Tag: Prince

Say it’s your birthday

bob-wilson-snr-birthday
Bob-Wilson-Snr

You might wonder about this birthday photograph of my Dad, who died in 1991. Point being, he was born 100 years ago in early October 1916. This is the way we want to remember him, a studio portrait from a happy time in his life. He made multiple copies and distributed them to whanau (extended family- for the non-Kiwis amongst you). This was the photo which inspired me to write “Like our Fathers,” a song about how we end up looking like our Dads and often thinking like them too.

October always gets me thinking about birthdays, not only my own, but a steady run of Libran/Scorpio birthdays. Some of these friends are celebrating milestone birthdays this year, though they’d pass for 39 even under bright lights. A couple of my Scorpio friends call this ‘birthday month’ and take liberties on all 31 days (and nights). Just in case.

So yes, it was 100 years ago a few weeks back when Dad reached that landmark, which brought to mind a Loudon Wainwright III song “Older than my old man now”. Loudon had just turned 64, whereas his old man died at 63, the event spawning not just one song but a whole album of tunes about ageing, regret, and perhaps a little survivor guilt:  “I am older than my old man now; I guess that means I kicked his ass.”

Loudon (who was 17 when his Dad died)  starts the song with a reflective spoken narrative – “If I remain still, If I am alone and silent long enough to hear the sound of my own blood, breathing or digesting above the rustling of leaves or the world of refrigerators, my father is likely to turn up. He just arrives, unbidden, in the long-running film of my thoughts.”

LWIII, as he prefers to be known, touches on birthdays and mortality in quite a few songs, including “Five Years Old”, “Happy Birthday Elvis” and “The Birthday Present”, where he celebrates “that halfway point, where life really begins”.

She Who Breaks Into Song When Least Expected has been known to sing this at special birthdays; its wry observations about loose teeth and sagging skin (‘proof that we have been around’) ticking all the boxes for a 50th or even a 60th celebration.

There are any number of pop songs and cultural references about birthdays, including more than 30 episodes of The Simpsons. Our resident Simpsonophile reckons the standout is Series 3 episode 1 “Stark Raving Dad”, when Homer is checked into a mental asylum and meets a fat white dude, Leon Kompowsky, who thinks he’s Michael Jackson. Jackson, a fan of the animated series, lent his voice to the character although for contractual reasons it was credited as John Jay Smith and a Jackson impersonator Kipp Lennon was hired to sing the ditty Jackson composed to celebrate the birthday of Bart’s sister Lisa. The otherwise forgettable song Happy Birthday Lisa appeared on the album Songs in the Key of Springfield attributed to a W.A.Mozart.

The Simpsons creative team had an idea to bring the Kompowsky character back in a similar scenario involving Prince but it never eventuated. After the death of the Artist formerly Known As, an Australian website published excerpts from the proposed script, which Prince had rejected.

But what about Literature?

Although I was fairly sure I’d read all that iconoclastic Japanese author Haruki Murakami had to offer, I found a slim volume of short stories in the local library. The 13 stories in Murakami’s anthology “Birthday Stories” include one of his own and a short introduction to each story by the inestimable author, (at one point the 4-1 favourite for this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature).

The anthology includes “The Bath,” an earlier version of Raymond Carver’s much-studied “A Small Good Thing”. The latter story, about a boy who gets knocked over by a car on his eighth birthday was made into a short film starring Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Andie MacDowell and Jack Lemmon among others.

If you’ve not seen Robert Altman’s “Shortcuts”, based on Carver stories, I won’t spoil the plot, except to say Lyall Lovett’s performance as the cranky baker trying to get paid for an expensive birthday cake is up there among the great moments of on-screen menace (Jack Nicholson in The Shining notwithstanding).

