"When snatched from all effectual AID!"

 One of my favorite scenes from the Emma Thompson Sense and Sensibility is when Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet) takes it upon herself to coach Edward Ferrars (Hugh Grant) in the art of interpretive reading. The result is hilarious and well-acted, but I never Googled what exact poem Grant was reading when he spoke the line used in the title of this post. But I stumbled upon it naturally this morning while reading through a book of poetry containing Cowper. Here's the link to the entire poem: The Castaway | The Poetry Foundation

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Book Review: Anthems We Love by Steve Baltin

“All songs are easy and hard to make, but once they are released they become part of whoever hears them or whoever loves them.”

--Tom Waits, from Anthems We Love

Like others before me, I questioned the choice of the word “anthem” in the title of Steve Baltin’s new book; it simply doesn't fit the topic. But that is by far and away the only quibble I have with this engrossing work filled with “you were there” moments in pop music history. As someone who is fascinated by the creative process, I hoped to discover some details along those lines, but Anthems We Love is hardly a blueprint for aspiring songwriters. Neil Diamond simply tells Balin that “Sweet Caroline” was given to him “personally by God.” Doors guitarist Robbie Krieger claims the idea for “Light my Fire” came when Jim Morrison told him to write something “universal” and the three most universal substances Krieger could think of were air, water, and fire. So, he chose fire, of course, and then skips to the song's debut.

Carly Simon gives a bit more detail as she describes the scenario that produced her hit, “Anticipation." While anxiously waiting for a delayed Cat Stevens to show up to her apartment for a dinner date, she took out her guitar:

Sometimes I just play the guitar loud if I’m nervous. Some people hit pillows, I play the guitar, exaggerate the emphasis of my playing the strings. So I was doing that and going, ‘Anticipation,’ because I was waiting for him to show up. I was anticipating his arrival. So I just started the song and I wrote the whole song, words and music, before he got there that night. So in about fifteen minutes I wrote the whole song…”

Grace Slick took a bit longer to create her “anthem”—an entire 30 minutes—and provides more compositional detail than perhaps any of Balin's interviewees; apparently, she wrote “White Rabbit” on a $50.00 beat-up upright piano with enough working keys to play some basic chords:

I know how to play a C major, C minor, D major, D minor, all that. Those are block chords. So in order to write a song all you need to know is block chords. And a melody. You sing the melody, you play the block chords with your left hand, right hand. And you can write a song that way. “White Rabbit” was written that way.

Where the book really shines, in my opinion, is the way it fulfills the promise of its subtitle. Artist after artist relates how their songs—whether given to them intact by God or plunked out on a broken upright—grew so much bigger than their moments of creation to profoundly affect the lives of millions. Marilyn McCoo describes how grown-older audience members still storm the Fifth Dimension stage whenever the group performs “Aquarius”; strangers named Sara (without an H, of course) continually approach Daryl Hall to say they were named out of love for “Sara Smile”; and Janis Ian was shocked one day to meet a couple of good-looking “golden” people backstage who told her they were powerfully affected by “At Seventeen.” “I had never understood,” she tells Batlin, “the most popular kids were also terrified and worried about losing their popularity.”

Anthems We Love is clearly a labor of love and will be thoroughly enjoyed by anyone who has ever fallen in love with--or to--a song.

Let the River Run

 

When six-year-old Sally Taylor requested her mother, Carly Simon, to teach her the family business, Simon declined. “Sal,” she said, “If you’re meant to write songs, you’ll just know how to do it.” (1)

The little girl was “really frustrated” by this reply but recovered enough to become a successful songwriter in her own right (not a surprise as her DNA must be loaded with a talent for musical composition). While I have little of Sally’s specific ambition, I did feel some of her frustration during my search for background info on Simon’s Oscar- Grammy- and Golden Globe-winning song, “Let the River Run.”  

Simon’s memoir, Boys in the Trees, was no help as it ends long before 1989, the year of Simon’s big wins. Her subsequent memoir, Touched by the Sun: My Friendship with Jackie, seemed more promising, at least its timeframe. Like her previous memoir, Touched details Simon’s emotional issues and friendships with Hollywood elite while giving us a few brief glimpses of Jackie. 

