DB's Song of the Day (day 365): "ROCK 'N' ROLL GHOST" (1989) The Replacements

And so “the year of posting daily” comes to an end. When I learned that Paul Westerberg, lead singer/songwriter formerly of The Replacements, was born on this day, I experienced what Jay Farrar might call “a foregone situation.” I don’t see how I could pass up today’s song as the last song of the year.

Not that there weren’t others in the running. I considered “Here Comes a Regular” but it’s too late in the year for that. And more rocking numbers like “Never Mind” (title of a Replacements’ song before it was the title of a Nirvana album) would not have been out of place. Then there’s solo Westerberg, and songs like “It’s a Wonderful Lie,” “Love Untold,” “Hide N Seekin,” “Things,” are all favorites. Or what about “Attitude,” from the last Replacements LP?

But, given the theme of ghosts that I’ve touched on more than a few times, and considering “the end of it all” vibe I’m going for here, “Rock’n’Roll Ghost” seems the most appropriate. It appears second-to-last on the second-to-last Replacements LP, Don’t Tell a Soul, the first album with Bob Dunlap taking over for the ousted Bob Stinson. For many, the loss of Stinson changed the tenor of The Replacements, as Westerberg led the band toward a more “commercial” sound with less of their former abrasive punk style. Sure, but that’s the way things were going by the late Eighties in any case. My view, not being that big a fan of the more shambolic 'Mats, was simply that Westerberg’s songwriting was improving and to make that apparent required a bit more commitment to the material. The early 'Mats stuff was cheeky and sloppy and fun, but, y’know, all things must pass.

And that’s what this song is about. It’s a good tune to comment on all that because one suspects that it’s Westerberg acknowledging that he is, himself, a “rock’n’roll ghost”—a mere shade of the ballsy rocker he once was, about to turn 30 the year this album was released: “I was much too young / Much too cool for words / Look at me now.” That’s not an old man’s comment, that’s an older young man’s comment. That’s full of the regret that comes from realizing that—to the cool dude one once was—one’s current self would not past muster. “I look into the mirror and I see / A rock’n’roll ghost.”

As someone who turned 30 the year today's song was released, I found the song commenting on something I was realizing, as I trundled off to grad school. My days when rock was the brightest beacon in the firmament were coming to an end. In fact, they’d already ended, mostly, and bands such as The Replacements were helpful in keeping some of that engagement alive even while, as here, lamenting its passing.

Well you know / And you go / When I’m alone I have no cause / To think about the shit we used to know / Made of snow

That opening sounds starkly beautiful. And, what’s more, Westerberg isn’t afraid to make it feel beautiful, to pay witness to that “wan and heartless mood” we know so well. We might think, if we like, of the opposition of “shit” and “snow,” where the one is the stuff that, as they say, sticks, and the other is the stuff that melts. We used to know lots of things, lots of shit. But there’s no cause, no longer with you, to think about that.

But without that shared material, there’s not much worth living for, apparently. Well you said “he’s better off dead.” Possibly. At least, there’s a feeling of getting a glimpse of what’s called “Death-in-Life,” that state bereft of inspiration and imaginative sallies and the full tilt not giving a fuck of the true blue rocker. Limboland.

There’s no one here to raise a toast / Take me by the hand, man, raise a toast / A rock’n’roll ghost / To a rock’n’roll ghost. Yup, one ghost toasting another. It’s perhaps too chastened a song for the night when people like to party as one year becomes another, but, however good or bad 2014 was or 2015 will be, the song speaks, as the last Song of the Day, for a quiet, reflective tribute to the ghosts of rock’n’roll that continue to haunt so many of us. “We don’t know until we’re gone,” Westerberg says, and maybe he’s right. Maybe knowing what we did while we were here is for someone to decide after we’re gone. Fine. Finis.

Happy New Year! And, in the words of my favorite line by one of my favorite ghosts: “Look to see me no more.”

