The holiday season upon us, I am bracing myself for the onslaught of too-familiar music. I mention this because, just yesterday, I heard Joni Mitchell singing “Blue” on the radio and realized I’ve always thought of “Blue” as a winter album, though it’s far far from festive. Starting the day after Thanksgiving, we’ll be hearing “Frosty the Snowman,” “Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer,” “Let it snow,” “I’ll be home for Christmas,” “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” and so on everywhere we turn. These are tunes for which, with few exceptions, there are no original artists. Every tune is a cover.

Hearing Joni Mitchell brought to mind how difficult it is to cover somebody else’s tune. Consider her “Woodstock” as the best example. Her version is dreamy and moody, almost elegiac. Maybe because she wasn’t at Woodstock. Now, compare hers to the Crosby, Stills, and Nash cover Can you tell that CSN were at that concert? Their version churns like a bulldozer through mud. That kind of power. Then it surprises the listener with those sky-high harmonies. It’s the kind of tune that makes teenagers want to jump in a car and drive across America. Full of hope and love and a vague sense of heroism. Yeah, we are stardust. Golden. Had Steven Stills never done anything else in his career, he’d be noteworthy for making Mitchell’s “Woodstock” a rock classic. It’s a galaxy away from the composer’s version and, dare I say it, a better tune.

Now consider another tune I heard recently: Paul Simon’s“Mrs. Robinson.” The original is noteworthy not only for its smart cynicism, which flew in the face of middle-class hypocrisy way back in 1968, but also for its tasteful, cutting-edge mix of acoustic and electric instruments on top of a pronounced conga backbeat. Nobody has come up with a better arrangement. Not long ago, Cake did a predictably mindless version by replicating everything the original does but in post-punk double-time. The Indigo Girls did a ho-hum version for TV’s “Desperate Housewives” that copies the original exactly. And there you have the typical repertoire for artists doing covers: 1) speed up the original, or 2) let a girl sing instead of a guy or a guy instead of girl, or 3) slow down the original, or 4) add a strange instrument, like a sitar, where there was originally a conventional instrument.

In 1975, country artist Ray Stevens surprised everyone, including himself, when he won a Grammy for his cover of “Misty,” which was written by pianist Earl Garner in 1954. Stevens’s version features banjo at the forefront and a seductively catchy half-time beat that almost gives the tune a funky feel. Everybody loved it. Stevens himself happened upon the arrangement when horsing around with his band in the studio.

The question is this: if you can’t improve the original, why are you messing with it? I know, sometimes the fans of a particular artist want to hear their star do a particular song. Nowhere is this more embarrassing than in the case of Rod Stewart. Or Michael Bolton. Or John Bon Jovi. Oh, I could go on. And, of course, everybody has a Christmas album. Had Kurt Cobain lived, he’d have a Christmas album by now. You know who should do a Christmas album? Cat Stevens. That would be interesting.

Although Bing Crosby didn’t write it, “White Christmas” seems to belong to the long-gone crooner, and it remains one of the all time favorites, regardless of one’s religion. I must admit I like it very much. The man sings it with conviction. Also, like most Christmas tunes, it has nothing to do with Christmas. It’s more about the weather, isn’t it? Snow and sleigh bells and treetops glistening. Nothing about going to midnight mass or eating turkey with irritating relatives. Maybe that’s why we can listen to these tunes again and again without much complaint: they don’t ask much of us. A little snow, a little sentiment, a little wishful thinking.

Here’s my wish for you: may you hear music that makes you want to jump in a car and drive across America singing till you’re hoarse and dopy with hope.

One more tune:Happy Xmas

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Last night, on the campus of my university, I saw a young woman ahead of me stepping carefully beside the sidewalk and shining a flashlight into the grass. Obviously she had lost something. She had her head turned just-so, as if to get a particular view of the dark grass. I imagined that she was in for a long, tedious search. As I passed, I saw that her head was turned just-so because she was holding a cell phone in the crook of her neck. “Mom, I know where it was,” she was saying. “ I almost remember seeing it.”

I imagined her searching for two or three hours, spending that time chatting to everybody she knows. Okay, her search wouldn’t be so tedious and certainly wouldn’t be lonely. Good for her. Good for cell phone technology. Or maybe not so good, I thought. I couldn’t help feeling that, tethered to her phone, she was missing something. Maybe she wasn’t missing much—one or two hours of silence while she searched—but add those hours to others she might spend alone with her thoughts as they run from her childhood to her present, as they turn over one problem in her life that casts light on another, as they give her opportunities to question who she is and why she does what she does and feels what she feels, add all of those lonely thoughtful moments, those hours of thinking instead of speaking, and what do you have? A very different life, it would seem.

