by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I put on the big show for the night, the annual Memorial Day
concert from Washington, D.C., which this year honored the 150th
anniversary of the Memorial Day holiday. The holiday was originally called
“Decoration Day” and it was originally promoted as an occasion on which people
would honor the Civil War dead by placing flowers — and, later, miniature flags
— on their graves. These “concerts” are less about music than multimedia shows
honoring America’s servicemembers, living and dead, and it’s a measure of the
inevitable passage of time that though there were readings of letters from as
far back as the Revolutionary War, the oldest people who were actually present
were from the Korean War (the so-called “forgotten war” that’s being remembered
now that President Trump may or may not be meeting with North Korean dictator
Kim Jong Un in Singapore June 12 and the U.S. may or may not actually make a
peace treaty with North Korea — though the actual combat stopped with a
cease-fire in 1953, the U.S. and North Korea are still technically in a state of war with each other!). I
can remember a time when the musicians featured on these concerts included
major “names” like the Beach Boys and B. B. King; this time around the only
musical act that got showcased was something called the “Lieutenant Dan Band,”
led by Gary Sinise (who, along with Joe Mantegna, has hosted this concert every
year it’s been televised) and named after the character Sinise played in
virtually the only movie he made that anyone’s ever heard of, Forrest
Gump.
The concert opened with a singer
named Charles Esten doing Billy Ray Cyrus’s “Some Gave All” — and doing it
quite well; it was the title track of the artist’s first album, though the
dance novelty “Achy Breaky Heart” was the hit and he’s now much more known as
Miley Cyrus’s father than for his own career — and then a Black singer who was
apparently a winner on the TV contest The Voice named Spensha Baker (I think I remembered and wrote down the first name
accurately) did “The Star-Spangled Banner” and did it pretty “straight,” with a
minimum of the soul ornamentation previous African-American singers like Aretha
Franklin have brought to it. After that came an historical montage of film
clips from World War I and Gary Sinise reading the first two stanzas of the
poem “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. Then Mantegna and Sinise narrated a
montage of clips from World War II and Korea while the orchestra — the National
Symphony, conducted by Jack Everly — played “Mars” from Gustav Holst’s The
Planets, and actors Brian Tee and John
Corbett told a quite moving story of Hiroshi Miyama and Joe Annello, two U.S.
servicemembers in Korea who were part of a unit ambushed by the Chinese; both
were taken prisoner, but Hiroshi (whom Annello called “Hershey”) was released
early and Annello, after suffering a wound that threatened to leave him unable
to walk, waited to get out until the end of the war, wondered what had happened
to his buddy, and then was astonished to see a photo of him in Life magazine being received by President Eisenhower. The
two real men were in the audience and the actors who’d played them greeted and
hugged them at the end. Then singer Alfie Boe came out to honor the story we’d
just heard with a rendition of, of all things, the Hollies’ “He Ain’t Heavy,
He’s My Brother” in a stentorian, almost operatic style — Charles said he
thought it was one of the worst mismatches of singer, song and occasion he’d
ever heard.
After that was another sequence of a montage of footage and an account
of a servicemember read by an actor — only the war this time was the one in
Afghanistan (at 17 years and counting this has become America’s longest-running
conflict in its history, reflecting that we’ve got caught up in the trap Mao
invented and a number of guerrilla groups have used since of entrapping the
enemy in a protracted armed
struggle they can’t ultimately win and which ends when the imperialist occupier
gives up and goes home — this is
how we lost the war in Viet Nam), the actor was Mary McCormack (the marvelous
lead in the late, lamented series In Plain Sight about the U.S. witness protection program) and the
servicemember she was playing was Leigh Ann Hester, the first woman ever to win
a Silver Star. Another woman star, Allison Janney, did a presentation of women
in the U.S. military through history (including a Revolutionary War veteran who
enlisted by disguising herself as a man), and the orchestra played John
Williams’ “Summon the Heroes,” a piece of typical Williams mock-heroic bombast
similar to the Star Wars theme
and his Olympic anthem. Then it was time for Gary Sinise’s band — he’s the bass
player and he is O.K. but not a great musician, though there are some solid players and singers in the group,
including a violinist who sang most of the leads — doing a country song called
“The Things We Love,” a duet with an unidentified woman on “Ain’t No Mountain
High Enough” (blessedly following the Marvin Gaye-Tammi Terrell original rather
than Diana Ross’s overwrought cover) and Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the
U.S.A.,” a song I’ve actually quite liked even though people of my progressive
political persuasion are expected to hate it.
The Viet Nam segment that
followed featured actor Graham Greene paying tribute to veteran Bill Rider
(apparently Greene was picked because Rider is part Native American) while the
orchestra played Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (which has become the
unofficial theme song for the Viet Nam War due to its use in Oliver Stone’s
film Platoon) and the “Goin’
Home” Largo from Dvorák’s New
World Symphony. The segment ended with a
gospel chorus led by an unidentified woman soloist singing, of all things, Paul
Simon’s “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (though only the first two verses), and
singing it quite well — on her first chorus she seemed to be dodging the high
notes Art Garfunkel nailed on the original record, but she pulled it together
and her overall rendition fell stylistically between the Simon and Garfunkel
original and the cover by Aretha Franklin that returned the song to its gospel
roots. Then the concert lumbered to its traditional close with an appearance by
General Colin Powell, the presentation of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, another
patriotic song (I can’t make out from my hastily scrawled notes either the singer’s
name or the song’s), the medley of the five U.S. military service songs, Megan
Hilty doing “God Bless America” (and singing in a fine, pure voice that’s what
the young Julie Andrews would have sounded like if she’d been American) and a
finale featuring Spensha Baker leading the ensemble in, of all things, Bill
Withers’ “Lean on Me” to highlight the brotherhood — and, now, sisterhood — of
the U.S. military (though regarding the latter I couldn’t help but wonder why
in the age of “#MeToo” there isn’t more public attention to the plight of
servicewomen who have to deal with sexual harassment, out-and-out rape and the
impunity all too often given to the rapists, especially when their rapists
outrank them). The Memorial Day Concert is a blundering spectacle but one I
still wouldn’t want to miss, and in one regard it’s a welcome to those who get
too caught up in the idea of war as a noble enterprise that it’s still, at its
base, about people killing other people; as General George S. Patton famously
said, “Nobody ever won a war by dying for his country. You win a war by making
the other son-of-a-bitch die for his
country.”