Murakami’s “Birthday Girl” tells of a waitress forced to work on the night of her 20th birthday. She is fortuitously assigned the job of taking a meal to the reclusive restaurant owner in his hotel room. On hearing it is her 20th birthday, the owner grants her a wish. But in the best ‘show but not tell’ traditions, Murakami does not reveal what the girl wishes for, hence the endless conjecture by Murakists on websites and forums dedicated to the writer. The original anthology was published in Japan only. The English translation includes Murakami’s personal thoughts on birthdays in which he reveals he has visited Jack London’s farm because they share a birthday and he greatly admires his writing style, as he also admired Raymond Carver.

If you are a Murakist, this exploration of his thoughts on prizes, Nobel or not, may be of interest.

All of which is more culturally enlightening than that godawful song people insist upon singing at birthday functions. I was dining alone at a Chinese restaurant in Lismore, as you do. The only other occupants had booked a long table, the women mostly at one end, the men mostly at the other and the kids in the middle. I figured it was a child’s birthday when the waiter brought out a cupcake with a sparkler. The table broke into Happy Birthday to You. Unhappily one end of the table started singing half a line before the other end got stared. The ladies selected a key close to D while the men started in E flat. It sounded as you might imagine. Not to be discouraged, the guests carried on into a rousing round of ‘Freeza,” though how an eight year old can be a jolly good fellow is something they clearly did not talk about beforehand.

Then the kids started throwing noodles at each other.

Just so you know, the official Happy Birthday to You song has been released from the clutches of a music publisher and assigned to the public domain. One of the plaintiffs in the copyright court case was going to be charged $US1,500 for using the song in a short documentary (about the origins of the song).

First written by sisters Parry and Mildred Hill in 1893, HBTY is often claimed to be the world’s most popular song. It’s not high art, but universally popular, that’s for sure. G or A are the best keys.

I have a good few years ahead of me to be older than my old man now, but I take it as an encouraging sign that the Department of Human Services, in its services to humanity, issued me with a new pension card that expires in 2018. Lordie, so I must have passed some actuarial high water mark when men in their late 60s pop their clogs. “He’s good to seventy” someone has decreed.

As comedian and actor George Burns (1896-1996), once said of ageing: “You know you’re getting old when you stop to tie your shoelaces and wonder what else you could do while you’re down there.”

www.wikiquotes.org

Eulogies and celebrities

Guest writer, music trivia buff Lyn Nuttall (aka Franky’s Dad), ponders the outpourings of grief when celebrities die.

Amy Winehouse
(Photo by Fionn Kidney https://flic.kr/p/54TiAC flickr creative commons).

Back in January, when Bob and I discussed how lavishly some musicians are eulogised, it was David Bowie’s death that was in the news. Then Prince died a couple of weeks ago and my Facebook timeline filled up with posts from shocked friends. Still trying to digest this, said one, I just… I just can’t believe it said another.

There were Prince videos, and mentions of purple rain, Paisley Park and raspberry berets. A few days later, a friend said he had been listening solidly to Prince’s music for the past few days. Even literary magazine The Paris Review posted twice about Prince to Facebook. When my digital copy of “The New Yorker” appeared during the week, its cover was given over to a simple depiction of… purple rain. At the weekend, somebody at our monthly book club meeting repeated the (unfounded) gossip about Prince having had AIDS.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Prince was soaring to the top of the album charts as mourning fans rush to remember the artist’s legacy through his music. This sounded like clumsy reporting. A fan doesn’t wait for the artist to die, they go ahead and access the music whenever it’s available, and in any case there didn’t seem to be a need for anyone to rush. A dignified saunter, perhaps.

As Bob said in his post following Bowie’s death, “some will grieve, others are just sad,” and on that occasion I was in the sad group, but I couldn’t say I was grieving. I remembered individual songs with affection, but the bottom didn’t fall out of my world.

In the case of Prince, I was on the footpath, watching the wild and colourful funeral procession of a stranger passing by. Many had urged Prince’s music on me over the years, and I had often followed their advice and listened, but I never became a fan. My response wasn’t callous, this was the death of a man of 57, too young in any walk of life, but I wasn’t shocked and I can’t say I was grieving.

The extent of the reaction took me by surprise, but as an outsider I’m not qualified to belittle it. No doubt there were outside observers who didn’t get it when we mourned the deaths of Buddy Holly and John Lennon, two examples when I was an insider and did get it.

