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Friday, September 15, 2006

ABF Friday:  Mordant Celebration edition!

One year ago today I was having one of the better times of my life.  I was in northern California, attending the wedding ceremony of my old friend Larry Gallagher, whom I’d met in college and with whom I’d played some fine music back in the day, and Catherine Shaddix, whom he’d met back in the more recent (mid-90s) day at the Mount Baldy Zen Center.  It was a thoroughly Buddhist ceremony—nothing wasted, everything fun, very moving vows, and a hilarious discussion afterwards about whether the Vipassana ideal of lovingkindness wasn’t too difficult for us mere humans to achieve (and, relatedly, whether it was a bad idea to have a belief system in which one was constantly weighed in one’s own scales and found wanting, what with all those “hindrances” in the way) and whether Buddhists might not be better off with a more realistic outlook that involved 80 percent lovingkindness and 20 percent revenge.

One of the highlights of the weekend for me was playing music again with Larry and other-former-bandmate Oren Bloedow and about seven or eight terrific musicians (“terrific” here meaning “much much better at playing music than I am”).  I had neglected to bring my hi-hat cymbals with me to San Francisco, and I was frantically writing this review essay on the trip and meeting the delightful Chris Clarke along the way, so part of the weekend involved a series of Madcap Adventures that I did not fail to detail on this blog last year.  (Dang, I just reread that post and got all wistful.) I hadn’t played music in public for about six years, and I haven’t played since.  I don’t know why.

And, as I wrote in that post, our set ended on a most fun and kinda-ironic (and therefore even more fun) note:

My part of the evening was capped off when word got around the crowd that no one in the United States could be properly married until the band played “Celebration,” whereupon we all got back up on stage and played a seven-minute jam that included an extended solo so remarkable that half the musicians spun around and said, WTF? as one of the guitarists took the tune to places it had never been.  As we ended sharply on “everyone around the world, come on”—improbably, since we had never played the song before—Kid B brought the celebration to a close, declaring, “by the power invested in me by Kool and the Gang, I now pronounce you husband and wife.”

Well, what I didn’t tell you last year was that the next morning, as the entire wedding party of thirty-or-forty-or-so people gathered for casual breakfast and coffee and chatter in the crisp California sunshine, Larry and I and a small group of people (including Joey Cheezhee of Joey Cheezhee and the Velveeta Underground, about whom I’d heard so much over the years but had never met) had a soul-searching discussion that will serve, one year later, as the basis for today’s Arbitrary But Fun Friday.

It started like this.  Rob Riddell, one of those fine musicians (and the author of the “about Larry” page of Larry’s website), was going to be married three weeks hence, and he’d gotten such a kick out of the impromptu “Celebration” celebration that he was reportedly thinking of playing the song at his wedding.  Quite apart from the question of whether this constituted an illegitimate form of copying-off, there was the question—and I don’t remember who first brought it up—of whether it was appropriate to play “Celebration” only three weeks after playing “Celebration,” because, after all, as the first verse clearly states,

There’s a party goin’ on right here
A celebration to last throughout the years

And who would want to violate the letter and the spirit of this powerful song?

On the other hand, no one in the United States can be properly married until the band plays “Celebration.” So we were faced with something of a dilemma.

My contribution to the discussion went like this: the question about “Celebration” unfortunately opens out onto the entire genre of packaged-party songs, such as Madonna’s “Holiday” and Chic’s “Good Times.” Because the entire premise of these songs is that our lives are, in fact, full of stress and strife, and we’re just going to take this one day (and night) and have ourselves a goddamn good time if it kills us.  So you obviously can’t play them three weeks apart.  You have to wait until you’ve accumulated enough agony, enough sorrow and trouble, and then you can play one of them again.

Madonna makes this quite clear:

It’s time for the good times
Forget about the bad times, oh yeah
One day to come together
To release the pressure
We need a holiday

“Put your troubles down/ It’s time to celebrate,” she sings, and though there’s an obligatory note of optimism—“Let love shine/ And we will find/ A way to come together/ And make things better,” we know this is so much horseshit, because the song opened by telling us we were allowing ourselves “just one day out of life” (my emphasis).  The note of optimism fools no one.  The song just keeps on mentioning pressure and troubles and bad times.  And that’s because when tomorrow comes, we return to the salt mines, where (if God is merciful) we will soon expire.

