Bob Wire Has a Point (It's Under His Cowboy Hat)
Even a Liberal Can Be Patriotic
The Osprey even won the gameBy Bob Wire, 7-31-09
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“Oooooh oh, say can you seeeee, by the twilight’s, uh, thing…”
I snapped awake, cutting short the recurring nightmare I’d had since the Ospreys’ general manager asked me if I’d like to sing the Star Spangled Banner after our pregame concert at the baseball stadium. For this singer, it would be the culmination of a lifelong dream: to belt out the national anthem before a stadium full of rapt (read: captive), patriotic baseball fans.
The thing that terrified me, of course, was the possibility of pulling a Roseanne Barr, or even worse, forgetting the words and trying to bluff my way through it. Bluffing is no problem for me; I’m a compulsive liar.
No, that’s not true.
Still, even though I’ve muffed the words to my own songs frequently and laughed it off, I had to get through this thing mistake-free. In today’s polarized political climate, anyone who screws up the national anthem will be vilified by right-wing knuckleheads who would love to accuse me of being a commie-loving, collie-molesting, bomb-tossing, wild-eyed pistol waver. And that would be just in the salutation.
“Are you going to mess around with it?” Barb asked me. Oh, hell no, I told her. You don’t mess with the freakin’ national anthem. I’ve seen people (Whitney Houston comes to mind) who take this treasured song and give the melody more twists and turns than Jon Tester’s lower intestine. They dick around with the phrasing, pump it full of vocal tics, and bend the notes with melisma until an entire stadium full of baseball fans is ready to demand their $842 ticket price refunded.
So I memorized the lyrics and practiced singing it for a couple of weeks. This song is a bitch to sing, because if you start in too high a key, that “rockets red glare” note will be waiting to pounce, dangling that high peak just out of your range while you squeal like a stuck pig, showing your ass and ruining the moment for everyone. Hell, even Ollie the mascot will be laughing and pointing.
The trick is to start as low as you can. So I found a key that worked for me, and hoped to god that I could remember it when the time came. I also hedged my bets by printing out the lyrics and tucking the sheet into my cowboy hat. I would doff my hat to sing the song, of course, so I was sure I could sneak a peek if I had to.
The day arrived, and everything went pretty smoothly leading up to The Moment. My band played our hour-long set in front of a small, but appreciative crowd. No one fell off the roof of the dugout we were on, and I think we sounded pretty good. But the concert was a mere formality. For me, the main event was yet to come.
While the boys broke down and loaded out in record time, I was escorted onto the field, and told to wait in front of the home dugout while they made a few announcements. Rock music blared from the PA, making it impossible for me to search for the proper key to start the song. I panicked momentarily, and wondered if anyone would mind if I sang “Ring of Fire” instead. Some local luminary threw out the first pitch, and then it was time. The field announcer led me to home plate, handed me the mic, and it was go time.
I rarely get nervous before a show, even for a crowd of 3,000. But at this moment, my throat turned to parchment, my vision shrunk down to a blurry tunnel, and I could feel my rectum starting to unclench. I gulped. I took off my hat. My hands were shaking. Everyone in the stadium was standing. Waiting. The silence grew. I took a deep breath, held the microphone up to my mouth, and began to sing.
Too low. But now I was screwed. I dug deep for that low note, and it went into a subsonic range that can only be heard by moles, bats, and Dick Cheney. But then I pulled up out of the nosedive and the song was underway. In the second verse I had to take a surreptitious peek into my hat, which was clamped against my belly. To my chagrin, I saw that sweat had soaked the paper, dissolving the words into something that looked like a highly magnified gonorrhea germ. But after the “rockets red glare,” I was home free. I couldn’t resist a couple of vocal whoop-de-doos, but then I slowed ‘er down at the end and held the “home of the brave” phrase as the crowd started to cheer, some of them waving their hats in the air. I was expecting doves to be released, but that didn’t happen. No fighter jets flew overhead, no fireworks sprayed into the air, Eva Longoria didn’t run onto the field to jam her tongue down my throat.
“Bob Wire, ladies and gentlemen!” said announcer Dan Stromme from the press box. I waved, replaced my hat, and left the field. Later, as I was working the stands, selling CD’s, I walked past the press box. “Nice job,” said Stromme, a DJ for Trail 103.3. I thanked him. He laughed, “You know we’re gonna have to give you crap Monday morning for looking into your hat for the words.”
[Bob Wire will resume his regular schedule of writing after Labor Day. But check back frequently for the odd post. And we do mean odd.]
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