I woke up one morning and I couldn’t hear E anymore. The note, not the letter.
It was just gone. I first noticed it on the way to work, listening to an old mixtape of classic rock songs, wondering how come I hadn’t remembered how jagged and minimalistic these wayback arena rockers really were all along, how little I had realised the disruptive strangeness at the heart of – what was that song again?
‘Smoke On The Water.’
No, wait. I know that riff. Like any idiot, I’ve played that riff on Fender knock-offs in music stores. I even had the Astrud Gilberto song they ripped it off from on an mp3 somewhere. This was not Smoke On The Water. Even if that was Ian Gillan there stuttering out some unintelligible garble with most of the syllables sliced away, even if that drum pattern there was unmistakably Ian-keeping-the-Paice, that song was not Smoke On The Water unless I fell asleep on the wrong side of the reality trellis and woke up transported to a dimension where the stars were little fish, the sky was the underside of a vast avocado and my skin is green with little purple ruffles.
I glanced down at myself. Brownish with tufts of black hair here and there. Looked out the window. Skies grey, thick with clouds, not fruit rind. Too early for stars, but still. This was not Smoke On The Water. Something was wrong with the tape, that was it. What was I even doing with a tape deck in my car anymore? Might as well have a giant ‘L’ tattooed on my forehead and be done with it. I was reaching work anyway, so I stopped the tape and drove on.
The first half of the day was busy. It was a Tuesday morning and I had to get caught up on all the work I’d been postponing since last Thursday so that I could finally start postponing this week’s work. Three hours of wading through miles of dense technical copy, straining my eyes to catch serial commas, stray typos and violations of approved style guidelines. Three hours and then I was due for lunch, a couple of cigarettes and maybe a quick nap in my car.
In the canteen, I was spooning something soggy and drenched with over-spiced gravy into my mouth and trading weak jokes with my colleagues, everything as per normal, when Amit’s phone rang. Amit’s one of my better friends at work. We have some shared history in the local rock scene, he even played rhythm guitar for a couple of bands that I sang for at one point. I’ve mellowed out since then, moved on from the Bay Area thrash and Florida death we were into back then.
Now it’s a lot of 70s rock, some folk, a couple of newer bands that seem to have good grooves. He’s still totally into the extreme stuff only these days it’s all grindcore and one-man black metal bands. So I fully expect his ringtone to be something noisy, raw and abrasive. What I don’t expect is this Morse-code like assortment of sudden bursts of sound erupting into silence otherwise only broken by the sound of cymbals.
“That’s…some weird music, man..,” I tell Amit once he finished with his call. He looks at me strangely,”‘Are you messing with me, Ray?”
I shake my head in a negative.
“Something wrong with your ears?”
“What do you mean?”
“This is Paranoid, man. Even you must still remember how that sounds.”
I asked him to play it again, and sure enough, those strange, lopsided 3-chord motifs which were all I could hear of the verse were actually the little 4-chord breaks that come in on the end of only the most famous riff ever, second only to Smoke On The Water.
I spent the next few days listening to anything I had that was detuned so that I could avoid coming to terms with what was happening, and it worked some of the time, but of course you can’t really play music without hitting the odd E.
Then, I couldn’t hear D. Then C. A few weeks later I tried some early Napalm Death that I still had lying around on an old TDK D90. No dice. I’d lost B too. I went to a doctor, who put me on to a specialist and they all agreed there was nothing physically wrong with my ears, nothing fried in my brain. They suggested I go to a psychiatrist, but I don’t put much stock in that kind of thing.
Now it’s all gone. I tried some Schoenberg, but apparently I don’t undertand what ‘atonal’ means, because I couldn’t hear that stuff either. I can hear speech within a certain range, for some reason, but if someone has a really high or deep voice, it starts fading out at the edges.
I took all my tapes and CDs, all my ratty old vinyl and even my external hard drive of music and left it all at a charity store yesterday. Then I went back home and got drunk while I watched my guitar – a nice old Yamaha acoustic that I still used to tune up and play a few songs on from time to time – burn. The end of an era. I cried a little, even. But I thought I might be able to get by.
Then I woke up this morning. And I can’t see red anymore.
Jayaprakash Satyamurthy lives in Bangalore. He writes various kinds of corporate content for a living. He also writes weird fiction, because he has to. He plays the bass guitar for Bevar Sea, a stoner/doom band and for Djinn & Miskatonic, his own doom/psychedelia project. He and his wife Yasmine support a horde of cats and dogs and each other’s many dreams. Jayaprakash also maintains a sporadic blog at http://aaahfooey.blogspot.com