The glimpse at her songwriting is far briefer: 

“It was two years into my marriage that ‘Let the River Run,’ which I’d written for Mike’s film Working Girl, won a Grammy and a Golden Globe, and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Song in a Motion Picture.” (2) 

The only details in the memoir related to "Let the River Run" are tangentially related to the song: the debilitating stage fright Simon experienced leading up to the Academy Awards. That's about it. She doesn’t discuss how the song came to her, the images, the lines, the melody, nothing. Also not mentioned is the plot of Working Girl: New Yorker Tess McGill (Melanie Griffith), who has obtained a night-school business degree while supporting herself with clerical work, longs to rise out of the masses of support staff to be her own person, generate her own ideas, make her own business deals. Her boss, Katharine Parker (Sigourney Weaver), encourages McGill to consider the two of them business partners, even though one is a broker and the other a secretary. But when Parker steals McGill's idea, she fights back, and the result is a thoroughly inspiring plot. 

With a song to match. So, what is the story behind the song's composition? Wikipedia led me to this nugget on Simon’s website:

“Carly has stated that she found inspiration for the lyrics by first reading the original script, and then by the poems of Walt Whitman. Musically, she wanted to write a hymn to New York with a contemporary jungle beat under it, so as to juxtapose those opposites in a compelling way.” (3) 

Walt Whitman. Yes, now that you mention it, his influence is clear. Let’s see if we can do some literary detective work, beginning with this line from the song: 

“Let all the dreamers wake the nation.”

Whitman was certainly a dreamer. He wrote “Leaves of Grass,” the 1860 edition, with the hope that a poet could literally save the nation from going to war by reminding its citizens of their connection to one another despite their differences: 

One from Massachusetts shall be comrade to a Missourian,

One from Main or Vermont, and a Carolinian and an Oregonese, shall be friends triune, more precious to each other than all the riches of the earth…

I will make the continent indissoluble,

I will plant companionship thick as trees along all the rivers of America, and along the shores of the great lakes, and all over the prairies,

I will make inseparable cities, with their arms about each other’s necks. (4) 

Obviously, this dreamer-poet did not “wake the nation” because the Civil War started the following year, but he certainly gets an “A” for idealistic effort. Whitman was also famously a chanteuse of ordinary people and their ordinary work, most clearly seen in his poem, "I Hear America Singing":

I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear,

Those of mechanics, each one singing his as it should be, blithe and strong,

The carpenter singing his as he measures his plant or beam,

The mason singing his as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work,

The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat, the deckman singing on the steamboat deck,

The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench, the hatter singing as he stands,

The wood-cutters song, the ploughboy's on his way in the morning, or at noon intermission or at sundown.

The delicious singing of hte mother, or of the young wife at work, or of the girl sewing or washing,

Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else. 

The day what belongs to the day—at night the party of young fellows, robust, friendly,

Singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs. 

Simon’s “strong melodious song” doesn’t mention specifics such as typewriters or telephones or business deals, as Whitman might have, had he written about 1980s Manhattan, but Simon gets to the essence of the matter: the human heart is “aching” and the soul “trembling, shaking” with desire to fulfill one’s destiny, do the work one was born to do. 

Her second verse, loaded with imagery, simply rolls off the tongue: 

“Silver cities rise; the morning lights the streets that lead them; And sirens call them on with a song.”

A bit of Homeric adventure in this second line, combined, perhaps, with the sense that workers, together, make a city “silver,” something beautiful; they are the ones who enable a city to “rise,” giving it the life and greatness it wouldn’t have without their efforts. Simon, like Whitman, ennobles these laborers, providing them with dignity, beseeching them to comprehend the power in their sheer numbers. And perhaps, a few of them, like Odysseus, yearn to hear the call of the siren. Tess McGill, in "Working Girl," has definitely heard their song, via her steely ambition, to rise out of the clerical pool and into the world of business dealing. 