Forgive me my geezerdom, but I worry for the young and their reluctance to be alone. Learning how to be alone is like learning how to speak. It’s that vital. Or maybe it’s like learning how to listen, how to shut up and attend: pay attention, regard the world around you, take it in, make it matter. If we attempt to fill every silence with chatter—the white noise of sociability—then we’ve crowded out quality time with ourselves.

I’m all for sociability. And I’ll grant that those who spend every free moment talking on the phone may become thoroughly sociable, and delightful company, from such practice. But what about sociability with oneself? Is it silly to think that I should be my own best friend or, at least, when alone, a good companion to myself? That doesn’t happen automatically. We have to cultivate ourselves as we might cultivate, say, a neighbor as a friend. That takes time. That takes practice. It amounts to finding ways to occupy ourselves when alone, sharing with ourselves the best we have to offer. Long distance runners know what this means, as do leisure walkers. Those who sit for hours in front of the television may not.

The one thing I never had as a child was an invisible friend. Though I think myself creative, I could not bring myself to create that other self. It felt forced and a little silly whenever I tried. It occurs to me now that I may have been satisfied with the company I already offered myself and so, by inventing an invisible friend, I was crowding myself out. As it was, I spent a lot of time alone and in silence. But here’s the thing about silence: it’s never really silent because it’s filled with imaginings and wide-ranging thoughts and music we create for ourselves. It’s a great, sometimes wild, place to be—our heads—and it dismays me to think that young folk nowadays are choosing to spend more time asking friends “What’s up?” on the phone than hanging out in the back yards of their flowering minds.

Of course, decades hence, they themselves may wax nostalgic about the simple pleasure of spending hours on their phones talking about nothing in particular to this friend or that. And, no doubt, they will shake their heads in dismay as their children zone out for hours via the telepathic implants that allow them to chatter to five friends at once. Did I mention that you should forgive me my geezerdom?

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I was running late this morning. I usually run late. Which means I run out the back door to our garage. If I’m not careful, and I’m often not careful, I will step in dog shit. Our backyard is full of it. I don’t mean to be hyperbolic when I say “full.” The yard isn’t heaped with it. But it’s plentiful, because it’s hard to keep up with our two dogs, and so, unlike Jill, I often step in it. I stepped in it this morning. When this happens, Jill laughs. Always. 

This morning I took the garden hose to the waffled sole of my shoe and still that didn’t get it all off. You can imagine my mood at a moment like that, running late and hosing down the caked sole of my shoe. It was a beautiful morning otherwise, I should add— unseasonably warm.

It’s not the dogs’ fault, of course. They do their business where they can. Some days we come home to find that one of them has dropped a dump on the kitchen floor. We keep them in the kitchen while we’re out because, well, they’re dogs and they don’t know a chair from a fire hydrant. PJ, our male dog, sometimes gets an irrepressible urge to spray things as a cat would. Once, he sprayed a pile of CDs near the stereo. We didn’t discover it for over a week (we were kind of busy).

Living with dogs is like living with rampant two-year-olds. Now, some optimists claim that dogs have the intelligence or a two-year-old, but I wonder why such an assertion should impress us. I’ve never met a two-year-old who inspired confidence in his impulse control, much less his discernment. We forget that dogs, like two-year-olds, are wild things. Wild wild wild! They have no business being indoors.

That we allow dogs to live with us, that we let them lounge on our couches and sprawl on our beds, speaks volumes about human need. We accept the love of a dog—despite its dander and slobber and stink and fleas and flatulence—because the love of a dog seems pure somehow. That’s why so many people choose a dog over a human companion. Dogs make it simple: you feed me, the dog says, and I’ll do anything for you. I’ll wear a party hat and prance in a parade. I’ll herd chickens. I’ll jump off a high dive. Anything.

That kind of devotion costs us, though. I see my neighbors out at dawn walking their dogs, no matter what the weather. I guess you get used to that. Jill and I, we just let the dogs out back. That’s why I’m always stepping in it. Jill knows that I could live without them. Cats I must have in my life, I’ll confess here and now. But dogs, they’re crazy in a way that cats will never be. Goofy crazy.

We have a basset hound and a pit bull/boxer. The pit bull suffers from separation anxiety. He hates to be tethered to anything. If you tether him to a radiator upstairs, say, while company is here, he’ll whine loudly, then yowl as if tortured. Then he’ll drop a dump on the floor. Then he’ll start chewing to shreds whatever is nearby, like the magazine rack, then the clean laundry.

The basset hound—like any hound—is nose-driven, always searching for food. She’ll eat anything. Really. If you don’t believe me, take a look at this video: What will Frieda Eat? One night she ate two 18” apple strudels from our kitchen table while we were out of the room. It took her no more than seven minutes. Another time she snatched four raw Italian sausages from the kitchen counter while our backs were turned—and did it so stealthily that we didn’t notice until I said to Jill, “What’d you do with the sausages?”

