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Wednesday, May 27, 2009
NEVER TELL YOUR MOTHER SHE'S OUT OF TUNE
Jack Bruce
Songs For a Tailor
Atco : 1969
[Buy It]
YOU SAY YOU TRUST YOUR MOTHER
Swamp Dogg
1972
Available on : Excellent Sides of Swamp Dogg, Vol. 2
S.D.E.G. : 2001
[Buy It]
MY MOTHER WAS A FRIEND OF THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE
Blurt
1980
Available on : The Best of Blurt Vol. 1: The Fish Needs a Bike
Salamander : 2004
[Buy It]
MAMA TOLD ME NOT TO COME
Randy Newman
12 Songs
Reprise : 1970
[Buy It]
MOTHER
John Lennon
John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band
Capitol : 1970
[Buy It]
I DON'T WANNA BE A SOLDIER
John Lennon
Imagine
Capitol : 1971
[Buy It]
WHO PUTS ME IN MY LITTLE BED
Ada Jones
1913
Edison Blue Amberol
YONDER COMES MY MOTHER
Son House
1965
Father of the Delta Blues
Sony : 1992
[Buy It]
In the last week three friends of mine have had what I'll call non-productive moments with their mothers. This isn't the appropriate place for details, so I'll make some up. One friend wanted to go on a camping trip in the wilds of Alaska, and her mother, who once lost a sibling to a vicious Kodiak, overreacted to the plan. "No," she screamed. "You will be torn to pieces by that bear, my darling." Another friend told her mother she was planning on taking crack. "Whatever," her mother said. "Save me some." The woman was then incensed that her mother didn't care more for her. The third friend had given notice at her job, which her mother had never much liked, on account of the fact that her boss was a hardened criminal who bootlegged DVDs and carried a gun in the waistband of his pants. But some important wires crossed in her mother's head, and she became furious with her daughter for once again becoming, at the age of 41, unemployed.
The other day I saw the Albert Brooks movie "Mother," which I have been bothering my wife to rent. She went to every video store within walking distance of our house, and no one has the movie. I despaired for it. Then it turned up on HBO, and we watched about two-thirds of it. I don't usually talk about pop culture other than pop music here, but I urge everyone to see it. It has too much dime-store psychology, and it knows that, but it has a fantastic performance by Debbie Reynolds as the perky, practical, judgmental, loving mother. Brooks is great, because he's always great: when he is forced to eat the permafrost sherbet in his mother's freezer, he screws up his face and says that it "tastes like an orange foot." There are plenty of moments of inspired discomfort -- at one point Brooks taunts his younger brother by pretending that he and his mother are having a sexual relationship -- but the climactic scene, where Brooks, who is playing a successful but blocked sci-fi writer, discovers that his mother also harbored dreams of literary fame, is legitimately moving. Consider this a Moistworks two thumbs up, though both thumbs are mine.
In the last hour I have been working on a technology to beam that movie into my friends' minds. I want them to understand that most of what their mothers do is done from love, and that the poor execution should be forgiven if possible. I would also beam the movie into the mothers' minds and tell them to ease off, that their kids are smart and confident so long as they are permitted to be that way, and that they need not worry so industriously about the worst-case scenarios. Of course everyone already know all of this, but I want to agree. And while I perfected the technology about five minutes ago, now I'm having second thoughts, mainly because the three situations I heard about this week concern mothers and daughters, and the Albert Brooks movie, along with everything I personally know, concerns mothers and sons. I think we can all agree that mother-daughter business is significantly different from mother-son business. It's knottier. It persists. There are mirrors hung next to windows, which can be confusing and exhilarating. I'm not even sure that mother-son solutions can address mother-daughter problems except in the most hapless, generic sense. Oh well.
