‘Beach Fever,’ being an Entry in the ‘If You Want’ Challenge

by Ian McDuff

This Songbook chart is my entry in adelate’s If You Want Challenge. I apologize for the fact that it’s a day or so late, if not a dollar short: I detest unpunctuality, and this will teach me never to sign up for a challenge that has a deadline in Holy Week. The challenge itself is All About the Leonard Cohen Songfic (good taste, mine hostess of challenges!), while the Songbook soundtrack is the Chairmen of the Board’s ‘Beach Fever.’

Josh was on a Leonard Cohen kick.

JC – the public JC – would have been laughed to scorn, had That Public JC dared to be caught being caught up in Cohen. The milieu – sometimes, James Lance Bass thought, bitterly, less a milieu than a ghetto – in which they lived was unforgiving. They’d thought, long ago, in their innocence, that getting away from Lucifer J. Pearlman would mean being free; they had found instead – songs of innocence fading away to songs of experience – that they had only exchanged one cage for another, if slighter larger, one. Sometimes, Bass mused, it seemed that both professionally and sexually they lived in a succession of closets, a world drawn by Escher in the grip of a nightmare, closets and windowless rooms opening into yet further closets and windowless rooms, in infinite regression…. They had exchanged Lou for Clive, Clive (when he cashed in – and out) for the same Teutonic suits at BMG they had first been in thrall to: the bastards who had come so close to forcing James Lance out of the group before ever it truly began: and so on ad infinitum. What was constant was that they were never free, and would never be, for in the end, Lou and Clive and Johnny and the Huns (‘“Johnny and the Huns,”’ Chris had once said: ‘great name for a band’), and all of those to whom they unwillingly answered, were merely the agents of the harsh mistress they served and would never, ever imaginably escape: the Great Bitch Public.

And that public liked its Sparkly Dance Boys stupid and generic and simple: rough edges abraded and complexities smoothed over. And the public that didn’t care for Sparkly Dance Boys at all wanted them kept firmly in their place. Josh’s public persona, ‘JC Chasez, Popstar at Large,’ would be laughed to scorn if he were caught with the name of Leonard Cohen on his lips. The public that had made ’N Sync, and could with casual adolescent cruelty break it without compunction or thought, would have but one question: ‘Leonard Who?’ And the public that closed its serried ranks to keep ’N Sync carefully segregated in its ghetto of musical irrelevance … that public, by definition, knew and revered Cohen and his œuvre, and its response would be crueler still: ‘JC Who? Who, pray, is this insect that dares pretend to mysteries beyond his ken?’

JC Chasez and Lance Bass, public personæ, whose names and broadly drawn characters in all two dimensions were a public property and part of a running cultural joke (James Lance Bass was increasingly bitter these days: doggedly, snappishly cynical as a philosopher in a barrel), had learnt the hard way to stick to their scripts and never dare venture beyond their assigned roles.

Even, to an extent, among their family – for it was one family now, Bass and Chasez alike – and their friends and their brethren. Justin, once Joe and Chris had explained to him who exactly Leonard Cohen was and where precisely he stood in the ranks of serious music (cutting off Josh’s rambling attempts to do so himself), had made it clear that even he thought C was being pretentious, and overreaching, and meddling with things too far beyond him. Which had not ‘set well’ with James Lance ‘some at all,’ and things had been a mite tense in ’N Sync land for a bit. Not for the first time. These sordid quarrels between him and Justin were becoming a part of who they were, to Chris’s annoyance, Joe’s anger, and Josh’s distress.

Josh didn’t sound distressed right now, though. He sounded … sexy as hell. Without thinking, he was milking the maximum of suggestiveness out of the lyrics he was singing to himself as he painted, James Lance working quietly on a spreadsheet in the room next the studio:

Having Josh in the house was a perpetual feast, of course; it was also a perpetual concert. Nick and Howie, one night, at one of their regular dinners (as the four of them had observed so often as to make it a private proverb, with what other gay couple could either couple double-date, after all?), had commented quietly on that. ‘I love hearing Howard sing,’ Nick had confessed, ‘but, I dunno, if it were, like, all the time, it would be – less, uh, more unspecialer, maybe?’ And Howie, of course, had known what Nick meant, and had not taken offense – James Lance always admitted he had a lot to learn about relationship maintenance from Howie – and seconded the sentiment. ‘I never want Nicky’s gifts to seem so familiar to me that I lose that sense of wonder I have whenever he and I are alone and he’s singing just for me.’

