Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come / Get Yourself Another Fool

[Part of an ongoing series about protest songs; we'll resume 'regular' rock talk at some point...]

This happened:

In 1993, in high school, I discovered Sam Cooke. I brought my CD boombox into the living room upstairs and lay on the carpeted floor with my head next to it. It was cold – California-winter cold, with a dry crispness even under the gray of morning’s clouds. Later it would be bright sunny and still crisp, quiet with no waves. Maybe later Mom would make a fire in the fireplace.

I had heard his hits, of course, grew up with them in the canon of American popular music that came embedded in radio stations and car rides and movie soundtracks and old records belonging to grownups. On my own, I came to Sam Cooke via a CD re-release in the 1990s of an earlier record (Night Beat) that placed Cooke perfectly between his gospel beginnings and his pop appeal.

And I was sold, entirely. I bought all the greatest hits compilations, searched shops for the original albums on vinyl, tried to sing along and realized there are some voices too good to sing with. I told my friends about the amazing vocal arrangements and the smart lyrics. I read books about 60s soul music and began a deeper discovery of other artists of the era.

It was on that floor, in the boombox, that I first heard “A Change is Gonna Come.” It’s a famous song, I learned later, made perhaps generic by its own fame at this point. This song, released in the early 60s just after Cooke’s death, became a frequent soundtrack to the civil rights movement. But to listen to it for the first time, closely, with your head next to it and the crackle from the carpet and the heater humming beneath its strings, is to feel its power– to understand viscerally how a piece of music can effect in its listener a feeling of change, even without all that context stuff.

The song consists of Sam Cooke’s purest-of-the-pure voice backed by dramatic orchestration. It builds and crests and rides an obvious sense of its importance. And it works. You can’t deny the existence of potential, of change, in the way Cooke revolves this phrase:

It’s been a long,
a long time comin’
but I know
oh-oh-oh
A change gonna come.
Oh yes it will.

But here is what makes this song a protest song: it is personal. It is lyrically ambiguous; it mentions intimate events that could be read either as “small” emotional experiences, or large moments lived in history as they are occurring. This song never once mentions by name things like racism, segregation, economic brutality, violence. It never calls out the context in which it became a major song of the civil rights movement. But it’s in there.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to nail down a way to make art about politics is because we experience injustices as people, not as headlines or as slogans on cardboard signs. Cooke didn’t say, “meet me in Alabama and we’ll do some civil disobedience to fight for our rights!” He said, “I was born by the river in a little tent.” He said, “I go downtown and somebody keep telling me, don’t hang around.” He says it’s been too hard, living like this. So let’s not do it anymore.

 

And this happened:

In 1995, I went to Paris and a boy broke my heart. It was cold in Paris, colder than home but still possessed of that sort of dry precipitation less-extreme winters give us. The sky over pointy rooftops and grand facades was always grey, a few times dusting my nose with snow, but mostly just grey. I walked a lot. In an old woolen military pea coat I walked.

The faithless boy who left me there gave me Paris like I hadn’t imagined I could have it: entirely, mine, alone. And a general strike gave me Paris like I never would have it again, shutting down the subway, all but the fewest of long-distance trains, and even museums. Workers from every sector struck for weeks, delivering to me a city filled with people: people in numbers large on streets, walking, people who would normally be in taxis, walking; people who drove opening their vehicles to even more people, hitchhikers standing on every corner as the new image of rush-hour traffic…

There were no subways, no trains, and museums were either closed or closed early. So I walked around. From the apartment I found with a generous friend of my mother’s, located in the 19^th arrondissement in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of “central” Paris, I walked all the way across town. I crossed the Seine at least twice a day. I walked when it rained and I walked at 2am when it was not very safe and I walked in the morning when I didn’t know where I’d go that day. When it was cold or wet, I stopped and drank coffee or ate a kebab or crepe. When it was lonely, I stepped inside one of the many small repertory movie houses that dot the city, watching my old American friends Humphrey Bogart and Clint Eastwood portray macho black-and-white versions of the romance and the home I sometimes missed.

I had a cassette walkman and just a couple tapes, and I would sometimes meet up with a group of students to play cards. Whoever won the first round got the walkman as a prize, sitting out the rest of the game in a headphoned state of musical reverie. This often took place in a ‘maid’s quarters’ apartment up eight flights of stairs with a bathroom in the hallway complete with pull-chain toilet. The view from the apartment was amazing, with Dickensian sights onto the peaks and valleys of external-versus-internal city existence: a corner of the Arc de Triomphe, a cat crossing a rain gutter, a woman’s profile steamed in distant bathroom windows, and the anciennes themselves, the Parisian buildings, each one older than the state in which I was born.

