Fragility of memory

 I was at a Maria Muldaur concert here in Phoenix last night. It was the first time I'd seen her live in performance, even though I'd first encountered her voice in Jim Kweskin Jug Band records in about 1968. For one reason or another, I simply missed her whenever she was doing a show anywhere near where I was living. 

Anyway, last night was lovely, she was in good voice, singing a little lower maybe than in her youth, but still able to provide sinuous frills in her vocals as she did in the days of "Midnight at the Oasis," which was a hit 50 years ago. (Yes, the '70s are turning 50.) My wife and I thoroughly enjoyed it. 

The format was a series of monologues about how she came to this or that song or style of music that the next number exemplified. And so she told the story of listening, when she was a young girl living in the Greenwich Village neighborhood of New York City, to a country music station based in New Jersey and hearing the likes of Hank Thompson and Kitty Wells. She said that she was about 6 years old and singing Wells' "It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels."

Although it may seem that I intend to review the show, but I don't. Something about this story of the Kitty Wells song seemed off to me. It nagged at me and when I figured out what the issue was, it made me think about the nature of memory and how fragile it is. 

Back in 1992 when I was writing a column for The Arizona Republic, I got my first chance ever to talk with her on the phone for an interview about her then-current album "Louisiana Love Call" and her tour to promote the record, which was coming to Phoenix - although I again missed her show. I quoted her as saying, "Picture this if you will, a 5-year-old Sicilian girl from New York singing 'It Wasn't God Who Made Honky-Tonk Angels ... yodels and all." It's a cute story, and my point isn't to take Muldaur to task for this but according to every document I could find today it's impossible, unless she's younger than she's willing to admit. 

Based on her biography, she turned 82 last month. That means she would have been 9 years old when the song was released in June 1952. Now, is it any less of a cute story for a kid of 9 to be singing the tune, which was about how cheating husbands (or otherwise lying men) have led many a woman astray? It was a subject about which we'd expect a kid - whether 5, 6 or 9 - to have no understanding, and of course, that's the humor in telling the story. 

My point isn't that Muldaur did anything wrong. This is not a morality tale. It's a caution to all of us that the stories we tell ourselves are often incorrect in actual detail, but they are meaningful to us personally. Why didn't that point nag me in 1992? I'll own up to it. I contributed an inaccuracy to the historical record by not researching when Wells released "... Honky-Tonk Angels." 

It's no big deal, right? I mean, who's going to be hurt by that? I even feel bad pointing it out. However, I think about this story in the context of more history-shaping events and how we make up our minds about things, with incomplete, often erroneous data, pushed by deadlines and other pressures.

I know that I didn't know as much 30 years ago as I do know, which is why I totally let the Wells reference pass in that column, but last night it bothered me. One of the things that had changed in the interim was that I had time to reflect and to check almost instantly on my phone about when Wells' song came out. In the back of my mind, I remembered reading stories about the 70th anniversary of the song in 2022, which is what sent me to my phone. 

So, let's not be hard on one another. Almost no fact is incontestable, but our memories are real and important, even if they don't quite match the common timeline. What's weird is that the nature of truth is in the story - not the nonessential details. I guess truth is found by sorting out the important stuff from the distractions. 

I've seen this movie before - Part 2

 If you notice that news commentators are mentioning 1968 a whole lot as they cover the U.S. presidential race, I want to point out that wasn't happening (as far I can tell) back in March when I first mentioned the way that history doesn't quite repeat itself. 

What changed? Historic headline events in this year's race could not be ignored the way nuances could.

Why 1968? Well, that was the year when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated on the campaign trail, mirroring the shooting in Butler, Pa., this year. That was also the year that the last sitting president eligible for re-election - Lyndon Johnson - chose not to run. As you don't need me to tell you, events in the past couple of weeks have brought these two parallels front and center. 

There's another parallel coming and that is that the Democratic Pary's national convention will be held in Chicago, just like the one in 1968, which was attended by street protests and violence. The anger underlying the protests was against the Johnson administration's war policy in Vietnam, a war that was never declared by Congress, which according to the Constitution has the sole power to declare war.