“Good Times” puts more of an emphasis on “good” times, as you might imagine, but despite the incessantly repeated (and therefore ultimately unconvincing) claim that “these are the good times,” the song just can’t help alluding to the conditions that make it necessary:

Must put an end
To this stress and strife
I think I want to live the sporting life

(This, folks, is why Raymond Williams was right to say that “we have to break from the common practice of isolating the object and then discovering its components.  On the contrary we have to discover the nature of a practice and then its conditions.”)

And then there is the truly ominous second stanza, which ends with that idyllic picture of “Clams on the half-shell/ And roller skates, roller skates,” but predicates this vision on what can only be called a sense of urgency and despair:

A rumor has it that it’s getting late
Time marches on, just can’t wait
The clock keeps turning, why hesitate
You silly fool, you can’t change your fate

Scholars of packaged-party songs have tried to gloss this stanza by way of its echo of “Time’s winged chariot” (“But at my back I always hear/ Time’s winged chariot hurrying near;/ And yonder all before us lie/ Deserts of vast eternity,” from Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress”), thereby claiming “Good Times” for the carpe diem tradition.  (The opening line, “a rumor has it,” is pretty clearly a nod to that tradition.) But still, my point remains.  Andrew Marvell certainly couldn’t utter these words to his coy mistress every three weeks, and you can’t play any of these songs that frequently, either.

Few artists have demystified the “party song” tradition so thoroughly as Mary J. Blige, of course, whose delightful “Family Affair” and “Dance for Me” are bracingly insistent on their status as tenuous (though thumpin’) respites from “drama” and “situations” and “BS.” “Dance for Me” admits, “And I know you been stressed/ That’s how we got you messed up,” and “Family Affair” goes so far as to suggest that the first injunction to “leave your situations at the door” was insufficient, and requires a second, more emphatic “I told you leave your situations at the door” (emphasis added, but already implied, I think).

In fact, as our post-wedding discussion progressed, our little group began to wonder if there were any get-up-and-dance songs that weren’t ultimately self-consuming artifacts.  For does not the seemingly straightforward exhortation to get on the good foot imply a bad foot, and that you may be on it as we speak?  And who wants to be reminded of that bad foot in a song about the good foot?  “Ain’t nothing goin’ on but the rent/ A whole lotta bills and my money’s spent/ And that’s on my bad foot.” See?  Told you.

I’ll develop this theme in another post, when I explain why Sam Cooke’s “We’re Havin’ a Party” actually suggests (not in its lyrics but in Cooke’s delivery) that the comforts of this world, even unto the Cokes in the icebox and the popcorn on the table, are paltry and evanescent, and that our true condition consists of misery and grief and mourning.

But for now, here’s our ABF question: is it possible, knowing what we now know, to play or dance to any of these songs unironically?  And precisely how long should we wait before playing or dancing to them again?

Happy anniversary, Larry and Catherine, and thanks again for a lovely party that will last throughout the years.

Side notes: Check out Larry’s new CD, just released the other day or so!  As the website says, “‘Can I Go Now?’ continues in the long tradition of Larry Gallagher albums that began with his other CD three years ago.” I especially recommend “I’m Deep (Will You Sleep with Me),” and I can’t resist mentioning that I couldn’t resist quoting, in Liberal Arts, Larry’s wry take on the guilty-white-liberal phenomenon in “I’m Sorry For What My People Did to Your People,” namely, the stanza that goes,

I’m sorry for what my people did to your people
It was a nasty job
Please note the change of attitude
On the bumper of my Saab.

The first CD is well worth your while, too, ranging from the lovely “Disappointment Slough” to the laugh-til-you-cry “Wimpy White Guys with Guitars.” Just don’t tell Larry I sent you.  Make him guess.

And Jamie turns 15 tomorrow!  We’re taking him to this gig tonight.  And let’s hope he likes his new iPod!  Celebrate good times, come on!

Posted by Michael on 09/15 at 10:50 AM
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