Over Easy:For Your Reconsideration

Part of growing up addicted to music was deciding who was cool and who was lame. And we were tougher than any singing competition judge, tougher and unflinching in our dismissal of an act that didn’t measure up. Artists were quickly assigned their places on the status map, and it was virtually impossible to get reassigned to a more desirable location. That first single better kick ass, right?

In the singer songwriter era, authenticity was everything. That and good hair. I knew early on that while James Taylor and Jackson Browne were cool, somehow singers like Glen Campbell and John Denver were forever relegated to MOR status with their variety TV shows and songs like “Rhinestone Cowboy” and “Thank God I’m a Country Boy”. It took a long time before I listened to Glen’s touching version of Jackson’s “These Days”. Or heard James Taylor covering “Wichita Lineman”. At some point, I broke down and admitted that John Denver's “Leavin’ On a Jet Plane” was a beautiful song.

I was embarrassed that my parents had given me the first Monkees album for Christmas, because played alongside The Animals or The Kinks or, of course, The Beatles, the Monkees were, let’s face it, lame. Or were they? Yes, they had the problem of their origin story-They were auditioned and put together for a sitcom about a band. I found out much later that the producers originally planned to use the Lovin’ Spoonful as the band, but contractual obligations prevented that alternative history from unfolding. And I loved The Lovin’ Spoonful! But once the Monkees had songs like “Pleasant Valley Sunday”, a quirky Carole King song, and then “Daydream Believer”, which is a certifiable great song, well, what was I to do? Then, just as I was coming to terms with all of this, it came out that Michael Nesmith had been the father of music television. (It’s a long story, you can look it up).

This didn’t however alter my distrust of the boy band, put together as a moneymaking enterprise, and when The Backstreet Boys, assembled not formed, planned to record one of my songs, I thought “Oh, ok.” I happily stewed in my snobbery. Then I heard their version of the song. They sang the daylights out of it, and despite all the creamy harmonies, brought out emotional aspects of the song that genuinely moved me. Clearly, I had to recalibrate.

I’d dealt with this cognitive dissonance before. I can’t say that I thought Hilary Duff was an artist for the ages, but she was cute and The Lizzy McGuire Show got a lot of play at our place, and when Hilary recorded a song of mine called “I Can’t Wait” as her first single, my esteem grew considerably in the eyes of my then 7-year-old daughter and her friends. And when I found out from my co-writer that Hilary had battled back against resistance from the overlords at Disney, adamant that she was recording this song, I admired her pugnacious 15-year-old self on a whole new level.

Coolness is a funny thing. You can’t buy it, but you can lose it. It’s hard to maintain and can be squandered on awards shows during an ill-considered duet. Rare is the artist like Leonard Cohen, who starts out cool and remarkably gets cooler through the years. Of course, some bands are too cool for their own good. The Velvet Underground, Kraftwerk, The Stooges are all bands that are referred to by rock critics as “seminal” but that and coolness won’t keep the lights on.

I consulted my friend and manager, Jeff Rogers, who knows about stuff before almost anyone else does and can point you in the right direction if you want to know where the true north of cool is. He has instincts like Cayce Pollard, the coolhunter in William Gibson’s brilliant “Pattern Recognition”, so I asked him if he’d ever had to reconsider someone who had been marginalized by the tastemakers among us. He said, “Absolutely! For example, I thought of the Psychic Hotline when I thought of Dionne Warwick,” I blanched over the phone. “Then recently, I saw a doc about her and saw her as the groundbreaking artist and activist that she is.” I breathed a little easier, and the next 10 minutes of the call were taken up with singing “I Say a Little Prayer” and “Don’t Make me Over”. I confessed that, as much as I loved Bacharach and David songs, it took me some years to appreciate the genius of the lyrics to “Do You Know the Way to San Jose”.

Jeff then told me the ultimate tale of reconsideration. He got a call to ask if he would manage the winner of the first Canadian Idol season. He said no but was persuaded to attend the show, during which he went through a conversion and decided that he would take on the task. Watching the finalists, he saw both “sincerely trying their hardest to do the thing they love most.” And even though they weren’t the cool, alternative artists that he was used to working with, “Their innocence was their only crime.” He cried during the finale.

I understand his dilemma and why his instinctive reaction was to say “no”, without having seen the show or met the competitors. Idol shows are the perfect example of the “legitimacy conundrum“. They are transparently constructed to elicit a certain response from the audience, from the heroic repertoire to the histrionic performances to the quaint back stories of the competitors and the gauntlet of approval that the judges represent.

It’s the opposite of a scruffy bunch of dropouts who live in a burned out building and shoplift to stay fed, all the while working on a collection of songs that might change the world. But even those bands can surprise you, throwing you a curve by casually mentioning the Monkees as a prime influence, as they play you their cover version of “Daydream Believer”.

That’s me in the shower singing “Rhinestone Cowboy”. C’mon, everybody now!