Last Thoughts on Levon Helm, 1940-2012.

Over the years, Levon Helm was many things and he cropped up in many places: He was a rock and roll legend with a revitalized career who hosted group jams that anyone could sit in on; he was the abusive coal mining father to Sissy Spacek’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Loretta Lynn in Coal Miner’s Daughter; he was the down-home southern narrator to the wonderful (and now-forgotten) documentary Elvis ’56; and, of course, he was the drummer and often lead vocalist for the Band.

I found out about the Band the same way that most people in my generation did: From my parents’ vinyl collection. Their self-titled “Brown Album” was the one my parents had, and as a result, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” was the first song of theirs I remember hearing. Which means that, like so many others, my first encounter with the Band was with Levon’s voice. And I don’t think I would’ve wanted it any other way.

“The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” was Levon’s song, but as is usually the case with the Band, nothing is quite that simple. A true collaborative group, their best music, found on their first two albums, was written as a team, less like a baseball or football team than a team of great storytellers swapping tales like gamblers in the back of the saloon, trying to outdo each other while still contributing something essential to the whole. There was a lot going on, but none of it ever felt forced or unnecessary. And as the drummer, Levon is the one who anchored it all.

Greil Marcus once famously described the Band as four Canadians held together by an Arkansas drummer, and that hit the nail on the head. The Band had always been Levon's band – he was its senior member and the one who kept it going between their celebrated stints with Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan as Levon and the Hawks – and he was the only one in this archetypal Americana band who was actually American.

And appropriately, it was in the heart of the South, with Levon, that the Band’s story began. Recruited by local B-level rockabilly singer Ronnie Hawkins as a drummer for his backing band the Hawks, Levon went to Canada with them in the early ’60s, where there was still an audience for authentic rough-and-tumble American rockabilly. Over the months, as Levon’s fellow Hawks quit, gave up, or went back home, they were replaced, one-by-one, by local Canadian boys. Before long, Levon found himself to be the sole yankee, surrounded by guitarist Robbie Robertson, bassist Rick Danko, pianist Richard Manuel, and organist Garth Hudson. Eventually Levon even outlasted Hawkins himself, taking the group back to the states where they played an endless string of clubs, pubs, and dives.

It was at one of these places, the Peppermint Club in New York City, where they first hooked up with Bob Dylan. At the time, Dylan was looking for a band to lead for his first electric tour and the Band was looking to have a set professional gig. It was a match in proverbial rock and roll heaven. That was loud. Very, very loud.

But the ensuing tour proved to be one of the most controversial events of rock and roll history, as audiences often jeered and rejected this new electric incarnation of Dylan. Lines were drawn between the audience and the performers, and the concerts often played out like a war in sound and fury. Levon, for one, grew disenchanted – he said he didn’t play music to get booed – and sat out for most of the tour (including the legendary “Royal Albert Hall” concert where someone shouted “Judas!” to Dylan), literally jumping ship to work on an army boat for a string of months before reconnecting with the group on the other side in the summer and fall of 1967, where they were recording the loose, weird music now known as Dylan and the Band’s “Basement Tapes.”

Everyone took turns playing drums in Levon’s absence, with Manuel doing it the most regularly. Levon always maintained that Manuel was the better drummer anyway, and when he rejoined, he initially only contributed mandolin. But as their basement recordings found their way out onto bootleg records and demo tapes for other artists, the Band’s reputation grew in stature, and they were able to land a lucrative deal with Capitol Records, releasing their first two albums, Music from the Big Pink and the self-titled “Brown Album,” in 1968 and 1969.

They were among the finest and most influential records in rock and roll history. In retrospect, the Band mark the point at which the passing whims of current rock fads – “British invasion rock,” “folk rock,” “psychedelic rock,” and the rest – give way to what we now think of as “classic rock,” a rootsy, back-to-basics organic sound that the Band pioneered. Music from the Big Pink was released on July 1, 1968; by December, the Rolling Stones had officially abandoned their psychedelic misadventure with the back-to-basics Beggars Banquet, which featured gritty hits like “Street Fighting Man” and “Sympathy for the Devil,” while the Beatles planned their grand back-to-basics project, which became the Let It Be album and film, early the following year. George Harrison sang the Band’s praises and envied their teamwork, while Eric Clapton left Cream upon hearing the Band, secretly wishing they would ask him to join them when he first met them.

