“Eighty percent of success in life is just showing up.” – Woody Allen

For a few years there – as George Bush “won” a pair of shady elections and then repeatedly defied the Constitution, the will of the people and any decent measure of common sense – Americans disenchanted or disgusted by his reign could be forgiven for wondering if some sort of coup might be required to remove the Republicans from power. Such a measure seemed unlikely, of course, and not just because violent overthrow is about as un-American as, say, torture. It’s worth noting that, in order to stage a coup, a large number of us would have needed to get our asses up off the sofa and take to the streets! Instead, we spent seven years watching dejectedly, furiously – but, for the most part, passively – as Bush and his minions screwed up every single thing they touched.

In the end, however, electing Barack Obama and ending the Bush era didn’t require violence, or even civil disobedience. All it required was the force of our better ideas, the inspiration of a great young leader – and the resolve to stand steadfast against a stream of vitriol from politicians (and their dwindling core of followers) who couldn’t believe their house of malfeasance and misanthropy was at long last crumbling around them. American democracy finally proved capable of withstanding even Bush and the modern GOP – assuming, that is, that Bush and Dick Cheney actually vacate their residences on January 20.

We did stand with Obama this fall, and we did it in huge numbers. It’s been a big year for big crowds – big, peaceful crowds, fortunately. Since the beginning of this election cycle we’ve all marveled at the turnouts for Obama’s rallies, from 15,000 freezing souls at his announcement speech in February ’07 to a convention crowd of 90,000 in Denver, 100,000 in St. Louis, 200,000 in Berlin, and 250,000 in Chicago for his victory speech. Guesstimates of the turnout for his inauguration are already off the charts; officials are preparing for an onslaught of up to 4 million celebrants on the National Mall.

Of course, Obama’s big crowds were never a perfect measure of his qualities as a candidate. They certainly did bear witness to his charisma, and his strength as an orator. More than that, though, I believe they were a testament to Americans’ pent-up desire to express ourselves politically, to participate in the act of changing this country, simply by virtue of Showing Up. It was a spirit of urgency and, yes, patriotism that also led millions of us to click a button on the Internet and send Obama another $10 or $100 every couple of months, and led many thousands to volunteer in campaign offices, on the phone and around our neighborhoods.

I’ve been thinking about those crowds a lot lately – and not just because I’ve been weighing the question of whether or not to fly cross-country and join the revelers on the Mall. (I’m currently leaning against it, though if Clooney or Spielberg has a couple seats open on the Gulfstream I’m willing to rethink.) The real impetus has been my recent viewing of a wonderful documentary, The Singing Revolution, that is being readied for DVD release in early 2009. It recalls the people of Estonia’s inspiring efforts to keep their culture alive through decades of Soviet occupation and even genocide, and shows how they finally gained their independence without spilling a drop of blood – by expressing their national pride through song, and by simply Showing Up in large numbers, unarmed, to assert their right to freedom. (more…)

A decade ago this past summer, Kay Hanley and her bandmates in Letters to Cleo had to be talked into accepting a free trip to Hollywood when the producers of a new teen comedy approached them about contributing to the film’s soundtrack. Little did the band know that within a couple of weeks they would be planted high on a rooftop in Tacoma, Washington, fearing for their lives as a helicopter buzzed closer … and closer … and closer…

First things first. Next March will mark 10 years since the theatrical release of 10 Things I Hate About You, a comedic update of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew that has overcome a middling performance at the box office to become one of the most popular teen movies of the post-John Hughes era. The film is best remembered these days as the American acting debut of Heath Ledger – who, ironically, is almost certain to be vying for a posthumous Oscar just a couple weeks before the anniversary of that debut. It’s likely Ledger’s participation, as much as the film’s immense likeability, that accounts for its near-constant presence on pay and basic cable over the past decade.

