The history of epic musical attempts to meaningfully engage with the vast sweep of American history is, to say the least, problematic. Meat Loaf’s “Ben Franklin Makes Love in a Foggy Grove of Trees,” though energetic enough on vinyl, failed to translate to live performance. The rather too subtle stage actions (Ben thoughtfully taking off his “spectacles” as Priscilla Hedges, partly unclad, sings up at him, “When you invent the kite / Will you still recall this moment? / Or will I become part of / A vague montage of New England sluts?”) fizzled in the large venues then favored by Meat Loaf. The Tim Rice–Andrew Lloyd Webber production of “Johnny Tremain” was likewise moribund, its “heavy” lyrics (“My hand / This hand / Once so lovely / Has now been reduced to a glob of horrid meat / Just because I was a little careless with that thing full / Of molten silver”) deemed too intellectual for a complacent mid-nineteen-seventies American audience craving the banalities of Liberace and late-phase Elvis. Furthermore, the subtle sexual innuendo woven throughout (“My thumb, once opposable and benighted / Now sits limp, like a penis unexcited”) were ultimately too risqué for a staid culture that, at that time, still believed that babies came when you left a pastel turtleneck rolled up in a wad overnight. Although concept albums like Gary Puckett & the Union Gap’s acid-inspired “Long Tan Coat of Albuquerque Disconsolate Rain” or Tom Waits’s rock bio-opera about the life of Jesse James, “A White-Trash Rambling Christ Figure Just Shot Your Brother, Amigo,” attempted to draw on the epic historical energy of America, these were, at best, scattershot and partial attempts: it was not until this moment, and the appearance of “2776: A Musical Journey Through America’s Past, Present & Future,” that it could truly be said that a record encapsulating all that is America had been attempted and failed.
When I was a teen-ager, reading liner notes like these, I was often swept away, imagining what the recording “scene” must have been like. Who were all those cute girls in that photo on the inside foldout of the Allman Brothers Band’s “Brothers and Sisters” album? Did they have Southern accents? Were some of them actually Brits? That would be hot. If I had showed up at the session, would the girls have been like: “Y’all, look at this cute Yankee preteen—let’s have him off for a quick towboat in the bloody lorry?” Here, there is no need to speculate. I was there. I saw it. I was there for the entire nine-day orgy of talent and spontaneous creativity, an orgy that was oddly unsexual, and in which I was sometimes the only participant, as everyone else had gone out for dinner and apparently forgotten to invite me. Sometimes—inspired, dazed, loaded, pulsing, reverberating, high on the music—we would wander out into the upstate night and just gaze up at the stars, realizing we were part of history. I remember Bruce Springsteen musing, “Folks, folks, we are part of history.” Come to think of it, that might be where we first got that idea about us being part of history, from Bruce saying that. And I remember Bono firing back, “Yes, Bruce, but isn’t it the case, technically, that everyone is part of history?” “You got me there, Bon,” Bruce said, and everyone roared with laughter, having just nearly witnessed, we realized, a real clash of the titans, there by the campfire. Unfortunately, the Bruce-Bono contribution—a speculative number in which Woody Guthrie and Tom Joad teleport back in time and tell a story to Pocahontas about a New Jersey state trooper accosting Gandhi outside a Paterson night club in 1955, with its rousing chorus (“Just because he looked / Like a person of color”) and then its somewhat less rousing subchorus (“That incident, concerning color / Had put us all in a sort of dolor”)—had to be cut, simply for reasons of time (it was more than eleven hours long).
Truth be told, there were a number of regrettable omissions. Beyoncé and Jay Z’s piece “Bomber” had to be left off the album. (“Driver of this plane, this / B-52 on the way to Nagasaki / Stuff your ears with cotton and / Close those eyes / Me and my man are about to do it all over this / Here bomb”). This was before Beyoncé got more popular. And, honestly, at that time the producers didn’t want to take the risk. Who was this “mere kid”? Sure, she was pretty, she had a great voice, she had sung at the Inauguration and been in Destiny’s Child and all of that, but who could tell? It seemed unlikely, a mere ten months ago, that she would be such a “hit.” Well, show business is full of exigencies. Also verities. Not to mention prosthetics. That man who attempts to bet on show business would soon find that his fake leg was being handed back to him on a silver platter, but would also find that you can’t bet on show business, just horses. And dogs.
