by Lorrie Moore
Meanwhile, Scott Walker and Paul Ryan and Ron Johnson were out and about in Badgerland energetically derailing Russ Feingold’s campaign as well as Clinton’s. Johnson boasted charmingly in TV ads that he was one of the few nonlawyers in the Senate, and this had great appeal statewide, especially in a year when a businessman who had never held public office was hypnotizing not just the media but the land. Ted Cruz had won the GOP primary and Wisconsin Republicans and evangelicals knew (eventually) to get behind Trump. The draconian and quietly petulant Paul Ryan came around big-time. But the Democrats were asleep at the wheel, letting insiders pose as outsiders. Well, both parties were doing that.
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There is much Monday-morning quarterbacking still going on, but Clinton’s popular-vote lead of almost 3 million votes, meaning almost 3 million people were disenfranchised, is a depressing thing to contemplate. Would we not plot regime change of a country with a similar sham democracy? Well, Clinton was playing a board game and knew the byzantine rules and all the answers to the questions on the cards, but forgot to move her markers around the board.
Will she be missed? Clinton, like Trump, and better than she knows, can cast a spell. Watching her throughout 2016, I noticed how attractive and savvy she could be. I watched her every debate. She was in a man’s game, and fiercely and mostly unflappably she took it on: I noticed how good-looking she was when she was having fun. It was hard to take one’s eyes off her. I studied her outfits and statement necklaces. (Let’s be real: The clothing of women in public life is fair game for passing commentary since it is so various, arduously assembled, and deliberately chosen—see Melania’s pussy bow.) I liked what Clinton was wearing in June in Columbus speaking against Trump and (too briefly) for the economy. I loved what she wore during Benghazi-gate, even if her attitude looked callous. I admired that yellow suit jacket at her town hall in New Hampshire, a state she should have won in the primary just based on that town hall, where she was excellent, compassionate, and in charge. She looked striking in dark, forest blue-green jackets, but it was that mustard-gold one in the Milwaukee PBS debate that impressed me most, with its “backward in heels” quality. Okay, I joined thousands of other women looking for similar attire on eBay. Her jackets became an online shopping subcategory on Google and her pantsuits the theme of a fantastic, exuberant flashdance in Washington Square Park (available on YouTube). Were we not all a little obsessed with her, even as she cooperated with the national Trump fascination by reducing her campaign to a referendum on him? She and Trump sometimes seemed to be a squabbling couple: Big Loner Papa and Working Mom. Working Mom tends to lose in that game. And she lost by 107,000 even while winning by 3 million.
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And so she leaves a blank spot in the landscape—or will we see her in public life doing good works, as we saw with the Carters and will surely see with the Obamas? Did she only want to be president for herself? Time will tell. Wearing those baseball caps, which only sometimes hid his “defiantly ridiculous coiffure,” Trump (and his faux-guru campaign of “I’m with YOU,” inverting Clinton’s more point-of-view-challenged “I’m with Her”) waded recklessly in and out of various coded channels of white identity politics—Disco Sucks, All Lives Matter, Law and Order, Make America Great Again. His convention theme song was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Running for president seemed mostly to be one of those things on his bucket list, like being on America’s Got Talent. Actually winning the office did not seem to be on the list and visibly stunned him. Not a politician, and less a businessman than a show-business man—part Crazy Eddie, part Henry VIII, part AWOL Andrew Jackson—like the reality-show participant he was, he seemed in it for the adventure and applause. The actual White House may be a bit frumpy for his taste. And governing will be more complicated and tedious than he expected. He immediately went on a “thank you” victory tour to get back to those crowds. He is a barker for the American carousel—of course it takes talent to do that well, wrote Oscar Hammerstein with a pitying wink. In the same song Hammerstein also wrote, But he wouldn’t be President unless he wanted to be!—and maybe Trump will walk off the job to tend to his golf courses and hotels, leaving the position to Mike Pence (whom the GOP would prefer). Trump has already dispensed with the daily intelligence briefings. Too repetitive! Mercurial is a word that only begins to describe him. But if he walks away, perhaps the word beautiful will be returned to us. It would be nice to get it back. On the other hand, he may not want to leave the set of the biggest reality show he will ever be in. One suspects his desire for a show (rather than a program) will prevail.
