Music – Page 9 – HystericallyBored

2012-02-232022-05-08

Solitary Man

The movie “Solitary Man” (Starring Michael Douglas, 2009) uses the Neil Diamond song, “Solitary Man” as it’s theme. That makes no sense.

“Solitary Man”– just about the only song by Neil Diamond that I like– is about a man who decides that he will just live alone rather than engage with women who, it seems to him, are likely to cheat on him, and play “games” behind his back. He’s looking for a sincere, faithful woman, who won’t see love as a “part-time” thing.

In the movie, Michael Douglas plays Ben Kalmen, a man whose career as a car dealer is crashing, and who is a serial womanizer. He just can’t resist. He’s already blown one marriage and has just seduced a woman in order to get her father to invest in a new car dealership. When he sleeps with her daughter, a chain of events brings him to near ruin.

Ben’s problem is not women who play around behind his back. And he’s not a solitary man– he doesn’t nearly have the gravitas for it.

As I said, I do like the song, and I’ve liked it since I first heard in the late 1960’s, I think. It has that kind of self-pitying seriousness adolescent boys take on when they realize that girls aren’t necessarily grateful to you if you like them: it’s a bubble-gum pop-rock version of the infantile “My Way”, a contemptuous statement of male insularity and self-sufficiency.

It’s really a typical Neil Diamond song in the sense that it doesn’t seem to reference any specific reality. Cute lyrics: “I’ll be what I am”. Yes, you will.

Somehow he walks in on Linda and Jim, without evoking any kind of actual location or circumstance: he “found” them together. His relationship with “Sue” died too. Just died. And he knows:

…it’s been done having one girl who loves you,
right or wrong,
weak or strong

What? I’m not sure what he means by “right or wrong” and I’m not sure why a “weak” relationship would be any better than Sue. The two phrases do not add to our understanding or insight into this man’s predicament. Here’s an example of how it’s done, from the master:

You say you’re looking for someone
Never weak, but always strong
To protect you and defend you,
Whether you are right or wrong

Okay, so it’s unfair to compare Neil Diamond with Bob Dylan. Okay– so that’s my point.

But while we’re looking, more from Dylan:

You say you’re looking for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart

“…close his heart”! Then he adds, later: “someone who will die for you and more”.

So, I ask myself, what do I actually like about “Solitary Man”? I don’t know. The chorus, I guess, and the minor chord it starts out in, and the sneaky rhythm. That’s all. And maybe the way Chris Isaak makes it sound.

By the way, Diamond deserves some credit for the album “Tap Root Manuscript” (1970) which experimented with native African rhythms and textures more than a decade before Peter Gabriel or Paul Simon embraced the idea. That doesn’t make it a good album– it still has the excretable “Cracklin’ Rose” on it, the most overplayed song of all time (once would have been sufficient). (It’s real claim to fame is that it is one of the few songs that is more annoying than “Sweet Caroline”, which has inexplicably– or not– infested the crowd at Boston Red Sox games, maybe because it was inspired by Caroline Kennedy. It’s true.) But “Tap Root Manuscript” was relatively bold and relatively daring and it was important as an acknowledgement, by popular music, of the black roots of rock’n’roll.

Diamond started his career as a factory song-writer in the Brill Building, writing hits for other groups including the Monkees (“I’m a Believer”, “Look Out, Here Comes Tomorrow”). The Monkees later insisted on writing their own songs, which Mickey Dolenz likened to Leonard Nimoy becoming a real Vulcan.

Diamond once sang a duet with the Fonz, which could only have been less embarrassing than a duet with Helen Reddy at the same gig. Think about it: the author of “I am I Said” sang a duet with the man who destroyed the mystique of the 50’s rebel. And the “I am Woman” lady.

I never quite understood why Diamond was invited to “The Last Waltz”, the eponymous farewell concert of The Band. I thought at the time that it was an allusion to the strain of pure pop music that helped shape rock’n’roll, part of the mix that influenced the Band. Diamond is the opposite of The Band: colorless, predictable, pompous. You could tell he realized that he had just had the coolest honor ever by being invited. He could put it right up there next to his Grammy for “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” (the soundtrack) and his Razzie for “The Jazz Singer”.