By abandoning pretentions and consciously shunning any modern passing fancies, the Band paradoxically found themselves at the center of all that was hip and innovative in rock and roll. Not that they had the chart hits to go along with it. Music from the Big Pink only hit #30 on the album charts while its accompanying single, “The Weight,” only made #63, perhaps putting them behind only the Velvet Underground for the decade’s most influential music that translated to the least amount of popular sales. But when they got ready to release their next album, it was seen as enough of an event that they were featured on the cover of Time Magazine.

And to my ears, that sophomore album, The Band, is their masterpiece. It plays like a rock and roll version of the Great American Novel, an utterly timeless, seemingly all-encompassing signature achievement.

The album has pop and rock, blues and country, high-mountain yodeling and middle-of-the-ocean sea-shanties, and down-home rag music, like “Rag Mama Rag,” which Levon doesn’t so much sing as he does unleash a nineteenth-century equivalent of a wall of sound, voices shouting, violins searing, pianos banging, drums collapsing upon themselves, and a tuba churning underneath it all, as one pictures whatever the wagon train pioneers did at night in the place of a rave.

The album has guitars and fiddles, pianos and organs, drums and horns, and what sounds like a giant radioactive Jew harp (actually Hudson’s organ run through a wah-wah pedal), which churns under “Up on Cripple Creek,” at #25 the biggest hit the Band would ever have, sung with gleeful abandon by Levon, as he adds his natural charm to a tall-tale of love caught on the sly, until it becomes the Band’s funkiest – and sexiest – song. It also is the rare song that both alludes to other music (seven perfect words: “We had Spike Jones on the box”) and is alluded to in other music (The Beastie Boys’ lifting “I bet on one horse to win, and another to show” for their Paul’s Boutique), which of course only strengthens the chain on either side, as well as within itself.

The album has songs about old men and part-time lovers, unfaithful servants and union members, women hiding guns and men who are thieves (and dig it), wild storm warnings and lonesome pines, and transcending it all is Virgil Caine, a Confederate Army veteran who loves the land he was born on and has seen it at its best and at its worst, and sings short lines that encompass long passages of time, until he becomes noble, or like a ghost with nothing left to do but tell his story to himself, which is to say, to anyone listening, to us.

It is Levon’s – and arguably the Band’s – finest performance. Robertson had written “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” for Levon, tapping into Levon’s knowledge about the sights, sounds, and feelings of the Civil War and spinning them into lyrics that resonate like few other depictions of the event. “In the winter of ’65,” Levon sings at one point, not so much destitute as he is merely reciting facts that have long since dulled his saga until they feel blank, “We were hungry, just barely alive.”

As he sung it, I wonder if Levon didn’t think back to the winter of 1965, when he had freshly left Dylan and the Band to strike out on his own on the army boat, and how lonesome he may have felt without his musical comrades around him; he certainly found his way back all right. I also wonder how many other people listening to the song in 1969 assumed it was referring the winter of 1965, and thought back to their own recent past, which, only four years later, must have seemed quite distant in its own right.

But make no mistake, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is about 1865, and the fall of the South in the Civil War, and America, and so much more. It’s said that our modern-day interpretation of the Civil War as a “brother against brother” conflict is a fairytale we tell ourselves because it was actually a failed second revolution to free the slaves, which imploded in the Reconstruction era, a time that we’d much rather skip over altogether than even bother to make up a fairytale about. African American slaves got their freedom, but at what cost? The sharecropping system and our country’s sense of integrity. Is it any wonder we’d rather think about a strapping white guy with a mustache dressed in blue shaking hands with a strapping white guy with a mustache dressed in gray?

As a cultural artifact, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” is near bottomless. It demonstrates the “brother against brother” myth by taking the perspective of a southerner to elicit northern sympathy (as was done in countless Civil War artifacts, from – yikes! – Birth of a Nation on down through The General and Gone With the Wind), for, by tapping into that quiet sense of forlornness, it allows the northerner to put themselves into the southerner’s boots and understand their pain, if only for a moment, because as their once and future countryman, only they can truly know it. Just as we can only hate someone that we once loved, so too can we only love someone that we once hated.

In this way, every gesture in the song, no matter how small, becomes enormous. A yankee lays Virgil’s brother in his grave; Virgil’s wife calls for him to come quick and watch Robert E. Lee go by; Virgil is reduced to hunger and chopping wood with worthless confederate bills in his pocket. Each moment in the song is entirely imagined and yet entirely real, an idea about a time trapped in a time, a color picture of a black-and-white photograph.

