01 Plane, Too

“Plane, Too” (Loudon Wainwright III)

I learned “Plane, Too” by accident.  The right chords stumbled into rhythm, it was that simple.  The words of the song are just a list of things on the plane, facts laid out plainly.  It has a practical brilliance.  I like lists, though I never make the useful kind.  I was big into lists at the time—lists of facts, actually—obsessing over Harpers magazine’s “Findings” page, and a book of lists I found perusing the library shelves, which included a list of inventions that were denied patents, such as an air mattress filled with helium that could float to the ceiling when not in use, a sort of Murphy bed of the future, and an airtight gas mask to connect to your toilet to get oxygen in case you are trapped in a house on fire, which in a way I was.  The book also included a list of bizarre animal mating facts, describing the labyrinthine vaginas of ducks, the many stabbed thoraxes of the bug world, and in the midst of all this list reading I was listening to a Moby Dick audiobook, driving around Pennsylvania listening to lists of whale parts.  Times were whale heavy.  I was working full time, mostly from home, and grad school, mostly from home, with my wife, pregnant with our son Oscar amidst a dead and ending marriage, and our 3-year-old son, Milo. 

I figured out how to play Wainwright’s “Plane, Too” while trying to write a song of my own, suddenly recognizing my song as someone else’s.  So I changed mine a little, called it “Let It Dry”, and included it on the album Domestic.  By album I mean burnt cds with photoshop cover art handed out to a handful of friends, but carefully crafted nonetheless, eight albums of original songs in as many years.  Amanda saw it all as worthless time wasting, but to me it was more and more all I wanted to do.  The ritual of it was enthralling, and the results were meaningful, if only to me.  Or to Milo, Oscar now too, but at the time there was only Milo, and often when I was working on music I would think about him hearing it years later, a puzzle of me to decode, the most unabashed snapshot of me I could muster.  The sound of me, and the way I heard it, my tastes, my moods and being.  All of the decisions that together made it what it was, like a thousand scuffs to a stone, carving something to resemble a face, a hole going somewhere, or just a little empty space.

It’s fitting I figured the song out accidentally, because in my attempts at music I thrive on accidents and first attempts.  I have no formal education, and out of stubbornness have intentionally avoided it, instead relying on the joys of winging it, and a computer’s ability to edit out what’s bad, and make the most of what’s good.  I still don’t consider myself much of a musician, but I’ve been a dedicated and opinionated music listener for as long as I can remember, used to play radio DJ as a kid with my parents’ records, then did the same all through college as a DJ and music director of the radio station, with bags and bags of promo copies piling up in the university mailroom, like a weekly Christmas of my dreams.  I’ve always had musical instruments around me, always wanted terribly to be able to play them, but never terribly enough to take it seriously.  My dad played bass in a few bands when he was young, and still played in one for a time when I was a kid.  They were called Speed Merchant and they practiced sometimes in our basement.  My dad, my uncle Fred, a long-haired guy named Harry who played a flying V, and a bearded singer named Buck.  My dad even had the sweatbands found around the wrists of any bonafied rocker still standing at the end of the 70’s.  They played a lot of cover songs, classic rock stuff, like “Taking Care of Business” by Bachman Turner Overdrive.  I remember going to see his band play, and the way I would vibrate in my chest from the drums.  “It beats my heart,” is how Milo describes the same feeling.  I wanted drums every year for Christmas but never got them.  My mom signed me up for drum lessons Saturday mornings, but no actual drums were involved, just a near silent rubber padded wood practice block, so after only a couple of weeks I gave it up because I was sick of missing good cartoons.  I did play my dad’s bass though, either when my parents weren’t home or when I had his permission, and after awhile there was an acoustic guitar from a yard sale, but always right handed, and I’m the lone lefty in a family of six.  My dad tried once to give me lessons, but it went about as well as the ‘drum’ lessons, then worse when I broke something on his prize ’77 Fender Peavey Bass.  Of the whole experience I mostly remember my dad swearing while soldering a wire to the pickup—our last practice session together. 