[2022-05: Turns out Robbie Robertson invited him, and the rest of the The Band was just as puzzled and flummoxed as I was.]

A short story by Joyce Carol Oates I really, really like.

Chris Isaak does a respectable version of this song on Youtube.

Neil Diamond’s version is typical of most of his work: bland, ornamental, unbelievable. This is a man who performed “I am I said” with a serious expression on his face. The Daily Telegraph referred to it’s “raging existential angst”. Is that in the “LA’s fine but it aint home/New York’s home but it aint mine no more”?

It took Diamond four months to write. And three minutes to make ridiculous.

His recording of Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne” ranks among the worst covers of all time.

You people are all crazy.

“This is TV partner; this is the great American narcotic machine at work”, Michael Nesmith (the Monkees) in an interview in the VH1 documentary on the Monkees, before he became a Vulcan.

The most pompously stupid comment on a shallow, trivial pop song I have read recently:

The song is a “ballad of a loner looking for love.”[3] While nominally about young romantic failure, lines in the lyrics that read:

Don’t know that I will
But until I can find me
A girl who’ll stay
And won’t play games behind me
I’ll be what I am—
A solitary man…
Solitary man

have been closely identified with Diamond himself, as evinced by a 2008 profile in The Daily Telegraph: “This is the Solitary Man depicted on his first hit in 1966: the literate, thoughtful and melodically adventurous composer of songs that cover a vast array of moods and emotions…”[4]

Literate? Are you nuts? “Don’t know that I will / But until / I can find me” is “literate”? !

2012-01-022022-05-08

’til Selfish Gain no Longer Stain

Mitt Romney transverses Iowa in the last days of the primary caucuses there quoting the bowdlerized, corrupted, bullshit version of “America the Beautiful”:

America, America
God shed his grace on thee
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea

But here’s the real verse, from the real song, as composed by feminist/lesbian poet Katharine Lee Bates, who saw that there were a few things wrong with America:

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

Why, that sounds like a jab at Wall Street and those big corporations like the one Romney used to work for. As with the dropped verses of “This Land is Your Land” real Political Correctness has always come from the right, usually in the form of patriotism, but also religious virtue. In the issue, for example, of Christmas symbolism in public buildings, the “political correctness” is to trumpet the Christian virtues of the nation at taxpayer expense. Separation of church and state is the liberating doctrine.

Every ideology sees their own cause as correct and virtuous.

2011-12-072022-05-02

Silence is Golden (1967)

This is one of those songs I vaguely remember as part of the aural wallpaper of the rooms of my youth. Nowadays, you would hear a song that you like as much as I liked this and immediately go home and download it. Well, no– you would just immediately download it onto your iPhone or whatever.

I probably hadn’t heard it in 30 years when I suddenly remembered it. Actually, it’s the name of a recent column by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times. And I remembered part of the song: “and if I tried, I know she’d say I lied” then something something then “… don’t hurt her, you fool”.

So I went to Youtube and there it was. And I was frankly astonished at the harmonies.

Even more astonishing in this video: they are actually playing and singing! Live!

The lyrics, for an early 60’s pop song, are surprisingly allusive:

Talking is cheap, people follow like sheep.
Even though there is no where to go.
How could she tell he deceived her so well?
Pity she’ll be the last one to know!

But it’s the vocal arrangement that is… well, really quite stunning, with the harmonies:

How many times will she fall for his lines
Should I tell her or should I be cool?
And if I tried I know she’d say I lied.
Mind your business don’t hurt her you fool!

The solo falsetto voice insinuates itself into your mind, like a distant conscience, only to be hammered into full awareness by the choral harmonies, and then that wonderful, sliding, “or should I be cooooool”.

The real live Tremeloes. This is a rarity. Most video performances from this era– and most eras– are lip-synched to a studio recording. If you care as much about the issue as I do, this is a fabulous treat, a real performance.

The girl at 0:59 looks to me like she’s not into her dance partner: she’s scanning the floor for someone she really wants to dance with.

At 1:32 some genuine feedback, affirming that this is a live performance!

The falsetto, if you’re wondering, appears to be coming from the singer in the middle.

This was also performed by Frankie Valli with our without the Four Seasons.

