“What’s the matter with him?” read the very enigmatic text-message from my brother, in response to no text message I’d sent him. I don’t text much. I don’t have anything against texting; I even like to do it; but there’s almost never been a time that I felt I had to whip out a text message to somebody instead of just calling and talking to them.

Still, this needed an answer. But what? I didn’t have the faintest idea what he meant. In that kind of situation, I usually go with full-fledged naiveté. “What’s the matter with who?” I texted back.

“He’s all right,” came the answer.

That didn’t help. “He can’t be,” I answered, hoping to baffle him as much as he was baffling me.

“(the next line’s the giveaway)” Huh?

When I read the last message, “The Lord won’t mind,” a stuck gear in my head finally sprung loose and I began to hear Slippery People by The Talking Heads playing on my mental iPod:

What’s the matter with him? (He’s all right!)
How do you know? (The Lord won’t mind.)
Don’t know no games (He’s all right!)
Love from the bottom to the top

Only several of the words were missing from my memory so all I could text back was, “something bottom to the top,” to which he answered, “close enough.”

Feeling guilty about ruining his game for him, I texted the first lines of the song that was playing on the radio: “Hey, kids, shake it loose together.”

“Got nothing,” he shot back, so I added, “The spotlight’s hitting something that’s been known to change the weather,” but he still couldn’t get the hook. Unfortunately, the song was Elton John’s Benny and the Jets, and I say unfortunately only because nobody knows the words to that. I didn’t have the faintest idea what the words to it were until one day when I popped the CD into my player, googled the title and sat in front of the computer screen trying to match the words to the sounds coming out of the speaker. It sounded right, but it makes no sense at all:

Hey, kids, shake it loose together,
The spotlight’s hitting something that’s been known to change the weather.
We’ll kill the fatted calf tonight, so stick around.
You’re going to hear electric music, solid walls of sound.

“I didn’t know that song had words,” my brother texted back, when I finally gave it away with a line from the chorus, ”She’s got electric boots, a mohair suit…”

“I doubt that even Elton John knew the words,” I shot back sincerely. Really, I think Elton was just humming while moving his lips.