And holding it all together from both ends is, of course, Levon: His vocals are what imbue the song with such richness, his drumming is what turns it from a march to a funeral to a wistful sing-a-long in a matter of seconds. Levon always liked hunting through old instrument shops when working on an album, and just before recording The Band, he stumbled upon an old wooden drumset that he purchased and used on the record. I suppose they were used on the entire album, but I feel like I can most clearly hear them on “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” It makes sense that these wooden drums that hold the beat because the music sounds so rustic, so sturdy, like it was made out of old hickory like Andy Jackson.

And with his smooth drawl and his mischievous grin, Levon Helm was the perfect person to sit behind them and tell the tale that he never lived but somehow always knew.

The Titanic at 100.

At this exact moment – 11:40 PM, April 14 – exactly 100 years ago, the Titanic struck the iceberg…and the modern world began.

I commemorated this event, as I had been planning to do all year, by watching A Night to Remember – a “real” Titanic movie, as I told my wife, as opposed to the dreck that James Cameron’s great-grandchildren can live off of until the Titanic’s 300^th anniversary. We watched the movie (my apologies, I mean film) and were both moved and amazed, but as we talked about the events it portrayed, we kept going back to the Cameron film. Love it or hate it, like the Titanic itself, it had become an impenetrable fact.

Ironically, A Night to Remember was originally made as a response to an over-the-top Hollywood smash called Titanic. This was the 1953 Clifton Webb film Titanic that everyone thinks they mean when they see A Night to Remember but are deeply mistaken. I remember watching the 1953 Titanic on TV with my grandmother back in the Reagan administration and watching all of the cleanly-scrubbed men go down on the ship singing “Nearer My God to Thee” in brave unison. It was on that day that I learned the concept of “women and children first,” which was a foreign notion to my post-feminism upbringing, but I digress.

When A Night to Remember was made five years after the 1953 Titanic, its makers strove to make their film everything that the earlier film was not, which is to say, they strove for that elusive beast of “authenticity” over story. As much as possible, things were based on personal testimony, and any one lead character or storyline was sacrificed for a constantly shifting ensemble narrative that in some respects was closer to a documentary than a romantic epic. It is strange to think that the film was made only about 45 years after the initial tragedy, which is as far away from its day as the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club was from the time that I write this. And I grew up on that album. That record was part of my parents – and in turn, our – lives.

This firsthand approach must be what gives A Night to Remember its excitement and energy; I literally spent the entire second half of the movie waiting “just two more minutes” before getting up to refill my water glass because the idea of pausing the film didn’t cross my mind as a possibility.

My wife pointed out the one major aspect of the film that is not accurate – the boat doesn’t split in two when it sinks, because nobody would realize that until Alvin the submarine (named after a chipmunk created for a novelty Christmas song the same year that A Night to Remember was released, but I digress) stumbled upon it in the mid-’80s, finally pinning its exact location down after some 70-odd years and correcting the story of how it sunk.

One feels like James Cameron must’ve began sketching out the storyboards to his 1997 Titanic the minute this discovery was made in an effort to make a perfect “unsinkable” film about the boat. He had the one thing that previous filmmakers did not: The hindsight of history.

I’ve only seen the Cameron Titanic once – I initially boycotted it as I do most films that present themselves as The Greatest Thing Ever (hence I still have yet to see a Lord of the Rings movie) – but I relented when they were showing it for free while I was in college. I must’ve had absolutely no homework left to do that night.

At any rate, I finally saw it and found it to be one of the funniest movies I’d seen in a long time (my favorite bit of dialogue being where Rose tells the ship’s architect she knows what was troubling him because she could see the iceberg in his eyes), down through to the drawn-out, ridiculous finale. I felt bad for the main character, I thought during it’s second half: The boat. What a beautiful boat, and amazing visual effects achievement, and now it’s wrecked and gone.

It wasn’t until recently that I figured out what it was about the Cameron Titanic that made it tick: It was a movie disguised as a film for teenage girls who thought that they were experiencing a film that was really a movie; in this regard, it was the cinematic equivalent of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind – it seems like such “adult” stuff when approached in adolescence, but pretty quickly it reveals itself to be kinda dumb once one experiences the onset of adulthood.

