I Always Think There's a Band

On The Music Man, cornets, and American exceptionalism

About to embark on a polyamorous relationship

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about The Music Man (yes, that Music Man) for the past ten days. And when I say “haven’t been able to stop thinking about,” what I really mean is “am being slowly tortured to death by the songs of.” In desperation, I have decided to see if I can excise “Seventy-Six Trombones” from my cerebellum by writing a wee thing about it. So here is a tiny Doctor Waffle offering—a waffle bite, if you will, or a Belgian amuse bouche—all about Meredith Willson’s most famous stage musical.

It all started because the town in which I live decided to put on a play. Yes, that does indeed sound like the beginning of a musical; that detail is not lost on me thank you very much. The aw-shucks gee-whizdom of the denizens of Oxford, Mississippi, coming together to stage a community musical is matched only by the aw-shucks gee-whizdom of The Music Man itself. Except ... not really. Because it turns out, my friends, that The Music Man is a dark, twisted, and sinister masterpiece worthy of Bertolt Brecht in his heyday.

Because the idea of my community staging a musical twanged every last string on the cornpone mandolin of my heart, I convinced not only my partner but also two friends visiting last weekend to go see the local production—which was fabulous. (Really and truly, no snark.) And then because I couldn’t stop humming “Shipoopi” under my breath day and night (which is, as far as I can tell, a cheerful little ditty about sexual assault), I asked Mr. Waffle to watch the movie with me just a couple of days later. And he agreed! That is why we have been married for 23 years and 3 days.

I had never seen the stage production, and it had been decades since I’d watched the 1962 Shirley Jones-Robert Preston film, co-starring Little Ronny Howard as Marian the Librarian’s younger brother—or is he? I had remembered it as a story about a musical genius who visits a small town in Iowa and convinces its citizens to start a boys’ marching band. But it turns out it’s actually about a con artist who visits a small town in Iowa and flim-flams, bamboozles, hoodwinks, and hornswoggles¹ the locals into buying a bunch of band instruments and uniforms in exchange for a promise to teach all the boys to play, while secretly planning to blow out of town before the ruse is revealed.

I have spent a lot of time in the past ten days trying to understand this con. The townspeople of River City, Iowa, give Professor Harold Hill—the Music Man—money in exchange for band  instruments, which do indeed arrive. (Cue “The Wells Fargo Wagon.”) So far so legit. Then Hill hangs around for another month or so, telling the boys to learn to play their instruments on their own using “the think system” (I am familiar with this technique because it’s basically the way I try to teach my students to write). Eventually the uniforms arrive, and Hill is about to blow out of town before getting caught but stops: he has fallen in love with Marian the Librarian and instead decides to stay and face the music (sorry).

But where is the con? Money for instruments, check. Money for uniforms, check. The only deception seems to be that he doesn’t read a note of music and thus can’t teach the boys to play, but he hasn’t taken any money for lessons, so—??? Where is the townspeople’s loss? They could get someone else to teach them to play the instruments that actually did arrive on the Wells Fargo wagon while wearing the uniforms that also arrived, later, on another Wells Fargo wagon. And hey presto—a band!

More to the point: what does Harold Hill get out of this? A small profit margin on the instruments and uniforms? That doesn’t sound like a con to me; it just sounds like capitalism. (Okay, okay, I walked right into that one.) It’s just like the “South Park” episode featuring the underpants gnomes who think they can turn their kleptomania into some kind of world domination:

But these plot problems are simply the beginning. The deep insanity of this musical resides in its bizarrely cynical love plot. Our heroine, Marian the Librarian, is a cheap-ass ho who had a torrid affair with a rich old miser who died and left her all the books in the town library. (Apparently, this is how one becomes a librarian!) Their secret love child, Winthrop (played by Little Ronny Howard in the movie), is being passed off as Marian’s younger brother, but no one is fooled. Meanwhile, Harold is also a giant slut-bag who has left behind a woman in every county in Illinois—all 102 of them!—and probably has syphilis. No one in River City can stop talking about sex for even a second, particularly in front of little kids. The mayor’s daughter is shtupping the town hoodlum, who has become the town hoodlum as a result of being Lithuanian. (I am not making this up.) The mayor’s wife is a member of a lesbian dance cult, and four gay barbershop-quartet singers² roam the streets of River City every evening before retiring to a quaint boarding house to lick whipped cream off one another’s naked bodies.

