Thoughts on Huey Lewis' Wang

I have a problem with ear worms. It's been a problem that I've suffered from my entire life. Songs, even songs I don't remember hearing recently, will stick themselves in my head and stay there for extended periods of time. Usually they pop up during quiet moments, like when I'm trying to go to sleep at night. Or, at least, that's when I notice the song there. In reality, I think the song or songs are running pretty much constantly in the back of my head.

In theory, this sounds pretty cool. It's like I have a personal soundtrack for my life.

A few weeks ago, we took the kids to Exploration Place for the afternoon. They have an installation right now about cartoons (I think it's put on by Boomerang or Cartoon Network, and it must have been around for awhile as pretty much all of the shows they cover aren't on Cartoon Network anymore), and they had a display where you got to sample a short clip of animation with different soundtracks playing in the background. The clip was pretty standard fare. A young girl magically ascending the outside of a big tower and entering a top floor through a window. And it was pretty amazing the difference the music made in what the viewer perceived to be going on in the clip. If happy music was played, you imagined the girl was playfully going up the tower to meet a friend for some mischief. If the scary music was being played, you anticipated her meeting some mysterious stranger with questionable motives. If the neutral music was being played, she was just entering a room in an unusual way.

Following the power of the soundtrack to shape mood, if an appropriate soundtrack could be played in the background of a person's life, that life could be made exponentially more interesting. Or more ANYTHING, really. If upbeat music were playing constantly, normally boring moments of life could be given new vigor and life. It could really change the way the world worked.

What is playing in my head, though, is not the least bit appropriate or inspiring or interesting. Instead, it is almost always a smallish snippit of some seemingly random song. It could be nearly anything. And the song might stick around for a day or two if something kindly replaces it, or it might stick around much longer. I'm not sure how long this has been happening to me, but I first noticed it a little over a decade ago.

We were on a float trip with friends. One of our friends, for reasons I can't recall, referenced the song "Up Up and Away (in My Beautiful Balloon)." I don't remember if he sang it or simply mentioned it and that was enough for the song to enter my mind. Whatever it was, the chorus for this song was stuck in my head for an entire month. Every quiet moment was filled with it. And this was a song that I had heard a few times in my life before, but it was not a favorite and I certainly didn't know anything but, well, pretty much just that title part put to music. It was misery.

And I might just have put it right back in my head again by bringing it up now and finding the link, thus having to listen to just a bit of it again. Considering what it is replacing, though, I might be just fine with that.

What it would be replacing is a song I heard a week ago on the radio. "Jacob's Ladder" by Huey Lewis and the News (look at the crowd in that video! I seriously miss the days when a Huey Lewis could gather that kind of a following).

Now, I like your Huey Lewis as much as the next guy. Quite a bit more, probably. I had two of his CDs growing up ("Fore" and "Sports," obviously). When I hear his music on the radio, I still want to call old friends and tell them to flip their radios on quickly. "The Power of Love" was my favorite song for about a year after I saw "Back to the Future" (and "Back in Time," the terrible B-side that also briefly appeared in the movie has been an ear worm for me a few miserable times).

Pause: Here's a little bit of embarrassing personal information. My three favorite songs, as I remember them from my childhood, were, in order: "Two Less Lonely People in the World" by Air Supply (I still love Air Supply, but this is not one of their "better" songs), "Believe it or Not" by some guy (I gotta admit, I still love this song, and if you disagree that it's awesome, you suck--also, Connie Sellecca was hot and STILL looks good even though she's almost 60. And you really should watch the little still shots as they scan by in this "video," they are pretty fantastic), and "The Power of Love." I owned the 45s of "Believe it or Not" and "Power of Love" and listened to both songs hundreds of times in a row in my lonely, lonely room when I was growing up. I also briefly flirted with "Touch" by Stan Bush (from the Transformers movie from the 80s--this song, sadly, has not held up as well over the years, it's just too hair bandy in a not great way), but I think that was just a Transformers related phase.

It's worth noting at this point that, even with the moving of all these previously favorite songs into the front folders of my brain, Jacob's Ladder is STILL holding strong.