But 10 Things was much more than a showcase for Ledger and Julia Stiles, the co-star who also used the film as a springboard to greater fame and fortune. For all the contrivances of its Shakespearean plot, the film is among the most sensible and believable of the teen genre, full of warm and funny performances from a terrific supporting cast. Grown-ups Larry Miller and Alison Janney get some of the best moments, happily – particularly Miller as an Ob-Gyn so paranoid about his daughters dating that he forces them to “wear the [empathy] belly around the living room” before they leave the house. “Kissing? That’s what you think happens [at the prom]? I’ve got news for you. Kissing isn’t what keeps me up to my elbows in placenta all day long.”

The icing on this cupcake of a film is its music – a panoply of late-’90s modern rock (Semisonic, Sister Hazel, the Cardigans) and ’80s funk and pop (“Atomic Dog,” “Dazz,” “Push It”). Ledger’s most indelible scene featured him high-stepping across the football-stadium bleachers as he serenaded Stiles with “Can’t Take My Eyes Off of You” – with an unexpected assist from the marching band. (more…)

The other day my Popdose colleague Ted Asredagoo posed the question of how President-Elect Obama — once he is wrapped up in the business of actually, you know, governing — will manage to carry forward the inspirational themes that enlivened his campaign. There’s no doubt that he created an enormous movement toward renewed activism, both in governing and in citizenship – and that he did so mostly through the power of lofty speeches and iconic imagery. Ted closed his essay with an entreaty to Obama: that “as the presidential bubble forms around him and his day-to-day is taken up with the prose of meeting after meeting, as President he must take great care not to forget his poet’s heart displayed on the campaign.”

I couldn’t agree more with that analysis, but I would take it a step further: Obama must also take great care to ensure that we don’t forget his poet’s heart. Americans face tough times over the next few years, despite our newfound optimism in the wake of Obama’s election; chances are pretty good that, no matter what new policies he implements after his inauguration, our downward economic spiral will continue well into his term. Chances are excellent, meanwhile, that as Obama chooses his battles and launches his new initiatives, critics on the left will ask why he’s not doing even more, while critics on the right will simply dismiss everything he’s doing as pointless and misguided (if not Socialist and anti-American).

That’s their job. In times like these, however, Obama’s job must not be simply to sit behind his desk and make the decisions that (hopefully) will steer us out of this mess over a period of years. He must remember that he is his own best salesman, and that many millions of us supported him precisely because of his ability to inspire … to bring out the best and most hopeful in himself and in us. The rockiest moments of his campaign came at precisely those times when he was momentarily cowed by his opponents’ criticism of his lofty rhetoric and huge crowds: in early March, when Hillary Clinton decided to take Saturday Night Live seriously, and in August, when John McCain responded to Obama’s Berlin speech with the “Celebrity” ads.

The phrase “bread and circuses” traditionally has a negative connotation. Coined by the Roman poet Juvenal, it suggests that the masses will ignore their long-term needs and their highest aspirations in favor of any politician who can provide immediate gratification. Hillary’s “just words” argument and McCain’s “celebrity” dismissals attempted to convince us that “bread and circuses” were all Obama was offering in response to the challenges we face; remember all the news articles from last winter fretting about the rise of an “Obama cult”? (more…)

“It’s like riding a bike!” Kay Hanley exclaimed last Saturday night, acknowledging the audience’s raucous response to her reunion with Letters to Cleo at the Roxy in West Hollywood. Eight years had passed since the band’s breakup, yet – with the benefit of just three days of rehearsals in an L.A. warehouse – Hanley and her mates managed to pull together an almost impossibly tight performance as they resurrected their power-pop sound of the ’90s.

The ease with which they came back together has something to do with the fact that they’ve never been entirely apart. Hanley and guitarist Michael Eisenstein are married with two children, and have worked together on her three solo releases; for much of the last year, Hanley has joined drummer Stacy Jones in traveling the world together as part of the Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus “Best of Both Worlds” tour – Hanley as backing vocalist, Jones as musical director.