DB's Song of the Day (day 358): "FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK" (1987) The Pogues

It’s Christmas eve, and, besides being Christmas, tomorrow is the birthday of Shane MacGowan, famed lead singer of The Pogues and co-author with Jem Finer, The Pogues’ banjo player, of today’s song (and the video isn't half bad either). “Fairytale of New York,” its title taken from a novel by Irish author J. P. Donleavy, was originally released in 1987 and has become one of the most popular Christmas songs of our time, particularly in the UK. Perhaps it simply captures some essential sentimentality associated with the holiday, and does so in a way that is equal parts nostalgic and brash.

The song first came to my notice on the soundtrack of Julian Schnabel’s film Basquiat (1996), but only the segment of MacGowan singing solo was used, the part that might more fittingly be called “Christmas Eve in the Drunk Tank.” That segment is full of a down-and-out bravado that, in MacGowan’s wavering tenor, proclaims a drunkard’s hopes for a new year, even as an elder inmate of the drunk tank avers he “won’t see another” Christmas eve, and sings “The Rare Owld Mountain Dew.”

The idea of “the last one” is picked up in the dueling duet between MacGowan and Kristy MacColl as lovers who have hit hard times in New York rather than the rise in fortunes they’d hoped for. “They’ve got cars / Big as bars,” was the fond dream. She reminds him, “you promised me / Broadway was waiting for me.” The song also recalls a bygone New York when “Sinatra was swinging” and “the boys of the NYPD choir / Were singing ‘Galway Bay,’” a time when New York’s Finest were predominantly Irish.

That sense of both a welcome sense of home and a disheartening sense of estrangement rides through the song, and finds its pithiest expression in the name-calling between our sparring couple: “You’re a bum / You’re a punk” she says; “You’re an old slut on junk” he replies, and she really ups the invective with “You scum bag / You maggot / You cheap, lousy faggot / Happy Christmas your arse / I pray God it’s our last.” And here the instrumentation — the tin whistle especially — helps to create an upbeat feel even in the midst of the mud-slinging. It may be the end of it, but the NYPD singing, and the bells ringing out for Christmas Day come into present tense and that little jolt makes us take stock, seasonally speaking.

In fact, that verbal jousting becomes part of what makes the song better than the usual Christmas song. Since Christmas comes at the end of the year, and returns each year, any long-term relationship lives through many Christmases and finds its “state of the union” at times as the big clock rolls around again. Tied-up with all that, of course, are the prospective dreams and hopes—many of which are dashed as such things go. And that’s the element of the song that MacGowan’s wonderfully romantic vocal keeps alive—“I could have been someone,” “Well, so could anyone,” she replies, and accuses him of taking her dreams “when I first found you.” “I kept them with me, babe / I put them with my own / Can’t make it all alone / I’ve built my dreams around you.” It’s a touch pathetic, but for that very reason feels heartfelt and brave. Whereas she’s just doing the usual whining—like not getting what you wanted in your stocking—that spoils many a Christmas.

Certainly, MacGowan’s part could all just be a compensatory dream in a drunk tank, but it feels real. And that’s about all you can hope for, for Christmas: a bearable reality. Getting dumped on by one’s best thing is par for the course, all-too-often, and The Pogues’ song puts it out there. But it also gives us a wish for the season that sounds hopeful and hard-bitten, chastened and cheering:

Got on a lucky one / Came in eighteen to one / I’ve got a feeling / This year’s for me and you / So happy Christmas / I love you, baby / I can see a better time / When all our dreams come true

Amen, I’ll drink to that.

DB's Song of the Day (day 356): "REDEMPTION SONG" (1980) Bob Marley

This day—the day after solstice—in 2002 we lost the mighty Joe Strummer, former frontman for The Clash. Today’s song, by Bob Marley, is a song that Strummer recorded with his band of the early 21st century, The Mescaleros. He also recorded it with Johnny Cash, not long before the death of both (Cash died in September of 2003). The duet appears on Unearthed, a collection released posthumously in November 2003.

Marley’s version, solo on acoustic, was released on his final album Uprising; Marley died in 1981.

