The freaks’ll stay together, They’re a tight old crew
You look at them, And they look at you…. Devil Baby, by Mark Knopfler
This is a song about a freak show. And why not?
Today I turned on the TV and found not one, but two “active shooter” situations going on in California. UPDATE: One hour after I wrote this, a news conference in San Bernardino, scene of the first of these shooting events, reported 14 people dead and 14 wounded, by “as many as three gunmen.”
Before that was Colorado and the viciousness and cruelty of targeting Planned Parenthood — and women. Before that was Paris. And the Russian plane. And always — Isis/Isil/DAESH/BokoHaram. And of course, Donald Trump. SO.
This is a song about a freak show. And that’s why.
ALSO we all know I love Mark Knopfler so there’s that.
I’ve tried everywhere to find audio or video of this wonderful song. I know it exists because I used to play it with my kids*. Even without the music though, it’s great. So on this anniversary, with honor, admiration — and awe:
The Ballad of Momma Rosa Parks
(Nick Venet and Buddy Mize, 1963)
In nineteen hundred and fifty-five,
In a southern American town,
A tired colored lady got on a city bus
And immediately sat down,
With a closed mind and an opened mouth
The big bus driver got rough
And told his only passenger
To move to the back of the bus.
cho: When Momma Parks sat down,
The whole world stood up,
What's good for one is good for all,
It's good for all of us.
The lady's name was Momma Rosa Parks,
A hard workin' woman indeed,
She was goin' home, 'twas her goin' time,
She had little hungry mouths to feed,
She wasn't botherin' nobody
And doin' nothin' wrong,
By the Lord's rules of love
When Momma Parks sat down
The whole world stood up.
printed in "Songs of Peace, Freedom and Protest" by Tom Glazer
(1970, David McKay Company)
*If you know where I can find it please let me know!
We’re ending this month with so much sadness and bad news and facing an election year sure to bring much more. SO instead of the long NABLOPOMO meditation I’d planned I offer you the last song from the best concert I haveever been to IN MY LIFE, not just because this amazing lineup* (it was almost too much to absorb,) but because it existed to serve the 2004 Democratic ticket as John Kerry challenged George Bush.
Yeah I know he lost, but the song – this song – written by Patti Smith, still helps to remind us today of the task that lies before us. “The People Have the Power.” We, the people, need to do all we can to protect our rights and fight to revive those stolen from us: the Voting Rights Act, the terrible assaults on women’s healthcare providers, especially Planned Parenthood, racial injustice and pain beyond describing, xenophobia and hate speech from those who would lead us. We can’t afford to lose.
So, enjoy the music and take it to heart, then remember for the next year that those people who have the power?
They’re us.
*Babyface, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen, Dave Matthews Band, Dixie Chicks, Eddie Vedder, Jackson Browne, James Taylor, John Fogerty, John Mellencamp, Jurassic 5, Keb’ Mo’, Pearl Jam, R.E.M.
Donald Trump is important. Maybe he’s channeling Huey Long, maybe Lonesome Rhodes, maybe just “the Donald,” but despite his xenophobia and thinly veiled racist take on immigrants, he has spun a new American dream and captured those who have been without one for a long time.
Despite those excluded, whom Ta-Nehesi Coates describes so well, the belief that the dream exists is a gigantic part of the American story even though, for many, it’s faded from view. Today, in the shadow of the attacks in Paris, I wonder whether his message will thrive or wither in the face of such horror and fear.
With all that in mind, what does Trump have to do with John Valjean? What did the story mean to Jack Kemp (there’s a new biography ) and Teddy Kennedy (there’s a new book about him, too) both of whom, from opposite parties and ideologies, saw Les Miz multiple times? Can what spoke to them teach or maybe comfort us as we recoil from another bloody revolution in the streets of Paris? Tell me that this* is not what they – and we – are feeling today.
This little boy is now a father, but when he was six, we took him, along with his brother, to see Les Miz. At the end, he dissolved in my lap in tears, a wise child who understood, as so many do, especiallu today, what we may have lost and must struggle to recover? Listen and then, you decide.
*When Les Miz opened in New York, both Teddy Kennedy and Jack Kemp saw it multiple times. It might have been about a revolution, but it was everyone’s revolution:
Do you hear the people sing?
Singing a song of angry men?
It is the music of a people
Who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
Echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
When tomorrow comes!
Will you join in our crusade?
Who will be strong and stand with me?
Beyond the barricade
Is there a world you long to see?
Then join in the fight that will give you
The right to be free!
This showed up in my Facebook feed Thursday night and blew me away. It may have been funny to many, but it left me breathless.
I don’t know if it’s possible for younger people today to know how terrible that time before Roe was for so many young women like Penny, who faced the terror and hopelessness of an unwanted pregnancy, or what a real miracle it was that she was rescued.