I listened to Sam Cooke sing “A Change is Gonna Come” and other songs out that window and other windows, moving, always moving around the city that winter in Paris. But it was “Get Yourself Another Fool” that I felt closest to at that time. As a recently dumped young lover, this was my personal protest song, a masterful breakup song to an oppressive situation. The song’s loving fuck-you lyrics and the ghostly organ beside them ushered away an era, a relationship, and a method of assumption now dead to me.

And this also happened:

It was in Paris on one of those cold grey mornings that I attended my first French demonstration, by accident. Turning down the rue de Belleville, I approached the Place de la Republique and even in the daily crush of urban bodies made thicker by the transit strike, it seemed to me that there were more people than usual. It seemed like they were wearing matching colors, some of them, and then I saw their signs and heard their chants. Hundreds of thousands of people, multiple mornings a week during that month, demonstrating against public sector cuts.

I remember the press of bodies feeling warm and I was feeling cold. I remember not really understanding what people were talking about. I remember being startled to see the everydayness of the protesters– people who looked like my friends’ parents and my friends and middle managers and cab drivers and mechanics and doctors (not nurses—doctors). As I pressed in to the heat of the crowd, the face of Marianne de la Republique poked over the crowd. Someone had tacked a sign on the sculpture’s chest that said “solidarité” and I wondered if that word means something different in French culture, where the concept of “brotherhood” and “equality” are right up there in the national slogan along with the classic “liberty.” Where professionals protest in the streets right alongside those who work for them. Where there is a middle class who feels comfortable shutting down a city to make their power known, who not only isn’t afraid to ask for more, but feels they have a right to. Where solidarity is a cultural quality, not just a term used within the specific context of labor movements.

I walked on, along my daily route, through the iconic daily existence of Paris. Past shady bars near Bastille where one night walking home at 2am, two young men tried to grab my arms and I yelled them away from me before running all the way home. By the plaza outside the Hotel de Ville where that famously misleading iconic photo was taken of that couple kissing, and by Notre Dame, whose minimal statue of Joan of Arc I would visit and sometimes whisper to when I felt sad and cold. I walked near the English-language bookstore of legend, Shakespeare & Co., where I asked a strange man for a light in French and he replied “I don’t speak French” in an New York accent and then later I saw him busking on the street and he sang better than Dylan and we became friends. I walked to the area around the Sorbonne as some kids broke the windows of the Macdonalds where I frequently went to use the toilet. Past the Turkish guys at the café I liked, and the closed-for-strike newsstand owned by the two Algerian dudes who always tried to talk to me about surfing when they found out I was from California. The streets were smokey, people were running, the beep-beep of European sirens blared. Snow formed and failed, and tried again to form. I walked.

And I kept walking. And I felt it, there, in a private moment of my own personal pain and in a public political moment: Something bigger. Something huge, if we can only do this in America – make our personal pains public and make them outraged and make them matter. It’s protest, it’s heartbreak, it’s something big that is also something tiny and inside you. Something like a change, coming.

Life’s Rich Pageant

I.R.S., 1986

So, R.E.M. broke up.

I have to be honest: I didn’t exactly know they were together. I’m an R.E.M. fan, but I still tend to think of 1994’s Monster as their “new” album, because I’m pretty sure that’s the last of their albums I bought. However, lately, in part because I’ve been around a lot of mandolins recently, I’ve been revisiting their earlier albums and remembering how much I loved this band, and why.

They’re good. Really good. They make me raise my head up and sing along and sometimes even jump up and down. They clearly know way more about music — structure, harmony, all that academic stuff — than many of their contemporaries. They send me back to times and places far from here. They last.

In fact, they often get better over time: Automatic for the People and Monster were almost dirty secrets for me at the time of their releases, because R.E.M. was by that time firmly a popular band and grunge was happening and they weren’t “hard” or “loud”; I joined in with other alternative posers in whispering that R.E.M. were “sellouts” while at night I still listened to Drive over and over until I could fall asleep. Now, without such a time-based pop culture context (and partially because compared to a lot of popular rock bands now, R.E.M. is so obviously cool and dark and different), those “mainstream” albums of theirs play even better.

R.E.M.’s songs consisted of rock structures, harmonic vocals, and fine-tuned songwriting — with countryish suggestions via fingerpicking and a bit of twang in Michael Stipe’s voice. They were not a country band, but they were a rock band from Georgia. They wrote about some of the same things punk and grunge bands wrote about, but they felt… quieter. And they were good. Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe: all in their own rights deft and skilled musicians who were so self-possessed they didn’t showboat with their sound, but instead were a group. This was a band, not a lead singer and some backing musicians (I’m speaking about their music and sound here, not about their cultural/celebrity image, which was decidedly and increasingly Stipe-centric). They even all sang harmony.

