"Needs to Improve"

In my Grade 6 Progress Report from Adams Elementary School in Wichita, Kansas, these are the summary comments from my teachers (June 2, 1961):

“Good year!! Mr. Compton” (Physical Education)

“J.L. has done good work this year. – B. Huey” (Music (Vocal))

“J.L. has made good progress in all areas. A very satisfactory year.” (Lindel Silvertooth, Teacher)

And the check-list matrix of skills in the report mostly follows through on these positive assessments, with all abilities, save one, receiving a mark of “Progressing Satisfactorily.” The one glaring deficiency is the “Needs to Improve” mark in the Music (Vocal) area “Is developing good tone quality.” (“Progressing Satisfactorily” and “Needs to Improve” were the only options, essentially a Pass/Fail system, and I failed at developing good tone quality.) As either the reason for this mark or the result of it, for our school’s concert that Spring, Miss Huey instructed me to just mouth the words to the songs and not allow my faulty tone quality to pollute the performance. A couple of weeks later, Miss Huey asked me to volunteer as an usher and hand out programs at our annual three-school combined district concert.

I don’t recall being particularly upset at these apparent slights. But in retrospect I realize this assessment shadowed me through at least my teen years as I pursued a brief run in several rock-and-roll bands and a couple of folk groups. Probably because we didn’t have enough money in my first band for more than two microphones, I wasn’t in a situation to sing, even backup (I played drums, in the back, not front). But I’m sure in the initial discussions I demurred, having only a few years earlier been officially assessed as being wanting. I started doing a bit of backup singing in my first folk group (playing guitar by then), though we had two microphones for the two of us, and singing folk music allows for some deviation in “good tone quality” (I wonder what Bob Dylan’s tone quality assessment was when he was in 6^th grade?). By the last year of my folk group days, I was actually singing lead on several songs, though primarily Dylan and The Band, not Simon and Garfield or Crosby, Stills, and Nash.

I’m not sure what to make of this reflection, although I have to wonder how my rock-and-roll or folk career might have been different if my elementary school skills had not been assessed simply summatively (“This is how good [or bad] you are; live with it”) but rather formatively (“This is where you are, this is where you need to go, and here’s some instruction in how to get there”). Whether a better folk singer or not, at the least, I’d probably feel much more confident singing “Happy Birthday” to my granddaughter rather than just mouthing the words or handing out programs.

"The Only Living Boy In New York"

One of my favorite Paul Simon songs is “The Only Living Boy in New York,” the eighth track from my favorite Simon and Garfunkel album, Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970). Simon wrote it after Art Garfunkel had gone to Mexico to be in the film Catch-22.

Tom, get your plane right on time.
I know your part’ll go fine.
Fly down to Mexico.
Da-n-da-da-n-da-n-da-da and here I am,
The only living boy in New York.

“Tom” was the Tom in the early 1960s’ Tom (Garfunkel) and Jerry (Simon) folk duo.

Half of the time we’re gone but we don’t know where,
And we don’t know where.

The background vocals were recorded multi-tracked in an echo chamber. The simple, sparse lyrics and the resonate sound evoke abandonment and loneliness, a longing for something that had passed by, a foreboding of the breakup that was soon to follow (Bridge Over Troubled Water would be the last studio album for Simon and Garfunkel).

There are currently two Honda Accord ads playing on TV that use the song – or at least the echoed background – to evoke . . . something:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gSxz7XRAwtA

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iicf3G4nfiE

The ads are devoid of people (even drivers for the cars) and are both set in the desert, so I guess they’re using the background vocal to suggest perhaps uniqueness, or individuality (the only lyric, vaguely rendered, is “Here I am,” the final phrase from the song). I doubt they intend to signify abandonment or loneliness.

And that’s what pisses me off. Stop pilfering the songs that I grew up with. Especially when they’re distorted into some sort of corporate message contrary to the message of the song. There’s a music list that plays always in my mind, memory and understanding, and I don’t want those memories and that understanding corrupted by commercial shill (replace the “ll” with “t” if you like).

But I understand well that I rail against windmills. There is no battle, let alone war, to be won. Here I am. The only living boy.

Tom Jones

This just isn’t of much import, and probably not of reason for comment, but god help me, I can’t but notice that the 70-year-old Welsh heart-throb crooner Tom Jones (how many oxymorons in that phrase?) has decided after 40 years that women throwing underwear (“knickers” in the British vernacular) at him as he performs is somehow “just wrong.” Apparently, after all these years, he finds it insulting, despite over the decades his encouraging the lingerie barrage, beginning with his mopping his brow at the first instance. “It’s not unusual to be loved by anyone . . .” As he told the British Times Magazine: "It's just wrong. I'm laying my soul down here. And people start laughing."

But it may well be that the septuagenarian’s newfound modesty could have something to do with his recently released album, Praise & Blame, a spiritual album that a vice-president of Jones’s new record company, New Island, described as “some sick joke” and demanded that his company “pull back this project immediately or get my money back.” As Jones begins his promotional tour of the album, it certainly might be uncomfortable for women to be flinging panties at him as he’s singing “Lord Help the Poor and Needy,” “If I Give My Soul,” or “Burning Hell.” But if he’s still got the earlier “Mama Told Me" and “Sex Bomb” in his repertoire, the fuselage of undies could continue unabated.