The Flatland Chronicles

Soundtracks of My Life: Melanie Safka

When I was in college, Melanie was my favorite singer.  Later, the Grateful Dead and Jethro Tull edged her out, but in college---when I was studying to be a singer myself---I liked songs I could sing myself.

Yeah, she rocked my world.  She was so part and parcel of the hippie-fringy-antiwar movement that I find myself gravitating back to her in this renewal of an old national nightmare.    I posted 'Lay Down,' which I'd have to call her greatest song, here.  I never cared for the other ones most people knew ("Brand New Key," "Look What They've Done to My Song," "Peace Will Come," and "Beautiful People.")

She has a fairly distinguished history for a singer none of my young friends seem to have heard of.

[S]he was booked as the first solo pop/rock artist ever to appear at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera House, the Sydney Opera House, and in the General Assembly of the United Nations, where delegates greeted her performances with standing ovations. The top television hosts of the time -- Ed Sullivan, Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett -- battled to book her. (After her stunning performance on his show, Sullivan goggled that he had not seen such a "dedicated and responsive audience since Elvis Presley.")

Accolades rolled in, from critics ("Melanie's cult has long been famous, but it's a cult that's responding to something genuine and powerful -- which is maybe another way of saying that this writer counts himself as part of the cult too," wrote John Rockwell in The New York Times) as well as peers ("Melanie," insisted jazz piano virtuoso Roger Kellaway, "is extraordinary to the point that she could be sitting in front of us in this room and sing something like 'Momma Momma' right to us, and it would just go right through your entire being.")

In the years that followed Melanie continued to record, continued to tour. UNICEF made her its spokesperson; Jimi Hendrix's father introduced her to the multitude assembled for the twentieth anniversary of Woodstock. Her records continued to sell -- more than eighty million to date. She's had her songs covered by singers as diverse as Cher, Dolly Parton, and Macy Gray. She's raised a family, won an Emmy, opened a restaurant, written a musical about Wild Bill Hickok and Calamity Jane…

She has, in short, lived a rare life. But all of it was just a prelude to what's about to come.  (official website)

Just hearing these old songs causes a resurgence and unspooling of vague daydreams from my younger days.  I didn't know what they meant then and I don't know now.  Whatever they were about, they didn't come to pass as I expected.  But I still have hope. 

And I feel like Melanie's time is coming again, if it hasn't already.  Will we see a renaissance of the antiwar movement?  Will the kids out there unplug long enough to resist?   Let's make the present different again.

Soundtracks of My Life: Classic Songs of the Vietnam Era

I posted this at Buck Naked Politics for a Thursday 13.  It's so personal to me that I thought I'd cross-post it here.

You Tube is such a wonderful thing.    This is the sound of war, resistance, and a transient transcendence.  In those days everything had a rainbow aura around it, even blood and death and the seemingly endless grind of my generation's war.  We thought that things were changing and that we could be the agents of change.  You can hear in the voices that these singers thought what they were saying meant something that transcended the merely personal.  Meet the old boss just like the new boss, and the people who we thought were leading us into a new age.   

"Yellow Ledbetter" by Pearl Jam: Another One of Those Songs

I love Pearl Jam.  But it is a weird love that involves a complete inability to listen to most of their music without weeping, so I don't listen to them unless I'm prepared and fortified or else am free to cry.  I love Pearl Jam.  But it is a weird love that involves a complete inability to listen to most of their music without weeping, so I don't listen to them unless I'm prepared and fortified or else am free to cry.  And if you knew me, this would surprise you.  I'm not the sentimental type except secretly, in the same way as everyone else who takes a detached, ironic view of life. 

It's partly because Eddie Vedder has that sort of voice and the songs are those sorts of songs.  The lyrics to the songs Eddie Vedder writes are deep or at least give that impression (like poetry by Dylan Thomas, say). There's also that aspect of Vedder's singing that involves sometimes seriously mangling the lyrics, no doubt intentionally---which would matter more if I understood the lyrics.  There again, maybe I don't want to understand them.  Their meaning for me is---and remains---private.

Sometimes It's Better Not to See the Video

This is, like, my favorite song in life about lost love.   It cuts deep.

But the video (which I didn't see till long after the song had worked its way permanently into my DNA) is about a sad little origami cow.  It's such a sad little cow.  And I always am nearly in tears when I watch it (though for completely different reasons) right up to the moment when it starts singing along with the words.  I present to you  "Pink Bullets" by The Shins!

Pop Culture Revelations: "Son of a Gun"

Ever since I heard this song---after many, many years---on "British Spongebob" (right; just see the post...), I can't get it out of my head.  You know how some songs evoke all sorts of ideas and images that you can't explain and that seem to belong to someone else (or some other lifetime)?  This is one of those for me.  And it isn't the words, but the tune.

I wish I could snag whatever image tries to drift up to the surface when I hear it, but so far, no luck.  Pop culture revelations indeed....