered them through. A story-song combo!
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Becky G dreams of being the next Jennifer Lopez
Becky G vividly remembers what she calls “my little mini midlife crisis.” It happened seven years ago, when she was 9.
At the time, her family had been forced to move into her grandparents’ Inglewood garage after losing its Riverside County home. Money was tight. Her dad was stressing out. And her mom was “really scared.”
That’s when Becky had an epiphany.
“I did have this moment of realization of, ‘Oh, my God, what am I going to do with my life?’“ she says. “Just feeling like I had to get my act together, even though there was really nothing to put together yet.”
Today, the biggest challenge facing the preternaturally ambitious Mexican American teen isn’t getting her act together. It’s deciding which part of it -- rapping, songwriting, acting, modeling -- to focus on as she strives to turn herself into a one-woman entertainment juggernaut.
With a major-label record contract, a new deal with CoverGirl and A-list musicians and producers clamoring to work with her, Becky is an avatar of a new L.A. urban sound: young, female, Latina, bilingual and fiercely aspirational.
#storysongs combo: “I Want It All,” by Queen. “....And I want it now.”
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Washington bar’s patrons with pot are living the high life
Tavern owner Frankie Schnarr takes a long draw from his bottle of Coors Light and scans his sports bar, listening to billiard balls rattle and a pinball machine explode with points.
Suddenly, there’s that smell: musky-sweet, skunky yet somehow pleasing, an odor traditionally fraught with illegality.
Three men in jeans and sleeveless shirts shooting pool nearby fire up a small purple pipe packed with pot. They inhale deeply between shots, laughing, passing the bowl, mellowing their buzz with an occasional swig of beer.
Marijuana. Being brazenly smoked in public, right there under the bar owner’s nose.
Schnarr smiles.
“You get used to the smell — it’s like the mold at your Mom’s house,” he says, motioning for another Coors. “It’s strange at first, but later you realize, ‘Oh, that’s what that is.’ Some people walk in here these days and go, ‘Oh, wow.’ But most walk in and say: ‘Oh, wow. This is cool!’“
At Frankie’s Sports Bar and Grill, firing up a “fatty” or a “blunt” is not only condoned, it’s welcomed. Last fall, Washington state legalized recreational marijuana use, allowing people to smoke the drug in private, but not in public places such as bars. Schnarr, 63, has found a way around that: He’s using a space in his bar he says is private, not public.
Now the second floor of his sports bar — a mammoth room with TVs, card tables, 10 pool tables, four shuffleboard tables and rows of booths — is the only pub in the state to allow the practice. It’s a rarefied realm where patrons burn joints and bowls of greenish weed in a free-for-all fashion that’s still unknown in most of law-abiding America.
#storysongs combo: “Mary Jane,” by Rick James. Sure, I could have gone with “Legalize It” by Peter Tosh. This one’s a little more fun.
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Syria divided: Crossing a bridge where a sniper waits
Battoul makes her way around the smashed bus full of sandbags and steps into sniper territory. A man balancing a large box of produce on his left shoulder, cilantro peeking out, is close on her heels.
“Hurry, hurry,” he says. “This is not the time to walk slowly.”
She tries to blend into the crowd making its way over the 300-yard stretch of no man’s land that divides the two Aleppos: one held by the rebels, one by the government.
Every day, a government sniper holed up in City Hall picks off at least a few people. On good days, no one dies.
People call it the crossing of death.
Once, Battoul and her sister saw a 4-year-old boy pleading with his mother not to take him over the bridge that spans the Queiq River, the scariest part of the crossing.
“I don’t want to die,” he said, crying. The boy continued to beg his mother, who was holding a baby in her arms, until Battoul’s sister scooped up the boy and carried him, crying and screaming, across the bridge.
The first time Battoul crossed, she kept replaying all the terrifying stories she had heard. But once across safely, her fear slipped away.
“Life has to go on,” she says. “People cross and someone gets shot and they pick up the martyr and keep going.”
#storysongs combo: “Short Bursts,” by We Were Promised Jetpacks. The final minute of the song, especially, seems to fit the story.
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Giving new life and an old home to struggling sea lion pups
The pickup crept down the steep drive to the beach at White Point in San Pedro. When the driver reached the bottom, he carefully backed the truck as close as he could to the water, the surf fizzing like soda being poured in a glass of ice.
It’s a route that Harry Mansfield, a volunteer at the Marine Mammal Care Center a few miles away, could probably travel with his eyes closed by now.
For the last few months, he’s repeated the routine as many as a dozen times a week: delivering sea lion pups that once nearly died in these waters off Southern California to a second chance at life in the wild.
Although the waves were choppier than Mansfield would have preferred, the sea lions, waiting in their crates, perked up as soon as they caught a whiff of the salt in the air, their whiskers twitching.
They were eager to splash into the ocean.
But the year-old sea lion known as 534 huddled in his crate. He’d come to the center May 11, after being found stranded on a beach in Malibu, more dead than alive.
Two months later, he’d nearly tripled in size. Every test showed he was healthy, ready for the wild.
Yet here he was, hesitating, as the currents of a vast ocean waited to draw him back in.
#storysongs combo: “I’m Free,” by the Soup Dragons. Yes, it’s a Rolling Stones song. But I have my Scot pop thing going on and like this version better—and love the dance mix of the single in this video.
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Using paint and the power of persuasion, muralist uplifts Pacoima
On Van Nuys Boulevard in Pacoima, the speed limit is 35 mph but a lot of drivers do 50, whipping by liquor stores and laundromats, cracked sidewalks and the occasional sign-spinner whose enthusiasm is wilting in the 90-degree heat.
The Bradley Avenue intersection offers plenty of reasons to keep your foot on the gas pedal: In the first week of August, the area saw three vehicle thefts, a robbery and a burglary. The San Fernando Gardens housing project, claimed by gangs and drug dealers, is a block down the street.
But on this afternoon, muralist Levi Ponce is giving motorists a reason to rubberneck.
On the baked orange wall of an insurance business, Ponce paints a Latina Lady Liberty to start. Then some neighborhood kids and muralists offer to help. A pod of whales appears on a collision course with Lady Liberty, now flanked by a herd of elephants, a bald eagle and an Aztec woman.
“Lots of this wasn’t planned,” admits Ponce, 26, who is wearing a ribbed tank top and paint-splattered shorts, a trucker hat pushed high on his brow. “But it’s always that way.”
He shrugs and dips his brush in gray. Some quick strokes, and Lady Liberty’s curls froth like ocean waves. A few more and her shoulder sinks underwater. He stands back, swaying slightly to the 1990s hip-hop hammering from iPod speakers in a nearby truck bed, and nods.
Then a helper holds up a pizza box that has been cut into a stencil of a star and asks if he can start painting.
“Do your thing, baby boo,” Ponce says.
It used to be that the walls of the businesses on Van Nuys Boulevard were battlegrounds. By night, graffiti crews defaced storefronts with swaggering letters in neon green, red and yellow. By day, building owners fought back with pressure washers and a mixture of white and brown.
Then Ponce brought his paintbrush and his powers of persuasion, winning over residents, shop owners and tagging crews alike — and in the process turning the boulevard into a roadside gallery known as Mural Mile.
#storysongs combo: “Blue Boulevard,” by Dave Alvin and the Guilty Men. Quite beautiful, with a touch of “Thunder Road” to it.
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If you have ideas for story-song pairings of your own, tweet the title and artist to @karihow or @LATimesColumn1 with the hashtag #storysongs.
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