The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: Old songs in new skins
April 1999
The pop moment I've found most affecting in the last few months comes at the end of Little Voice, when Michael Caine's wiped-out sleazeball promoter gets up drunk on a nightclub stage and sings a horrible, self-flagellating version of Roy Orbison's "It's Over." The classic song has been rubbed smooth by decades of overplay, but now it's ripped into someone else's story so violently you may never again be able to hear it as an innocent object, as a kind of toy. Now it has been brought into a play about real life—or the play of life itself.
I couldn't get Caine's scene out of my head. I began to think about how songs survive—and one of the way songs survive is that they mutate. Once you start thinking this way, it's like listening to a new radio station: a vampiric, surrealist station where nobody knows what time it is and everything happens at once.
Sometimes this happens subtly, around the margins, in soundtracks or commercials. The song is moved just slightly off the map we normally use to orient ourselves—but in a way that, in a year or ten, may completely change how we hear it, what associations we bring to it. Pop songs are always talked about as "the soundtrack to our lives," when all that means is that pop songs are no more than containers for nostalgia. But lives change, and so do soundtracks, even if they're made up of the same songs.
Etta James's "At Last" was a Top Ten R&B hit in 1961, and a small pop hit. After that it lived a quiet life in a small, neat house on a poor street—until last year, when the musical director from Pleasantville came knocking. In James's hands the record is a soft exhalation after years of silent suffering, a sweep of passion so full of doubt it all but turns in on itself, and it came to orchestrate the most romantic scene in the film: a boy and a girl, connecting for the first time, driving into the sylvan glade of Lover's Lane as the novelty of their emotions brings new color streaming into their black-and-white '50s sitcom world. The bucolic setup was too good to leave to the movie, though—and now, just months after the film's release, you can see the scene replayed, tree for tree and leaf for leaf, in a Jaguar commercial. But while in the movie the song is a forgotten voice brought back to speak as if for the first time, blessing the young lives it's dramatizing, in the commercial the song completely escapes. It's too unrushed, too patient, to be used as the commercial wants to use it: to make you want something right now. So it turns and walks away—not back to the history books, but back to Pleasantville.
Where Bob Dylan's "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll" has gone is a much trickier question. Dylan supposedly wrote it after attending the 1963 March on Washington, where he and others sang for equal justice. There was a story in the paper about a rich man's son in Baltimore, one William Zantzinger, who, drunk at a society party, had beaten a black hotel worker to death. The song Dylan wrote was solemn, elegant, and almost unbearably painful. In the last verse his tone turned bitter and ugly, and he sprang the fact on which, for him, the story turned: "For penalty and repentance... A six-month sentence." When you listen, it's as if Dylan can barely expel the last word. It breaks and stumbles, as if the singer will never not be shocked.
Thirty-four years later, in 1997, Homicide ran three episodes about the murder of a Haitian maid employed by a rich Baltimore family; the father, played by James Earl Jones, had shielded his guilty son. Why? Because of William Zantzinger, the Jones character says, and he tells the old story in Bob Dylan's words, as if they are now part of a bible, as if a white man's crime should pay for a black man's, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth—even if in both cases the eyes that close are those of a poor black woman. "'In the courtroom of honor, the judge pounded his gavel, to show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level,'" Jones explained, so long after the fact, or before the new fact, that it was impossible to read his tone: "'The ladder of law has no top and no bottom.'" But the law had a top and a bottom for Zantzinger, Jones was saying: Doesn't my boy deserve the same? A song that was once so clear, that sounded as if its words might be chiseled over some courthouse door, now seemed to make no sense at all.
Then last December 8, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee, Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz stirred the broth one more time. Among a group of scholars arguing against Bill Clinton's impeachment on various constitutional grounds, Wilentz seemed to come out of nowhere, pugnacious, angry, granting Republican representatives no more respect than he would a well-dressed lynch mob. He denounced the argument "that if we impeach the president, the rule of law will be vindicated if only in a symbolic way, proving forcefully that no American is above the law and that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom." Nonsense, he said: The offenses of which Clinton is accused put no constitutional principle in jeopardy—and if you vote for impeachment for any reason found outside the constitution, out of vengeance or for gain, "History will track you down."
With those last words, Wilentz recovered the voice of the song that, through blind quotation, he had made part of the official historical record of the nation—a voice of suppressed and bitter fury. ("I got tired of Henry Hyde describing Clinton as if he were William Zantzinger," Wilentz says.) In his way, Wilentz was singing a Bob Dylan song as badly as Michael Caine sings "It's Over" in Little Voice—and as fully. I can't listen to Roy Orbison's original anymore; compared to Caine's version it sounds bloated and strained, where Caine's is all sweat and self-loathing. The song itself may be over—or, rather, definitively appropriated, never to be given back. As for Dylan's song, like Etta James's, you can think it has just begun to travel, a mutant now, limbs fallen off, strange sores appearing, the sores growing into whole new bodies.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, April 1999
"But you who philosophize disgrace/and criticize all fears/take the rag away from your face/now ain't the time for your tears."
Quite possibly my favorite of Dylan's many songs because he just comes out and says something about America that the rich establishment would want to stay buried.
The actual story of William Zantzinger has him hitting Hattie Carroll with a toy cane, not a heavy walking stick. She died as a result of the harassment more than any severe blow as she was overweight and suffered from hypertension. I didn't know this until recently and I think it changes one's perception of the song at least somewhat. Is it artistic license on Dylan's part or an outright misperception of a contemporary event in 1963? It also someone mitigates the 6 month sentence outrage as it wasn't exactly a murder but a battery that resulted in the victim's death due to other causes. In more recent times, we have police using excessive force in trying to restrain and apprehend a suspect and the suspect dies as a result. How accountable is a police officer in trying to subdue a potentially dangerous suspect who is either fleeing or resisting arrest? While society cannot and should not accept 'death by cop' events, we do empower the police to use force when necessary. This all strays from the Hattie Carroll discussion, but to bring it all back home, she was not exactly 'slain by a cane'.