I remember the events of 11 September 2001 very clearly because
music played a major role in my witnessing the awful events which took place
that day in New York City. I was lying
in bed at the end of an extremely busy day at work waiting for the documentary
When We Were Kings to be played on the ABC.
All I wanted to do was hit the record button of my VCR with the intention
of going through it at my leisure later on to enjoy the awesome musical footage
of James Brown, B.B.King and others who had gone to Zaire to accompany the
Muhummad Ali v George Foreman Rumble In The Jungle. I dozed off for a few minutes as the preceding
program was coming to end; by the time I woke up the documentary had begun and,
rather than hit record or turn it off, started to watch, only to doze off
again.
When I awoke again, I was jolted awake
by the image on my screen. There were no
images of Ali, Foreman, Brown or B.B; instead there was footage of the World
Trade Centre with what appeared to be a smoking hole in one of the towers. No sooner had this registered, I saw a plane
emerge from the left hand side of my screen and crash into the other
tower. Whoever was speaking at the time
clearly wasn’t watching their monitor and I screamed at my TV set in a futile
attempt to get that person to acknowledge what had just happened. To this day I don’t know whether I saw that
particular crash live. But I stayed up
until well into 12 September as the news from the Pentagon and Pennsylvania
came through; it was only after the second tower collapsed that I tried to
force myself to sleep. I didn’t succeed
all that well and then kept the television on for the entire night. I wasn’t the only person who did this that
night and the following morning was one of those weird days when everyone who
witnessed the events had a compulsive need to speak to each other, almost as a form of
therapy or consolation. That afternoon I
accompanied my then Manager to a meeting on the 12th storey of a building on
the outer fringe of Melbourne’s Central Business District network of
skyscapers. To this day, it remains the
only meeting I’ve ever attended that everyone involved was sitting on the one
side of a table facing the windows.
Since then, September 11 is marked by various events to commemorate
the innocent victims and the heroic rescue workers who lost their lives. Some musicians were moved to record music
about the day; Neil Young wrote Let’s Roll, Bruce Springsteen was inspired to
record The Rising and a variety of musicians (including Young and Springsteen) performed
largely inspired versions of well known songs in a live television fund raiser
called America: A Tribute To Heroes.
Additionally, just about every biography or autobiography written about
an American musician talks about their response to the day. For example, Pat Benatar in her autobiography
wrote of dilemma about whether to perform her show that night. She decided to go ahead, figuring anyone that
would come probably wanted to find some form of solace in music. As a result, she gave an acoustic performance
to a full house and found some of her songs, especially the opener that night
We Belong, invested with a new meaning.
The dilemma faced by Benatar has been shared by many acts or
record companies when they are forced to address the loss of loved ones or
comrades in music. Today’s playlist
contains some examples of the different ways they’ve gone about it:
(# 584) Lou Reed And
John Cale - Songs For Drella (1990)
The two original front men for the legendary Velvet
Underground put aside their differences to record this tribute to that band’s
patron, Andy Warhol. (Drella was his
nickname.) It is a dignified, moving and reasonably straightforward rendering
of his life in music. Smalltown is a
great character setting opening; Style It Takes memorably namechecks the VU and
tracks like Trouble With Classicists, Faces And Names, Slip Away (A Warning)
and Nobody But You brilliantly carry the story along. But it is the closer Hello It’s Me that
raises lumps in throats as they address his death and convey the wish that they
hoped he enjoyed the show before a final goodbye.
(# 585) AC/DC – Back In
Black (1980)
Just about everything associated with this album is the band’s
tribute to fallen lead singer Bon Scott.
There’s the title, the all black cover, the church bells ringing in the
start of opening track Hells Bells, but for the most part, the greatest tribute
was that the band kept going, following exactly the trail Bon probably would
have done. Some of the tracks were
started by Scott but were finished by the Young brothers and his replacement
Brian Johnson; certainly it’s hard to conceive of tracks like Have A Drink On
Me or Let Me Put My Love Into You coming from anyone other than Scott. But none of this will explain why this is
now, with Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon, the second biggest selling
album of all time as well as the biggest selling heavy metal/hard rock album
and the biggest by an Australian act.
Rather this is because this album is the home to Hells Bells, Shoot To
Thrill, the title track and the memorable hit single You Shook Me All Night
Long all classics of the genre and the culmination of everything Scott and his
comrades had sought to achieve.
(# 586) Stevie Ray
Vaughan And Double Trouble – The Sky Is Crying (1991)
Record companies usually don’t do acts who died at the
height of their powers any favours when it comes to posthumous releases of previously unreleased
studio material. Usually the main
problem is in finding someone sufficiently well versed to distinguish the good
from bad. This is not one of those
cases. Released a year after Stevie Ray’s
tragic death in 1990, his label brought in his brother, Jimmie Vaughan, to
select the tracks for this album. And
Jimmie chose extremely well showing off all aspects of Stevie’s work. The title track is a an explosive slow blues
(even if too obvious a title for the album), Chitlin Con Carne is a jazzy
instrumental similar to some tracks on
his last studio album and which may have indicated a direction he was to
go and Jimi Hendrix gets another nod through a cover of Little Wing. But the killer tracks is, again, the final
track. Life By The Drop is the sole
acoustic number in the SRV catalogue and it is absolutely brilliant with lyrics
that could easily be misinterpreted as a career overview. There is no other
track that could have conceivably been used to end the album.
(# 587) Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here (1975)
What’s this doing
here you wonder? Many people's choice for
the mantle of the finest Floyd album, this was never conceived as a memorial album but
is rapidly becoming one. As all Floydheads
know, the bookends of this album, Shine On You Crazy Diamond is about former
member Syd Barrett with at least two other tracks, Welcome To The Machine and
Have A Cigar relating to the music business and the way in which it gradually
unhinged him. Now that Syd is gone,
these tracks take on a much greater relevance.
It has also been magnified by the death of Richard Wright whose keyboard
work on Shine On is now viewed as a fitting epitaph. Then there is the remaining track, Wish You
Were Here, a track that Floyd Fans now apply in their minds to Barrett and
Wright and presumably the remaining members when their time comes…..
….which brings me
back to 9/11. One of the musical
highlights from the America: A Tribute To Heroes broadcast came from the
unexpected combination of Limp Bizkit and John Rzeznik of The Goo Goo
Dolls. Their number was a solo acoustic cover of
Wish You Were Here.
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