R.I.P. Frank Buckles, 1901 – 2011.

Frank Buckles is dead.

The name might not mean anything to you, but Buckles is someone whom I have been following for the past few years as the last known living American veteran of World War I. Some two million Americans fought overseas in World War I (while another 2.7 Americans served in the Allied Forces during the war); Frank was the last – the final living witness of the epic event in which a young, idealist America made its way onto the global stage where it would play out the rest of its subsequent history.

But with all of this grandiose end-of-an-era junk, it’s easy to forget that Frank Buckles was a man – and one with a unique combination of strength, determination, and cleverness that helped him overcome the fact that he almost didn’t even get to serve in World War I at all.

Born on February 1, 1901, outside of Bethany, Missouri, a 16-year-old Buckles was inspired by a recruitment poster to join the Marines, who rejected him for being too young and underweight. Buckles then tried to join the navy, who rejected him for being flatfoot. Finally, in the summer of 1917, Buckles lied about his age and was enlisted into the army; well over eight decades later, Buckles told Defense Secretary Robert Gates that it was the only lie he ever told.

He sailed to Europe in the Carpathia, the boat that had rescued the Titanic survivors five years before. Buckles eventually volunteered to be an ambulance driver, which he had been told was the fastest way to get to the action. Although Buckles never got more than around 30 miles way from the frontlines, he helped to feed hungry French children and was awestruck by the relentless determination of the French soldiers in vivid memories that he would carry with him far into his old age.

He also experienced things that were unique to his time – specifically, witnessing British veterans from the Crimean War (which was fought in the 1850s) before being stationed in France, and talking with General John J. Pershing at a party after he got back home. (One imagines that if he’s not the last living person to have met Pershing, he must be in the last five or so…)

After the war, he worked for White Star – the shipping company that owned both the Titanic and the Carpathia – and spent much of his career traveling around on business. He was on one such business trip to the Philippines in December 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and took over the area. Buckles was imprisoned for over three years by the Japanese, eating his meals out of a tin cup he kept into his old age, and dropping some 50 pounds before being liberated by an American airborne unit in 1945. In the following decade, Buckles retired from the business world, and ran a cattle farm, where he would work until his early 100’s.

By that time, Buckles was becoming known as the country’s foremost advocate for World War I, serving as the honorary chairman of the World War I Memorial Foundation, which seeks to refurbish the long-forgotten District of Columbia War Memorial, built in the 1930s, and establish it as the National World War I Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C., alongside ones for Vietnam and the Korean War, each of which suffered less American casualties than World War I.

Although arguably the most epic event in modern world history, Buckles’ fight has been a tough one, as World War I has been overshadowed by World War II to the point that it has become little more than a hazy place-keeper between the Civil War and World War II in popular memory. Most of this has to do with timing. Because World War I was fought over two decades before World War II, there were always less veterans around to keep it at the forefront of people’s minds, especially once you consider that the World War II generation’s children were the baby boomers, the largest generation that our country had yet seen.

Technical limitations also play a large part. Unlike World War II, where we have video footage and photographs of the storming of Normandy and Iwo Jima, there is comparatively very little footage of World War I, and of that footage, only a small amount is of actual battle. Finally, our nation’s level of involvement (or lack thereof) played a major part. World War I was primarily a European war, which the Americans jumped into relatively towards the end. Compared to America’s central place in World War II, its role in World War I was tangential at best. And even when President Wilson famously declared it “the war to end all wars,” the people were primarily interested in retreating back to their native soil for a more isolationist approach to world affairs.

But the die had been cast. Like it or not, World War I was the Pandora’s Box that established America on the global stage, setting the course of its history ever since. World War II may have been the more decisive conflict in terms of America’s role and the modern world it directly shaped, but it is like the Godfather II or The Empire Strikes Back – a sequel that arguably betters the original, but will first and foremost remain just that, a sequel. Its name looks us right in the face, but our “Greatest Generation” culture has caused us to single it out as a singular event, whereas it is more accurate to think of World War II as World War I, Part II. All of the tensions left unresolved by World War I (primarily the treatment of the Germans) set the stage for the better-remembered war, but for me, World War I stands above it because it is just that: the First World War. All of the trials and tribulations of our modern world – from war and peace to the United Nations to the global economy to our definitions of freedom and our self-appointed role as the world police – comes directly out of our less-than-two-year involvement in a war that was largely a stalemate between the two sides.

So where does this leave Frank Buckles? At 110, he was the last soldier of the battlefield, the final American participant in its first global epic. In 2009, Buckles made one of his final public gestures when he wrote a special Memorial Day letter to the American Veterans Center and the National Memorial Day Parade. In it, he reflected upon his service during the Great War:

After three years of living and dying inside a dirt trench, you know the Brits and French were happy to see us “doughboys.” Every last one of us Yanks believed we’d wrap this thing up in a month or two and head back home before harvest. In other words, we were the typical, cocky Americans no one wants around, until they need help winning a war.

But that’s what makes America special – as much as we want to avoid war, we’re ready to sacrifice everything if that’s what it takes to make sure the bad guys don’t win. America’s entry into the war was decisive. Just 19 months after the first Yanks arrived, the guns fell silent.

There is a certain kind of power that goes along with witnessing. A similar idea can be found in Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic, when he recounts an exchange from 1993 in which Bob Dylan speculates upon the difference between himself and slightly younger artists like Bruce Springsteen. “They weren’t there to see the end of the traditional people,” Dylan said. “But I was.”

