Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

He made me drive, piloting me around town to the hits of 1965. Stop! In the name of love. Turn! Turn! Turn! Over and Over! And when he got us completely lost: Help! I need somebody. Help! By the time we found the studio for the first session, Jonah was riffing on tunes he’d absorbed on a single hearing. All we need is music, sweet music. In Chicago. New Orleans. New York City. They’re dancin’ in the streets. The sound engineers heard him and went nuts. They made him do level checks by singing My baby don’t care in every cranny of his register, from up above countertenor to down below baritone.

“What the hell are you doing singing Schubert?” one of them asked. “With power like that, you could be making real dough.”

Jonah didn’t tell them the twelve-hundred-dollar Harmondial advance felt like a small fortune. And nobody pointed out the problem: he made the Supremes’ “I Hear a Symphony” sound, well, symphonic: a one-off novelty act, my brother, the one-hit wonder of precision-pitched, breath-supported R & B lieder, the single-handed Motown Mo-tet.

We stuck to Schubert, and by the fourth take, the sound engineers changed their tune. In Jonah’s throat, all these dead tunes were once again someone’s popular song. Something in his voice on those tracks insists, We are still young. Something in that near hour of songs, recorded over the course of days, says the centuries are just passing tones on their way back home.

I can hear it on the record, still. My mother’s voice is there inside his, but my father’s is, too. There is no starting point. We trace back forever, accident on accident, through every country taken from us. But we end everywhere, always. Stand still and gaze: This is the message in that sound, rushing backward from the finish line it has reached.

When he heard his first takes, my brother couldn’t stop snickering. “Listen to that! It’s just like a real record. Let’s do it again. Forever.”

Jonah could hear things on the tape the engineers couldn’t. We spent two increasingly tense days battling between cost and inaudible perfection. The producers would be knocked out by the first several takes, each of which left Jonah wincing. They told us about how they could splice in a measure to fix a lapse. Jonah was outraged. “That’s like pasting eagle feathers on your average slob and calling him an angel.”

Jonah learned to seduce the microphone and compensate for its brutalities. Under the pressure of compromise, our takes took on the edge of live performance. In the baffled, soundproofed room, Jonah grew incandescent. He sang, posting his voice forward to people hundreds of years from now.

The third night, after we got the Wolf within a few vibrations of how it sounded in his mind, we sat down with the Harmondial publicist. The girl was fresh from summer camp. “I’m so glad you two are brothers!”

I flopped around like a fish on the dock. Jonah said, “We are, too.”

“The brothers thing is good. People like brothers.” I thought she might ask, Have you always been brothers? How did you come to be brothers? She asked, instead, “How did you get interested in classical music?”

We went mute. How did you learn how to breathe? It hit me. The story this girl already imagined would go into press releases and liner notes, unhindered by any data we gave her. Even if we told her about our evenings of family singing, she wouldn’t hear. Jonah left it to me to create some facsimile. “Our parents discovered our musical ability when we were young. They sent us to a private music school up in Boston.”

“Private school?” The fact flustered our publicist.

“A preconservatory boarding school. Yes.”

“Did you…get scholarships?”

“Partial ones,” Jonah said. “We washed dishes and made beds to pay the rest of our way. Everyone was very generous toward us.” I snorted. Jonah shot me an offended look, and the poor girl was lost.

“Was the music you learned at school…a lot different from the music you grew up on?”

Jonah couldn’t help himself. “Well, the tempi dragged at Boylston sometimes. It wasn’t the school’s fault. Some of those kids were coming from musically backward homes. Things got a little better once we were at Juilliard.”

She scribbled into a canary yellow legal pad. We could have told her anything, and Jonah pretty much did. “Did you have any role models? I mean, as far as singing…classical music?”

“Paul Robeson,” Jonah answered. The girl scribbled the name. “Not for his voice so much. His voice was…okay, I guess. We liked his politics.”

She seemed surprised to hear that a famous singer could have politics. Mr. Weisman was right. This wasn’t RCA Victor. You only start once. I watched Jonah’s answers drop into the permanent record, where they would last as long as the sounds we’d just laid down.

The girl asked for publicity photos. We gave her the portfolio, complete with clippings. “So many reviews!” She picked the photo I knew she would, the one emphasizing the novelty that Harmondial had just bought. Something to distinguish their catalog from all the other burgeoning record labels: a brother act, black but comely. She looked for just the right pose of comfort and assurance, the one that said, Not all Negroes want to trash everything you stand for. Some of them even serve as culture’s willing foot soldiers.

In the car, heading to the hotel, Jonah sang, “I wish they all could be California girls.”

“God only knows what she wishes we were.” We both knew, now, just which sentence in the Times had sealed this offer. The upstart record label wanted this up-and-coming Negro voice, the next untapped niche. Civil rights meant ever larger, integrated markets. The same thinking had just led Billboard to combine their R & B list with their rock and roll. Everyone would finally sing and listen to everything, and Harmondial would capitalize on the massive crossover.

We finished recording on a Wednesday night, two days later. The producer wanted Dowland to be the record’s last track. I picked the studio’s backup piano, a rare combination of covered sound and stiff action that helped me fake the frets of a lute. Today, you’d never get away with piano anymore. A third of a century ago, authenticity was still anything you made it. Time stands still. But never the same way for long.

Jonah’s first take felt flawless. But the engineer working the board was so entranced with his first-time taste of timelessness that he failed to see his meters clipping. Take two was leaden, Jonah’s revenge for the first’s destruction. The next five takes went belly-up. We’d reached the end of a difficult week. He asked for ten minutes. I stood up to take a walk down the hallway outside the recording booth, to give my brother a moment alone.

“Joey,” he called. “Don’t leave me.” Like I was abandoning him to oblivion. He wanted me to sit but not say anything. He’d fallen into a panic at sending a message out beyond his own death. We sat in silence for five minutes, and five stretched to ten: the last year that we lived in that would leave us still for so long. The engineers returned, chattering about the recent Gemini flight. I sat down, Jonah opened his mouth, and out came the sound that predicted everything that would still happen to him.

“Time stands still with gazing on her face.” As my brother sang, a few minutes’ drive from the studio, a white motorcycle policeman stopped a black driver — a man our sister’s age — and made him take a sobriety test. Avalon and 116th: a neighborhood of single-story houses and two-story apartment blocks. The night was hot, and the residents sat outdoors. While Jonah put stillness’s finish on that opening mi, re, do, a crowd gathered around the arrest. Fifty milling spectators swelled to three hundred as the policeman’s backup appeared on the scene.