Led Zeppelin’s track, “Among the Hessian Troops at Saratoga,” also had to go. You might ask, “Why would you idiots omit a new Led Zeppelin track?” Good question. I can only say that as we were putting this record together— (Wait, just got a call from the producers. They ask that I not say “as we were putting this record together.” O.K., I get that. Fair enough.) I can only say that as us were putting this record together, us really were suffering from what us often referred to as “an embarrassment of riches.” What does this mean? Us never really figured that out. Why would someone be “embarrassed” by “riches”? Seems counterintuitive, doesn’t it? That is certainly not how us roll! Anyway, imagine you are in us’s shoes, and have to leave out not only Springsteen and Bono and Beyoncé and Led Zeppelin but also, and perhaps most hurtfully of all, the fourth-century Coptic singer whose name transliterates most closely as “Dyt-Koek” and who took the trouble to be dug out of his grave, in Jordan, and reanimated just for these sessions. I will never forget hearing, from across the Thruway, as I was going to take a leak, the ghostly refrain of his traditional ballad “My Magisterial Lord Honors Me by Sacrificing My Brood by Thy Crewl Sword.” What pipes that Coptic had! And what a shame that track had to be left off. And Diet Coke (our nickname for Dyt-Koek) was, like, “For this did I returneth back from the tomb?” But that is art. Art is choices. It’s not like there is some new invention that allows infinite data to be presented in a small package. You have to leave stuff out. That is the way an artistic project is given shape, and thereby meaning. So, sorry, Prince, sorry, Toby Keith, sorry, Yo-Yo Ma, sorry, Foghat, sorry, Beethoven, thanks for coming out to “the farm,” better luck next time.
We recorded at “the farm,” an abandoned barn off the New York State Thruway littered with dead sheep and (before Prince took charge and paid to have him carted away) a dead farmer, and also some abandoned sheep and even, at one point, an abandoned farmer. It got pretty crowded in there, but, swept away by the Dionysian energy, no one minded, even when the abandoned farmer fell asleep across the mixing board and deleted the Ritchie Blackmore solo on Don Henley’s version of “The Wheels on the Bus.”
What can I say about those crazy days and nights? I was there. You weren’t. You only wish you were. And I wish you were. Or, as the English majors say, I wish you had been. That is called, they tell me, “past-perfect tense.” O.K., whatever, Shakespeare. Still, there’s something to that. Those nights were past, they were perfect—and they were tense. I remember once when all our gear went missing. What a crisis! All the harmonicas were in that bus! We’d parked outside a diner full of hostile locals and state troopers. After a rather scary meal, we came out to find the bus missing. We glanced back into the diner and all the hostile locals and state troopers were looking down at their plates, the beginnings of a smile flickering across their face. Across their faces. What I mean to say is, the beginnings of a smile, one per face, were flickering, there on the various— There must have been about, I’d say, forty faces in there. Plus, this one guy had no face. He must have been in an accident or something. Or, come to think of it, maybe he was a robber, wearing a pair of panty hose over his face? But, anyway, even that guy was smiling. They were all looking pretty smug in there, so happy that us long-haired creative types had been stymied by their cornpone antics. Because slowly it had begun to dawn on us: they’d stolen our bus! Until someone realized we’d gone out the wrong door. We raced around the rest stop to confirm this, some of us, including Billie Holiday and Mick Jagger, racing back through the diner, only to find our bus—sure enough—just where we’d left it! We had a good laugh about that. Inside, the hostile locals and state troopers and that guy with the panty hose over his face were also having a good laugh about it. And I thought, Ain’t that America? For you and me? Ain’t that America, the land of the—
Which was when the hostile locals and state troopers and that guy with the panty hose over his face all raced out and beat us up, for having wrongly accused them of stealing our bus. After the beating, though—indicating the complexity of America—all the hostile locals and state troopers and that guy with the panty hose over his face invited us over for apple pie. And there were, like, as I said above, about forty of them. So we had to slog from house to house all night, eating pie after pie, when we should have been back at “the farm,” recording. Some of those pies were better than others. I guess that’s not surprising. It would have been pretty weird if every hostile local and state trooper and that guy with the panty hose over his face had all served us pie that was exactly equally good. Unless, I guess, they’d all bought their pie from the same place. Like Walmart. Or BJ’s Wholesale Club.
Anyway.
There were so many amazing moments during the making of this record. I suppose for many of us the high point was when Bob Dylan shuffled into the studio and sang his own composition, “As I Drive This Nation Sublime”:
But in the end that had to be left off, too.
What is an album, really? A collection of songs? Yes. Well, yes and no. Someone once described a novel as “a long piece of prose with something wrong with it.” That might be said of this album. Only with music. This album might be described as “a long piece of music with something wrong with it.” But this album is more than just that. This album might more properly be described as “a really long piece of music, with a lot of things very wrong with it.” There are even things wrong with this album that the artists, who gave of themselves so selflessly, don’t know about yet—hidden defects that are, of course, necessary by-products of intense artistic immersion, such as, if you are buying the vinyl version, a big gouge might be found on Side 2. (A warehouse issue.) Or, on one of the tracks (won’t say which one), this really great vocal break, by Aretha Franklin, actually, got misplaced and herein has been replaced with some nice synth horns. (Sorry, Queen of Soul! Luckily, for you it’s easy!) And, apparently, some of the CDs were inadvertently switched with copies of a 1972 Lennon Sisters Christmas album. Well, that is art. Art is about the unknown. There are no refunds in art. The artists just put it out there, giving their all. And so do you consumers. You just put it out there. “It” being your money. And we take it and there are no refunds, in a spirit of artistic “give-and-take.” We are all in this together. As someone once said, T. S. Eliot, perhaps, “We are the world.” But art is mysterious, isn’t it? Which tracks will you end up always skipping over? We can’t know. That is art. Which of these songs will get under your skin and just irritate the shit out of you? Who can say? How many of these albums will end up in smelly, moldy boxes in flea markets, nestled between “Pat Boone Sings the Lonesome Blues” and “Timeless Ballads for Cooing and Wooing”? That is for history to judge. For our part, we want to say: Thank you for buying this record. Do not attempt to return it. This is for a good cause. Don’t ruin it. Don’t take a good thing and, by doubting it at the last moment, like at the altar, ruin it, and all the guests are embarrassed and the food can’t be returned and the d.j. still has to be paid and all of that.
