Redburn Reads (Oct. 15, 2024)

Musical Memories of a Baby Boomer

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In my last RR, I promised an escape for politics, if only briefly, and that’s what I’m going to deliver today. We’re closing in on the election, but perhaps it’s time to just take a deep breath, put aside the anxiety, and enjoy something different.

So this post will be about some of my musical memories, starting with a stunning Leonard Cohen concert in Paris in 2009, when he revived his career (and restored his bank account after his manager stole most of his money) with a series of world tours that reached its zenith with  “Live in London,” an album I listen to frequently. That painting on the wall is in Montreal, where Cohen was born and raised, and which we visited just this month.

As Leonard neared the end of his life, he sat down with David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, to remember what he had done over a long and eventful life.

When Leonard Cohen was twenty-five, he was living in London, sitting in cold rooms writing sad poems. He got by on a three-thousand-dollar grant from the Canada Council for the Arts. This was 1960, long before he played the festival at the Isle of Wight in front of six hundred thousand people. In those days, he was a Jamesian Jew, the provincial abroad, a refugee from the Montreal literary scene. Cohen, whose family was both prominent and cultivated, had an ironical view of himself. He was a bohemian with a cushion whose first purchases in London were an Olivetti typewriter and a blue raincoat at Burberry. Even before he had much of an audience, he had a distinct idea of the audience he wanted. In a letter to his publisher, he said that he was out to reach “inner-directed adolescents, lovers in all degrees of anguish, disappointed Platonists, pornography-peepers, hair-handed monks and Popists.”

I’m not sure if I fit into any of those categories, but I’ve still got Cohen’s first record – and his last. Here’s Remnick describing how Leonard got into the music business.

Cohen loved the masters of the blues—Robert Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Bessie Smith—and the French storyteller-singers like Édith Piaf and Jacques Brel. He put coins in the jukebox to listen to “The Great Pretender,” “Tennessee Waltz,” and anything by Ray Charles. And yet when the Beatles came along he was indifferent. “I’m interested in things that contribute to my survival,” he said. “I had girlfriends who really irritated me by their devotion to the Beatles. I didn’t begrudge them their interest, and there were songs like ‘Hey Jude’ that I could appreciate. But they didn’t seem to be essential to the kind of nourishment that I craved.”

The same set of ears that first tuned in to Bob Dylan, in 1961, discovered Leonard Cohen, in 1966. This was John Hammond, a patrician related to the Vanderbilts, and by far the most perceptive scout and producer in the business. He was instrumental in the first recordings of Count Basie, Big Joe Turner, Benny Goodman, Aretha Franklin, and Billie Holiday. Tipped off by friends who were following the folk scene downtown, Hammond called Cohen and asked if he would play for him.

Cohen was thirty-two, a published poet and novelist, but, though a year older than Elvis Presley, a musical novice. He had turned to songwriting largely because he wasn’t making a living as a writer. He was staying on the fourth floor of the Chelsea Hotel, on West Twenty-third Street, and filled notebooks during the day. At night, he sang his songs in clubs and met people on the scene: Patti Smith, Lou Reed (who admired Cohen’s novel “Beautiful Losers”), Jimi Hendrix (who jammed with him on, of all things, “Suzanne”), and, if just for a night, Janis Joplin (“giving me head on the unmade bed / while the limousines wait in the street”).

After taking Cohen to lunch one day, Hammond suggested that they go to Cohen’s room, and, sitting on his bed, Cohen played “Suzanne,” “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye,” “The Stranger Song,” and a few others.

When Cohen finished, Hammond grinned and said, “You’ve got it.”

Remnick has put together a wonderful collection of his profiles of popular musicians, Holding the Note, including a tremendous piece on Bruce Springsteen from 2012.