My dad’s Speed Merchant practice sessions had stopped a few years before that, at my mom’s insistence, when I was about six.  Mostly the bass sat in the basement.  Once, my dad used the bass and a guitar and keyboard to record a Christmas song, with me, Aaron, and Nick, three of four McGaw boys, singing the chorus together, and taking turns with each verse to list our demands—the year our Christmas lists needed to rhyme.  The song ends with a little self-indulgent keyboarding from my dad, coincidentally not unlike how my cover of “Plane, Too” ends.  My dad wrote poetry for years too, mostly stuff he wrote at work, especially night shifts and overtime.  Any mention of my dad’s creative endeavors to my mom receives an eye roll and a “don’t get me started” look of disdain.  In spite of this, I’ve always been fascinated at these glimpses of my dad’s inner world, and always somehow convinced that I could know him better through these things than through actually interacting with him, being that we have never been all that close, and only ever talk about work or the weather or movies or music, a normal, average father and son relationship, really, but dull compared to listening to that Christmas song, or hearing recordings of his band.  So I think of Milo and of Oscar and I hope that they will want to listen to what I have made and they will know me better, understand me more that way than they could otherwise, or at least in a different way, and I would still know and have that side of me as well, or at least something of it to study and to show. 

Amanda never listened to the music I make.  She would feign interest now and again, and a few of the songs she legitimately knew, but mostly they were her competition for my time.  She thought they all sounded sad, and she had no stomach for my bad singing.  Early on I tried to write songs about her, for her, but that didn’t work, so later out of disdain I would write breakup songs, knowing she wouldn’t hear them.  At the time I first accidentally learned “Plane, Too”, I was teaching English for a cyber school, and sneaking time between washing dishes and mowing the lawn to write songs about washing dishes and mowing the lawn, listening to a lot of Loudon Wainwright.  Knowing how Amanda felt about all the time I spent on music, I would feel guilty whenever I did, and would usually just wait it out until she went to bed, or would stay home whenever she went to her parents’ house or anywhere I could get out of.  The whole thing was making me more frustrated than happy, plus I felt like I had exhausted my talents and my tricks for making music, believed it was a waste of time, and felt foolish, yet could not for the life of me want to stop.  “Let It Dry”, a song about line drying clothes, Amanda’s idea of fun, was also about giving up on writing songs and making music.  The chorus went, “Just give it up / hang it up / and let it dry”.  I thought I was going to stop making songs but I couldn’t, so I just made a song about it.  Then after that came songs about being trapped, or miserably resigned.  One song went “You’re just a dish in the sink / you can’t do anything about anything”, another “Oh, well oh well, oh well, what can I do?”

Loudon Wainwright is quite skilled at writing songs about ordinary life and ordinary things.  When he is good—which to me is really not that often—he captures plain old life in a way that makes mundane truths shine as if profound.  His lyrics are clever and funny and ultimately affecting because the worlds they create are so recognizable, and because his voice is an honest one, even when it’s clearly all a show, him in the role he’s made of himself.  Take for instance his song “Cardboard Boxes”, from his 1985 album I’m Alright.  Over a guitar that’s headed out west, it begins “I’m gonna go to the supermarket / I’m gonna go to the liquor store / I’m gonna get me some cardboard boxes / you know what them boxes are for”, and you laugh to yourself because you do know what those boxes are for.  He hams it up throughout with Bonanza whiplash noises, a song that is simply about moving, so much that you imagine him coming up with the song while actually packing and moving boxes, the hamming being simply how people react when faced with menial labor.  The song is easy, silly really, a joke, funny because it’s true. 

Wainwright is known for being funny, but his humor is always more of a wink than a punchline.  He’s more of a John Prine than a Weird Al, and he can be a lot less funny than he’s known for, his humor often bathed in angsty cynicism, jokes a little too raw to laugh at comfortably.  Take his “Suicide Song” for instance, from Album II, his second album:

Do the monkey do the pony do the slop do the boogaloo twist

Cut your throat, cut your throat, cut your wrist

When you get hung up hang yourself up by the neck

What the hell what the hell what the heck

Wainwright has sung a lot about suicide, and about drinking too much, about getting older, about failed relationships, about being an absent father, about being a bad person, but Album II’s “Plane, Too” is basically just about a plane ride, and everything on the plane.  Yet, it is somehow more emotionally affecting than most of his songs.  Throughout his singing career, Wainwright has embraced the candid nature of folk music, and that candidness is essential to his style, whether it comes out as a laugh or as a whine.  But the candidness of “Plane, Too” isn’t much of either.  It just is what it is, which makes the world of the song all the more real and believable.  I haven’t been on a plane too many times, but the plane in the song sounds like every plane I have been on.  And what’s more, it is one specific moment, a roll call of things on that one plane, and there are so many other planes, and things, there is so much we just sit with and be with, on that plane or wherever.  It is a snapshot of what there is to show for ourselves, one of those telling glimpses of one’s life as an ant farm, set to a simple repeating melody.  More than that, it is about choices, about everything that’s available laid out, and the one big lack of choice, yourself.

Of all the trips I’ve taken on a plane, only one was without Amanda.  It was when I was still working for the job I hated the most—a private, for-profit online school that put all their efforts into marketing and none into their curriculum, and kept all their teachers part-time wage slaves so they wouldn’t have to spring for insurance.  Aside from the teachers and a couple of other instructional supervisors like myself, everyone in the company had a business background, and it showed.  They sent me to Houston for four days, to run a booth at a homeschooling convention.  It was the longest I had been away from Amanda since we started dating the summer before 11^th grade.  I was awfully unhappy in our relationship at that point, so it wasn’t hard being away, but it was hard to be away from Milo.  It was the longest I had been away from him since he was born, a record which would hold until the following summer when I started a graduate writing program through Wilkes University and went away for the 8-day residency it begins with.  Wilkes-Barre was less than an hour away.  I could have made the daily drive, but was looking forward to the time to myself.  Amanda and I were ever more distant.  She spent all her time being a mother, while I was spending any free time on music, complaining it wasn’t enough.  I surprised myself with how little I missed Amanda the week I was gone, annoyed with our evening check-ins.  The program was full of people who liked to write, were into music, saw nothing wrong with wanting to spend all your time doing it, in fact were interested, got it and embraced it.  It was paradise for my ego, a week of doing whatever I wanted, surrounded by people who wanted me to do just that, who were doing it too, and by the end of it I had decided that I needed to live on my own.  We were living separate lives anyway, shifts of the same job, to each other at best a convenience.  I was cold and distant to her, which made us both miserable, and we would squabble over parenting.  So, this new life I started imagining—my own place for the first time ever, having Milo to myself half the week, and time to myself the rest—sounded perfect. 

When I got back I tried to explain it all, to tell the truth, and it made her a wreck.  Part of me had thought she would have found it a relief.  To make things worse, as I talked, stepping as lightly as possible with my words, Milo came up to us and said to her “Mama, I don’t love you… I don’t love you Mama”—words I was thinking but being so careful not to say.  It was two days later that she told me she was pregnant.  She found out while I was away but had said nothing.  All I could do was try to take it all back, and we went on with our lives as before.  I started learning some covers for a show I was to play at the town Artfest, including a couple of Amanda’s favorite songs, hoping to make her show some interest or enthusiasm, but whenever she did it just seemed fake and forced to me, and really most of the songs I played were with someone else in mind.  I also learned a Loudon Wainwright song for the show.  One of his best, called “Dilated To Meet You (Or At Your Cervix)”, sung with his wife Kate McGarrigle, who was pregnant with their son Rufus at the time.  Here is how it goes:

We're wondering when you will arrive,

We're wondering what you'll be.

We're wondering if you'll be a her,

Or if you'll be a he.

Maybe you'll arrive today, perhaps tomorrow night..

We're hoping you won't hurt too much,

And that you'll be all right.

Life has a few unpleasantries, we may as well confess.

We suppose you'll cry a lot,

And that you'll be a mess.

There is one thing you should know well,

Of this there is no doubt...

You cannot get inside again once you have come out.

Even though there's trouble...

Even though there's fuss...

We really think you'll like it here...

We hope that you like us.

When I played the song at Artfest, I dedicated it to Amanda, broke our news of a baby to the friends in the audience of a dozen people or so, but she wasn’t there.  Milo was acting wild and wanted to play on the old fire truck that was parked nearby to entertain the kids, and she was with him, chatting with some other town moms, and missed the whole thing. 