“What was he saying?” Marcus asks, before reflecting:

He might have been saying that as in 1963 he watched [Dock] Boggs, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James, Clarence Ashley, Buell Kazee, Sara and Maybelle Carter – “the traditional people,” standing on the Newport stage, for Dylan’s cryptically perfect phrase, both as themselves as a particularly American strain of fairy folk – he had learned something about persistence and renewal. Or he might have been saying something simpler, and harder: I saw a vanishing. He was present to witness an extinction, to see the last members of a species disappear. Thus it was left to him to say what went out of the world when the traditional people left the stage.

Marcus goes onto argue that through performance, one can play the role of someone signing a death certificate: “You were to certify that a certain race of people had vanished from the earth, which was also a way of testifying that they once had been large upon it – and as a result of your witnessing, what traces these people might have left behind were lodged in you.” He continues to the next step: “It’s a possibility that instantly raises its own question. What will go out of the world with you?”

It’s a powerful question, and one that speaks to witnessing and surviving, as well as, I believe, responsibility. Marcus was writing about southern folk musicians who came of age in the 1920s, as they were rediscovered by Dylan’s generation in the 1960s: “cut off by the cataclysms of the Great Depression and Second World War, and by a national narrative that had never included their kind, they appeared now like visitors from another world, like passengers on a ship that had drifted into the sea of the unwritten.”

As can be heard in the most striking song of this era, Geechie Wiley’s utterly bizarre “Last Kind Word Blues” from 1930, these people lived in a time where the First World War was behind them like a desert in the rear-view mirror. In the song, the singer uses otherworldly verses to conjure a land in which death looms everywhere and isolation is a way of life; when she sings of her lover’s last kind words – which are that if he dies in “the German War,” be sure to send his body back to his mother-in-law – it resonates deeply not just because it depicts a woman who is isolated from her lover by war and death, but because its singer is herself isolated in the strange time between the world wars.

But if the generation that came of age between the wars seemed out of place and archaic, the existence of a person who actually fought in the war – a real man, an actual soldier, alive and lucid in America – felt nearly inconceivable. Yet until 12:30 AM on Monday, February 28, such a person existed, the ultimate witness to not just his life and times, but America’s; he could remember when the Titanic sunk and how he sailed to Europe a few years later on the ship that rescued its survivors, he could remember the gruesome carnage of the French and British in World War I and the near-starvation faced while imprisoned by the Japanese in World War II; he was retired by the time Elvis made his first record in 1954, a senior citizen by the time Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, a septuagenarian by the time Nixon resigned from office, a centenarian by the time of the September 11^th attacks, and a supercentarian by the time of his death, after which the country’s first African American president ordered all federal flags to be flown at half-mast.

With Frank Buckles goes an entire era, way of life, and history. World War I is now completely cut off from us as Buckles was the final veteran in this hemisphere to serve in the war. The only other people alive who served in any capacity are Claude Choules, who served in Britain’s Royal Navy, and Florence Green, who was a member of Britain’s Women’s Royal Air Force; Buckles was the final living World War I soldier in the world.

In the middle of an interview with the Library of Congress from 2001, Buckles paused a moment to reflect upon his mystic chords of memory:

Oh, and when I think about these things, remember, I've never told anybody about my experiences except my daughter Susannah and wife Audrey. And I never talked to people about it, because people didn't know I had been in the Army. But the pictures come back to me, they're pleasant things. The unpleasant things I don't remember those, I forget those purposely.

He was a living witness, the final of his kind, a good man who lived long enough to see the world change and have a small hand in doing so. One is tempted to turn to the highbrow quotes of military leaders and great men, but I most think of the character of Dilsey, the African American servant from The Sound and the Fury, a book written by William Faulkner, who himself was only about four years older than Buckles: “I’ve seen the first and the last…I’ve seen the beginning, and now I see the ending.”

* * *

To learn more about Frank Buckles and what you can do to help the WWI Memorial foundation, please visit:

http://www.frankbuckles.org/

To see the full transcript of the 2001 Library of Congress interview from which many of Buckles’ quotes were taken, visit:

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/vhp/story/loc.natlib.afc2001001.01070/transcript?ID=sr0001

1927: “Moonshiner’s Dance – Part I” by Frank Cloutier and Victoria Café Orchestra

There is one reason that “Moonshiner’s Dance – Part I” is known today and was not buried in the great scrapheap of Prohibition-era dancehall novelty records: It was included at the center of Harry Smith’s celebrated Anthology of American Folk Music. In the collection, Smith sequenced 84 songs over three double-record sets, each one loosely grouped by theme (“Moonshiner’s” is song number 41, at the end of the secular half of the “Social Music” volume). Although the album was commissioned and distributed by Folkways Records (which was later picked up by the Smithsonian), Smith didn’t include any field recordings, instead opting for his vast collection of blues, folk, and country 78 RPM records, all of which were commercially released in the late ’20s and early ’30s. He then released the Anthology with an accompanying set of cryptic liner notes that refused to give the race, sex, or genre of any of the performers. In other words, he created a complete democracy.

Kids like Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia began digging into the collection soon after its release in 1952, and within a decade, it was arguably the founding document of the early ’60s folk music revival. The Anthology made such a great impression upon the ’60s folk generation, it got to a point where virtually every song had been researched, studied, contemplated, and covered.

Every song, it seemed, except for Frank Cloutier and Café Victoria Orchestra’s “Moonshiner’s Dance – Part I.”

The song “is one of only two medlies [sic] on the Anthology,” points out Kurt Gegenhuber in his blog The Celestial Monochord. “Not a tune but a collection of tunes, it is an anthology in the Anthology, a collage incorporated into a larger collage. Our understanding of ‘Moonshiner’s Dance’ therefore benefits from some of the same thinking we apply to the Anthology itself – if, possibly, on a different scale.”

