In 1912, George F. Abel was stationed at the Presidio of San Francisco with Troop B, 1st Cavalry. A veteran of the Border War in Mexico, he had only been with this troop for six months so, perhaps, that’s why his comrades thought it a joke when Abel casually remarked that he intended to commit suicide on Monday, November 11th of that same year, the year of 1912. He was not taken seriously. Late that night Private Abel went to his quarters in the cavalry barracks on post and sent a shot from his carbine through the right side of his head. Captain J.L. Mabee called for an ambulance, but to no avail; Abel had shot himself dead.
That same night a funeral was held. Detachments of infantrymen and cavalrymen escorted able Abel to the San Francisco National Cemetery, where he was buried with full military honors as the Sixth Infantry Band played on.
He had but one sister. She lived in Buffalo, New York and did not attend.
PAPA’s much anticipated album Tender Madness finally dropped on October 8th, and I’ve spent much of this month listening and forming an opinion. As of today, the verdict is in: I’m obsessed. “If You’re My Girl, Then I’m Your Man” hits it on the head–bombastic intro settling into a love-torn confessional in which drummer Darren Weiss tells us what we want to hear. He’s our man, forget our plans.
Perhaps it’s the bias of dating a drummer, but I love a solid drummer-frontman and Weiss delivers. While this track “Put Me To Work,” and the album’s namesake “Tender Madness” are the strongest on the album, it’s a fruitful listen the whole way through and worth a purchase in total.
Every time I need a good cry, I put on Sarah McLachlan’s 1997 album Surfacing. This album makes me cry for two reasons: 1) it was the last gift I received from a beloved Grandfather and 2) the track “Full of Grace” was used on the WB show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. While the latter may seem absurd, I urge you to remember the effect of popular culture on malleable teen girls (and boys, for that matter). Also I’m not alone in this: YouTube is aplenty with “heartbreaking” video montages that play out to that particular track. While I don’t tear up over the plot of Buffy, I do wax nostalgic for a time spent in a rambling ranch home under the umbrella of an upper middle-class childhood–sheltered and untroubled.
I spent countless hours playing each and every track from Surfacing on the piano, and pretending to be much more worldly, pulling the “epic suffering” of my “tortured” teen existence through my fingertips onto the ivories. This, however, means nothing if the album cannot grow with me in order to remain relevant; Surfacing absolutely has. My favorite tracks then are not my favorite now, and I find new meaning in those I routinely skipped before. For this reason this Throwback Thursday’s topic with always be present as well as past–in constant motion with its listener.
Three years ago today, I buried my father. I flew south through a lightning storm only my father could conjure on the day he’d passed, and for once had not a shred of fear for flying. I bought a shitty black dress I’d never touch again, picked a casket, his final outfit and my final thoughts. Except those thoughts were far from final, but I knew nothing about that then. Wandering through the childhood home we would dismantle and sell a few years later, I stopped at his office; it smelled of medical decline and cologne. I went through the CDs he kept beside his desk, just under the candle that lit the night with fragrance while he worked. Vanilla, always vanilla. Elvis, The Four Tops, Louie Armstrong, a smattering of 1990s divas (he loved his Whitney Houston), The Supremes, and, last but not least, Nat King Cole all entered my eardrums well into the early hours of the morning as I wrote his obituary and soundtracked the funeral and wake. As always, I communicate best through music.
On October 23rd, 2010, we said goodbye from the chapel in which he’d married my mother some 30-odd years before, to the day. As always, Daddy drew a crowd. Faces from all stages of his life had come to tell tales of the man whose largess we all assumed could never be felled. In between these stories the music played: first “Stardust” by Nat King Cole, for his nickname was Stardust Mel; then “(There’ll Be Peace) In The Valley (For Me)” to note an end to the man’s suffering alongside his love of Elvis; and, finally, “Smile” again by Nat King Cole because that song spoke best to his persistence. Then I took the stage. Ever the introvert afraid of public speaking, my words came with incredible ease even if they were strained by the circumstances. I told a simple story of his role as father.
Once a week, my Dad would take little me with him to a mom-and-pop newsstand in Temple City where he picked up the latest edition of the Racing Form. He’d leave me in the car, parked just out front, and come back with the paper and a treasure trove of sweets–always careful to note that I was not to tell my mother. We’d sit in the car for a few minutes to devour the contraband, and he would teach me how to snap my fingers, roll my tongue and whistle. Never did get the hang of that whistle. While approaching signals on the ride to and from our destination, he would gauge the change in lights and, just as it was about to shift, he would blow a mighty gust of wind towards it–changing the light from red to green. Being little, I literally believed my father could control traffic lights. As I paused to hold back tears, a thought came to me and I shared it with the group: my Dad spent the rest of his life ensuring I had nothing but green lights; in fact, he did that for us all.
