Tag Archives: The Beatles

We need to go darker

Katy Perry in the video for “Wide Awake,” conjuring some musical magic.

Katy Perry’s “Wide Awake” has been on my playlist all week long, an incongruity even sandwiched inside an eclectic playlist that includes Hendrix, Dylan, the Byrds, Tom Petty, Richard Ashcroft, Thomas Newman, Jerry Goldsmith, Mychael Danna and Hans Zimmer.  I cannot stop listening to it.  It accomplishes the remarkable feat of being both catchy and soulful, bruised yet full of hope.  Apart from innocently fancying Ms. Perry herself (which my Alexander Skarsgard-adoring better half assures me she’s totally okay with) I’ve been indifferent toward her music until now.  Her breakout hit “I Kissed a Girl” is the giggle of a nine-year-old too chicken to truly explore questions of confused sexuality lest her parents think badly of her.  “Firework” is a well-meaning song undermined by Perry’s inability to hit and sustain high notes.  The lack of proper rhymes in “California Gurls” and the Brady Bunch-esque misdeeds of “Last Friday Night” are a saran wrap-deep package unwilling to chafe against the very successful mould in which she’s been forged.

Then her marriage to Russell Brand broke apart, and she wrote, recorded and released “Wide Awake” as a meditation on what she’d been through and where she is now.  And it’s a great song.  This isn’t a pig-tailed goofy girl jumping up and down on a beach – it’s the honest testament of an emotionally bruised woman picking herself up off the concrete.  Katy Perry has established such a niche for herself that she didn’t have to record this song – she could have released yet another ode to partying in the sunshine and achieved plenty of accolades and album sales.  But she chose to try to say something profound about who she is and how she’s feeling about the world.

I’m not going to go faux-Lester Bangs and suggest that “Wide Awake” is a watershed moment in music.  But it illuminates a larger question that I think most artists grapple with.  Is introspection by its nature a journey of sadness?  Does something have to be dark to be good?  Is the stuff of genius found only in the minor chords?  There’s an old axiom that says all real comedy is born from pain.  So too does it seem that the best music is that which reflects lessons learned at great cost.  This is not to say that everyone gets it right – it seems that every Kelly Clarkson song is about breaking up with someone and being better off because of it, but unlike Katy Perry in “Wide Awake,” you get the sense that Kelly’s just reading the lines someone else wrote for her instead of feeling them through the notes, and that’s why, at least to my ears, “Wide Awake” will have greater staying power than the grating and empty “Stronger (What Doesn’t Kill You)”.

Bob Dylan told John Lennon when they first met that he needed to get personal in his lyrics.  You begin to witness the transformation through the Beatles middle period as songs like “I’m a Loser” on Beatles for Sale and “Help!” lead to angry kiss-offs like “Norwegian Wood,” the existential exploration of “Nowhere Man” and the psychedelic dream state of “Tomorrow Never Knows,” and the Sgt. Pepper era becomes the truly dark, soul-baring Primal Scream anguish that closed out the Fab Four and realized itself fully in John’s solo career.  Had Lennon and the others chose to rest on their laurels and sing nothing but upbeat generic pop for their entire careers, they might have done very well.  They might still be touring casinos and retirement homes today.  But they wouldn’t be legends.  It was their choice to share their vulnerability, their humanity, that made them so – the gods who dared to admit they were the very same as the mortals who worshipped them.  In the documentary Imagine, there’s a scene where Lennon confronts an obsessed fan who is trespassing on his property, who wants to know how Lennon could have known so much about this fan’s life as to write songs that seemed to be about him.  Lennon responds, frankly, that “I’m singing about meself.”

The stories that have the deepest impact on us are tales of catharsis; of people like us who are tested to the limits of their endurance, who go all the way to the point of breaking and come back changed, improved, and renewed.  To find the brightest light, one must brave the darkness, because it is only in the dark that light can shine.  Every artist who starts out warbling giddily about rainbows and lollipops will face a crossroads at some point, where they will be forced to decide whether to continue skipping along the yellow brick road or stumble off into the gloomy forest – with no guarantee that something better waits on the other side, only faith that it does.  It’s a journey that is always worth taking.  The Dixie Chicks’ music improved immeasurably after their fracas with the American right over their Bush-inspired version of John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus moment”, when they got away from karaoke-ready dreck like “Goodbye Earl” and opened up with powerful anthems like “Not Ready to Make Nice.”  Brian Wilson struggled his entire career against the goofy surfin’ tunes that characterized the Beach Boys and that his record label insisted he continue to produce, and as a result we were blessed with lasting gems like “God Only Knows.”  I have no doubt whatsoever that someday Justin Bieber will grow a goatee and release an acoustic album, and you know what – done with the right intentions, and not just as a sales gimmick, it’ll be terrific.

