is what I did when I got home the night around the café jukebox. Acting on sheer instinct I opened up my father's battered old copy of Homer's Odyssey, and sure enough, I discovered that Sisyphus had not been totally abandoned by the gods. He was granted one grand consolation. As he labored with his stone, he could hear exquisite music from the flute of Orpheus.
As Sisyphus in the ancient underworld found solace in the sweet sounds of Orpheus' flute, so too we are helped in mysterious ways by the power of mythic music, whether in the records of Miles Davis or the notes of the anonymous saxophonist playing on the lonely street corner or fire escape.
In his inimitable poetry, Homer wrote, “Poor Sisyphus could hear the charming sounds that ravished his ear.”
Imagine the implications of that line. The divine detail is subtly placed. This is no mere coincidence. What it reveals to me is that we can more easily bear our burden if we listen closely for the music of life all around us, the music that is there for the listening, for the solace, for the triumph over our troubles.
For as long as we know music has healed mind, body, and soul. In our own time singers from Billie Holliday to Judy Garland, Ray Charles to Elvis Presley, have often worked in the old tradition of the wounded healer. Their voices soothe the savage beast of modern life. During the past fifty years one of the most effective antidotes to the corrosive burns of lonely urban life has been the tenderly tough voice of Frank Sinatra. His story is an American saga. It begins with the myth of the Italian immigrant, is encrusted with the legends of his beginnings on the road and with Tommy Dorsey, inflamed with the reputed connections to the mythic Mafia, and is even, as journalist Pete Hamill writes, inflicted with “the sorry narrative of the Fall,” the fall from grace and subsequent resurrection.
All of these elements are there in The Voice. As music was the ultimate consolation for him, so it has been for millions of listeners, the voice of reassurance that if he could turn suicidal despair around, so can we.
The myth of Sinatra, like the myth of Sisyphus, is elegiac. It is the soulfully persuasive story of coming back from the dead, as Sinatra did after his disastrous marriage to Ava Gardner and his subsequent bouts with suicidal depression, with music that signals the triumph over fate of heartbreak. In this music, as in great blues, there isn't the slightest pretense of conquering pain and sorrow forever, like you get in escapist movies or confectionery pop songs. Instead, you hear the voice of conviction that the only road back from heartache is to love again.
The mythic message from Sisyphus to Sinatra is that only love can conquer death. Sisyphus risked everything for the love of his wife, of fresh air and light and warm sand, and for his citizens, so they could drink fresh water. Sinatra risked everything to go back into his pain because he believed that music was the best healer, the most sacred thing in his life, the only way to turn pain into beauty.
That Old Black Magic
After the smitten lover left the café that night, I remember approaching the jukebox with something like amused reverence. I have heard memorable concerts at some of the greatest venues in the world, from Paris and Vienna to London, the Baths of Caracalla, the Met in New York. But rarely have I felt the tangibility of music as I did that night in my local café listening to Sinatra's bluesy soulfulness.
So I slipped my own dollar into the jukebox and listened once again to Sinatra's healing game song, “Only the Lonely,” his “Slide on over the couch” cry from the heart from a tender tough guy to his girlfriend. I heard the song as if for the first time, this time as the voice that had tamed the dark shadows along a lonely avenue, a voice to answer the emptiness when there are no words left, only music to express the movement in the heart called courage that will help us back up the hill of love and life one more time.
The existential myth of Sinatra may be the soundtrack for urban loneliness; some say his is the voice of the century, but its power lies in its storytelling as well as its power of music. The isolation of life in our cities has been a generally agreed upon price for the myth of individualism that rules the culture, but it needed a story, a voice. As singer Julius LaRosa told the New York Times after Sinatra's death in 1998, “Sinatra was able to turn a 32-bar song into a three-act play.” With what rock star Bono called “swagger and attitude,” Sinatra did more than give urban life a voice, he mythologized it, made our loneliness and our struggle seem sacred, and triumph possible. The source of that conviction may be found in something Sinatra once said about his early influences, the main one being the old family standup Philco radio. “The music on the radio was our religion,” he said, “it was even shaped like a cathedral.” In tribute, Bruce Springsteen once described Sinatra's music as “synonymous with black tie, the good life, the best booze, women, sophistication, [but] his blues voice was always the sound of hard luck and men late at night with the last $10 in their pockets and trying to figure a way out.”
“Don't despair,” Sinatra replied to Bill Zehme when asked about dealing with defeat. “You have to scrape bottom to appreciate life and start living again.” Talking to journalist A. E. Hotchner in 1955, he said, “Me. I did it. I'm my own worst enemy. My singing went downhill and I went downhill with it…. The only thing that can hurt you is yourself.”
In other words, he made music out of the struggle that is at the heart of life.
It may be a lonesome old town, we may feel blues in the night, but there is some old black magic in the dark that we can turn into light.
The secret is the way you wear your hat, which must be done by lowering one shoulder and raising the other, as if to say you've been to hell and back and you can take on any burden the world wants to throw at you.
At Sinatra's eightieth birthday party, Springsteen gave him a mythic tribute from the stage: “On behalf of all New Jersey, Frank, I want to say that, brother, you sang our soul.”
The myth endures. Music saves our soul. “To sing,” writes Joan Baez, “is to love and affirm, to fly and to soar…” and indeed, “Beauty exists, but must be hunted for and found.”
Many Stories Deep
The world is in utter darkness without stories. We need the courage of the heartbroken man at the top of the mountain to turn and go back down and turn his sorrow into joy. We need to hear the music he heard. We need his stories.
We are like wandering Aesop who discovers he must tell his stories night after night if he wants food or shelter. There is only one way to survive his never-ending travels, and that is to transform everything he sees into a story so soul-satisfying for his hosts that they will gladly feed him and give him a bed. So he learns to turn the enigmas of the day into the fables of the night. Some strangers just bring news and gossip from the down the road; the storyteller dares to bring more.
We are like the pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales who are reminded by the innkeeper at the Tabard Inn to tell one story on the way to the cathedral and another on the way home. He has seen and heard travelers come and go for years. He knows that the journey is incomplete, not even a bona fide pilgrimage, without the stories that try to glean meaning from the chaotic incidents along the way.
The Greek fabulist Aesop depicted by the Spanish painter Velázquez (1599–1660) as an itinerant storyteller bearing an old leather-bound book from which he will read his fables and so earn his bed and bread for the evening.
