How Real Can You Get?

233. LEAH ANDREONE, 'It's Alright, It's OK'
Produced by Rick Neigher; written by Leah Andreone & Rick Neigher
RCA 64662 1997 Billboard: # 57

I've loved this song since the first time I heard it, but there's no way I'd ever call it "authentic."

This is a singer-songwriter thing. The master narrative goes something like this: Bob Dylan changed American music forever by taking folk music and making it personal. After him, coffeehouses sprung up all over Europe and North America, but suddenly singers were no longer required to sing musty old Scottish songs. They could sing about the material of their own lives. And they did it alone, just them and a guitar or a piano on a stage. It was personal and it was non-industrial, just an artist talking to a selective audience.

There are a lot of problems with that reductive narrative, more than I can cover in a single post, but let me begin with just two words: Joni Mitchell. For me, Joni Mitchell was the greatest of the singer-songwriters, maybe not as great a songwriter overall as Dylan, but certainly the greatest at writing confessional songs that were both personal and relatable. Again and again, she wrote songs that you can "get" on first hearing, but you can still find new layers in them every time you listen.

But you know what? Mitchell's greatest album, Blue, is impossible without technology. I really felt this with a vengeance a few years back when Ted Turner did one of his tributes to modern songwriters and they featured Mitchell. For nearly all her great songs, those paying tribute couldn't really do justice to them with just one vocalist. All those gorgeous harmonies she laid down? Multitracking. Even when she did everything on an album, it didn't recreate a spontaneous, intimate performance, anymore than Beach Boys' Party! did. Each of Mitchell's albums was a labor of construction, every bit as much as one of her paintings, most of which show a lot more craft than your average Jackson Pollock.

A quarter of a century later, we have Andreone, definitely positioned by her label to be an inheritor of the Mitchell-derived tradition. Writing confessionally? Check. On the first Lilith Fair tour? Check. Huge in France? Check. But, on the other side of the ledger, is she a sellout? She doesn't play all the instruments! She cowrites the song with her producer! She's a fraud!!

I have a simple solution: this isn't folk, or even confession, and it's certainly not truth. It's Pop, and rather accomplished Pop at that. This is a good song about an almost total mental breakdown, but it's too polished to have been written by someone who had ever suffered one. I would bet, though, that she has been around someone who has, because several of the details recorded here seem spot-on. Moreover, no matter what the purists might claim, this song wouldn't have been as good on solo acoustic guitar, because you need the rhythm section and especially the organ to move you through it. And are white confessional folk singers from L.A. allowed to wail like that, as if giving into despair inevitably leads to facing Mecca?

One of the great shames about the reverse snobbism of so much 1990s music culture was that it tried to sell smart Pop as something that it wasn't. This song isn't Truth, but it does have a fair amount of soul. And it's not "upbeat," no matter what the allmusicguide might claim.

This Is Our Moment, This Is Our Time

700. 10,000 MANIACS, "These Are Days"
Produced by Paul Fox; written by Robert Buck and Natalie Merchant
Elektra 64700 1992 Billboard # 66

For a moment, a very brief moment, this particular 10,000 Maniacs song captured its time in history, which is only appropriate since it's a song about making sure that remarkable times don't pass without proper notation. The lyrics concern themselves with personal rather than public history, with the flush of youth and how intense your feelings and insights can be in that phase of your life. The singer is clearly beyond that phase, but she isn't rueful or judgmental. She's just telling the young person to whom she is speaking that she should remember this moment. She should (in the words of an earlier song that was less historical and more universal than most people appreciated at the time of its release) keep your eyes wide/the chance won't come again.

Buck and Merchant's lyrics here aren't particularly inspired, not even on the rough-hewn level that Dylan's had been thirty years before. As with the Stooges' "T.V. Eye," it's the music that carries the real meaning here. This was the one single above all else where that odd mix of old folkie instruments that the Maniacs liked to play actually gelled. All that strumming makes it feel as if something is bubbling under the surface for the whole song. The lyrics may adopt the perspective of a slightly older person looking back on her youth, but the music still exists in that glorious, giddy, inchoate moment, where the visions are inspired and come fast and furious, just before one needs to think about translating them into concrete plans. In my own version of this kind of youthful moment the guitars rocked a lot harder, but I still concede the general resemblance.