Kurt Gegenhuber is to Frank Cloutier what Robert “Mack” McCormick is to Robert Johnson or Nick Tosches is to Emmett Miller – the person who put countless amounts of time, research, and money into the pursuit of a 20^th Century musical phantom.

So why did no one bother to take up Cloutier until Gegenhuber fell into his pursuit less than a decade ago? Because even in the truth-is-stranger-than-fiction world of the Harry Smith Anthology, “Moonshiner’s Dance – Part I” is a complete anomaly. It is “folk” in only the loosest sense of the term – this is no bastardized Elizabethan ballad or hand-me-down slave spiritual, it is a medley of old parlor ballads played by a dancehall jazz band in a polka tempo; it is also, as Gegenhuber tellingly points out, the only song on the collection that isn’t by a rural southern performer – Cloutier and his orchestra were the house band at the Victoria Café in St. Paul, Minnesota.

And as Gegenhuber experienced when doing his initial research, the record is maddeningly difficult to classify – too ethnic for the jazz discographies, too jazzy for the folk discographies, and not popular enough to make the pop music discographies. Its sole claim to fame is its inclusion as the black sheep of Harry Smith’s Anthology, an outsider of an outsider culture.

Indeed, hearing “Moonshiner’s” in the context of the Harry Smith Anthology is something of a shock. The music that makes up the other 83 songs of the collection are decidedly rural in sound and vision, blues singers from the south and country balladeers from the hills. Even urban-based jug bands like the Memphis Jug Band and the Cincinnati Jug Band played rural-style songs with rural-style instruments, old songster tunes and blues played on mandolins, harmonicas, and of course, the ever-present jug – even if they were technically urban-based, this was music that celebrated a rural way of life with a rural sound. Not so for Frank Cloutier and Victoria Café Orchestra. Cloutier’s band was a working northern jazz-pop combo with a full sound to match; instead of acoustic guitars and bottleneck slides we get piano, clarinet, drums, and – a true rarity for the Anthology – a tuba.

But none of this even begins to scratch the surface of the sheer weirdness of this record, a whole that is far beyond the sum of its parts. The record begins with Cloutier calling out “Hey, hey, Mr. Larson–” followed by about five seconds of unintelligible speaking that has been lost to the ages (here’s my best shot: “Fistfight equally unfined auto-inspect in the playpen” – I think the FBI had an easier time making out the lyrics to “Louie Louie”). Cloutier’s piano sets the tempo at a brisk one-step polka as the band plays the first melody, whooping it up with laughter, shouts, and random non-sequiturs – at themselves, at each other, at their song, at the audience, at the Eighteenth Amendment – an infectious, near-constant sound that becomes its own parallel section of the song, a sort of madman’s “director’s commentary” track, if you will.

The first melody is played by a clarinet – an exuberant reading of a simple melody brimming with pride like the Spirit of ’76 band leading a Fourth of July parade. It turns out the song is really “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” but this detail, like the exact origin of any other melody appearing in this song, is just a footnote. Like the best music on the Anthology, “Moonshiner’s” taps into a collective unconscious of American music, like a song you hear for the first time on the radio that you nonetheless swear you’ve heard somewhere before. This is the source of the song’s mystery – as well as its strange power.

When the clarinet’s melody ends, the men then call out in a halting unified chant:

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

The music rises with false anticipation, as a banjo snakes its way around a fluttering melody right out of the first page of How to Play the Banjo, but is as tuneful and catchy as anything that could be played more sophisticatedly. With the banjo line in front, the sound seems to shift into that of a fairground medicine show – silly and over-the-top, but strong and steady enough to entice people off of the midway to step right up and buy that bottle of snake oil. And then:

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

The music rises again in anticipation as it regroups, but remains suspended on itself; someone (Cloutier, I believe) shouts out something out like “Two more couples,” as his bandmates react with laughing glee. A harmonica works its way out of the sound like a locomotive, its melody pushing in and out with a sense of zip that belies its simplicity, not too far unlike Uncle Dave Macon’s “Won’t get drunk no more” refrain of “Way Down the Old Plank Road” that begins the final side of the Anthology. And again:

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

The music briefly rises and parts in false anticipation, suspending for a moment over some more inane dialogue that sounds to me like – “What’re you gonna do with that cow, Herbert?” “Milk somebody, Frankie!” “That’s right!” – before their responding howls in response are cut off by a horn playing bravely and full of cautious victory, like it was leading a march of pilgrims in flight, before somehow neatly resolving into a melody that sounds like the cloying children’s song “If You’re Happy and You Know It Clap Your Hands.” (For the record, it’s not; Cloutier and his band are playing the old spiritual “On the Cross,” a lovely tune of faith and devotion that has been sung by everyone from Fiddlin’ John Carson to Hank Williams on down.)

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

Coupled with the constant laughter, the way the record keeps counting off into suspended anticipation before playing the next melody itself feels like a joke the musicians are having among themselves on you. They will always have the upper hand because they are always in the know; you can never be in on a joke in which people are laughing at you. This time they lock onto the most catchy melody of all-time, which has infiltrated the country as “Turkey in the Straw” and the sea as “The Sailor’s Hornpipe,” and was played by Mickey Mouse in his first cartoon appearance, Steamboat Willie. Somewhere in the middle of the melody the drummer smashes his cymbal like a baseball being hit out of the park, and for a fleeting moment, the song takes you there too.

“One! Two! Three! Four!”