The division at that time mirrors the hostile political environment today. In my mind, what symbolizes that is the way that the ABC TV network chose to cover the conventions. There were only three major broadcast networks back then, and ABC was the smallest with the least resources. So rather than do the gavel-to-gavel coverage of the conventions that CBS (think Walter Cronkite) and NBC (think Chet Huntley and David Brinkley) did, ABC waited until after prime time with a TV digest of the day's events and a political-analysis segment between conservative combatant William F. Buckley in one corner and liberal combatant Gore Vidal in the other. 

Part of the appeal that ABC was making to viewers at the time was to a public that wanted to be checked out of all the partisan bickering and just escape with primetime entertainment programming, which the other networks were not providing. Whether you were apathetic, tired of all the back and forth, an independent or a partisan of the other party whose convention was getting covered that night, you didn't have to watch all the partisan stuff. 

I know it's hard to believe in the age of streaming, but there wasn't much TV beyond the three networks. 

Anyway, I watched the Buckley-Vidal segments in real time in 1968. During the next-to-last night of the Democratic convention, Vidal called Buckley a "crypto-fascist" and Buckley then threatened to punch him. The only documentation I found on Buckley's response was a quote in The Nation's online site that says, Buckley threated to punch Vidal "in the goddamn face." (The Nation's report also says that Buckley called Vidal "a queer.") I don't remember those words. My memory was that Buckley threatened to punch him in the nose. (The copy editor in me wanted to confirm whether I had misremembered, but I didn't do an extensive search on YouTube for video. After spending about 10 minutes watching one segment that I thought was going to bear fruit, the video was incomplete, and there's not enough time left in my life to be spent trying to confirm such insignificant details.) The fact is that a heated exchange happened live on TV because people were divided over this issue to the point of coming to blows. To me, this was a perfect microcosm of that macro fact. 

Who knows what will happen in Chicago? Who knows what will happen in November? All I can say is, I don't want to see this movie ever again. 

I've seen this movie before

 I'm old enough to remember 1968. In the United States, it was a presidential election year. A president, Lyndon Johnson, rendered himself unelectable by pursuing an unpopular war policy opposed by a rising youth movement.

Johnson gave a televised policy speech on the Vietnam War on the evening of Sunday, March 31, 1968, and announced that he would not run for re-election. It may have been a coincidence, but on the East Coast, at least, Johson's speech pre-empted a show that was very vocal in its opposition to the war: "The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour" on CBS. 

What prompted this? The most likely answer was that two candidates opposed to the Johnson administration's war policy had declared their intention to vie with Johnson for the Democratic Party's nomination. Sen. Eugene McCarthy declared in November of 1967, and just two weeks before Johnson's announcement, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy declared on a similar platform. Johnson's decision also set the stage for his 1964 running mate and vice president, Hubert Humphrey, to run for the Democratic Party's nomination. Johnson had already won the New Hampshire primary, held March 12, by the time he made his decision not to run. McCarthy got 42 percent of the vote to Johnson's 49, which was an astonishing result, given that Johnson had the power of the incumbency and a good economy as tailwinds. However, the Tet Offensive, a successful sneak attack launched by North Vietnam and its Viet Cong allies in South Vietnam in January, appeared to be the impetus to making the division in the party irreconcilable.  

Meanwhile, a Republican opponent accused of being a shady character, Richard Nixon, said he could keep America strong and quickly end the war. There was also a third party, the American Independent Party, whose nominee was Gov. George Wallace, a Southern Democrat (I can't tell if he ever permanently changed his party affiliation to AIP, if you know, let me know and I'll fix this) and segregationist. According to some sources, Wallace's goal was to win enough electors so that the Electoral College could not decide the election (i.e., no candidate would receive the majority of electors) and the election would be thrown from the public sphere to the House of Representatives, where he could wield some clout for his own policies. 

