by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
At 5 p.m. yesterday I
switched the TV on in vain hoping that the much-ballyhooed telethon Hand in
Hand, devoted to raising money
for relief efforts for Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, would be shown in real time
at 5 p.m. (8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. Central). Alas, after competition from the
Internet has pushed up the big awards shows so at least we get to see them in real time, we on the West Coast were once again
reminded by the East Coast-centric mavens of the media world that we suck hind
tit, now and always. So I waited for the show to come on at 8 p.m. on
tape-delay (in case you haven’t got the message, I hate tape delays and really resent the way we on the
West Coast are made second-class media citizens by the time shift) and in the
meantime watched my usual favorites on MS-NBC, Chris Hayes’ All In, the Rachel Maddow Show and Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell — and they seemed oddly relieved to be able
(mostly) to stop talking about the natural catastrophes that have been
afflicting Texas, Florida and the U.S. Virgin Islands (ironically the U.S.
State Department has been assisting relief efforts to get U.S. citizens off the
British Virgin Islands to the
north of ours, but it seems no one in the U.S. government was off the block to
get help to the residents of the U.S. Virgin Islands, even though they’re legally part of this country, have
U.S. citizenship and even have an elected, though non-voting, member of the
House of Representatives) and get back to what they really want to talk about: Trump and Russia! Trump and
Russia! Trump and Russia! After
those three programs (though I bypassed the second half of O’Donnell’s show as
usual so I could watch Jeopardy!, in which the woman who’d won the night before successfully defended
her championship and this time all three panelists got the Final Jeopardy right
and I missed it — the singer
who’s won Album, Record and Song of the Year Grammys twice in the 21st
century: I guesed Taylor Swift but it was really Adele, which was embarrassing
since I have all three of her CD’s), and afterwards I left the TV on NBC to
watch Hand in Hand.
That turned out to be a major disappointment: though it was billed as a
“telethon” it was only an hour long, and though it was blessedly shown without
commercial interruptions (thougn one could credibly argue that the entire show
was an hour-long commercial for hurricane relief!) there were only seven
musical performances, not the long sets by established artists that had given
previous aid shows like Live Aid, Live 8 and the 9/11, Katrina and Sandy
telethons their sense of scope and power. Instead there were a lot of
unidentified stars (almost no one was identified by name on this show — apparently the producers, Justin
Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun and Bun B “of the
great Texas hip-hop duo UGK,” according to Mikael Wood in the Los Angeles
Times (as far as I’m concerned the words
“great” and “hip-hop,” the alias for rap used by people who like it, don’t
belong in the same sentence, though at least the producers did not include a rap act in the show) getting trotted out to do
pretty middle-of-the-road material. It opened with Stevie Wonder, backed by a
great Black woman soul singer who was nominally one of his backup voices but
deserves a chance to sing leads, doing — not one of his own inspirational songs, like “Higher Ground,”
but Bill Withers’ “Lean on Me.” Wonder began his performance with an odd little
speech saying that people who didn’t believe humans are causing climate change
are “blind and/or stupid,” a weird thing for one of the world’s most famous
blind people to say but indicative of a political subtext that ran through the
event (and which Los Angeles Times TV
reviewer Mikael Wood made the focus of his article, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/music/la-et-ms-hand-in-hand-hurricane-telethon-20170912-story.html,
even though it was considerably more muted than Wood made it seem) — climate
scientists have been saying at least since Hurricane Katrina 12 years ago (has
it been that long?) that human-caused
climate change isn’t causing more hurricanes but is making the ones that would
ordinarily occur considerably worse and more damaging.
After Wonder’s “Lean on
Me” came a duet between Blake Shelton and the Black singer Usher on “Stand By
Me” (a song with its roots in the Black gospel tradition from which all the pop music of the 20th and 21st
centurie — ragtime, jazz, blues, rock and rap — derives), along with Tori Kelly
(a Braun client) and the Spanish-language singer Luis Fonsi doing a bilingual
duet on Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” (Who’d have thought “Hallelujah” — an
album track Cohen recorded long after his career peak which was pretty much
ignored on its initial release — and not “Suzanne,” which was virtually
inescapable in the late 1960’s, would be the song by which Cohen would be remembered after he passed?)