If the transition from modern-rock ingénue to Hannah Montana backer sounds jarring, it doesn’t to Hanley; the Cyrus tour is just one element in her scheme to fashion a permanent career in the music business, post-Cleo. To that end, Hanley and Eisenstein abandoned their hometown (and Cleo’s home base) of Boston early in this decade and relocated to Los Angeles, where both have immersed themselves in a wide range of projects. Hanley’s lengthy resume now includes her vocals on the soundtrack tunes that were the best part of 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats film; a partnership with a college friend, singer/songwriter Michelle Lewis, that has resulted in an on-again, off-again band (the Dilettantes) and a similarly occasional songwriting collective (Ladyapples); and a seat aboard the Disney mothership, from which she has written and performed theme songs for the TV series My Friends Tigger and Pooh and the film Care Bears: Oopsy Does It!

Amidst these more profitable activities, Hanley has continued to pursue an acclaimed solo career — most recently with a rockin’ CD titled Weaponize, released last spring, for which she abandoned digital for analog recording. She now calls it “my favorite thing that I’ve ever done”; listen for yourself. (more…)

I didn’t cry for an hour and a half. I watched dozens of other people weep and shout and wail and fling themselves to the floor with happiness; I watched pundits variously expound thoughtfully, babble incoherently and fumble for words before simply going mute. I did join my wife and kids in dancing with joy to a couple of my favorite – and now forever Obama-rific – songs:

George Michael – Freedom ’90 (live) (download)
Dixie Chicks – Truth No. 2 (download)

But it wasn’t until the close of Obama’s magnificent victory speech, after the pageantry and the big extended-family waveathon … it wasn’t until everyone else had left the stage, and Obama turned back and gave one last salute to the crowd, that I began weeping uncontrollably. A headache I had been nursing all day finally dissipated, and the tension I’d been carrying around for two months … for two years … for eight years, really, finally seemed to melt away.

It was at that moment I realized I couldn’t write the column I was planning for today – the one in which I suggested that after all the name-calling, the vilifying and the brutishness of this campaign, I didn’t feel sorry at all for the emotional pickle in which McCain’s most intemperate supporters must find themselves. Not because this problem doesn’t exist for them, but because Obama’s speech renewed my hope that even those folks will soon cool their jets.

“In this country,” he said, “we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long … And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress … As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, we are not enemies but friends. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection … And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices. I need your help. And I will be your president, too.” (more…)

On Tuesday, citizens of California will have an opportunity to place our indelible stamp on the forward progress of civil rights in the United States. I’m not talking about the election of Barack Obama as president, though that certainly will result in dramatic and needed advances on all sorts of levels. Instead, I’m talking about Proposition 8, which if passed would amend the state’s constitution to add the simple, elegant, yet contemptible phrase, “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”

What’s the big deal here? you might ask. After all, voters in 26 states already have written such restrictions into their constitutions – why not California? The difference is this: On Tuesday, for the first time, a state’s voters will be going to the polls with the power to take an existing marriage right away from same-sex couples. That is, Californians will be deciding whether to tell more than 11,000 couples who have exchanged wedding vows since last May that their marriages are no longer legally valid. Each voter’s moral and ethical decision on Prop 8 will not be made in the abstract, as those decisions were in other states, but will have real and immediate consequences.

Whatever happened to “let no man put asunder”?

Unfortunately, no one knows exactly what those consequences will be. Will all those marriages be instantly annulled? Will all those couples have to wait in limbo through years of court challenges? California’s attorney general, Jerry Brown – yes, that Jerry Brown – has said he will argue in court that marriages already performed should not be annulled. But if 11,000 gay couples in the state continue to claim a basic right that has been stripped from millions of other citizens, what will “marriage” mean to anyone anymore? (more…)

Don Dixon may never quite achieve the lofty stature of rock and roll’s Great Men, but there’s no questioning that for nearly 40 years he’s been one of the industry’s great guys. He’s a repository of well-told tales about musicians famous and forgotten; a producer of renown who midwifed some of the ’80s’ greatest “college-rock” hits; and co-godhead of a cult following that blossomed over years of onstage magic he created alongside his wife, singer Marti Jones. Through all of that, Dixon also has built a small but diverse catalog of recordings under his own name. His songs have explored themes ranging from the personal to the momentous to the ridiculous, but even as his work has matured Dixon has never forgotten the value of a great pop hook.