At the time, people thought this band was political, in the way that at the time a sixth grade me wearing a “save the rainforests” sweatshirt on the first day of school was considered political. In other words: not exactly activism, but earnest and concerned, especially in the face of most pop music of the 80s.

Party to their political earnestness and their emergence from an independent record label, was R.E.M.’s status as the poster band for “college radio”: alternative, indie, whatever you want to call it. I had heard about this when my friends got me into them in high school, but I was a decade too late to understand what college radio in the 80s meant to people who were actually in college in the 80s. I was a child in the 80s; by the time I got into R.E.M., I didn’t know about radio and the way it could build alternative cultures in the face of pop destruction and Reagan-era conformity. I didn’t know about the unique sounds this band was creating or that they were truly unique sounds– or how big their influence was on most of the other bands I loved in the 90s.

Here’s a fun exercise: put on “Old Man Kensey,” from Fables of the Reconstruction. The slow bass intro, the strength of single, dark plucked guitar notes. A droning repetition to the rhythm and the voice. Speed this up a tiny bit, put a little more angst and raw pain in the voice, make it louder and switch out the chorus pedal for a fuzzy distortion and let the song explode at the chorus … and it’s a Nirvana song. Something in the way. Repeat.

For me and my friends, who worshipped Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Madonna and Pavement equally, R.E.M. was about mix tapes and poetic phrasings, long sessions spent driving and singing along in bad harmony, a romanticized image of southern America, and hints at the political wrapped in the eternal emotions of rock and roll. But mostly, despite their cohesiveness as a group, R.E.M. was about the words.

Stipe is a poet. Let’s just be honest here. In the video for “fall on me”, one of my possibly favorite songs of all time, we see only the lyrics, in all caps, sans punctuation, running over upside-down images of humanity’s earthly follies:

Did you notice the lyrics?

A melody and a counter melody. The sky and the sky. There’s a problem feathers iron. Lifting and falling and there was a moment somewhere – my dad’s backyard, a bootleg live R.E.M. mix tape copied over and over via friend and friend, in the hammock, discovering the most immediate way for me to feel grounded: to lie on my back and look at the sky, through overhead leaves if possible, and pray — and ask — that it not fall on me.

Also something about the way humans think we can own things we can’t own.

This was poetry. This was a musical era in rock in which a lyricist could ramble free-associatively in semi-linked metaphors and imagistic expressions of emotion, and still mean something. The best lyricists of a certain kind still do this – Cobain, Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy? Thom Yorke almost gets there but doesn’t let go enough — but it is becoming increasingly rare in rock music, as hooks and guest-spots and statements take over our sonic media like so many status updates.

So I’ll throw on this record and be in the backyard, still years too late to know anything about context, and I’ll be only in poems, in finger-picked poems, under the sky, beginning to fall all over again.

Horses, side 2

Arista Records, 1975

dear Patti,

i was talking today to an older, successful writer. She was saying there isn’t a good how-to writing book about how to live a life and still write. Make a living, manage the paid work with the passion work, retain relationships, attend events, juggle pitches and poems, save time for spacing out. Wish i could write that one but i can’t/ Don’t know the how-s or the to-s of it.

 

side 2 (of Horses) feels older, a little bit. Side 2 is about longer-ness and loudening and farewells, but also about really becoming yourself.
So, why the post-adolescent confessionals in response, all typed out like a Beat, what’s up with the question marks and where’s the rock and roll analysis, what gives with the girlish need for perfection, the romance of artistic superlatives?

Because, patti smith, your work — music, words, all — connects me with something tiny and true and wonder in here, something that tells me, remember?, and remember. the something never satisfied, the something keeps you making, the something that always asks for more. greedy in its own gifting, this something.

A million and a half smart people have written briliant critiques of your album, patti, saying things like gamechanger, like godmother, birther of a vivid nascent howl of culture (and your flow, your sweet rapper’s flow, they sing of you!) sing how you traveled time for generations of us, young, who heard you first in others, who only later really noticed hearing you. for me you followed your own influence, the way the jump-cuts of Jean-Luc Godard came for me after MTV: by the time we got it it was quotidian, even typical.

i ask to let me never think of voice as everyday, be it raw people poems or Fenders or my own. i ask to let them also be this way: unleashed like potential, like the tremor in a land-owner at hearing the pump-slash-gutwrench of electric guitar meets angelic imagery, accessed like an every-day how-to.

