JUN 10, 2006

I wouldn’t.  Hearing that insipid screech-fest would increase my need for anesthesia tenfold.  No, if I were given a choice for surgery music, it would have to be jazz. 

So next time – and, alas, I know there will be a next time – a little Billie Holliday, if you please.  “I’ll Never Fail You,” “Practice Makes Perfect” or “I’m Pulling Through” would seem to be appropriate.  “All of Me” is one of my favorites, but I’m concerned it might give the wrong impression to the individual with the scalpel – my surgeries tend to involve cutting things out, and it sort of frightens me to think of Lady Day’s hypnotic voice uttering the line “Why not take all of me?” just as the surgeon is deciding where, exactly, to place the knife.

Herbie Hancock might work, too.  “Stiched Up,” especially, even if it does feature John "May Cause Nausea and/or Abdominal Pain" Mayer; not “Vein Melter,” because this would also seem to give the wrong impression. 

I do not, however, want anyone singing or dancing in the operating room, which kind of rules out a lot of good music, including many jazz standards, such as “What a Wonderful World,” which is of course not a dancing song – a crying song, more likely – but, I find, damn near impossible not to sing along to.  “Swing Swing Swing” is even more dangerous – no swingin’ with scalpels, please. 

Ever seen the movie “Dave”?  There’s this scene in which the title character gets a crowd to joyously sing along to “Louie Louie,” an infectious tune that has a boogie-inducing effect on the human mind.  Great stuff, that.  But please, not in the vicinity of my anesthetized, cut-open body.  I mean, really: it’s bad enough that they leave tweezers and sponges and stuff inside people now and then, but I don’t want to be the first person to have an inadvertent appendectomy because some surgeon was groovin’ too hard to his iPod.

Worse than “Louie Louie” would be “Twist and Shout.”  I mean, remember the end of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” when Ferris gets pretty much all of Chicago singing and dancing?  Yeah.  Wonderful scene, but, again, not one I care to have repeated in the O.R.  No chorus lines or samba lines or line dancing, no nurses doing high-kicks, no anesthesiologists bustin’ a move.  This also, I suppose, rules out any other songs that people might associate with show-stopping numbers in film.

I’ve had surgery several times, and now I wonder what songs may have been playing while I was being cut open.  (Virtuoso performances by all of these individuals, by the way; my colon and I thank them profusely, though we hope there’s no encore.)

Dr. Libertarian (performing in Northfield, MN, 2003): I’m guessing Lou Reed.  The good doc seemed like a sort of no-nonsense but not-actually-that-tough fellow.  Nice guy, but there was a definite sort of melancholy, despairing tone to his stoic demeanor and quasi-libertarian utterings.  Maybe The Who, especially that song from “Apocalypse Now.” 

And then there’s Dr. Scalpel, who desperately wanted to remove major pieces of my body, such as my entire colon.  He never got to perform, thankfully, and I shudder to think of what he would have done and what he would have listened to.  I dunno.  What’s hot among the “evil dipshit” demographic these days?  I would say some kind of obnoxious, overproduced country stuff, but frankly he seemed like a liberal, which sort of rules out a taste for most country these days, aside from the Dixie Chicks.  But I just can’t see him digging that.  Honestly, I bet he fancied himself as a Johnny Cash type, in the manner of an malevolent dweeb wanting to emulate the archetypal tough-guy-with-a-heart.  I can just see Dr. Scalpel with his knife poised, bellowing, “I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.”