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.
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.
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.
Fiona Apple has had her ups and downs, publicly. There is her well documented Best New Artist acceptance speech at the 1997 MTV video music awards where she told us all that the “world is bullshit,” and, more recently, she stormed off stage during a performance at a Louis Vuitton event because the crowd was inconsiderately chatty. This is unfortunate since it dilutes the impact of her music, which is damn good. Coming of age at the height of Lilith Fair meant I have a profound connection to most female musicians of that era, but Fiona always spoke stronger to me. While I can’t imagine my mother was pleased to hear her 7th-grade daughter singing “Criminal” in the shower–“I’ve been a bad, bad girl / I’ve been careless with a delicate man / And it’s a sad, sad world / When a girl would break a boy just because she can”–her music, and my butchering of said music, was an integral facet of my development as a female. The ability to play act the scenes she sang about fattened my lexicon for real-life scenarios foreign to a sheltered kid. Plus, she made playing the piano look way cooler than it is, and I appreciated that as a fellow pianist.
My love for this woman is as wide as it is strong. Tidal, When The Pawn…, and Extraordinary Machine all save space on my shelf, and all three albums have, at one time or another, been invaluable companions on monotonous highways driving south. In fact, she’s been with me for so long, been through so much with me that I feel as if we’re old friends. Not in a Single White Female way, but in the spirit of mutual understanding–much like one could have with a bartender or barista at a frequent haunt. You don’t know them, they don’t really know you but you understand one another due to a shared interest and there is no judgement, it is a safe space. No, Fiona Apple does not know me but I probably know a thing or two about her because her music is nothing if not personal; this is the curse of being an artist.
Her music bonds the fragility of heartbreak to the venom of a breakup and the vacuum of the afterbirth, so to speak: that state of purgatory where love hasn’t fully seceded to hate or ambivalence, and you’re merely empty. It’s complex yet simple, and utterly relatable for a teenage girl whose every emotion is extreme (aided and abetted by watching too much My So Called Life). Listening to her old albums now is like a trip down memory lane where each song represents a different freeze frame in my life. I see the home in which I grew up, me sprawled on the floor of my bedroom, in winter, reading skateboard magazines with the comfort of my parents on the other side of the door yet shut out. I remember driving in my first car, sun roof open and hair whipping out the windows as I rushed through the warm Southern California night from one party to another and then home. So, what I guess I’m trying to impart on this Throwback Thursday is that Fiona Apple is home to me. The faces have been swallowed by the ground and the places have changed ownership, but I’m home in the house of memory as long as Fiona is by my side. And in these uncertain times, comfort may just be the quintessential throwback.
For a blog taken with the mission of memories and memorialization, what better track to obsess over than “Oh Memory” from Hayden’s recent album Us Alone. Each track from this album resonates with my agenda–“Old Dreams,” “Blurry Nights,” and “Rainy Saturday”–and the album in total calls for quiet introspection. A cozy chair, the warmth of a tapered fire, and the type of stillness that settles dust. In short, Us Alone is primed to transition us into Fall. Which is perfect, because the nights have begun to chill.
Our musical education starts young, and is largely influenced by our parents in its infancy. I’ve oft hypothesized that you either grow up in a Beatles household, or an Elvis abode–that the two seem to be mutually exclusive. My father was a HUGE fan of the King. To my teenage horror, he would roam the house doing impressions: singing with his lip curled and pulling Presley tunes from his diaphragm. I even inherited a sweat-stained scarf he allegedly (according to lore from his own mouth) fought a woman for after Presley had tossed it into the audience at a show. To reassure you, the provenance of the item is legitimate, but the process of acquisition is suspect; my father could tell a tale.
Elvis Presley remains an integral thread in the fabric of our American heritage, he cannot be ignored, but he is also a controversial icon. Largely credited with the creation of Rock and Roll, he is also criticized as a thief for stealing music played more authentically by its originators, black musicians, and making money from their sweat with his white face and bedroom eyes. He was also a drugged-out psychotic who commodified women, loved guns to an uncomfortable degree, and was drunk on the power of his own mystique. Greil Marcus (my idol) discusses Elvis’ legacy as it relates to the American landscape far better that I in Mystery Train, which I suggest you read if you want to follow this thought further.