‘Josh … isn’t. Not singing for me, I mean. He’s not singing for anyone. Not even for himself. It’s just. He breathes, he sings. That’s just Josh.’

‘I wasn’t condemning him, James.’ Howie used the name that, on the analogy of ‘Josh,’ signaled that the Public Lance Persona was safely put off and bundled away, and that only Josh’s James mattered, the real and private James Lance Bass.

‘No, I know. It’s. Well, you know how it is. I love him. Quirks and all.’

‘I’ve noticed,’ Nick said, tentatively, ‘you, well, you sing a lot at home, too. I didn’t think … you never seemed … is that something you’ve sort of picked up from Josh?’

‘Yeah. He likes … ain’t like it’s, y’know, like a thing. I mean, he doesn’t press, and it’s not like it’s “Sing, bitch, or you get none.”’ They laughed: the idea of Josh pulling that sort of stunt with his James was the broadest comedy. ‘It’s just, he likes it so much, and, well, with him wandering around breathing out music all the damn time, I cain’t really quite help it nohow.’

What James did not say was that, at home, in private, in what Chris called ‘the Bass-Chasez House of Harmonic Lovin’,’ they neither of them sang, they could neither of them bear to sing (it wasn’t discussed, it hadn’t been agreed or even expressed: it was tacit, implied, instinctual) – they could neither of them bear to sing the sort of songs the Bitch Public demanded of them. Justin, when he did feel like making music of his own rather than listening to the work of others, rapped and beatboxed in private as in public, naturally and unthinkingly; but Justin was free of the divided mind that afflicted Josh and James, Justin’s internal conflicts did not include any dissonance between the music he liked, and the music he was expected to like and to perform.

But James and Josh, in their private world, needed the escape of wider horizons, even if those horizons and their width were illusory (cages within cages, in infinite regression), and they sought that escape in the music that poured, unbidden, unthought-on, from their throats.

It was a private music, and eclectic.

It was a private music, and their own.

Howie had asked, fascinated, if they communicated in some way by this means; a question to which James had had no answer. He had never been able to quantify the media through which he and his Josh communicated: it seemed to him, in all honesty, as if they hardly needed to, the empathy between them being so strong. What he did know was that they each found comfort in the other’s songs.

For his part, James sang, often, the songs of his Southern childhood, old folk ballads that hearkened back to Appalachia and before that to Galway and Galloway, to Wales, Wessex, and Wester Ross, to Nairn and Nottinghamshire. He sang, also, irresistibly, the country and bluegrass tunes that were the daughters of those ballads; and he sang, too, with ironic inflection, Randy Newman. He sang the slow, sun-soaked Southern standards, lazily, as if he were Leon Redbone. And he sang the Carolina beach music he had come to love, conjuring in every bar the sun on the sea and the strand, the sun that had so memorably gilded his Josh when he had introduced him to that Platonic ideal of Southern prepdom. And even, subtly and wordlessly encouraged, perhaps prompted and inspired, by his lover, he sang, with increasing confidence and steadily decreasing self-consciousness, opera. ‘O Isis und Osiris,’ it might be, or ‘In diese heil’gen Hallen,’ his basso rounded and mysterious, awesome in its power, donning the cloak of Sarastro: it cast its grave and stilling spell, its mystery, tinged with the bittersweet of the Viennese soul, over him and his Josh alike.