All of which is a way of saying that the song has a definite “late in life” feel to it, if only by association. In the case of Marley, who was already very sick by the time the album was released, it feels like a final affirmative statement, a song about dedication to a cause and about belief in the triumph of the spirit. In all the versions I mentioned, the proximity to death of the singers makes of the song a kind of last testament, “We forward in this generation / Triumphantly.”

Whether or not you see evidence of such triumph, the point of such a song is to attest to the sense of progress, to provide a rallying cry. Marley begins by describing slavery and lets the forward movement from those dark days speak for a sense of eventual emancipation. But, like Christ who was always quick to point out that the fulfillment of his talk about the “kingdom of heaven” wasn’t likely to take place in this world, nor as a political nor material advantage, Marley—borrowing from Marcus Garvey—makes a statement about the kind of incentive for change he has in mind: “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery / None but ourselves can free our minds.”

The idea recalls to me both John Lennon saying “you better free your mind instead” and Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus laughing “to rid himself of his mind’s bondage.” “Mental slavery,” we could say, is a habit of mind, a way of being chained, by your own lack of knowledge or imagination, to burdensome ways of thinking, to ignorance, to unjust, uncharitable, unenlightened views. The notion of the free play of the mind, of the mind as unshackled by its own materiality, is one of the mainstays of philosophy and of some religions. (Which recalls to me my boy Rimbaud: Par l’esprit on va à Dieu! Déchirante infortune! [Through the mind we go to God! A wrenching misfortune!])

But, whether or not our minds can lift us to God and whether or not that in itself is a form of mental slavery, I’ll leave aside at the moment. Well, maybe not. Since Marley does invoke some of that sense of fulfillment when he sings: “How long shall they kill our prophets / While we stand aside and look / Some say it’s just a part of it / We’ve got to fulfill the Book.”  The book here is the Bible or at least a prophetic tract. The idea being that the killing of prophets is something that happens regularly in “the Book” and so it’s almost pointless to inveigh against it as it seems to be a fulfillment of God’s plan, which “the Book” is taken to be the text of.

That kind of thinking for me, frankly, smacks of mental slavery. And what I like about a song like Marley’s, as can be found in some of the lyric utterances of Dylan or Lennon and others, is that it can support various interpretations. The intention of the song, as stated in its recurring refrain, is to invite the singing of “songs of freedom,” while the line “’Cause all I ever have / Redemption songs” makes a comparison between songs of freedom and redemption songs. They may be one and the same, or it may be that the call for freedom and the call for redemption are not always the same call.

In other words, “what profit a man if he gain the whole world but lose his soul”? If “freedom” means you can do as you please and can ignore what must be done and can retain your vain pursuit of nothing but your individual happiness, then better to have “redemption”—a calling beyond “success in life” to, perhaps, action to a purpose or even simply to prayer or to utterance—as for instance songs—that can speak to the spirit and offer it a guide, a signpost, a banner even.

That, to many, is what Marley’s song is. A redemption song because its message is about the need for redemption, maybe even the promise of redemption. The point, within the tradition of the Spiritual or hymn, is simply to attest to that sense of need and promise, for without some sense of redemption the world is a much less valuable, much more limited place. It all goes back to suffering—and the trials of life—as having a purpose beyond the merely factual or purely utilitarian. And so Marley’s great late song is, in that sense, as much as anything a cry in the wilderness.

Long, long ago, the time of year of the winter solstice in the northwestern hemisphere became the time to celebrate the birth of Christ. The confluence is meaningful, as all sun myths must take stock of the shortest day and the longest night. Reason enough to sing a song of redemption and a song of birth.

My boy Rimbaud again: “Quand irons-nous, par-delà les grèves et les monts, saluer la naissance du travail nouveau, la sagesse nouvelle, la fuite des tyrans et des démons, la fin de la superstition, adorer—les premiers!—Noël sur la terre! [When shall we go, across the shores and mountains, to hail the birth of new labor, new wisdom, the flight of tyrants and demons, the end of superstition, to adore—the very first!—Christmas on earth!] How's that for redemption?

’Cause none of them-a can-a-stop-a the time