With all of this counting, one can’t but wonder if Frank Cloutier and Café Victoria Orchestra aren’t the spiritual grandfathers of the Ramones – playing about a minute’s worth of music, counting off, and doing it again. But for the first and only time on the record, they get right down to business with no odd suspension before the melody kicks in. This time it’s the rousing finale; in terms of its sweeping sound and spirit, the only thing that can touch it on the Anthology is the song that closes the sacred half of the “Social Music” set, a rousing march called “I’m in the Battlefield for My Lord.” Although they are two entirely polar songs – one a mockery of Prohibition, the other a testament to sacred faith (the one played by Cloutier and his band is actually the old parlor ballad “You Wore a Tulip and I Wore a Big Red Rose”) – strictly as a sound, they are one in the same; if the spiritual described what being on the battlefield for your lord looks like, this section of “Moonshiner’s” describes what this notion feels like. Cloutier and his orchestra become enormous, an army marching victoriously across a field still smoking from the weapons of battle. If you could follow the sound, it seems, you wouldn’t go across the field, but rather up into the heavens – the well-earned reward of a good life’s work, a consecration of the land worthy of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

The record closes with a final chant of “One! Two! Three! Four!” with Cloutier then interrupting the festivities with a command of “Be seated–” the two words that signaled the beginning of a minstrel show, before the record quickly fades away into dead silence.

Taken as a whole, it is as good a summary of the heights and depths America in two minutes and forty seconds as I’ve ever heard. No matter how many times I hear it, there are always new things to be heard and puzzle over, new melodies to catch, new associations to be made: The way the band morphs from a Spirit of ’76 band into one that plays parlor ballads, rural tunes, sea shanties, spirituals, and children’s songs (often at the same time!), invokes the medicine show and the insane asylum in equal measure, takes in a ballgame and rides a locomotive, and finally forms God’s great army marching towards a better world, only to make way for a minstrel show; the way its periodic count-offs into the false anticipation of suspended music feel like bridges to nowhere that completely sever the pieces of the melody even as it unites them; the disjointed dialogue and mad laughter throughout that seems to imply the good-natured front of American humor is just that, a front; and finally, the way that its placement on the Anthology is like finding a Spike Jones record in the middle of a stack of old Carter Family 78s.

So why did Harry Smith put the song in there? Was it a commentary on the act of anthologizing? Was it a reminder of how parlor ballads can dissipate into the backwoods and come back as folk songs? Was it an example of how American music is so mixed up that sometimes the most American of performances can be paradoxically built upon German “oom-pah” music? Damned if I know. But maybe, just maybe, he put the song in there for the same reason that I just wrote a few hundred words about it and still feel like I could write several thousand more without even beginning to feel that I had completed my task at hand: America is a seeker’s country, and you have to get lost in its mysteries before it will reveal its truths.

Either that or he put it there as one big joke – which is to say, he let the record speak for itself.

[This is from the continuing series “100 Years of American Recordings, 1891-1991.”]

Long Black Limousine

Elvis Presley is an epic American the way that few are – he towers over the 20^th Century just like how Abraham Lincoln towers over the 19^th and Benjamin Franklin the 18^th. Each one was born poor, but by the middle of the century had worked their way up to a major (if not the major) influence of their day. They also each took a national stand on the tangled issues of race and freedom: Franklin’s final public act before his death was to call for the abolition of slavery; Lincoln finally did abolish slavery; Elvis took the drama from the political stage to the performing one.

He was, as many liked to claim, the boy who stole the blues. But of course the endless cycles of love and theft have been around as American culture itself, when blackface minstrelsy first reared its ugly (to a modern audience, anyway) head around the same time that Lincoln was winning his first major public office as a state congressman for Illinois.

There’s a straight line that can be drawn from Al Jolson and Jimmie Rodgers on down through the Beastie Boys and Eminem; Elvis stands in the middle, breaking the line in two as he turns black into white, blues into country, underground into pop, and perhaps love into theft.

But this is not all; it may not even be half. Elvis’s true gift was his sense of conviction, and this was something that transcended any lines of color, time, or space. When the material was good, and Elvis gave it his all, he made you believe what he was singing like few performers before or since. It is said that Elvis wanted to be an actor most of all – a real, respected actor like James Dean, as opposed to the cinematic punchline he became – and somewhat ironically, you can hear it in the music long before you can get it from one of his films. He throws himself into the song like a Brando or DeNiro throws himself into a role, taking it as far as it can go.

At his best – think “Hound Dog” and “Blue Suede Shoes” for one extreme, “Love Me Tender” and “Can’t Help Falling in Love” for the other – Elvis brings the song (and, by extension, its listeners) to a near-Platonian ideal; at his worst – think “Yoga Is as Yoga Does” or “Mama Liked the Roses” – he either distances himself from the material by phoning it in with a hollow gusto that denies the sound of his voice and often creates music that is as fascinating as it is dreadful (put on “Poison Ivy League” and give me a call), or gets so far into the feeling of the song, he loses us along the way, resulting in a recording that is flat and maudlin.

If Elvis is to be thought of as some sort of actor in song, many would hold that “Mystery Train” is his finest performance. It is certainly his best idea: As Greil Marcus has famously theorized, “Mystery Train” is a blues song written and first performed by Junior Parker that adapts its central verse – “Train I ride, sixteen coaches long/That long black train got my baby and gone” – from the old Carter Family tune “Worried Man Blues.” For Elvis, who surely would’ve known both the Parker and the Carter versions, this set up an interesting conundrum: Unlike his other music, which was safely divided between the blues songs, where he “left home,” and the country songs, where he “came back,” here was a song where the country song was embedded into the blues song, which threw Elvis’s world off its axis, and resulted in a one-of-a-kind performance.

