Steamed

When I recently read the obituary of songwriter Paul Leka, it was accurate, in a sense, to say that I felt pretty steamed.

What, that name doesn’t ring a bell? It wouldn’t have for me, either, except that the full New York Times headline read “Paul Leka, a Songwriter of ‘Na Na Hey Hey,’ Dies at 68.”

If that song title isn’t familiar to you, chances are you haven’t been inside a sports stadium in a very long time.

The full name of the tune is “Na Na Hey Hey (Kiss Him Goodbye).” It was a number-one hit on the pop charts in 1969 despite—or probably because of—its repetitious banality. Fully half of its four-minute running time consists solely of the title words being chanted over and over, to an equally droning musical accompaniment. It’s sort of like the even-longer “na-na-na-na” ending of “Hey Jude,” except without those great Paul McCartney screams, the imprimatur of The Beatles, or—most importantly—the memorable lyrics preceding it. Whereas “Hey Jude” famously and inspirationally urges John Lennon’s then-young son Julian, and by extension all of us, to “take a sad song and make it better," “Na Na Hey Hey” in its initial two minutes is just a guy’s plea for the girl he likes to dump her boyfriend.

“Na Na Hey Hey” is a stupid song, but one that nevertheless appealed to my musical sensibilities when I was 11 years old. Not because of its boy-girl dynamics, as I wouldn’t yet date for another, oh, never mind how many years, but thanks to that oddly mesmerizing if seemingly endless chorus. I bought the single and pretty much wore it out over the course of the next few months.

But then I was done with it. And so was the rest of the world, until 1977, when—according to Leka’s obit—the organist for the Chicago White Sox employed the chorus as a taunt whenever the opposing team’s players struck out or when one of its pitchers was removed. Crowds who previously might have shouted “Sit down!” or “Sox rule!” at the departing opponent found it infinitely more satisfying to elongate their derision by singing “Na na na na/Na na na na/Hey hey hey/Goodbye!”

Somehow, some way, the chant went viral, in an age long before the Internet and social-networking tools existed to facilitate such contagion. As a result, over the course of the past three decades the ending chant of “Na Na Hey Hey” has become a staple at athletic venues around the world—because taunting the opposition knows no specific sport or nationality.

So, while presumably few people outside of his own family and a smattering of fellow songwriters and musicians of a certain age recognized Paul Leka’s name when it recently joined all the others on St Peter’s eternal registry, the song title “Na Na Hey Hey” resonated with many readers. As had been the case with me. But here’s the thing. I’m dead certain (no pun intended) that very few people reading Leka’s obit—even individuals like me who once had owned the 45 of “Na Na Hey Hey”—knew that the recording artist to which the single was credited was a group called Steam.

See, this is the kind of thing I tend to remember, while so many things that it would be infinitely more useful to recall—names of professional contacts, my online passwords, whether a dear friend is recovering from cancer or lost a kidney or what—are sacrificed. I no sooner had seen the headline associating the late Paul Leka with “Na Na Hey Hey” than I thought, “Ah, yes, the song that became a stadium phenomenon, performed by that one-hit wonder, Steam." But then, no more than a few seconds later, I asked myself, “Why the hell do I remember that?”

I mean, sure, I owned the single. But the name of the band was written in tiny type on the label, and it isn’t as if I’ve set eyes on that name in probably 40 years. It also isn’t as if I’d periodically been reminded, over the decades, that Steam was “the band behind the monster hit ‘Na Na Hey Hey’" when the combo swung through town for a widely promoted gig at the state fair or a nightclub devoted to revival acts. In fact, what I learned in Leka’s obituary was that there wasn’t, and never had been, a real band named Steam. Leka and his friend Gary DeCarlo, who co-wrote “Na Na Hey Hey,” recorded the song together and made up the name Steam on the spot, perhaps because their musical partnership was as ephemeral as the stuff arising from a still-hot cup of coffee. There would be no Steam follow-up hits, tours or merchandise. Steam would not live on at all, except as one more pebble of pointless trivia taking up precious space in the rock pile of my brain.

It’s confounding. It’s annoying. I take no pleasure in the motley conglomeration of discrete, rhyme-or-reason-less facts and figures that seems to add up to a disproportionate percentage of my collective memory.

