By Edward E. Crouse

FOR THIS & "song issue," I caught up with Sullivan O. Bianco, a karaoke junkie and infrequent songwriter, outside of the Mint. Though it has no bearing, the songs "Physical," "Kiss," "Summer Lovin'," "Sweet Emotion," and "I've Never Been to Me" were playing while we spoke. Each tune seemed to sour Mr. Bianco's mood, but as this diddler jawed on, his comments about a specific song gradually subsumed anything I could contribute to this issue. The wheat of his remarks is reproduced below. The chaff will have to come later.

Bay Guardian: What's that you're smoking?

Sullivan O. Bianco: Fuck off. I'd rather be alone. It's not like I have a choice.

BG: When did you get this way?

SOB: It started the other night, when I had a coughing fit. I was listening to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes."

BG: Which version?

SOB: It doesn't matter.

BG: Why that song? It's a pretty song about nothing in particular. It's vague.

SOB: Nah, I doubt that. I always suspected that "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is a song about smoking, even though a dash through the lyrics has no evidence whatsoever of this. Still, I feel like knuckling down about this point, charged by continued listenings to each of the available versions from Billy Eckstine, Bryan Ferry, the Jerry Garcia Band, Ella Fitzgerald, the Platters (of course). Vulgar as it is, smoking makes the smoke metaphor (also the only image in the song), and soon both the futility and tension of the song's love affair readily pimple up. It doesn't simply put you in the same place as it would if you'd spun "Black Coffee" or Otis Redding's "Cigarettes and Coffee." By the time the smoke gets to clawing your eyes (oh yeah, don't take the cigarette out of your mouth, either), scraping them more reliably than freshly minced onions, you feel that the song might really be about self-destruction and denial – twin symptoms of love and smoking.

BG: That sounds like crap.

SOB: It sounds like a lot of things. It involves a lot of abstract things, like seeing somebody smoke, maybe, or overhearing that someone is about to leave you. Suspecting something, or having that suspicion planted by outsiders, is taxing your imagination, surreal, almost.

BG: You can't really picture anything from the song except one person, alone.

SOB: Right. It offers a less sentimental version of this because it lacks a location, description. One is even hard-pressed to find an image in the song. Because of this, singers can "own" this one more readily; all you can see is someone abandoned. Brooks Atkinson described the first staging from Roberta like this: a girl in a peasant costume sits by herself on a bare stage and accompanies herself on guitar.

BG: I guess I see your point. Despite the "eyes" in the title, the song is entirely verbal.

SOB: It's an exchange of gossip and wisdom between "they" and "I," and a sad, futile spar between the two parties. They know that I'm blind, I know that my love is true. Someone must be lying, or at least arguing from ignorance. Both parties take turns mocking each other, but only "I" gets burned. "They" speak in words, directly quoted: "They said, 'Someday you'll find / All who love are blind / When your heart's on fire / You must realize / Smoke gets in your eyes.' " In other words, they know something I don't know – that my lover is having an affair, or maybe they suspect that the loved one is about to leave and don't want to say it.

BG: So it's a song about a conversation?

SOB: It's a weird frame altogether – a narrator is relating to a listener, describing only conversations, arriving at a point where the narrator agrees with the "they." "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" is this strange, absurd time-mind island. The song has neither a chorus nor a verse, something in between. It's just some scattered dialogue about the past and the miserable present. It's resigned to the grief, not quite past it, still dreaming ruefully.

BG: The conversation is rather rude – a rude interrogation. Like: "How do you know your lover is true?" "Well, I can't deny what's inside of me." "You're evading the question." "And you ... are ... blind."

SOB: Ouch. [He sips his 7 and 7 that he's smuggled out of the joint.]

BG: So ultimately, "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" offers nothing more than a platitude.

SOB: Yeah, one that caught on when the song first became a hit. According to Jerome Kern biographer Michael Freedland, " 'Smoke gets in your eyes' was being repeated all over America as the current 'in' expression."

BG: SGIYE? Was that really the father of TGIF or "Shit happens"?

SOB: The song was born in 1933, a hybrid of a tune and different tempos that composer Jerome Kern decided to recycle for Roberta. It lived first as a tap dance bit from a scene change in his previous musical, Showboat, then later became a theme for a series of proposed NBC radio musicals which never took off. Kern, Wagner devotee and jazz hater that he was, conceived it as a march. Lyricist Otto Harbach argued the tempo down, sparking a minor feud with Kern, who finally agreed that it worked better as a ballad.