Incidentally, the advertising on YOUTUBE is getting to be extremely annoying. Extremely.

The Four Seasons released “Silence is Golden” as the “B” side to “Rag Doll” in 1964. Inexplicably, it never caught on, and the Tremeloes smartly picked it up in 1967.

The Tremeloes had been known as “Brian Poole and the Tremoloes” (a newspaper misspelled the name) until 1966 when Poole left. He did them a favor: without a “lead” singer, all of the members of the band stepped up, and, it turns out, all of them could sing very well. “Silence is Golden” sounds like it: nobody has the diva role.

A faster version has been recorded by “The Square Set” (1967) in South Africa.

2011-11-122022-05-01

Godspell

Apparently, Godspell is being revived on Broadway this year. The title “Godspell”, by the way, is not meant to suggest some kind of spiritual magic: “Godspell” comes from the old English words for “good word”, which also evolved into the more familiar “gospel”.

There was “Jesus Christ Superstar” and there was “Godspell”. Superstar was incredibly polished, elaborate, and ambitious. It was sophisticated and complex. It was an opera. Godspell was like the country bumpkin cousin, all jocularity and clowning, but, underneath it all, as conventional and conformist as the church in the wild dell. Astonishingly, Christians still objected to it, because the cast looked like hippies, and because, after all, Jesus was portrayed as a clown.

Here’s an oddity. John-Michael Tebelak, a student at Carnegie Mellon University, wrote the musical while he was still in college, as a masters thesis. He died of a heart attack April 2, 1985 (age 35).

Jeffrey Mylett, cast member, died May 7th, 1986 (AIDS).

Lamar Alford, died April 4, 1991, age 47, cause of death not disclosed.

David Haskell, died of brain cancer, age 52, August 30th, 2000.

Lynne Thigpen, cast member: cerebral hemorrhage, age 54, March 12th, 2003.

Merrell Jackson (one of the apostles), February 23, 1991, age 39. His cause of death is conspicuously unmentioned anywhere on the web. He could sing, he could act, he could dance: let me guess.

[Sonia Manzano, another cast member, clearly implies it was AIDS.]

Two members of the celebrated Toronto production (May 1972-August 1973), also died young: Gerry Salsberg, June 22, 2010, in a car accident, and Nancy Dolman, natural causes, August 21, 2010. She was married to Martin Short.

Victor Garber, who played Jesus in Toronto, performed the same role in the movie.

Tebelak was both a believer and a hippie, and Godspell shows it. I’d always regarded it as charming at some level, but sloppy and unfocussed, which is another way of saying it shows its roots as an improvised piece that was taken in different directions at different stages of development. The deciding factor of its success seems to have been the involvement of Stephen Schwartz, though some seem to think the original score by Duane Bolick was more authentic, more rock’n’roll. We’ll never know– I’ve never heard of it being available anywhere. On the internet? Duane Bolick doesn’t seem to exist. He’s probably dead.

Here’s another oddity. The original, with the music by Duane Bolick, was a smash success among the small crowds that saw it at Carnegie Mellon, and when it first went to New York. So, if you have a smash success, you want to throw out the music, right, and rewrite it? I don’t know what to make of that. The template for this kind of makeover is Hollywood, which almost always cuts the heart and soul out of a story before castrating it into innocuous vehicle for Leonardo Di Caprio. But there was a more immediate template: James Rado and Gerome Ragni’s Hair. Hair (1968), like Godspell, seems to be about the rock’n’roll generation, and outwardly acknowledges rock music, but it is structurally, heart and soul, a Broadway musical. It should be: the composer, Canadian Galt MacDermot, had never encountered hippies before being contacted by Rado and Ragni to write the musical.

Many people, including cast members who played in both versions, concede that Stephen Schwartz is a genius, and that he made it sound more clever and polished and sophisticated. Like Barry Manilow and Bette Midler?

And here’s another oddity: Stephen Schwartz also came from Carnegie Mellon University. And yet another oddity: many of the original cast members, and the director, who happened to be John Michael Tebelak, made it all the way to the Broadway version. Tebelak was even involved in the movie script. Surely someone has written a Hollywood movie about this plot: sincere, visionary hippie writes a musical that rocks the world, transport him and his cast to Broadway, and wins a Tony.

