The kids who wriggled and spun around American Bandstand’s TV dance floor every weekday afternoon at 4pm circa 1957 weren’t necessarily Philadelphia’s most sophisticated or articulate, but they knew what they liked in a pop song. And when host Dick Clark asked for their take on the week’s new 45 rpm releases, they had a way of getting right to the point. “It’s got a beat . . . and you can dance to it” was the reply I heard hundreds, maybe thousands, of times during the years I was addicted to the show.
I have to admit, it made a lasting impression on me. How else to explain why this particular, desultory adolescent remark still comes to mind when I’m confronted with a certain kind of thing? What kind of thing? That thing with a beat.
And what is a beat? A kind of pulse – the unmistakable sign of life as a going concern, as open for business, as ready for what’s next. A beat is the thing that keeps going no matter what else is happening. It’s the thing you feel perfectly safe looking away from because you’re sure it will still be there when you come back. A beat goes on. Doesn’t drop a stitch. Marks time. Marches on. If you’re in a relationship with a beat, well, lucky you.
A beat is both animate and animating. In a Boston Globe wine column, I once recounted the experience of tasting a 1906 Dow’s Port this way: “Wan in color and shaky on its feet, but after a hundred years one could still discern a tiny beating heart of fruit.” How I admired it!
Mid-century Philadelphia teens liked a song with a beat because they could dance to it. I like wine with a beat because I can eat to it, socialize to it, refresh to it, find inspiration in it to keep my own beat beating.
I’m often less than excited by spendy wines with pretentions to seriousness, in part because they so often appear to have traded whatever beat they might have had for a creamy, dreamy string section. All Mantovani; no Chubby Checker. Bad deal.
If the wine corner can be said to have an aesthetic, I’d like to think it has something to do with all this. Not enough of a throbbing presence to keep the neighbors up at night or trouble their dreams — but enough to remind them that we’re here.
Why exactly do I find myself so attached to wines with a pulse? It could be all those youthful afternoons spent with Dick Clark, or just the love of a walking bass line. Beats me.