Eavesdropping

1.

This morning, after seeing David Adjmi’s Stereophonic, you’re in the mood for some music, but as usual in 2023 choice cannot be avoided. Spotify or Sonos, Echo Dot or Roam or Living Room or Kitchen or Bedrooms 1 or 2 or any combination of the foregoing, search by artist or album or song or genre or mood or do you in fact not want music at all but a podcast or sermon or workout, not that choosing ‘music’ or even within music ‘album’ will narrow the field. There’s a box of albums – the literal, pressed-vinyl ones – sitting on the living room floor underneath the router, it’s been sitting there for at least fifteen months, nearby is a turntable missing its needle and, nearby the router, some sort of hookup thing missing its dongle. You’d thought to simplify the listening situation by returning to analog but even that choice is complex and has not been completed. Under circumstances like these you frequently wind up in silence, a welcome escape from the burden of choice. I know there are services that choose the day’s music for you but these too require being chosen. 

Some combination of my age and my temperament has made me one of those people whose heart muscle contracts with longing at the sight of the number 1977. I’m nostalgic even for the crises of the late 1970s, for lines at the gas station, the toppling of the Shah, the native chief shedding his tear over highwayside litter; and I’m deeply nostalgic for the dominion of FM radio, because it always felt like, and often was, the absence of choice: at the roller rink, on the school bus, sitting in the back of some car. Under these circumstances we don’t choose Gerry Rafferty’s “Baker Street” or Neil Sedaka’s “Laughter in the Rain” but we’re bathed in them, they’re the aural rain, a form of shared cultural weather. If choice has played a role, it’s as abstractly as the so-called Hand of Fate: people out there buying the records, DJs out there playing them, but these mechanics are as distant as the inflation rate. I miss this, terribly. I still want to float like a mote through a musical landscape not at all of my making. I want to be enveloped and immersed. If this sounds passive and infantile, of course it is, I’m talking about my childhood. But I’m also trying to talk about conditions of childhood that capture something that transcends childhood, some human need that doesn’t go away. 

Always, floating like a mote through that musical landscape that was not of your choice or your making, you were nearer or farther from songs that fell like bolts of lightning, and that sometimes struck you to the heart. A chemical likeness, between what your body wanted and what the song brought: that was the hit, it happened in the blood. Then it did feel like you’d chosen the song, even made it, with the strength of your response.

The first time it happened to me remains the most powerful, and I can still see and even feel some of the mundane details of the moment, the superior air-conditioning in that particular room of the rented house in Texas where my mother and I had the stereo and where, now that I was twelve or thirteen years old, I came of age as an FM radio listener. One afternoon while I was listening, The Song sounded its opening notes like a storm warning; electricity crawled up my spine. “Prolepsis” is a word from ancient Greek which means representing a thing as accomplished that does not yet exist. The Song played, and I was connected somehow both to its moment of origin and my own future self. The Song played and I was already sitting here, a professional writer whose process is halting and chaotic, whose current novel is literally strewn all over the dining table at which I’m currently trying to write this side-essay, its pages intermixed with unpaid bills, unopened mail, and unheeded instructions to myself written on post-it notes at some past moment of fleeting clarity. The Song played and I was already sitting here in the wake of a bruising divorce. It was a clarion call to myself as I someday would be, and hearing it was frightening and galvanizing. 

Not knowing how else to answer its call, I literally called the DJ on the phone – I knew all the numbers of all my chosen stations, because back in those days the DJ would actually answer. What was that song, I demanded. I don’t think he only laughed at me, although he had reason to. That song had already been thundering around the musicscape for several years, it was no one’s discovery by that time but mine. But if the DJ laughed, he wasn’t cruel. He asked for my home address and, all trusting, I gave it. Not long after, I found a package – no postage, hand-delivered – sitting outside my front door. Inside was a station logo t-shirt. “Welcome to the world,” I took the gesture to mean. I wore that t-shirt for years, even after I’d discarded the station as hopelessly mainstream and uncool. But I never discarded The Song.

I did all sorts of things trying to understand why that song made a lightning rod of me. I listened to all the band’s other songs. I lay on the floor staring at the enigmatic images the band had chosen for its record covers and sleeves. I pored over Rolling Stone articles about the band. When their tour came to my city I went to see the band perform. None of this was enough. Obeying a clumsy intuition, I even started writing stories about the band members’ love lives – cringe-worthy efforts that wouldn’t rise to the label of fan fiction but partook of its obsessiveness and voyeurism. 

Arriving to see Stereophonic I knew that it was not “about” the band but my emotions were undeniably band-adjacent. They were the same anxious longing and dread: to get behind and within, to excavate an existential mystery to which I felt intimately connected and from which I felt hopelessly excluded.

At one point in the play, Peter and Diana, who have been lovers and collaborators far longer than they’ve been in the band, begin arguing from opposite sides of the soundstage window. Diana summons Peter into the soundstage with her, and gestures to the sound engineers at the console, Grover and Charlie, to kill the mics. But as soon as Diana and Peter have moved out of view of the window, Grover turns the mics on again. Then we in the audience, our house seats an extension of the control room, eavesdrop on what happens between Diana and Peter, along with Grover and Charlie. Grover’s body is like a seismometer helplessly wired to the disaster: Grover hunches, shudders, cringes, involuntarily and wildly shakes his head: nonononono! Then Peter returns to the booth, the engineers, in the instant before the door opens, hitting the console’s mute button and scrambling to positions of bored ignorance as Peter takes his seat again, equally hiding his rage and humiliation. 

The moment is played to be funny and prompted huge laughs the night I saw it, but the laughter was, at least for me, less a tribute to the outstanding physicality of the actors than a release of discomfort and guilt, a recognition of my trespassing upon something I should never have witnessed. I was reminded of my amateurish, grasping fan fictions, my refusal to be satisfied with the music alone, not despite but becauseof its power. When artists give us beauty, why isn’t that enough for us? Why do we then have to know how?

At the same time, the quest to get inside and behind, to know how it was done, is the only appropriate tribute. Today, in honor of writing this piece, I read the Wikipedia entry for that Song that made a lightning rod of me more than three-fourths of my lifetime ago. Until now I’d resisted such impulses, afraid I might ruin a thing that I love. So it was a renewal of discovery for me, almost like hearing The Song for the first time again, to learn that it was less recorded than assembled, from previously rejected recordings of all three of the band’s vocalists. The work was accomplished “often manually, by splicing tapes with a razor blade.” Who’d held the razors? The sound engineers.

I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that of all the characters in Stereophonic, it was Grover, the lead sound engineer, I found most moving and heroic. But it wasn’t until this morning, when I learned this new (to me) fact about The Song, that I understood why. Though we spy alongside him, Grover isn’t an analogue for us, the spying audience, at all. He's the unsung creator. 

Susan Choi’s five novels include Trust Exercise, which won the 2019 National Book Award for fiction. She has also received the Asian-American Literary Award, the PEN/W.G. Sebald Award, a Lamba Literary award, the 2021 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and fellowships from the NEA and the Guggenheim Foundation. Photo by Heather Weston.