But, really, what is this album? How should I know? I haven’t heard it yet. I asked and asked, but the producers were, like, “George, we are busy here with the real talent, will you please just write the fucking liner notes already? The liner notes are not really a thing. Just finish them and send them in. Or else we’ll just put more photos in that space. Actually, you know what—”
And then I hung up, not wanting to get into it with them, because I knew they were super-busy.
And, really—and perhaps more to the point—what is America? America, to me, is a flash of sunlight through a grove of trees. And then an alligator appears and you run like hell. America is a hope, a dream, and then that dream ends with you on your back, the taste of blood in your mouth, and some big crewcut guy is screaming at you that you seem like some kind of fucking subversive. And then he starts crying. He’s tired, he says, he doesn’t need this shit, he just got off a double shift and his racist club is now going to start charging for the brown shirts. America, to me, will always be a glass of iced tea at the end of a long day, the distant sound of a freight train, and then your mama puts down her glass of tea and goes, “That’s weird, there are no train tracks around here.” And then you all dive under the table, but that was dumb, because how is being under the table going to help you as a freight train comes crashing through your shack? And then later, at the rustic graveyard, after Pa has been lowered in, and has lurched out, and been pushed back in, with a shovel, a rustic gravedigger mutters a philosophical word to you in passing, but you can’t make it out, because his beard is just atrocious.
America, to me, is that house in the distance, across a plowed field, just at dusk, and an orange light shines from within and you are filled with a vague longing to trudge across that vast field and get to know those strangers better—you are lonely, you have been out on the road a long time, the world has been singing you a sad song indeed, and the nights have been cold, and various birds native only to America have been crying out in the night, and you have hallucinated their cries solidifying into human voices singing, “Loss! Love! Mourning!” And you mount that paintless porch and knock on that crooked door, and when a man answers and sees that you are a stranger, is he afraid? Does he slam that door in your face? No, he welcomes you in, and gives you a warm meal and a place to rest, and late that night, in an ancient room that speaks to you mysteriously of Antietam and Gettysburg, you think, Wait a minute, I know these people, these people are my freaking cousins—why did they act like they’ve never seen me before? And in the distance you once again hear a freight train, and you brace yourself, but this time (and perhaps this, to me, is the essence of the American propensity for hope), this time, the train is on tracks, and though the house shakes and some of the wife’s ceramic frogs fall off the shelf, the house stands, and you doze off, into a verdant, dream-laced sleep, thinking, Tomorrow, I will awaken into a land where the streams run crystal clear and golden fruit falls off the boughs of the trees, but since one can’t eat golden fruit, I’ll take my cousins over to Denny’s and see what’s up with this whole pretending-not-to-know-me shtick. Did I somehow offend them? Is this about that minibike I borrowed? Oh, shit, I bet it is.
What you now hold in your hands (assuming you are holding this record in your hands and not, say, your cat, or God knows what else you might be holding in your hands as you read this) is a labor of love. Some of the greatest artists of our time were gathered together, along with some lesser artists who were sort of filling in for some of the greatest artists of our time who had, unfortunately, previous commitments, or else didn’t give a shit, really, about some poor kids in Kenya or El Salvador—but, anyway, a group of artists at various different levels were brought together, at that farm (not the one with my cousins in it but that earlier one, with the dead sheep), and they did what artists do: they created. They got “lost in the fecund creative moment,” while occasionally stepping away to check their phones and see how their real projects were going.
But enough. Enough from me. You did not buy this album to read my liner notes. You bought this album for the music. I understand that. Well, whatever. I’m sorry I’m not musical. My part is done. The music lies ahead. The boring “writing” part—the part that has sustained mankind and helped us make meaning since time immemorial—is done. Let’s get on with the strumming and banging and wailing of lyrics that don’t quite add up and the senseless libidinal gyrating and all of that.
For my part, I will always be glad to be part of this. To have been part of this. I will always be glad that I was to have been part of this, and then, at a later time, was being part of this, and then, at an even later time, had been part of this, and then, at a much later time, when I am old, I will know that I once had been glad to have had been part of this.
Now go.
Listen to the music.
Whoa-whoa.
Listen to the music. ♦
George Saunders wrote these liner notes for the recently released “2776,” an album of music and comedy to support One Kid, One World, an educational charity benefitting children in Kenya and El Salvador.
