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 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.