Meanwhile, we will see what’s on Hillary’s bucket list. She has admitted to having no hobbies. (What working woman has hobbies?) After she gave her gracious concession speech on November 9, she stepped away from the podium and plunged almost suicidally down into the crowd. Several alarmed secret service agents dove in after her. We’ll watch how she resurfaces. First the futile recount. And then what.
(2017)
Stephen Stills
Several years ago an academic colleague and I embarked on what we called a “Stills-off”: we would listen to our record collections and get the musician Stephen Stills’s oeuvre down to its top five songs. Then we’d see whose list was better. I assumed our choices would overlap, and high among them would be “4 + 20,” whose piercing Appalachian melancholy seems to belong more to the ages than to a moody twenty-four-year-old, as well as “Find the Cost of Freedom” with its sea-shanty sound of grief and endurance. We would both surely include his Buffalo Springfield resistance anthem “For What It’s Worth,” which with Stills’s calm, urgent baritone and rhythmic stops holds up as well as any political song ever written; originally released to protest a Los Angeles curfew—its composition probably began earlier, when Stills was only nineteen—it has endured long past its original occasion. According to Tim Rice, it is “one of the best songs ever written with just two chords.” (Rice is a lyricist; the song has more than two chords.)
But my colleague and I could not stay away from Stills’s rocking guitar solos, which when revisited on various recordings mesmerized us—“Crossroads,” for instance, or “Ain’t It Always,” pieces that got Stills labeled “Guitar God” on YouTube. Then there is “The Love Gangster” (from his first Manassas album), on which Bill Wyman of the Rolling Stones plays bass, earning him a partial writing credit. Wyman wanted at the time to leave the Stones and join Stills’s band; the instruments on Manassas are all in the hands of virtuosos. (Stills has put out recordings where, like Prince, he has played all the instruments and sung all the parts—“Do for the Others,” a lovely, lonely song of resignation from his first solo album, is aptly named—but Manassas did not require that solitary effort, though the band is entirely Stills’s brainchild.) “Stephen is a genius,” said Neil Young in his book Waging Heavy Peace.
And so our lists began to burst at the seams and soon the Stills-off seemed an increasingly stupid exercise. Stills, now seventy-two, has often been named one of the top rock guitarists of all time and is the only musician to have recorded with both Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton on the same album—Stills’s first solo LP (1971). Rolling Stone has listed Stills as both #48 and #27 in its periodic top 100 guitarists list, though he is famously underrated and probably better than what either of those numbers suggests. His work has sprung from every stripe of American music—blues, folk, rock, “songs with roots,” as he has put it; he was Americana and singer-songwriter before those terms were used. And although as a child he began as a drummer and tap dancer, the only percussion one is likely to hear from him now might be when he knocks rhythmically against an acoustic guitar. Once, on a 2006 tour that was being filmed, he tripped over some electrical cords and fell to the stage with a certain percussive flair. “We’ve got more lights than we’re used to,” he said. “We usually don’t care if they can see us because we’re old.”
A year following my misbegotten Stills-off, I attended a sold-out concert in Nashville by The Long Players, a tribute band that for its concerts performs one single album from start to finish. This time they had chosen Déjà Vu (witty!), which is the first and best (and was for a long while the only) album by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young. (Ampersand and no Oxford comma for Young: when he needs to get out of a band, he flees quickly.) No sooner had The Long Players begun with Stills’s “Carry On” than the capacity crowd was standing—this cannot always be counted on with members of the AARP—singing along at the top of their lungs, knowing every single word. Jubilant, revelatory, the evening was more than a geezer-pleaser: it was baby boomer church, late-middle-aged ecstasy, a statement of a generation that it had not just yet entirely surrendered to the next. I was starting to suspect that no American demographic has had an album—not even one by the Beatles or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell—so completely downloaded into their memory banks as this 1970 album had been.
