Karaoke no-nos

DATE: Saturday, September 17, 2005
PLACE: Maryland Yards
POISON OF CHOICE: Bud Light pitchers
CAST OF CHARACTERS: Me, Lashonda, Angela, Garrett, Dominic, Sydney


"You're drinkin' water - that's a turnoff!" Lashonda screams at me. She's on her ninth gin and tonic in a little over two hours. I've had a couple pitchers of draft beer and am currently nursing a blue plastic 28-ounce cup of ice water.

Lashonda is a bar veteran - fifty years old, absolutely hilarious and more than willing to talk up whoever she can find to buy her drinks. She's paying her own way so far tonight.

We're sitting at Maryland Yards, five doors and one street over from the restaurant where we both work. Lashonda and I haven't been out drinking together in several months because we have opposite social schedules. She works days, heads out to the bars (usually on Wednesdays and Fridays, with her daughter Roxana) in mid-afternoon and is usually passed out or dead drunk by the time I get out of work.

But tonight, Lashonda (that's her bar name - she's really quite lily white, with bleached-blonde hair cropped short and a dozen or more tattoos all over her body) and I both got out of work just before nine and parked ourselves at the Maryland Yards karaoke VIP table.

The VIP table is a rectangular six-top directly in front of the karaoke equipment, monitor, microphones and speakers. This is the loudest spot in the bar when karaoke is going, and even when shouting, we have to lean across the table to be heard and understood.

Lashonda and I are sitting closest to the karaoke area. On the inside of our table are two old friends, Angela and Garrett. They're a married couple who run karaoke shows at St. Louis bars - for five years now, they've cued up and adjusted the levels on thousands of drunk, off-key renditions of pop, rock and country songs.

I figure if that was my job, the last place you'd ever find me on a night off would be in a bar, singing karaoke. Angela and Garrett are loving it, though - five or six times so far I've heard them mention that this is the first Saturday night they've had off together in several years.

Garrett's drunk off three or four beers - he gets up to sing Weird Al's "Like a Surgeon" and goes into deer-in-headlights mode. "Dude, it's the same as 'Like a Virgin'!" a guy in his young twenties from the next table over shouts to Garrett when it becomes obvious Garrett is completely lost in the song. Impeccable advice from that kid, but it doesn't help Garrett.

Also at our table, two mid-twenties karaoke enthusiasts who are friends with Angela and Garrett. One, Sydney, is an average-looking girl with a monster rack who just told me I heckled her four years ago when she got up to sing "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For." I don't remember it, but apparently I yelled out, "A girl can't sing U2!" and then turned to my friends and did the universal guy pantomime for Look at the size of those tits. Sydney has seen it in her heart to forgive me for my four-year-old transgression, and we're getting along well tonight.

The other, Dominic, has big puppy-dog eyes and kind of a goofy face. We've been talking about music the last few minutes - Dominic plays guitar, writes songs and, I soon discover, is a world-class crooner. He gets up to sing some Frank Sinatra song I've never heard of and completely nails it. He could hang with Michael Buble and Harry Connick Jr., any of those cats - hell, he reminds me of the Singing Sword from the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

Yet Dominic has nothing but compliments for me after my rousing rendition of Weird Al's song "Yoda." Our table, jaded karaoke vets that we are, has decided to sign up for songs in group rounds. Everyone but Dominic has already put in a John Mellencamp song and a Jefferson Airplane/Jefferson Starship/Starship song. Now we're on our Y round.

My idea was to pick a song whose title starts with an X, Y or Z letter. And you can't pick a song that starts with the words "You," "You're" or "You've." That's too fucking easy. Turns out, though, the last three pages of the song title directory had been ripped out, so no Z's, and there were only two X songs. One of them was a country song called "XXX's and OOO's," and the other was a DMX song that was called "X Gon' Take a Chunk Out Yo Behind" or something. And if we enforced the "You," "You're" or "You've" rule, we were left with about fifteen choices.