The song “Dilated to Meet You” is from Loudon’s album Attempted Mustache, perhaps his finest work, and one of three albums recorded during his rocky marriage and divorce from Kate McGarrigle, as well as the births of their two children, Rufus and Martha.  I recorded my cover of “Plane, Too” a couple of months before I finally moved out, a couple of months after Oscar was born, sleeping on the couch, packing in the attic, waiting to make sure Oscar was going to be okay and would know me.  It was the first song that I recorded with the new amplifier I bought, the first amp I’ve owned and the only real money I have ever spent on my music making habit, aside from blank CDs and printer ink.  My guitar was a Christmas present years ago, my keyboard another present a few years after that.  Everything else is either makeshift or loaned.  I record everything with a computer mic and outdated recording software I pirated off the internet. 

Right around the fourth minute of my cover of “Plane, Too”, you begin to hear Milo yowling into the microphone, the mic stuffed half into his mouth.  It is a brief snippet of one of our lengthy and numerous jam sessions, repeated in a loop, and it isn’t the first time I’ve used Milo in a song.  From when he first made noises I recorded them.  The lullabies I sang to him I recorded for albums.  I have even used a picture of him as an album cover, and footage of him in a music video.  In a way, doing so seems only natural.  I’m merely capturing pieces of my life.  Yet, at times it feels dirty, like I am using Milo to my own benefit, or letting my artistic interests or self-indulgences interfere with my role as a parent.  Oskie has not yet made it into a song, though I have recorded some of the 6 month old coos that he makes, and I have a lullaby just for him, though I don’t get much of a chance to sing it, our time together limited to short chunks, and no sleepovers yet.  If I don’t use him in songs, will he be mad and jealous later on?  Is it lowdown and hypocritical of me to use my kids in my music, but not be there with them every day?  I don’t know the answers to any of these questions, but I know the answers are not simple. 

Wainwright has incorporated his children into his music for years, and in a number of ways.  First was Album II’s “Be Careful There’s a Baby in the House”, recorded when Rufus was still a far off thought.  Even then his view was none too rosy, with lines like “and a baby can spot your shtick / All that coochie coochie coo is a lot of poo poo when you spread it on that thick”.  Next came “Dilated to Meet You”, and the terribly awkward ode to breastfeeding, “Rufus is a Tit Man”, with the downright skeezy couplet, “So put Rufus on the left one and put me on the right / And like Romulus and Remus we’ll suck all night”.  With “A Father and a Son”, Wainwright approached the topic of parenting with less levity and more self-criticism.  The second verse starts “When I was your age I was a mess / On a bad day I still am, I guess… / I know that I’m miserable, can’t you see / I just want you to be just like me / Boys grow up to be grown men / And then men change back into boys again”. 

Loudon wrote some Martha songs as well, such as “Pretty Little Martha”, with the lines, “I sang a song for your big brother, and I’m gonna sing this one for you / You’re in Quebec with your mother and I’m down here in New York state / Quebec with your mother, the world is cruel and so is fate”. 

Like both of their parents, Rufus and Martha each became acclaimed singers and songwriters, and, despite the rocky family portrait that many of his songs paint, Loudon has performed numerous times with both of them.  He has also recorded two rather devastating duets with his daughter Martha.  One is called “You Never Phone”, which begins with this verse sung by Martha—“You never phone you never write / Hell I’ve stopped hoping that you might / You’re trying to hurt my feelings right?”.  On the other, called “Father / Daughter Dialogue”, Martha again confronts her dad, singing “The facts are in and we have found / That basically you’re not around”.  In the next verse, she accuses him of acting like he cares in his songs, but not in life, and Loudon’s reply does little to shake the accusations:

Darling Daughter can’t you see

The guy singing the songs ain’t me

He’s someone people wish I was

What I can’t do this dude does

And if the songs seem slightly pat

I know life’s messier than that

They’re just songs and life is real

They’re just my version of how I feel

In one of our fights Amanda said that all “art” is self-indulgent, and there are times when I agree with her, and also times when I see nothing wrong with self-indulgence at all.  When I first met Amanda, in the teenage prime of self-indulgence, she wrote poems and was first chair sax in the school jazz band, wrote me notes in perfect backwards cursive I had to hold to the light to read, and sent me graham crackers in the mail.  I do think that art is fantasy, like so many things, projections of our inner lives, but I also think there is nothing more beautifully human than that.  The worlds we make and lives we live inside of ourselves seem to be at the root of much of the joy in life, and the unhappiness too, as we can always imagine a life better than our own, and hope for what never comes.  And it is a disturbing experience to have your notions of yourself or your world shown to be wrong.  For instance, I thought she was as done with me as I was with her.  She thought I was someone I wasn't.  She thought I loved her.  

Throughout his career, Loudon has developed a self-depreciating persona of a cad and a bit of a sonofabitch.  It’s a character to be sure, however candid he seems while performing, but I bet there is truth to it as well, his own insecurities and doubts given form.  Even his duets with Martha, I mean they are making music together, and obviously talking enough for that.  They are playing to what their audience knows of them, storytellers developing their drama, but it is hard to think there isn’t a good deal of truth to the songs as well.

I have always thought of myself as a good person, far from Loudon’s cad—someone selfless, caring, and respectable.  And in the year it took me to finally move out, I kept this image in my head of everything working out for the best for everyone, that ultimately it was all for the best.  That it wasn’t just about me.  I still think this, but then there are the times when I don’t see my kids for a couple of days, when I miss seeing Oscar’s first this or that, or when I feel leprous around all of the friends that Amanda and I shared, and I begin to realize I may be wrong.  That who I am inside myself has little, or at least unpredictable, bearing on who I am in the world.  I love my children completely, and I love being a dad—love having them on my own and being the primary parent, something that is impossible when their mom is there too.  I see them most days.  Milo usually stays with me three nights of the week, and Oscar will too when he is older.  I want to believe that I can make everything okay, something better, to show I was right that things were not okay before.  But what if I’m wrong?  What if my kids grow to resent me, or see me as a stranger, see all of this as selfishness, as me choosing myself over them?  I think of how little I feel like I know my dad—and feel like this is the way I can make sure Milo and Oscar really do get to know me, but then I wonder if I don’t know my dad very well because I never tried to, never really wanted to enough, and whether I am making that same mistake with my kids, or if it is a mistake at all, if we all distant because that is just how it is.  I am terrible with people—I despise small talk and I am insecure about most social interactions.  Writing or making music, it is easier to say what I really want to say, because I am really just talking to myself.

My version of “Plane, Too” includes a recording of ee cummings reading his poem “a man who had fallen among thieves”.  I first heard the poem while I was at that first Wilkes residency, the night I decided I was going to leave Amanda.  It was on an album of cummings readings that I had borrowed from the Bloomsburg library, where the kids and I are weekly regulars.  I was listening to it while driving around, trying to think of something to write for an assignment I was given.  The first line that caught my attention was “dressed in fifteenthrate ideas”.  I listened to the poem over and over, discerning the words.  My favorite part is the last stanza, which goes:

brushing from whom the stiffened puke

i put him all into my arms

and staggered banged with terror through

a million billion trillion stars

Though in the context of the poem it is obviously not, those lines to me are about being a parent, and not only because babies come with a lot of puke.  I read the words and I imagine Milo in my arms and I am saving him, and I pause the thought and add Oscar, so I am carrying both of them out of some fiery something or other.  It’s that ‘I love you so much I’d dot dot dot’ moment, and I am there holding them and saving them, doing just what I said I’d do.  And I am showing everyone, whoever they are, that yes, see here?  How I’m doing it, see?  How I am the good guy, or at least one of them?   All the while still wondering, am I?  Banged with terror, fear and doubt, but still, doing it.

The problem is, that moment doesn’t come very often, or never comes.  There isn’t much of a chance to prove anything, and in the meantime so much waiting, so many things.  Just waiting for that moment to arrive, like sitting on a plane, waiting for it to land, just making up silly songs to pass the time, just trying to get away from yourself, but one glimpse of your reflection and there you are again, still.

There was a bathroom on the plane

Flushing toilet too

There was a mirror on the plane

Me too