Not Good Enough For Anyone

I used to go to this restaurant in Oly where they always played this Pandora station that relied entirely on easy listening hits from the '70s and Christian music. At first it irked me, but I was addicted to their Singapore noodles, and somehow the two things got mixed up in my mind and I got so I kind of enjoyed my ire. One day, the station played the Carpenters song “Yesterday Once More” and I burst into tears.

welcome to Oly: downtown. (photo by me.)

I can’t even explain how it triggered me, but it felt like reading “Black Beauty,” watching “Brian’s Song” and the day I missed qualifying for J.O.s by 1/10^th of a second all rolled into one…only mixed up with some extreme pleasure, i.e. aural BDSM or something. I immediately went home and downloaded “The Singles” and played it in the privacy of my car over and over again.

A few months later, I was cruising a private site on FB and one of my favorite artists, Lloyd Cole, posted a note about his own love of the Carpenters, and the comments thread on his remark reflected that same confusing emotion I was having. People couldn’t really articulate their love of them, that pleasurable mix of shame, nostalgia and appreciation.

The Carpenters music is many things: the apex of whiteness and the nadir of self pity. It is sad and schmaltzy and perfectly executed. There are things in it that are so sickeningly shallow, like, extended flute solos, choral flights, strings, arpeggios, and children singing ‘la la la,’ that it almost makes one ashamed to be human, and other things that are so incredibly deeply felt that they exonerate the rest of it. Karen’s voice, our hind-sighted knowledge of her pain, and, simply put, the sheer musicality of it…these things are all sublime.

I suppose it is the juxtaposition of these two conflicting things that make the Carpenters music so resonant for me. Hearing their songs creates uncomfortable little bursts in my heart.

However. It’s always a lot easier to write about music you hate than to talk about music you like, and why you like it, nor do I think a writer can convince someone to enjoy music they already have an opinion on. Either the Carpenters grab you where you live, or they don’t. I don’t think the Carpenters are essential listening, per se, but — unlike the Beatles— they are uncoverable, and that’s saying something.  No female singer in the world could match Karen’s purity, and all those male-sung versions by bands like Redd Kross, American Music Club, and Grant Lee Buffalo (collected on the 1994 “If I Were A Carpenter” LP) merely takes away their nuanced depths, leaving something quite – well, the kindest applicable word is pitchy – in its place.

Some of it has worse qualities as well. Sonic Youth’s cover of “Superstar” is so misguided, pretentious, and lacking in empathy, that it has become the popular meme in Brazil meant to designate ‘poop.’ No doubt Sonic Youth thought they were somehow celebrating her role as a tragic heroine, but something about their version devalues Karen Carpenter as a human being and an artist, and that must be why it makes me  (and a bunch of Brazilians) uncomfortable.

It’s possible, also, that my love of the Carpenters is tied to nostalgia. “The Singles” includes the songs that totally suffused my childhood AM radio listening self, so it reminds me of things like the Sonny and Cher show and Carol Burnett, gunne sax dresses, Dorothy Hamill haircuts, and those wedge heeled shoes I always wanted my mom to buy me (but that she wouldn’t). Pant suits. Lip gloss. Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford…all that pre-Prop 13 California stuff, when there was seemingly no such thing as homelessness and (bad segue) I spent all summer long in my bathing suit.

(Presumably it reminds Lloyd Cole of something similar, only more English. I love that he loves her, because I love his music so much as well, and yet the two things – Carpenters and Lloyd Cole songs – are so very different. Have you ever heard of the hypodermic needle theory of the media? It’s the idea that mass media injects its ideas into you: that watching violence makes you violent, and so on. That Lloyd Cole writes what he does with the influences he has is proof that there is absolutely nothing that the media can do to poison you. You can watch racist and sexist movies for your entire childhood and still end up a social justice warrior. You can watch Fox & Friends and not believe a word of it. You can listen to schmaltz and write “Rattlesnakes,” and that sure redeems the schmaltz.

That said, I do have some reservations over some of their choices. The best case in point is their version of the Beatles’ “Ticket to Ride,” to which I say faugh. That’s a travesty if ever there was one, all quavery slow and drawn out sadness shoved into a song that really just wants to bop. Consider the original and then consider this and you’ll have a meltdown, it’s so wrong headed. When I looked into the histoire du Carpenters, I discovered this was their first single, and its success cemented their contract with A & M. Like almost every one of their songs, it was a cover of a song that was relatively new, only four years old. So it’s exactly as if someone came out with a new, radically re-envisioned, version of, I don’t know, “Get Lucky” by daft punk (a big hit in 2013), and then remixed to appeal to old ladies. And check this out: one of their next hits, “We’ve Only Just Begun,” was originally a jingle for Crocker National Bank. Richard heard it on TV and thought it could be a hit. It’s no wonder some people had contempt for the band at the time, but it shows that the cliché, “she could sing the phone book and make it sound good’ is true for Karen Carpenter. Oh there’s a lot to hate about them. But there’s a lot to love as well.

