My column today is a smorgasbord, touching on identity politics (the curse of), presidential immunity (and the recent Supreme Court decision), and Ismail Kadare (the late Albanian novelist). There’s more too. Here.
Let’s have some mail. In a post last week, I said, “. . . for ‘Desperado,’ I’ll forgive Don Henley almost anything.” (Never mind the context. That need not detain us.) A “wonderful song,” I said, “especially when sung by other people.” An unkind cut, but honest.
A reader writes,
I’m with you on “Desperado.” What a song. A beautiful song and, in my listening, a very spiritual (dare I say “Christian”?) song. “You better let somebody love you . . .”
Forty years ago, I was working the sound board for a little band of Christian guys who would go into jails and prisons and do concerts — mostly rock covers with double meanings, such as “I Ain’t Got You,” with a few good Christian songs.
I could tell a number of stories, but I’ll tell just this: The highlight of every performance was “Desperado.” The perfect song in the program. The room often got a little pensive.
I can see it, hear it.
Another reader writes,
I agree that “Desperado” is better when sung by others, and thought I’d share a recent version sung by one of my favorite bands. If you’re not already familiar with the Petersens, they’re what you find when you look up “wholesome” in the dictionary. A family bluegrass band whose members seem to really enjoy one another, and who are straightforwardly Christian without being obnoxious about it.
Anyway, if you haven’t seen this already, I hope you enjoy it.
Here is the video.
A little language? A reader writes,
We were reading The Grapes of Wrath in school, and I went to the teacher and asked her what a “gutache” was. The word is spoken by one of the Joad kids, if I remember correctly. I pronounced it “GOO-tash.”
The teacher laughed and replied, crisply, “Gut ache.”
My mom uses “gutache” to this day — pronounced my way.
Stick with words for a minute. In a recent column, I wrote,
One of the most interesting and enjoyable words in our language is “Oi.” Did I say “our”? Well, you hear this word in Britain. Grammarians classify it as an “interjection.” The TV series Ted Lasso, which is about a London soccer team, is replete with it.
I recall something from Boris Johnson’s time as mayor. He said to a young man sitting across from him, “Oi, there’s no eatin’ on the Tube.”
Classic.
Well, a friend informs me that “oi” — or, to render it correctly, “Oi!” — is “also a genre of music. Skinhead and skinhead-adjacent.” Ah. To read an article about this by Alexis Petridis in the Guardian, go here.
Finally, apropos of nothing — and everything — a reader writes,
Jay,
I’ve often wondered what it was like to be alive at certain moments in history. Moments that historians have designated “life-changing.” The Declaration of Independence: July 4, 1776. Lincoln’s assassination: April 15, 1865. Armistice Day: November 11, 1918. The stock-market crash: October 29, 1929. The Nazi invasion of Poland: September 1, 1939. Pearl Harbor: December 7, 1941.
I was alive for the Kennedy assassination. I was ten years old. They dismissed us from school early. In my immaturity, I thought this was cool. JFK’s death seemed like TV fiction.
So, let’s buckle our seatbelts. The presidential election on November 5, 2024, will be a day that future historians will garnish with superlatives. If I’m alive on that Tuesday, I must remember. When the sun rises on Wednesday, November 6, 2024, America will never be the same.
Yikes. Anyway, have a good week.
Hang on, one more thing: Up above, I said I preferred others in Don Henley’s “Desperado.” May I revise and extend my remarks? Henley wrote the damn thing — wonderful thing — along with Glenn Frey. Honestly, he can sing it however the hell he wants. And “who can gainsay it?” (I have borrowed Buckley language.)
As I have related before, I heard Leontyne Price sing Lee Hoiby’s “Where the Music Comes From” many times. Then I heard the composer himself sing it (accompanying himself on the piano). He was probably about 80 then. And it was so . . . so . . . real. I realized that the song was a deeply personal — almost prayerful — soft-rock song, not an art song (though, God, Leontyne was good in it). Hoiby himself called it “my Cat Stevens song.”
I can hear it now, from both the luminous soprano and the rather hoarse, octogenarian composer. So moving, both ways.