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My first time seeing Lyle Lovett dropped my jaw, elevated my soul, and swelled my musical heart to three times the size. It’s an experience that made such an impact on me that the memory of where I was and how it happened is forever imprinted on my brain, just like the memory of where I was when I heard that John Lennon had been shot, or when the Challenger exploded. I feel like I’ve told this story before (or since), but Lyle was appearing as the musical guest on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I was lying on the carpeted floor of our living room in Richmond Hill, with my elbows down and my chin wedged between my hands when this odd-looking man’s opening line (which was spoken, without any music) fully grabbed me…
Hello. I’m the guy who sits next to you and reads the newspaper over your shoulder. Wait, don’t turn the page. I’m not finished. Life is so uncertain…
…and held me through the soul/jazz chorus that was 100% not in my musical wheelhouse (but it soon would be) and all the way to his life-changing (for me, anyway) punchline the closes the song: “Make it a cheeseburger”. By this point I was sitting upright with my hands mutely reaching towards the screen – and my musical world had been rocked (or perhaps more accurately, un-rocked). In three and-a-half minutes Lyle Lovett had changed what music could be, or at least shown me a bridge between the novelty music that I always loved and cherished and “real” music that could be respected enough to be featured on Johnny Carson.
The fact that this moment was so very soul-shaking is why it truly amazes me that I remember it all wrong. I was curious as I sat down to write this story so I checked the internet and discovered that the date of my life-affirming memory (and Lyle’s second time appearing on the tonight show) was in May of 1989, a half-dozen years after we had moved away from Richmond Hill. I thought I had been about fourteen years old when this happened but in fact I was just a few months away from starting university. Sure, I was watching at my parents’ house, and I was probably even laying down on the floor, but I would have been watching a whole different television and laying on an entirely different carpet than my memory will allow.
This realization has quite messed me up, and it has changed the trajectory of this ticket story substantially. I was intending to bounce nicely from the shock-and-awe of that short televised moment to my first time seeing Lyle Lovett in concert on November 6th, 1996, and basically highlight how his live show was a two hour macrocosm of that momentous, wide-eyed and open-hearted experience that had floored me (not) so long ago. Oh, I was going to go on about how I vividly remember Lyle up there effortlessly delivering song after song of shockingly wonderful and endlessly surprising country/jazz gold, how effectively he utilized his big band, sometimes whittling his talented orchestra down to just a trio or even just a single instrument, how he peppered the whole experience with great stories delivered with impeccable timing and the driest of humours, and most importantly how the final song of the evening – after hearing literally dozens of astoundingly brilliant, immaculately crafted sonic pleasures – was able to hit me with the same strength that I felt when I had seen him that very first time.
It was a song called The Girl in the Corner that appears as a secret hidden bonus track* on the double CD that he was touring. It wasn’t a novelty song at all, heck, I don’t know what kind of song it is. It’s actually a pretty straight-ahead balled-y sort of song but once again Lyle presented me with a revolutionary songwriting concept that struck me dumb. It was the chorus. It’s normal enough (“Then she looked at me, then she laughed at me, then she lifted her glass to me…”) but somehow after the fourth line (“And the rest they say, is history”) you just know there’s a final line coming, but there isn’t. I have no idea how he did it, but Lyle created a standard and satisfying four-line chorus to an equally standard and satisfying completely straight-ahead three-chord tribute to love and somehow makes it sound unfinished.
And that’s the hook!
I walked out of there buoyed to the brim with musical élan.
Or did I? Now that the recollections of my entire past have been called into question I can only speculate. Are all my memories wrong? Did any of this really happen? Are there little men outside who busily construct my known world just before I open the door and hasten to deconstruct it again as soon as I get home? Am I just a byte in the algorithm of a some higher power’s Sims game, busily raking in gold coins for the Ultimate User? If no one discovers a CD’s secret song does it really make a sound?
Who knows? But I sure do like Lyle Lovett.
*Isn’t it amazing that they used to put ‘secret’ songs on CD’s? I mean, sure…once, but after that? Come on.
Todd Man Out 