So we went with Y artists instead, which worked out even better than I'd hoped. I was going to pick "Yoda" anyway, but when we switched from Y-songs to Y-artists, I was the only double-Y. "Yoda" by Yankovic. The karaoke MC calls me up to sing it right after Lashonda gets done with this excruciatingly long and repetitious Yes song I've never heard of from the '70s.

"We should have laid down some ground rules for this Y-song thing," I say into the microphone when they call me up. "Like, you can't pick a song that's over eleven minutes in duration."

--

Some doofus in a cowboy hat is singing a country tune whose chorus features the following refrain: "You're one hot mama / Let's turn this room into a sauna." Meantime, I'm badgering Angela about her standup comedy videos.

Angela, before she became the best-loved karaoke matron in Maryland Heights, tried at least a dozen careers. One of them, a decade or so ago, was standup. She's naturally funny in person and very much at home on the microphone, but she won't let me watch the videotapes of her act. I've been trying for years to get her to crack, and I'm working overtime tonight.

"What's the problem? They're not funny?"

"Garrett!" Angela screams.

Garrett spins back around from the drunken conversation he's having with the guys at the next table. "Yeah babe?"

"Tell Andrew - are my standup tapes funny?"
"Yeah, they're hilarious."
"She won't let me watch 'em."

"Good luck with that. She won't even let me watch them." He turns his attention back to neighboring table.

"So why can't I watch them? Is your hair big and your outfit embarrassing? That's just superficial shit."

"It's not that. It's just, a lot of shit that comes out of my mouth, it's not who I am anymore. It's my past, and it's stuff I don't want people who know me now knowing about me then."

"Like personal stuff? Dirty stuff?"

"No, ideas. Attitudes. Things that reveal old insecurities and vulnerabilities."

"Look, I've got writing on the Internet from when I was 15 years old. From when I hated myself. Half of it seems all wrong now. You can read about me trashing classic movies and praising shitty ones. I went off on Beck, Radiohead, the Smashing Pumpkins, and I gave that La Bouche song 'Be My Lover' three stars out of four. I was an idiot. To say nothing of my actual ideas about serious things."

"So you know what I'm talking about."

"Yeah, but I know I respect your brain and your opinions and your emotions, and I know there's something I can learn from your comedy. You're hilarious in person and in your karaoke shows when you're not even trying."

"Andrew, you know what, I'm sick of arguing with you. You can watch my standup tapes. You win."

"Are they on VHS or DVD?"
"VHS."
"Oooh... now, that's not gonna work out. Never mind."

She starts laughing. "You asshole."

--

"I wanna wear the bowling glove!" Lashonda calls out.

I hurt my wrist on my days off earlier this week - Monday night after the bowling league, my friends Jason and Jordan were trying to teach me how to hook my ball.

Then on Tuesday, which has become my one reliable binge-writing day of the week, I spent twelve to fifteen hours on the computer - writing, uploading and sorting through old files, catching up on email and working on design ideas for my about-to-be-launched website.

By the time I went to work on Wednesday, I was essentially one-handed. I've spent the rest of the week wearing a black, velcro-strap wrist brace on my right hand. Aside from having to explain its presence about three times an hour to whoever asks, I haven't been catching a whole lot of shit for it.

Just all variations on the same joke, that I injured my wrist by masturbating too much. And I tell them, no, that's a simple up-down motion. Nothing that could cause too much damage to the wrist. Just, you know, step one, step two, repeat.

Lashonda, though, is enjoying making fun of the wrist brace, which she keeps calling a bowling glove. She also noted - rather, accurately - that singing a Weird Al Yankovic song about Star Wars while wearing a wrist brace is about the uber-geekiest thing a person can do. She tells me the bowling glove actually sold the performance.

Now she puts on the brace and starts showing it off to people. Maybe if she makes up a good wrist-injury story, she'll get a couple free gin and tonics out of the deal.