They’re funny, no two ways about it. Jill loves them to death. We used to argue about them, as parents argue over children. I’m the disciplinarian, she’s the permissive parent. I’m a big fan of Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisper, because he tells it like it is: Treat dogs as dogs. If you don’t, you will confuse them and then they’ll start acting stranger than dogs usually act.

Cesar has taught me that dogs are at their best when they are with the pack. That’s why our pit-bull goes berserk when he’s alone. In the pack, dogs know where they are and what they should do, i.e., stay with the pack and follow the leader. In our pack, dare I say, I am the leader. Still, it gives me pause when, on a dog-walk in our neighborhood, after PJ has dropped his load, I pull out a plastic bag and palm up the warm handful, which then I’m obliged to tote for blocks, like a footman carrying his master’s gold.

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If you were under the age of 10 or 12 and lived in the New York metro area during the 1960s, as I did, you knew—and probably loved—Soupy Sales, the comedian who died at 83 last week. In 1965 he was as big as the Beatles or so it seemed to me. He had his own fan club, fanzine, trading cards, record album, and syndicated TV show. His parody of a rock dance, “Do the Mouse,” was a radio hit. You can see it on YouTube.

What made Soupy special was his go-for-broke style. It seemed anything could happen on his show. Though mindful of his kiddy audience, he played to the crew, who egged him on and laughed all the way. A lot of it was obviously improvised. During one skit, he paused, looked up in puzzlement, then asked, “What’s that noise?” He kept interrupting the skit to ask this question. “It sounds like a bad speaker,” he concluded. When, at last, the noise ceased, he said, “Ah, somebody woke up on the set!” Then he waved at the crew. “No, no, don’t let me disturb your nap.” He was having a good time and invited us viewers to do the same. But he wasn’t self-indulgent. He seemed genuinely slap-happy and a little crazy, like the kid in class who will eat paper paste and jump out second-floor windows on a dare.

Jerry Lewis — famous in the movies — preceded him with a similar reckless style but, unlike Soupy, Lewis seemed downright desperate for the audience’s love and approval. Watch Lewis and you can see that part of him is always too aware of the camera. He’s like the kid who can’t really play dead because he can’t keep himself from opening his eyes to see how people are taking it. Soupy Sales, on the other hand, didn’t seem self-conscious at all. He gave himself totally to the moment, whatever that moment was — whether receiving abuse from the eight-foot-tall dog, White Fang, or dancing with abandon when music erupted suddenly from the set.

The set was supposed to be the interior of Soupy’s house but was nothing more than a wall with a door. There was a black board on one side of the door and a table on the other. Also a pot-belly stove. During the course of the show, Soupy would be compelled to answer the door several times. (A model that originated with Captain Kangaroo a decade before and culminated with Pee Wee Herman decades later.) We seldom saw the visitor, which kept our focus on Soupy, who always got duped, insulted, or injured during the exchange. This was the other appeal he offered: he was wide open to the world and usually the world got the better of him. Yeah, kind of like Charlie Chaplin but not. Unlike Chaplin, Soupy never asked for our pity. Usually the worst that happened to him was a cream pie in the face. His vulnerability made him seem like one of us.

He wore white denim jeans, which were really hip at the time, and his hair, though short, was kind of mod. He also said things like, “Cool it.” Top-40 hits (including Motown) appeared in many of the skits. In other words, though he was the same age as our parents (and, in fact, a WWII vet), he wasn’t anything like the grownups we knew. He performed close to the camera, sometimes right up on the lens. And even though he was making the crew laugh, he made it clear that mostly the jokes were on them — he and his viewers (us kids) were in this together.

His reckless improvisations led to the rumor (which turned into urban legend) that he told off-color jokes like this: “I love taking my girlfriend, Peaches, to the baseball game because we have a great time. I kiss her between the strikes. And she kisses me between the balls!” This never happened (he didn’t have to stoop so low) but it seemed like something he’d do because, at bottom, Soupy was irreverent. Or fearless — like the time he stared at his instructional blackboard in an attempt to explain a pun that was way above the young viewer’s head and he stared and stared at the pun, then turned to the camera finally and said, “You’re on your own today, folks.”

After his show’s cancellation in 1966, Soupy never recovered his popularity. It’s amazing that someone so successful one year can drop out of sight the next and never come back He ended up playing a panelist on game shows. I saw him do stand-up on a TV show in the eighties and he was awful. The scripted punch-line format wasn’t right for him at all. He needed the open-ended, anything-goes formlessness of his old show. The cast of that show (especially Clyde Adler), and even the rowdy crew, created enough push-back and volatility to make him soar. He soars still in my memory.

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