You Can Be Scared When It Gets Too Real

Leaning on music in times of trouble

Almost exactly a year ago, mid-December 2022, I was reclining on a couch in Brooklyn, where I'd been house-sitting. I was drinking my third or fourth glass of wine of the evening, and listening to music on my computer as I scrolled my phone. Next to me was a stack of records. One record in that stack, which I'd picked up that day used at Academy in Greenpoint, was Frank Zappa's 1972 album Waka/Jawaka. 

For most of my life as a listener and record buyer, I'd not been a Zappa guy. When I was 21 or so a friend made me a tape of Apostrophe and Over-Nite Sensation, and filled the extra space on the cassette with tunes from One Size Fits All. This friend was deep into the Grateful Dead—earlier, he'd taped me most of Europe ’72, along with Cornell, and he later tracked down tapes of the two Dead shows we'd attended together in Detroit in 1992—and he was deep into Zappa. 

I listened to that tape a fair amount, though I more or less figured that it would be all I needed from the man. At some point a few years ago, I bought the albums from the long-gone cassette and enjoyed them enough to pick up a new Zappa record when I found one for a decent price. From there, my interest in Zappa accelerated, to where by a year ago I owned at least a dozen of his records. Waka/Jawaka was one I hadn't heard, and it came from the early ’70s, around the time as the first clutch of his music I'd heard 30 years ago. 

Since there was no turntable in this apartment, I listened to Waka/Jawaka on my computer. It sounded good, but I wasn't in the headspace where I could fully enjoy it. Two days earlier, my Mom, who had some Alzheimer's-related dementia but still lived independently, called from Michigan to say that she was having trouble breathing. I then called an ambulance and they took her to the hospital. As so often happens when you go to the ER but your condition is stable and you don't have a life-threatening emergency, it look many hours for her to see a doctor. She was on a gurney in a hallway and I was calling the hospital, calling her, trying to figure out what was going on By this point I was used to the challenges of caring for my Mom from far away, but this day was particularly frustrating and scary.

I finally talked to a doctor and then got an update the following day. By then, my Mom had a room. They'd given her a body scan, and discovered fluid in her torso, which had been pressing against her lung. They inserted a tube into her side and drained it, and it turned out to be two liters’ worth. I kept picturing a Coke bottle of that size, having that wedged in your gut, and trying to breathe. She was feeling much better, but they'd be keeping her for a while. 

On this night in Brooklyn, scrolling while listening, I was looking at the Mayo Clinic website and WebMD to see what this fluid could be. From reading and triangulating among various probabilities, one thing the doctor mentioned seemed most likely: cancer. I booked a ticket back to Michigan. 

The next 10 days were chaos: I flew to Detroit and rented a car. When you rent a car these days, they tell you to just take one from a certain section in the lot, your choice. I chose one, put my suitcase in the back, started it up, and saw it didn't have bluetooth. So I turned it off and chose another car instead. But I left my suitcase in the first one, and only realized it when I arrived in Lansing. Enterprise had no idea where my bag was. It set the tone for many stress-induced mishaps and general bad luck to come. 

The worst luck of all, which we discovered the day after I landed, was that my Mom had stage 4 cancer. I was her power of attorney, so I huddled with my siblings and we had to make some decisions. Given her age, her dementia, and her own wishes, surgery and chemo were off the table. So based on what they were telling us, we found a bed in a hospice facility. Given how the cancer had spread, they predicted she would live for between three and eight weeks. Two weeks earlier she seemed perfectly healthy and now her time was very short.

I would make two solo trips to New York and back over the next month, driving through Ontario. Every detail of life was charged with emotion, which made these drives intense. I enjoyed the time alone to think, but I was often feeling worried or afraid and I missed Julie. 

On these drives, to my surprise, I listened to a great deal of Frank Zappa. This desire had something to do with the fact that the values of this music—compositional complexity, odd juxtapositions, instrumental virtuosity, general zaniness—fell outside what I usually listen for, and so his records felt new to me, and not so weighted down by my own history. And there was a lightness in the music, which took me away from the dread I was feeling. Zappa was a misanthrope and his lyrics, with their casual bigotry and desire to shock, were sometimes hard to stomach. But his music is steeped in delight and filled with surprises. During one drive across snowbound Ontario, which began before dawn when I couldn't sleep after crashing in a hotel and decided I was better off getting back on the road, I listened to his 1969 album Hot Rats front to back, and for the first time in a while I felt happy. I played it again.

For most of January, me, Julie, and my sister Sera, who came out from Portland, stayed in AirBnBs around Lansing. My brother Merrick came in regularly from his home in western Michigan. My Mom’s boyfriend, whom she had only met in past two years, was there every day. We visited my mother and when we needed a break Sera and I explored our old home town, seeing what was still there and the new places that had sprung up. We saw things from our childhood for what we knew would be the last time. And as part of our farewell tour, we hit record shops in the area. We stopped at Flat, Black & Circular, the great East Lansing shop that opened in 1977, which was the first record store I ever visited. I bought used Zappa LPs when I found them, which was often.

My Mom died on the last day of January. It was horrible. But I also felt a great deal of gratitude. I was glad we could be there with her at the end. Maybe I’ll write about it someday. And then it was time to head back to New York.

Through all this turmoil there was one Waka/Jawaka song in particular I couldn't stop listening to, ever since first hearing it that night in Brooklyn. “It Just Might Be a One-Shot Deal” starts with a slow, loping rhythm infused with twang, like something that might play when a comic character rides down a street in an old Western.

The lyrics describe a surreal scene: a frog walks into your house and dumps a mountain of sand on the carpet, which then sprouts into a forest. We watch the tableau unfold, and the song disassembles—it speeds up, slows down, switches the beat, collapses in on itself. And then the lyrics take a turn:

Just consider this:
You can be scared when it gets too real
You can be scared when it gets too real
But you should be diggin' it
While it's happening
(Yes! You should be diggin' it while it's happening!)
'Cause it just might be a one-shot deal

From there, the song slides into an impossibly light and gliding country-funk groove: Zappa plays acoustic, a rarity for him on record, and Sneaky Pete Kleinow of the Flying Burrito Brothers solos on pedal steel. 

This solo is so beautiful. Breathtaking, really. Every time I play “One-Shot Deal,” I rewind the pedal steel part at least three or four times. This fanatical desire to spin it back led it to be my most-listened song of 2023, if Spotify Wrapped is correct.

The pedal steel solo conjures images of improbable joy—the first thing that came to me is a rock skipping across water, defying gravity as it zooms over the surface of a lake. As a kid in Michigan, I loved skipping stones, and there were millions of flat ones on beaches—I’d look for one not too thin or light—that fit perfectly into a 10-year-old boy's hand.

I remembered reading the Guinness Book of World Records around that time and seeing the numbers on the stone-skipping record, and it included the breakdown between skips and pitty-pats. I didn't know what the latter meant and there wasn’t an easy way to find out. But now I can Google it, and I just did. I have to say, I was pretty good at skipping stones back in the day. I saw that world record and what I could do, and it didn't seem that far out of reach. 

So yeah, a tough year: But you should be diggin' it while it's happening. Trying. Have to keep remembering the good stuff. Like now, listening to this heavenly tune by Frank Zappa, as the chords suspend the pedal-steel lead, keeping it aloft long enough for it to work its magic. Hearing it again after many dozens of plays this year, I return in my mind to the grace of the rock moving over the water, going further and further from the shore as it slows down from skips to pitty-pats but remains visible, locked in a moment you wish would last forever.