All of which is well and good – and I believe, rather brilliant and fascinating – but for me it only tells part of the story. “Mystery Train” is one of those amazing songs (the Jaynettes’ “Sally Go ’Round the Roses” is another) that sound totally normal when you first hear it, but gets stranger and stranger the more you think about it. In time, one cannot help but wonder if the long black train the singer rides that has his baby and is never coming back, that took his baby but never will again, is death itself, with the singer jumping on to see if he can somehow turn the train back on itself, cheat death, and escape into freedom. The record is all tension and intensity, the sound of a man literally trying to stare down a freight train. But then, right as the song begins to fade away and you’re beginning to assume that the standoff is a draw, you can hear the singer give a cry of “Whooo-OOOO–W’HOOOOO!” and laugh in a pure burst of joy that lets you know that he has indeed escaped the mystery train.

With so much going on musically, lyrically, and ideologically, you can almost miss that this is a song about a corpse.

* * *

This same mistake could not be made on what I consider to be Elvis’s finest performance of all-time, “Long Black Limousine.” The song opens with tolling church bells as the singer sets the scene:

There’s a long line of mourners driving down our little street

Their fancy cars are such a sight to see, oh yeah.

They’re all your rich friends who knew you in the city

And now they’ve finally brought, brought you home to me.

Like many of the finest firsthand narratives in American music – “Johnny B. Goode” by Chuck Berry, “North Country Blues” by Bob Dylan, “Louisiana 1927” by Randy Newman, “The Promised Land” by Bruce Springsteen – “Long Black Limousine” is told in a way that rings true for the song: a small town man who uses simple words to conjure quick, clear images. And yet, through the sound of the song – the way the tolling bells set the tempo of the first verse, the sad earnestness of the singer’s vocal, choosing each word carefully as he feels his way down the steps of the melody, the sense of death that has saturated the entire recording – we get a much clearer picture of what’s going on. The stage is set for an epic, and true to form, the song jumps back to reveal that it’s beginning was really the ending.

A drum roll shifts the song’s pace into an easy funk as the singer tells us the back story. It’s a tale we’ve all heard before: A young girl leaves the small town to make it in the big city and promises that when she returns, it will be in a limousine. The song cuts back to the present as the singer acknowledges that the girl has finally gotten her dream.

The bridge fills in the crucial missing information in telling sketches that read like headlines: The party, the fatal crash, the highway race, the unseen curve. Elvis sings the titular phrase strongly, bravely, and repeated by a chorus of female gospel singers whose “ooooo”s push the song up to the next level – literally, as the song jumps up to a higher key, further building the tension and forcing Elvis’s voice to a higher, more desperate register.

And as in his finest performances, Elvis more than rises to the occasion, singing with the sentimentality of country, the grit of blues, and the soul of rock and roll:

Through tear-filled eyes I watch as you ride by, oh yeah

A chauffeur, a chauffer at the wheel dressed up so fine–

And I will NEVER, I’LL NEVER LOVE ANOTHER

Oooooooh– my heart, all my dreams–

They’re with you, in that long black, limousine.

It is this verse that makes the song: When Elvis sings that he will never love another, you believe him; this is less the sound of a man singing the lyrics to a song than it is a man living his words out. There is pain in his voice, but also anguish, fear, regret, and – to my ears, at least – some paradoxical sense of romantic satisfaction. This is a young man from a small town, one who presumably had little to show for his life except for the fact that he just happened to have crossed paths with this girl who became a very big star. Like Abraham Lincoln and Ann Rutledge, it is unclear just how well the two knew each other – interestingly, there is no mention of a young romance or a first kiss or another small-town clichés; all we know is that they were close enough to have a conversation in which she promised that she would return in a long black limousine. Given her apparent pluck and resolution, it is quite possible she had this conversation more than once, and perhaps with anyone who would listen in the town. But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that she said it to the singer, and in a way that was direct enough that he can recall it as her telling him. This gives the song an almost casual touch that belies its closed-off climax – everything feels open, alive, and airy. Yet there is still a sense of something grander waiting in the wings, like when watching the early scenes of an old movie and knowing full well that the sparring young guy and girl will end up together.

I once read a piece about such a movie, It’s a Wonderful Life, in a collection of film essays by the Scottish author and film critic Gilbert Adair. He argued that, in the famous scene in which Clarence shows George Bailey what his wife Mary would be doing if George had never been born – “She’s about to close the library!” Clarence chokes, before taking him to a bespeckled, spinster parallel-universe version of Mary –It’s a Wonderful Life portrays what could be the greatest love ever captured on film: Mary would have never wed another even if George had never been born. It’s the kind of moment that passes by without notice, but the more you think about it, the deeper it becomes.

A similar sense of finality frames “Long Black Limousine,” only instead of being proven by someone never being born, it is proven by someone’s death. But given the ambiguity of the song’s central characters, as coupled with the singer’s stark romanticism, I cannot help but wonder if the girl’s death caused the singer’s love, as opposed to a situation like It’s a Wonderful Life, where the love is tested by life, and not the other way around. That is, if the girl hadn’t been killed, would the singer be declaring his love for her in such an epic, final way? Is it possible that, from the singer’s perspective, the girl was always a bit out of reach, especially once she became a big star, such that her death merely seals the unrequited love that would have been felt anyway? And with this most extreme version of a love lost – that is, death – the singer’s response is in its own way equally fatal: Her physical death sparks his emotional one; his heart and his dreams were indeed riding with her in a long black limousine.

All of which is certainly dramatic enough, but when you throw on the layer of the real world, things become even more complicated. For Elvis, the most famous performer of his time, to be singing the song of an anonymous small town nobody invites his audience to switch places with him. Part of the song’s power derives from it being sung in the second person – “You know, when you left, you know you told me,” that’s four you’s in less than one line – which invites us, the audience, to play the part of the deceased movie star. We are the ones riding in a long black limousine, and we are the ones who in death receive the eternal love of the singer’s life.