Like young you, standing in an ideal triangle of light before the shutter of the artist of your life, we ask for more so we can become it.

cuz we can only try, sweet girl, to be the artists of our lives.

we don’t mind.

we try.

Horses, side 1

Arista Records, 1975

[you can click on the text above to make it bigger if you need to]

Linda Ronstadt – Greatest Hits

Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch, 1976

Consider Linda Ronstadt. No really, consider her. Country singer turned chart-topper. Latina pop superpower. Roller skate wearer. Rock and roll success in an era where most stars were men.

When I talk about Linda Ronstadt, I often automatically start off by being defensive on her behalf. Maybe it’s because at first glance, to a modern-day kid, she doesn’t seem the most legit: she doesn’t play an instrument, doesn’t write her own songs, and was frequently photographed in less than feminist ways. But in fact, her musical prowess is immense, she has managed to be a commercial success with (mostly) control over her own career since the 70s, and she’s always reckoned with being a sometimes scantily clad woman rock singer in honest and interesting ways, in public.

And that’s all before you hear her sing.

Ronstadt often talked in interviews about preferring to record music that she grew up with. Her early albums display a mix of country music with ranchero-style rhythms. And Ronstadt herself was a lot of the music I grew up to.

There’s an impression in my musical memory: my mom sitting on the front steps, probably grading papers or doing accounting work, singing Ronstadt versions of classic songs to me as I circled our small carport on rollerskates, practicing. The carport was the only cement surface in reach near our house; after its small square of smoothness, our long gravel driveway connected to a potholed, barely paved road. I considered myself well-practiced once I could hit a stray gravel rock without falling, instead stopping and catching myself and immediately starting off again for another go around the miniature rink, skinned knees and all.

Nowadays we would call Ronstadt a cover singer—most of her dozens of hits were songs written, and often made famous, by other people. She didn’t play a guitar onstage. She just stood there, singing. “I Can’t Help it if I’m Still In Love With You” (written by Hank Williams; also iconically performed by Patsy Cline). “When Will I Be Loved” (by The Everly Brothers). Her renditions of songs became the go-to ones for my parents’ generation, booting out the performances of such artists as Betty Everett (“You’re No Good”) and Wanda Jackson (“Silver Threads and Golden Needles”) for more decade-appropriate interpretations.

Before the “alternative” rock era ushered in the need for singers to write their own material and “do” more onstage, Ronstadt would have been called “an interpreter of the Great American Songbook.” Whether or not you agree with the limited concept and scope of a “great” “American” songbook (I think it’s both sort of sentimental and totally exclusive of non-mainstream artists and art), Ronstadt’s role in recording popular American songs from the span of the 20^th century is not that different from revered vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald or even Patsy Cline. It matters. And it’s so, so singable. Seriously. This woman has sung every song. It’s insane.

Say what you will about the seventies being a decade of odd, derivative, yet oddly influential rock music. Ronstadt managed to provide the requisite interpretation of the “songbook” appropriate to her period of ascendance—slow ballads and easy-swinging rock tunes with guys dropping in guitar solos during which she stood silent. She felt the songs, “Desperado” and all. And she did the songs justice. Hers remain good musical choices, even if the fashions and pretentions of the era may not. (And we all know all eras have pretentions, in hindsight.) Her voice is powerful.

There is something about Ronstadt that is indeed truly seventies, despite her career encompassing every decade since the sixties. She’s not a folk or protest singer, and not a groomed offspring of the fifties and sixties. She was a contemporary of Janis Joplin, yet despite her grounded and powerful tone most of the music Ronstadt performs is much less rockin’ than Janis’s music. Poking around the internet for videos to post, I remember how seventies Ronstadt makes me feel, even down to the fact of my existence being a product of that decade. The softness of the rock with the guitar focus. The girl singer acting tough while being sexy and girly. The retrospective gentleness of popular music. The groovy sexual expression, the return to the personal and the focus on emotion and after the political and game-changing foci of 60s popular music. Ronstadt embodied this all, contradictions and all.

She also remains an anomaly as a mega-selling Latina pop star, having always loudly and proudly credited her Mexican heritage as a formative part of her identity, musically and otherwise. She has released several Spanish-language albums. She’s also performed opera, collaborated with classic composers, and I’m sure more that I don’t even know about. Despite the facts that her hands are empty onstage, the woman is a musician.

I wish I had a Stone Poneys record. I don’t. I have one of her many greatest hits comps, one I probably picked up in a dollar bin somewhere. It was released in 1976, the year I was born. And every time I put it on I’m spinning around the carport again, learning the songs of my century through the robust, emotional, smooth, and sweet renditions of a terrific, trailblazing “lady singer.”