Jack Shafer at Politico, wrote about the “mega-obituary” and suggested that Prince died when his prime fanbase, “Prince-loving Boomers and Gen-Xers”, are in a position to call the “editorial shots”. In The Guardian, Ian Jack commented tetchily on the voluminous David Bowie tributes, including 24 pages in The Guardian. He went to that paper’s archives and discovered its muted reporting of the deaths of Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley, a contrast that seems to support Shafer’s point.

Regardless of generational bias, I’ve never understood the impulse to go out and buy – or stay in and download – the works of an artist who has just died. If anything, my impulse has been to give their works a rest for a while. Later, I get back to them with the old enthusiasm.

No doubt, there are a lot of people who discover the artist through the publicity around their death; they like what they hear, and go ahead and buy some of it.

It is remarkable how people can genuinely grieve for a celebrity they’ve never met (Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston or B.B King). We are routinely saddened, even depressed, about the deaths of unknown people we’ve never met, victims of violence or epidemics. But the grief some people show for celebrities goes beyond that natural empathy for another human. When Steve Irwin died, the circumstances were shocking, and it was a wrench to see such a positive, larger-than-life figure suddenly taken. A teaching colleague and her students made tributes which she delivered to Australia Zoo. They clearly felt that they knew Steve as if he had been present, in person, in their lives. I read an online comment from a woman who said her three-year-old already missed Steve, a sentiment you often see: they miss the celebrity.

I can think of times when I’ve missed a celebrity. I still miss Jon Stewart (still alive, I hasten to add) hosting “The Daily Show”, because I used to enjoy watching him every day, and now I can’t do that. When Phil Hartman died in violent circumstances it was shocking, and I missed him when he was no longer in the next season of “Newsradio”, but his absence was in the nature of a cast change, not in the sense that I was used to having him around the place and then he was gone. I was a little sad and reflective when Groucho Marx died, but I couldn’t really say I missed him. I didn’t come down to breakfast and think, “Gee I miss seeing old Groucho there every morning, cracking his egg open and making wise-ass comments over the morning newspaper.”

There is a persistent illusion that we “know” an artist through their work. Of course we know that important aspect of them, but we don’t know them as we know people we see every day. I’m not convinced that we can confidently claim to know a person through their works, in spite of attempts by some scholars of Shakespeare or J.S. Bach to extrapolate biographical details from the works. This is partly because a work of art has a life of its own that is beyond the control of its creator, especially after it’s published and every member of the audience puts their own construction on it.

Note the surprise when a well-loved celebrity disgraces themselves. Bill Cosby? Surely not! We know him so well, it’s not possible. Rolf Harris? Nooo, not Rolf! Please! tweeted the twitterers. We forget that we know only their published work, a little gossip and second-hand reportage, and a carefully crafted public persona that may tell us nothing about them out of the public gaze. Forgetting that, it’s a small step to grieving for them as if we’ve lost a family member or close friend.

I wondered why the cause of Prince’s death was so important to the fans. Then I thought of an example of my own. I’m a fan of British singer-songwriter Nick Drake who died in 1974 aged 26 without achieving much recognition. By the 1990s, when I discovered his albums, musicians were citing him as an influence, his songs were being heard in films, and he was being championed by MOJO magazine.

Even long after the events, I read everything I could, and hung out for the bio-doco “A Skin Too Few”, made by his sister Gabrielle who disagreed with the coroner’s suicide finding. I was interested in a theory that his depression was down to the grey English winters, a known syndrome. I was fascinated by a video snippet of a young man walking away from the camera at a music festival, in what might or might not be the only existing footage of Nick Drake.

See how they weave a spell on us, when we connect with their work?

All in all, though, a minimalist approach would suit me. Report the news succinctly and without gushing, write a well-researched obituary, and leave the rest to the reader. My ideals are those concise obits in the British press that manage to cover the life and achievements of an artist in one page. As a bonus, they usually get the details right and don’t demand any mass emotional response.