Recommended soundtrack while reading: Retro Seeburg Elevator Music Volume 8
I’ve been listening to a lot of elevator music lately. Sometimes the tracks move me to tears. Maybe, I think, I am rewiring my brain. Does that make me less real? Then again, every part of me was part of something else first. I tell my father I am blissed out on Muzak and he apologizes to me for no longer possessing the energy of a younger person.
In a dream I had, I stood behind the Easy-Listening King on a hill of wildflowers, watching his shirt crease in the wind. He worked at a radio station running a mellow music program from midnight to six in the morning. The dead ends of my hair hurt my face when they hit. Every time I cut them off, they break again. I wanted to say something to him but couldn’t find the words.
The Seeburg 1000 Background Music System, my favorite of the “beautiful music” record producers, offered three song libraries for optimizing office workers, shoppers, and factory employees, respectively. As the years went on they added libraries for the Penthouse, the Upbeat, and the Mellow Mood. These were the days, I am told in school, when you could design your way out of anything, when the horizon for self-improvement curved all the way around the earth. To me the future is a black hole, an approaching entry point ever more compressed and inconceivable.
The Easy-Listening King and I whistled for a dog named Sunday. The King’s hair was darker than anything around us, the only grounding point I could see. He dressed like a sackcloth Elvis. When I looked at my hands the skin seemed to be moving inwards. We had been walking a long time.
Did you hear that? he asked me. I shook my head, but he was still facing away.
Seeburg, who started out manufacturing player pianos and then jukeboxes, created a turntable cabinet in the late 1950s to play their library on loop. Sets were sent out every four months in exchange for the previous quarter’s records, which were then destroyed. They survive only by human misconduct. If left unreturned, the regional salesman was fined and the client did not receive new music. Everyone suffered for bad behavior, a video essay I watched on the subject told me.
The Easy-Listening King and I had ridden the train to this place in silence. He bent over the pull-down tray from the seat in front writing programming notes on drink napkins. We arrived at his house to find the back door open and Sunday gone. He called her name over and over again with a wobble in his voice.
You might expect all the Seeburg library songs to sound the same, a kind of consumer research slurry, but they show surprising range and soul. They are beautiful music as promised, designed in their beauty to disappear against the background. Some are covers. Most use a full orchestra. Different libraries venture into pop songs, show tunes, mariachi bands, disco flutes, and experimental synthesizers. I have my favorites and my favorites are nameless.
The Easy-Listening King and I looked down on the river and a low stone wall before it that marked the edge of his property. The wind picked up. He crouched, put a hand to the dirt below the flowers, and sat. Buttercups left brushes of pollen across his elbows. I stepped behind him and almost put my hand on his head but did not. The gesture felt too familiar when I traced through it in my mind.
I listen most often to a piano-forward album titled DWLP-3278. It brings to mind the world I wanted for us all. Can’t you see them playing tennis? Don’t they look kind in their sweater vests? They must have been so much more real. Without a future, one turns around.
The Easy-Listening King emptied his pockets of the napkins he had written on during the journey. Song titles piled up in his lap: What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life. It’s Always Thursday. Look for a Star. Cast Your Fate to the Wind. Sweet Surrender. Happy End. Funky Trumpets.
I feel simple for leaning into a false life designed by men in glasses to increase sales at J.C. Penney’s for fiscal year 1964. We were always only people. I would have been myself at any time. All I really know is that something is missing from me; I feel more hopeful to think it lost than something I just dreamed of having.
What did you hear? I asked the Easy-Listening King. It was hard to speak into the wind.
Only the train again, he said.
Maybe Sunday went back home, I said.
He shook his head and asked me to tell him it would be alright.
Sure it will, I said. I never expected to reassure the Easy-Listening King of anything. He was supposed to reassure me.
I can’t find any information about why the past quarter’s records had to be destroyed before anything new would be delivered. Millions of Seeburg 1000 BMS LPs lie smashed under the years somewhere. The ones I listen to online were once a burden to a heavily fined regional salesman. He came home and took his hat off and put it on the kitchen table. He was a person just like me.
There it is again, the Easy-Listening King said. I listened for the sound of something beautiful lying hidden across the hill. He kept his sideburns black with a small brush, and under the sun the dye had begun to leak into the creases of his face. The napkins flew from his hands and twisted across the valley. His sweat spread his shirt dark against him. Somewhere, I figured, his dog Sunday was still running, her mouth open to the cycling wind.