I once had a manager who thought he was John Galt. Or at least a John Galt. Even though I adored him, I knew he wasn't. And when he went on to embezzle a substantial sum, it bore out my literary instinct.
I knew, though, who he was talking about because I had read Atlas Shrugged as a younger girl. So much younger, in fact, that my mother had taken the book away from me, saying, "You don't need to read that. You're selfish enough already." But I eventually read through to the end.
So when Ayn Rand's writings came back into public notice with the advent of and media attention to the Tea Party and the Libertarians and Paul Ryan's Randian Catholicism (an oxymoron), I did not have to run out to buy the book to understand that there would be trouble ahead for women, immigrants, and the poor from anyone who followed her precepts. Which are horribly, horribly selfish precepts, and idolatrous, and about as far as one can get from the teachings of Jesus.
A group of Christian faith leaders (Faithful Filibuster) gathers every day Congress is in session across the street from the Capitol building to read scripture out loud, especially the 2000 verses that tell us how to care for the poor. This is both a protest, and a public education service. Obviously there are a few folks in the government who have clean forgotten that the Bible has any use other than as a weapon with which to bludgeon people.
Those same forgetful folks have also forgotten their Ayn Rand. For it is not, in Atlas Shrugged, the heroic capitalists alone who bring down the government, and with it, the entire culture. It is the giddy, greedy, cruel Wesley Mouches, out for themselves.
You have changed the rules in the House so as to prevent any change in direction. You bark about the Constitution. You would edit out the uncomfortable bits of Jesus' words. Show me how you are not a Mouch.
Listen up, House. You dance yourselves into a tunnel of an ever-shrinking width. It is not the narrow path to heaven. It is a death trap. You will soon lose the ability to turn around. You are worshipping power, and money, and individualism. You are throwing other people's children into the fires of Moloch, in the belief that wealth and particular interests will take care of you if you legislate the sacrifice of others. They will not take care of you. They will use you, and devour you, and fail you, and forget you. They are false idols.
Relent. Repent. Come back into the daylight. Help save our country by saving its people. The Lord, which you claim to proclaim, said to love God, and love our neighbor, to heal the sick, and raise the dead.
It's time to take Him seriously. It is time to turn around. Come back to your senses. We need you. Come back to us.
I have always been a Beatles fan. Always. I remember the first time I heard them, and from that moment on, as far as I was concerned, they were The Ones.
But I had friends, tin-eared and delusional, who thought the Rolling Stones were The Ones. Poor dears! Their sonic worlds were clearly different from mine, and they were clearly wrong.
One thing was certain: nobody liked both. In fact, it was tacitly understood that one was not allowed to like both.
Which meant that I deprived myself, on principle, of the raucous splendor of the Stones music for many years. I still like the Beatles best, and probably always will. But I know now that there are times when only Keith Richards' guitar tones will do.
Over the years, I watched heated arguments over whether Kiss was categorically better than Alice Cooper, jazz better than rock, fusion indisputably better than swing, countertenors better than female altos. Yikes! Either/or, either/or. Choose or lose! Yes, it's necessary, to a certain extent. But it's also choose and lose. The best musicians I know listen to everything, and borrow from everything. Both and all would seem to be their motto, and I think this is the best way to be.
I bring this up today because I am tired of hearing wonderful musicians and singers (including me) complain about Lady Gaga. I think we should stop doing that. Most of us can't do what she does, and there are a lot of folks who really love what she does. Fair enough. Her music and performance style are not to my taste, and so they're not part of my daily life. What does seem to be part of my life is the ceaseless growl of negative comments made by some of the artists I do like.
Most of us are old enough to know better. I think we can do better, if only when in front of other people.
Let's lighten up on each other. Let's speak with a greater measure of grace and dignity, and stop flaying the girls in the meat dresses and the short dresses and no dresses at all. Let's stop muttering about J.K. Rowling's wealth, too (you know who you are). Success does not ensure a trouble-free life. Things can happen. The Wheel of Fortune can turn very quickly. Believe me. I know this very well.
Benjamin Disraeli is credited with having said, "Never complain, and never explain." I'm going to try that, at least for the rest of the afternoon.
