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 364): "WING" (1996) Patti Smith

Today’s birthday girl, Patti Smith, got into my blood in the summer of 1978 after Easter was released. And in 1979 came Wave. Those two albums capped off the streak that began with Horses (1975) and Radio Ethiopia (1976). That’s classic period Patti. Songs from those four albums graced the tape I made of songs alternating between Patti and The Doors.

I thought initially I’d take a song from back then, something like the sensual bacchanalia that is “Break It Up,” from Horses, or the randy, mercurial seduction of “Ain’t it Strange” from her second album. Or even the prayerful plea of “Privilege (Set Me Free),” on her third, or a song that seemed tailored for me and MEM in 1979: “Dancing Barefoot.” All those songs carry a charge I could attest to, for sure.

But then I thought of a song Kajsa gave me by Patti Smith from 1996’s Gone Again. It was the return of Patti Smith, as I hadn’t heard her since those high and free late Seventies days. She had lost her husband, lost her first love Robert Mapplethorpe, her brother, and her early bandmate Richard Sohl. And hearing her haggard voice again was moving. In fact, the vocal that brought me to tears was her special guest appearance on R.E.M.’s “E-Bow the Letter” from New Adventures in Hi Fi that same year. It took me by surprise to be hearing her, and to know, as Gloucester says of Lear, “the trick of that voice” was quietly affecting. In 1996, my family suffered my father’s death and there were traumatic deaths back in 1979 too. It seems, somehow, that Patti Smith, with her tragic tones tempered by strength, fits into that state where you’re getting beyond the known world. What comes after? Who knows? But Patti Smith is one of the few rockers who seems to really want to know.

There’s always been this love-hate relationship with the notion of revealed godhead in her songs, as though, on the one hand, the poet wants to be a god unto herself, and, on the other, feels the need to worship something beyond the human. At times, her overstated yearning can become a bit much. In “Privilege” I don’t mind it because adding Psalm 23 to the song just seems like something worth doing, if you’re going to be calling upon God to “give me something, give me reason to live.”

Me, I tend to be somewhat less hieratic in my living, though not always in my writing, so maybe that’s why I feel able to claim kin often enough with Ms. Patti. And today’s song is her in an attenuated mood. This isn’t one to rock out on and do the dirty deed, nor one to beseech your Maker to give you some kind of soul boost, it’s a song of mourning, a song of coping, a song of coming through. And I like it as a wish for the end of the season, end of the year. It’s not a “wish you were here” so much as a “wish you could transcend” sentiment. “And if there’s one thing / Could do for you / You’d be a wing / In heaven blue.”

That could be said to those she’s lost; it could be said to the many ghosts I’ve cited—even the ghosts of former selves—in these many posts; and it builds on her statement that she “was a wing / In heaven blue” herself and “soared over oceans” and “I was free.” The imagery reaches back to the Song of day 357, Pearl Jam’s “Given to Fly,” another song about flying and freedom and making an effort on behalf of a spiritual connection. Smith is less heroic in her appeal here, though, and that in itself appeals; she identifies herself, in lines delivered in a characteristic nearly guttural drawl, “I was a pawn / Didn’t have a move / Didn’t have nowhere / That I could go / But I was free / I needed nobody / It was beautiful.”

That sense of getting beyond one’s debts to and need for others is part of the big finish of death, one imagines. When you can just sail like a wing into the blue. Similarly, there is a vision—seen in the eye of the dead—of “no future at all.” An uncanny, bodiless freedom, a freedom from being and from all the wanting and needing and trying and striving and shame and sorrow and joy and love that goes with the body. Not even a bird, mind you, just a wing. Just flight, and no way to land.

A wish for all our ghosts.

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 . . .