But of course to a modern audience, it is Elvis who is dead. He’s the one who left his small hometown to make it big in Hollywood, and eventually came home to us as a corpse. Elvis’s death looms so large that it almost overtakes the song, which is no small feat considering it is a direct contradiction of it. In the end, Elvis is dead and we are alive, giving him a love that is as big, powerful, and all-encompassing as he was.

He may have cheated the long black Mystery Train in his youth, but in the end, he rode in his own long black limousine.

Andy Warhol: Genius

I believe that Andy Warhol was the last true American genius. He takes his place among the others who saw America in a new and different way that was ultimately visionary and prophetic. These people are few in number but stretch back far in terms of tradition: Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Louis Armstrong, and Martin Luther King, Jr., to name some of who I consider the key members of this elite group.

Andy Warhol takes his place alongside these other people because, like them, he had a complete and unique vision of America -- and it's one that proves truer with every passing year. It is, in a word, Pop. Long before the advent of reality television or up-to-the-second Twitter updates, Warhol envisioned a country that was paradoxically fueled by its emptiness, taking the lowest byproducts of modern mass consumer culture -- advertising imagery and endless reproductions of glamorous pop culture stars -- and elevated it to the level of high art. It was a land in which image is everything, fame is fleeting, and surface is depth. In other words, America as we know it today.

One only needs to walk into a supermarket or turn on the television to see the affects of this. Often when I go by checkout lines or newsstands, I'll think about what a shame it is that Warhol did not live to see what I can see. All over are bright magazines -- celebrity rags like Us, Life & Style, OK!, and Star -- promising up-to-the-minute "news" about the current "It" children of Hollywood, each of which are so overlapping in style and stories that they all just seem to blend into one big magazine with repeating pictures and printed on cheap paper.

Like the New York Dolls reached for a punk audience they knew must be there, Warhol seemed to sense this phenomenon, launching his own celebrity magazine, Interview, to celebrate celebrity with its trademark star-on-star interviews. Last time I checked, Interview was still going along, but it's usually kept with the "lifestyle" magazines as opposed to the celebrity weeklies. It is, for lack of a better word, quaint -- an oversized glossy magazine featuring famous stars interviewed by slightly less famous stars, one man's vision of how the national obsession with celebrity would play out in a future in which everyone becomes famous for 15 minutes.

But there is another thing that separates Interview from the celebrity weeklies: Interview usually focuses on established, glamorous stars who most can agree have some amount of talent, while the weeklies focus on the current pick-of-the-month wild child or self-destructive media whore who often does not seem to have any real talent. In fact, many of them come from reality television -- the other great media in which Warhol's vision plays out every day -- as quasi-famous people appear on disposable reality television shows (some people can remember the members of the first Real World cast, American Idol winner, and Bachelor contestant, but how many can name the second, third, or seventh?) By applying the lowest-common denominator of fame to the reality television participant (that is, that they appeared on television), the celebrity magazine and television show depend upon each other, creating an endless cycle of hype and validation that is most clearly seen on online blogs, where the magazine and television essentially become one instantly and constantly-updated beast.

The most important television shows in America today are its reality shows. I've come to believe that all of America can be measured on a scale with MTV's Jersey Shore at one end and A&E's Hoarders on the other -- young and old, beautiful and ugly, public and private, outdoor and indoor, mindless and probing, comic and tragic, naked and mad, beautiful and damned, muscular and weak, sexy and sterile, alive and dead. They are the benchmarks because they each take the hallmark of American's global identity -- mindless consumerism -- to its two logical extremes: the young and superficial scene-maker whose world proudly revolves around gym, tanning and laundry and divides their time between the beach house, the beaches, and the dance club, and the older and reclusive depressive who has spent decades literally buying everything they can, beyond the point of logic, safety, or sanitation, often in a house that is falling apart all around them. Both add up to the same effect: They are both trainwrecks -- try as you may, you cannot look away.

But perhaps even more importantly, they both are examples of one of Warhol's central maxims that surface could be depth. Describing the desired effect of his groundbreaking multimedia Up-Tight show from 1966, where the Velvet Underground played savage, avant-garde rock and roll at a deafening volume, over which Warhol would project his mind-numbingly boring films of people sleeping or sunlight slowly changing over a building, Warhol explained that "The more you look at the exact same thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel." Emptiness, he seemed to be saying, was not a sin, it was a virtue. And so the mundane became profound, and the trash became beauty.

Driving Warhol's vision was a unification of opposites similar to his emptiness-as-virtue philosophy: The notion that the very lowest culture can be the flipside of the very highest of culture. He first did this with his early Pop paintings of cartoon characters and retail catalogue imagery, which he saw through his signature silkscreen prints of celebrities, wanna-bes, and cultural icons, and even on such late-period activity like when he appeared on an episode of The Love Boat. This paradox has infiltrated virtually every part of our popular culture, from films like Pulp Fiction to television shows like Jersey Shore, musicals like Rent, and virtually the entire sweep of post-modern rock and roll music, which Warhol himself helped to ignite with the Velvet Underground (it would peak a decade later with the Sex Pistols).

But for me, nothing sums up the picture better than the whole "vintage T-shirt" craze of the late '90s and early '00s -- once the first wave of hipsters bought up the best ones in all the thrift stores, places like Urban Outfitters started making new shirts that looked vintage, and the younger hipsters didn't really care about the clothes' levels of authenticity; for them, looks were enough. Every time I walk by a sales rack in a fine clothing store with T-shirts that are made to look aged or jeans that are manufactured with holes, I think of Warhol and wonder what he would say about this.

My guess is he would have nothing to say and so he would say nothing.