Dixon’s recollections of his producing career were the topic of last week’s Hooks ’N’ You column, and he reflected on some of his best-remembered songs two weeks ago in that same space. We’ve got more Dixon- (and Jones-) related tricks up our sleeve in the coming weeks here at Popdose; in the meantime, here is an overview of his recordings, with commentary from the man himself.

Most of the Girls Like to Dance But Only Some of the Boys Like To (1985)
purchase this album (Amazon)

The word “seminal” gets tossed around way too frequently in rock-crit circles, but here goes: In 1969-70, as a student at the University of North Carolina, Dixon co-founded a band called Arrogance that played a seminal role in the growth of the music scene around the state’s “triangle” area (Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill). Arrogance released five LPs over the next decade, and nearly made the big time despite the usual assortment of personnel changes and label difficulties. Their best chance came with a signing to Curb/Warner Bros. and the release of an album titled Suddenly in 1980; unfortunately, the album stiffed, and within a couple years Arrogance was no more. (Tracks from the band’s records can be downloaded from efolkmusic.org.) (more…)

There’s a faction of music fans out there who are annoyed by Ray LaMontagne, and it’s not too difficult to understand why. Here’s a guy who refuses to behave like a pop star, or even a traditional frontman, after taking 50 bucks of your money. Onstage, he occupies one edge of his band’s semicircular setup and rarely moves from his spot, meaning that patrons on the right side of the auditorium may never see his face in full. There’s no spotlight on him, no between-song communication with the audience, and LaMontagne seems so shy … not so much shy, actually, but occasionally uncertain of his surroundings and his place within them … that a listener can be forgiven for wondering if one more obnoxious “whoop” or song request from the audience will spur poor Ray to pack up his guitar and go back to that shoe factory in Maine, never to be heard from again.

Yes, it’s easy to understand why an uninitiated listener might find LaMontagne’s stage presence irritating – until he opens his mouth to sing. That voice! So clearly a product of its influences, and yet such a primal, naturalistic instrument that one imagines it was bestowed upon him in some sort of wee-hours crossroads deal, as though the devil still had one more trade up his sleeve after draining the usefulness from Robert Johnson’s soul.

Of course, we know the devil couldn’t have been involved in this particular deal, because if there’s one thing LaMontagne’s singing projects in spades, it’s soul. Whether he was performing the countrified tunes off his new Gossip in the Grain album, or channeling Memphis R&B on the already-classic “Three More Days,” the emotional resonance in LaMontagne’s rasping voice kept the pre-Halloween audience at L.A.’s Wiltern Theatre riveted. I’ve honestly never witnessed so many fellow concertgoers leaning forward in their seats, pulled from positions of greater comfort by an instinctive need to get a little bit closer to the source of that sound.

Well, maybe that’s an overreaction to the fact that his vocals were mic’ed just barely above his accompaniment, and some of those patrons (this wasn’t the youngest crowd the Wiltern has ever hosted) probably were straining just to hear them. Nevertheless, there’s much to be said for a person of such immense talent who insists upon immersing himself in his band’s groove, rather than dominating it. And LaMontagne, whose L.A. gig came near the end of a six-week nationwide trek, clearly has found his comfort zone (and his preferred decibel level) within the confines of his rhythm section (Jennifer Condos on bass, producer Ethan Johns on drums), keyboardist Chris Joiner, and particularly within the open and elastic sounds of guitarist and pedal-steel virtuoso Eric Heywood. (more…)

Doesn’t it seem like just a decade since the protagonists of our current national melodrama began taking the stage? John McCain announced his candidacy on David Letterman – only to discover that what Dave giveth, Dave can definitely take away. Hillary Clinton thought she’d prove herself futuristic by announcing from her sofa, via an Internet video message; little did she know how the Internet would eventually help overwhelm her once-inevitable rise. Only Barack Obama chose to do things the old-fashioned way, with a grand speech from a statehouse lawn; it was the first of many occasions when Obama, alone among his rivals, recognized that momentous times call for Big Gestures.