In the last ten seconds, I put the blueprints for the movie-beaming device into the top drawer of my desk and took out a series of songs about mothers. There's Jack Bruce's "Never Tell Your Mother She's Out of Tune," which is interesting advice if you consider it more broadly - Bruce seems to be saying you should just take the lumps from maternal scrutiny/sanction and move on. Unfortunately, all the reasoned thinking takes place in the title; the song, despite some nice guitar by George Harrison, is a collection of disjointed blues-inflected lyrics. There's a similar problem at the heart of Blurt's spiky, excellent, somewhat nonsensical "My Mother Was a Friend Of the Enemy of the People." For actual answers, it's useful to go elsewhere. Swamp Dogg's "You Say You Trust Your Mother" investigates what can happen when children no longer believe that their mothers are acting in their best interest. As usual with Swamp Dogg, the song is far more complex than it first appears; it's not just about biological mothers, but about nations and patriots, the dangers of unconditional trust and the toxic sadness of suspicion. Randy Newman's "Mama Told Me Not to Come," on the other hand, illustrates what can happen when children fail to heed their mothers' advice - what can happen, it seems, is that those children can grow up fast: The radio is blasting, someone's beating on the door
Our hostess is not lasting, she's out on the floor
I seen so many things here I ain't never seen before
I don't know what it is but I don't wanna see no more
Mama told me not to come
Mama told me not to come
Mama said that ain't no way to have fun So what is the way to have fun? To listen to your mother? To ignore her? To ignore her knowing that what she's saying is half-panic and half-wisdom? In the Albert Brooks movie, he is drawn back to his mother when he starts to believe that he is dysfunctional in life because he has failed to understand what lies at the root of the mother-child dynamic. But he cannot accept anything his mother says at face value: she's always prodding him, always provoking, never saying exactly what she means. If she told him not to go to a party, he'd go, just like the young man in Randy Newman's song - and like that young man, he might spend much of the party thinking of his mother's sound advice, and even missing her a little. One of the most famous mothers in rock and roll belongs to John Lennon, who lost her when he was seventeen; she surfaces explicitly in the Beatles "Julia" and then "Mother," from Lennon's first solo album. She may also be present, though more obliquely, in "I Don't Want to Be a Soldier," the ragged, anguished political broadside that closes side one of "Imagine":Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Well, I don't wanna be a sailor mama, I don't wanna fly
Well, I don't wanna be a failure mama, I don't wanna cry
Well, I don't wanna be a soldier mama, I don't wanna die
Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no Is Lennon appealing back to the mother he lost for sanity? For safety? Or is "mama" more generic here? Is it a girlfriend? Is it womanhood in general, understood as protection against the ravages of war and male insecurity? Again, these are all mother-son situations, and not particularly helpful for mother-daughter dust-ups. Again, oh well. I did find one explicit mother-daughter song, from Ada Jones, from 1913, though it's sung from the perspective of a child dreaming of adult romance and complexity and coming back, every time, to the reliability of a mother's affection--and then, as punchline, to the harsher reality of a father's responsibility:I've had the measles and the mumps
The stomach ache and stomach pumps
My ma says she's afraid a cough
Some day will surely take me off
I get five cents each time I take cod liver oil, you see
And when I've got a dollar saved my ma buys more for me
Who puts me in my little bed?
My mama dear
Who hugs me when my prayers are said?
My mama dear
Who buys me every kind of pill
With sugar on to cure my ills?
But who pays all the doctor bills?
My dear old dad In the ninety-six years since the song was first released, it hasn't gotten any less creepy.
Mothers, children, conflicts, bonds: it all comes together and all comes apart in Son House's "Yonder Comes My Mother," which is rich with unanswerable questions of separation, emptiness, fullness, exhilaration, and fear. While most songs about mothers get caught up in domestic particulars or psychodrama, this one sees only the big picture, and this may be because it's mistitled, somewhat: this is Son House's version of the spiritual "When the Roll Is Called Up Yonder," which makes a case for accepting even the flawed among us, and for looking past shortcomings to the common thread that binds together all humans, even those who are already bound together. Wait, maybe it is about mothers and children, after all.Labels: ben, blues, rock and roll, soul
posted by Ben
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