First, a selective timeline created to prove a point:
August 15 1969 - Woodstock, Richie Havens performs famed "Freedom"
August 17 1969 - Woodstock, Jimi Hendrix performs famed "Star Spangled Banner"
May 1970 - "Let It Be" written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney is released on Let It Be
September 1970 - Jimi Hendrix dies
1971 - Jimi Hendrix's posthumously released The Cry of Love features "Freedom"
September 1971 - John Lennon's Imagine features "Imagine"
December 1980 - John Lennon dies
October 1989 - Neil Young releases Freedom featuring acoustic and electric versions of "Rockin' In the Free World"
September 21, 2001 - Neil Young performs Lennon's "Imagine" on the Tribute to Heroes telethon
October 20, 2001 - Paul McCartney performs "Freedom" and "Let It Be" at the Concert for New York
December 5, 2001 - Neil Young releases the single "Let's Roll"
Second, the point: our musicians have grown lazy and failed us in our time of need - songs of freedom simply ain't what they used to be.
Though we can't accuse our favorite classic rockers for lack of trying, they have their hearts in the right place - we can lament the absence of any great music in response to the tragedies of Sept. 11. Who are we, mere music consumers, to belittle the artists when the muses that once inspired so frequently seem to have left our rock heroes high and dry when they seem so needed? We are people with taste, and with a discerning ear for fine music. So when the music of freedom that has filled the airwaves in the past five months offends that discerning ear, we ought to celebrate our own freedom by tuning out the 50-somethings' songs of today and return to theirs and others' freedom songs of yesterday. If we don't, the terrorists will have won. And even worse, Paul McCartney will go on in life thinking it is perfectly acceptable to write exceedingly trite songs with the most simplistic of lyrics and blander than bland melodies, then sing such songs for an entire nation ravenous for patriotic popcorn, eager to swallow anything glowing red, white, and blue regardless of how hollow it may be. And that would be a pity.
The 1969 Woodstock festival, a self-proclaimed "3 Days of Peace and Music," started and ended with perhaps two of the most passionate heart-stopping freedom songs of rock and roll. The small upstate New York arteries, clogged and impassable on the festival's first day, forced the lead act Richie Havens to play long beyond his allotted time until the next performers had arrived. His long beard dripping with sweat, he vamped away at the guitar and raspily roared on with the word's "freedom," and later, "Sometimes I feel like a motherless child." The impromptu blurting evoked an emotional release in the ever-growing peacenik crowd that would sustain them for the next 72 hours as they nearly drowned in mud and nakedness. By the time closer Hendrix went off his solo electric guitar, rampaging through the National Anthem complete with distorted static bombs bursting in the air and deafening reverb rockets glaring red, it was evident - freedom and music could and did become one.
Over the years, the songs kept coming. Hendrix offered his own tune titled "Freedom," while Paul McCartney gave us comfort "in times of trouble" urging us with "words of wisdom" to "Let It Be." The next year a Beatles-free Lennon imagined a world with no war. Cynics found his tune overly idealistic but most agreed it perfectly, eloquently, and emotionally captured a newfound desire for peace that so many could not adequately put it to words.
Two decades later, just as our nation was slowly coming to the realization that it had survived eight years with a decrepit, senile movie actor as president, Neil Young found a comeback in the critically acclaimed Freedom. "Keep on Rockin' In The Free World," was a tune that shared the same idealism and passion of his freedom pop progenitors and mixed a rumbling rock and roll style with his trademarked high pitched I'm-the-man-whose-seen-it-all kind of voice.
So what have we seen lately? Occasional beauty and frequent musical mush. Young's rendition of Lennon's "Imagine" effortlessly melded the idealism of years past and the pain of the weeks that immediately followed the tragedy. It was a highlight among highlights during an amazing three hours of touching dirges and anthems. And yet while that performance achieved such a perfect conflation of emotions, Young's release "Let's Roll" - a tribute to Todd Beamer, who had telephoned his wife from Sept. 11's doomed Flight 93 - is an uncomfortable and awkward juxtaposition of sorrow and glory, terrible loss and funkified jingoism. A haunting cell-phone ring precedes the Beamer-point-of-view lyrics: "We got to get inside there, Before they kill some more. Time is runnin' out . . . let's roll"- laid uncomfortably on top Booker T. Jones' Hammond organ. Though eerie and touching in its words-from-a-ghost gravity, it soon loses its effective pull on our heartstrings when it suddenly reveals the faux-poetic meanderings of a man with one more verse to write. It is as if Young highlighted the buzzwords from Dubya's latest sermon and jazzed them up with that sweet old rock and roll sensibility of good versus evil: "Let's roll for freedom, Let's roll for love, Goin' after Satan, On the wings of a dove. Let's roll for justice, Let's roll for truth, Let's not let our children, Grow up fearful in their youth." The corn-pone lyrics replace passion with folksy cheesiness, creating a song that might seem rough and heartfelt on the surface, but when you get deep down is as noxiously ordinary as Lee Greenwood's early '90s crowd-pleaser "God Bless The USA."
So what happened? How did folks like the former Beatle who once penned such beautiful, complex, and touching tunes as "Let It Be," "Yesterday," "Hey Jude," and "Penny Lane" find himself at last weekend's Super Bowl asking America to clap for freedom? As he dove into yet another dull rendition of the tune "Freedom" which he had debuted, slightly off key, in his noble Concert for New York, he sang "Talkin' 'bout freedom/I will fight For the right/To live in freedom," it seemed as if most people were indifferent, waiting instead for a halftime show that would, for once, feature some talented musicians with something interesting to say.
Can we fault these hurting classic rockers for their sub-par attempts? Not really, not in this time when our nation needs any and all salves for its wounds that it can find. If they meant well, then I guess their words can only help. But they still have the responsibility and the privilege to be disappointed when those we once counted on come through with tunes that are plainly rushed and derivative. And that's a right, for which I will never stop fighting.