The following is one of my favorite Simon lines: 

“We’re coming to the edge, running on the water, coming through the fog…”

This was surely inspired by the ferry ride McGill takes every day from blue-collar Staten Island to the Manhattan business district. (This assumption is more than obvious as the song’s official video was shot on the Staten Island ferry). And yet, the line has more: Only one man is supposed to have walked on water; this is a group and they're running. In the next line “the great and small” are not only defying physics on earth but their collective power has catapulted them into the solar system. Very Whitmanesque and quite fitting for an inspirational song.

Simon's last line, "Come, the New Jerusalem," brings to mind an entirely different poet. There's nothing on the singer/songwriter's website that hints of a connection to William Blake, but take a look at the first stanza of his poem-turned-anthem, “Jerusalem”:

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

Don’t get bogged down with the odd, ancient claim that Jesus Christ visited England at some point during his brief life. But do notice how England is described physically: “mountains green” and “pleasant pastures.” Then contrast the description with Blake's second verse:

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Blake is asking, “Did God countenance the transformation of green England to an England filled with unhealthy mills cranking out products to the detriment and destruction of English workers? (Read Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South if you want a literary look at just how detrimental and destructive those mills were). Is it possible that Carly Simon was familiar with Blake's poem and likened his so-described “Satanic mills” to the offices where support workers--those who are not intended for and who are unhappy with support work--sat glued to their desks typing and answering the phone all day, every day? There was little opportunity for Blake’s mill workers to rise out of their drudgery; it was either slave or starve. But the desire to rise, to be one's own person in the cutthroat world of Manhattan business, that’s what Tess McGill strives for in the film. Unlike the 19^th century mill workers, her health isn't being endangered by secretarial work. But her sense of self-worth is. She knows she can do what Katharine Parker is doing and do it just as well. And she does. (Oops—didn’t mean to spoil the ending, but being an inspirational film, you probably already guessed where this was going, and if not, well, you’ve had 35 years to take a look 😊).

Although Simon needed medication to endure the Academy Awards, she writes in Touched that her big win banished depression from her life for a significant amount of time, even after her chronically unsupportive mother, Andrea Simon, called her at the LA hotel saying, “I’m so proud of you! Look at all those people who deserved it more, but you got it!” (5) 

I disagree. (And “all those people,” Andrea? There were only three songs nominated, you bumbling excuse for a parent!). The other songs—“Calling You” and “Two Hearts”—are quite forgettable. “Let the River Run" is not. Maybe it’s because it so clearly calls to the dreamer in each of us. Maybe because we’re all like Whitman’s muses, ordinary people doing ordinary things, hoping against hope that we can rise—not above others to push them down, but above our own limitations to become the best version of ourselves, so we can do whatever it is we were born to do. 

Let The River Run - Carly Simon (youtube.com)

(1) CNN.com - Entertainment - Star of Tomorrow: Sally Taylor - November 1, 2000

(2) Touched by the Sun, page 105. 

(3) http://www.carlysimon.com/askcarly/faq.shtml

(4) “Calamus” 6, 13, 16, from Leaves of Grass 1860.

(5) Touched by the Sun, page 111. 

Book Review: Danny Boy: The Legend of the Beloved Irish Ballad

 

My first and only opportunity to perform "Danny Boy" occurred in the basement of a Catholic church when a seniors' group hired us to sing our "Greatest Hits of the 20th Century" program. Because the performance fell on St. Patrick's Day, they requested we add a few Irish songs to our repertoire. At the exact moment I sang the line, "And I shall hear, though soft you tread above me," a thunderous stampede was heard overhead: the school had just released its students for the day. 

Which has (or perhaps should have) almost nothing to do with this review, although that hilarious juxtaposition of lyrics and distinctly non-musical sound prevented many eyes from misting up, which they normally would have given the powerful emotions often conjured by any performance of "Danny Boy," something Malachy McCourt, in his lovely little book, mentions repeatedly.

Who wrote the lyrics? Where did the Londonderry Air originate? Alright, it came from Londonderry but from whose pen--or possibly, in this case, from whose pipes or whose fiddle? Who is speaking/singing and what is her/his relationship to "Danny"?

