by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Charles and I watched the
National Memorial Day Concert on the lawn of the Capitol mall in Washington,
D.C. (the first time I’d seen this show under the new “all-digital” regime of
Cox Communications that does not allow me to record to videotape or DVD and
therefore forces me either to watch everything in real time as it airs or spend
a lot of extra money on a cable
bill my husband already thinks is too high for what we’re getting), which was
considerably better than usual. In previous years I’ve complained that the
music-to-talk ratio on these events was skewed way too much towards talk
instead of music; this time the two were in alignment. The main musical guests
were the Beach Boys, or what’s left of them by now — Mike Love was clearly
present and leading the group, and I think Al Jardine was there but I don’t
think it had any of the other surviving original members (and after their 50th
anniversary tour that produced a two-CD live album that was actually quite
good, and included all the
survivors from the 1960’s editions of the group, Love and Brian Wilson had
another one of their public feuds). Still, they were in good form and they
actually got to play a mini-set instead of just being trotted out for one song.
They played “Good Vibrations” (with the National Symphony Orchestra, conducted
by Jack Everly — who took over the Washington, D.C.-based orchestra’s pop
concerts when Erich Kunzel passed — coming in on the final bars), “California
Girls,” “Sloop John B.” (accompanied by some odd footage of U.S. servicemembers
surfing at China Beach in Viet Nam in 1968 — how Apocalypse Now!), “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” and “Surfin’ U.S.A.”
That
was, predictably, the high point of the program; the promos also featured the
opera singer Renée Fleming but she only got to do one number, the old Quaker
hymn “How Can I Keep from Singing?” The one time I’d heard this song before was
on the 1962 KPFA LP that featured Pete Seeger singing it, and his sincerity and
straightforwardness made the song seem quite beautiful — even though I’ve been
told by Charles and other long-time Quakers that this song gets sung at so many
of their services (“meetings,” they call them) they’re bored with it and
jokingly call it “How Can I Keep from Snoring?” Fleming’s version was surprisingly
dull except for some parts where she got to sing wordlessly and do some
coloratura ornamentation — there are probably some folk songs and pop hymns
that would have inspired her more than this one. It began with the latest (and
last!) American Idol winner,
Trent Herman — a nice-looking white guy with a stentorian voice — doing “The
Star-Spangled Banner” and negotiating that killer of a melody better than some
more highly-regarded singers have done — and went on to Katharine McPhee, a
statuesque white blonde with a big voice that sounds something like Adele’s (I
can just imagine the call to Central Casting on that one: “Find us an American
Adele!”), doing a medley of “America, the Beautiful” and “The Battle Hymn of
the Republic.” Charles had expressed the wish before the show that it would
mention the origins of the Memorial Day holiday as “Decoration Day” after the
Civil War (and if the programmers had really been adventurous they would have had Everly and
the National Symphony play the “Decoration Day” movement from Charles Ives’ Holidays symphony!), and to some extent they did.
Among the
talking segments were actor Esai Morales narrating a segment about the founding
of Arlington National Cemetery — which was done in 1868 because so many of the
Civil War dead had been buried more or less where they had fallen, their graves
marked either with crude wooden stakes (in the contemporary photo shown to
accompany the segment they look oddly like human bones) or nothing at all, and
the government at the time decided the fallen Civil War veterans deserved a
proper cemetery. The segment continued with actress S. Epatha Merkerson (whose
name I’d always thought was pronounced with both “a”’s short — which made
“Epatha” sound like “Ipecac” — but she was announced here with the first “a”
long) reading the story of Paula Davis, whose son Justin had always wanted to
be an Army Ranger and who was killed in Afghanistan, following which country
star Trace Adkins sang a bizarre but oddly moving song called “Arlington,” in
which he takes the point of view of a young man who got killed in a war and is
proud that he got to join his veteran grandfather in the national cemetery. “I
made it to Arlington,” he boasts — Charles thought the song was so spooky he
asked if Stephen King had written the lyrics, but I was haunted and moved by
the piece and its strangeness didn’t bother me. After that there was a sequence
about Viet Nam in which war footage was accompanied by the National Symphony
playing Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” (which has become the
quasi-official soundtrack for the Viet Nam war since Oliver Stone used it so
hauntingly in his film Platoon) and the Bach-Gounod “Ave Maria” (only instrumentally, which was a pity
— it would have made a better song for Renée Fleming than “How Can I Keep from
Singing?”) as Gary Sinise narrated the story of Jack Farley, who served in
combat in Viet Nam, lost his right leg there (though there was a slip-up in
that the photo that accompanied part of the narration showed a view from behind
of a man in military uniform missing his left leg) and had to struggle with multiple operations
to get at least some mobility back, and complains that they still can’t give him a prosthetic leg that actually
fits. The segment closed with the National Symphony playing, not a masterpiece,
but a mediocre selection called “Honor” by the Room Man, film composer Hans
Zimmer (“Zimmer” means “room” in German) — that’s the Memorial Day concert for
you: I hoped for Charles Ives and got Hans Zimmer!