The summer after that concert, on a porch in New England, I found myself among several dinner guests sitting about postprandially in the July night. Suddenly a guitar appeared, and just as suddenly we were all singing Stephen Stills’s “Helplessly Hoping.” Though we did not know one another that well, working from brain muscle memory we knew the song so automatically that harmony was possible. There was no Beatles or Dylan song we could have sung as successfully. I began to marvel, yet again, at how much, for a particular generation, the songs of Stephen Stills were marinated into our minds, our spines, our bones.
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Now it was the following spring, March 2017, and a friend and I were waiting for Stills to step onto the stage of Nashville’s legendary Ryman Auditorium with the Allmanesque Kenny Shepherd and an old hipster keyboardist Barry Goldberg, a blues-rock ensemble called The Rides. (Stills once said that Crosby, Stills, and Nash called themselves by their names not just so that they could be free to come and go but because “all the animals had been taken.”) The Rides, the blues band of Stills’s dreams, he says, got its name from Shepherd’s and Stills’s shared love of cars (though Stills also loves horses). “We’re not Prius people,” Stills has said. That he is still playing gigs at his age is evidence of his stubborn professionalism (from the time he was a teenager—from the early Au Go-Go Singers to Buffalo Springfield to Manassas—he was the one to organize his bands). It is also his salute to another musical generation (Shepherd and company) and demonstrates his love of the cradling lope of the blues. (Ahmet Ertegun, Stills’s beloved friend who produced reunion after reunion of CSN and sometimes Y, often keeping them afloat, died in 2006.)
The Ryman audience is again primarily of the generation that came of age during the 1960s and ’70s—a sea of snowy hair. Stills himself was twenty-two during the Summer of Love. Because of prodigies like him, who were enabled by the radio—especially ones in cars—in their connection to an entire country, almost every kind of music remains emotionally available to an audience this age, except perhaps hip-hop. (Hip-hop demands a young, nimble mind; most of this crowd was born too soon to wrap their heads around it and cannot sing along the way young people can.) But Stills will have everything in his tool chest that his particular crowd might desire. (He has even done some crossover with Spike Lee and Public Enemy for the film He Got Game, but he will have left that home.) Stills may be hobbled by arthritis—backstage he fist-bumps rather than handshakes with fans; he has carpal tunnel and residual pain from a long-ago broken hand, which affects his playing—and he may be deaf, but Beethoven, too, became deaf. Drugs and alcohol may have dented Stills somewhat, forming a kind of carapace over youthful sensitivity, as well as its sidearm, cockiness—qualities one often saw in the face of the young Stills. Some might infer by looking at the spry James Taylor or Mick Jagger that heroin is less hard on the body’s infrastructure than cocaine and booze. “Stills doesn’t know how to do drugs properly,” Keith Richards once said. But one has to hand it to a brilliant and beloved rock veteran who still wants to get onstage and make music even when his boy’s beauty and once tender baritone have dimmed. It shows allegiance to the craft, to the life, to the music. It risks a derisive sort of criticism as well as an assault on nostalgia. But it invites admiration, even awe.
