Bryan's Song

Back to You (live acoustic) - Bryan Adams (mp3)
Summer of '69 (live acoustic) - Bryan Adams (mp3)

Bryan Adams was that slut in your high school no one admitted to bedding.

Words I’ve never heard uttered:
“Bryan Adams is my favorite all-time musician ever ever ever.”

Not once. I checked Snopes.com, and there's no record of anyone ever making this claim. Not male, female, or even a transgendered person in transition.

Recently, I heard a talking head point out that Mitt Romney had only won one single solitary popular election in his entire political career. That one-time victory to lead Massachusetts was the only time he ever won an election.

Bryan Adams is the Mitt Romney of pop rock.

Billboard named him #38 on their “Hot 100 50th Anniversary Charts.” That’s, like, #38 over 50 years of pop and rock and stuff. And you just know there were staffers in that room who saw Bryan Adams landing at #38 and threatened to burn down the building. “Fuck this. This is a joke. Bryan Adams shouldn’t be #338, much less #38 on this stupid list,” they surely said. "Hell will freeze over before we sign off on this." And then, predictably, like the wuss music nerds they were, they threw a Nerf ball at the glass meeting windows with righteous vitriol and accepted that hell would just have to freeze over.

Meanwhile, no one in that room would actually defend him. Everyone would just sit quietly in their Billboard meeting room chairs, shrugging their shoulders and sharing those higher-than-thou looks of disgust. But, in their heads, quietly to themselves, they’d be humming the tune to “This Time" or "Summer of '69."

BA had 5 different albums go Platinum in the U.S. For roughly a decade, Canadians used BA songs instead of their national anthem when TV service was announcing the end of air time*.

If you know your cheesy pop music history, then you’ve already formed a theory on when the BA Train went off the rails, and it’s eight cute little words. You know it’s true. He did it for you. Somehow Morgan Freeman and Alan Rickman get away with participating in this farce, but BA gets forever damned to the fires of sellout hell.

Here’s the real problem with this theory: it assumes that at some point people loved them some Bryan Adams, and to the best of my memory and understanding, this simply isn’t true. He was never loved. People never sat around water coolers asking each other:

“Hey, you pick up that new Bryan Adams album yet?”
“Shit, he’s got a new one?? When’d it come out?”
“Tuesday. There was a hundred of us camped out down at Record Bar Monday night waitin’ for the doors to open. We was so damn pumped.”
“It’s good, huh?”
“Oh man, everything you loved about Cuts Like a Knife and Reckless gets ramped up on this one. It’s just awesome.”

No, that conversation never happened anywhere in the USA. We didn’t brag about it. We didn’t show him off. We carefully and sparsely placed him on mixtapes, more than prepared to act like it was a mock-ironic decision if someone dared question it.

In fairness, this is probably the fate he deserved: popularity sans conviction.

Hell, I was one of his fans, and it’s taken me almost 500 words to even admit it. I buried it down here in the hopes that only a few people will mock me for it later.

It’s not like he was Debbie frappin’ Gibson or Tiffany or some shit. Yet how many rock stars of any stripe would inspire, by the mere mention of his name, another rock star to consistently lose his shit? You woulda thought Ryan Adams was being mocked for being Andy Gibb. BA never aided the Nazis. He never remade “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” as some horrifying ‘70s movie. He just sang poppy rock songs and sold out a few dozen times.

I like Bryan because he made it OK to shout out "Me and my baby in a 69!" at the top of your lungs, and adults didn't seem to mind. I like him because he seemed almost semi-normal in a business (especially in the '80s) when some kind of costumed get-up or big hair or wild makeup or funky fashion statements or massive and obvious drug addictions seemed mandatory to even get your foot in the door. I like him because he crafted a mean damn hook that sold 10 million albums no one will proudly claim.

Like. Not love. Because nobody wants to own up to that level of devotion when it comes to BA.


* -- Yes, kids, there was a time in our world when most television stations signed off the air for a majority of the early morning hours. And yes, I totally made up the part about Canadian TV sign-off song, but it wouldn't surprise me. Canada is funny like that.