Another significant alternative party, known in my neck of the woods (it was New Jersey in those days) as the Peace and Freedom Party, also was in the mix. Its platform rested on opposition to the war and pushing for civil rights and racial equity. Depending on the state, the ticket might have either Eldridge Cleaver or Dick Gregory at the top. In my state, it was the comedian, Gregory. It didn't have much effect on the election (read its history according to Wikipedia here: Peace and Freedom Party - Wikipedia) but the statement made in defense of nominating people who weren't already politicians (the slogan was: "We are not seeking the candidate with the broadest appeal. We seek the candidate with the deepest truth.") has some bearing on how this 1968 movie is being rebooted this year. 

So now, in Joe Biden, we have a candidate significantly damaged by the chaotic end to a long military deployment in Afghanistan and economic headwinds that his opponents blame on his economic priorities. Earlier this year, it appeared he was being challenged for his own party's nomination by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., yep, the son of the 1968 protest candidate. Now, Kennedy appears to be on a maverick third party run, more like Wallace's campaign. And in the "Peace and Freedom" corner of this year's campaign is philosopher Cornel West, running for "truth and justice," per his website. Further tightening the parallel is that both Peace and Freedom candidates were black, as is Cornel West, in an otherwise white field. 

In the 1968 case, the U.S. elected a president against whom credible allegations arose that he had been involved in a criminal conspiracy to tilt the 1972 election in his favor. In the 2024 case, we have a candidate who claims the 2020 election was rigged against him and who is being prosecuted on allegations that he engaged in conspiracies to overturn the tallied election results in 2020. 

The difference is important and sad. Nixon did not want to be impeached, so instead he stepped down from office. He never admitted to any wrongdoing and the U.S. never got a chance to have the issue adjudicated, as his successor pardoned him. In the current case, the candidate has been impeached twice, but not convicted, and uses that history and each succeeding prosecution to raise funds for re-election.

Clearly, the parallels aren't perfect, but I wanted to share them because I'd rather see a different movie. History rhymes. 

  

Music as a target of (and an imperfect answer to) inhumanity

I am thankful that Harvey Mason Jr. reminded an audience of music makers and their fellows that the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack in Israel brutalized a music festival. 

The festival wasn't the only target of attack, and the points I'm trying to make are tangential to the awful trajectory of violence. However, let those who have expertise on the politics and the history of this conflict, which sometimes seems eternal (it's been going on all 71 of my years), to debate those larger issues, including whether rape and killing of civilians can be justified as tactics of warfare. 

I simply hate the violence and want to talk about the part that I can talk about, the part that's pretty much been ignored and not mentioned enough. The part that Mason, who is the Grammys' CEO, talked about during his speech on the televised primetime Grammy Awards show this past Sunday evening (Feb. 4). 

Mason reminded his audience that music events have been attacked by both organized and lone-wolf terrorists. 

"Music must always be our safe space - when that is violated, it strikes at the very core of who we are," he said. "We felt that at the Bataclan concert hall in Paris. We felt that at the Manchester Arena in England. We felt that at the Route 91 Harvest Music Festival in Las Vegas. And on Oct. 7, we felt that again when we heard the tragic news from the Supernova Music Festival for Love, that over 360 music fans lost their lives, and another 40 were kidnapped."

Music is a visceral thing that appears to have been a community builder since humans first gathered food, and Mason said as much: "Let us all agree that music must remain the common ground upon which we all stand together in peace and harmony. Because music has always been one of humanity's great connectors. Think about it: Every song that we're honoring or hearing tonight moved someone, no matter where they were from or what they believed. It connected them to others who were moved in the same way."

Zealots don't care. The cause is secondary to the havoc they can wreak. They hate music and music fans (not to mention art and the other humanities) and love to kill and maim them, because, well, "Why should anyone have fun if others are suffering? How can you be blind to our cause? You are the enemy because your decadence is complicit in this oppression?" 

I have an imperfect answer in the face of atrocities and war crimes. Remember those videos of people from all over the world, of any color, of any religion, all going nuts as they danced and sang Pharell Williams' "Happy"? If that can happen, then maybe rather than kill one another, we should appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature." I think we ought to recognize that this planet is one boat with all of us passengers. We either get along or the whole vessel tilts over and we drown. What will drown us? 

Hatred. 

Lack of reason. 

Music and art murdered equals humanity debased.