GK: Sticking my neck out, talking to myself

The Column: 07.05.21 and Post to the Host

American culture took a sharp turn when the guitar took supremacy over the keyboard. I was a teenager, I remember it. Little Richard sat down at the piano in 1955 and tore the joint apart with “Tutti Frutti” (A wop bop a loo bop, a lop bam boom!) and Jerry Lee Lewis did the same with “Great Balls of Fire” but Elvis, who could play piano, picked up a guitar as a prop, and a nice Jewish kid in Hibbing, Minnesota, decided to be an alienated loner cowboy poet and a whole generation of angry heroes with Stratocasters emerged and there went the ball game.

The piano is not a loner instrument. It requires a piano tuner and piano movers. It is a piece of furniture. Playing piano implies home ownership. You can’t put it on the back of your motorcycle. The piano has social standing; it belongs in church or school or a barroom. It is an instrument around which people gather. Whereas the guitar became the instrument of alienation. Your parents wanted you to take piano lessons with Mrs. Lindquist but you went to a junk shop and bought a Sears Silvertone used for $7 and got a Mel Bay chord book from the library and sat in your bedroom and taught yourself to play a G chord and a D7 and then started writing your own songs, about being misunderstood and mistreated and hoping to find a woman to leave this town with and head down the highway.

The guitar took over during the Eisenhower administration but Ike was a general, not a guitarist, and alienation didn’t win the White House until the guy with monumental hair who put together a winning majority of alienated voters. He was a loner at heart, a victim of witch hunts and media conspiracies, and he was adored by enormous crowds and he glowed in their adoration. He never was an accompanist, he was himself, a genius, a winner, a hero. He was a great lead guitarist though he never touched a tuning peg.

People were sick of government, of process and tradition and all the rigmarole and mickeymouse. Done with it. Bobby Zimmerman never intended to take over his dad’s appliance business. My generation was suspicious of all things corporate and we all had guitar fantasies like Bobby’s, of leaving town and following our heart and becoming an artist, letting our hair grow long, wearing cowboy clothes, making our own rules, living free.

I know people who wound up leading regimented lives in large organizations who nonetheless imagined themselves as loner cowboys and maybe this is why my generation screwed up so royally. Brilliant loners invented fabulous electronic gizmos but in the fields of social betterment requiring consensus, we’re a mess, and this is what opened the door to an angry alienated rock ’n’ roll president.

Uncle Joe is the opposite of alienated, a dog owner and churchgoer, who’s spent most of his working life listening to other people talk. He’s a sing-along guy.

I make no judgment about any of this. I think old people should shut up and leave politics to the young and spend our time dozing on a porch and watching for scarlet tanagers. This is not about politics, it’s about instruments. I feel the nation needs more pianists.

I went to a Bruce Springsteen concert once where he sat solo on stage and accompanied himself at the piano and sang new songs and you could feel the audience’s dissatisfaction, wanting the Boss to reach into that piano and pull out a guitar and play “Born To Run.” It was brave of him to do a show at the piano but they wanted him to be a standard alienated rock ’n’ roll hero.

Little Richard sang, “Shake, baby, shake,” but really he was singing gospel about the joy that Jesus can bring, and my generation passed that up and chose the guitar and got moody and introspective and along came pseudo-intellectual stuff like “My Back Pages” and “Imagine” and though the Beatles ventured into gospel with “Help!” the choice of alienated cowboy over gospel preaching defined my generation and changed America. Pop music is about the supremacy of youth and fighting for independence in a world that doesn’t understand you and gospel tells us to give up power, unplug that guitar, don’t be alienated, gather around the piano and find your joy with the others. Loss is gain. Be grateful for everything, for Daisy who drove you crazy, for the wop bop a loo bop, and all the shaking going on. It was all good.

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Send your questions and comments on the columns, the posts as well as any other burning question you may have you on your mind to admin@garrisonkeillor.com.

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POST TO THE HOST (Comments from the week of June 27, 2021)

Dear Mr. Keillor,

I liked your homage to your father and the account of your trip together to New York in 1953 and it raises the question in my mind: what sort of father were you?