Of course they didn’t really win a Tony, but Hollywood doesn’t care if it really happened or not. It understands perfectly that movie audiences want to be spoon fed harmless illusions.

The movie version of Godspell is set on the streets of New York, including an extraordinary sequence with cast members dancing and singing on window washer platforms and on the roof of the unfinished World Trade Center. It’s all a bit precious in some ways, but it’s also a courageous attempt to take the gospel out of the sterile Mayberry of Andy vintage, and it’s own quiet irrelevance, into a vital, crackling, youthful urban setting: God speaks to the twin towers! It remains startling in concept, which is outrageous considering that it is 2012, but it’s even more outrageous that Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann campaign for president as if it were the 1950’s, devout and puritanical, and ragingly hypocritical. God rules everything when it comes to prayer in schools and abstinence training, but his authority is severely limited when it comes to stewardship of the environment: drill baby, drill.

Tebelak’s Jesus, by the way, is a bit sanctimonious. When John the Baptist/Judas almost uses his name in vain, he slaps him, and the rest of the troupe are aghast when Judas almost slaps him back. It’s a weird scene. This is not a new age Jesus, sheep-like, tolerant, inclusive. It’s a strong moment in the play and I am amazed that the considerable forces of homogenization and pleasant superficial conformity didn’t filter it out.

At one point in Godspell, in the movie version, the cast is dancing on top of the roof of the unfinished World Trade Center. The shot was taken from a helicopter. It is remarkable.

Anything like that (along with other scenes on roofs and windows washer platforms) shot today would have been green screened, so enjoy it while you can. It’s pretty amazing.

The Original Cast album, the first recorded version of Godspell, was recorded in one day, and sounds like it.

There are copies of the original theatrical trailer for Godspell online. You will be shocked. The trailer seems to illuminate aspects of the movie. The cuts are several seconds long. There are no helicopters, explosions, or naked women. The purpose actually seems to be to give you some kind of idea of what kind of movie Godspell is.

Peter Pumpkinhead

“Peter Pumpkinhead” was recorded in 1992 by British group XTC, and was a #1 hit in Britain. In 1995, the Crash Test Dummies recorded a new version for the movie “Dumb and Dumber”. These lyrics were excised:

Peter Pumpkinhead pulled them all
Emptied churches and shopping malls
Where he spoke it would raise the roof
Peter Pumpkinhead told the truth

The song uncannily predates “Take Back Wall Street” by 20 years. But America is not ready, apparently, to empty churches and shopping malls. Especially, those places where the devout truly worship the things they crave more badly and urgently than anything else in the universe: shopping malls.

But he made too many enemies…

Governments would slur his name
Plots and sex scandals failed outright
Peter merely said
Any kind of love is alright
But he made too many enemies
Of the people who would keep us on our knees
Hooray for Peter Pumpkin…

Do you believe that was written before the Clinton sex scandal?

The writer of the song, Andy Partridge, has stated that he didn’t have any particular individual in mind when he wrote the song.

So there.

2011-09-112022-05-01

Deportees

On January 29, 1948, the New York Times ran a story about a plane crash in California in which 32 people died, 28 Mexicans, and four Americans. The four Americans were identified by names and professions. The Mexicans were merely identified as “deportees”.

Woody Guthrie read the article and thought about those Mexicans. He thought about their wives and children and girlfriends, and about the way they risked their lives at times to cross over into the U.S. illegally to try to make some money to send home to their families. He thought about how they were often exploited and cheated by their “coyotes” (guides), and sometimes abandoned to die in the dessert. He thought that they deserved to have names.

He wrote the lyrics for “Deportee (Plane Crash at Los Gatos Canyon)” and recited the piece at some performances. Ten years later, a school teacher named Martin Hoffman took Guthrie’s poem and wrote a melody for it. Pete Seeger covered it and it became a hit.

It’s a beautiful song. It’s flawed (that last didactic verse isn’t necessary)– like the faces of many great beauties– but it has a zen-like clarity to it that entrances. It builds slowly, laying out the scene, literally and metaphorically, and then hammering home it’s point with

We died in your hills, we died in your deserts,
We died in your valleys and died on your plains.
We died ‘neath your trees and we died in your bushes,
Both sides of the river, we died just the same.

