On Leaving and Coming Back

Animal Collective, Gladys Knight, Glen Campbell, Jerry Jeff Walker, Dionne Warwick

I wasn’t yet sure what this newsletter would look like when I wrote the first entry, I just had something I wanted to write and no other place I could think to put it, so I came here. That one, which I published months ago (not checking how many), had aspirations toward essaydom, and I haven’t yet come up with anything to follow it, in part because I wanted the next thing to feel as complete and formal as that one did, to me, anyway. But I also want to post more regularly on this platform, where I’ve enjoyed reading other writers’ incomplete and informal thoughts lately, so I’m giving myself permission to publish mine.

A piece I wrote about a new reissue of Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, Animal Collective’s first album, appeared on Pitchfork over the weekend. That band means a whole lot to me, in part because Sung Tongs, when I heard it in high school, gave me a powerful early impression of the idea that music could be weird and challenging and sensuous and inviting all at the same time, not that I would have put it that way then. I hated it when I first listened, after my friend Jake gave me a burned CD copy with the promise that it would be like nothing I’d ever heard. Within a year or so, I thought it was the greatest album ever made. Years later, Garcia Peoples was playing a show in New Haven, where Rick Omonte of the great Elm City bands Mountain Movers and Headroom remarked on the Sung Tongs t-shirt I was wearing. As I recall, his attachment to the album was like an inversion of mine. For me, as a kid with little exposure to music beyond the radio dial, it was a portal to further out sounds; for him, as a guy who’d already been playing weird, noisy music for some time when it landed, it was a reminder that consonance and melody had their places, too. Pretty cool that one record could do both. 

Another reason I loved Animal Collective was that they were from the suburbs of Baltimore, just like me and my teenage friends and bandmates. Their music carries a sense of the place, even if they made most of it after leaving. A patch of wilderness at the edge of a parking lot, a public swimming pool at night. Our band reinvented itself very soon after we accepted Sung Tongs and Feels, its followup, into our little canon. If they could do it, we could at least try. Those records are almost painful for me to hear now, so vividly do they bring back the basements and backseats where I first learned to love them.

When Avey Tare assembled the music that would become Spirit They’re Gone, Spirit They’ve Vanished, he was consciously trying to bring Maryland back, if only to say goodbye. “A lot of the songs I wrote were in transition of leaving Maryland and moving to New York,” he told the Baltimore City Paper in 2011. “And I think I was kind of just looking back on—kind of like, going back there sometimes and pretending that all that stuff was still happening, and I was around everybody I was around back then.” He returned to Baltimore County to record the album with Panda Bear. Not long after that, the whole band left home more or less for good. 

I didn’t get a chance to talk much about the album’s relationship to home in my review of the reissue. But it reminded me of a little list I’ve lately been keeping, in the back of my mind, of songs about people who strike off to New York or Los Angeles and soon find themselves yearning for the people and places that raised them. 

It started when I heard “Midnight Train to Georgia”—not exactly an aesthetic match for Animal Collective, but bear with me—on the radio from the driver’s seat of a Uhaul van one day in February. I was rolling along the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, on opposite tracks from the song’s protagonist, who retreats to the simple life back home after a shot at stardom in Los Angeles sputters out. The small town was the site of my grand misadventure, and the big city was the familiar place that beckoned my return. 

Of course, I’d heard “Midnight Train to Georgia” before. I knew it mostly as a showcase for Gladys Knight’s dazzling lead vocal, a performance powerful enough to keep me from thinking very much about the song she was delivering. This time, the opening lyric grabbed me: “L.A. proved too much for the man/(Too much for the man, he couldn’t make it)/So he’s leaving the life he’s come to know.” The part between the slashes is delivered as an interjection of backing vocals by the Pips, who sounded just a little too peppy, even a little smug about this guy’s failure, like they’d seen it coming all along. Or maybe I was taking it too personally. 

Knight, on the other hand, radiates love for her subject, beginning with the bit of sweet gospel humming she lets out as a pickup before dropping into those first lines. “He said he’s going back to find,” she continues, ascending through a melodic flourish apparently of her own invention, because it doesn’t appear on either previously recorded version of the song, “what’s left of the world he used to know.” (I’m thinking again about Avey Tare in New York, pretending that the Maryland of his childhood had stayed the same while he was gone.) We don’t learn much about the character who’s observing the guy and delivering these lines, but the subtext for me is that she’s a version of Gladys Knight herself, whose dreams of artistic success went very differently. It moved me tremendously that she doesn’t look down on him as some sort of wannabe. She adores him.

I learned—on Wikipedia, who am I trying to impress—that the songwriter was Jim Weatherly, a former University of Mississippi quarterback who fell back on a career in songwriting after it became clear that he wasn’t cut out for pro football. Not a bad plan B. He said in interviews that a phone conversation with Farrah Fawcett of all people inspired him to write it, though I have to imagine his own second-chance story had something to do with the content. Fawcett told Weatherly that she was about to board a “midnight plane to Houston” to visit her family, and that’s what he called the song when he recorded the original version. 