No spoilers here, and McCourt doesn't necessarily provide a concrete answer to all these questions, but he does lay out enough information, both legendary and factual, to make this an enlightening read for lovers of the song. McCourt's writing is sometimes humorous, often beautiful, and always informative as can be seen from a summarizing paragraph towards the book's end:

"While 'Danny Boy' will always be touted as an Irish ballad, it was truly the product of many different worlds meshing together. Let it be the tune of a blind, Irish fiddler drifting across the sea, reaching an English barrister who would finally marry words and melody to create a song capable of describing, at least in part, the contents of the human heart. The song depicts the human condition, about the unknown and the black cloud of finality that accompanies it. The message is available to all those who want to hear it. 'Danny Boy' has a profound effect on people from all corners of the world, a trait it shares with the truest of any work of art."

Carly Simon: Boys in the Trees & No Secrets

While prepping my notes for the debut of our “Songs of the 1980s” program, I checked out Carly Simon’s memoir to discover what, if anything, she had to say about “Let the River Run,” the first-ever simultaneous Grammy, Oscar, and Golden Globe winning song (written, composed, and performed). A quick flip to the back pages of Boys in the Trees led to the disappointing discovery that the memoir ended well before Simon’s big 1989 win. But as this memoir chronicled one of the more influential voices in the musical backdrop of my adolescence--via radio and my personal copy of No Secrets.--I was curious to discover what made this particular voice tick.

She was the daughter of Richard Simon, founder of the famed Simon & Shuster book publishers. Luminaries, including the likes of Benny Goodman, Richard Rodgers, James Thurber, Oscar Hammerstein, were regular visitors to a household filled to the brim with music: her talented father endlessly performed classics on the piano, and the entire family entertained each other acapella with the latest from Broadway. 

But beneath this stunning façade was a depressive father who paid his third daughter little personal attention; a mother who carried on an affair in the family home with her son’s live-in tutor; a boy who sexually molested Carly, beginning when she was only seven; a painful and lifelong stutter she developed at eight. Simon might have been a daughter of privilege, but she was also a child of suffering.

However, the money came in handy when she and her sister, Lucy, began their singing career, traveling back and forth to London. Known as “The Simon Sisters,” the two put out three albums before Lucy got married and Carly was left on her own. At this point, her childhood repeated itself in a way; just as her parents surrounded themselves with the superstars of their day, so did Carly, making friends with half the music and film industry and sleeping with the other half: Cat Stevens, Kris Kristofferson, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, to name a few of her more famous, albeit brief, partners.

Her relationship with James Taylor was love at first sight. Or second--they knew of each from their Martha’s Vineyard childhood summers. Or wait, third sight: When Simon saw his face on the cover of Time Magazine in March 1971, she declared to her sister Lucy, “I’m going to marry that man.” A month later, they met as adults, and married the following year. The two had much in common: both grew up wealthy. Both were singer/songwriters. And both were pained souls searching for peace, as Simon describes in the memoir:

From the beginning, James and I were linked together as strongly as we were not just because of love, and music, but because we were both troubled people trying our best to pass as normal.

Yet, for all their issues, the initial union of these two creative forces seems to have been quite lovely:

As James came toward me, the space between us got smaller and smaller, and our perpendicular lines, with the surge of a waterfall, became parallel. Our life together would go on in just this way for quite some time.

The songs Simon wrote chronicling their early years were included in the No Secrets album, which I owned as a 12 y/o. While in the midst of the memoir, I suddenly regretted the LP having slipped from my keeping during my high school years. Reading the stories behind the songs produced a craving for another encounter with the record. Before its replacement came in the mail, I began comparing it to Carole King’s Tapestry in my mind. King was the other powerful musical backdrop in my young life, and her Tapestry songs, playing in my memory, seemed far more cerebral and cleverly put together than Simon’s.