It isn’t even as if I’m a kind of idiot savant who may forget the date of a key interview or the name of a close friend’s son, but who at least could kick ass in a sports trivia contest by rattling off the names of every player on the roster of the “Murderers Row” 1927 Yankees, or could impress film buffs by recalling who won all the major Oscars in 1987 or 2003. When I wrote the word “discrete” just now, I meant it. Even my accumulation of arguably or patently pointless knowledge is completely scattershot. I remember things like Steam, and the fact that President James Garfield was assassinated in 1881, and the pairing of character actors Herb Edelman and Bob “Gilligan” Denver in a short-lived sitcom called The Good Guys in the late 1960s. (I also remember that the show’s bouncy theme song began “We’re the good guys, who never let a friend down/Friends forever, ask anyone in this town.”)

But, can I even recite in order the names of all the American presidents of the last half of the 19th century, for whatever that may be worth? Is my familiarity with TV theme songs anywhere near encyclopedic enough to get me into the final rounds of some obscure competition on the Game Show Network?

No, and no.

Much has been written, I realize, about the neuroscience of how and why the human brain remembers what it does, forgets what it forgets, and might go about retrieving what it can retrieve. As much as I’d like to be glib and tell you I just keep forgetting to check out that array of potentially insightful resources, the fact is, last year I bought myself one of those works.

It’s called Moonwalking with Einstein, is subtitled “The Art and Science of Remembering Anything,” and was a bestseller in 2010 for author Joshua Foer. You might have seen him on talk shows, discussing how a year of “memory training” transformed him from being a guy of average retention to winner of the US Memory Championship. I’m looking at the book flap right now, and it says that Foer “draws on cutting-edge research, a surprising cultural history of memory, and venerable tricks of the mentalist’s trade to transform our understanding of human remembering.” If that sounds potentially dry, the back cover features a glowing endorsement by one of my favorite nonfiction writers, the hilariously accessible science author Mary Roach.

Of course, I have not, to date, read Moonwalking with Einstein. In fact, I had to fish it out of a box in our basement when my chagrin over this Steam business brought it to my mind. I have no trouble, however, remembering why I bought it and then didn’t read it. Per the book flap, “Foer’s experience shows that the memory championships are less a test of memory than of perseverance and creativity.” It was the “perseverance” thing that had pushed the book to the back of my reading list. I’d ultimately decided that, while I’d love to have a better memory and all that, I didn’t much want to work at it. I might rather read books that didn’t give me homework assignments.

In the wake of this Steam Incident, however, I’ve changed my mind about reading Moonwalking with Einstein. I figure maybe I can at least pick up a few tips—minimally effortful ways to train my unruly and un-sharp mind just a little better, with the effect of maybe remembering a few more substantive things than I might otherwise retain. And perhaps not even at the expense of my Steams and other pieces of useless minutiae, because author and National Public Radio commentator Stephan Fatsis writes in his back-jacket endorsement that “Joshua Foer proves what few of us are willing to get our heads around: there’s more room in our brains than we ever imagined.”

What Fatsis means, I gather, is not that our brains are partially empty (although I sometimes feel the jury’s out in my case), but that there’s always space for more to be retained. I’ve long despaired over my poor hold on new information, so the possibility of losing less of it intrigues me greatly. On the other hand, though, my reading retention is abysmal, which poses a huge catch-22 in trying to draw lasting lessons from Foer’s research and narrative.

What I’ve decided is, Moonwalking with Einstein is going to be the next book I’ll read. Maybe it’ll hook me and convince me to make a real effort to improve my memory. But then, I imagine it’s the kind of thing where even minimal exercise is better than none at all, and presumably I can coax the self-discipline to do the equivalent of a few sit-ups or toe-touchers. At worst, the book stands to be a painless read. I mean, my girl Mary Roach—author of the fantastic Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers—touts Foer’s book as filled with “humanity, humor and originality.” How much of a slog can it be?

So, I’ll start Moonwalking with Einstein soon. I mean it. I owe this to myself and to all the people in my life for whom my lapses of memory have adverse consequences, be they small or substantial. And frankly, I don’t want to feel quite so annoyed the next time, in a single 24-hour period, I miss an office meeting whose date I forgot and find myself singing the entire "Ballad of Jed Clampett"—including the part that accompanied The Beverly Hillbillies’ closing credits.