The Carpenters music is really made for the ipod era, since their records are just compilations of singles anyway, and Best Of albums aren’t ruined by the shuffle component on your ipod. And there’s so much to love on the Carpenters singles LP. A song I’ve rediscovered recently is “Goodbye To Love,” which just kills me (it’s by Leon Russell, by the way). I’m a sucker for “Rainy Days and Mondays” and for “I Won’t Last A Day.” Then there’s the sublime “Sing,” — from Sesame Street! — which fits alongside a shortlist of ditties about the greatness of music as a genre - ABBA’s “Thank You For The Music,” Barry Manilow’s “I Write The Songs,” Gloria Estevan’s “Turn The Beat Around,” — whatever you think of it, you have to respect that theme, especially in the day and age when music and art are being devalued and eliminated from school curricula. I can’t imagine anyone writing a song about how great STEM subjects are. (STEM stands for Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, for those not near an educational facility today: the four subjects all students are encouraged to master.) “Sing” is simple and silly, but in a Shel Silverstein kind of way:

Underneath my outside face

There’s a face that none can see

A little less smiley

A little less sure

But a whole lot more like me.*

It’s so much easier to appreciate that sentiment, and the sound that goes along with it, at my age and from this distance, and the same is true for the line, "don't worry that it's not good enough/for anyone else to hear." If my brain is full up with snippets of lyrics, each one of which is fading with every passing year, then I hope that's the one that lingers as I gradually lose my mind.

 *"underface" by Shel Silverstein.

The Way We Were

One day in the distant past when my brother and I were driving to Yosemite, we had this great idea for indie rock fans which was meant to alleviate the problems of touring. We were going to start a whole town that was just chock full of rock clubs, so that instead of bands having to go on tour and lose money seeking their audience, the fans would take on the monetary burden of seeing them instead.

The town would provide more than just a place to see your favorite acts play new hits, though. To attract repeat patrons, it would have a profusion of different-themed clubs, like there was one called “Covers” where your favorite bands came and only played covers, and one called “Switch,” where bands who were in town would exchange members (or instruments) and play each other’s repertoires, and there was one called “Backstage,” where you watched the set from the back instead of the front, only heard monitor sound, wore a laminate, and got your beer by plunging your hand into a cooler of melted ice.

Part of the idea was to make the fans act like they were on tour, instead of the bands. There were different kinds of hotels you could stay at, with different pricing, ranging from sleeping on someone’s floor during a loud house party (for free!) to the higher end type of hotel with a pool in the center (fun fact: the majority of spinal cord injuries caused by diving happen in this kind of hotel, when drunken male idiots jump into the pool from the balcony). The town was going to have a museum as well, and in it, there would be all the old vans of your favorite bands. For a fee, you could sit in a smelly one for eight hours straight with people you didn’t like, and stuff like that.

a Fellow, a Decemberist, a Fastback

Since this was pre-Branson Missouri, pre-Britney residencies in Vegas, pre-E-Bay and pre-Air BNB, I think we were pretty clever. Today, people do all kinds of things like this – they have baseball fantasy leagues and go on spring training trips, experience eco-vacations where they build bridges or help save orangutans; there’s even (I’m told) a South African safari you can go on with Robyn Hitchcock where he will sing you songs at night round the campfire. But back then, there weren’t those things and doing anything like that was monetarily out of reach anyway. And for whatever reason, “going on tour” seemed like the most romantic and hard to achieve dream – something someone like me, who was not in a band and was a girl to boot, could never ever dream of doing.

Except that I did it. For ten days in March and April of 1992, I Went On Tour with the Young Fresh Fellows and the Dharma Bums, in Europe, no less. I went with my friend Lisa, who was president of their record company, Frontier. We went because we could, and I feel fairly sure we may be the only two women who were not actual musicians and not sleeping with someone in the band who have ever had this opportunity.

Young Fresh Fellows, Nijmegen 92

This isn’t the time or the place to tell the story of that tour, but suffice to say it could easily have been the best ten days of my life. Many years later, I was reminiscing about a few of its highlights with head Fellow Scott McCaughey, who had by this time joined a new band called REM. He’d just headlined with them in front of 250,000 people at Rock in Rio in Brazil. “Oh, but believe me, that night in Spain was way more fun,” he said.

And I am sure that it was, because the mind boggles at anything getting better than that. Sometimes, when I am at Victoria Station in London, I look wistfully at the exact spot where we all parted company, the Fellows and Lisa and I. I remember us sitting there at 4 in the morning, waiting for the tube to start up, covered in Euro-grime and tear stained with laughter from a ridiculous all night journey on the Calais ferry back to the UK, and I just smile and smile.

