14 Days on the Couch With Music and Death

Streaming quarantine performances, John Prine, Hal Willner, Ellis Marsalis, Harry Connick Jr., music writing

Hello! As I write this I am on Day 13 of what has almost surely been a COVID-19 infection. I've been quarantined at home and seem to be recovering well. A week ago I simply didn't feel well enough to write and compile the New Directions in Music newsletter, and I apologize for its non-arrival in your email boxes last Tuesday. 

I've had a lot to think about. There has been a seemingly endless parade of talented, beloved musicians and others from the industry who have succumbed to the virus and are no longer with us: Hal Willner, Ellis Marsalis, and John Prine, to name but a few of the more well-known names who have passed. For the living, working musicians there are no gigs now, and for some (presently undetermined) time into the future. 

Over the past 13 days, I have spent a lot of time exhausted and sick, monitoring my body's signs and signals while slumped in front of the television. Like many viewers around the world, I was by turns bored, amused, scared, sad, angry, and hopeful. I watched a lot of music programming, some of it regular old stuff, much of it new performances broadcast from the artist's home. 

I watched the late-night programs as they stopped showing reruns of old shows with live audiences and began to broadcast from home with varying results. Jimmy Fallon, whose show has always been more about strict entertainment than Colbert, Kimmel, or Seth Meyers, seems to have an edge, a more natural disposition both for being funny without a studio audience and for genuinely connecting with remote guests and his audience at home. He and buddy Justin Timberlake did a quarantine remix. 

Husband and wife Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood did a live Facebook performance together which was well-received despite technical glitches. The Grand Ole Opry broadcast a live stream featuring Terri Clark, Lauren Alaina, and Ashley McBride. The next week features Trace Adkins, Jason Crabb, and T. Graham Brown, all without an audience in the famed Ryman auditorium.

Country performer Joe Diffie, who had a string of hits in the '90s passed away from COVID-19. And so did John Prine, who began in the folk scene in Chicago in the late 1960s and ended his career, and his life, as the brightest firmament in new Nashville. There wasn't a single one of the current generation of Nashville songwriters, musicians, and singers who wasn't influenced by his work in some way. When he died after eight days on a ventilator, the outpouring of grief and heartfelt gratitude was overwhelming. 

I sat, feverish and sobbing on the couch as I listened to Brandi Carlile perform Prine's "Hello In There", remembering John's words from an interview: "I've always had an affinity for old people. I used to help a buddy with his newspaper route, and I delivered to a Baptist old peoples home where we'd have to go room-to-room. And some of the patients would kind of pretend that you were a grandchild or nephew that had come to visit, instead of the guy delivering papers. That always stuck in my head."  

So meaningful as so many in their seventies and eighties passed away daily, their faces obscured by tubes and masks, cared for by nurses in masks, sometimes wearing shields that rendered their eyes invisible. Hello in there. 

We lost Ellis Marsalis, the patriarch not only of the Marsalis family but of entire generations of New Orleans musicians, including a whiz kid named Harry Connick Jr. I watched Connick on GMA and on his periodic broadcasts from home, Hunker Down With Harry. While it's always a joy to see Connick play, it was sad to see the jazz world and New Orleans suffer yet another painful loss. 

Music producer Hal Willner, known for his work on Saturday Night Live as well as his compilation albums of themed performances featuring a wide variety of musicians also passed of complications due to the novel coronavirus. Perhaps his best-known recordings were Lost in the Stars, a collection of songs by Kurt Weill performed by artists that included Lou Reed, Marianne Faithful, Sting, Carla Bley, Tom Waits, and Stay Awake, a tribute to the songs of classic Disney movies. Stay Awake featured such performers as David Johanson, Los Lobos, Bonnie Raitt, and Garth Hudson. 

Willner worked on Saturday Night Live starting in 1981, and he was loved by the show's stars, past and present. He became friends with Lou Reed, for whom he produced three late albums and Marianne Faithfull, for whom he produced the album Strange Weather. This past week, in its first remote broadcast featuring. the cast from their home quarantine, SNL paid tribute to Willner with this stunning video featuring SNL cast members past and present singing Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day.'  I cried yet again. 

And speaking of Marianne Faithfull, the British singer who survived her time with Mick Jagger during the drug-soaked late sixties and early seventies and carved out a whole new career for herself in the eighties and nineties is now hospitalized with the coronavirus.

The hits keep on coming, fast and furious. Just today country singer Margo Price announced that her husband, country singer and songwriter Jeremy Ivey has been suffering from symptoms of COVID-19 including shortness of breath that prompted an ER visit. Ivey's two tests have come back negative and inconclusive, which is anything but comforting given the circumstances. 

All of these performances and death notices floated by as I spent time on my own coronavirus journey. I've been able to remain at home, and though I've had some difficulties my case is by no means severe, yet it presents its own worrisome features and causes anxiety that I have no way to neutralize given the fact that this is an illness that presents differently in different people, even those in the same circumstances. 

Of course the music world is not the only niche that is affected this way. There is a daily litany of actors, writers, people from the worlds of fashion, of art, of commerce and law, healthcare workers, police, firemen, enlisted military personnel--the list is seemingly endless. In such an environment we can't help but consider our own mortality and take stock of our own lives. 