But when No Secrets arrived, when I placed it on the turntable and was again in the presence of that lovely, husky voice, everything that compelled me to inhale it while it was in my possession came rushing back. The lyrics and tunes are simple, yes, and one sometimes feels that they don’t perfectly rhyme, but they are unarguably beautiful. And with half of the memoir under my belt, some of the songs now struck me as the creation of a sensitive soul, perhaps—no, definitely—someone who has transformed deep suffering into poetry. “Embrace Me You Child” is beyond touching, written by a late 20-ish woman who admired her musical father from the distance to which he always held her.

If Simon suffered from her short-term adult relationships (which, from the memoir, it’s clear she did), she had the last word with at least one of them in “Your So Vain,” a #1 song that kept the world guessing for decades. Beatty, it seems, was at least the subject of verse two, but verses one and three are amalgams of clever phrases Simon jotted down as well as (possibly) two additional men whose identities she has never revealed. Simon was tortured with lifelong low self-esteem, but perhaps at the moment of this song’s composition, she felt strong enough to call out at least one egotistical miscreant because she was happily in love with Taylor; making her own recording of his song, “Night Owl”; celebrating their new relationship in the joyous “The Right Thing to Do” while angsting over it in the title track, “No Secrets.”

I never got around to performing the inspiring "Let the River Run" at our 1980s library program because we ran out of time, though learning to play and sing it was pure joy. But I'm certainly thankful my research led me to Boys in the Trees. It's a fabulous read, written in loving detail by a life-long diarist and poet of the first order. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to play my new copy of No Secrets one more time.

"The Way We Were": Memories of a song.

 

I was a high school freshman when I saw “The Way We Were” in the theater with my clique of friends, one of those irritating groups of young people who attend films to socialize and watch the screen only during conversation lulls. So, I retained only two distinct memories of that viewing. Number one: When inebriated Hubble Gardiner momentarily rolls on top of an eagerly waiting Katie Moronsky, my friend Barb turned to me and whispered, “Did they just…?” I had no answer for her since I was just as clueless. You’ll have to cut us some slack; we were both sheltered 13-year-olds, and whatever the characters did during that brief scene remained very much under the covers.

The second memory was the music. Perhaps that’s why my babysitting family gifted me with the soundtrack album for Christmas the following year, which I listened to nonstop, despite my mother’s constant complaint that Streisand was just “yelling.”  

Mom was a choir singer with an excellent musical ear, but she and her contemporaries, who inhabited the tiny close-knit world of first-generation Dutch Americans, had been raised by Old-World parents who forbade their children to watch films or otherwise interact with popular culture. Although Mom snuck out to see The Wizard of Oz (naughty, naughty!), Judy Garland’s vocals apparently didn't ignite a life-long love affair with pop music; I later discovered a scrapbook Mom affectionately put together--programs from church and school choir concerts. While she clearly possessed a devoted affection for vocal performance, it was impossible that Streisand's exquisite sound would find a place in her heart. 

But I was mesmerized by the singer as was the rest of the world: I recently learned that 50 years ago, February 1974, the album's title song, “The Way We Were,” became the number one single on the US Billboard for three weeks, remaining in the top 100 for 24 weeks. It was Streisand’s first single to make it that far, which I found surprising, since she had been a star for more than a decade and The Way We Were was her fourteenth album. Yet the album’s title song was, indeed, her first number one.

Inauspiciously, this Oscar-, Golden Globe-, and Grammy-winning song was written on spec; composer Marvin Hamlisch hadn’t yet made a name for himself. But film producer Ray Stark promised him that if director Sydney Pollack liked Hamlisch's attempted title song, he would not only be reimbursed for its composition, but would also be hired to score the entire film. Hamlisch eagerly agreed. He and Streisand had been friends since the Broadway production of “Funny Girl” when she was the young rising star and he the rehearsal pianist.

He went to work, deciding early on that though the film tells the tale of a doomed love affair, the theme song should be in a major key, so as not to give away the ending. Working for three hours a day, composing draft after draft, he finally created something he loved, before nervously auditioning it for the film director. Pollock’s young assistant director, in the room when Hamlisch presented the song, was smitten: “From the moment I heard the first notes…chills ran up and down my spine. It was hauntingly beautiful.” (1)

Apparently, Pollack shared his opinion, because the tune was then turned over to Alan and Marilyn Bergman, a successful wordsmith team, who, together with Hamlisch, presented the finished product to Streisand in May 1972. She loved it, suggested a few brilliant alterations, and it was finished. 

