Auf Wiedersehen ...?

Well, it looks like at least for the time being, when I post here it's going to be grand exegesis on popular music. It is what it is -- I've been listening to the stuff since I was a larva, so it's woven into my life like religion or crappy reality shows are woven into some lives ... perhaps yours?

Well, then. If you don't like popular music, I don’t care if you read this, but it ain’t gonna mean much to you if you love Jesus or TV very much, or (most importantly) if popular music is and always has amounted to wallpaper for you. I can’t stop you from reading, and wouldn’t if I could, but it ain’t my problem if you’re offended or bored (or baffled).

I read a recent interview with Elton John in Mojo Magazine. Mojo is a British publication that really has no direct USAmerican analogue – you’d have to combine Rolling Stone, Spin and Magnet, then sift out any content that wasn’t music-related, and even then you’d only have something not quite unlike it. As best I can remember, there hasn’t ever been a USAmerican publication so information-dense about music, and covering such a broad variety of it so well, in my somewhat extended lifetime.

Back to the subject. The Mojo interviewer had asked Elton about the recording of Someone Saved My Life Tonight – the conventional wisdom was that Gus Dudgeon, who produced a lot of early EJ work, had given him a lot of grief over the fact he seemed to be backing off the emotional content of the song as he was recording it. The interviewer was angling for – and got – an admission that indeed, the song had been at least loosely autobiographical. There's more story to it than that, but it's not germane to this, so I won't go into it ...

Now, if you are not as dumb as a sack of hammers or totally sociopathic, you had likely come to the conclusion Someone Saved My Life Tonight was about a suicide attempt. It would be a little bit of an invitation to misjudgment or misinterpretation to name a song Someone Saved My Life Tonight that wasn’t, at least metaphorically, about death. I’d always kind of assumed it was, at least loosely, autobiographical; I certainly wasn’t surprised to see that it was.

What kind of had me going ‘wha?’ for several days after I read the interview was the next thing ol’ Reg said. I’ll paraphrase (because I’m too lazy to go look for the magazine, and this isn’t exactly an official publication); he said people will pretty much interpret songs you perform (as was usually the case, Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics to the song and was there on the night of the incident that inspired it), so you might as well be candid ... and that he also thought the Beach Boys’ God Only Knows was a similar case.

I knew Brian Wilson had some emotional and psychological problems around the time he quit touring with the Beach Boys in the late sixties – it’s in his autobiography – and still, apparently, has some of what we USAmericans (sometimes ironically) call ‘issues.’ I know that one of the reasons SMiLE wasn’t released for decades was that he spent some portion of the years since he started it off the rails, and the recording and post-production work didn’t get finished (not to mention, once he’d left the Beach Boys for good, he must have anticipated that some not-entirely-random litigious thug of a former bandmate would sue, and he didn’t disappoint).

There are pictures of Brian Wilson in that autobiography I mentioned (Wouldn't It Be Nice), in which he weighed well north of three-hundred pounds, and walked around on the beach where he lived in a bathrobe and slippers in broad daylight. He was clearly off the bead, spinning out of true, you name the euphemism for not quite compos mentis.

I won’t even get into the whole Dr. Landy thing.

All that considered, I still have a hard time processing God Only Knows as a suicide note. Maybe it’s because Wilson was almost pitifully sincere so much of the time, when he wrote songs. I always read that song as more of a passive-aggressive threat to a woman who was backing off and whom the narrator suspected would soon be attempting to leave his life. A direct suicide threat would have seemed more blatant than I thought he was, back then.

I don’t know – I guess it’s like ol’ Reg said, though. We read into songs what we want to hear. I don’t tend to believe the Badfinger song (most famously recorded by Harry Nilsson), Without You is necessarily a suicide note, either (though two of Badfinger's members did commit suicide). In fact, I kinda’ think the two songs are similar in intent, if not in tone. I think they’re both hyperbolic, eleventh-hour efforts to get ‘the girl’ to stay.

I won’t even get into what suicide threats accomplish in this situation – having had some experience with it, I can honestly say it ain’t the most effective emotional device any human being has in his/her trick bag. If you feel compelled to use it, I'd advise you find another one – if it works, you’re involved with a doormat, and you're a button-pusher. Unless you really mean it, and even that isn't going to accomplish anything much that you want to accomplish. Trust me on this one.