Somehow we all made it through that month and year, and we live on because we have each other even if we we’re missing him. Although some days, the bad days, it’s easy to slip into confusion. Death is nonsensical to a woman who never bought into the fairytale of an Everafter with its pearly gates gleaming through a watercolor sunrise and a fatherly figure welcoming you home. Though all condolences were much appreciated, I began to resent those who cooed, “Don’t worry, sweetheart: he’s in a better place.” A better place. A better place? A better place for my father would have been on our couch, in perfect health, watching the Dodger game with my mother and me. While these people may have believed in Heaven they did not know it to be true, nor did/do I, nor do any of us and the last thing grief seeks in its surge is a blatant lie. So while those thoughts were well intentioned and I do not begrudge them their beliefs, they sent me on a fools errand to find a text that would tell me where, precisely, my father had gone. Where in the ether was he now?
I wanted science; an A + B = C of death and the afterlife. The problem there is that most texts on the subject are either religious, spiritual non-religious, or philosophical and decidedly anti-quantitative. After a few false starts I found the opposite of what I sought, which, turned out to be exactly what I needed at the time. At Green Apple Books on Clement Street, I stumbled upon a staff recommended book titled Mourning Diary. Hailed as a “unique study of grief–intimate, deeply moving and universal,” Mourning Diary is a posthumously published compilation of notes written daily by Roland Barthes following the death of his beloved mother in October 1977. In it he documents all the stages of grief in concise sentences owing to the small scraps of paper on which he wrote them, and in the process made phonetic all the ungraspable emotions I was attempting to define: the first realization of an imminent mortality; the sick impulse to charge into the future with more purpose, what he called “futuromania;” the infuriating inconsistency of grief–sometimes happy, sometimes sad, oftentimes an emotional paralytic–and the guilt associated with not knowing which one you prefer; and the “domestication of death” where the notion becomes a fiber in the fabric of daily life. In total, he owns up to the paradoxical nature of death for those who have died and for those who continue to live. Sometimes we just need smarter people to explain how we feel.
With Barthes in my back pocket, I found the perfect companion piece in Mary Roach’s Spook over a year later. In Spook, Roach attempts to find the mathematical equation for the after life I so desperately sought for so long. She addresses various angles with which people approach the great beyond from reincarnation to seances and telecommunication, near death experiences and ghost hunters–all through the lens of science, the law and a healthy dose of dry wit. A decided skeptic, she talks of and to believers, such as Mary Todd Lincoln or members of the International Ghost Hunters Society, and men of science who wanted proof to appease the nagging of an unanswered question, such as Duncan Macdougall’s quest to prove the existence of the soul (by weighing it at the precise moment of death, as it left flesh for the heavens), or Professor Bruce Greyson’s computer-reliant examination of near death experiences in operating rooms. In almost every instance, people on the hunt for proof of an afterlife–whether spiritual or scientific in nature–are motivated by loss, which only makes sense as questions never formulate without precipitators. In the end, Roach could not prove the existence of the soul or the sphere to which it traveled after death. However, she also could not disprove it and that very fact changed her decidedly skeptic stance to one of cautious acceptance of the unknown.
Through all my searching, this is also where I have landed: the realm of unknowable knowing. Belief is incredibly intimate and informed by each micro and macro nuance of our existence to date. It is subjective and as such we hold “this” but not “that” as true and fold it into our worldview–how we believe the world (and our place in it) to be. While I can’t bring myself to fully believe my Dad is looking over me from on high, I’m able to understand where my Dad “is” thanks to Gerry Nahum, a professor at the Duke University School of Medicine who was interviewed by Mary Roach. As a quantum physicist, Nahum believes that the soul is merely a group of information which must have an energy equivalent. Since energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be displaced, then the soul, the entity that makes us who we are, merely exists somewhere else after we die although most likely not in the same exact form. Incredibly enough, this is the same explanation my Fella gave me in October of 2010 and, as such, it’s what I now believe. Fella + Physicist = A Believer.
Perhaps this search would have been moot if I knew my father’s thoughts on the matter. Unfortunately, we never had that talk since he refused to speak of his own demise, save for one moment of disabled terror where he looked my mother in the eye and asked, “Am I going to die?” All she could muster was an “I don’t know” and he grew silent, thinking of what I can only imagine. Not that I blame him for this, it’s just another regret; there are so many in times like these. But regrets never change the past, and the living must decide to decay under the weight of loss, live a deadened life, or live better, stronger and more intentionally to honor those that left us. Most importantly, the living must speak of the dead so that they live on in a different but equally as substantive a way.
