Setting Times stories to music: From the Waterboys to the Jam
By Kari Howard
By chance, three of my favorite songwriters paired with this week’s Great Reads. And I realized: Many of their lyrics are Great Reads in their own right.
Elvis Costello is the cleverest songwriter of his generation, the Tom Stoppard of post-punk and beyond. Just about every song on the album “Imperial Bedroom” is a dazzler of wordplay. Here are a few lines from “The Loved Ones”:
Don’t get smart or sarcastic
He snaps back just like elastic
Spare us the theatrics and the verbal gymnastics
We break wise guys just like matchsticks
Mike Scott of the Waterboys is the unabashed romantic, Byron, Keats and Shelley set to music. This song shatters me. It’s called “The Big Music”:
I have heard
the big music
and I’ll never be the same
something so pure
just called my name
And then there’s Paul Weller, who wrote the song that changed my life (but that’s another story). A lot of people focus on his sartorial style – he’s known as “the Modfather” in Britain – but the man has the soul of a poet. Scratch that. He is a poet – of the everyday, like Philip Larkin. I offer just one stanza of the totally sensory “That’s Entertainment” as proof:
Waking up from bad dreams and smoking cigarettes
Cuddling a warm girl and smelling stale perfume
A hot summer’s day and sticky black tarmac
Feeding ducks in the park and wishing you were far away
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. A story-song combo!
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Gavin Newsom a rising star who’s in eclipse as lt. governor
For more than two years, Gavin Newsom has suffered the indignities of being the state’s second-in-command.
His ideas about economic development and education are routinely ignored. He chairs a commission that’s met only once. On the rare occasions he subs for the chief executive, protocol dictates he not make headlines. (In April, when Gov. Jerry Brown was in China, Newsom boldly declared a state vegetable. And fruit. And grain.)
On a Monday this spring, he was escorted off the Senate floor.
A security officer had told the lieutenant governor that he couldn’t sit in the same room as lawmakers when they debated policy because he was a member of the executive branch.
Outside, Newsom slumped on a wooden bench, his face that of a star pupil who’d been sent to the principal’s office.
“I’ve actually presided over the damn thing,” he said, noting his ceremonial role as president of the Senate, one of his few official duties. “It’s kind of ironic.”
Just then, a woman stopped and asked Newsom — former San Francisco mayor, hero to the gay rights movement, gubernatorial contender — if he would pose for a picture with her son. Newsom put his arm around the boy and flashed a Hollywood smile.
“What’s a lieutenant governor?” the boy asked.
Newsom kept his gaze on the camera.
“I ask myself that every day.”
#storysongs combo: “Brilliant Mistake,” by Elvis Costello. A song of regret: “I wish I could push a button/And talk in the past and not the present tense.”
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For autograph hound, no sign of this Sports Illustrated cover girl’s identity
He’s hunted down the biggest names in sports — star athletes such as Ben Hogan, Tiger Woods and Joe Namath.
Over the last 31 years, Scott Smith has snagged the signatures of 4,413 sports stars featured on 2,913 covers of Sports Illustrated magazine, tracking some down in phone books (in the pre-Google era) and slipping through a gantlet of Argentine troops guarding soccer star Diego Maradona.
He’s managed to collect Michael Jordan’s autograph on 35 of his 51 covers. He has Muhammad Ali’s on 48 of them. Mickey Mantle signed 11 of his covers.
But for all of his prize catches, one has eluded him: the signature of the woman on the cover of the Oct. 17, 1960, edition of SI, holding what appears to be a kite.
The unnamed model is illustrating what the cover calls the “new look in sports clothes” — in the woman’s case, a sleeveless blue bodysuit.
“The woman is wearing what they called stretchy pants, a one-piece jumpsuit,” said Smith, 48.
He contacted modeling agencies, fashion historian Linda Morand and Jule Campbell, former editor of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition. None of them could help. The magazine’s index and inside contents didn’t offer any clues to the cover girl’s identity.
“The woman looks like Mary Tyler Moore,” Smith said. “But it’s not her — I asked her.”
(For the sad coda to this story, read here.)
#storysongs combo: “Cover Girl,” by Cheap Trick.