And so here we are, five days before the election and less than 24 hours after the last flurry of those gestures. Thirty-five thousand Floridians gathered at midnight for the Kiss-Up in Kissimmee, watching Bill Clinton — in a manic attempt to restore the bona fides he sullied during his wife’s misbegotten run – make his best full-throated argument for Obama. (I say “full-throated” because Clinton seems to have calculated that if he spoke unbelievably loudly – and in a mad dash of words – we wouldn’t notice that he could have been talking about any Democratic candidate, not just the one perched on a stool next to him.) Obama even managed the video-era feat of being two places at the same time, sitting down with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show even as he and Bubba were simultaneously bounding (if not bonding) on stage outside Orlando.

And then there was the small matter of the 30-minute infomercial with which the Obama campaign commandeered seven broadcast networks and cable channels last evening. In case you haven’t seen it, and have a half hour to kill, here it is:

Whatever else last night’s Obamapalooza accomplished, it achieved the same thing his announcement speech in January 2007 did: It made his opponent’s efforts appear small and petty by comparison. McCain spent the day, as he spends every day, on the attack, playing to the narrow-mindedness and bloodlust of his rally crowds rather than to the concerns and hopes of those couple million voters who may not have made up their minds, yet don’t view the world through a conservative ideological prism. Having turned his back on “honor” and “integrity” and all that crap that had never really worked for him anyway (see South Carolina, 2000), McCain and his Bush-leftover advisors now aim to replicate W.’s 50-plus-one strategy by getting ugly and staying ugly right through Tuesday. (more…)

Whether you were a child of the ’60s or (like me) of the ’70s, the Beatles’ perpetual presence on the radio seemed something of a birthright. Every “official” Beatles single between “I Want to Hold Your Hand” and “The Long and Winding Road” reached the Billboard Top 40, and for five years after the band’s 1970 breakup all four members were reliable fixtures on AM radio. That omnipresence began to fade in 1975 as John Lennon went into retirement, George Harrison’s hitmaking became hit-or-miss, and Ringo … well, Ringo seemed to lose his mojo right around the time he found producer Arif Mardin.

But Paul McCartney found a way to remain radio-relevant straight through the ’70s, making the Top 40 even with drivel like “Letting Go,” “Girls’ School,” “London Town” and the singles from Wings’ last album, the brutal 1979 Back to the Egg. (His chartmaking prowess survived a lot of lousy singles, to be sure; it’s not for nothin’ that McCartney-written “classics” made my lists of the Worst Number One hits of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s.)

A couple of funny things happened to Macca on the way to the ’80s, however. Sixteen days into the new decade, he was handcuffed at Tokyo International Airport while trying to smuggle a rather large quantity of weed into the country, and instead of giving him a slap on the hand and looking the other way, Japanese authorities locked him up for nine days and threatened to throw away the key (before eventually relenting). He returned home to find erstwhile bandmate Denny Laine exploiting the event with a single called “Japanese Tears,” and suddenly Paul found himself without a band once again.

He retreated to a home studio, much as he had as the Beatles were splitting, and emerged with a solo album that was even more idiosyncratic than his first one had been a decade earlier. But then, after the first single from that McCartney II album (“Coming Up”) topped the charts in customary fashion, he released another one – and it didn’t even make the Hot 100, much less the Top 40.

That single was “Waterfalls” (download), a lovely ballad whose quality is hard to deny, but whose utter pop-chart failure is easy to understand. Its lethargic pace and bare-bones production values hardly fit on the radio during the summer of 1980 alongside “Funkytown,” “It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me” and “Upside Down” – Christopher Cross’ “Sailing” was about as slow as programmers were willing to go. (more…)