BG: Yet it's become a standard.

SOB: Yeah, well, that's probably because of the sudden, "off"-sounding key change between the verse (I guess I can't call them verses, can I?) and the bridge. The thought changes, the whole atmosphere changes and is completely inspirational to both players and composers. It is very adventurous and open musically, leaving a lot of room for different and sometimes difficult voicings. It gives gate-crashers different keys and alters the mood of a song. That alteration also mirrors, you know, the fluctuation of being in love and being utterly alone. Brian Wilson was probably most smitten with Kern out of all the Tin Pan Alley-ites.

BG: Suddenly, in the bridge, it seems like the narrator (singer?) has hope.

SOB: The singer gets one last dig in at the infernal "they" or "them." But it's one that's not quoted, just related.

BG: Say again?

SOB: The singer tells you that he/she is chaffing, or mocking [the] tormentors. Vaguely, and then the singer laughs and in that same moment states that [he/she has] been left behind and that "they" have been right all along. By the way, have you ever heard of any other songs with the verb "chaff" in them?

BG: No.

SOB: That's Otto for you. He's underrated and funny, a really idiosyncratic rhymer, but also the mentor for Hammerstein, you know. Elsewhere in Roberta, in the song "Yesterdays," he gets some doozies out: "forsooth," "olden," "sequestered."

BG: But that's a song about the past and I think it sounds necessarily antiquated.

SOB: True.

BG: It's a mutant. It's clearly a love song but doesn't belong to any of the subgenres, like the carnal "fire" songs (even though there's fire), or the I'm-feeling-blue-and-smoking tunes. It gets a wider swath.

SOB: Obscuring, burning, acutely paining. It has less in common with "Fire," "I'm on Fire," the two "Heat Wave"s (Irving Berlin's or Martha and the Vandellas'), "Too Darn Hot," "Burning Up," because it takes place after, because there's a lack of activity. It's more masochistic, not particularly fleshy. You know, it's ... well, smoky. You can't cling to smoke or smoking. Smoking's an empty, glamorous act, and the song is elegant, languorous, and prone. In all of those, the burning is in progress, taking place.

BG: The other day, a friend said that he got into smoking because of a photograph he saw in Life. I think it was of Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, and Picasso all fuming way.

SOB: I don't want to overstate this, but the singer should be a smoker, someone to add just one more image to the song. Sing it all the way through without taking the smoke out of your mouth – hell, don't even exhale, and then you'll know the price of love. Smoke will kill you, will get in your eyes, and that red you see will open them. If you haven't collapsed by then.

BG: Awfully cynical of you.

SOB: That's where the song is. Between knowing and not knowing, blissful ignorance and worldliness, gossip and privacy, smoking and smoldering.

BG: So what version did you listen to while you were smoking?

SOB: All. Fine, I'll let on. Ferry's is too big and rockist for me. He creates a verse and then grafts a pitiful St. Elmo's Fire sax break onto it. He gives up on the idiosyncrasies of the song, but I suspect he would more loosely interpret it if he did it now. Ella's is fine, the Platters are too much in heaven, they're too transfigured for my taste. For Chrissakes, they use harps!

BG: So you weren't listening to any of those.

SOB: I have to admit, Eckstine's is perversely great. There's no sense of lite or flit in his person. That baritone! It sounds the way taffy looks as it's being prepared, and it's also deep and dark. This is the most firm and planted version of the song. His voice rolls over the years, and it was only when I heard his rendition that I realized what an isolated, scary break there is between the bridge and the last "verse" 's word, "now."

BG: You'll have to refresh this point.

SOB: "Yet today / My love has flown away / I am without my love." And then, in the same place where "I" used to say "they," "I" says "now."

BG: Meaning?

SOB: That the present is invested with an authority I couldn't see. The facts I am presented with are the ones I'd feared most and avoided: I am being mocked again, I am here now, and I weep buckets. In public.

BG: You're paraphrasing somebody, but who it is escapes me.

SOB: My man, you oughta smoke.

BG: What shall I smoke, pray tell?

SOB: Something, anything. Just get it in your eyes and let it fall away.

BG: Oh, stick it.

SOB: [Inaudible.]

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