As with most criticisms, however, there is always a counter-argument. Elvis grew up dirt poor on the wrong side of the tracks, literally, so it stands to reason that he would absorb the rhythm and blues prevalent in the black community with which he interacted, bonded as they were in their poverty. He was also incredibly generous and while his taste was ostentatious and his entourage absurd, it’s easy to interpolate from these facts the underlying insecurities that drove the King of Rock and Roll–he would always be the Mississippi mama’s boy with dirt under his fingernails from scratching his way up into the world. To displace this, he lived lavishly and showered all he knew, even mere acquaintances, with finery as if to remind himself that he had made it, but also for the joy of giving and having. Once you taste the P in Poor, you never again want that flavor on your tongue and are compelled to spare others from the same.
My father was a lot like Elvis Presley. The plot lines of his early years were the same but different, the generosity almost identical if not financed on a lower level. I have a feeling he understood this even if he didn’t consciously dissect it’s meaning. The last years of his life were difficult and did not befit his stature, just as the way the world lost the King did not jive with all that he had given. No man who savored company as sweetly and cared for his loved ones so thoroughly as these two should have died alone, and in this respect I will always mourn the passing of them both with a pang of regret. When Elvis died, the world sobbed together and sort of lost their minds. When my father died, I grew up fast and soundtracked his last moments aboveground with an Elvis song. After all, my father had left the building.
This Throwback Thursday happened because I stumbled upon an uncut version of Elvis Presley’s glorious 1968 NBC Comeback Special. 1968 was a heavy year of world-wide social upheaval, and in its midst comes a svelte, leather-clad Elvis, looking better than he ever did before and ever would again, singing stories in an intimate setting. This is how I prefer to remember Elvis, and not as the bejeweled Las Vegas spectacle he became. After rolling through the Presley catalog like a stroll down memory lane, the special ended with the debut of “If I Can Dream”–a call for hope in a time seemingly gone made, and now, through the fog of nostalgia, a thought to guide a daughter growing older in a vacuum.
In 1927, Mark Sullivan wrote a book titled Our Times: The United States, 1900-1925. Part II of this work is called America Finding Herself, the first chapter of which is “The American Mind.” Here Sullivan defines a nation’s culture as consisting of, among other things, “the points of view every one has about individual conduct and social relations…his standards of taste and morals, his store of accepted wisdom which he expresses in proverbs and aphorisms; his venerations and loyalties, his prejudices and biases, his canons of conventionality; the whole group of ideas held in common by most of the people.” He goes onto explain that we learn these things from our parents and our system of education.
Webster’s definition of education is as such: “2. The knowledge or skill obtained or developed by such a process : LEARNING.” I note this to emphasize that the classroom need not necessarily apply to education. In fact, I would argue much educating, the kind that sticks and supports integrally, is found outside of a walled room. Learning is to be had in bars and underneath bras; on trains and in shallow waters; in movies and meadows; at the bottom of a bottle and the end of a race. And all the things I know can be found in song because music is the slate upon which Americans write their lessons–present but chalky, a mere swipe away from irrelevance.
With his 2007 album American Hearts, A.A. Bondy takes it upon himself to quietly draw us a roadmap to American history. Bondy’s songs so masterfully incorporate American imagery that the listener fails to know he/she are learning. This is the best form of education. American Exceptionalism, in particular, is on display from the battle cry of Don’t Tread on Me repeated in “American Hearts” to the reckless wanderer as outlined in “Killed Myself When I Was Young.” The track that filets the American mind best is “Rapture (Sweet Rapture)” for we are nothing if not descended from a group of miscreant Christians looking for the Rapture on their own terms in a City on a Hill. Even all these generations later, most of us are still looking for that City, for some sign, for a voice that brings us home. That’s the essence of an American heart: belief abutting doubt atop a bed of impudence in the lonely drive West.
In her label biography, Antenna Farm Records describes the music of Dana Falconberry as “stripped-down songs inspired by dreams, memories, and landscapes.” I cannot improve on this except to say I agree. I agree because the imagery which sprang to mind while listening to the track “Crooked River” off Falconberry’s album, Leelanau, is exclusively sourced from a 1989 film I was obsessed with as a child called The Teddy Bears Picnic. This comparison is not literal, the music not similar, but the sense of wonder and magic is present in both song and cartoon.
This bit of nostalgia is (OF COURSE) available for perusal on the YouTubes. What a delightful trip down memory lane courtesy of Falconberry and the Internet.
Nostos Algos 