Long ago, a colleague asked me how I’d like to be remembered. Before I could even think about it, I replied, “simply as a good and decent man …”
He laughed, having understood the reference. Anyone our age who was breathing in 1968 knows those were the words the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy used in eulogizing his brother, Robert, who had been assassinated.
I thought of this the other night when I was watching AXS TV (one of cable’s best-kept secrets, by the way) and saw a documentary on Fleetwood Mac’s album “Rumours,” which is a favorite of mine.
Every song on that album is an anthem to somebody. Obviously former President Clinton thought enough of “Don’t Stop” to use it as a campaign anthem, even if it was really a musical pep talk from Christine McVie to her ex-husband John after they broke up. “Gold Dust Woman” is an anthem for anyone who has been through unbearable turmoil and lived to tell about it. “Go Your Own Way” might as well be the theme song for all couples who suffer acrimonious splits. And “Songbird” could be among the most gorgeous songs ever written.
In fact, for an album that became such a powerful focal point for those who came of age in the mid-to-late 1970s, almost every song on it carries a tinge of breakup and sadness, which, of course, is exactly what most of them are about.
Still, it proves that there’s often no rhyme or reason to how songs are received by their audiences. Nineteen-year-old Justin Hayward sat down one night on a bed with a new set of sheets he’d just been given, and wrote a plaintive song about moving on from one relationship to another.
The sheets were made of satin. And they were white.
When he pitched his song to his bandmates, they were underwhelmed by it until the keyboard player, Mike Pinder, threw in a riff that became the song’s connective tissue.
From there, “Nights in White Satin” by the Moody Blues was born — a bonafide rock classic. And to this day, while Hayward certainly appreciates everything the song has done for him, he has no idea how or why it connected with people the way it did.
Brian Wilson labored, not only to get his band, the Beach Boys, to take “Good Vibrations” seriously, but to get them to record it. He ultimately had to write a whole new set of lyrics (well, actually, bandmate Mike Love, who neither liked nor understood the original words, wrote them). Not only that, but Love vehemently balked at the whole idea of “Pet Sounds,” which is generally acknowledged today as one of rock’s enduring masterpieces.
You never know.
More than anything else, though, I’d like to be remembered 50 years from now by something I’ve written, whether it’s a song, a book, or even a column that resonated the way, say, Francis Pharcellus Church’s New York Sun editorial “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus” did in 1897. That would be a satisfying legacy.
I know I cannot speak for other people. But I just always assumed that any ambitious person would want to leave behind something substantive for posterity. So one day a few years ago, I undertook my own unscientific poll among friends on Facebook. It came after seeing Bono and U2 on TV, holding the audience in the palms of their hands while singing “Beautiful Day.”
Boy, I fantasized, what it must be like to have such power! What I wouldn’t give to have written “Hey Jude,” and hearing an audience erupt with cheers and applause after recognizing the first few notes.
Anyway, I even stipulated that I was looking for something truly grandiose, and that anything went, no matter how lofty.
I really got an education. Either nobody got the drill, or people think it’s egotistical to want to leave their mark on the world. I got a lot of “I want to be known for being a good parent,” or “I want to be known for being a good person.”
Oh, come on. As if anyone thinks, “I’d much rather be known for having raised an ax murderer.” Or, perhaps, “if I can go to my grave counting on two hands the number of people I truly made miserable, I’ll die happy.”
Maybe we just think too small. And even among the apparently small core of people who allow themselves healthy flights of fancy, maybe life often beats them down to the point where they rein in the ambition and end up counting “just getting through the day” as a significant accomplishment. Maybe that even defines me at times.
Well, as Frank Sinatra sang in “It Was a Very Good Year,” “I’m in the autumn of the years, and now I think of my life as vintage wine, from fine old kegs, from the brim to the dregs.”
I guess that means there’s less and less time to think small. Less and less time to play it safe. And that almost seems paradoxical. Common sense dictates that as you get older, you get more conservative. When you want to protect what you have.
I don’t know about that. I still expect that some day, and in some way, I’ll have my “Hey Jude” moment and
produce something that the world will remember 50 years from now.
But gee whiz, let’s not wait too long, huh?