Fun, fun, fun … Chuck Berry style

OK. I’ll admit it. It’s true.

I have become Quite The Little Show-off lately. It seems I sometimes take that need to announce my presence just one step too far in a move that has me rapidly progressing from Cute … to Obnoxious.

Take this for example.

Me: dining room, middle of the house, tapping away at this very keyboard.

Jase: study, back of the house, doing an elusive Something.

(Jase sneezes.)

‘Ooh!' I think. 'Here’s my chance!’

So I sing out, loudly and ever-so-sweetly:

‘Bless you!’

Jase replies in a dull monotone.

‘Thanks.’

(When he doesn’t reply, I just keep ‘blessing’ him until he does.)

In response to his thanks, I then sing out even more loudly, and even more sweetly,

‘You’re welcome!’

It’s unnecessary, this last one. I know that. But it’s code you see. It’s code for: ‘I can hear now! Have you noticed?’

Similar to the way I announce myself in group conversations now, really.

Anyone: ‘So Jase, have you been down to that new market yet?’

Me, sweetly interjecting: ‘No, he hasn’t.’

Poor Jase can’t get a word in.

This one is code for: ‘I’m here too! Hi there! You can safely include me in your conversations now.’

Yes, I’ve come to love conversation for conversation’s sake. But the annoyingness doesn’t end there.

If I recognise a song on the radio, I feel it is for Everybody’s Benefit that I announce what it is. Then proceed to sing along, to prove it. Even to the in-between bits where there’s not supposed to be any singing. (Dum, dum, dah dah, dum DUUUUM.)

But folks, this show-off was put in her place yesterday by none other than Mike Love of the Beach Boys.

I was playing my rehab ‘guessing game’, shuffling the songs on my iPod and seeing how quickly I could identify them.

Then I heard it.

Johnny B. Goode!! Chuck Berry!!

I started ‘singing’ the guitar part and imagined myself on stage, Marty McFly style. And just as I’d worked myself up into an air guitar frenzy, and was about to shout out ‘way down in Louisiana, down in New Orleans’, I instead heard a meek little voice sing this:

‘Well she got her daddy’s car and she cruised through the hamburger stand now …’

What??? No way! That was totally Johnny B. Goode.

Um, no.

It was, of course, ‘Fun, fun, fun’ by the Beach Boys.

I replayed it over and over but, every single time, I heard the Johnny B. Goode riff.

I later told Jase about it. Played it for him. Did the annoying thing (naturally) and sang along with the instruments during the intro.

He smiled.

‘Yeah, they have the same riff. I can see how you got there.’

His answer was mildly comforting, though I would have preferred him to say: ‘Well of course it’s Chuck Berry! That’s not Mike Love * at all – you just had the lyrics wrong. Even though you don’t even have Johnny B. Goode on your iPod. You were right. Of course.’

(My hearing friends who want an idea of what music sounds like for me, there you go. I can give you no better example. Listen to the introductory riff in each song and you might get an idea of the detail missing from music. I’m sure my natural hearing would have given me more instruments, the bigger picture, to ensure I never confused the two songs. But I still like what I hear now! I catch the melody, the vocals and some of the instruments. And in true CI style, if I now proceed to listen to these two songs more often, I will hear the differences and be able to train my brain to recognise them. Fascinating!)

So yes, I became a bit less self-assured after that incorrect guess of mine. (Just like when I thought the ‘Sound and Way Beyond’ rehab software was playing me ‘Twinkle, twinkle little star’ and when I looked at the available answer options it turned out to be the ‘Alphabet song’. Heeeey! Trick question!)

Anyway, I’m now on a new mission. One that involves sourcing a copy of ‘Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree’ and comparing it to Men at Work’s ‘Down under’. See if I can make sense of last year’s plagiarism lawsuit, now that I have a talent for confusing riffs.

Apologies to Jase in advance for repeating these songs over and over. 

Guess I’ll have fun, fun, fun till the husband takes the iPod away. 

* I’m suddenly aware that it may not be Mike Love who opens that song, but all Beach Boys currently sound as squeaky as Mike at the moment. ;-)