And for his part, Josh had covered standards, Sinatra’s and Bobby Darin’s, Ellington, Gershwin, and Berlin; and had long sung at unexpected moments Roy’s own ancestral songs, ‘Jolie Blonde’ and ‘La Delaisse,’ ‘Brasse le Couche-couche’ and ‘Valse du Vacher;’ and he sang, as well, identity songs, Romanovsky & Phillips, mostly, whenever he felt a surge of Pride. He sang the Western swing that was the marriage of his jazz and James’s country music, lots of Lyle Lovett and James Taylor, and the R&B that had fathered James’s beach tunes: the house rang to Bill Withers or Ben E. King, and if Josh inadvertently sang Gregory Abbott’s ‘Shake You Down’ while his James was in the house and in hearing, the next hour was a lost cause, just as whenever James sang Barry White, Josh in his turn was overcome….

And that was fine, and that was very well indeed, and that was a comfortable thing, a private music and their own.

Why, then, was James uneasy now that his Josh was absorbed by a new and consuming obsession? There was nothing new in that, after all: Josh was notorious for going on all-consuming jags, throwing himself so fully into his new musical interest of the moment as to be temporarily oblivious to all else, until he had internalized whatever had rapt him so, and made it forever a part of him, to the very fiber.

What it came to, James admitted reluctantly to himself, was that until now, important though ballads and jazz and grand opera might be in musical history, their private music had carefully eschewed anything with the heft and power of Cohen. Cohen’s was a music nearer, more accessible, more immanent than opera: more applicable, not safely distanced and transcendent. And unlike Gershwin or Rodgers, Hart, and Hammerstein, it was not common enough currency that its plangent meaning did not strike home. His unease, when you got right down to it, was bound up in what he recognized as the great chasm forever fixed between himself and his love, his other soul. He was a singer, certainly. He had made himself a performer. But he was not a musician, not in the way Josh was, not in the way that made Josh’s soul bleed honey and wine. Where Josh was going, in his mind and in his heart that were so infused with music beyond James’s own capacity to hold them, was somewhere James could not follow; and Josh, it sometimes seemed, had found a way out in music, a way to break loose for unbounded horizons James could not find, trapped as he was in the infinite regression of locked rooms. And that was a prospect more fearsome than death, more oppressive and awful than the vast inhuman vacuum of deep space.

James was cheering himself up: the ‘playlist’ was evidence enough of that, Josh thought, grinning a little. James might think the two of them didn’t communicate formally or overtly through music, but sometimes James was too analytical, too linear a thinker for his own good. Sometimes, Josh knew, Sweet Baby James’s horizons needed a little widening. When James was wandering around singing ‘Down at the Beach Club,’ and ‘Sweet Beach Music,’ and Gloria Hardeman’s ‘Meet Me With Yo’ Black Drawers On,’ and ‘(Gonna Have to Leave Her) ’Cause She Can’t Fix Grits,’ it was pretty damned clear that he had a case of beach fever and was feeling a bit neglected. James wasn’t one to wallow when either or both of those needs were unfulfilled: rather, he always tried to cheer himself up, without thinking: and it was that that was certain to get Josh’s attention – he knew he had a bad habit of getting lost in his own head – and alert Josh to the need to cheer his James up himself.

James passed by the doorway, singing quietly to himself, and Josh grinned broadly, eyes crinkling. Sure enough, ‘Beach Fever’ it was, and that was something Josh knew how to cure. James’s own lyric was the right diagnosis, and suggested the remedy:

Josh felt a brief pang of guilt, realizing that his latest obsession had probably left James too much to himself. But as Cohen himself would put it, above all things was Josh James’s man, and nothing was going to change that.

‘Baby?’

‘Hmm? Hey.’

‘Start packing.’

James grinned. ‘Sugar, we’re always both of us packin’.’

Josh kissed him, lightly, and sent him towards his dresser with a smack on the ass. ‘Trunks and sunscreen, babe. You need some beach time.’

Music moved Josh deeply; but no chord ever written touched him to the core in the way James’s grin did when his face lit up like that.

The sun began to set and the Gulf waves laved the sand near Pensacola. On the beach, laughing, gold-gleaming in the westering light, against a horizon boundless, infinite, free, two men who would always be boys at heart played. It was a private music, and their own.

All lyrics and soundbites are the property of their respective copyright holders and used pursuant to the Fair Use Doctrine.

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