Sylvia Plath

Ryan Adams--"Sylvia Plath (live)" (mp3)
Paul Westerberg--"Crackle and Drag (original take)" (mp3)

Kiss me and you will see how important I am.
--Sylvia Plath

The creative, wild, self-destructive, educated, dangerous, sexual, brilliant, despondent, vulnerable, unrestrained, unsaveable woman. The femme fatale. The woman with a thousand faces. The woman as muse.

That woman, or at least the archetype that she has become, is Sylvia Plath, confessional poet of the 50's and 60's, who died by suicide in 1963.

It might seem strange to be writing about Sylvia Plath during a month devoted to music, but then she is the inspiration for two of my favorite songs of this eleven-year-old century--Ryan Adams' "Sylvia Plath" and Paul Westerberg's "Crackle and Drag."

I am not surprised at all that Plath would become a muse for these two esteemed songwriters. What man doesn't think he could have done something for Sylvia or her equally well-groomed, urbane counterpart, Anne Sexton? I had been looking for a context in which to explore this fascination, which I share, for it is the subject of the songs that attracts me as much as the songs themselves.

The two songs could not be more different.

Ryan Adams' composition is elegaic, comic, and casual, an imagined life, not with Sylvia Plath, but with "a Sylvia Plath." He works the archtype, the woman who is unbound by Earth's rules, who indulges her every whim and fancy and who would take you (him) along for the ride. While he teases her behaviors and his own desires to share in them, his soft, sparse piano accompaniment mourns her absence, as if the worst loss one could possibly have is the one that he never had to begin with--she who would take you way beyond your established boundaries, but safely. His Plath is the passionate creature unconcerned for her own outcome, the woman he might have a fling with, knowing for any number of reasons that it could not possibly last, but knowing that he would indulge anyway:

And she and I would sleep on a boat
And swim in the sea without clothes
With rain falling fast on the sea
While she was swimming away, she'd be winking at me
Telling me it would all be okay
Out on the horizon and fading away
And I'd swim to the boat and I'd laugh
I gotta get me a Sylvia Plath

Westerberg's song is a frenetic rocker with urgent, rising guitar chords and verses that are nearly shouted, built around the details of Plath's squallid death, caring for her children in a cold, London flat before taking care of herself in a different way, using the gas in the oven:

She made a good go for a weeping willow
She closed the windows and made herself a pillow
And took a long deep breath
While her babies slept

Doomed, tragic, neglected by the end, this is the Sylvia Plath who was likely bi-polar, waking in the middle of the night to write stunning, manic poetry that has lasted longer than anything her brief, controlling husband has ever written. The constant repetition that she "made a good go for a weeping willow" suggests an empathy, an understanding on the part of the songwriter that she did the best she could with her mental state and circumstances.

See what I'm doing? I'm subtly making the case that Ted Hughes was never good enough for her, that he wronged her for leaving her with two small children. The woman who started their relationship by ripping the flesh of his cheek at a cocktail party in an act of wanton carnality could never, in our internal narratives, be served by one flawed mortal man. And so we despise him. I do. He is Yoko to her John Lennon, perhaps more talented, but completely unsympathetic and doomed himself to live decades beyond her legend.

Men want to rescue, and they want to rescue the Sylvia Plaths. They want to rescue the doomed, even rescue the unrescuable long after there is any chance of rescue. They want to dream of that rescue, that turning of a strong tide. The very idea enrages our women--those who are strong, stable, balanced, sacrificing in everyday ways without grand gestures, not projecting a victimhood of time, upbringing, or circumstance. But we cannot help it. We are men. We hear her siren song even across the decades. We send out our own songs in return.

Which song is better? There is no comparison, which is to say that the two songs tap into such different parts of the myth that, besides references to the same subject, they share little in common. Adams' makes me feel empty; Westerberg's taps into my own moments of desperation. Listen to both, and then go back to the source.