We have discovered that when humans fall silent, sitting at home, not going out, not driving places, not shopping, not stirring up the waters or tramping down the grass, that nature takes over. Nature and whatever else you believe to be out there. Suddenly we are seeing clear waterways and cities like Los Angeles where air pollution, a given on any day, is now much less of a problem. I was messaging a friend last weekend, wondering why we are in such a hurry to get things back to the way they were. I feel relieved that the treadmill I feel I've been on most of my adult life has come to a grinding halt.

My friend responded that he agreed, although "I wouldn't go all nothing but flowers." I went to YouTube and pulled up the Talking Heads song by that title. For some reason, it fills me with happiness, and I really want to live there. 

Once there were parking lots

Now it's a peaceful oasis

You've got it, you've got it

This was a Pizza Hut

Now it's all covered with daisies

You got it, you got it

I miss the honky-tonks,

Dairy Queens, and 7-Elevens

You got it, you got it.

And as things fell apart

Nobody paid much attention

You got it, you got it

In the end, singer David Byrne wants to come back after all. 

Don't leave me stranded here

I can't get used to this lifestyle

But I'm not so sure. As time floats by and I regain my health, I feel like I could get used to this lifestyle. Maybe. 

Bonus Tracks

I also spent some time on Twitter each day. Actually, I spent a lot of time there, reading posts by a lot of other music writers, many of whose work I greatly admire. I also played along with some fun pastimes for music freakazoids, like name your three favorite Prince tracks (When You Were Mine, The Future, Sometimes it Snows in April) or three favorite Dylan tracks (Girl From the North Country, Tangled Up In Blue, Isis). 

I came up with a list of my favorite Beatles songs from each regular album release, not including collections or the Anthology:

Please Please Me: I Saw Her Standing There

With the Beatles: All My Loving

A Hard Day's Night: Tell Me Why

Beatles For Sale: Baby's In Black

Help: You've Got to Hide Your Love Away

Rubber Soul: Nowhere Man

Revolver: Tomorrow Never Knows

Sgt. Peppers: Within You Without You

Magical Mystery Tour : Strawberry Fields Forever

The Beatles: Dear Prudence

Yellow Submarine: Hey Bulldog

Abbey Road: Here Comes the Sun

Let It Be: Two of Us

I compiled a giant playlist of songs that seemed to soothe me and help me feel better regardless of the time period when they were recorded or their musical style:  

• I found this little feature about Charlatans' Tim Burgess hosting Twitter listening parties where people listen to albums 'together, apart' and tweet about them at the same time. Now that I'm feeling better, I'm hoping to check these out. 

• I also discovered Henry Rollins' 'Cool Quarantine' broadcasts on KCRW: "I wanted to make a show that felt like those great hangouts you might have done where you and some friends descend on someone’s house, everyone brings some records and the jam session goes and goes."  

I read some really great pieces by a variety of music writers. To quote Brian Eno, some of these were old, some of these were new, and some of these turned up when I was least expecting them to.

• I started following GENMag editor Hanif Abdurraqib (@NifMuhammad) and read about his love for Starland Vocal Band, who were excellent songwriters and had much more to offer than simply 'Afternoon Delight' (though I love that song as much as the next guy). He pointed readers to this 1978 Washington Post article by Richard Lee, Making Music vs. Making It, which is both illuminating and tragically dark.

• Of course, there was no shortage of pieces about John Prine, both from people who knew and worked with him and by journalists. Two of the best: Ann Powers' John Prine's Songs Saw the Whole of Us for NPR and John Prine: The Last Days and Beautiful Life of An American Original by Patrick Doyle for Rolling Stone. 

• REM recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of their first gig in a church in Athens, Georgia. Athens Music Junkie blog wrote about their album "Up" and how it relates to where we are right now in R.E.M., Up, and the Promise of a Tomorrow.

• Pitchfork's Jeremy D. Larson wrote about the impact of Herbie Hancock's highly influential 1973 release Headhunters. This is well worth reading even if, like me, you are familiar with Hancock's work from this period and have listened to the record hundreds of times. 

• Brooklyn Vegan's Bill Pearis writes about Hal Willner's groundbreaking work on Night Music, the Sunday evening music show that was easily the most interesting and eclectic program to hit American Television. Hosted by David Sandborn and Jools Holland, the program brought Willner's unlikely pairings of musical guests into homes that had never heard of The Residents, John Zorn, or John Lurie. Willner produced the show for two seasons in 1988 & 1989, after which it was syndicated with Sanborn as the host. " Later I came to learn that some people couldn’t deal with the eclecticism. I didn’t realize at the time how dark they considered it."

Here's a performance from Night Music featuring Conway Twitty and The Residents:

So here's hoping that you and yours and healthy and doing well. If not, I am truly sorry and hope that all you are going through results in a better tomorrow. And for those enduring tragedy in this pandemic's wake, my sincerest condolences. 

I’d love to hear how you’re weathering this storm, what has impacted you, what you’ve seen that has really moved you. Feel free to leave a comment and interact with me and other readers.

As always, please consider forwarding this newsletter to someone you know who might enjoy it. See you next week.