--

Shortly after a truly frightening duet with Lashonda on Starship's '80s adult-contemporary cheese classic "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now," which was my favorite song when I was nine, I start asking Angela - as a woman who's made her living operating multiple weekly karaoke shows for more than half a decade - what songs she never, ever wants to hear again in her life.

"Well, for starters, anything from fuckin' Grease," she says, pantomiming the motion of raising a gun to her temple and pulling the trigger.

"Yeah, no Grease. And no Shania Twain," Garrett adds. "And I'm almost done for life with the Dixie Chicks."

"'Earl!' Fuck, I hate 'Earl'!" Angela spits out.

"Dude, I've watched my friend Emma sing 'Goodbye Earl' over a hundred times, I think," I tell them. "I even watched her get airhorned off the stage by the mean judge at a karaoke contest at Harrah's casino before the first verse was even up."

"I know I personally have called Emma up to sing that song at probably forty of my shows."

"So 'Earl' is in the Top 20 songs you never want to hear again?" I ask them.

"Top 15 probably," Angela says.

"What else?"

"'Margaritaville' - I can't stand Buffett - 'Friends in Low Places,' 'Sweet Caroline.'"

"Don't forget 'Picture,'" Garrett chimes in. "Only a couple years old and already one of the most overkilled duet songs of all time."

"I can't stand 'Picture,'" I say. "It's just so fucking boring and monotonous and, I don't know, almost on the fourth grade level. But I've sang it probably twenty times with five different chicks. They love to sing it, and it's so fucking easy I could nail it in my sleep."

The current song ends, and when the tepid bar applause dies down, we actually don't have to shout for a minute. Someone named Nancy gets called up to sing.

"In the Top 10 for sure," Angela continues, "Bon Jovi. 'Wanted Dead or Alive'."

"What about, like, 'Sweet Child O' Mine' or something?" I ask her.

"Nope. Doesn't really get sung that much, and it's half-instrumental anyway. As far as guy songs, it's Bon Jovi and then probably 'Turn the Page.'"

"Can't stand 'Turn the Page,' and I never even knew it existed before karaoke bars. That, and like, 'You Never Even Call Me By My Name' and 'Family Tradition'."

"All in the Top 20."

Nancy's track breaks the silence. Pre-recorded background voices singing the acapella opening to "Killing Me Softly."

"This one has in the Top 20 for sure," I say, stepping up the volume in my voice to talk over the music.

"No, Top 30," Angela replies. "But everything Nancy sings is a cliche. See if she doesn't do 'I Will Survive' next."

I pull out the 3" by 5" notebook I carry around with me, tell Angela to write down some more karaoke overkill songs. There are dozens. She writes a few down that we already mentioned, and adds a few more. Passes it to her husband. He adds a few more.

Meanwhile, everyone at the table is asking Angela if this song or that song qualifies. The people standing at the railing running perpendicular to our table end up writing in the notebook. In the end, I have the following spread across five pages of the notebook (excluding the ones listed above):


Top 20 (Don't Sing At My Show)

Summer Nights
Me and Bobby McGee
Redneck Woman
Lucille
Baby Got Back
My Heart Will Go On
Black Velvet
We Are Family
Hit Me With Your Best Shot
I Love Rock and Roll
Like a Virgin
Like a Prayer
Last Dance
Love Shack
Paradise By the Dashboard Light
All That Jazz
Brown Eyed Girl
If I Could Turn Back Time
Fancy
Crazy
It's Been Awhile
Kryptonite
With Arms Wide Open
My Sacrifice (which Angela calls"My Fuckin' Sacrifice! My Goddamn Sacrifice!")
Fly Me to the Moon
My Way
New York New York
Luck Be a Lady
Bitch
Bills, Bills, Bills
Bring Me to Life
Criminal
Plush
Black
Interstate Love Song


I notice someone - presumably Nancy herself, who is hanging out with the railing crowd - crossed "Killing Me Softly" off the list. Dominic isn't happy to see three Sinatra tunes on there, either. But there's a general consensus. Go to enough karaoke shows, or run one for a few years, and you'll hate all these songs, too.