“Both sides of the river, we died just the same” may the most eloquent summation of a liberal, progressive attitude that I have ever seen. This is not about war between illegals and native sons, or Mexicans and Americans, or the owners and the dispossessed. It’s about how we treat each other as human beings. It’s about the dignity of the laborer, and the hypocrisy of a culture that openly hates illegal immigrants but depends on them to harvest their crops, look after their children, and wash their cars.

One measure of the greatness of a song is its enduring appeal. Is there another song that has retained such a high degree of relevance? Up to 500 Mexicans die every year trying to cross the border illegally to do work that Americans won’t do, for willing employers. In return, they are treated like “outlaws, like rustlers, like thieves”.

How do I acknowledge 9/11? With this tribute to “Deportees”.

In 2005, more than 500 Mexicans died trying to cross over into the U.S. illegally.

Deportee on Wiki

Best version? I have an ensemble version that I adore that is attributed to “Woody Guthrie”– obviously, the song-writer– with no further information about the performers. Sounds like early Weavers, but it’s not them. Lists of songs performed and recorded by the Weavers do not list “Deportee”.

Dolly Parton did a version, on her album “9 to 5”. I will remind you that she was quite a good singer before the industry got their fangs into her style.

The only “tribute” to 9/11 I could really stomach to watch was the curious performance of Paul Simon, at Ground Zero, of “The Sounds of Silence”. As he sang,

And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made.

the camera cut to a shot of the American flag draped on a nearby office tower. Very curious. Simon didn’t change a word– good man!– so we were left with an image of the “words of the prophets” written on the subway walls and tenement halls.

We know from another Paul Simon’s songs (“A Poem on the Underground Wall”) what one of those words was.

2011-06-232022-05-01

Harry Chapin Takes a Taxi

The best lines of Harry Chapin’s epic “Taxi”, one of his most successful and popular projects, are these:

And she handed me twenty dollars for a two-fifty fare
She said, Harry, keep the change
Well another man might have been angry
And another man might have been hurt
But another man never would have let her go
I put the bill in my shirt.
And another man would have had Harry throw the bill in her face in the song and ruminate on how at least he didn’t sell his soul.

I’ve always liked Chapin, but his flaws as a performer and writer are a bit too pronounced to rank him anywhere near the greats of his era.

And there are some extraordinarily awful songs: “Circles” and “Flowers are Red”, and “Mr. Tanner” which is worse than awful: it’s disingenuous. It’s when you consider alternatives like Neil Diamond that Chapin’s honesty and seriousness are appealing. He belongs to a sub-genre of serious, unpretentious, and sometimes visionary but inadequately gifted artists like Don Maclean, Murray McLachlan, Tom Paxton, and Tim Hardin.

And I wonder sometimes about Kristofferson.

Well, you wonder about all of them. I loved “Sniper”, and “Taxi” has it’s moments, but I could hardly ever bear to listen to a Chapin album all the way through more than once. In fact, I don’t think he has a single song that doesn’t have a dud line or two in it (what the heck does “little boy blue and the man in the moon” mean?) And couldn’t he have found a better phrase than “you know we’ll have a good time then”? Even “Taxi” ends with a rather diminished: “I go flying so high/when I’m stoned.” And now that I mention it, “through the too many miles and the too little smiles”. Does he mean too few smiles? Or that the smiles were little?

But at least he was too honest to not admit that, in “Taxi”, Harry keeps the money. Of course he keeps the money. It is the moment in the story when it seems most clearly connected to real life.

By the way, Chapin doesn’t have a great voice, but he puts passion into it, and he takes risks, and he had Big John Wallace with the fabulous five-octave tenor and his cello to give life to his arrangements.

Trivia: Chapin’s widow, Sandy, won a $12 million lawsuit against the owners of the truck that rear-ended Chapin’s 1975 Volkswagen Rabbit in 1981 resulting in his death. According to the authorities, he may well have suffered a heart attack before the accident and the police investigation showed that he had slowed to 15 mph and was wandering the lanes at the time of the collision.

Chapin’s license had been suspended at the time for traffic violations.