Russell, Minneapolis

I was an absentee father, sir. I was upstairs in a room with the door closed, writing, or I was on tour in the East or South or West. I’ve known a number of good fathers, men my age, who made great sacrifices in order to nurture their children, and I was not one of them. Both of my kids, however, loved being around the radio show and loved the staff, so although they had no father, they had many volunteer aunts and uncles.  

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Dear Sir:

I’m a Republican who enjoys your writings but I notice that lately you’ve been setting politics aside and I don’t believe I’ve seen the name Trump in months. What’s going on? Are you coming over to my side? I hope not. I enjoy you as an opponent, not an ally.

Merle T., Nashville

I admire Republicans, sir, and anything I can say about them has been said better by other people, such as George F. Will. They’ve been masters at wielding power as a minority party through the dark arts of voter suppression and gerrymandering and the parliamentary cunning of Mitch McConnell who is an artist and grabbed two Supreme Court seats to expand a slight conservative majority into a commanding one. The Democrats poured fifty million into in hopes of defeating his reelection, running a female Marine Corps fighter pilot against him, and it was no contest. He manages his quorum like a teacher taking the class on a field trip, all of them roped together in straight lines. He is a cynic at the pinnacle and what can I say? Nothing. So I don’t.

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Hi, Garrison.

I never managed to listen to your show when it was on the air, but I love “The Writer’s Almanac” and have listened to it daily for years. It’s a small bit of peace and calm in a world with not much of either, and I thank you for it. As a historian I enjoy the history that you include, and it also reignited my enjoyment of poetry. I even post a daily poem on my Facebook page for my friends to like or ignore at will. I’m wondering how you gained your love of poetry, and how do you pick each day’s poem to include in the program? Please keep them coming! 

Your friend from Idaho,

Todd C.

My dad knew quite a few poems by heart and liked to recite them, “The Wreck of the Hesperus” and some of “The Raven” and “Crossing The Bar,” and I started writing verse when I was in grade school, so it was an ordinary part of everyday life. I didn’t care much for mystical poets — I can take Emily or leave her — and I never cared for the Beats except some of Gregory Corso and Ferlinghetti and T.S. Eliot left me cold, so did John Berryman (except his “Addresses to the Lord”), the list goes on and on, but for the Almanac, I chose poems that could be appreciated with one hearing, poems of clarity and emotional force, a diversity of poets including Mary Oliver, James Wright, Billy Collins, Barbara Crooker, Ron Padgett, Louise Glück, and many many others.

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Dear Mr. Keillor,

I have always been fascinated by your ability to write your own song lyrics. I know some of your songs are parodies of other well-known ones, and that some melodies have come from classical pieces (I’m thinking specifically of your Lake Wobegon Hymn), but do you also write some of your own melodies, or do you have “your people” do that for you? If so, what’s the process … do they give you the melody first, or do you give them the lyrics first?

Samantha, a longtime listener to APHC

I can’t have someone else write melodies for my songs because I can’t read music and probably wouldn’t be able to remember a complicated melody that a real composer would write, so my melodies are simple cliché tunes. I once, in an evening of great daring in 2012 that terrifies me when I think about it, sang ten of my sonnets with the New York Philharmonic that Andy Stein had arranged for orchestra (from melodies invented by me). I stood by the conductor Rob Fisher and sang from memory and when it was all over, I vowed I’d never do it again and I haven’t.

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Mr. Keillor,

I saw where you wrote once, “I feel grateful to have lived when I did,” and it struck me as curious, the past tense, but also I wonder if you were being ironic. I’m 22 and doing just fine and wonder what was so good about the old days that isn’t true today.

Tyler

I could mention a whole long list of things, Tyler, but I’ll just mention a few. I was born in 1942 and I inherited a culture that was shaped by the Depression and the War, my parents’ generation, that believed in neighborliness and so I could go out on the highway and stick out my thumb and get a ride. The old Depression spirit of mutual assistance was still in the air. There was a big community celebration of the Fourth of July that doesn’t exist in my hometown anymore. I went off to college and put myself through school by washing dishes and parking cars. I paid $71 tuition for a quarter at the U, and today, U of M students pay almost thirty grand per year and accumulate big debts that burden them just at the time of life when one should be free. When I enrolled at the U, though I was earning the minimum wage, I bought a season ticket to concerts at Northrop Auditorium and got to see the Cleveland Orchestra, Andres Segovia, Vladimir Horowitz, Eileen Farrell, a long list of great talents for a few bucks. The minimum wage hasn’t gone up much and everything else has skyrocketed.

