DB's Song of the Day (day 363): "STAGE FRIGHT" (1978) The Band

Now deep in the heart of a lonely kid / Who suffered so much for what he did / They gave this poor boy his fortune and fame / And since that day he ain’t been the same / See the man with the stage fright / Just standing up there to give it all his might / He got caught in a spotlight / But when we get to the end, Lord he wants to start all over again

Thus the great opening of The Band’s great song, “Stage Fright” from their 1970 album of the same name. Back at the start of these posts this year, I featured Dylan and The Band performing “Forever Young” at the concert filmed by Martin Scorsese and released as The Last Waltz in 1978. Today, in honor of Rick Danko’s birthday, I return to that year for the last selection from the Seventies, and to that concert, where you can see Danko and The Band perform today’s song. I’ve always been moved by how frightened Danko looks when he gets to “now when he says that he’s afraid / Won’t you take him at his word? / And for the price this poor boy’s paid / Well, he gets to sing just like a bird.” The way his face is lit by the red spot within the blue spot is very effective and he seems to mean what he says. One of my favorite moments in that excellent film.

Some have speculated that Robertson wrote the song about Dylan, but I don’t see that. Dylan was never shy of performing—from the time he was a teen in his high school talent show—and even if one references his withdrawal from the stage between 1966 and 1968, it doesn’t seem that “stage fright” has much to do with it. Others have considered it a description of Robertson but I think you’d be hard-pressed to say Robertson “sings just like a bird.” The person most obviously suited is Danko, if only because he puts it across so well. Supposedly Robertson intended Richard Manuel to sing it, but Danko’s vocal better-suited the song. I’m not going to try to determine which—if either—suffered more from stage fright, but it seems to me to be Danko’s song all the way.

In any case, it’s a song about how fortune and fame and the life on stage can take their toll—which is certainly a theme of the Scorsese film. It’s also about how lonesome the life in front of crowds can be, as “fancy people go drifting by,” a theme Dylan has developed in some of his songs as well. The idea that “you can make it in your disguise” has a lot to do with the interplay of exposure and concealment that creates so much of the effect of performance. But the lines that most recommend the song here, late in my series, is “when we get to the end / Well, he wants to start all over again.” Some such attitude has affected almost all my writing, where re-reading and revising is a constant process of starting all over again. Not so here. What’s done is done we might say, and that, I would say, is the best advantage of blog-posting.

It’s touching to see The Band performing this song at the end of their heyday in 1976, recalling that Danko died in 1999 at 56, Richard Manuel died in 1986, age 42, and Levon Helm died in 2012, age 71, leaving only Robbie Robertson and Garth Hudson of The Band.

Where the moment of truth is right at hand . . .

DB's Song of the Day (day 362): "WIND UP" (1971) Jethro Tull

Yes, it’s nearly time to “wind up” the year and the series, and we’re still in that “vacation mode” that tends to stretch from Christmas eve to New Year’s Day. And last New Year’s Day was when this Song of the Day marathon began. Reaching “back down the years to the days of my youth,” as the song says, brings me to an album that scored big with me when I was at the age of 12, generally considered an impressionable age.

Jethro Tull’s Aqualung was one of the first albums I encountered that made me think about what it was trying to say. And that had something to do with the fact that, when you got to the end of the album, you heard today’s song as its final track. And, since it’s a song about taking exception with one’s teachers, it gave me pause. Coming to the end of my Catholic schooling—I graduated from it at 13—and having gone through Confirmation, the skeptic in me had about had it with “the faith,” but I wasn’t yet provoked by it. At 12, one is “confirmed” but it’s rather pro forma. Then one begins to think: what if I had just said “I’d rather not.”

Ian Anderson, lead singer and composer and flutist for Jethro Tull, composed a song that says what adolescents generally don’t say when preferring to demur about things their parents seem staunchly to believe but which they can’t say they share. Anderson doesn’t make this “non credam” a cry against parental expectations—he has other songs about that—but rather makes it about one person’s conscience when realizing that, with good conscience, going along with the flow on this religion thing is rather a blow to one’s sense of reality and values and one’s own intelligence.

He begins it with the Great Demur: When I was young and they packed me off to school / And taught me how not to play the game / I didn’t mind if they groomed me for success / Or if they said that I was just a fool / So I left there in the morning / With their God tucked underneath my arm / Their half-assed smiles and the book of rules. These are not cryptic lines and there’s no difficulty in getting his meaning. The attitude is sardonic. “I may be a fool but since those who think me a fool are themselves fools what does it matter?” Twice when singing the verse, Anderson throws in a little sound effect after “success”: the first time it’s a little chuckle, as though success is a silly idea, or at least that the idea of him succeeding in the way his teachers and parents expect is silly; the second time he gives a sound like “yuck” or a minor retching as though such success is a nauseating idea. It adds to the speaker’s comic, clowning attitude toward his younger self but even more so toward those who presumed to instruct him about what the nature of the world and God and his own best interests are.

So I asked this god a question / And by way of firm reply, he said / “I’m not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday” / So to my old headmaster and to anyone who cares / Before I’m through I’d like to say my prayers / I don’t believe you, you had the whole damn thing all wrong / He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday.”

