House of Large Sizes by Ian Graham Leask is one of my new favorite books. Ian is one of the principals of Calumet Editions, the company that is publishing my memoir, Making It: Music, Sex & Drugs in the Golden Age of Rock (coming soon!). Ian did an amazing job of editing my book, and so, when he asked me to write a piece about the role of music in House of Large Sizes, I was glad to accommodate. As a matter of fact, I got a bit carried away. It’s long! Needless to say, this will make way more sense if you read the book.
Being a musician and an author, I have a tendency to notice music choices in the books I read, and House of Large Sizes is one of my new favorites. Let me highlight some—actually all—of the musical references in HOLS and speculate on what they might mean.
When Ian Graham Leask wrote this, I couldn’t help but think there was a kind of symphony running through his head. Mostly classic rock, but with a few variant themes—like, opera, Zydeco, and blues—symbolizing certain characters and locales.
The book opens in England on Terry, an aging psychotherapist, who learns he has a thirty-two-year-old son, the result of a tryst in his wild youth while passing through Minneapolis. He’s walking home and musing about the new developments in his life and, on Waterloo Bridge at sunset, the Kinks song, “Waterloo Sunset” (one of my favorites as well) pops into his head. This morphs into another Kinks staple, “Lola,” the tale of a femme fatale who’s really a man. This, as we shall see, foreshadows events to come.
Meanwhile, in Minneapolis, Terry’s illegitimate son, Gilbert Pym, the book’s protagonist, receives a stack of postcards in the mail from his brother George, who’s gone to New Orleans. George is seeking a sex change operation and has been turned down at all the legitimate clinics, so he has decided to “go underground” and have the unsanctioned operation in New Orleans. On the second card is a picturesque café George says it’s like the Eagles’ “Hotel California” (where “you can check out anytime you like, but you can never leave”).
Gilbert goes to New Orleans to try to find his brother to talk him out of what he’s about to do. Upon waking from his nap in his Latin Quarter hotel, he takes in these new and starkly different surroundings. He is bombarded by the atmosphere of New Orleans, especially the sounds. Enervated, he walks out onto his balcony, wearing only a pair of baggy shorts, to survey the sights and the sounds of the street. Someone is playing one of his favorite records (and mine), “Back in the High Life Again,” from one of Steve Winwood’s solo comeback albums, 1986’s Back in the Highlife. Pym checks to see that no one is watching him, and then he dances.
Pym decides to dine at the restaurant across the street from his hotel. While waiting on the line for unreserved seating, which starts outside on the street, he hears Zydeco music coming from somewhere. Although the French lyrics are incomprehensible to him, something in the plaintive voice of the singer evokes love and loss for Pym—and there’s plenty of both in HOLS. It would be inevitable to hear Zydeco and Cajun music in New Orleans. A brief history: Zydeco (from les haricots, the French word for string beans) is music from the black and creole farmers of the bayou country. Zydeco is spawned from the folk music of the original white settlers of Louisiana, the Cajuns. Cajun and Zydeco music are very similar and are both sung in French. The word Cajun comes from Acadian. Acadia, which is now the state of Maine, was the place in French Canada (New France), where the ancestors of the Cajuns resided. They were driven out by the British in the French and Indian War of the mid-eighteenth century, and migrated south and west to the Louisiana territory.
Upon entering the restaurant, Gilbert is greeted with staring, laughing people, all pointing at him. “There he is, the secret dancer!” shouts a big Englishman, who stands, pointing at him. It turns out this is Terry, who has come to New Orleans with his wife, Vera, to see his only son, Gilbert Pym. But, at this point neither of them know who the other is. Terry is in his cups and interacting riotously with the whole restaurant. Someone starts singing Johnny Horton’s “The Battle of New Orleans,” the 1959 hit that tells the story of the defeat of the British in the War of 1812. Terry cheerfully joins in with the singers.
A few pages later, Terry is remembering his affair with Gilbert’s mother, Nina. It has become untenable because Terry has become friendly with Nina’s husband, and so he makes up an excuse about being enrolled in a class back in England, and leaves. There’s a vague reference to a Rod Stewart song, which is not identified, but I knew instantly which one Leask was thinking of: “Maggie May”: I suppose I should collect my books and get on back to school…
Twenty pages on, we find Gilbert back on the balcony of his hotel room. It’s night. The restaurant across the street is dark, but he can hear music coming from somewhere. It’s Django Reinhardt, the Belgian-born gypsy, who became known as one of the greatest and most innovative jazz guitarists of all time. I imagine it was with Stéphane Grappelli on violin and Le Quintette du Hot Club de France. The pervasive influence of the French is never far away in New Orleans.
Another twenty pages later, we see Terry singing in the shower. It’s an odd mashup: Otis Redding, Pavarotti, and finishing with a sendup of Marilyn Monroe’s “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend.” Terry’s version goes: A kiss on the clit might be quite continental, but candles are a girl’s best friend.
Pym and Sasha (a gorgeous trannie) go to “the bar with mirrors,” in the heart of the Quarter. People are dancing to a blues band on stage. The song is not specified, but I like to think it might be something like “Come On” by New Orleans blues legend Earl King. New Orleans has always been a melting pot of music styles, and blues is certainly among them.