Until then, play “Wide Awake” again and think to yourself, damn, Katy Perry makes for one fine-looking goth.

Stealing from the best

This is a bit of old news, but I felt it worth discussing for two reasons – one, I just found it, and two, it involves one of my favorite writers.  The gist of the matter is that Aaron Sorkin, in delivering the commencement address to Syracuse University several weeks ago, (horrors!) re-used some familiar material.  Namely, he cribbed from an address he’d given to the same school fifteen years earlier, and threw in a few lines from The West Wing for good measure.  This isn’t the first time he’s been singled out for recycling his best lines; astute fans of his work can recognize singular phrases lifted almost verbatim one from the other, or even a particular rhythm to chunks of dialogue.  (As you know, I’ve had a little fun here mimicking it.)  Occasionally, and unfairly, it’s been used by critics to undermine his arguments, as in the case of his acid-tongued rebuttal to Sarah Palin following an episode of her reality show in which she shot a moose on camera - detractors fixated on the fact that the phrase “bringing the right together with the far right” was a lift from the fourth season West Wing episode “Game On,” and missed Sorkin’s overall point.  In a way, it’s somewhat symbolic of how ideas get lost in a sea of nitpicking over minutiae; in the same way that some feel a person’s past mistakes, no matter how trivial, can utterly disqualify them from ever holding higher office.

No one can dispute that Aaron Sorkin’s is a unique voice.  He has been able to tap into the power of words to create stories and characters that have inspired millions of people.  In an environment where posting a video of yourself throwing up on YouTube can lead to a reality show and a book deal, Sorkin is that rarest of creatures – a man who has achieved fame not for his looks or indeed anything particular about his personality, but for how he strings words together.  The ranks of true celebrity writers are thin (that is, celebrities who weren’t famous for something else before their book), and apart from Stephen King there are few whose celebrity endures.  Most aren’t comfortable with the spotlight, and those out there who are writing solely because they want to end up on magazine covers soon discover they’d have better luck getting there with the aforementioned YouTube projectile vomiting.  Sorkin’s fame comes entirely from the quality of his body of work, and his conscious choice throughout his career to raise the bar instead of lowering it for cheap ratings and quick cash.  People respond to that.

Guilty pleasures aside, there is indeed a substantial element of the population that enjoys being challenged, being asked to think about things differently, to question their assumptions and debate issues without descending into name-calling.  The West Wing ran for seven years in the toxic political climate of the second Bush era, and was a lasting tribute to the virtue of public service in a time when cynicism about government’s ability to do anything was spiking (and sadly, continues to rise long after the show has ended).  People latched on to the words coming out of Sorkin’s characters’ mouths; they wanted to speak with the kind of conviction and intelligence found in idealized creations like Sam Seaborn and Josiah Bartlet, and with the well-informed smartassery of Toby Ziegler and Josh Lyman.  In person, Aaron Sorkin probably isn’t as quick and sharp-witted as he is with the benefit of a keyboard and a delete key.  But what comes out of that keyboard is as much his personality as the walking-and-talking version of the man.  It’s his style.  It’s what people expect of him, and what every single person in that audience at Syracuse who knew who Aaron Sorkin was was expecting to hear.

The expectations in seeing a star like Aaron Sorkin speak - and he is a star, make no mistake – are no different than going to your favorite band’s latest concert tour.  You know they’re going to devote the lion’s share of the setlist to the new album they’re trying to promote, but you’ll be damn well disappointed if you don’t hear a couple of their biggest hits.  Richard Ashcroft continues to close every one of his concerts with “Bitter Sweet Symphony” even though The Verve have been broken up now for several years.  You’d feel cheated if you went to see Paul McCartney and didn’t hear a single Beatles song.  Hell, you’d probably feel cheated if you paid to see Justin Bieber and didn’t hear “Baby.”  Why shouldn’t Aaron Sorkin play to his audience in the same way?  Indeed, a few of the familiar lines in the commencement speech are clearly sentiments he believes in very strongly – decisions are made by those who show up, and never doubt that a small group of committed citizens can change the world.  These are good and important things to remind graduates about to step into a world that claims to value hard work and responsibility but instead lauds instant fame, achievement without effort, the fleeting, the hollow, the apathetic and the utterly vapid.