Then they trotted out Colin
Powell — interestingly introduced as “General” rather than “Secretary of State”
(he’s been in the news again lately because the State Department
inspector-general’s report on Hillary Clinton’s e-mails mentioned that Powell
also kept some of his State Department e-mails on a private server, but drew
the distinction that Hillary Clinton was the only Secretary of State who’s
served during the e-mail era who kept all her e-mails on a private server and never set up an official .gov
account at all) — for an anodyne speech about how it’s important to listen to
veterans’ stories in order to help them heal. Fortunately the Beach Boys
followed him and, as I noted above, got to do five whole songs instead of just
being trotted out for one or two numbers. After that came the most fascinating
narration of the night: Gary Sinise telling the story of the Allies’ disastrous
campaign at Anzio Beach in Italy in early 1944 (they landed in January and
established a beachhead almost immediately, then were pinned down for four
months by German machine gunners and planes before they finally broke out) and
in particular the story of Alton “Nappy” Knappenburger, who had a Browning
automatic rifle and in one horrific day of combat managed to use it to take out
some of the German machine gunners — he was thinking only of saving his own
life but he ended up killing 60 Germans and winning the Congressional Medal of
Honor. This time the accompaniment Jack Everly chose was the beautiful “Largo”
movement from Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony (it’s probably only coincidental
that this was the favorite piece of music of President Franklin D. Roosevelt
and the famous theme, later abstracted as a pseudo-spiritual called “Goin’
Home,” was played at his funeral), and the segment led to one of the buglers
from the U.S. Army Trumpet Corps playing “Taps.” Renée Fleming came on after
that, and then it was time to introduce the commanders of the various branches
of the U.S. military (including the National Guard) as their branches’ theme
songs were played. (You didn’t know the National Guard had a theme song? Me neither.)
The chair of the Joint
Chiefs of Staff, General Joseph F. Dumford, made a short speech and then came
the final song of the evening, Broadway singer Alfie Boe (I couldn’t help joke,
“What’s it all about, Alfie Boe?,” before I realized he’s probably been getting
that all his life) singing Bob Dylan’s song “Forever Young.” Of course I
couldn’t resist the comment that for anyone (like me) who grew up in the
1960’s, the idea of anyone at a patriotic concert singing something by someone
as resolutely anti-war as Bob Dylan would have been mind-boggling — and Charles couldn’t resist one of his
snippy jokes about Bob Dylan’s voice (or alleged lack thereof), saying that his version was probably just two or three notes.
“Let’s just say that Alfie Boe is singing all the notes Dylan wrote, if not the ones he actually sang,” I said — and Boe managed to turn the song into a
surprisingly effective power ballad. After that the concert wrapped up with the
whole cast and chorus joining in on Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America.” The
National Memorial Day Concert is one of those events that jumbles up an
acknowledgment of veterans and a thank-you for the sacrifices they’ve made with
all too much justification for what they’ve actually done — one can appreciate
the service veterans have made and the way at least some of the U.S.’s wars
have genuinely been at least in part to “preserve our freedom,” as the
militarists claim, yet one can also do a lot of questioning of what we’ve actually had these
poor men (and women, now — one of the most startling images in the show was of
a woman in combat in one of the U.S.’s most recent wars) do and just what we’ve
asked them to sacrifice for. At the same time the footage and photographs of actual combat
underscore once again how horrible war is — is there anyone out there who still believes war is a noble enterprise? War and the
military may be necessary evils, but they’re evil nonetheless and the only
reason they need to exist is the unscrupulousness of some people, movements and
nations in the world who only want to conquer and destroy. One can appreciate
the sacrifices made by veterans
(and get incensed when they get screwed over by their own government,
particularly by agencies like the Veterans’ Administration that are supposed to
help them) without endorsing either the overall concept of war or the specific
wars they served in!