But she still got $12 million? I guess if you rear-end someone, you’re going to be at fault no matter what the guy ahead you is doing.

What’s wrong with “Mr. Tanner”?

“Mr. Tanner” tells us about a man with a good voice who works in a laundry and sings to himself. His friends discover his talent and encourage him to move to New York and go for the big time. He does so. He takes every penny he has and rents a hall and gives a performance but he gets raked by the critics. He returns to his home town shattered and disillusioned. As in “Flowers are Red”, Chapin’s villains are made of straw and, as Susan Boyle showed, critics are far more likely nowadays to shower praise on mediocre talents than they are to savage good ones.

The other flaw with “Mr. Tanner” is that the circumstances of his disappointment are ridiculous: critics don’t attend vanity concerts put on by somebody who has never performed publicly anywhere before, and if they did, they would never have reviewed him in the same way they would review professionals. He wouldn’t have been “fair game”.

It’s not likely professional critics would even attend a concert presented by an unknown singer without any previous professional credits. And Chapin conspicuously omits a critical component of this scenario: the audience. Either they would have loved him because, in Chapin’s scenario, he really is very good, in which case he would have been validated regardless of critical opinion, or they would have booed, thus validating the critics.

But that would have eviscerated Chapin’s goal of eviscerating the straw-critics. And it would have been problematic: there are so many mediocre singers who are very popular and successful. “Mr. Tanner” might very well have been a hit.

It tells me that this song is not based on any real experience or first-hand knowledge. If it was, Chapin would have dealt with the problem of the audience.

[2022-05-01]

A far more interesting take on this issue is the wonderful film, “Florence Foster Jenkins” staring Meryl Streep as someone who really did have a terrible voice and was still able to throw a concert, in Carnegie Hall, of all places.

Unfortunately, Chapin wrote a sequel to the song which, if nothing else, proves that sequels are almost always a bad idea. Especially since, in this one, (role reversal) she refuses the money.

So Chapin re-visions the song… and reverses the most endearing — and believable– detail of the original.

2011-05-262022-04-30

Sarah Slean’s Diva Moment

Sarah Slean is a terrific singing talent. Maybe a good songwriter too. But.

On the CBC, late at night, May 20th 2011, Sarah was being interviewed as part of a songwriter series on CBC, on Apropos. She told a story about a song she had written. She was living in Paris for whatever reason. Every day, she walked past a little café. And every day she saw a middle aged man sitting there drinking by himself. She said the man looked like he had given up on life. “He pierced me,” she said. She was so moved by his plight that one day she just decided out of the blue to write him a letter. She wrote in the letter that he should “start again”. No matter what you have done in the past, let it go, and start again: the universe loves you.

The next day, when she brought the letter to the café, he was gone. The next day as well. And the next. She gave up on the idea, though she left the letter in her bag. She wondered if he was lying dead in an apartment somewhere, un-noticed and unremembered.

Up until this point, I thought it was a fairly interesting, compelling story. I was all ears, as I drove back from a wedding in St. Catharine’s. I wondered if she would end up buying a beer and sitting down and joining him, to show that there was hope, at least, of friendship in the world. That she would show a little interest in him, ask about his life, his family.

She continued her story. A little later, she walked by again, and there he was! Her heart beating wildly, she walked right up to him and handed him the letter and then walked on. She did not stay to talk.

She was very pleased with herself.

Then I realized that she was less interested in this man who “pierced” her than she was in herself being pierced. And then she wrote a song which she freely admits is really about her. The song is not about him, or whatever interesting thing happened to him, or whatever interesting things he would do in the future, or why he was unable to connect with anyone, or why he had given up. It was all about this courageous young girl who summoned the audaciousness to actually have an amazing insight into her own insight.

And the very definition, to me, of a diva.

The CBC has a soft spot for divas. Many afternoons, on my way home from work, they will play the latest recording by someone who seems endlessly fascinated with her own voice. It’s a kind of showiness that is all about theatricality and ostentation and effects for the sake of calling attention to one’s self, and really quite boring.

Visitation

2011-03-252024-02-27

1960’s Princesses

Among all the princesses and all the mermaids and all the goddesses of late 60’s popular culture, she may well have been the most entrancing: Michelle Phillips, fine-featured, blonde, green eyes.