Sam Seaborn once quipped, “good writers borrow, great writers steal outright.”  I suppose if you do have to steal from someone, that someone might as well be you – you’re less likely to get sued for it.

Breaking the fourth wall: Michael Kaeshammer live

Michael Kaeshammer.

There is an unwritten rule when attending any performance, be it a concert, a play, even a political debate, that nary the twain shall meet.  It is that separation between performer and audience – he is up there, you are down in the seats, and though the performer may banter with you and encourage you to laugh, sing or applaud, that wall remains intact.  An implicit contract exists to ensure that you both remain in your respective spaces.  The trouble for a performer with the sheer energy of jazz pianist Michael Kaeshammer is that his energy defies captivity.  He bursts from the inside with the spirit of music; you can almost sense the electricity crackling from his skin.  He cannot remain confined; not to his piano, certainly not to the stage, and had the venue been open-air you could imagine him trying to jump onto the wing of a passing plane.  That is not to say his performance is anarchic, far from it – one does not get as good as he is without incredible discipline.  Thousands of notes come dancing and flying at you in the space of milliseconds without a single errant strike.  But watching his fingers fly across his instrument makes you wish that a piano had more than 88 keys, just so you could see what he could do with it.

Kaeshammer, German by birth (it’s pronounced CASE-hammer) but a resident of Canada is a disciple of the New Orleans sound with a dash of Victor Borge thrown in for good measure.  Last night’s performance at the Burlington Performing Arts Centre was a master class in the application of limitless verve to a style perfected forty years before he was born.  For him, a live show is not so much a chance to entertain fans as it is an opportunity to push the limits of expectation.  For Kaeshammer, the capacity of a piano isn’t restricted to its ivories:  he draws jazz from its shell, its strings, its lid and even creates an unusual harpsichord-like sound by placing a tambourine inside it.  Kaeshammer’s diverse repertoire pays tribute to the heyday of boogie-woogie (with a few gentle jabs at his father’s traditional rendition of Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer”), but tips its hat to a broader era by working in gospel staples like “People Get Ready” and a virtually unrecognizable – in a good way – cover of The Beatles’ “One After 909″.  And he’s just as at home in quieter numbers like the closing encore, Sam Cooke’s timeless classic “A Change is Gonna Come.”  Regular bassist Marc Rogers and drummer Mark McLean are on the train with as much love for the form and love of trickery as the guy at the keyboard:  Rogers wails on both the electric and the acoustic bass like a latter-day Hendrix, while McLean’s hands are little more than a blur as he uses sticks, brushes and fingertips to make a basic five piece drum kit sound like an entire percussion section.  The skill these guys exude is at a level beyond reach of most average musicians; it must frustrate wannabes that they look like they’re having so much darned fun doing it.  Kaeshammer is all smiles as he plays, tapping his feet as if possessed by a musical Pazuzu (or Stompin’ Tom Connors), and yet at any given point prone to get up and stroll around the stage, pop down into the audience and find an empty seat to appreciate the craftsmanship of his bandmates.  It goes without saying, perhaps, that this enthusiasm naturally bleeds through into the audience, who clap, stomp, sing and cheer for more.  This accessibility in watching him perform makes it less like going to a formal show and more like your buddy Mike invited you over for a beer in his den, which happened to have a grand piano and a backing band in it, and they decided on a spontaneous jam.

Like Emilie-Claire Barlow, Michael Kaeshammer proves that the spirit of jazz is alive and well in these chilly climes far beyond the sticky, swampy bayous of Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain, and that it hasn’t been diminished by the deafening wail of pop and hip-hop in the mainstream music scene.  That there is still room for this amazing virtuoso display of ability and exuberance, that music can still surprise you by defying the straitjacket rules of form and function (and what sells well) is cause for thanks, celebration, and a well-deserved standing ovation.  Kaeshammer has no boundaries in either his playing and in his performance, and least of all in the fourth wall.  Indeed, the ability to reach past the proscenium and touch something inside each soul, is the stuff of music itself – something Michael Kaeshammer has certainly figured out.