I’ve chosen this song for the last Sunday of 2014 to honor Anderson’s point. The idea of “winding up” God on Sunday looks askance at the whole notion of ritualistic worship, of going to church because it is expected or obligatory, rather than as an act of actual devotion. I don’t know if Anderson wishes to demean organized religion in general, but he does want to make a point about how religious values are inculcated. To me, back then, his point was well-taken. What annoyed me most about church service was how distant it seemed from any sense of valuable “communion” (for lack of a better word) with whatever we conceive ultimate existence or meaning or being to be. God as anything more than a tired concept for a supernatural arbiter of behavior seemed to have fled the precincts of the church. I don't know why Anderson chose to put these ideas into a song at precisely that point in time (Tull's 4th album, released when Anderson turned 24), but it came along at the right time for me.

You can excommunicate me on the way to Sunday school / And have all the bishops harmonize these lines. It’s easy to imagine being drummed out of the congregation for professing one’s animosity toward its attenuated rituals; and it’s invigorating to say that the bishops themselves, if we’re being honest, might agree it’s all a bit of a sham.

Anderson’s singing seems tentative at times, as though he’s not sure how to put this. It’s a very theatrical performance, shading into self-parody for effect, and, it seems to me, stepping lightly around Dylan’s notion that “I became my enemy in the instant that I preached”—if one starts beating the pulpit to sound the battle charge against religion and priests and the like, one is rather tainted by the effort. It’s time for a clean break. Which I appreciated in the little sally, “to my old head-master.” It’s the classic gesture of the student finally wise enough to tell his teachers a thing or two.

The infectious hard rock part of the song finds Anderson taking exception with his own lineage in a manner that might recall Christ himself: How d’you dare to tell me / That I’m my father’s son / When that was just an accident of birth. Christ repudiated his earthly father in favor of his heavenly father. Anderson seems to repudiate genetic ties in favor of something more spiritual or at least affective. I’d rather look around me, compose a better song / ’Cause that’s the honest measure of my worth. Putting all his eggs in his creative bag, so to speak. And, assuming that his father would see devotion to songs and singing as childish, it’s a way of saying that there’s no point of comparison between himself and the old man.

All of which was fairly bracing to me at that age of leaving puberty for adolescence, making a leap into a position—about many things (as anyone who knows me would agree)—that can be summed up by: “I don’t believe you, you had the whole damn thing all wrong.”

Joyce’s Stephen professed his non serviam. Before I ever encountered that, I’d grasped the purpose of a non credam.

DB's Song of the Day (day 360): "SEPTEMBER GURLS" (1974) Big Star

Today’s song is kind of a request. Today is the birthday of my oldest friend, Tim—Happy Birthday!—and it so happens that Alex Chilton’s birthday is the 28th. Chilton who died in 2010, was the leading figure of Big Star, a short-lived but much admired band from the early Seventies. “September Gurls,” written by Chilton, states “December boys got it bad.” And that’s the line that seems to make a claim for December boys, set against those September girls that “do so much.”

What is it those December boys have “got bad”? I’m not too sure. I suppose it’s a certain infatuation with “September girls.” When Tim laid this song on me on a tape back in the mid-Eighties (none of us knew Big Star until bands like R.E.M. and The Feelies and the dBs and The Replacements started touting them), September girls were easy to imagine. Being in college and seeing troupes of girls returning to school each fall accords well with the song’s feel. Or living near or working at a college. The spelling of “girls” as “gurls” reminds one of “those lovely seaside girls / your head it simply swurls” from “Seaside Girls,” a song that drifts through the day in Joyce’s Ulysses. September gurls make heads swurl as well.

How can I deny what’s inside / Even though I’ll keep away / Maybe we’ll love all our days / December boys got it bad

That’s the part that sticks with me. The denial of a feeling, and keeping away from a temptation that might actually be a fulfillment. The third line seems to open the door for hope or maybe it’s suggesting a lifetime of unrequited love, which is what the December boy has got, bad. Fair enough, not so much a downer or bummer as a statement of affective dysfunction. Loving, as in lying, against time. Fun!

And Chilton, whose band Big Star became one of those lodestars in the Eighties, a blast from a past that, to my ears, becomes more acute as time goes on, is a melancholy master, much of the time. In fact, my song of tribute was likely to have been “Nighttime” (“I hate it here, get me out of here”) or the aforementioned “Kangaroo” or maybe the song that summed up a certain bluesy feeling some of us might recognize as parental, “Blue Moon.” There are even darker songs, and there are some, particularly on the first album, that are very jangly and Byrds-meets-Kinks like. A nice vibe of Seventies spirit, not too angsty. But where the “mellow” edges are starting to fray, as they tended to do, all too often.

There’s always the spike of the bridge here to give us a lift: “Oooh when she makes love to me” and then a nice little musical ellipsis. So maybe things aren’t so bad for our December boy, as he sounds like a passively patient lad getting some presents, those favors every good boy deserves.

I loved you, well, never mind / I’ve been crying all the time

The “never mind” sets the tone. As in: one could say a lot more about that and the crying over what was or could’ve been, but that state of having it bad is just one of those things you learn to live with, pilgrim.

It’s a fitting song, here on the day after Christmas, because that’s when you really know for sure the year is going, going, gone. Did you not get what you wished for? Better luck next year. And it’s got that Chilton jangle that recalls to me, often, that “morning after” state wherein one feels a bit bruised by the liberties one took with one’s psyche the night before yet still opens wondering eyes upon a strong day newly dawned. It seems to me a song at peace with its yearning. At a certain point all we can do is enjoy the pageant as it passes. September girls do so much.