Anthems For The Stadium

Just sitting and listening to music can bring on thoughts of improving the world.  I have wondered recently about updating the moldy oldies that people sing at baseball and football games.  I don't mean to replace the National Anthem, of course.  That uniquely unsingable anthem stands as the supreme challenge to singers young and old, strong and weak of mind or voice.  

Even if you can remember the words, you really can't remember where to breathe.  Not that anyone would fault you for breathing before "see" in the first line.  Nor will  anyone fault you for sounding as if you are being slowly impaled when you sing "free" after an ill-considered breath in "land of the free."  That, too, is expected.  The singer of the National Anthem is expected to suffer greatly during the task and to emerge alive, though seldom victorious.

Bad style and bad technique do not mar our love of country.  We have heard so many spectacularly bad renditions that we have come to accept them as a part of our Heritage.

So leave the National Anthem alone and let it survive serial attempts and assaults by one and all. I have in mind other opportunities for updating the music at our sports events.  I envision the replacement of a moldy oldie like "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" with something really suited to the lungfull of air you can take after five beers, several hot dogs, a plate of melted cheese product with traces of corn chip, and many bags of popcorn or peanuts.  What I would much rather hear is a chorus of 40,000 fans singing either of two Three Dog Night hits from the Golden Age of Polyester, "Joy to the World" or "Shambala."  Yes, I really mean it.  Imagine the joy of thousands of people singing the much easier words and tune of Shambala:

Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain
With the rain in Shambala
Wash away my sorrows, wash away my shame

With the rain in Shambala

These are confessional, hopeful, wholesome sentiments made into prayer with the three-part harmony of Ah-ah-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo, Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah!  After several choruses of that, they'll all be primed for an astroturf-melting shout of "HOW DOES THE LIGHT SHINE in the halls of Shambala?"  People will be so happy they will forget that the teams have resumed play.  Verily, if the beer hasn't intoxicated you, the singing of that Ah-ah-oo-oo chorus will do the job!

I think the Cardinals organization should take this seriously.  I think our government should take this seriously.  I am seldom happier when chiming in with a song than I am when I sing this great rock anthem, Shambala.

There are certain songs that every adult should know by heart.  Especially in these hard times, we should all know the timeless one by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Free Falling."  That's the tune for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Stock Exchanges, and the hyper-compensated thieves who have been pushed out of the aircraft with golden parachutes.  Rather than have it sung at those times and places, I'd have it sung by the hundred thousand Penn State fans in Happy Valley.  They'd sing it in place of "Fight On, State!"

On the Home Page of the investment brokerages, I'd have a singable audio clip of Paul Simon's "Slip Sliding Away."  Doesn't that make sense?  "You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip sliding away."  These are songs everyone should know.  Besides, the Paul Simon "investment anthem" is less troubling than the Beatles' "HELP!!"

Another really good one for those who are embattled and resisting impeachment is also a Tom Petty tune.  "I won't back down" is the name of it. Tom sings, "you can stand me up at the gates of Hell and I won't back down."  Then comes the big refrain that 40,000 fans should chime in with..."HEY, BABY!  THERE AIN'T NO EASY WAY OUT.  HEY, YEA!  And I'll stand...my...ground.  And I won't...back...down."  

These songs should be required learning by one and all because they represent the vanishing legacy of My Generation.  My 15-year-old granddaughter, who wants to play electric guitar, does not recognize the name "Tom Petty" and can't sing or play any riff or phrase from "Free Falling."  You can say all you want about a generation that doesn't realize that Muhammad Ali was an American boxer, doesn't recognize the phrase, "it depends on what "is" is," thinks the American Revolution was a rock band, and is bewildered by telephones with dialing mechanisms.  All these things can be remedied or punished.  But you can't replace a timeless cultural legacy that is embedded in these singable evocations of History.  

Ah, Paul Simon, how you grind up syllables!  My personal theme song is one of his.  I'll sing the refrain in Paul's pronunciation: "But I would not be cawn-vic-ted by a jury of my peers; still crazy after all these years."

Journeys Into Adulthood

Hello darkness, my old friend....

That's the first line of Paul Simon's I remember, from The Sound of Silence. Even then, when I was an undergraduate, what stayed in my mind was a radical inelegance in fusing words to a tune. The first stanza went this way:

Hello darkness, my old friend,
I've come to talk with you again,
Because a vision softly creeping,
Left its seeds while I was sleeping,
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence.

You know where I'm going with this, right? The creepy way he and Art Garfunkel had to sing all the words that ended the 3rd and 4th lines in each stanza....