That, and I couldn’t get past the fact that, if the movie was supposed to take place in 1997, the “old Rose” character would’ve had to have been around 120 years old. Maybe that’s a technical gripe, but all Cameron had to do was set the movie in the mid-’80s – and you could do that by setting the story around the ship’s rediscovery that revealed where it actually was – and get a much tighter, more realistic film. Oh wait, I mean movie.

But at the root of all of the things the Titanic story can tell us about nature, technology, and class, it remains the simplest story imaginable: Man builds machine, flies too close to the sun, and pays the hefty price. The fact it was also the first “modern” media event only cemented it in our collective unconscious, seeming much more immediate than, say, World War I, which was much bigger, costlier, and more important.

I used to have a professor who said that historical films tell you more about the time in which they were made than the time they try to depict, and somehow I feel like that’s relevant when thinking about the Titanic. Only, somehow, it feels as though it’s the Titanic that has stayed the same and we who have changed, challenging us to measure ourselves up against its burden.

It is this element that keeps the story fresh and fascinating, and bigger than ourselves, yet eerily intimate. In other words, it’s a story that reminds us what it means to be human.

Last Thoughts on the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1771 – 2012.

Earlier this month, I happened to catch an obituary of sorts that largely slipped by the general public: After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was going to stop its publication. Perhaps it was a reflection of the Britannica as an anachronism that the mainstream press paid this little mind. But I found this intriguing, and worth considering.

It is strange to think of the concept of an encyclopedia as novel, but in 1771, the title page of the first three-volume edition announced its purpose: “Encyclopaedia Britannica; OR, A DICTIONARY OF ARTS and SCIENCES, COMPILED UPON A NEW PLAN. In WHICH The different SCIENCES and ARTS are digested into distinct treaties or systems; AND The various TECHNICAL TERMS, &c., are explained as they occur in the order of the Alphabet.”

Cue the trumpets.

The Encyclopaedia Britannica quickly became the center of its field; George Washington owned a set. By the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, it was in its fourth edition at 20 volumes; by the time the Statue of Liberty went up, it was in its historic ninth edition at 24 volumes, which marked the peak of its scholarly sophistication; by the time the Titanic sunk, it was in its eleventh edition, at 28 volumes, which was the first time the volumes were published largely simultaneously (as opposed to serially); by the time Franklin Roosevelt said that “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” it was in its fourteenth edition at 23 volumes, in which the editors tried to simplify and edit the language for a greater (read: American) audience. This edition also saw the beginning of “continual revision” to ensure that it would never go out-of-date.

And by the time of the Watergate scandal, The Encyclopaedia Britannica was in its fifteenth edition, which was now published as a 12-volume Micropaedia of short articles and a 17-volume Macropaedia of long ones, depending on whether the reader wanted an overview or an in-depth article. It was still publishing in this model by 2010, the date of what would be its final print edition. It was 32 volumes and 129 pounds at the time of death, with a price-tag of $1395. But with only 8,000 copies of the 2010 edition sold, and an additional 4,000 sitting in a warehouse, the Encyclopaedia Britannica died of old age, neglect, and disuse.

It’s easy to see why – ever since Aristole set out to collect all of human knowledge into one set of writing, there’s been a human compulsion to gather all knowledge possible in one place for reference. Knowledge is power, and, not coincidentally, the apple of Man’s fall. To truly be able to gather it all for mass consumption would be both the Holy Ark of the Covenant and Pandora’s Box.

Until a few weeks ago, the Encyclopaedia Britannica was the oldest continual holdout of this romantic notion to gather all information in one place; tellingly, it was when the series transferred from the Old World to the New World at the turn of the 20th Century that the articles got shorter and things began to get cut. Although it would technically reach its peak sale in 1990 (120,000 sets in the United States), it would quickly fall victim to the onslaught of the digital age. And then, as we all know, being able to use a computer allows you to have all of the human knowledge at your fingertips, at least in theory.

It is truly the end of an era, when the big and bulky bounded volume gives way to the tiny and weightless computer article. Of course, Encyclopaedia Britannica pitches that they are staying modern and effective by transferring their work to an online edition, to which one can subscribe for $70 a year.

It probably would bring things full-circle to now use the new online Encyclopaedia Britannica to research the old print Encyclopaedia Britannica, only I wouldn’t know.

I got all of my information for this article from Wikipedia for free.

On Nora Guthrie, Woody Guthrie, & the Walking Woody Guthrie Jukebox.

When I went to see Nora Guthrie speak about her father Woody this afternoon, she began describing her father’s legacy with a little story about him going to New York City for the first time in the early spring of 1940.

