BOSTON. Miles Fleming is a jazz guitarist who keeps body and soul together by a collection of jobs that would give a Department of Labor economist a headache. “I teach one class a semester, give private lessons, play weddings, clubs when I can get a group together, and busk on the streets on those nights when I don’t have a gig,” he says before stopping to catch his breath. “Oh, did I mention” he begins before this reporter cuts him off due to word limits imposed by both print and on-line publications.
“There’s Mass Eye & Ear.” “What?”
But Fleming is feeling under the weather today, and may not be able to make a four o’clock recording session at which he is scheduled to add a screeching solo to a commercial for a regional car dealer. “I’ve got a really bad earworm,” he says, hitting the side of his head with the heel of his hand in the hope of shaking it loose. “I can’t concentrate.”
“I can’t hear you.”
The “earworm” of which Fleming speaks is John Mayer’s “Waiting for the World to Change,” which the jazzman says–not without a tinge of jealousy–embodies everything wrong with pop music. “It’s a white ripoff of a black song, Curtis Mayfield’s ‘People Get Ready,’” he fairly spits out. “It’s got some twerpy instrument playing on the intro–is that a glockenspiel?” If those alleged musical defects aren’t enough, Fleming adds, “the message of the song sucks. ‘Me and my friends could change the world, but we’re too freaking lazy so we’ll wait for it to change.’”
Unfortunately, the American medical profession places “earworms”–annoying melodies that can’t be forgotten and won’t go away–low on the scale of afflictions that scarce medical resources should be devoted to. “We have aging rockers who can’t hear a thing at age forty,” says Dr. Emil Nostrand of the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Hospital. “When you ask them if they belong to a HMO, they say ‘Yeah, I’d like to do a little blow.’”
“I need a Joni Mitchell greatest hits CD–STAT!”
With long waiting lists at “Mass Eye and Ear” and similar healthcare providers, it took a religious order–the Sisters of St. Tinnitus–to step into the breach with the founding of a specialty hospital–Our Lady of Perpetual Ear Noise–to give aid and comfort to earworm sufferers. “What the sisters do, it’s really a godsend,” says Fleming’s mother, Ruth Ellen Fleming. “I don’t how they can devote themselves to such hopeless causes, ministering to men who spent their youth with ears up next to Marshall speakers that you could hear a mile away.”
Marshall amp stack: “Haven’t you got something a little bigger?”
An examination of Fleming’s ears with an otoscope–a tool with a light, a magnifying lense and a funnel-shaped viewing piece–reveals that the “worm” isn’t deeply embedded, and with the injection of an over-the-counter ear cleanser and new musical content he is soon sitting upright while he recovers his balance from the procedure, which took under five minutes. What, this reporter asks Sister Mary Clifford Brown, did she choose to replace the multi-platinum hit that bedeviled the patient before?
“Parisian Thoroughfare.”