The gig is over. You've sung your one or two (or three!) shows on closing night, taken your curtain call, done your meet-and-greet, and you are ready to eat dinner with your fellow artists and talk about how it all went. Or you might even be ready to go home, or to your hotel room, and go to sleep.
But the rest of the world has other plans. Someone important is throwing a party for you, and they entreat you to come "for just a little while", and your agent insists you go "just to put in an appearance", and your manager urges you to "swing by" and promises you won't have to stay long. Off you go, tired and hungry, hoping there will be food, hoping there won't be too much of a crowd, hoping you can be in bed before 2 AM.
Can you guess what happens when you walk through the door?
If you are a performer, you don't have to guess, because you already know. If you aren't, here are Noel Coward and Judy Garland explaining it all much better than I can.
James Taylor has always been so identified with the "singer-songwriter" genre (in which the singing is sometimes not as good as the writing) that not everyone notices that he is an extraordinary vocalist. But if you listen to any one of his many recordings, you will hear an exquisite combination of intelligence, wit, simplicity of style, honesty of expression, great intonation, impeccable time, and heart. Taylor has been singing in tune and serving the lyric for a long time now, and he gets better with every passing year. In my mind, he is one of the very best singers of my generation.
In this clip he talks about singing. Enjoy!
P.S. He and his then-wife Carly Simon attended a Transfer show in the early 70s, and dropped by our dressing rooms. It was like a visitation from the gods, not in a You're So Vain kind of way (they were both very sweet), but rather because they were both so much taller than us. Built on a more glorious scale, really. Makes me stand up very straight whenever I remember it.
I had a lovely time this afternoon being interviewed by Sandra Lee Schubert of Wild Woman Network. You can listen here.
Grammy awards were given out last night, and I didn't watch. Anything I want to see from that event will be on YouTube; this freed up my evening considerably for practicing and chatting with friends and Thinking About Things. I do want to make one comment on this year's music biz love-fest: Esperanza Spalding is very good, and I am very happy that a female jazz musician/singer of her caliber also has the good looks and the good industry support to take the award in the Best New Artist category. This meant, among other things, that an actual living jazz artist was on the televised part of the show, and not relegated to the pre-ceremony announcements. I can't think when a jazz artist - jazz, not jazz-y, jazz-like, or jazz-lite - won that award, and I find it quite remarkable. Let's hear it for the girl! None of the other awards surprise me.
Because of Esperanza's Grammy, I predict a surge in enrollments at Berklee College of Music and in high school jazz programs (if any are left after the horrifying cuts in education that seem to be on the way). Several years hence, the surgers will graduate with jazz degrees and impressive tuition-induced debt. But there aren't now, and won't be then, enough venues in which to play. Wait - there are venues, but most of them don't pay enough to bring musicians within riffing distance of the poverty line, much less allow them to crawl over that low bar. Same thing is going on in theater education: more and more graduates, fewer and fewer theaters.
Nevertheless, we are going to be singing songs forever, whether we are paid or not, and therefore I have something important on my mind, something I think about every time I teach a master class, or attend a singer's performance. Coaches and critics talk often about the necessity of commitment when singing (and acting. Non-singing actors reading this can substitute "scene" for "song", and "line" for "lyric", because they're the same). No matter how beautifully or convincingly it is done, when a someone sings a song, or even a single word in a lyric, that he or she does not completely understand, I can tell.
Furthermore, the whole audience can tell. We can tell that you don't know what you're talking about. Even though your listeners might not be able to put their fingers on how they know this, and what exactly is amiss, their exquisitely sensitive bull-detectors will ring a tiny alarm. Ring that alarm often enough during your performance and, though your audience members may be sitting in their seats, they will be emotionally and intellectually gone, thinking about the laundry, or the events in Egypt, or the likelihood of being downsized, all of which they could be doing at home in a much more comfortable chair.