May it be good or bad, I am the one and only progeny of Robert Meldahl–I work with hands like his, I speak with inflections like his, I live with afflictions like his. In this there is comfort, and nothing makes me happier than speaking about my father, who was a great man, a flawed man, a man of stories, professional accomplishment and stubborn pride. This stubbornness is why, despite myself, I think he speaks to me through the radio. For this I have my reasons which revolve around my belief that there are no coincidences in life; feel free to comment or message me if you’re keen on hearing the stories. This nonsensical notion makes sense to me because a) beliefs emerge from sensory experiences more often than they do from words or logic, and b) if we revert to unbundled energy after we die and are returned to the universal electromagnetic field then radio waves would be the easiest way to communicate with a daughter obsessed with music.
So if you’re out with me and Nat King Cole or Elvis comes across the air waves, give me a little nod and I’ll know you believe what I believe, and we’ll believe together.
While working as a wireless operator with the U.S. Navy in Panama, Herman Abrams met Mabelle Edith Crotchett—a government nurse toughing it out in the tropics. The two were married on April 12th, 1911. Thereafter they bounced around, as Chief Petty Officers in the Navy and their wives are want to do, and skipped from Brooklyn, New York to New Orleans, Louisiana to Washington, and, eventually, to San Francisco. This is where Herman died on October 15th, 1937, leaving Mabelle to remarry a man by the name of George Cornwall in the Spring of 1940.
My first real piece of music writing came in middle school when I was a yearbook staffer assigned to write two pieces on popular culture representative of that year, 1997. I chose to review two movie soundtracks: Titanic and Good Will Hunting–Titanic because I was a ‘tween obsessed with Leonardo DiCaprio, and Good Will Hunting because Elliott Smith was the soundtrack to my “tortured” middle class suburban existence. Although I didn’t know it at the time, I had found the thing that would dominate my adult life: explaining music with words.
The soundtrack to Good Will Hunting propelled Elliott Smith into notoriety following his performance of “Miss Misery” at the Academy Awards. Ever the introvert, the attention was daunting. In a recent Jeff Baker interview with William Todd Shultz, author of Torment Saint: The Life of Elliott Smith, Schultz describes the discomfort Elliott Smith felt after meeting Celine Dion backstage at the Oscars, and observed that “[Smith] didn’t have the greatest self-image. It was almost problematic to be famous because it didn’t fit with how he experienced himself as a person.” For a man beloved by a hardcore fan base, he generally wanted to be alone. Perhaps this explains his prolific musical output, first with Heatmiser and then on is own. It also explains the general tone of his songs, which are quietly introspective, Beatles-informed and confessional. I think this is the great conflict for many artists: how to sing to soothe your aches but maintain your privacy in a public forum.
Elliott Smith’s biographical record is sad, a cautionary tale of drug addiction born of low self esteem that ended the life of an immensely talented artist. Similar tales have been told too many times before. To listen to his albums chronologically from Roman Candle (1994), to Elliot Smith (1995), Either/Or (1997) and XO (1998) through Figure 8 (2000) is to watch an artist become more sure of his voice, ability and message. At the time of his death, he had acquired a coterie of vintage equipment and was actively recording new material for an album provisionally titled From A Basement On The Hill. Depending on whose story you believe, he was either turning things around when he died–clean and sober, in a stable relationship and starting a foundation for abused children–or devolving into another period of paranoid depression. Competing versions of the year prior to his death have produced different opinions on the act: either he executed “the best suicide I ever heard of,” as believed by Courtney Love, or he was murdered with a kitchen knife through the heart. While I want to believe the latter, the former is equally as likely.
I remember where I was when I heard of Smith’s death like my mother remembers where she was when Kennedy was assassinated. I’m very protective of Elliott Smith and his music in a big sister kind of way. This is why my hackles were raised when Madonna recently covered “Between the Bars” in a politicized performance that promoted the short film secretprojectrevolution. What I’ll say on this is…I think we’ve all seen the manipulating effect of politics this week. My protective instincts aroused, I realized–to my astonishment–that this month marks the 10th anniversary of Smith’s death, and learned a tribute will be staged in New York on October 21st. The lineup boasts indie powerhouse Cat Power at the head, with Yoni Wolf of WHY?, the Low Anthem, Adam Schatz from Landlady and Man Man, and others who will play their own music in addition to Smith covers. Tickets are steep at $50, but a portion of the proceeds will go to the Elliott Smith Memorial Fund, which partially supports youth based nonprofits Free Arts for Abused Children and Outside In–a Portland group that helps homeless youth (to which you can also contribute through IndieGogo).
