Saturday, 7th February 2009.

Gershwin and Saccharine

A moment of realisation during a Saturday night proofreading session: the Leonard Bernstein recording of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ really is a stinking pile of rubbish.

David Schiff has actually written a study guide on ‘Rhapsody in Blue’, part of the Cambridge Music series. I no longer have it (which categorically proves the point I often make to Emily about hoarding – it’s always the books you throw away that you eventually need) but I do remember Schiff was particularly harsh when it came to evaluating the Bernstein recording. As a student doing research on Gershwin I thought this was unfair, and at the time I felt my reasons were academic. I now realise that it’s because the Bernstein recording was, for a considerable period of time, the only one I owned. It was the one I listened to when I lived in a first floor room in my Leeds hall of residence, when I had an awful lot of free time and very little money, and the one I had on when I’d write the long, lingering letters to friends and family, and make notes and sketch character development for the dreadful screenplays I was developing.

The other thing about the Bernstein recording is that it has a seal of approval: a royal one, at that, released as it was as part of a series of one hundred recordings sold in age of the Prince’s Trust. The back sees a photo of Charles himself, arms neatly if awkwardly folded, wearing a checked grey suit and a haircut that reminds me of how my father used to wear his (back when he had hair, or at least a full head of it). The prince looks to be no more than forty years old. One of his watercolours graces the front. To be honest, I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for Prince Charles, who I think has had a very bad press over the years for the simple reason that he married a girl he never loved. So perhaps I was prepared to overlook any deficiencies in the Bernstein recording, on the grounds that it was acquired by the Prince’s Trust, sold at a respectable price and had therefore been vetted for quality, as opposed to the cheap session orchestras who grace the Readers’ Digest recordings.

This sense of approving ‘recognised’ music works the other way as well, because it’s just as easy to dislike something because the noted critics did. They must, after all, know what they’re talking about, because they’re paid to, and they see / hear / read enough films / recordings / novels to pick up trends and be aware of benchmarks and standards? So when Schiff, who seems to have listened to every recording of the Rhapsody under the sun, declared his sense of loathing for the Bernstein version there was a part of me that wondered if perhaps he knew what he was talking about. Then I went back through the book and saw that he tends to favour the smaller big band versions that are closer to Paul Whiteman’s original take, as opposed to the fuller, more heavily orchestrated renditions which have now become more or less standard.

In other words, perhaps Schiff was never going to like the Bernstein recording. It’s this that went through my mind the other week as I played it – for the first time in years, as it happened. But it was at that moment that I experienced a revelation: the recording is dreadful. It’s plodding, tedious and hesitant: the piano codas are all wrong, stopping and starting not for dramatic emphasis but because Bernstein himself doesn’t seem to know where to go. The orchestra is hardly together (syncopation was part of it, but I’m sure even Gershwin wouldn’t have wanted that much) and I heard, for the first time ever, several wrong notes. From one perspective this revelation came as a major disappointment, but I will admit that there was a part of me that actually felt quite pleased, because it meant I’d overcome my emotional attachment to the recording and was for the first time looking at it objectively.

All this talk of musical epiphanies, and I still don’t know if there’s a name for them. Everyone has them, although they’re perhaps more often featured in reverse, when a song you thought you hated suddenly and mysteriously acquires new meaning and appeal. That emotional attachment is important, and we’ll come back to it, because generally an attachment will help you like a song that is recognised as dire, while the removal of said attachment is equivalent to lifting the veil and finding out that for years you’ve been loved an ugly, misshapen wreck. It’s a weird thing to experience, because it forces you to re-examine your preconceptions about a song and even about an entire artist, but it can happen more often than we might think. If I wanted to be tremendously arty (and more than a little egocentric) I might call this ‘the Umbrella Effect’, after the Rihanna song that I once hated, until a single car journey turned everything around.

If, on the other hand, I wanted to come up with an appropriately pretentious term to describe the Umbrella Effect’s doppelganger, I might call it the Bernstein Cascade – or the Gold State. This does sound rather like something out of a western, but in this instance the name is derived from bearded Californian Andrew Gold, who was crooning through the lounge speakers last Sunday while I was tidying up. It was while I was collecting up Scooby Doo figures and putting them in a Tupperware box that I realised that ‘Thank You For Being A Friend’ is a truly dreadful song.

Have you heard it lately? Go and have a listen. It’s on Amazon; I’m sure you can find a reasonable stream somewhere. I’d supply an MP3 but I think I’d be risking bad karma. The funny thing is, this used to be in my top ten: played and played and played some more, most often on my hospital radio shifts. We’d turn up the speakers in the studio and I’d be singing along at full volume before realising I hadn’t turned my microphone down. At the end of the song, I’d hug my co-host. Writing this down is a bit like therapy, actually; it’s a way of confessing the parts of my personality that I’m glad I managed to suppress, if not eradicate entirely.