Because a vision soft-LEE-EE creep-ING

This was off-the-wall horrible, but we adored him for elevating our youthful enchantment with vague and lonely ideas and making them...art!

If his lyrics seemed to be unremarkable in those days, his guitar playing was the key that got his music into my soul. Paul Simon played in the same folky finger picking style that I did, that we all knew how to do, but I think he made his playing sound more fluid, more natural to the music he made. In those years, he was a star and I was a grad student, reaching for a new fusion of art song with folk song. I didn't have a gift for melody, nor one for harmony, and my song lyrics were, if not admirable, workmanlike. Years later I realized that liking something and wanting to be like somebody were not the same thing as having the gifts to belong in the spotlight.

Since I'm being a critic, I owe you a brief, mercifully brief, glimpse at what passed for a song lyric in my lonely boardinghouse room when I was studying much better music in grad school:

It's been dark all day on the lonely side of town,
The light behind the clouds is slowly failing.
I will set my mind at peace before the night comes trickling down,
I'll provision all my thoughts and set them sailing.

I could do a few things pretty smoothly, you know? I could get a lyric started and then smash into a creative wall. I could do this repeatedly! The thing about "fewness" is that it wears down the listener by the third or fourth song of a set. Paul Simon developed a broader talent, learned to invent melody for his lyrics while not being what one would call a "melodist." Mozart was a melodist, and Schubert, but they didn't write their own lyrics. Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, contemporaries, groped around for their melodies in thin air. In the process they both came up with some successful surprises and song structures. Simon's sheer inventiveness got him over any number of musical and lyrical difficulties. Bridge Over Troubled Water signaled a maturing of his talent as a song-writer. Even my mom loved it! Let's celebrate inventiveness in the human soul!

I lost interest in Paul Simon until his Still Crazy After All These Years album in 1975. Those songs were amazing. What sat me down and nearly brought me to tears was a saxophone solo on that first song, the title song. It’s one of those snatches of melody that works its way in like a fishhook and stays there, and you’ve been landed, grounded as it were, in a defining moment of the soul, and it’s not a particularly happy one. It's not just the saxaphone, either, it's Simon working with Phil Ramone to "produce" an appropriate environment of sound for these songs. It's the soft background of an electronic keyboard, a muted, intimate feel of a small ensemble, so that the sax gives the impression of being a thought, a recollection of some kind, rather than a musician in the same acoustical space; and then Paul Simon comes back in and sings,

Now I sit by my window
And I watch the cars
I fear I’ll do some damage
One fine day
But I would not be convicted
By a jury of my peers
Still crazy
Still crazy
Still crazy after all these years

Like Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks album the previous year, this one revolves around the breakage of love. The rhythm of the rhyme gets in your ear in Paul Simon’s lyric to “I do it for your love:”

The sting of reason
The splash of tears
The northern and the southern
Hemispheres
Love emerges
And it disappears
I do it for your love

Eleven years later, I caught up with him again when he created the Graceland album and the tracks of South African music from Ladysmith Black Mambazo, and on the title track an image for guitar players only:

The Mississippi Delta was shining
Like a National guitar
I am following the river
Down the highway
Through the cradle of the Civil War

The National guitar, chrome plated, gleaming, and I know the silvery look of the river when the sun hits it right. But if you don’t know it’s a “National” guitar, you may think it’s some sort of nonsense about a “national guitar,” whatever that is! He’s on a pilgrimage, a divorced man with his nine-year-old child, thinking about the crevasse of love lost:

She comes back to tell me she's gone
As if I didn't know that
As if I didn't know my own bed
As if I'd never noticed
The way she brushed her hair from her forehead
And she said losing love
Is like a window in your heart
Everybody sees you're blown apart
Everybody sees the wind blow

And the guilt he feels about this breakage is assuaged in a statement of faith:

But I've reason to believe
We both will be received
In Graceland

You know, that’s the kind of song that’s so personal, nobody’s cover of it carries the sense of insight or conviction Simon brought to it. The other night I heard Alison Krauss sing it at the Gala honoring Paul Simon. She was great, the band was great, and Jerry Douglas’s dobro playing was beyond words. But it was as if she was giving a “reading” of someone else’s autobiography. We have to make our own journeys, and the maps we leave behind are sometimes embedded in a song.

Paul Simon always seemed to me to operate in Bob Dylan’s shadow, way back then. But when they both left childhood behind and lived the sorrows of an adult, their careers took different turns. I’m fascinated to consider Blood on the Tracks and Still Crazy After All These Years as crowning achievements of two highly gifted song writers of about the same age, who then had to go on and figure out how to grow themselves anew after their phenomenal beginnings.