The song was placed throughout the film, first during the opening credits, which portray Katie and Hubble as Cornell students at opposite ends of the 1930s cultural/political spectrum. Hamlisch was so concerned about overusing the song, he initially decided not to include it in the film's final scene, when the two leads have a brief encounter before parting forever. But when he sat through the first screening, he realized the music at the end wasn't working and should be replaced with the main theme.

He paid for some last-minute orchestration and attended the next screening. Tom Santopietro, in his book, The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic, relates what happened next:

“[Hamlisch] braced himself as Katie and Hubbell said goodbye and the orchestra swelled. He waited tensely—until he heard the sound of a single woman crying, and then another, and yet one more, until crying jags broke out throughout the theater. The song worked and the movie worked.” (2)

I hadn’t experienced enough of life in 1973 to join this throng of weeping fans, and I only saw the film once in the theater, so for years, all I had with which to encounter the song was my record album. It was plenty. The title song became a siren call, beckoning me to the beauty that could be discovered in not only listening to a song, but in performing one. Fifty years ago, “The Way We Were” catapulted its way into the consciousness of every musically inclined individual, even a sheltered suburban teenager who couldn’t get enough of its soul-tugging power.

 

(1)   Santopietro, Tom. The Way We Were: The Making of a Romantic Classic. Essex, CN: Applause Theater & Cinema Books, p. 108.

(2)   Santopietro, page 136.

Book review: All the Leaves are Brown: How the Mamas & the Papas Came Together and Broke Apart

 

A deeply troubled, musically-inclined man enters the folk music movement of the late 1950s, divorces his wife for a teen groupie, connects with two other folk musicians via drug parties, writes folk songs, goes broke, learns that west coast folk-rock is replacing east coast folk, moves across the country, writes folk-rock songs, goes more broke, walks into a recording studio with his dirty, hungry quartet, records a song, watches it go platinum, catches his young wife in the arms of his best friend, writes more songs, does more drugs, makes more records, makes more money, does more drugs, organizes (and performs at) the Monterey Music Festival, then watches (and assists) his quartet disintegrate. As he does more drugs.

You might call that the timeline of John Phillips, leader of and songwriter for The Mamas & the Papas, a musical comet that sailed briefly and brightly through the folk-rock constellation of the 1960s. I requested a review copy of Scott G. Shea’s new biography, All the Leaves are Brown, because, like most Boomers, the lovely “California Dreamin’” has a permanent spot in my musical memory and I never tire of hearing it. I distinctly recall walking to the bus stop one wintery morning while the song—already in its seventh year of existence--played in my head. And one dull Sunday afternoon, my flautist sister was able to perfectly mimic the song’s flute solo after we listened repeatedly to my 45.

But enough with the personal connections and on to Shea’s book. I was initially thrown off by the amount of detail he includes, especially the opening chapter which lays out Phillips’s ancestry. However, by the third chapter I was completely hooked on his conversational, accessible writing style and the details are what kept me reading. Shea also provides a masterful arc of the 1960s pop music scene while relating how the Mamas & the Papas found their place in it.  Here, the details not only fascinate but illuminate the entire era. 

The interpersonal relationships of the four were unbelievably chaotic, which makes the creation of their two mega-hits all the more remarkable. How could such beautiful meldings of melody and lyric performed with perfect harmonies emanate from these four substance-addled friends/combatants/lovers/wannabe lovers? The irony embedded in that question is part of what makes the book so absorbing and why I finished it in a couple of days, skipping very little.

Shea’s writing has been criticized for its lack of robust editing, and I won’t necessarily disagree with that assessment but on the other hand, because the prose doesn’t call attention to itself, the reader can instead focus on a fascinating story, largely well-told. 

Highly recommended for anyone interested in the Mamas & the Papas saga and the world they briefly inhabited.