It also comes on the heels of a “definitive biography” by British author David Roberts. Titled Change Partners, after one of Stills’s own songs, the book is an act of hurried, sloppy, aggregated love, an activity that can sometimes have a fun side. Ignore the typos—mistakes such as sewed for sowed or daubed for dubbed—and don’t go looking for any psychological depth. Roberts has collected most of his data from widely available interviews. A speedy checklist of girlfriends—Judy Collins, Rita Coolidge, Joan Baez, Susan St. James—plus wives and children will largely have to do for the personal side of things. Stills’s “Rock & Roll Woman” is declared a valentine to Grace Slick. Roberts is far more interested in constructing a chronicle—flow charts would have been helpful—of the constantly shifting permutations and reunions that formed Stills’s ongoing musical associations through the decades and that early on gave us the sublime Crosby, Stills, and Nash (and sometimes Young) cobbled from The Byrds, The Hollies, and Buffalo Springfield. They reassembled through the years like jazz musicians, performing their songs live in the improvised and unexpected manner of jazz. The songs in concert rarely sounded the same twice and never like the studio versions. The “beautiful Celtic keen of Graham’s and David’s cat’s purr, and my cement mixer,” as Stills described their voices together. To those looking on, it seemed Nash had the organizational skills; Crosby had the intuition; Stills had the musical chops and the most brilliant songs; Young—like a comet zooming in and out of orbit—had the poetry and mystique and artistic searching but did not join the choirboy harmonies at which the other three excelled. “Neil wants to be Tony Orlando and we’re Dawn,” joked Stills in the 2008 documentary CSNY/Déjà Vu. Young had organized the 2006 concert tour as a war protest and decorated the stage with yellow ribbons. Stills seemed afraid it was political kitsch, but he went along.
The Roberts book may err on the side of sportscasting in announcing the Billboard rankings for each album Stills and the others put forth, and he is constantly putting Stills and Young in competition with each other. One’s eyes glaze over at sentences such as “The finer points of the release were not enough to return Stephen to the upper echelons of the charts and Illegal Stills stalled at Number 30 (US) and Number 54 (UK).” In interviews Stills himself has seemed indifferent to the horse race—sometimes modest, sometimes scornful, sometimes tongue-tied with or without attitude, but always shy and often wry and amusing. He is the most talented and the most politically active but the least self-promoting of this famous trio/quartet.
Though born in Texas of midwestern parents, Stills was primarily a Florida boy (Tampa, St. Petersburg), with a dash of Louisiana and Costa Rica. Stills speaks Spanish; his father was a building contractor whose peripatetic business life often followed the military. The family life mirrored that of many postwar families (“What do we do, given life? We move around,” wrote Stills in a 1972 song.) Stills’s father continually relocated the family, even to Central America. Stills went to five different high schools, including a military one. Skilled at several instruments, he played in high school bands, including marching ones, and he has since donated money to the University of Florida marching band. He clearly believes such bands are where many musicians get their start.
Florida has always been an interesting hub of musical styles—a farrago of Appalachian, country, gospel, blues, Latino (Caribbean and Cuban émigré), and Seminole traditions. In jazz the great bass player Jaco Pastorius is often thought to be an embodiment of the region’s unique sound, guitar notes bending in tropical, otherworldly tones. Hip-hop, too, has its own South Florida subgenre. In rock there were Jim Morrison, the Allman Brothers, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, who named themselves after their J
acksonville high school gym teacher. Ray Charles made his early reputation in Florida, as did Tom Petty. Stills brought what might be but isn’t called country-folk-Latin-blues-rock to his bandmates, whatever band he was in. One can hear most of the influences simultaneously as early as “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” (1969), a folk-rock love song written about Judy Collins, but whose rousing coda has a strong Latin flavor, due to Stills’s overlaid vocal track. CSN performed it at Woodstock, Stills wearing a poncho. Stills composed songs quickly, but unconventionally, often pulling together tracks he had recorded earlier in his studio, before he knew where they might land—the equivalent of a writer’s notebook or a chef’s pantry. He liked to cook, both literally and figuratively, for his bands. “Carry On” was written in eight hours.
Again one may circle back to wonder—skeptically, impertinently—what causes a musician to keep playing into his advanced years, even if he is bringing an entire generation along with him. Neil Young allegedly once played a new and unpopular album in its entirety before a British audience, to much grumbling from the ticket holders who wanted to hear something familiar. When he announced toward the close, “Now we’re going to play something you’ve all heard before,” the crowd cheered in relief. And then Young played again the first song he had played that evening. He has worked at some price, and eccentrically, not to become a human jukebox.