And that's all well and good. It's only been a week. That's pretty minor. I had a few of the Yo Gabba Gabba songs playing in my head for weeks at a time during the days when we watched that once or twice every day. I can live with a week or two of the same song playing over and over. I did, rather famously (among the two or three friends who knew about it), create a 90 minute tape that had only two songs on it played over and over again--one on each side (Weird Al's "Melanie," which is still one of my favorite songs and, I think, Al's greatest work) and Lionel Richie's "Deep River Woman" with Alabama (trivia! I proposed to Libby with that song playing in the background and she is forever burdened with that knowledge and this song because of it!). So, clearly, I have no problems listening to questionable music over and over again ad nauseum.

The problem is the dreams that have repeated for two nights in a row now.

Normally, I don't remember much of my dreams. Every once in awhile I'll keep a flash, or the last little scene of a dream in my mind for the better part of a day. And then it's gone. Normally, I am a lucid dreamer and can easily control what direction my dreams take, which probably makes them more forgetful as nothing truly interesting usually happens in them. My sleeping brain, apparently, is pretty regimental and vanilla. But the last two nights, that lucidity has been eluding me. Either that or my brain WANTS me to go to a very unusual and probably worrying place. Namely, Huey Lewis' junkal region.

Necessary Backstory: From 1993-1995 I worked at a movie theater. We were not a popular movie theater. We tended to get the art-house flicks and the popular movies a month after they came out (the one time we got a popular, newly released movie, we destroyed about ten minutes of the film--during a climactic scene--which totally ruined the movie for everyone who watched it and probably had something to do with our never getting opening movies ever again after that point). During this period, we got the movie "Short Cuts" by Robert Altman. "Short Cuts" is famous for only two things (in my mind, at least): Julianne Moore's bush and Huey Lewis' wang, both of which made their film debuts in the movie. Oh, and Andie Macdowell's terrible delivery of the line "My son is dead, you bastard"--I tried to find a link to illustrate just how bad her delivery is of this line, but I couldn't find anything, so apparently we were alone in thinking that she was utterly terrible in the role of grieving mother.

Anyway, we had the movie in our theater for at least a month. At first, I kind of liked the movie. It was edgy and different and I was in a good state of mind for Altman's rather unusual style at the time. But then, after seeing portions of the movie over and over again, it started to wear thin. And the portion that I saw the most was the part with Huey's dong. I don't know HOW it happened--maybe it was the power of the subconscious mind to keep track of the passage of time and it led me into the theater at exactly that moment without my knowledge, though I'm not sure WHY my mind would torment me so--but it happened. I am reasonably sure that I saw "the news" no fewer than a dozen times.

I don't normally have a very vivid memory. If I am somewhere quiet and can really concentrate, I can picture certain things from my past pretty clearly, but that's still a bit of a trial. Usually, I remember things through a kind of vague haze with lots of blobs and very little color. It's one of the reasons why I have zero artistic ability. I don't visualize well. But not Little Huey. It is indelibly etched into my brain. With perfect recall, I can picture it whenever I want to. Mind you, I don't WANT to, and it's not a memory that I purposely pull up, well, ever.

And for two nights in a row, my brain has taken me to the scene where Huey is peeing in a river (I'm not going to link it, but a search for "huey lewis peeing" will bring up a few links where you can see the scene--thank you, internet, for verifying that my memory was recalling the scene correctly). My dreams have had to perform some pretty fascinating mental gymnastics to take me to a river setting, but it has. Twice. And both times, even though the "power of love" wasn't very clearly visible in the movie itself, I seem to have a crystal clear image etched in my brain and I can see it with crystal clarity. Only, unlike in the movie, my brain does a slow pan and zoom over the parts I'd really rather not slow pan or zoom over. And, the entire time, "Jacob's Ladder" is playing in the background.

Each time, I wake myself up, but I am unable to do so until AFTER the scene has played out, and then fitful sleep filled with that goddamn song and the after-image of Huey's looie endlessly looping is all I'm able to muster afterwards. It is, obviously, a little disturbing and worrying.

None of this, of course, is anything that YOU need to know. To be honest, I was just hopeful that referencing all of these other songs would prompt what I think is the most important first step in my healing process: replacing "Jacob's Ladder" with something else, maybe even leading to a dream sequence that I'd be more appreciative of. Maybe I should listen to and watch the video for "Cherry Pie." Except, of course, then I'll have to listen to "Cherry Pie," which might be even worse than seeing Huey's penis in slow motion.