John Lennon, the toppermost of the poppermost

A message that endures.

Today is John Lennon’s birthday.  The founder of the Beatles, one of the most fascinating musicians of all time would have been 71 had his life not been cut short by a deranged fame-seeking loner.  Though he has been gone for over three decades, Lennon remains a compelling figure; a man who has been admired, studied, written about, talked about and portrayed by a countless array of performers.  And rarely does a day go by when his most lasting contribution to the world – his music - is not heard on the radio, downloaded by a new fan, performed by an aspiring bar band or discussed at length by those of us still enraptured by his incredible legacy.

 
Why does John Lennon have such a hold on the world 31 years after his death?  In the pantheon of artists who passed away before their time, why is Lennon the most singular figure?  It can be argued that in terms of their relative impact on music, Elvis Presley was more significant – the man who basically took blues and melded it with country to forge it into rock & roll.  But what is Elvis today?  A punchline, fodder for cheesy impersonators in bad wigs mumbling “Thank you, thank you very much.”  Towards the end of his life, Elvis became symbolic of the worst excesses of the rock star – bloated, hiding in a cavernous mansion, shooting televisions, eating deep fried peanut butter and banana sandwiches and finally succumbing to drugs in his bathroom.  While John Lennon certainly had his eccentricities – the bed-ins, the strange recordings of screaming and warbling passed off as “art” – the main reason he doesn’t turn up in the pages of the Enquirer having just been spotted at a supermarket, is that in his message – one of a lasting hope for peace - there is nothing to mock.
 
Some stars seem more than human.  They appear, whether intentionally on their part or not, to inhabit a celestial echelon unattainable by we mortals who gaze upon them from afar with admiration.  While John and indeed all four of the Beatles were arguably the greatest and most influential stars of music of all time, what endeared them most to their fans was that throughout the peaks and pitfalls of their career, they always seemed human.  They never took themselves as seriously as they could have given the astronomical heights of their achievements, and remained for all intents and purposes, regular lads.  They were not perfect nor did they pretend to be; they made mistakes, they fought amongst themselves, they spoke from their hearts without filters and without poll-testing and clearing everything through publicists first.  Like the Buddha, they simply were.  The honesty of their music and the positivity of the message that resulted from that honesty could not help but touch the soul.
 
As The Beatles wound down, John chose to devote himself to the cause of peace.  He was an unlikely messenger for it – a man who admitted his faults, who did not attempt to veil the rage inside.  He could be horrible to those closest to him, particularly to his own family and dearest friends.  But just as only Nixon could go to China, a man like John, full of anger and bitterness towards the world, was the only one who could communicate the need for peace so vividly, so completely and so perfectly.  We all have that rage inside.  We resent the misfortunes that have been thrust upon us through what we feel is not our fault.  We want to scream and curse at the whole world.  We are all that angry boy crying for his lost mother.  And we can overcome it.
 
John Lennon asked us in the simplest terms, only to imagine peace – knowing that imagining is the first step to making it happen.  Most importantly, he recognized that peace was too important a message to be limited to the leadership of one, it must be a mantle taken up by the many.  In one of his last interviews, John scoffed at the idea that people considered him a guru, or a messiah.  He didn’t want that.  He wanted to make his music and be left alone.  More than that, he specifically did not want people to rely on him to tell them how to look at the world.  In “God,” John steps back from that leadership role, singing, “I was the walrus, but now I’m John.  And so, dear friends, you’ll just have to carry on.”  This line isn’t a cynical rejection.  He knew that people had the capacity to make peace in their own way and that was the only way peace was going to happen.  He still sings it to us today and challenges us to take up the torch in his absence.
 
In one of his most notorious quotes, John once observed that The Beatles had become more popular than Jesus.  It’s perhaps dangerous ground to tread, but the popularity of the Beatles and of John Lennon can be likened to that of Christianity in its appeal – in its ideal, most uncorrupted form – to the best parts of ourselves.  No matter our stripe, we’re all looking for the answer.  John told us that it was love, but he left it up to us to find that love on our own.  The challenge of faith is in maintaining the devotion to the search, in the recognition that the realization of the objective may never come until the very end.  But the road is worth the walk.  And so on John Lennon’s 71st birthday, we lace up our shoes and set out again with his songs playing on our iPod and his dream alive forever in our hearts.