She married John Phillips at 18. Aesthetic member of the Mamas and the Papas. Inspiration for “California Dreaming”. Sang backup for Leonard Cohen on one of his tours, 1970. Married, briefly, to Dennis Hopper, one of the few genuine psychos of all the Hollywood psychos.

And married again and again: five times.

“Go Where You Want to Go” is a slight song, typical of the John Phillips’ Mamas and Papas: melodic, cleverly-arranged, and ephemeral. And pretty and alluring like Michelle’s face– you wonder and hope there’s something rich and satisfying beneath that pouty face.

The haunting parts of the song are the voices of the girls, Michelle and Cass:

You’ve been gone a week, And I tried so hard
Not to be the crying kind
Not to be the girl you left behind

Actually, the really haunting part is the “with whomever”:

You gotta go where you want to go
Do what you want to do
With whomever you want to do it with…

Listen carefully– I hear something authentic in the yearning voices on that line.

Cass was in love with Denny Doherty but he did not reciprocate, and Denny and Michelle had an affair a year or so after this song was recorded and she was kicked out of the band in June 1966 for a few months (that’s how you fire your wife. Note that Denny was not kicked out of the band.)

Is that what we also hear in Fleetwood Mac’s “Rumours”, the insinuations of real desire, real longing into the voices? She returned to the group at the end of August in the same year and dubbed over her replacement’s vocals. To this day, no one is quite sure which vocals on “The Mamas and the Papas” are hers and which are Jill Gibson’s.

Barry McGuire called Cass Elliot a “stallion”. She must have rued the cruelty of fate putting such a monumental voice and hunger into a package that was not Michelle Phillips– oh, life is unfair!

Or just real sadness, as you, as Neil Young put it, “try to make arrangements with yourself”. That’s a pretty good description of 20-somethings trying to manage their lives– the components of happiness are often there, circulating, waiting, not-waiting, hesitating. Sometimes holding out to see if something better might come along. The movie “St. Elmo’s Fire”, frustratingly, took the raw material of poignancy and ambivalence and turned it into melodrama and sentimentality and mush and I almost feel haunted by the potential for something interesting in the elements they placed before us and failed to deliver on. “Once”, on a smaller scale, delivers more, because there are no fireworks but real unresolved urges, missed opportunities, and uncertainties.

Hollywood loves to blueprint relationships for us. In real life, as in “Once”, it may not be clear to us where a relationship might or should end.

Michelle is the last surviving member of the band. Cass Elliot– she of the voice as beautiful in sound as Michelle’s face in light– died of a heart attack in London at age 33 after three “stand-out” performances at the Palladium in July 1974. John Phillips burned himself out, deep into drugs and alcohol and waste, and died of heart failure in 2001. Denny Doherty died in Toronto of an illness January 19, 2007.

The TV record, now strung out on Youtube, is cruel: most of their performances seem to be lip-synched. Their opportunity to shine at Monterrey with their signature song, “California Dreamin'”, was fatally marred by a lack of preparation and massive drug abuse: it’s one of the most disappointing live performances of an important song by a successful pop group ever. You can’t hide the embarrassment. Most of the video archives simply dub the studio recording over it.

But it wasn’t their most preposterous live performance ever– that came on “Hullabaloo”, with go-go girls popping out of bathtubs, and the band visibly ridiculing the dance moves.

John woke Michelle up in the middle of the night in New York City in 1963, I think it was, because he had a great idea for a song and needed her help to finish it. She has admitted that she basically just wrote down the words for him, and chords, and maybe helped with a few phrases, for which she, nevertheless, still receives a healthy income: the song was “California Dreamin'” of course. The first two lines– and the hook– “California dreamin'” made the song what it is:

All the leaves are brown, and the sky is grey
I’ve been for a walk on winter’s day

The distilled moment of 20-something ennui and disconsolate self-absorption. Think of those lines when you’re young and maybe in love and maybe not and maybe you could do better and maybe not and the evening didn’t go all that well and you’re not sure if maybe you shouldn’t move on and try some other future and all the leaves are brown and the sky is grey… and the wind is blowing your hair and the leaves and you feel such delicious desolation that it’s almost tragic, and it’s definitely deep, and you feel alive.