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Garrison:

I am a proud feminist (3rd generation) and a progressive but I secretly enjoy your columns though I do feel you are taking subtle digs at my people and beliefs but that’s okay though I do wonder, honestly, can’t a privileged white male like yourself sympathize with what women of my generation are up against?

Charlayne

I don’t think of myself as a “white male.” To me, it’s a rather broad category that includes Mitch McConnell but also Paul Simon and Ian Frazier and the saxophonist Paul Winter and the poet Donald Hall and Donald Trump. It’s hard to see clear connections there: distinctions must be made. As for being a person of privilege, I’m okay with that. To be born in Minnesota is a distinction granted to few and to be from Anoka, Minnesota, is even rarer. What distinguishes us is our great modesty. We were brought up not to complain. “Children in China would be grateful to have half of what you have,” my mother said, and now Chinese mothers are probably telling their kids, “American children would be grateful,” etcetera. The tables turn. I used to be a satirist and now I’m a privileged white male and satire is considered inappropriate and elitist. That’s okay. I had my chance and enjoyed it and now it’s your turn.

When it comes to sympathizing with women, I don’t believe the women I know have asked for my sympathy except in extraordinary circumstances. The truth is that I bond with women more easily. If a man asks how I am, I say, “Fine,” and I’d never say more than that, but with a woman friend, I can pour my heart out. I don’t know where that fits in the spectrum of gender, it’s just the way life is.

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Mr. Keillor:

You wrote once that you felt better once you stopped reading the news and I assumed you were kidding but lately your columns seem so upbeat and make almost no reference to current events that I’m forced to ask: do you ignore the news, and if so, how can you? Don’t you feel an obligation to be informed? I get my news from a number of sources, some of them non-mainstream, and I feel very uneasy about the future of democracy and the future of the Earth. Don’t you, even a little?

Trevor Hamilton, Portland, ME

I worry about my children and grandchildren and young people I know but I worry about them as individuals, not in general terms. I think there has always been anxiety about the future. The 19th century was no picnic, nor the 18th. And think about the Romans in the last hundred years of B.C. as the years were getting smaller and smaller. When they got down to 10 B.C., they must’ve been having fits: would the World end at zero? Nobody knew.

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Mr. Keillor:

I am your age and I admire your cheerful writing, which, in this day and age, seems rare and rather precious. I wish I shared your lightheartedness. I see friends failing, see the country I knew disappear, see the uncertainty of life, and it leaves me feeling gloomy in the evening in a way not even a good martini can relieve. Is your cheerfulness for real? Or is it for effect?

F.P.

I have my off days, for sure, but I believe cheerfulness is something you set your mind on in the morning and hang on to for the rest of the day. It feels like an essential American virtue, found in Emerson, Whitman, even Emily Dickinson, and surely in Mark Twain: Don’t get bogged down in the past, the bonehead mistakes, the tragic losses, the betrayals of trust. Look ahead. If necessary, leave town. Do what you can to improve the day. We are resilient people. Disaster strikes and the next day people get up and go to work. Buoyancy is what you need. Power and influence are illusory. Charisma is a fiction. Brilliance depends on who’s writing the test. Rich and famous people get lousy health care. Doctors don’t give thorough digital exams to five-star generals. Famous people are more likely to die in stupid accidents because their handlers are afraid to say, Don’t do that, don’t go there. As Solomon said, the race is not to the swift nor the battle to the strong nor success to a guy with connections.

I am a cheerful man though I no longer have the long loping stride of my 20s and now I run like a duck. I hold on to the railing going down stairs. My memory circuits don’t snap into place — I have more doddering and ditheriness than I know what to do with. Longevity is not nature’s plan for us. Nonetheless, I look forward to it cheerfully. People ask me, “How are you?” and no matter what, I say, “Never better.” If you can convince yourself, then it’s the truth.