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South Africa butterfly hunters: A rare breed
Mark Williams was out with his butterfly net in his favorite South African mountain range when a flutter of gray-blue wings sailed by. They were almost as small and nondescript as the other gray-blue butterflies drifting past.
Almost.
Heart pounding and net flailing, he dashed after the bobbing sliver of color, hope fluttering like a wind-blown flag. He hooked in the tiny creature, its wingspan just over 1 1/2 inches. It was a Lotana blue, believed to be extinct. Nobody had seen one alive in decades.
“I ran it down and caught it with a huge … swipe, because they can move,” Williams said of that moment five years ago. “I knew straight away I’d rediscovered the Lotana blue.”
His search for the Lotana blue had taken eight years. Yet a lepidopterist’s life — the childhood bedroom stuffed with bird’s nests, pebbles and butterflies, the years of research, the wild goose chases — can be distilled into such wild, joyful moments.
Dashing through the scrub, net aloft, is a passion that has not changed much over the decades — except that like certain butterfly species, the South African lepidopterist population has dwindled to a few dozen fiercely competitive fanatics, most of them middle-aged men.
And the 63-year-old Williams, a man who has traveled hundreds of thousands of miles with his trusty net, confronting angry baboons, dodging bull hippos and narrowly avoiding snake bites, is one of their gods.
“I’m being called the Butterfly Whisperer,” Williams said with a smile, carefully moving the remains of rare and common species from one pinboard to another. “I’d love to go out with that title. Mark Williams, the Butterfly Whisperer,” he said, rolling the words as if savoring wine.
#storysongs combo: “The Butterfly Collector,” by the Jam. Not about butterflies, actually. Weller’s talking about a different kind of collector. Here’s a live version with Weller and Noel Gallagher, no slouch in the songwriting department himself.
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In Vietnamese salons, nails, polish and unvarnished opinions
The woman rubbed the cracked skin of a man’s foot, smoothing on almond cream. She massaged his leg, cradling his rough ankle as she muttered in Vietnamese.
“Choi dat oi!” she said, turning to a co-worker. “Oh my God! This guy is so dirty. I thought he looked clean. But he takes off the shoe and he is different.”
The manicurists kept their heads bowed and whispered, although there is no way the customer could understand their chatter. One polished his toes, the other did his fingers.
Inside the Derma Spa & Nails salon in Newport Beach, manicures started at $16, and the women worked away as afternoon grew into evening.
The customer wore a sleeveless tank top and jeans. He had a sparkling stud in his left ear and held a phone to his right, oblivious to the talk.
I sat two chairs away, tapping the keys of my BlackBerry, taking it all down. I didn’t let on that I understood their conversations; everyone working here was from Vietnam, as am I.
The murmuring of manicurists in Vietnamese is as much a part of the mani-pedi world as the scent of acetone and fingernail polish. I’ve been asked over and over by those who don’t speak the language: What do they talk about at nail salons?
#storysongs combo: “I Wanna Hold Your Hand,” by the Beatles. Here they are singing it on the famous 1964 Ed Sullivan Show. Screaming girls a bonus.
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Victims to wed on Colo. movie theater shooting anniversary
Eugene Han survived the bullets that tore into his body a year ago in a suburban movie theater. He endured surgeries and months of physical therapy to make his leg work again. On most days he could silence the screams and gunfire that lingered in his head.
What he couldn’t do was stop the calendar.
As the one-year anniversary of the mass shooting approached, Han began to feel anxious. He worried about how it would affect his girlfriend, Kirstin Davis.
Han was shot twice trying to protect her when a gunman began picking off moviegoers just after midnight July 20, 2012.
Davis suffered a minor shrapnel wound in her back. The deeper damage came later as Han watched the carefree woman he loved become fearful and withdrawn. As he slowly got better, she seemed stuck. She was afraid to be alone, yet afraid to be with people. Sleep was rare, and when it came it did so with dreams of a gunman looking under theater seats for her.
Han and Davis grew up with each other in Aurora, and started dating only three years ago. Their first date was at a Dairy Queen. He was struck by her beauty; she liked that he was a singer in the church choir.
They had talked about getting married, but it always seemed like something that could wait. After the shooting, Han, 21, felt a new impatience.
#storysongs combo: “Come Live With Me,” by the Waterboys. Mike Scott’s beautiful seven-minute marriage proposal in a song.
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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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