My grandparents moved to the desert almost three decades ago, before country clubs and resorts had turned all available expanses of dry Indian land into empty lots waiting to be developed. I remember the first time I stepped onto the desert sand, just across from where their driveway ended. I was a little city kid squinting at a smogless sky, and what I noticed more than anything was the sound of the desert, the sound of nothing but wind and breath, lizards in bushes, the crunch of loose rock under my sandals.
"Was there ever such a stillness as that which rests upon the desert at night!" exclaimed one of the desert’s first chroniclers, John C. Van Dyke, in 1901, "Was there ever such a hush as that which steals from star to star across the firmament!" Although "hush" and "stillness" are still prime traits of the desert soundscape, the silence of the desert has long been one of its greatest myths. The desert may be quiet, but it is rich with its own music. In his 1954 "Desert Music" — a poem that years later would inspire composer Steve Reich to imagine such a music — William Carlos Williams heard the desert as music that surrounded and engulfed him, "a music of survival, subdued, half heard."
Sound artists Richard Lerman and Ariel Guzik have also approached the desert as music, and both have attempted to record it. Lerman has used home-made microphones and digital video to wire the Sonoran desert as an acoustic, recordable landscape, giving us the sound of saguaro-cactus thorns and the seeds of palo verde trees and the wind on ocotillos and desert rocks. Guzik, who’s based in Mexico City, has come up with a desert-music machine, the Harmonic Spectral Resonator, that collects natural sounds generated by the movement of sun, wind, and earth and then converts them into machinic harmonies. On his first recording, REA: Harmonic Spectral Resonator (Conaculta/Fonca), the Mexican desert is a landscape of droning hums and steely wind. It’s the sound of the desert as if this were how the desert heard itself, the clogged vibrations and thumping pulses that reverberate between the desert’s ears.
But these desert listenings do what the desert writer Charles Bowden has so often warned against: they treat the desert as if no one lived there. When I hear the desert, I hear all these natural, ambient whispers and rumblings too, but I also hear the audio desert of my grandparents: the mechanized spray of sprinklers, the hushed baritone voices of TV golf announcers echoing throughout their house. Most of all, I hear the desert music that’s on Stardust Records’ release of the Mills Brothers’ The Best of the War Years — a collection of the eight 78 rpm "V-disc" sides that the vocal quartet recorded as entertainment for troops stationed abroad during World War II.
These four black men from Ohio have long been my white Jewish grandfather’s favorite group. The Mills Brothers’ "Lazy River" and "Till Then" were two of his favorites, and even though he knew every word by heart, he would never actually sing along with them while he drove in his car, just intone them in gentle, elegant scats as cool and lulling as his terrycloth jumpsuits, his slip-on leather loafers, and the kinky gray hair that he would comb back with fluid strokes of both hands — one following the other like waves.
My grandfather never raised his voice or swore, and I always imagined that it was the calm of the Mills Brothers that he liked, their uninvasive tones, their suave perfection, their class. Even over the hiss and crackle of those V-discs, their voices come through as classy and warm, and they sound especially so in my grandfather’s Lincoln. He would play them on old warped cassettes, or he’d tune them in on the radio — KWXY, his favorite station, which plays what it calls "beautiful music" and what he recently called, after taking off his oxygen mask in the hospital bed where he’s been all month, "olden but golden." KWXY plays the Mills Brothers next to the Four Aces and Guy Mitchell and between ads for hair-loss remedies and country-club memberships.
There is something protective and secure — something well beyond simply comforting — about this music (Williams called desert music "a protecting music"). Even when I was driving alone in the Lincoln after leaving my grandfather in the hospital, the soft music made the rolled-up windows seem bulletproof.
Van Dyke once characterized the desert as a place where "everything within in its borders seems fighting to maintain itself against destroying forces." The desert music of my grandparents now reflects that fight: the incessant anxious hum of my grandmother as she talks to herself, the exhaling hiss of my grandfather’s dialysis machine. The Mills Brothers are still there, and I can still hear my sandals crunch down on rocks, but the mix has gotten complicated: easy listening that’s become difficult, a desert music fighting against a silence that I still hope will never come.