Okay, I am exaggerating a little. But just a little! There really is a song about Marian’s sluttery and another about Harold’s sex addiction. But most shocking of all (at least to this tender-hearted theatre-goer expecting a wholesome family entertainment last weekend), Marian figures out early on that Harold is a con man and decides she doesn’t care because he makes her feel all funny down there. In the end, the whole town decides to forgive the Music Man for hustling, swindling, gulling, and rooking³ them because they had a swell summer running around with their new instruments, while not playing them. The End.

But even the Con-Not-a-Con plot and the Two-Strumpets-In-Love story do not exhaust the crackpottery of the show, for the music is also cray-zee! Meredith Willson, who wrote the book, music, and lyrics (and is, disappointingly, a man) is clearly certifiably insane. He started out as a piccolo player in John Philip Sousa’s band, so this whole writing-a-marching-band-musical business seems to have been some sort of Oedipal therapy for him. The music is bendy and twisty and downright weird, and the lyrics are the work of a mad genius. Get a load of the words to the centerpiece of the show, the love song that Marian sings to Harold (the shameless hussy):

There were bells on the hill
But I never heard them ringing
No, I never heard them at all
Till there was you

There were birds in the sky
But I never saw them winging
No, I never saw them at all
Till there was you

And there was music
And there were wonderful roses
They tell me in sweet fragrant meadows
Of dawn and dew

There was love all around
But I never heard it singing
No, I never heard it at all
Till there was you

I mean, it’s actually a gorgeous song (thank heavens, because apparently it’s to be my constant companion unto the grave), but what the hell does “bells on the hill” mean? What kind of an image is “wonderful roses”? “Birds winging”—what? It’s all just ever so slightly off, like it was written by ChatGPT but maybe a couple years from now. It’s so close to capturing the way real people think and talk and write Broadway musicals, but it’s not quite able to pass itself off as human. And every song in the show is like that, like the lyrics were written at three o’clock in the morning by someone who did his last line of coke at midnight but is still really wired so smoked a bunch of weed and washed down a couple of benzos with a tumbler of Scotch and is killing time at the piano while awaiting the sweet oblivion of sleep.

All that said—and I hope I have made this abundantly clear—I freaking love this musical. It’s bananas! It openly embraces the art of deception and centers forgiveness as a virtue! It’s sex-positive! It has a hundred and ten cornets! But above all, it features what has become my new favorite line in a movie, ever. At the very end of the film, little bastard Winthrop is crying because he’s been deceived by his hero, who explains to the boy that he really did care about him all along:

Winthrop: Can you lead a band?
Harold: No.
W: Are you a big liar?
H: Yes.
W: Are you a dirty rotten crook?
H: Yes.
[editorial intervention: again, still not clear how he is a crook, but whatever]
W [bursting into tears, kicking]: Leave me go, you big liar!
H: What’s the matter? You wanted the truth, didn’t you? Now I’m bigger’n you and you’re going to stand and get it, so you might as well quit wiggling.
[editorial intervention: this dialogue disturbingly continues the non-consensual touching motif introduced in “Shipoopi”]
There’s two things you’re entitled to know. One, you’re a wonderful kid. I thought so from the first. That’s why I wanted you in the band, just so you’d quit mopin’ around feeling sorry for yourself.
W [sarcastically]: What band?
H: ... I always think there’s a band, kid.

And there you have it: the navel, the nubbin, the crux of Willson’s skewed yet deeply familiar vision. This show—always touted as the most American of American musicals—is not quintessentially American because it’s set in a small town in Iowa, or because it’s full of rootin-tootin’ Sousa-esque songs, or because it features a barbershop quartet, or even because it opens on the fourth of July and has a bunch of fireworks in it. It’s not even American because it features a loveable con man. It’s American because it features a loveable con man who has bought his own con, a rhetorician ensnared by his own rhetoric. What is more American than getting swept away by your own high-falutin’ moralizing, your own quixotic vision? Than clinging to your faith, against all odds, in a broken and irredeemable system?⁴ Than continuing to stare, until nearly blinded by its phosphorescence, at the green light at the end of the dock?

O River City—we hardly knew ye.

1. Oh, America! So many synonyms for “rob blind.”

2. All told, this is a pretty queer musical. For one thing, it features Robert Preston’s gayest performance, and I include Victor/Victoria.

3. More synonyms!

4. Also, what is more American than a movie with an all-white cast? Our own Oxford production, thankfully, featured several performers of color.