If I’m frank about it, my new-found hatred of the song stems from the fact that I no longer have any friends who would form valid subject matter. I still have close friends, but they’re not the sort who would call on you with demands “any time of the day or night”. There’s a real danger that as you concentrate more on your family you alienate your peer group, and I do think that’s happened in our case. Sometimes friends just drift apart due to mutual disinterest. I don’t think that’s happened here, but I’m no longer as tight with the friends who once formed the focal point for me whenever I’d sing along with Gold’s dreadful patter. It’s partly a shift in lifestyle, the demands of parenthood, busy schedules, geographical proximity and the fact that, to be honest, none of us seem to want to make the effort. So I have to reluctantly conclude that I now loathe ‘Thank You For Being A Friend’ on the grounds that I no longer have any emotional attachment to the words.

There’s an old joke about a doctor who lives next door to an impossibly demanding patient. Said patient is forever hammering on the doctor’s wall at three in themorning, bellowing “Doctor! Have you got anything for a headache?”, or “Doctor! Have you got anything for a stomach ache?”, or “Doctor! Have you got anything for a backache?”. Eventually, the patient dies a sudden, untimely death, and the doctor quietly rejoices that he’ll once more be able to get an unbroken night’s sleep. Of course, some weeks later he experiences a fatal heart attack and is buried in the local cemetery, right next to his former neighbour. On his first night in the coffin, the doctor is woken at three in the morning by the sound of knocking, and a muffled voice bellowing “Doctor! Have you got anything for worms?”.

The concept of the obsessive hanger-on – the sort who can be, according to Jude Law’s character in The Talented Mr Ripley, “a leech” – is not something we like to talk about much because we realise that it’s relatively easy to be both obsessive and obsessed about. I’ve been a leech, and been similarly leeched: it’s awkward to be leeched yourself, and at the opposite end of the spectrum it’s a horrible moment when you realise that you in turn are suffocating the person you hero-worship. There’s a moment of clarity when you realise that they care less about you than you do about them, and it’s not a nice feeling.

Personally, I think Gold (or whoever his character is supposed to be) thinks that this wonderful friendship that obviously sits at the very centre of his life is entirely mutual. I‘m not going to rule this out, but the cynic within me finds it unlikely. For one thing, he’s guilty of sycophantic fawning to the point of nausea. For another, he overstates his case. For another, he won’t shut up about it. And he seems to have no concept of personal space.

For example, he talks in the second verse about buying a Cadillac, if said friend would so desire it. Does anyone really have anyone in their lives who’d be prepared to do this, even so-called soul mates? Could you visualise yourself getting to the showroom and picking out the most expensive model there and watch your companion open up his cheque book without so much as a flinch? And if not, isn’t it something of an empty promise? It’s also irresponsible – if not downright dangerous – to make this sort of financial commitment when you’re a struggling songwriter (unless you happen to have written ‘You Raise Me Up’, anyway).

I can hear my detractors whining “it’s a metaphor!”, but I still think it’s symptomatic of someone who’s prepared to make promises he could never keep in order to keep the friendship going, and that’s unhealthy. Things don’t get better later on:

“And when we both get older
  With walking canes and hair of grey
  Have no fear, even though it’s hard to hear
  I will stand real close and say
  Thank you for being a friend…”

It reads like bad poetry, and that’s before we even start dealing with the sentiment involved. What we’re dealing with here is classic leech syndrome: you could just imagine him turning up uninvited to said friend’s bowls match, as a bunch of silver-haired pensioners gather on the green. At the moment of truth, during the final, crucial shot that will win his team the match and the championship, Bob is poised with his ball in hand and is just swinging when he’s rudely interrupted by a voice bellowing “BOB! THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND!” from three feet away. The shot goes wild, the game is lost, and everyone slumps off to the bar where they ignore Bob for the rest of the evening – everyone, of course, except for his lifelong companion who is determined, it seems, to stick firmly with him until the two of them shuffle off this mortal coil.

And of course, that’s exactly what happens when we reach the bridge:

“And when we die
  And float away
  Into the night
  The milky way
  You’ll me call
  As we ascend
  I’ll say your name
  Then once again…”

You can guess what comes next. I can visualise the two of them, trapped in eternity, one forever hassling and serenading the other. I suspect that the poor friend in question is now regretting that he ever accepted this guy’s Facebook request. Cue strings, more thumping piano, and then the song mercifully finishes. I run to get the bucket. How could such excruciating slush have come from the pen of the man who wrote ‘Lonely Boy’? Actually, more to the point, how could I have liked it so much for so long?