I like Wagner's music better than any other music. It is so loud one can talk the whole time without people hearing what one says.This is a great advantage. -Oscar Wilde
In San Diego recently I was invited to share a friend's birthday at Jimmy's Famous American Tavern.
It was a good time, save for one truly annoying and maddening reason:
The music was so loud and the acoustics so bad that upon leaving I determined I had made my first and last visit to Jimmy's - "famous" or not.
Why coffee shops, bars, cafes and restaurants feel the need to play music at all, much less at decibels violating EPA standards exceeds my comprehension. Does anyone go to these places to listen to music? And if they go is their mental state so arrested they have confused drinking and eating while shouting across bar stools the measure of a good time?
Have you known anyone to walk away from such a place and say, "Hey dude, the music was awesome. I can't wait to go back."
This is not solely a Jimmy's Famous American Tavern issue, because you encounter it almost everywhere you go. (How bad is it? This bad. They play background music at Del Taco. Try to imagine chomping down on a 67-cent taco with the William Tell Overture in the background.)
One of my favorite places in downtown San Diego was Cafe Chloe. It has a Boston, San Francisco feel to it. I've gone there frequently for breakfast, and occasionally for lunch or dinner, and often with friends. But I've grown weary of requesting the music be turned down, even when I'm alone it's a distraction. I like reading the New York Times in solitude (and one should read the Times in solitude).
The owners of Chloe's are two fashionable and impressive women, very. The space they have created is so smart and so unlike San Diego it beggars the mind they bought Madison Avenue's myth that background music causes people to eat and drink more.
If they believe the success of their upscale café is somehow associated with their background music, then I'm here to say, "No, it's not." And, if the music stopped tomorrow, they would suffer neither patron loss nor revenue - because it's not about the music.
I go to restaurants for conversation, first, and the quality of the food, second. I don't go for music - ever. If I want music I'll go to the Summer Pops or Humphrey's in San Diego or listen to Chopin or Mozart or the Notre Dame Fight Song on my I-Pod (actually that's a lie. I don't have an I-Pod, but if I did I would).
Along the way, in my emerging campaign to rid coffee shops, cafes, and restaurants of the moronic combination of music and dining, I have scored a few victories, very few.
Recently, a Boston friend of mine called from Beverly Hills, where he was visiting, to say he wanted to come to San Diego and have dinner. I made a reservation for five of us at a truly splendid restaurant, the Farm House.
We hadn't been seated very long before I felt the "background" music was competing with our conversation. I gently asked if it could be turned down? "Would it be better," the hostess asked in return, "if I turned it off?" Wow, that hadn't happened before. I was impressed, and when we left I thanked her for her courtesy (I've been back).
But my biggest victory grew out of a gathering one evening at King's Fish House Restaurant in Mission Valley.
Tony Lewis, the great Pulitzer Prize winning columnist for the New York Times, was in town to speak at a City Club/San Diego Public Library Great American Writers Series event. As normally happens on these occasions I invited key City Club members to join Mr. Lewis for dinner. Trust me when I say they came because they wanted to meet Tony Lewis and to hear what he had to say.
But the background music made it difficult to hear what our learned guest was saying. I politely asked the manager if the music could be turned down? He said that wasn't possible; that it was an automatic system and he had no control over it.
Well, I didn't believe him.
So the next day I called King's corporate offices in Newport Beach and asked to speak to the company's CEO. When he came on the line I explained why I was calling. When I finished he told me the manager was wrong, that he could have, and should have, turned down the music. He then told me any time I was at King's and requested the music be either softened or turned off, that would happen - and it has (score one for the CEO).
Look, you may think this quite silly. You're entitled to think music and conversation go together, like the Rolling Stones and Oliver Wendell Homes. You would be quite wrong in thinking that, which probably means you won't enlist you in my campaign to ban music from coffee shops, cafes, and restaurants. We banned smoking. Why not music?
But know this:
I shall soldier on with or without you. Confident the cause I champion, the restoration of conversation to its proper place of preeminence at the dinner table, absent unnecessary and unwanted intrusions, especially music that assaults the hearing and dulls the senses, is a just and honorable cause, for which the future state of our democracy may well hang.
And, Oscar Wilde be damned.