by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
As I noted above, the PBS A Capitol Fourth concert (the 38th annual, built around
the National Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jack Everly, who’s led these
concerts ever since their founder, Erich Kunzel, died) played mostly to an
older audience demographic — though there were a few younger talents on
display. The show opened with the vocal group Pentatonix — who present
themselves as an a cappella
ensemble, though when I first heard them I thought they were cheating by using
a drum machine; it turns out that the “drum machine” is one of the
Pentatonickers imitating one vocally, and I wish they would stop doing it
because I think they sound better without it — with a song called, as best as I
could figure it out (unlike NBC’s announcers, PBS’s were not always scrupulous
in announcing just what song the musical act was about to play, nor did they
run chyrons) either “Sing, Sing, Sing” or “Don’t Let ’Em Break You Down.” Then
a young singer named Hylie Jean came out and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,”
a.k.a. “To Anacreon in Heaven” (those are the words of the old British college
drinking song for which John Stafford Smith composed the melody in the first
place), after which the first of the great (or not-so-great) old-timers on the
program came out. He was Jimmy Buffett and he came out surrounded on stage with
a company of performers from his just-closed Broadway show Escape to
Margaritaville (which apparently is not a Buffett bio-musical but a show about a serious,
political woman and a party boy stranded together on a desert island —
apparently, to quote Dorothy Parker’s lines about Sinclair Lewis’s novel Dodsworth, Buffett didn’t approach any friends with the
outline of his story and say, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before”). Buffett
is an O.K. entertainer who’s written one imperishably great song — you guessed it, “Margaritaville” — but for
some reason the dramatis personae
of his musical (including a young man who looked like Buffett recruited him to play Jimmy Buffett as a young man) turned Buffett’s
cynical, despairing tears-in-my-cocktail lament into an anthem to good booze
and good times.
Afterwards came a young country singer named Luke Combs who’s
heavy-set and not especially sexy (I’ll confess that to me a lot of the
attraction for modern-day “country” music is all those tall, hot, sexy guys in
skin-tight jeans who are so much fun to look at I really don’t care whether
then can sing or not!), and whose song “Honky Tonk Highway” doesn’t get many
brownie points for originality either, but who sounded a lot more convincingly “country” than either Blake
Shelton or Keith Urban had on the NBC show. “Honky Tonk Highway” had a part for
pedal steel guitar, this once-paradigmatic country instrument that seems in
recent years to have gone the way of the arpeggione or the ophicleide, and it
occurred to me that if Hank Williams could be brought back to life long enough
to hear it, he’d recognize it as part of his tradition where he wouldn’t feel
that way about Shelton’s or Urban’s songs. The next group was the Temptations,
or rather a rump group of Temptations recruited by the current owners of the
name (basically whoever still owns or controls Motown Records) to do three of
the original Temptations’ biggest hits, “Get Ready,” “The Way You Do the Things
You Do” and “My Girl.” The last two were written for the original Temptations
by Smokey Robinson (though on “The Way You Do the Things You Do” he had helped
from Bobby Rogers of Robinson’s own group, The Miracles), and a line like “If
good looks were a minute, why then you could be an hour” is pure Smokey
Robinson. The new Temptations may not have any personnel connections with the
original ones (for years a Temptations group circulated with one old guy as one of the background singers who was at
least 20 years the senior of everyone else on stage; he was Otis Williams, last
survivor of the originals) but they suffered considerably less than the rump
Four Tops that performed on one of the previous Capitol Fourth telecasts. I think that’s because the original
Temptations’ lead singers, David Ruffin and Eddie Kendricks, both had great
voices but didn’t have the distinctive sonic signature of the Four Tops’
original lead singer, Levi Stubbs, and therefore one could appreciate “My Girl”
without thinking, “This guy doesn’t sound anything like David Ruffin” (he actually sounds a great deal
like Ruffin!).The next performer up was opera star Renée Fleming, who like a
number of other opera singers at the end of their careers decided to take a
part in a musical and got to sing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from the current
Broadway revival of Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s Carousel. (Charles resents the way this song has become a sort
of acme of sentimentality when in the context of the full show it’s about a
woman being haunted by the ghost of an abusive late husband.)