Nick Drake, Emily Dickinson, and the Fruit Tree

Somewhere along the line it came to my attention that there is no known footage of Nick Drake performing. I found this surprising, given the amount of respect and importance he seemed to have, but more curious than unthinkable; when I learned the same thing about Big Star -- as I understand it, there is footage of them rehearsing, but it has no sound -- it didn't exactly throw me into a tailspin either.

It wasn't until my buddy Frank leant me a copy of Joe Boyd's killer memoir White Bicycles that I really gave this any serious thought. Boyd was a baby-boomer American, born in Boston and educated at Harvard, who went overseas to become the secret hero of the British underground rock, blues, and folk scenes. He co-founded the legendary UFO club where Pink Floyd and Soft Machine built their legends (Boyd produced Floyd's first single, "Arnold Layne," the wonderfully bizarre tale of a cross-dresser who's sentenced to the chain gang), recorded the original version of Eric Clapton's "Crossroads," produced the Fairport Convention's best records, and managed the Incredible String Band through their influential (though often tumultuous) career.

Oh yeah, and he all but single-handedly discovered and signed Nick Drake to Island Records.

Boyd's book fleshed out the Drake mystique: The tall, quiet child of privilege and learning with tobacco stains on his long fingers, which he used to play intricate folk-picking patterns while singing soft, melancholy melodies of haunting beauty. The songs often employed bizarre time signatures and cryptic tunings that only Drake seemed to know, which led to long, silent pauses between songs when he played for other people. For Boyd, Drake seemed to arrive fully-formed -- for all of his bizarre rhythms and complicated guitar accompaniments, Boyd never recalls Drake ever flubbing a guitar part or losing his way with a vocal; every performance felt full and complete, whether live or in the studio.

Drake's lack of stage banter and prolonged tuning breaks between songs made him a challenging live act, and after playing a few awkward shows to less-than-receptive audiences, he seldom performed live ever again. His was a sheltered, almost secret existence: Boyd produced his first two records, but it was not obvious the best way to flesh out this odd music, and one can hear him reaching for a sound. Employing members of the Fairport Convention and various string arrangers, Drake's first album, 1969's Five Leaves Left, employed a more folk-oriented sound, while his second, 1970's Bryter Layer, was the closest thing he came to rock music. (To my ears, Boyd's production of Drake's "Hazey Jane II" virtually invents Belle and Sebastian's signature fey chamber pop-with-trumpet sound roughly two and a half decades before the fact.)

Drake recorded his best-known and most celebrated album, Pink Moon, in the fall of 1971; this time, he chose to work without Boyd and instead made the album in two two-hour midnight sessions with producer John Wood. His prior albums' struggle with presentation was solved with a simple solution: Apart from a minor piano overdub here and there, Drake simply let his songs stand naked. As Island Records proudly touted in their media campaign, the first they learned of the record was when Drake delivered it to the label; indeed, it seems that no one outside of Drake or Wood (including Boyd) knew about this record until it was finished.

Pink Moon was released in early 1972 with little fanfare, in large part because Drake refused to do any promotion for its release. The one exception was that he agreed to do an interview for Sounds Magazine; it was the only one published in his lifetime (and one of the few contemporary press articles about his career, period). But Pink Moon failed to sell very many copies. In fact, compared with Five Leaves Left and Bryter Layer before it, Pink Moon sold the poorest of his studio albums -- none of which sold more than 5,000 copies upon their initial release.

In the months around the release of Pink Moon, Drake grew increasingly withdrawn and depressed. He suffered a nervous breakdown, moved back home with his parents, and the only income he received was a 20-pound weekly stipend from Island Records. He would disappear for days and show up randomly at friends' houses, stay a few days and be uncommunicative, and then leave just as suddenly as he came. Sometimes he drove his parents' car around until he ran out of gas. His appearance became increasingly disheveled and he acted in moody ways that worried his friends and family.

In the fall of 1974, he contacted Boyd and Wood to make a fourth album, but Drake's health had deteriorated to the point where he literally could not sing and play guitar at the same time. His personality was also much more unstable and he lashed out at Boyd for his lack of fame. The sessions collapsed after only four songs were recorded.

In November, Drake died of an overdose of antidepressants at the age of 26. The authorities concluded it was a suicide, but no note was ever found and many suspect it was accidental. Boyd, for one, claims that Drake was feeling better in the weeks leading up to his death and imagines that he took the drugs in a last-ditch effort to rid himself of all of the depression that plagued him. It's a tempting theory, but I'm not convinced. Drake had serious anxiety and depression issues, and it is not uncommon for a suicidal person to appear happier in the time just before their death because their decision to kill themselves has given them relief. Like so many other famous musicians' deaths, we'll likely never know the whole truth.

But Nick Drake was not a famous musician. He was a frustrated musician who sold only a minimal amount of records and was virtually unknown outside of a small network of British folk musicians and enthusiasts. But as what often happens with great artists, their work eventually finds an audience beyond anything they experienced in their lifetime. I for one first discovered Nick Drake the way that most people in my generation did: from the title track of Pink Moon being used in a BMW commercial. That perked my ears up and after reading several glowing reviews, I grabbed a copy. At first I found it a little dry, but then, after hearing it repeatedly while spilling late-night secrets in a coed's freshman dorm room, its subtle grace grew on me and I at last got the hype. Boyd's book inspired me to buy the rest of the catalog (I'm a sucker for short, condensed, and high-quality bodies of work) and fill in the cracks of my knowledge of him.

And yet, like so many other people who can call themselves fans of his music, listening to Nick Drake makes me feel more than just a little bit perplexed. I'm the first to admit that a large part of his draw for me is the romanticism surrounding his mystique and I make no effort to try and separate the myth from the music. (Indeed, similar mystiques around Robert Johnson and Jeff Buckley have drawn me into their bodies of music, and my life has been all the more richer for it.)