Me: Berlin 92

Anyway, afterwards life went on for all of us, as it does, until one day a few weeks ago, it – life – almost stopped for Scott, when he suffered a stroke while on tour with Alejandro Escovedo. Very soon thereafter, Scott’s friends in Portland Oregon rallied round to have to raise money for his considerable rehabilitation expenses.

Scott has a lot of friends. And Portland has a lot of musicians. The result was a couple of events that were well worth getting on a plane for. Dubbed “Help The Hoople,” the concerts were held at the Star Theater and the Wonder Ballroom, and featured sets by musicians and bands like the Dharma Bums, Justin Townes Earle, Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers and James Mercer of the Shins, M. Ward, Alejandro Escovedo, the Decemberists, and various intricate incarnations of members of them all, including people from Sleater Kinney and R.E.M. The music ranged through Hood’s earnest and lengthy rumination on race relations in the South (“What It Means”), Mercer’s solo-greatest hits set (“New Slang” and “Simple Song”), the Filthy Friends and Alejandro Escovedo’s hard rock (including a cover of “All The Young Dudes”), the Decemberists fantastical/historical folky jangle “Hamilton”-inspiring rhyming slang pop, and of course, a set by 3/4s of REM: “You Are My Everything” (James Mercer on vocals), “The One I Love,” “Texarkana,” “Rockville” and “Superman” (with Mills on vocals) and, on the final night, “I Believe,” with Colin Meloy on vocals.

There are those who might quibble that this is not seeing REM, but I am not among them: to me it was more as if I’d gained admission to those clubs I made up on the drive to Yosemite all those years ago. Later, Jason said, “It doesn’t even matter who sings REM songs now, it only matters that the band is the same.” But the way that I’d put it is different: I’d say, it doesn’t matter who sings REM songs because we are all REM. Well, some of us may be more REM than others: when Meloy sang “Down By the Water” with his own band the Decembrists with Peter Buck on guitar, he said, “You’ve heard this song earlier in the night, only we added a few chords.” 

And it’s true, it turns out it is “The One I Love,” revisited, although in some amazing way I like it better. I like it better because it builds on it, like a sequel, or a second floor. It uses the original song like a framework on which to hang a higher flag, or to tell a different story, and by so doing it makes the song grow bigger and stronger and brighter and more resonant. It’s as if the music we love is a beautiful tree, and the branches are reaching higher and higher, and those of us in the audience, and on stage as well, have internalized REM’s whole catalog as bodily nourishment, informing our folk tales and our personal histories. The Decemberists have, for sure, and if I were REM I would take that as the highest possible compliment. I heard that at sound check they were all looking at their i-phones to figure out the lyrics, but I know the lyrics to "I Believe" by heart:

Trust in your calling, make sure your calling's true;
Think of others, then others think of you...
practice, practice makes perfect,
But perfect is a fault, and fault lines change...
And change is what I believe in."

You know how people talk about ‘self-care’? This is my version of it: treating myself to an old school road trip, returning like a dog to its vomit. Going to the Scott shows was just like old days when I was a rock critic really – meeting up with Lisa, Jason, Hammi, and others in some rando city; drinking at some old man bar beforehand, then watching R.E.M.  rock it out. The only difference is, there’s now direct public transport from PDX into town; during sets I can post pix and comments to twitter, and, oh yeah, I wear glasses now.

But self-care is one thing, health care is another. I dislike intensely both the fact that we are all so much older now – old age, as my mom says, is not for the faint of heart — and even more that, whatever one’s health care situation is, one needs to give fundraisers to support the cost of it. There’s something badly wrong with the American situation, because not everyone has friends like Scott’s, who can auction off their rickenbackers or write $5000 donation checks, but everyone is at risk for stroke.

From what I hear, Scott is doing better than expected, and he has a support system like nobody’s business, yet even he is struggling financially with what is actually a fairly normal situation. And that’s not right.

scott and gross deli tray, germany 92

But thinking those dark thoughts about the horrible place our country is in can only lead to depression. Another way of looking at it is that generosity can sometimes be its own reward. The thing is, we are living through such terrible times now. It makes it even more important to know who your friends are, and to foregather. I swear, sometimes I feel like one of those characters in “Station Eleven,” wandering in the wilderness, looking for other survivors, and I know I am not the only one, either. On the second night of Help the Hoople, the concert at the Wonder Room, a Portland musician named Casey Neill said something similar on stage. He was talking about how it awful the times are and how bad we all feel about it, and he said, “So my New Year’s resolution is…”

And then he paused, and made this gesture with his hands. I suppose what he did was wring them, like a lady in a Victorian novel; yes, he seriously wrung his hands. And as he did this, we all knew exactly what he meant, he didn’t even need to speak it. But then he did. He paused, and said, “It’s…”

“…to carry this feeling we all have in this room right now, this love and companionship and community, out in to the world and spread it.”

Thanks, Portland. Stay weird!

(You can still donate to the Scott McCaughey Fund, by clicking this link: https://www.gofundme.com/c3npfr-scott-mccaughey-medical-fund.)