After that film
composer John Williams appeared as a guest, though he didn’t take over the
podium — Jack Everly continued to lead the orchestra as it played a medley of
themes from the 1976 film Superman accompanied
by clips from the film — which was fun even though if you’ve heard one John
Williams score for an action-adventure movie you’ve pretty much heard them all.
Next up was one of the relatively young people on the bill, country singer
Lauren Alaina, doing her big hit “Road Less Traveled,” which didn’t impress me
as much as “Honky Tonk Highway” had but was still nice enough. The next artist
was superstar classical violinist Joshua Bell, who was billed as playing a
“Spirit of ’76” medley but really just did variations on “Yankee Doodle,”
probably the only song from 1776
most Americans are likely to know. Bell also played what was billed as a medley
from Leonard Bernstein’s musical West Side Story — it was prefaced with a prclamation about Bernstein
and his centennial from Chita Rivera, second lead in the original 1957 Broadway
production of the show — but which included only two songs, “America” and
“Tonight.” The number was accompanied by still photos of the stage original and
also by clips from the 1961 multi-Academy Award-winning movie, which I
remembered thinking was the greatest movie ever made when my age was still in
single digits. When it was reissued in 1970 I was all too well aware that
Natalie Wood was miscast (and it didn’t help that the vocal parts were totally beyond her and were dubbed by the ubiquitous Marni
Nixon), Richard Beymer completely untalented, the second leads (George Chakiris
and Rita Moreno) completely stole the film from the principals, and the
marvelous opening scene shot in the streets of New York City (in a tenement
district about to be torn down to make way for Lincoln Center) just made the
rest of the movie, filmed in one T-shaped set in a Hollywood studio, look that
much more “fake.” (That had been a problem with a previous film of a Bernstein
musical, On the Town, too.) After
the West Side Story tribute
Pentatonix returned with a dull song called “Stay in the Middle,” and a young
country singer named Andy Grammer — no relation to Kelsey — did an O.K. song
called “Back Home” that was a hit single for him a few years ago.
The show’s
main event was the Beach Boys — or at least what’s left of them: a few years
ago all the surviving members of the Beach Boys (all the key ones, anyway)
united for an album called That’s Why God Made the Radio and a concert tour that generated a live album which
— praise be — encompassed material from the Beach Boys’ entire career, not just
the early fun-surf-cars hits. Unfortunately, the epic love-hate relationship
between the two most important Beach Boys, singer-songwriter-producer Brian
Wilson and his cousin Mike Love, went south again after this project and Love,
who in earlier legal proceedings had grabbed exclusive rights to the name “The
Beach Boys,” organized his own rump group — though at this performance he
paraded one other semi-original
member, Bruce Johnston, who was recruited to fill in for Brian Wilson after the
mercurial (to put it politely) Brian decided at the end of 1964 he would never
appear live with the band again. Their repertoire was predictable — “I Get
Around,” “Kokomo” (the novelty record they did in the 1980’s for a movie set in
Florida, which seemed to appeal to the Beach Boys because it gave them the
opportunity to celebrate a beach town on the other side of the country from
their native California) and “Fun, Fun, Fun,” and their performance was — well,
fun, fun, fun. After that came the more celebratory, patriotic parts of the
concert: the last four minutes of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (complete with fireworks — the fireworks
had actually begun during the closing bars of the Beach Boys’ “Fun, Fun, Fun” —
cannons and a chorus intoning the
Tsarist Russian national anthem whenever the score quoted it), pop-gospel star
CeCe Winans doing “God Bless America,” the orchestra in a medley of George M.
Cohan’s “You’re a Grand Old Flag” and probably the dullest patriotic song ever
written about America, “This Is My Country,” Renée Fleming doing “America, the
Beautiful,” and the orchestra in John Philip Sousa’s greatest hits (“Stars and
Stripes Forever” and “Washington Post March”), which closed out the telecast
even though it’s possible the concert itself continued after the 90-minute PBS
time slot. It was a fun event and a good way to celebrate America’s birthday.
