Joe Biden/Kamala Harris Inaugural Concert, January 20, 2021

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 5:30 p.m. I flipped on the TV and found that MS-NBC was about to broadcast the commemorative concert for Joe Biden’s inaugural, which they made the mistake of beginning with Bruce Springsteen performing “Land of Hope and Dreams” as a solo acoustic number. Springsteen didn’t write this song for the Biden inaugural – he wrote it in 1998 but didn’t record it commercially until the Wrecking Ball album in 2012 – but it sure sounded as though he had. Indeed, the running theme of the concert was new hope, new renewal, emerging from the darkness into the light, and it’s clear the artists of America – most of whom had aligned themselves with anti-Trump rather than pro-Trump America (when Trump was inaugurated the biggest “name” he could get from the music world was country singer Toby Keith) – were seeing Biden’s assumption of the Presidency as redemptive. Fortunately we on the West Coast were getting this concert “live” instead of on one of those damnable tape delays with which the East Coast chauvinists who run America’s media continually remind us that we on the West Coast – including those of us who have lived our whole lives in America’s most populous state – suck hind tit media-wise. (I’m still ticked off at all the TV shows that asked the question, “Who is Kamala Harris?” As a native Californian who’s voted for her in every election she’s run in that I could vote for her, I know damned well who Kamala Harris is – and so would all those East Coast media people if they actually gave a damn about California instead of treating us all those years as an inconvenience.)

The theme of renewal, of emerging into light after a long time of darkness, continued through the next song, Jon Bon Jovi (also playing acoustic guitar and singing solo) covering George Harrison’s Beatles song “Here Comes the Sun” (and doing it quite well: his ragged voice doesn’t sound much like Harrison’s choirboy croon but it worked, and as my husband Charles pointed out it probably suited the song better than the heavy-metal shriek Bon Jovi is known for from his earlier days). Then Yo-Yo Ma (the only person on the bill I’ve actually seen live – in a concert in La Jolla in 1985 where he and pianist Emanuel Ax played Russian music; they were great but I’d have rather heard them in Bach and Beethoven!) did a quirky medley of “Amazing Grace” (a song that’s been performed a lot in connection with Biden’s election win; it appeared once more on this concert) and the “Goin’ Home” theme from the slow movement of Dvorák’s “New World” Symphony. After that we got the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets playing an opening fanfare that led into “Hail to the Chief” and a brief speech by President Biden, largely rehashing his calls from that morning’s Inaugural Address for unity and an end to the rancor that has accompanied our differences all too often of late.

The next song, “Better Days” by Justin Timberlake and a Black singer named Ant Clemons, also fit the theme of renewal; while former President Trump (and oh, how sweet it is to be able to put “former” in front of that name!) and his allies, including the crazies who stormed the Capitol on January 6 intending to overthrow the election and keep Trump in power forever, still maintain that the election was “stolen,” those of us who never wanted Trump in the first place heaved huge sighs of relief as Biden not only won on election night but navigated the shoals of procedure after that (Stephen Colbert joked that Biden has had to win the election so often he’ll be America’s 46th through 51st President), and afterwards the Black Pumas came on from the Austin City Limits stage set (they are actually from Austin, Texas) for another performance of the same song, “Colors,” which they’d done on Stephen Colbert’s show (the last one he did during the Trump Presidency) the night before. Charles and I both thought the band was performing the song “live” on both occasions rather than palming a pre-filmed video off on us, though this time around the cameras focused less on the band’s white members and more on its Black ones. Still, the song is (predictably, given the title) an ode to multi-racialism and the multi-racial membership of the band only adds to the point. After that the Foo Fighters came on with “Times Like These” – yet another song choice that seemed to be keyed to the occasion (“In times like these we learn to love again”) – with Dave Grohl singing it softly in a slow-paced rendition backed only by the band’s organ player before he kicked in the tempo, sped up the song, brought the rest of the band in and for the first (and only, really) time last night we got to hear all-out electric rock ’n’ roll.

After that came a group of so-called “Broadway All-Stars” – none of whom were identified – taking turns singing that recent song “Seasons of Love” (the one that begins “525,600 minutes,” representing the length of a year) as an alleged tribute to Kamala Harris – who, damnit, was not born in New York!!! Once again the East Coast media showed their thinly veiled contempt for California and everyone and everything from here – they even seem to take a sick joy out of reporting that Californla has more cases of COVID-19 than any other state, which is true but only because we have that many more people than any other state. (Having a California band like the Beach Boys or the Eagles play the tribute for Kamala Harris would have been far more appropriate.) The next act was Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda reading a poem by Seamus Heaney (apparently one of President Biden’s favorite poets) which I think (if I heard the announcement correctly) was called “The Cure of Troy.” Then there were clips from the January 19 tribute Biden and Harris had led outside the Reflecting Pool on the Capitol Mall to honor and mourn the 400,000 Americans already dead from COVID-19, with a scorching medley of “Amazing Grace” (there it is again!) and Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” sung a cappella by Lori Marie Key, who apparently isn’t even a professional singer. She’s a nurse in Michigan who, like so many others in her profession, has been working her ass off caring for COVID-19 patients, but even without that poignant background she’s also an excellent singer with a great soul voice of absolutely riveting power. (Maybe it’ll turn out that she was a professional singer who retired from music and became a nurse, like Alberta Hunter – and maybe, also like Hunter, some day she’ll return to music and the career it sounds like she was born to have.)

Then the U.S. Navy Brass Band Ensemble played a ceremonial piece honoring Vice-President Harris – was there some quirk of the in-service rivalries that Biden got the Army band and Harris got the Navy band? – and John Legend came out to sing the Anthony Newley-Leslie Briccuse song “Feelin’ Good” from the musical The Roar of the Greasepaint – the Smell of the Crowd. For some reason this song has become anthemic due to the recording by Nina Simone in the early 1960’s, which as I’ve pointed out here before was fine as far as she was concerned but was weighed down by a truly horrible arrangement by Hal Mooney that made it sound like they’d recruited the band from a strip club. What’s worse about Mooney’s arrangement is that all too many modern singers who’ve covered the song, from Jennifer Hudson to Michael Bublé. Have copied it – and so did Legend last night. (My favorite versions of “Feelin’ Good” are Carmen McRae’s live version from the 1964 live album Womantalk – she sings it at least as well as Simone did and she’s got a small, tight jazz combo behind her instead of an overarranged big band – and an instrumental by John Coltrane.) Next a couple of D.J.’s and singer Luis Miguel did a mashup of three songs in Spanish, after which Tyler Hubbard and Tim McGraw did a duet on a song called “Undivided” whose “time to come together” theme tied in with the overall program’s message of renewal and healing the nation’s wounds. The program rather petered out with Demi Lovato singing “Lovely Day” (she’s got a truly powerful voice but wasn’t helped by the banality of the material) and Katy Perry singing “Firework” with – of course – a huge and elaborate fireworks display going on behind her.

Overall, the concert was a good one, though it suffered from the leadenness that frequently afflicts ceremonial occasions like this, and it didn’t help that powerful, committed artists like Bruce Springsteen were performing at the peaks of the powers – and because the pandemic has made it virtually impossible to assemble large crowds for public events (unless you’re Donald Trump, in which case you go ahead, do it anyway and kill off your own most fanatical supporters), the end of his song and all the others was greeted not with thunderous applause, not even a mild ovation, but stark silence that underscored just how much this nasty disease has cost us.