Elliott Smith, gone for a decade, has now entered the realm of the footnote, but one that is referenced as a resource, not relegated to the dustbin of history (to borrow a phrase from Greil Marcus); he is an active citation and not a forgotten muse. This is encouraging to me, a little validating even, because no one wants to see their inspirations fade even if they die. Momentary resurrections through the posthumously released From A Basement On The Hill and then the two-disc New Moon (2007) have kept him near and dear, a voice speaking from the grave, guiding the teenager that found him through college. I am, as ever, a devotee of he.
Featured below is a short called Lucky Three made by Jem Cohen (recently profiled on this blog in the post “Museum Hours”) on 17-20 October 1996 in Portland, Oregon and released in 1997. It falls out of sync at one point, but still offers insight into Elliott Smith’s world as well as his music, and reminds me that music is made by men and women who are mortal, as flawed and as fine as we the unmusical.
No one has ever accused me of being cutting edge. I’m generally the last to a trend, unless said trend has been a constant in my life for unrelated reasons–making me an accidental hipster. If you read this blog on the regular, you already know this as my Current Obsessions are generally not very current in a larger context, merely within my own life. With this in mind…Lisa Hannigan’s 2011 album Passenger has been on constant rotation this week.
After acting as the accompanying voice to Damien Rice for seven years, she released her first full-fledged album, Sea Sew, in 2008. While on the road in support of this effort, she wrote new songs that would become Passenger–infusing each tune with “the feeling of transience and nostalgia that this constant traveling” is prone to conjure. Produced by Joe Henry (whose credits include Elvis Costello and Loudon Wainwright III, among others), this Irish lass recorded Passenger in one week. Describing the quick turnaround process as “natural,” Hannigan told NPR that the album, thusly, felt like they “were playing to one person.”
This may be why the listening experience feels so intimate without sacrificing the type of grandiose imagery with which the Irish-born seem stricken. It’s almost as if the lush green landscape of their home turf is absorbed and returned to the land sonically. Irish writers possess the same gift, but return words to the land instead. The first track of Passenger, “Home”, illustrates this point well with its chiming, driving instrumental cacophony that forces you to dive into the album with two feet as she calls out “Home. So far from Home, so far to go and we’ve only just begun.” This is how we know as listeners that we’re to prepare for a journey.
Then come “Knots” and “What’ll I Do,” which are impossible to ignore as they endear you to Hannigan, in her high heels and old dress. This music is fun, she’s fun, and “What’ll I Do” will be stuck in your head for days. And just when you think she’ll be the next Pop Princess to be blasted at us, there comes “O Sleep,” a sublimely melancholy ode to strenuous nights which features Ray Lamontagne, and “Safe Travels (Don’t Die),” a stripped-down confessional of cautions born from love–a reminder of the cost that’s charged us when we’ve something to lose. Which is the point, right? We all have something to lose if we love, and long for it if we don’t. That’s what makes our wheels spin with traction and worlds turn with purpose. Realizing this we’re given “Nowhere To Go” a sweet reminder we’re not alone–a thought made more potent by the unassuming inflections of Hannigan’s ethereal voice.
For an album conceived on the road, it’s message grounds we listeners within our own lives as introspective beings. It allows us to review our own road in eleven easy songs, just one shy of a twelve-step program. Perhaps this is why I took to it so quickly: I’m just a kook looking for a guide. That would make sense since this girl is just a passenger taking notes.
For many years, Prince shunned the internet as a legitimate distribution source for music. Well, thank god that’s over now!! The man has a twitter handle and a Youtube channel called 3rdEyeGirl where he premiered a short clip of his new single, “Breakfast Can Wait.” Available for download on iTunes and streaming on Spotify and its sister services, this track is classic Prince–the only man on the planet who can sing a list of morning menu choices and make it sound crazy sexy cool. For me, however, the music took a backseat to the album art which features Dave Chappelle as Prince holding a plate of pancakes.
This tip-of-the-hat to the wildly successful Chappelle’s Show skit where Charlie Murphy and Prince, with their respective entourages, square off on the basketball court is a genius move on the part of Prince. It reminds us that he’s a music icon, an inimitable piece of American pop culture, but also demonstrates his ability to laugh at himself. This is crucial, because Prince is kind of scary when you think about him as a real person. If someone told me he levitates in place of walking, I would believe that person. Because it’s hard to imagine icons as humans not in possession of magical powers, and this is intimidating. Unlike the untouchable icon of years past, we now know two things about Prince: a) that he has a sense of humor, and b) how he likes his eggs cooked in the morning. Thank you for sharing, O Holy One they call Prince.
Please pardon the pun, but the new EP from The Vaccines, Melody Calling, is infectious. I thought this artful video would be an effective inoculation for the miseries of a Monday.
Nostos Algos 