So I’ve been listening to a Bruce Hornsby concert recently. I’ve been more than a little surprised by how much I’ve enjoyed it, as I’ve never been a Bruce Hornsby fan. Oh, sure, I liked "The Way It Is" back when it came out, but not nearly enough to buy the album or any subsequent releases. And although I’d hear him now and again on AOR, none of his follow-ups seemed to match that first hit, much less surpass it. I mentally consigned him to the Third-Rate Bin.
It’s an odd thing about me (I know, what isn’t?), but I have a habit of listing artists and works, assigning them places in the hierarchy. There’s considerable fluidity, as an artist or work I once thought Absolutely Brilliant I later decide is merely Really Good or even sometimes Rather Pedestrian. No resting on the laurels in my rankings.
And yet I’m not sure I really approve of such behavior, even as I’ve always done it. I think there’s quite a lot to be said for internal Compare and Contrast exercises (and Good Lord A-mighty, did I hate doing those in school; well, yes, I hated doing everything in school, but that’s currently beside the point). I think such exercises can shed new light on a given artist or work, help you to regard it in a different fashion, perhaps gain some sort of insight or notice some intriguing feature you might not have before.
But it also feels as though there’s something rather unseemly about it, as though symphonies or plays were being voted on for Most Valuable Player. It’s all in my dusty brain, so neither the artist nor the work being considered are going to suffer any actual material damage, and as I said, there tends to be considerable fluidity in my little internal lists, but I recognize that there’s the potential for such opinions to harden. And should that happen, I’ll be the only loser in the equation, but I think I would indeed lose something should that happen, so I try to be on guard about it. Flexibility’s a wonderful thing, but if you don’t keep stretching, you’ll lose that quality.
Anyhoo, I’ve been listening to this show. It’s from 1999 and he’s playing a solo show in Ashland, Kentucky, a town he says he’s never been to before but which Google informs me is the largest town in eastern Kentucky and I see no reason for Google (or Bruce Hornsby) to lie about such a thing.
I’m not sure but I think this may be the first solo tour Hornsby’d ever done without his long-time backing band. It’s just him and his piano and they’re both pretty loose. He takes requests, both in writing and vocally, meaning when people shout out songs, he either complies or explains why he won’t—and if he won’t it’s because he doesn’t know the words. A pretty healthy proportion of the audience seems to be Deadheads, judging by the requests, something Bruce picks up on; he’d toured with the Dead and I guess with Jerry gone, the ‘Heads’ll take what they can get. At one point he even goes and gets a chair so a fan can sit next to him and feed him the lyrics to some Dead song I’d never heard of but which is, I admit, pretty gorgeous.
Someone mentions that they saw him play a Holiday Inn back before he’d gotten a record deal and Hornsby tells the story of how they’d been screwing around with "Play That Funky Music (White Boy)" when the owner of the bar caught ‘em and fired ‘em. So he goes on to play a very quick (but quite nice) rendition before segueing into a song of his own. Yet he keeps dropping the lick from "Play That Funky Music (White Boy)" into each song he plays for the rest of the night. It’s a neat thing.
He plays "The Way It Is," of course but with a long, somewhat impressionistic intro and a long outro which features a Bach fugue. He plays, by request, a song he co-wrote with Don Henley, "The End of the Innocence." He plays the Traffic song "The Low Spark of the High-Heeled Boys." The solo during "On the Western Skyline" suddenly morphs into "Turkey in the Straw." It’s a fun show.
But what caught my attention as much as almost anything is when he goes into his own song, "Defenders of the Flag," which I’d never even heard of before, much less heard. I suspect a large segment of the audience was similarly unaware of the tune. It’s a blues shuffle and he’s no more than a measure in when the hoots and hollers start. There’s no way they could have recognized the song yet even if they knew it well; at this point it sounds like nothing more than a generic blues in A.
Yet they’re cheering and giving those guttural "yeah!"s we all know so well from attending shows, whether in small smoky bars or hockey arenas. It’s the sound white folks make when someone starts playing a blues.
What’s with that? What does that mean? I’ve heard it in honky-tonks and I’ve heard it on college campuses. I’ve heard it when people are busking on the streets of New York City and in the Hartford Civic Center. But why?
Is it that most people truly have an innate (or even learned) love of the blues? Is it that they have a true appreciation for this amazing American artform? Is it that they recognize how many timeless masterpieces have been created in this genre? Is it that there’s something cool about liking the blues?
And if that’s the case, that it’s considered cool to like the blues—and whether or not that’s the reason people "yeah!" about it, I think it’s certainly true—why is that? For decades the blues were considered disreputable, to say the least. Do some of those "yeah!"s come from people who feel that they're slumming? Or are the "yeah!"ers informed enough about the true wonders of the blues?
In the end, I’m not sure it matters; maybe it does, but I’m inclined to say not at this point. What matters, I think, is that people cheer whole-heartedly (there’s no irony, as far as I’ve ever been able to tell) as soon as a musician starts playing a blues shuffle. And I think that whatever the reason, that’s progress of some sort. At least, that’s how I think I’m going to view it. The glass half-full, that’s me.
The weird thing about Defenders of the Flag is this: What are the odds that in the age of streamed video from countless sources, one is utterly unable to find a performance of Defenders anywhere on the internet?
When any piece of tripe is available in its original format - plus several poor covers - the fate of this little protest song is a mystery.
Posted by: Timmy | Sunday, June 07, 2009 at 03:12 PM