“On the first night he was there, he wrote a song called ‘Government Road,’” she began. “On the second night, he wrote a song called ‘Jesus Christ.’ On the third night, he wrote a song called ‘This Land Is Your Land.’ And on the fourth night, he wrote a song about women’s hats.”

“And I think that,” she said proudly, “says it all: Politics, spirituality, America, and women.” It’s true – Woody’s mind was as far-reaching and all-encompassing as the pastures of plenty he famously sang about. It made me think of Andy Warhol’s “Pop idea,” which he would articulate some two decades after Woody’s trip to New York City that “anyone could do anything – so naturally, we were trying to it all.”

In fact, Nora Guthrie practically paraphrased Warhol’s words, explaining how she felt society was all about focus, focus, focus. She felt that her father was a man who didn’t worry about focus. He simply did whatever he wanted – writing stories, drawing, and playing music. He was a sort of Tom Joad/Renaissance Man.

The cruel irony was that, by the time Nora Guthrie was old enough to have memories of her father, he was already suffering from Huntington’s Disease. Her role to her father was one of a caretaker. Because of the disease, Woody could not control his limbs and it was very difficult for him to speak, and when he did, it wasn’t about Communism or fascism, it was usually to ask for food or drink. When your body is uncontrollably shaking and twitching, she explained, you are constantly burning calories.

There was music all around when she was growing up, she remembered, just none of it came from her father. She recalled the likes of Bob Dylan and Phil Ochs coming to the house to visit with Woody and the family, and when they did, his requests were always the same: Woody wanted to hear his own music. I had always read this, and took this as some reflection of Woody’s self-importance (there’s the legend that when Woody heard one of Dylan’s earliest compositions, he said that Dylan wasn’t much of a songwriter, but he had a great singing voice). Maybe so, but Nora had a different spin on things. She saw it her father’s confirmation that his music would live on, that he had started something that would outlive him and everyone else.

Not everyone got this. But people like Bob Dylan did. “When you came to see my father,” Nora explained, “you came to serve him. It wasn’t a question of what he could do for you. It was a question of what you could bring to him. And usually, that was a chance to hear his own music.”

It is unclear just how much, if any, of Woody Guthrie owned of his own records. I should’ve asked, but didn’t think to. And we know that he was too sick to play guitar or sing his own music. So when a kid came along like Bob Dylan, who was basically a walking Woody Guthrie jukebox, it only makes sense that Woody wanted his own music to be played.

For, unlike people today, Woody Guthrie had no iPod. But he had a Bob Dylan. Which is much cooler. An iPod can play back and preserve your songs, true, but a Bob Dylan can do all of that, plus take influence from it to form his own music, and in turn inspire others to do the same.

I, for one, would love to go back in time and listen in on some of the afternoons where a young Dylan was playing for his idol, but I can’t – I know of no known recordings of it.

But maybe that’s all the more appropriate.

Last Thoughts on Davy Jones, 1945 – 2012.

Davy Jones is dead.

That makes him the first Monkee dead, which is a bit surreal – especially since the smart money was always on Peter.

Davy was once and always “The Cute One,” the one who most drew you into the group when you were a kid, only to become the one you most reviled once you decided the Monkees were a sham.

I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV until they started rerunning The Monkees (they pioneered the music video, remember?!) and, like most kids, I was instantly hooked. Also like most kids, Davy was my favorite. Perhaps it was because he was the cutest, or the shortest, or the most innocent (Mickey was frantic in a way that was often over your head, Mike was the hipster’s cult-hero-in-waiting, and Peter was the one who never quite fit in that nobody seemed to favor), but Davy was always the most kid-like and therefore the easiest for a kid to like; when I took the opening theme song at its word and believed that the Monkees would maybe come to my town (I always pictured them coming straight to my house and ringing my doorbell – I was a very smart kid), it was Davy who I most looked forward to hanging out with.

But then, somewhere down the line, as what happens to every young Monkees fan, you run into someone who tells you that the Monkees were not a real band and did not play their own instruments. Instantly, as the Monkees fall apart in your psyche, it’s Davy who’s at the epicenter of it all. Given his cute looks and nondescript role in the band, Davy smacks of the industry suits’ intent to get a pretty teen idol in front no matter what, even if it turned out that the drummer had the better voice for most of the songs, and Davy was often left stranded in front banging away on his tambourine and maracas while singing backup. His role was the equivalent of the guitarist’s girlfriend, or worse yet, the girl the guitarist felt like he needed to string along. Even in the Archies, Veronica played the electric piano; it was Betty who was left uselessly in front, hitting the tambourine.