Many musicians in their grizzled late maturity have an uncertain grasp on their earliest days on the bandstand. (Not a few have an uncertain grasp on last week.) But Springsteen, who is sixty-two and among the most durable musicians since B. B. King and Om Kalthoum, seems to remember every gaudy night, from the moment, in 1957, when he and his mother watched Elvis on “The Ed Sullivan Show”—“I looked at her and I said, ‘I wanna be just . . . like . . . that’ ”—to his most recent exploits as a multimillionaire populist rock star crowd-surfing the adoring masses. These days, he is the subject of historical exhibitions; at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum, in Cleveland, and at the National Constitution Center, in Philadelphia, his lyric sheets, old cars, and faded performing duds have been displayed like the snippets of the Shroud. But, unlike the Rolling Stones, say, who have not written a great song since the disco era and come together only to pad their fortunes as their own cover band, Springsteen refuses to be a mercenary curator of his past. He continues to evolve as an artist, filling one spiral notebook after another with ideas, quotations, questions, clippings, and, ultimately, new songs. His latest album, “Wrecking Ball,” is a melodic indictment of the recessionary moment, of income disparity, emasculated workers, and what he calls “the distance between the American reality and the American dream.” The work is remote from his early operettas of humid summer interludes and abandon out on the Turnpike. In his desire to extend a counter-tradition of political progressivism, Springsteen quotes from Irish rebel songs, Dust Bowl ballads, Civil War tunes, and chain-gang chants.

Early this year, Springsteen was leading rehearsals for a world tour at Fort Monmouth, an Army base that was shut down last year; it had been an outpost since the First World War of military communications and intelligence, and once employed Julius Rosenberg and thousands of militarized carrier pigeons. The twelve-hundred-acre property is now a ghost town inhabited only by steel dummies meant to scare off the ubiquitous Canada geese that squirt a carpet of green across middle Jersey. Driving to the far end of the base, I reached an unlovely theatre that Springsteen and Jon Landau, his longtime manager, had rented for the rehearsals. Springsteen had performed for officers’ children at the Fort Monmouth “teen club” (dancing, no liquor) with the Castiles, forty-seven years earlier.

The atmosphere inside was purposeful but easygoing. Musicians stood onstage noodling on their instruments with the languid air of outfielders warming up in the sun. Max Weinberg, the band’s volcanic drummer, wore the sort of generous jeans favored by dads at weekend barbecues. Steve Van Zandt, Springsteen’s childhood friend and guitarist-wingman, keeps up a brutal schedule as an actor and a d.j., and he seemed weary, his eyes drooping under a piratical purple head scarf. The bass player Garry Tallent, the organist Charlie Giordano, and the pianist Roy Bittan horsed around on a roller-rink tune while they waited. The guitarist Nils Lofgren was on the phone, trying to figure out flights to get back to his home, in Scottsdale, for the weekend.

My first rock concert was in the summer of 1967, between my junior and senior years of high school. I was attending a summer science program in San Diego, met my first girl friend and smoked pot for the first time. Janis was still with Big Brother and the Holding Company and it was right after the Monterey Pop Festival that launched her to stardom. I hadn’t really heard much about her until a couple of my fellow students invited me to go along.

Here’s what she sounded like.

Like Leonard Cohen, I didn’t fall in love with The Beatles in the 60’s, but I now probably listen to them more than any other musicians, thanks to Siruis’ Beatles Channel, which is my go-to station more times than not when I’m driving, along with the Classic Vinyl, Smokey’s Soul Town and Tom Petty stations. The music I grew up with is still the music I listen to, I’m afraid. Like many baby boomers, I’ve never taken to most of the stuff that came after the 1980’s, including rap and hip hop.

I never saw The Beatles perform live, but I’ve been fortunate to have enjoyed Mary Chapin Carpenter early in her career, at the intimate Birchmere just outside Washington, and to have attended concerts by the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, The Who, Jackson Browne, Ray Charles, Judy Collins, Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and, most recently, Paul McCartney, at Fenway Park in Boston. Doesn’t quite make up for missing the Beatles at the Hollywood Bowl, but close – and the sound system was a lot better.

But, as someone who lived in Southern California at the time, I’m one of the few people my age willing to admit I wasn’t at Woodstock.

As a baby boomer, The Big Chill is one of those films it’s slightly embarrassing to admit liking. The sound track, however, is out of this world, especially “I Heard it Through the Grapevine” at the start of the movie. Here’s an even more stunning performance by Marvin Gaye than the recorded version used in the movie.

One movie that does look likely to endure is Pulp Fiction, which is 30 years old now, and still feels fresh and alive. It revived the career of John Travolta, and I still get chills from his dance scene with Uma Thurman. If you are going to click on any my links in this posting, you should definitely do it on this one!

If only for a few minutes, I hope this helps you forget your fear that Donald Trump might win the election and simply feel good about being alive.