But Nick Drake's music demands more from us, if only because his existence was that much more isolated and the rediscovery of his music has proven it to be that much more striking and brilliant. His voice is just too pure, his guitar work just too precise to be believed. And yet, he plays the role of a ready-made martyr with his songs that obsess over fame and brood about death. For someone so keen on reaching music immortality, he sang as though he was already dead.

More than any other popular musician of the rock and roll era, Drake sounded completely out of his time; the only other music figures that come close are yodeling minstrel singer Emmett Miller from the late '20s and early '30s and outsider indie-trailblazers the Shaggs, a trio of girls whose bizarre sing-songy melodies and matching guitar lines -- not to mention the drums that keep an entirely random time than the song they're playing -- have to be heard to be believed. But neither can hold a candle to Drake because he has them beat in two major categories: Drake is immensely popular and well-known (nowadays, anyway) and he was prophetic enough to live out the greater story his songs implied.

For one thing that you hear about Drake again and again is how he didn't sound like anyone else. His music doesn't really exist in a greater context, it outright defies any greater context that tries to present itself -- just try to listen to Five Leaves Left alongside other albums released that year: The Beatles' Abbey Road, the Rolling Stones' Let It Bleed, the Who's Tommy, the Band's self-titled "Brown Album." What is so remarkable about Nick Drake is that, unlike other albums released that year, his music isn't a defiant reaction to what's going on (like the Stooges' self-titled debut), a mockery of it (like Frank Zappa's Uncle Meat), a way out of it (Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band's Trout Mask Replica), or attempt to come to terms with it (Elvis Presley's From Elvis in Memphis). It is instead something that exists entirely outside of this music, on its own terms and in its own time.

All of this has led me to believe that in order to find an accurate and worthy parallel for Nick Drake, we must look beyond the world of popular music and into the realm of literature, where we find Emily Dickinson. Both are utterly unique in their respective creative fields, defying categorization with a singular, forward-looking vision. Both worked in virtual self-exile, moody, depressive, and cut off from the world, despite a privileged background and the support of family. And both worked secretly, pondering nature, death, and fame to an audience in their heads that would not exist in real life until decades after their deaths.

Dickinson of course is the more extreme of the two, rarely leaving her room for the majority of her creative life, and being so secretive that her family was surprised to find the neat bundles of the hundreds of poems she left behind. She lived her life like a phantom -- leaving us only one known photograph (although some people believe there is a second, although it hasn't been officially authenticated) and publishing only a couple of poems, anonymously and with severe edits, in her lifetime. Before long, the mystique becomes more real than the person it surrounds.

Music historian and critic Ian MacDonald (who himself committed suicide a few years back) writes in a lovely essay about Drake how fans born after Drake's death cannot believe that MacDonald met him when Drake played him and his friends a few songs in his college dorm room. MacDonald claims his latter-day fans asked if Drake could walk on water, shocked that anyone could have actually known someone whose life is so defined by their death. It challenges the senses and attempts to make the surreal real; I felt a similar way when I learned that a friend went to a party where a young Jeff Buckley was hanging around after a show, walking around randomly and plunking a two-string ukelele. And many Drake revisionists (at least some of who are his friends and former classmates) argue against the dour portrayal that's grown around his music and insist that he was outgoing and somewhat of a prankster. But of course, the actual historical record is mighty thin.

Which brings us back to where we began: There is no known footage of Nick Drake performing. The only known film of Drake is private family movies from when he was a child, and that's it. There is one phone interview I've heard online, but the sound quality is so poor (and Drake's voice is so quiet, as everyone always said it was) that I can hardly make out any of it. He left us no real personal writing or memoirs, no signed glossy pictures, not even any confirmed lovers. All we have of him are three LPs worth of music, all of it excellent, and some demos, outtakes, rehearsals, and various odds-and-ends that have been regularly reissued since his rediscovery. And that's about it.

What ultimately ties Nick Drake and Emily Dickinson together for me, then, is the unanswerable riddle of how they viewed themselves. Both were serious artists who spent years perfecting their craft, yet led such secret existences in which death was the only path to fame. Is this because death is safer than fame? One can spend their entire lives striving for fame, only to fail at achieving it again and again. But death -- once you get death in the picture, everything shifts; it puts a final cap on things that throws your chance at immortality into the hands of fate. Maybe you'll get famous, maybe you won't, but once you're dead it's entirely out of your hands.

As I already mentioned, both Drake and Dickinson explicitly dealt with fame in their art. Drake did so towards the end of his debut album in the song "Fruit Tree":

Fame is but a fruit tree

So very unsound

It can never flourish

'Till its stalk is in the ground

For Drake, it seems that the only element that could be considered essential to the creation of fame is time -- time to develop, time to gain popularity, time to prove one's own cultural or historical relevance.

Meanwhile, Dickinson characteristically summed up the whole concept of fame in twelve words of brevity, wit, and grace:

Fame's Boys and Girls, who never die

And are too seldom born --

The way she puts death before birth makes it feel backwards; the way she ends it with a dash instead of a predicate makes it feel incomplete. It gives the poem a sense of tension, a gasp of air that is never released, a tune that is never resolved. Fame is fundamentally incomplete, Dickinson seems to be implying on one level -- in order to be a true immortal, one must keep up their fame and posterity long after they have died, which would require some greater knowledge beyond what we know in this world.

Perhaps this is why Nick Drake envisioned fame as a Fruit Tree: It represented forbidden knowledge, tempted by the Devil and beyond what any human mind should be able to grasp. Death, on the other hand, is well within the human grasp, and if we are to believe that Drake's death was a suicide, one cannot help but wonder whether after admitting defeat in the face of fame, he saw death as the only alternative.

His music certainly sounded like he did.