We singers especially can be a lazy lot, but don't be lazy about this. Get help. If it's a word you don't understand, look it up. In an ideal world of my designing, I would send you to your personal copy of the Oxford English Dictionary, but for heaven's sake, who can even lift the thing, much less afford it? You all have computers. Google away. Type "distingué: define", and discover what Strayhorn really meant in Lush Life, and why he chose that word over others that mean roughly, but not exactly, the same thing. Learn how to pronounce it, too. And if it's the meaning of the whole song that's eluding you, do some homework. Dig deep into it. Ask a director. Ask a coach. Ask an elder. FIgure it out. If none of that helps, and you have the choice, put it on the shelf and live a little longer, and then try it again. Meanings matter. If you know what lyrics mean, your audience will, too, even if they didn't before you sang them. Until you have experienced this a few times, just trust me on this. It's magic. And it's true.
I met Gary Moore briefly in Australia in October, 1978. The Manhattan Transfer was doing a long engagement at the ballroom of the Sydney Hilton, and Thin Lizzy hit town to do a big outdoor concert at the Sydney Opera House. Back in L.A., I'd heard the first riffs of "The Boys Are Back in Town" roaring out of the radio speakers of my '65 Mustang, pulled over to the curb to listen, and then driven straight to the record store (remember them?) to buy the album (remember them?). So I was already a fan. The energy of that track was tremendous.
Lizzy and the Transfer had crossed paths in a TV studio somewhere at some point, without making much of a connection, but when it happened again in Sydney, an invitation to the concert was proffered. The Transfer was off that night, so I was happy to put on my rock & roll shoes and enjoy the show.
Lizzy, live, was a blast. Phil Lynott had a cool charisma, Scott Gorham and Gary Moore wove serpentine double guitar leads, the drummer, Mark Nauseef (subbing for Brian Downey), was great. The band would build a tune to a reckless peak, then yank the volume down, keeping the intensity, and rumble and growl till another build. I have always loved that push and pull, whether it shows up in the Basie Band or Little Feat. Power, restrained.
Moore was so young, racing around the stage, leaping, playing to the crowds, and he had a singing, muscular tone on his pretty Les Paul. As he aged, he just played better - that's what good musicians do - and his tone grew ever more rich.
Our paths did not cross again. The Transfer wasn't long back in L.A. before I fell asleep driving that Mustang. Everything changed.
But everything always changes, for everyone - Thin Lizzy disbanded in 1983, Lynott died in 1986. The other musicians I saw on the stage that day carried on in the business, sometimes working together. Moore established himself solidly as a solo artist, continuing to rock through good times and bad until this past weekend, when he died while on vacation in Spain. We were only just beginning to know him as an elder. The last chorus came unexpectedly, and there's a sadness on me about that.
Years ago, in the early 70s, there was a club called Reno Sweeney's in New York City. The place had "it" - the indefineable quality that makes a room the room for an artist to play and for an audience to frequent. The Manhattan Transfer was there for an extended run, and I think it was that gig, more than any other, that pushed us into a more sparkling level of success in New York.
Aided by a nasty review in The Village Voice, in which Robert Christgau called us racists because we were singing material originally recorded by black artists, the audience turnout was terrific. Everyone wanted to see what the fuss was about.
One night, my father (then a good-looking man in his mid-40s), was at the show. During the first set, he noticed Margaret Whiting, his favorite singer, sitting in the audience. In the break, he went over to her table, and politely introduced himself. She smiled, and listened while he told her of his admiration for her singing. He was a great fan, and though he had spent time with high-level government officials and heads of corporations and unions, this was different. Miss Whiting was a star, and I think he was just a little dazzled. When he told her that he was at Reno's to hear his daughter sing. Margaret asked, "which one is your daughter?", and he replied, The redhead."
"Oh!" she said, "She's very good."
Up to this point, my folks had been worried about my taking up show business. My grandfather was a professional singer, and so they knew it can be a hard and unpredictable life. I was constantly encouraged to consider a more conventional career (Dad opined that I was argumentative enough to be a good lawyer).
But after that night, when Margaret Whiting told him she thought I was good, there was a subtle shift in his attitude. I think that night marked the beginning of my father's acceptance of my choice to be a performer. I owe some of that to Margaret.
Miss Whiting died today, at 86. She will be missed by all who love straightforward, superb, honest singing, and by my dad, who is still a fan.
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