Back in his hotel, Pym hears some classical violin music coming from the next room. Maddy’s room (but you’ll have to read the book to find out more about her). It’s described as “a yearning plaintive gypsy melody.” My knowledge of classical music is sorely wanting, but this conjures up a violin sonata by George Enescu I once heard.
Later, Sasha and Pym are driving across the Lake Pontchatrain Causeway, and Sasha breaks into an old Irish ballad of lost love, from a man’s point of view; maybe something like “We Dreamed Our Dreams” as performed by the Furey Brothers.
Almost fifty pages on, Pym is waiting for Cindy, a TV news lady he’d met in Algiers (the N.O. neighborhood, not the city in Africa) at the French Market, in the heart of the tourist district. Cindy is late and, from the balcony above, Pym can see a “bum,” a loudmouthed panhandler he had seen before, getting ejected from the Algiers ferry. He’s a white man with reddish hair and blue eyes. He sings bits of pop songs—the only parts he can remember—to the tourists as he tries to hustle them for change:
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guessed my name
from “Sympathy for the Devil” by The Rolling Stones, then a Beatles tune:
What would you do if I sang out of tune
Would you stand up and walk out on me?
Along with the other diners on the balcony, Pym joins in on the next two lines:
Lend me your ears and I’ll sing you a song
And I’ll try not to sing out of key…
Pym spots Cindy, as she passes the bum and gives him a wave. He sings at her—more Stones:
Hey, you, get offa my cloud!
When Cindy sits down, Pym compares the bum to Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung” (snot running down his nose…). Cindy knows the guy’s story: His name is Liam Toth. He got his doctorate, but couldn’t get a professorship anywhere because he was a white male, or so he thought.
Pym goes to the House of Large Sizes and finds Sasha in her apartment above the store, adding figures on a calculator. In the background a sad aria sung by an operatic soprano is playing. Being no aficionado of opera, and from Leask’s description of the music, I immediately imagined one of the few arias I not only remembered, but which I found profoundly moving: “Un bel di vedremo” from “Madame Butterfly.” As an interesting footnote, there was a 1993 film called “M. Butterly,” in which the title role was played by a man in drag, perhaps a transsexual.
Still at the café with Cindy, Pym is thinking of his Minneapolis girlfriend, Estelle. He remembers her calling him and singing “Have I Told You Lately That I Love You.” I have to think this is the song by Van Morrison, not the country hit from 1957. I definitely prefer Van’s song.
Cindy takes Pym to the House of Blues to hear a band she likes. They’re an androgynous glam rock band called The Pretty Ponies (or something like that), and their music is a throwback to the style invented by David Bowie in the ‘70s. For me, Bowie is one of the all-time greats of rock ‘n’ roll, and a true original. He never rested on his laurels, but broke new ground with each album. But these Ponies (who dress like “fishnet Valkyries”) play the original glam Bowie style, like “Rebel, Rebel”:
You’ve got your mother in a whirl
She’s not sure if you’re a boy or a girl
Back out on the crowded tourist streets, Pym encounters Liam Toth, the angry vagrant, abusing tourists, cops, “all who wouldn’t listen.” He points at some big girls wearing Iowa State sweatshirts, and sings Queen’s Fat bottom girls, you make the rockin’ world go ‘round.
Escaping from the gathering in the hotel lobby after George’s funeral, Terry bolts and wanders the late-night streets of the Quarter. He searches for a pub he’s seen, and there it is: O’Flaherty’s. He joins a diverse group of fellow Brits at a back table. The jukebox plays Mary Black singing a sad traditional ballad. Although the book doesn’t name it, I can’t help thinking of the heart-rending “Ae Fond Kiss,” which she released on her 2001 Best of… collection.
By the end of the night, Terry is three sheets to the wind, and has to be lifted to his feet and helped by this motley crew to his hotel. Breaking into maudlin tears, he sings “The Wild Rover,” an Irish staple, that’s been covered by virtually every Irish folk artist:
And it’s no, nay, never
No, nay, never no more
Will I play the wild rover
No, never, no more.
Back at the hotel, Terry has to be helped upstairs to his room by Sammy, the desk clerk, and his wife, Vera. As she scolds him, he sings a chorus of an old rugby song—mocking her school:
Oh, we are from Roedean
Good girls are we
We take pride in our virginity…
Pym and Estelle roam the streets of the Quarter. He takes her to see the House of Large Sizes, where the late lamented Georgie bought his clothes, now closed up. Again, they encounter the bum, Liam Toth. Toth recognizes Pym, and gets an eyeful of Estelle’s impressive figure. With eyebrows raised comically, he points and sings a line from The Beatles’ “Birthday”:
…it’s your birthday
Happy Birthday to you!
Near the end of the book, we find Terry, once again in the middle of Waterloo Bridge. Vera, his wife of many years, has just succumbed to cancer, and Terry, mad with grief, rages at the fetid waters of the Thames. He sings a line from “Molly Malone”: Singing cockles and mussels, alive, alive, oh!
—Ted Myers
Ted Myers 