Dirty Dancing is set in the summer of 1963, just before Francis “Baby” Houseman is about to leave for Mt Holyoke. I left only a year later, for Smith. So she and I are cousins, if not sisters. Each wanting to change the world, each with a wonderful, trusting father, each falling for a bad boy with such a different history from our own … and each inexperienced in realities such as those faced by a pregnant dancer with no money whose illegal abortion goes terribly wrong.
She nearly dies — saved only by the skill of Francis’ doctor father. The film is a fairy tale – in the love story for sure, but also in the story of the damsel in distress rescued by a fatherly wizard who brings her back from the brink. Most women in those pre-Roe days – and many again now, in states where abortion rights are savaged every day — faced real back alleys and unskilled procedures on kitchen tables with no wizard, or anyone else, to save them. Penny’s story was as real as they come, and it’s no joke to remind us that her fairy tale is in real danger of once again becoming the dark horror story it used to be.
So yes – it’s always fun when cultural references inform reality. But it’s hard to enjoy even this clever comparison when the lives of so many Pennys and her sisters are in such terrible jeopardy.
Once upon a time, things were hopeful. We were too. Not because there was peace and love and bounty in the world but because, if we all tried, maybe there could be,
That’s what was so perfect about the Mad Men finale: the ironies of hindsight. There was the desperate Don Draper, moving toward bliss and emerging from both the 60’s and his misery to create the perfect, pseudo-idealistic yet consummately cynical commercial: a UN of young people on a hilltop, singing about Coke.
This video is what that video should have been. Musicians from 12 cities on 5 continents, brought together by Playing for Change, join to pay tribute to the fiftieth anniversary of The Grateful Dead and to remind us of what had all hoped, and maybe still hoped, could be.
I was a little teary. The friend who sent me the link said he’d been “crying like a girlymon the whole weekend…”
This isn’t the first “Playing for Change” video; take a look at what is a wonderful body of work created not only to move sentimental people like me but also to raise money for music schools and other services in areas of great need.
And while you’re at it – here are Robert Hunter’s lyrics for this beloved Dead classic.
If my words did glow with the gold of sunshine
And my tunes were played on the harp unstrung, Would you hear my voice come thru the music, Would you hold it near as it were your own?
It’s a hand-me-down, the thoughts are broken, Perhaps they’re better left unsung. I don’t know, don’t really care Let there be songs to fill the air.
Ripple in still water, When there is no pebble tossed, Nor wind to blow.
Reach out your hand if your cup be empty, If your cup is full may it be again, Let it be known there is a fountain, That was not made by the hands of men.
There is a road, no simple highway, Between the dawn and the dark of night, And if you go no one may follow, That path is for your steps alone.
Ripple in still water, When there is no pebble tossed, Nor wind to blow.
You who choose to lead must follow But if you fall you fall alone, If you should stand then who’s to guide you? If I knew the way I would take you home.
This is Girona, home to a large, prosperous, and effective Jewish community until a confluence of events took it all away.
In a single year, two historic moments changed western history and Jewish history, too. It was 1492. The very Catholic King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, partners in a marriage made to consolidate power, threw all the Jews out of Spain. Immediately. Convert or get out.
At the same time, of course, these same “Catholic Kings” sent Christopher Columbus on his way to the “new world” and forever changed faith, power and geopolitics.
Two “JUDEI” – Jewish figures from the 1050 “Creation Tapestry”
The letters floating above these two little people say “JUDEI” – Jew.
Girona mikvah dating from 1465
This 14th Century mikvah was found only recently. How haunting, especially with the recent mikvah scandal, to see before us evidence of how long women have honored this commitment.
Words from a tombstone (see next picture)Tombstone
For some reason, this just felt extra sad. There are so many little boys in my life – and some big ones – so maybe that’s part of it. Beyond that though, the humanness and loss felt so real, and the suffering of those times so much more concrete as I absorbed the words of this one grieving parent.
But what, you may ask, does any of this have to do with Bruce Springsteen? Well, as I entered the lovely museum gift shop, attended by this equally lovely gentleman, I heard Bruce on the radio. Gradually, I realized that he was singing My Hometown.
Now Main Street’s whitewashed windows and vacant stores Seems like there ain’t nobody wants to come down here no more They’re closing down the textile mill across the railroad tracks Foreman says these jobs are going boys and they ain’t coming back to your hometown
Last night me and Kate we laid in bed Talking about getting out Packing up our bags maybe heading south I’m thirty-five we got a boy of our own now Last night I sat him up behind the wheel and said son take a good look around This is your hometown
Exile and loss, pain and deprivation can be understood on so many levels. Just as the Jews were brutally ejected from the homes and community they had so painstakingly built, so were workers throughout this country as the factories and mines and mills that had sustained them for so long collapsed. Although on a different scale, they too lost everything they knew and the life they had loved, and were forced to find another, unknown place to call home. Although less brutally required to depart, they had no choice, really.
