Tower of song

Looking both ways: an end-of-the-year musical reflection.

By BEN FISHER
Leonard Cohen (photo credit: PHOTO BY RAMA VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/CC BY-SA 20 FR)
Leonard Cohen
(photo credit: PHOTO BY RAMA VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS/CC BY-SA 20 FR)
It seems like they’re all leaving us.
The beloved idols who provided the soundtrack for our happiest and loneliest moments are fewer at the end of this year, George Michael, who died this week, being the most recent one. Leonard Cohen, David Bowie and Prince were the artists of Mount Rushmore stature, but there were so many more.
Firebrand soul singer Sharon Jones, 60, who worked as a corrections officer at the infamous Rikers Island jail and as an armored car guard for Wells Fargo before gaining artistic acclaim, succumbed to pancreatic cancer in November. I saw her live once an outdoor concert in Boise, Idaho, in 2013. Bundled in a coat, I was freezing, shivering and exhaling white clouds of vapor into the sub-zero March night; she was singing, shimmying and boogying her way across the stage in a sleeveless black sequined dress.
Merle Haggard, 79, died of pneumonia in April after battling cancer and heart problems for decades. The first time I ever saw Bob Dylan in Atlanta in 2006, Haggard was the opening act.
Donned in all black, gruffly surveying the audience as he delivered his lyrics, Haggard was an imposing and interesting onstage figure whose pedal steel guitar-laden performance spawned my interest in classic country music.
There was the one I never got to see, the one whose death in May hit me harder than any of the others. Guy Clark was a Texas folk and country singer-songwriter who ran with the likes of Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt and Kris Kristofferson.
He was 74 but taken too soon. His final record, My Favorite Picture of You was nominated for a Grammy; my favorite songs of his were from his later years. He was a songwriter’s songwriter, that term reserved for those who ooze talent but never found as much commercial success as some of their peers.
Few songs have left as much of an impression on me as his “Dublin Blues” did the first time I heard it at a friend’s house on a cold winter night in Seattle. The title track from his 1995 record features rumbling Irish drums and an unflinchingly honest chorus and I begged my pal to play it again and then a third and fourth time before the night was over.
As the songsmiths dropped like flies throughout the year, from the godfather of bluegrass, Ralph Stanley, to Phife Dawg, founding member of the rap group Tribe Called Quest, people quipped about locking national treasures like Bob Dylan and Tom Waits in a rubber room under 24-hour doctor supervision.
IN OCTOBER, when I heard Bob Dylan’s name on Israel Radio’s Reshet Bet, I froze, certain that my songwriting hero had died. At age 75, nearly half a century after his zenith of fame, there wasn’t anything that Dylan could do short of dying that would merit making the hourly Israeli news.
But it turns out there was one thing… In 2016, this bizarre and horrific year, for the first time, a Nobel Prize in literature was awarded to a singer-songwriter, and it was bestowed upon none other than Dylan (who was markedly absent from the awards ceremony earlier this month).
US President Barack Obama congratulated Dylan on his win, while others acted as though the prestigious award had been given to a sixth-grader who had written a particularly good short story.
In his acceptance speech, delivered by the US ambassador to Sweden, Dylan said that when he was told he won the award he thought of Shakespeare. In a sharp response to those who criticized his win because he wasn’t a novelist or a poet, Dylan writes: “When [Shakespeare] was writing Hamlet, I’m sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: ‘Who’re the right actors for these roles?’ ‘How should this be staged?’ ‘Do I really want to set this in Denmark?’ His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. ‘Is the financing in place?’ ‘Are there enough good seats for my patrons?’ ‘Where am I going to get a human skull?’ I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare’s mind was the question ‘Is this literature?’” At the end of the letter Dylan compares himself to the Bard, while simultaneously reminding his critics that he never asked for this award and never proclaimed that his work was literature.
“Like Shakespeare, I too am often occupied with the pursuit of my creative endeavors and dealing with all aspects of life’s mundane matters. ‘Who are the best musicians for these songs?’ ‘Am I recording in the right studio?’ ‘Is this song in the right key?’ Some things never change, even in 400 years. Not once have I ever had the time to ask myself, ‘Are my songs literature?’ So, I do thank the Swedish Academy, both for taking the time to consider that very question, and, ultimately, for providing such a wonderful answer.”
DYLAN’S BIG win wasn’t the only oddity of 2016. A record that is topping many “Best of the Year” lists, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, was a surprise release that had no press leading up to its April launch. The R&B queen’s sixth studio release, Lemonade is not only a record, but also features a visual album counterpart to the songs, which explore themes of anger and resilience.
Citing Lemonade as an influence on their new record, the Drive-By Truckers, a group of five white males from Georgia and Alabama who play shows with a Black Lives Matter poster affixed to their keyboard, released their most political record, American Band, in September.
The Truckers have always been conscious of the complexity of the South, with one of their best-known songs featuring the line “Proud of the glory, stare down the shame/Duality of the southern thing.”
But their new release is a bona fide protest record with nearly half of the songs related to gun violence. Songs tackle other issues like immigration, as well as a tune about the police shooting of unarmed African-American teenager Trayvon Martin, in which lead singer and songwriter Patterson Hood sings:
“If you say it wasn’t racial
When they shot him in his tracks
Well I guess that means that you ain’t black
It means that you ain’t black
I mean Barack Obama won
And you can choose where to eat
But you don’t see too many white kids lying
Bleeding on the street.”
Two members of the band hail from a small community in Alabama called Muscle Shoals, known for its music scene in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. Soul legends like Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett would come for inter-racial recording sessions, a rarity in the region and era. Hood’s father was a bass player on many of these sessions and one can surmise that growing up in this Southern music utopia helped shaped Hood’s worldview and his lyrics.
The Drive-By Truckers hail from a region of the US that is seeing a regression of progressive values, and it is a comfort to listen to these socially conscious rockers.
LEONARD COHEN’S last record, You Want It Darker, features a title track that has the 82-year-old ruminating on his mortality, singing, “Hineni hineni, I’m ready my Lord” in the song’s chorus.
Yes, the song is a fitting coda to an incredible career, but perhaps his 1988 tune “Tower of Song,” which pays tribute to songwriters like Hank Williams who went before him, is an even more suitable tribute to him and all those we lost in 2016. Toward the end of the song over a synthesizer, bongo drums and a looping bass line Cohen croons:
“Now I bid you farewell, I don’t know when I’ll be back
They’re moving us tomorrow to that tower down the track
But you’ll be hearing from me baby, long after I'm gone
I’ll be speaking to you sweetly
From a window in the Tower of Song.”


Related Tags
leonard cohen