Sometime a few months before he turned four, Archie developed some consistent rhythm and ability to carry a little tune. I don’t know if this was ahead or behind schedule for that sort of thing, but considering he’d been banging on pans and yelling words for several years, it sure felt like a long time coming.
One night just before bedtime he set up a drumset of an upturned tote with a mini-frisbee as the high-hat and sat down to bang out a tune, using a light-up Mardi Gras wand as the sole stick.
“Okay, I want to play one of my favorite songs,” he said. “So tell me what one is.”
He pretended not to know what one was, or maybe he really couldn’t remember. He counted on our knowledge of his favorite songs, and he wasn’t wrong. We’d been cataloging his favorite songs for years. You may recall I scored a victory by introducing him to The Sweet’s “Little Willie” at a very early age. The disc it was on, which also contained The Velvet Underground’s “Sweet Jane,” went away for a while, and when it came back, on a trip to the beach when he was two, it instantly became his favorite song. He asked for it each time in the car, and I couldn’t have been more excited. We both loved it so, we never tired of it.
The bubble burst of course when he discovered kids’ music soon after and went through several phases, some horrid like this thing called Little People, which was supposed to be Fisher Price toy characters singing nauseatingly “rocked up” versions of “There’s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea” and other nasty ear worms. The singers were clearly adults trying to act like kids, which made it unbearable. Other phases, like Sesame Street and Raffi, were enjoyable in a predictably nostalgic way. But then he started pre-kindergarten in the fall of his fourth go-round, and all bets were off when they sent him home with a very special disc called Music Together. You see, we didn’t know it at the time, but we were already at a huge disadvantage, as his teachers had been using this disc in class exercises, and were in no way prepared for the onslaught that followed in the form of a little ditty called “Ram Sam Sam.”
This song, “Ram Sam Sam,” consisted of exactly one phrase, which comprised both the chorus and the verse, and exactly two chords that just repeated and repeated. The thing started slow and built real slow and deliberately, then got going on what seemed like a really fast tempo. This formula alone is enough to drive any kid wild, but the kicker was the dance that his teacher taught him to go with the song. It starts off with a march and an arm roll, with a little jump, and you move in a circle, faster and faster with the song, doing the dance faster and faster, straight through the soprano sax solo, until you collapse at the end in a heap of overloaded kid frenzy. It’s like a kids’ psychedelic freak-beat wig-out! It reminds me of what happens with a bunch of freaks at a Klezmer All-Stars show, or the pit at a Reverend Horton Heat show, bands that go up slow to fast and you dance in a circle. In other words, it’s really, really fun.
“Ram Sam Sam” took over his life and mine in a way I might have predicted but didn’t. He requested it nicely but frequently, and oh so cutely. I tried to counter, but it was useless. Even if I could squeeze in one of mine, it was always, “Can we listen to my song after this, daddy? Please, please daddy, can we listen to my song?”
What could I do? We listened to it in the car (where the arm parts of the dance were still executed from the car seat). We danced with him, at home, in his room on the rug, in the front room on “Daddy’s stereo,” on the deck, on the front porch, on trips to Grandma’s house where it went with us, everywhere and all the time and multiple times in a row, over and over again. Like the song itself, building each time, repeating over and over again, collapsing in a heap, starting anew.
The other songs on the disc also caught his fancy, or maybe they moved on to others in school. He listened to the entire Music Together disc so many times that he knew the words and the order. He learned to skip some he liked less. When he discovered “random” play he asked for that, calling it “uh-oh” because the tracks came in unexpected order.
“Can we listen to my CD on uh-oh, daddy?”
“Only after you finish your french fries and ice cream, son. Now pass daddy the Zapp’s Voodoo chips.”
The thing is, the stuff wasn’t bad. It has interesting rhythms and percussion going on, and the instrumentation is varied and nice, with a bunch of strings and horns. I even showed him a youtube video of Music Together Live! and it blew his little mind. The concert was over-the-top, with a hundred or so kids and parents dancing around in circles to a blowout rendition of “Working on the Railroad” like our mini psychedelic freakouts times a thousand. He studied all of it so closely that he began to learn rhythm and melody from it. So that night when he sat down for a totes and frisbee drum concert, Erin and I knew the first song would be one of those. He just needed us to count it off, so to speak. And when she started a soft “So Long, Farewell,” he picked it right up and banged off a respectable version, with a sped-up flourish at the end.
We didn’t get into “Ram Sam Sam” that night. After all, it was bedtime. But his musical skills bode well for the eardrums of our future. One problem is that, well, it’s drums. Plus he can still command us to sing and do the dance from behind the kit.
One other thing, his little brother likes to sing now, too, at one and a half, but he’s nowhere near carrying a tune. His favorite song at the moment.: “Sweet Jane” by The Velvet Underground.
XulaDad 