Loss of home, love, family and community is a hardship experienced by more and more people throughout the world. Hunger, terrorism, civil war, drought, economic collapse and religious, gender and racial discrimination hurt in different ways and to different degrees, but the pain is the same in nature if not in degree. The only thing that changes is the faith, or class, or color of the refugees. We still certainly don’t seem to have learned to care much more today when it happens to people who aren’t us.
This little fountain sits behind Napoleon’s “summer residence” in Elba, where he was exiled in disgrace after a horrific defeat — one Mark Knopfler described in his beautiful Done With Bonaparte. Napoleon never lived here; this house outside Portoferraio Italy was not his home but was to be a summer retreat. He fled Elba before he ever spent a night there.
The small island also includes several other beach towns with lovely harbors. There are also some lovely – and some weird, — sights. I’ve added a few below.
Right now it’s really late; I’ve shared some of Knopfler’s lyrics from his meditation on the suffering of Napoleon’s soldiers in the defeat that cost their leader his command and position, and cost them far more:
We’ve paid in hell since Moscow burned
As Cossacks tear us piece by piece
Our dead are strewn a hundred leagues
Though death would be a sweet release And our grande army is dressed in rags
A frozen starving beggar band Like rats we steal each other’s scraps
Fall to fighting hand to hand
Save my soul from evil, Lord And heal this soldier’s heart I’ll trust in thee to keep me, Lord I’m done with Bonaparte
I pray for her who prays for me A safe return to my belle France We prayed these wars would end all wars In war we know is no romance And I pray our child will never see A little Corporal again Point toward a foreign shore Captivate the hearts of men
Save my soul from evil, Lord And heal this soldier’s heart I’ll trust in thee to keep me, Lord I’m done with Bonaparte
Everybody needs a Mussolini apron – buy one just outside Napoleon’s summer house!Old Portoferraio in oilThe harbor in Porto Azzuro
BB King carried music in his hands and in his heart, joy at the sound of it and commitment to the making of it. All you had to do was hear him for three minutes and you knew that. And he faced down plenty to keep doing it. As the BBC tells it:
He played more than 300 gigs on the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit, the collection of performance venues in what were then racially segregated southern states where it was safe for black musicians to perform.
King said: “I have put up with more humiliation than I care to remember.
“Touring a segregated America, forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most ‘cos you didn’t realise the damage. You hold it in.”
I met him once, and the memory of that morning haunts me still.
It was, of course, when I worked at the TODAY SHOW (are you sick of those stories yet?) I used to go in early to hang out in the green room when someone I admired was going to be there. Of course, that included the morning BB was coming. He arrived with his musicians – no entourage, no fuss.
That morning, the Canadian singer Anne Murray was also on the show, appearing earlier than Mr. King. As we sat there quietly, watching the show, she told Bryant Gumbel that she was taking “a few months” off from her touring schedule to “recharge.”
King glanced up at the screen, looking sort of sad. “A few months” he said. “I could never do that. I can’t do that.” The disparity of income between blues musicians and the rockers they inspired was well-known, so much so that a foundation was established to help those who never made a dime from their royalties.
Even so, although he told the BBC in 2009, at the age of 83 “I can’t retire, I need the money,” I was never sure if his reason that day was money, or love of the road, but he said it with such longing, and with such an expression of regret, that I can see it right now. Clear as day.
I will always love his music and love his spirit and humor and warmth, and be grateful for his legacy. In my mind though, as he leaves us, it’s that peek into the life of a blues man – even a great one – as he made his way that I remember most.
Robert Altman‘s Nashville is a perfect movie. This very sexy song from the film, written and performed by Keith Carradine (currently playing Madame Secretary‘s (CBS) boss, the President of the United States) won the best original song Oscar in 1976.*
He is singing to Lily Tomlin, who plays a white gospel singer with two deaf children; despite her marriage, she is as isolated as the metaphor suggests. Their attraction is clear and heady: as he addresses his performance to her it’s clear they will find a time – just once – to be together. It’s a lovely moment in a harsh story.
The film is political, angry and brilliant. It would be remarkably relevant today; you could say the demagoguery and tea-party-like characters were “ripped from the headlines” if the film weren’t 40 years old. See for yourself; in addition to a wonderful film, you’ll get to see Carradine and Tomlin knock your socks off.
*This iconic 1979 winner from Norma Rae , “It Goes Like It Goes”, never really got the attention it deserved either – and in some ways they’re so similar.