The historical moment this song captured, in spite of itself, was the dawn of the Clinton era. I can even give you a date and an approximate time: 21 January 1993, maybe around 10 o'clock at night. That was the night of the Clinton Inaugural, and 10,000 Maniacs were one of the featured acts at the Rock the Vote Ball because they were, as Dennis Miller pointed out in his introduction of them, Chelsea Clinton's favorite band. There were better performances that night--1/2 of U2 combined with 1/2 of REM to do a boffo a capella version of "One" (which actually is a great song); Don Henley sang "Dirty Laundry" as if it were the night of the Gary Hart inaugural; and Michael Stipe combined with Merchant and the Maniacs to do a version of "To Sir with Love" that made me seriously reconsider all those bad things I had previously said about Lulu--but, even with all that, "These Are Days" was unquestionably the song for that night. If you hunt up the band's performance that night on YouTube, you'll see that they all knew it, especially Merchant. Never before and never since/I promise.

As they took the stage that night, 10,000 Maniacs almost certainly knew that they would be breaking up very soon. There was pretty much just a valedictory performance on MTV Unplugged (as opposed to all that mad shredding they usually did in concert), and it was all over. Merchant went solo and the rest of the band just limped along. By the summer, this song was being used for promos for Class of '96, a Fox series about college life that starred, among others, Kari Wuhrer.

And Bill Clinton? Sometimes it's hard to remember how much he did accomplish as President, because the shutdown, the sexual relations, and the rise of global terrorism just loom so large in retrospect. But the truth is, no President could have accomplished what we wanted him to accomplish when he took that oath of office. Even if he hadn't been a sex addict, he was still just a mortal, not the angel Gabriel.

Pay no attention to the date and timestamp on this entry--I'm writing it at 11:17 pm Tuesday 3 June 2008 and I haven't felt this hopeful about my country since all the way back then. But I'm afraid. I'm afraid to hope this much, because . . . well, because of history. I know all the things that can go wrong. I know how politicians can let you down. I know that the most secure way to be is smug and cynical and sarcastic and pragmatic. At my age, I'm supposed to have outgrown the stupid credulity of youth.

But I still remember knowing how it was meant to be. And there's a man over there who's daring me to be foolish, daring me to hope. Even though I'm supposed to be wiser than that, I might just take him up on it.

The Only Thing We Knew about Henry Porter Was That His Name Wasn't Henry Porter

435. BROWNSVILLE GIRL, Bob Dylan
Produced by, written by Bob Dylan & Sam Shepard
1986 Did not make pop charts

Even before I’m Not There, people frequently asked “Which Dylan do you like?” For me, it’s always been the yarn spinner: not the earnest folk singer of “The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll” (although I like that song too) but the retailer of whoppers who would be wholly at home with Zora Neale Hurston and her compatriots at an Eatonville toe party. “Brownsville Girl” is a great example of my kind of Dylan, a shaggy dog story that just won’t quit, in which Dylan never quite makes the connection between Henry King’s The Gunfighter and the mystery surrounding Henry Porter clear. The song is more than double the length of “Like a Rolling Stone,” but somehow it’s still a “single.” It’s certainly not an album track, if for no other reason than Knocked Out Loaded never really pretended to be an album.

The thing that separates the real Dylan from the ersatz Dylans—even from the real Dylan in what most people would regard as a fallow period—is that the semantic opacities of his lyrics are neither blatantly allegorical nor glibly superficial. They just are. You can follow them down a road, but don’t expect to ever get back from where they take you. Even Porter’s name is a fascinating semiotic cul de sac to run down: was it chosen because it’s the last name of the first great American film director (the director of The Great Train Robbery, the first great American western), or because it rhymes with “French Quarter” (the birthplace of so much that is American in music)? Both? Neither? Probably Dylan doesn’t even know, nor does playwright Sam Shepard who collaborated with him on the song. I bet it was Bobby who wanted the mariachi band, though.