Davy was an outsider in an outsider’s culture. He was a Brit amongst Americans, a song-and-dance man amongst rockers. Tellingly, his first appearance on national television was on the Beatles’ legendary American debut on The Ed Sullivan Show, in which Davy appeared later on in the episode as the Artful Dodger in a UK production of Oliver Twist. When the industry suits set out to create the Monkees two years later, it was Davy, with his Paul McCartney-esque cute looks and British Invasion accent, who was the clearest link between the Monkees and the Beatles.

Furthermore, given his stage background, Davy always seemed the most game to go along with whatever the industry suits wanted. When producer Don Kirshner promised Neil Diamond the A-side of the Monkees’ next single after his “I’m a Believer” was a #1 hit, it was Davy who they brought in to sing it, and released “A Little Bit Me, A Little Bit You” as a single without the group’s consent. (The Monkees wanted the Mike-penned, Micky-sung “Girl That I Knew Somewhere” as the next single; it eventually became the single’s B-side.)

This move, coupled with Kirsher releasing the Monkees’ second album, More of the Monkees, without any input from the band (they were especially pissed about the cover shot used, which was from a photo shoot advertising JC Penny shirts), brought things in Monkeedom to a head. When Kirsher met with the group to award them big checks for their success, he was blindsided to have the group turn on him, with Mike infamously punching a hole through the wall and threatening to Kirsher that it could have been his face. When Kirshner retold the story years later, he was quick to add that the only Monkee to ever give him any thanks or appreciation in all of this was Davy.

Yes, Davy was in the most complicated spot of the Monkees, carving out an existence suspended between the independence his bandmates sought and the strings that kept them tied to the industry suits who ultimately controlled them. I give Davy credit though, for as much as he was able to understand and work with the industry suits in a way his bandmates could not, he was also able to put his all into the band’s increasingly independent projects. If you watch their ill-fated movie Head, which you definitely should if you never have – it’s easily the most underrated rock and roll film of all-time and I’m not joking – you would never know that Davy was any less inclined than the others to piss all over their prefabricated image. He kisses Annette Funicello and takes a beating from Sonny Liston with the same earnestness as the others blow up Coke machines and get shot in war trenches, or freefall as pieces of dandruff from Victor Mature’s hair. (Hey, it was the ’60s, man.)

Perhaps for his ability to walk the line between the industry suits and his bandmates, fate rewarded Davy with the biggest gift of all: He got to sing the Monkees’ biggest and most natural hit, “Daydream Believer.” When you broke the song down, there was nothing in it that should have worked – it was a “hippie” song written by professional songwriters, an AM pop song with FM lyrics, a psychedelic excursion into showtune-style whimsy with strings – but then again, great pop music was never meant for the microscope. Yes, “Cheer up, sleepy Jean” probably doesn’t mean anything to a homecoming queen other than a weak fill for a stupid rhyme, but when you turned it up on a transistor radio or car stereo, “Daydream Believer” somehow all sounded just right.

And leading the way between rock and pop, industry and artistry, and success and failure was none other than Davy Jones, who sang the song with an earnestness that was void of any irony and filled with an understanding of the beauty of pop for pop’s sake.

An Open Letter to The Academy

Dear The Academy,

I enjoy a little Oscar curveball just as much as the next guy, so when what’s-his-name from The Artist beat out George Clooney and Brad Pitt for Best Actor, I was cool with it. Especially since it makes another year that Brad Pitt does not have an Oscar. (I don’t think that Brad Pitt should get any closer to an Oscar than picking up Angelina’s every time one of their 17 children knock it over, but I digress.) So thanks, I owe you one.

But then giving Meryl Streep Best Actress over Viola Davis?! That was simply too much. I think this will go down as a colossal mistake, on par with giving Crash Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain and Shakespeare in Love Best Picture over Saving Private Ryan. Now granted, with totally awesome wins from non-shoe-ins like Sean Penn in Milk, Marion Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, and Marcia Gay Harden in Pollock, I’ve been working on borrowed time for quite a while now. But this is how you even the score? By taking it away from Viola Davis? I just can’t believe it.

