What Would Barbra Do?

by Brockes, Emma

• ISBN13: 9780061254611
• ISBN10: 0061254614
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-04-11
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publications

Summary

Emma Brockes didn't always love musicals. In fact, she hated them. One of her earliest (and most painful) memories is of her mother singing "The Hills Are Alive" while young Emma crossed the street to go to her babysitting gig. According to her mother, the music would keep muggers at bay. According to Emma, it warded off friends, a social life, and any chance of being normal. As she grew older, however, these same songs continued to resonate in her head, first like a broken record and then as a fond reminder of her mother's love. Some people would slice off their arm with a plastic knife before they'd sit through Fiddler on the Roof or The Sound of Music. But musicals are everywhere, and it's about time someone asked why. From An American in Paris to Oklahoma!, Brockes explores the history, art, and politics of musicals, and how they have become an indelible part of our popular culture. Smartly written and incredibly witty, this is a book for people who understand that there are few situations in which the question "What would Barbra do?" doesn't have relevance, in a world much better lived to a soundtrack of show tunes. At the heart of What Would Barbra Do? is a touching story about a daughter, a mother, and how musicals kept them together. Part memoir, part musical history tour, it will keep you laughing and singing all at once.

Excerpts

What Would Barbra Do?
How Musicals Changed My Life

Chapter One

Magic Moments

Two summers ago I flew from London to L.A. to interview a man called Lemmy. Lemmy, if you are as unfamiliar with him as I was, is the lead singer of Motorhead, a heavy metal band that sold a lot of records in the 1970s, mainly to boys in black T-shirts with the arms cut out of them and girls with Manson Family hairdos. I say heavy metal; for all I know it is thrash metal that Motorhead does, or death metal; in any case it is the sort of metal that sounds like two trains crashing and is guaranteed, as Lemmy puts it, to "make your lawn die" if it moves in next door to you.

I was not an obvious choice for the job.

We had agreed to meet at the Rainbow Bar and Grill on Sunset Boulevard, where Marilyn Monroe met Joe DiMaggio and which the night before the interview I visualized as a cocktail lounge, with dim lighting and velvet booths and a wraithlike serving staff who communicated telepathically to avoid disturbing the talent. I wondered what they would make of Lemmy. I had read that he collected Nazi memorabilia and his latest album, Inferno, was basically a list of all the people who he thought might want to kill you, among them the devil and unspecified men on horseback. "No mercy / We bring the sword."

On a piece of letter-size paper I wrote: "Where is metal music going? How does the new metal compare to the old metal? Is metal misunderstood as an art form?"

The next morning I stood in the pearly L.A. light outside a locked, distressed-looking bar, which I guessed had changed hands since the 1950s. There were no booths and the poster on the wall advertised a band called Sick Sex, featuring a half-naked woman with the word "Slayer" written across her torso. "They're shut?" said Lemmy. "Oh, fuck." And taking two chairs down from a table on the terrace, he gave the photographer a hundred-dollar-bill and sent him to buy Jack Daniels and ice and whatever I was drinking—"Coke"—

"Coke?"

"Er, vodka and Coke"

—from an off-license around the corner.

I liked Lemmy. He had lived in L.A. for fourteen years, but still sounded like a comedian on the northern pub circuit. He never had a hangover because he was never entirely sober. "People don't know how to be outrageous anymore," he growled, pointing to a corner of the terrace where, in days gone by, he recalled couples having sex in full view of the bar. Lemmy looked wistful, then cross. "If you tried that now the feminist people would go fucking nuts."

At some point in the interview I let my eyes wander to the outside wall of the bar, where a heavy metal hall of fame had been hung. Lemmy followed my gaze. He asked how many figures on it I could name. Alice Cooper. Steve Tyler. Ozzy Osbourne. I was doing pretty well. "Who's that?" said Lemmy, pointing to a man with a spray of 1980s hair.

"Don Johnson?"

"For fuck's sake. David Lee Roth."

He looked at me suspiciously. "What kind of music do you listen to?"

There was a pause. It seemed to go on for some time.

What kind of music do you listen to?

Over the previous fifteen years, there had only been one brief period when I could have answered this question with anything approaching the truth. That was in early 1996 when I was at university and something called lounge music came briefly back into fashion. It was driven by a kitsch cover band called Mike Flowers Pops and the album Music to Watch Girls By, a bunch of easy-listening tunes used mainly in jeans ads and promoted as chill-out music for people who would otherwise be listening to skinny white men singing plaintively about their girlfriends. They took up "lounge" as you might take up something called "crap"—to show how their patronage could make even the most unpromising material cool.

Lounge music was not very interesting. It was half pastiche, half dim marketing exercise. It threw together mad compilations on the basis that all music made pre–1965 was pretty much the same. But it was the closest the top 40 had come to my record collection in a long time and I could've pulled off fake interest in it without too much effort, just as in 1985 I had been a fake A-Ha fan, in 1986 a fake Michael Jackson fan, in 1987 a fake Jesus and Mary Chain fan, in 1988 a fake INXS fan and even at one stage, in the early 1990s, a fake heavy metal fan, buttressing queries about my music taste with the mighty, conversation-stopping word "Sepultura." According to Kerrang! magazine, Sepultura was "Brazil's biggest metal band," an impressive fact to wheel out under music taste interrogation, except when you confused "Sepultura" with "Scarabeya." Scarabeya was not Brazil's biggest metal band, it was my friend Sophie's brother Richard's metal band, which played in school halls around the Aylesbury and Stoke Mandeville area.

"What?"

"Scarabeya. The metal band. You know. From Brazil. That sort of thing."

I pirated every top-40 album that the village library stocked and played them in my sleep. I listened to Radio 1 before school in the morning and taped endless compilations off the chart show on Sunday nights. Some of the music I genuinely liked (not the Jesus and Mary Chain, obviously) and there was an extended period of Stock Aitken and Waterman worship that I thankfully grew out of, otherwise this book would be about Big Fun. And yet, as I labored over my stereo in flagrant breach of British copyright law—this is what passed for rebellion in the 1980s' Home Counties—it was just no good. Nothing took and the voices in my head kept whispering: "Easy listening is good, easy listening is goooood." Cursing, I dragged myself back to Bing Crosby's 1932 version of "Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime" and the soundtrack to The Band Wagon.

What Would Barbra Do?
How Musicals Changed My Life. Copyright © by Emma Brockes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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Excerpted from What Would Barbra Do?: How Musicals Changed My Life by Emma Brockes
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