In the early 1960’s– nobody seems to have a definite date– The Mamas and the Papas went to the Bahamas to work on their music and ran out of money. Desperate, they went to a casino and Michelle threw 17 straight winners at craps to get them enough money to fly back to New York.

It is remarkable that they resisted the temptation to continue betting.

The essential dynamic of gambling is this: when you are losing, you will keep trying to win back what you lost, believing that your luck is likely to change for the better. When you are winning, you will feel lucky, and human nature will drive you to want to win more and more and more.

The inviolable statistical fact about gambling is that the longer you gamble while winning, the more inevitable it is that you will eventually lose everything you won, and more.

That’s why it is so astonishing that John Phillips decided to quit while they were ahead and use their winnings to fly back to New York.

Want to get rich? Own a casino.

In 1967, Cass Elliot had a child– out of wedlock — , a daughter. She refused to identify the father.

Me.

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Five Perfect Songs

There are five perfect songs. Here they are:

Sam Stone (John Prine)
All Along the Watchtower (Bob Dylan)
Anchorage (Michelle Shocked)
I Fought the Law (Bobby Fuller Four)
You Don’t Own Me (Leslie Gore)

That’s it.

About Sam Stone:
But life had lost its fun
And there was nothing to be done
But trade his house that he bought on the GI bill
For a flag-draped casket on a local heroe’s hill

“Suspicion” (Elvis Presley) comes close, but no cigar.

Other Honorable Mentions:

“Reelin’ in the Years” (Steely Dan) A truly awesome recording but I can’t overlook the pettiness of “the things that pass for knowledge I can’t understand…”

“Homeward Bound” (Simon and Garfunkel) a fine, fine song, but “all my words come back to me in shades of mediocrity” is a little precious.

“Four Strong Winds” (Ian & Sylvia) is a bit slight, so you have to repeat the chorus and that gives it a bit of a sense of aimlessness and repetition and violates the rule of economy.

The Beatles’ best song is “Girl”:

Was she told when she was young that pain would lead to pleasure?
Did she understand it when they said,
That a man must break his back to earn his day of leisure
Will she still believe it when he’s dead?

But “Eleanor Rigby” is also very nearly perfect.

“Go Your Own Way” (Fleetwood Mac) is too slight.

“Sultans of Swing” by Dire Straits is very, very good.

“Echo Beach” (Martha & the Muffins) Actually, this song is darn near perfect as well. Darn near.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” (The Band) Great, great song, but a bit murky, and the Band’s own recording of it is not as perfect as the song. As is “This Wheel’s on Fire” and “Tears of Rage”. I do actually like the cover version of “Dixie” by Joan Baez, featuring crack Nashville session musicians. It’s from an album that appeared to be an effort by Baez to reach out to the alienated silent majority of Americans who seemed to despise her.

Levon Helm (who wrote “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”) despised her version, but one suspects that that is because Levon Helm despised Joan Baez.

“Satisfaction” (Rolling Stones) Okay. So this one is perfect too. Six perfect songs. But it has to share with “Light My Fire” (Doors).

“Like a Rolling Stone” (Bob Dylan) Violates rule of economy, but also a great, great song. “Tangled up in Blue” might actually be a better song.

“Thunder Road” (Bruce Springsteen) Can’t sustain that great take-off, “you can hide ‘neath your covers and study your pain” though he tries, brilliantly. In the end, it’s just a trifle indulgent, a trifle too self-consciously monumental. A trifle. On some days I prefer “Jungleland”.

“Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” (Bob Dylan) is as good or better than any other song on the list. All right, seven.

“One of These Days” (Emmy Lou Harris) Lovely, enchanting piece, reminds me of “As I Went Out One Morning” (Bob Dylan): both are elegantly economical, tight, balanced.

“Someday Soon” (Judy Collins) Okay– another one. Eight.

All right: 9– “The Hammond Song”, by the Roches. Actually, this song is obviously flawed, but there are moments when it does sound just perfect to me. So 8. Wait — 9. I forgot about one of the most perfect, crystalline, renditions ever: “Wayfarin’ Stranger” by Emmy-Lou Harris with that absolutely wonderful lead by Tony Rice and mandolin by Albert Lee.