It’s like, okay, I get it, Meryl Streep’s such a great actress she gives the illusion of always winning Oscars, even though everyone seems to forget that before last night she hadn’t won one for a film since 1982. Yes, that was already her second Oscar, but a lot has happened between now and 1982; I should know, my wife was born in 1982.

But even still, taking the Oscar from Viola Davis just feels like highway robbery. Davis had already proven her mesmerizing ability as an actress in Doubt, where she held her own against an amazing cast (including an actress named Meryl something-or-other), and earned her first Oscar nomination, even though she was in the film for like 53 seconds. In The Help, she proved that her work in Doubt was no fluke, as she held the entire film together with one of the richest performances I’ve seen in a long, long time.

So how are we gonna make this right, The Academy? I don’t want to see Viola Davis fall victim to the Fonda/Newman curse of getting a long-overdue “honorary” Oscar, only to win a competitive Oscar the following year for some third-rate tearjerker or stupid remake (I’m looking at you, On Golden Pond and The Color of Money).

But perhaps you, The Academy, are merely the symptom but not the disease. We all know that Meryl Streep will get nominated again and may even win again, especially since there are about 15 dialects out there she’s yet to tackle. But Viola Davis? Part of the reason why I feel so burned by her loss is that I’m not confident she will have a role as rich and captivating as her character in The Help; there are simply not enough parts for African American women to shine as she was able to. Perhaps the problem, then, is not just with The Academy, but rather the entire motion picture industry.

Still, The Academy, we do have to make sure Viola Davis gets an Oscar soon. Your history is littered by next-year default Oscars, from Jimmy Stewart (lost for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939, won for The Philadelphia Story in 1940) on down through Renee Zellweger (lost for Chicago in 2002, won for Cold Mountain in 2003, in large part because Nicole Kidman was getting her next-year default in 2002 for The Hours after losing in 2001 for Moulin Rouge!, but I digress). So hopefully Viola Davis will be given her moment to shine, perhaps even as early as next year, although I’m not counting on it.

But let the record show I would do almost anything to make sure that Viola Davis wins an Oscar as soon as possible. I’d even let Brad Pitt win one.

Hugs & Kisses,

Eric.

The Only Girl I’ve Ever Loved: “Holland, 1945” & The Dead Girl Song Tradition

It sounds like a question from a demented Muppet parallel universe: Why are there so many songs about dead girls?

Its origins came down through those old, weird murder ballads like “Ommie Wise” and “Pretty Polly,” which were basically the dime-store pulp novel of the Middle Ages. Then you had country weepers like Roy Acuff’s “Jewel of Heaven” and hard blues like Son House’s “Death Letter Blues,” which mixed together to make music like Elvis Presley’s “Mystery Train,” a strange song about a lover’s corpse on a train that many believe is his finest record (I still hold that it’s “Long Black Limousine” – see earlier posting – about a lover’s corpse in an automobile). And then come those early-’60s death-as-kitsch car-crash records like J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers’ “Last Kiss,” Mark Dinning’s “Teen Angel,” and Jan & Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve.” Before long, there’s any number of Roy Orbison’s doom-struck ballads, the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It, Black,” and Bob Dylan’s “Visions of Johanna,” depending on how far you were willing to take them.

From thereon, we get variations on a theme. The Beatles sing of departed spinsters (“Eleanor Rigby”) and their deceased mothers (“Julia,” “Let It Be”); Neil Young sings about killing the girl himself (“Down by the River”) and the Clash run with it a few years later (“I Fought the Law”); Elton John sings of a famous dead woman (“Candle in the Wind”); Jimi Hendrix sings about meeting a girl who is already dead and his plans to join her (“Angel”); Joy Division witness a girl die from a seizure (“She’s Lost Control”); the Smiths’ say goodbye to a girlfriend in a coma (“Girlfriend in a Coma”); and Don McLean finds a muse in a girl who sang the blues (“American Pie”).

And Randy Newman takes the cake as only he knows how, with a song about a girl getting killed by a beach-cleaning machine while still dressed in her high school graduation gown (“Lucinda”) – and somehow makes it work seamlessly.

The angst of the ’90s was the natural home for a revival in dead girl rock and roll, with the scene overrun by meekly raw singers spinning twisted tales of love and death. Kurt Cobain was the one who took it the farthest. Just consider “Heart Shaped Box,” inspired by a documentary about children who were dying of cancer. “I wish I could eat your cancer well,” indeed. Meanwhile, Pearl Jam unintentionally brought things full-circle when their cover of J. Frank Wilson and the Cavaliers’ “Last Kiss” was leaked onto the radio in 1999 and eventually hit #2 on the charts, the biggest hit of their career.