It was hardly in a league with the best versions of “Hallelujah” — Cohen’s,
Jeff Buckley’s and k. d. lang’s — but it was still effective. After that
came one of the high points of the night, Dave Matthews (with, as Charles
joked, even less hair than he had at his career peak) performing a solo version
of the song “Mercy,” whose pleas to “lift up your heart, lift up your mind” and
“we gotta get together” seemed appropriate to the occasion. After that came a
performance by an oddly jumbled group of people from Nashville — Darius Rucker,
who after the breakup of his pop-rock band Hootie and the Blowfish did a surprisingly
successful career transition to country music and became only the second major
African-American country star (after Charley Pride), Brad Paisley and Demi
Lovato on the Beatles’ classic “With a Little Help from My Friends” — alas, the
performance covered Joe Cocker’s sucky version (the nadir of this white guy from England’s ongoing attempts
to emulate Ray Charles) instead of the Beatles’ joyous original. Then was the
last song, and musical high point, of the evening: another oddly assorted
group, this time from San Antonio, Texas, with Robert Earl Keen, Chris
Stapleton, Miranda Lambert (so she and her ex-husband Blake Shelton were
finally visible on the same show, albeit not only in different segments but
from different cities over 1,500 miles apart!), Lyle Lovett and George Strait
doing a Strait song called “Texas” whose gravamen seems to be that if Texas
hadn’t existed, none of the people singing the song would, either. (I couldn’t
help but think of particularly favorite musicians of mine that hailed from
Texas, including Oran “Hot Lips” Page, Buddy Holly, Janis Joplin, Stevie Ray
Vaughan and Maren Morris; the first four are long dead but Morris, an
incredible talent whose song “My Church” won my heart forever, deserved a place
on this show.) I believe (no pun intended) that the version of “Texas” segued
into a bit of a different song called “I Believe” (not the horrible piece of pseudo-religious treacle
Frankie Laine did his best with in 1953 or the charming faux-spiritual Artie Shaw recorded with Mel Tormé in
1946), but it could have just been a coda, which would shrink the total number
of songs performed on this show from seven to six.
The Hand to Hand telecast was only an hour long, and most of that
hour was spent telling presumably moving or heartbreaking stories about the
people who had survived the hurricanes, as well as a few who didn’t (including
a young mother who saved her son’s life at the cost of her own), of which the
one I found most memorable was that of a woman who was about to be evacuated by
a helicopter, only she wanted to bring a large bag with her. The helicopter
crew member told her she could come but she would have to leave the bag behind
because it was too heavy. “But my babies are in there!” she said — and when the
crew member opened the bag, it turned out she was right: she had a two-year-old
in the bag holding her even younger child. There was also a quirky segment on
the evacuation of household pets (or should I be P.C. and call them “companion
animals”?), which is actually a relatively new development in disaster
evacuations: up until Katrina the standard practice among rescuers was to save
the people but tell them to leave their pets behind, but so many would-be
evacuees during Katrina flatly refused to leave their animals that disaster
relief agencies rethought things and got it through their heads that not only
are companion animals frequently virtual family members to whom people get as
emotionally attached as they are to their kids, but having their pets with them
would be a good experience and helpful for people who’ve been uprooted from
their homes and lost all their physical possessions to derive emotional support
and get some level of healing going
quicker than they could if their beloved animals had been left behind to die.
The reported total of donations received from this program was $14 million —
though some of those were mega-donations from large corporations (Apple gave $1
million, and I suspect they also donated the computer equipment used to run the
call centers, since they certainly looked like Macs), often framed as matching funds to encourage people to
contribute. All in all, Hand in Hand was a good show for a good cause but hardly the show it could have
been, or as earlier celebrities-coming-together-to-do-good shows have been
(despite Bridget Jones’s Diary author Helen Fielding’s slashing attack on them as big-time ego-fests
in her first book, Cause Celeb), but it produced some good music and promoted donations to a good
cause.
