Dangerously Close

Open Mouths, Open Wounds

            Not long ago, I saw the Netflix documentary John and Yoko: Above Us Only Sky.  I have been Beatle besotted since childhood, and you can imagine what a miracle Peter Jackson’s Get Back was for me.  But the Netflix documentary gave me something else: watching John Lennon cut his vocal tracks for the Imagine album and hearing the vocals and only the vocals.  Yoko opened him up in 1968, and, especially between 68 and 71 those songs and they way he sang them are like nothing else.  Did Dylan write better lyrics?  Did McCartney write better melodies?  Sometimes, sure.  But hearing those isolated vocals, the vulnerability is almost too much to bear.  This is the boy who was abandoned by his father, who was just getting to know his mother when he lost her.  It was obvious why Yoko, the wish fulfillment, needed to be around all the time.  This tough guy from Liverpool was letting it all out. There was no distance between the emotion, the words, the melody.  It was an open wound, it was devastating, and it was addictive.

            Was anything else ever anything that that?  Yes.  Sometimes there is calculation between the voice and the listener, and sometimes, the singer is an excellent actor.  Listen closely, and you can her the difference.  Paul McCartney, one of the finest melodists and singers who ever did it, is an entertainer, not a confessor.  His contrast with John was part of why their collaboration was magic—raw and cooked, craft and confession. John said that the walrus was Paul, but then he said he was just being nice.  The walrus wasn’t just a Lewis Carroll character, it was an animal, a primal scream in the wilderness that made its way to Plastic Ono Band.  McCartney was a great screamer, but not like that.  Little Richard taught him how to do it.  Listen to “Helter Skelter” or “Oh, Darling” (a vocal Lennon said he could have destroyed if he could have) and then listen to Plastic Ono Band or Imagine.  Watch those isolated vocals.

            How do you know you are hearing the unmediated voice when you hear it?  To paraphrase what Judge Woolsey said of pornography, you know it when you hear it.  And if you’ve been devastated enough, it will be familiar to you and make all the hairs on your body stand up.  I just heard John Prine singing “Angel from Montgomery,” and was so overwhelmed, I nearly had to pull over.  This is what I felt when I was at an NYU party in the Fall of 91, and I first heard Kurt Cobain singing “In Bloom” and I had to run out to 5th Avenue, look at the Washington Square arch, and fully take it in.  It was inescapable during that period with Sinead O’Connor, and later with Elliott Smith.  Wordsworth said that world was too much with us and these voices embodied it.

            Listen to John Prine’s “Angel from Montgomery” against Bonnie Raitt’s beautiful cover.  Hers is more musical, his is more World is Too Much With Us.  Listen to Judy Collins’s covers of Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen.  Listen to all of Nick Drake’s non-hits, and inhabit the other side of sanity.  Listen to everything Judee Sill ever did, reaching for Jesus, settling for heroin, and never forgiving you for not getting it while she was here.  Collins sealed the deals—Joni and Leonard both got record deals on the strength of her covers—but Joni and Leonard get under your skin.  Paul Simon could sound calculated on his perfectly crafted songs, but dig deeper and listen to him singing about insomnia on “Peace Like a River.”  Try listening to “Only Living Boy in New York” without tears.  On his last album, he sang two deep in the brain songs from the perspective on a schizophrenic.  Ella Fitzgerald had the technique; Billie Holiday went to that scary place.  Listen to Lou Reed sing about shooting up, getting electroshock, tasting the whip of shiny leather.  Listen to Dylan singing “Mr. Tambourine Man” and listen to the Byrds’s number one hit.  The Byrds didn’t even use the verse that includes “the haunted frightened trees/ Out to the windy beach/ Far from the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.”  David Crosby arranged some beautiful harmonies, but if you want to go to that place, Dylan is the sound of the twisted reach of crazy sorrow.

            Shortly after recording Imagine,  Lennon made an album of subpar political songs that most people don’t remember, and his greatness was never so purely and consistently distilled again. It’s too much to ask of anyone. We all know that Lennon didn’t get a chance to have another act.  Can you imagine what a John Lennon Rick Rubin album would have sounded like?  Sinead O’Connor has had a rough road for a long time.  Judee Sill, Kurt Cobain, and Elliott Smith couldn’t take it anymore.  And maybe wherever they were, just before getting to the other side, is the greatest evidence of the uncanny we can ever have. 

            Sir Paul McCartney, now 80, is about to make history as the oldest performer in the history of the Glastonbury Festival, and I hope he never dies but just keeps making and breaking records.  His voice has shown a lot of wear and tear as he has aged, and the more he tries to sing those high notes from his younger days, the more you know he’ll never get back.  But maybe not getting back will take him to the rawest sounds that ever came out of his mouth.  He was always competitive with John.  It was his greatest muse.  Maybe 100-year-old McCartney will produce a sound so wrecked, it could be the ultimate primal scream.  Imagine.