But one year before Pearl Jam’s biggest hit came what may be the ultimate dead girl rock and roll experience: Neutral Milk Hotel’s 1998 masterpiece, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. Time is showing it to be one of the finest and most influential albums of its era, which is all the more surprising seeing as how it slipped by everyone unnoticed the first time around. I never appreciated how big it was until I took part in the Antifolk scene in the East Village, a scattershot array of ex-folkies, freaks, and tunesmiths if there ever was one. Aeroplane was a record we could all agree on – it’s the closest thing to how they say the old Harry Smith Anthology was for the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early ’60s. It was the oracle that everyone studied and knew inside and out.

But for all the things that Aeroplane is, was, and may be, there is one element that seems to get the most attention. One of the first things anyone learns about the record is that it is partly based on an apparent love for Anne Frank, but when you break down the actual album, there are only a few places that explicitly relate to her (three, by my count). It’s like pinball in the Who’s Tommy or Sgt. Pepper in the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper – its greatest trick is making it seem as though it’s everywhere.

The first direct allusion to Anne Frank doesn’t come until the song at the center of the album’s running order, “Holland, 1945.” After an offhanded punk rock count-off, over-driven acoustic guitars and bashing drums swoop in to create a sea of fuzz and chaos that make way for singer Jeff Magnum’s brave, beautiful words, strung up and a bit nasal, with a bittersweet melody that slices through everything like a hot butter knife:

The only girl I’ve ever loved

Was born with roses in her eyes

But then they buried her alive

One evening, 1945

With just her sister at her side

And only weeks before the guns

All came and rained on everyone

These seven lines come and go pretty quickly and are followed by many partially-related and entirely unrelated lyrics, but the song could’ve ended just after these words and not lost any of its impact. The finality of it all is staggering; for all of the songs ever written about dead girls, these lines are the bluntest, the harshest, and, to my ears at least, the most intriguing. “Holland, 1945” is a song about falling in love with a girl who is already dead – in fact, a girl in large part famous for being dead – long before the singer was ever even born.

Everyone who went to grade school knows who Anne Frank is, and the song gets the outlines of the story right, even if she technically never was interned in Holland: After her family was found by the Gestapo in August 1944, Anne, her sister, and mother were all sent to Auschwitz in September, with Anne and her sister eventually relocating to Bergen-Belsen the following month. Both sisters died in a typhus epidemic that swept through the camp in March 1945, a few weeks before the British liberated the camp. Anne and her sister were buried in a mass grave.

What does it mean that we can take someone who lived before we were born and learn so much about them that we feel as though we know them better than many of the people that we are actually friends with? At its root, In the Aeroplane Over the Sea is about grappling with intimacy, and what it means to become physically close to someone; nearly every song has at least a few uncomfortable lines about hands moving in mouths or fingers on the notches of the spine.

The Anne Frank theme seems to balance it all as an example of mental/emotional intimacy. Anne Frank lives through the words she wrote in her diary, words that she presumably did not expect to share with thousands of people for over a half-century after her death. And yet, by being dead, she pulls the rug out from under the album’s fascination with physicality because she is not here; we’re not even sure of the exact location of her burial ground.

“I want to get on; I can’t imagine that I would have to lead the same sort of life as Mummy and Mrs. Van Daan and all the women who do their work and are then forgotten,” Anne Frank wrote in her diary on April 4, 1944, less than a year before she would die. “I must have something besides a husband and children, something I can devote myself to! I want to go on living even after my death! And therefore, I am grateful to God for giving me this gift, this possibility of developing myself and of writing, of expressing, all that is in me.”

It may not be love in a romantic sense, but when Magnum sings that the only girl he ever loved “was born with roses in her eyes,” you believe him, just as you believe that she was buried alive just a few weeks before the guns rained down on everybody. His love for Anne Frank is a love of and for humanity. What Anne Frank was and what she has come to represent is what the singer loves, which may just be another way of saying he loves the braveness and the frailty in her that he can also perhaps see in himself.

If this is true, it brings the rock and roll tradition of dead girls to its farthest possible conclusion: The dead girl is not an external love who befell a tragic fate, but rather an internal feeling of love that was inside of us all along.

No wonder we’d want to keep white roses in their eyes.