“Midnight Train to Georgia” is obviously a much better title than “Midnight Plane to Houston,” which reminds me of the 30 Rock episode about Jackie Jorpjomp. But it’s difficult to pin down why “Midnight Train to Georgia” sounds so right in comparison.  Maybe it’s because it asks you to imagine the multiple days the guy would have had to sit watching the country roll by and wondering whether he made the right choice in going back. Maybe it’s the archetypal quality of “midnight train,” conjuring an older America in juxtaposition with glitzy Hollywood, as if he’s retreating not just to his childhood home but literally into the past. “Midnight train” also brings to mind “The Midnight Special,” an old Black folk song about an actual train that crisscrossed the country from the 1920s or so until 1971, three years before Knight’s version of “Midnight Train to Georgia” came out. (That older America wasn’t so far behind her on the tracks.) Both songs imbue the train itself with redemptive power. In Lead Belly’s famous version of “Midnight Special,” he entreats the engine to “shine her ever-loving light on me.”

I will experiment with some cross-promotion between posts here by saying that “Midnight Train to Georgia” has its own version of the quality I talked about in “Me and Bobby McGee” in the last entry: It is broad enough to lift you up and stir you even if you only catch a fragment of the chorus from a neighbor’s small speaker on a bustling Sunday in the park, as I did yesterday; and detailed enough to encourage and reward close attention to its contours when you can give it. The best pop songs do both, somehow. I do have one gripe with the composition: the revelation, at the end of the chorus, that the singer “will be with him on that midnight train” after all, an unexpected storybook ending that sort of flattens the song’s otherwise rich emotional ambiguity. I prefer to imagine her staying back in Los Angeles, hard at work on her own aspirations, still loving the guy even as he leaves her and the dream of L.A. in search of home.

I’ll try to keep the rest of these descriptions brief, because I said more than I expected about “Midnight Train to Georgia.” You may not always hear Glen Campbell as a clear influence on Garcia Peoples, but he’s very high in the pantheon for all of us, I think. “Country Boy (You Got Your Feet in L.A.),” the opening track to his Rhinestone Cowboy album, is a beloved staple of our tour van playlists. His ‘70s stuff swaps some of the mysterious understatement of his earlier collaborations with the great songwriter Jimmy Webb in favor of tunes that are sweet, bouncy, and practically guaranteed to please. The slick string section of “Country Boy” is a good match for its subject matter: the dissatisfaction and nostalgia of a guy who actually did make it as a big star, who looks out at all his Hollywood success and can only think about the humble life he left behind in Tennessee. It reminds me of contemporary pop from the likes of Drake and Kanye, who have mined celebrity ennui for everything it’s worth. I was talking at a bar the other night with a guy who compared Campbell’s voice to a ringing bell, which seems right to me.

Campbell’s music was the sort of shiny industry product that outlaw country artists like Guy Clark and Jerry Jeff Walker were ostensibly rebelling against, and “L.A. Freeway,” written by Clark and performed in my favorite version by Walker, is like “Country Boy”’s shitkicking younger cousin. It dramatizes the moment the tires hit the road in the great escape from L.A. to someplace homier, replacing Campbell’s rich-guy existentialism with cheap-beer class consciousness. Dig the second couplet: “Say goodbye to the landlord for me/Those sons of bitches have always bored me.” The coda of Walker’s version, when the drummer starts digging a little more deeply into his cymbals, sounds like somebody’s junk car rumbling to life on its way out of dodge, with a chorus of backing singers assembled to send it off.

I said before that these songs were about yearning for home in New York or L.A., but I’m realizing now that they’re all about the latter. I guess New Yorkers tend to write essays rather than songs when they skip town.

“Do You Know the Way to San Jose” takes place among L.A.’s “stars that never were,” washing cars and pumping gas for a living instead of singing or acting like they’d hoped. It’s one of those Burt Bacharach/Hal David songs that defy all logic of catchiness, full of oddly shaped vocal melodies and surprise half-diminished seventh chords and still lodging itself in my head every time I hear it, as if it were the simplest tune in the world. It’s good enough to merit an essay of its own, but for now I’m going to focus on two things about it.

1. The one-note organ riff that accompanies every few lines of the verse. It sounds like a honking car horn: just in the right pitch range, with a rhythm you could imagine a driver executing to demonstrate to his gridlocked peers just how grumpy he is. David’s lyric repeatedly invokes L.A. traffic as a metaphor for some greater stifling effect the city has on its residents’ dreams, and this seemingly inconsequential detail of the instrumental arrangement mirrors that idea perfectly. Best of all, the car horn effect doesn’t arrive as a rude interruption, musically speaking. It’s the grooviest part of the song. 

2. The “wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah wah” backing vocal part, a perfect example of the strangeness and delight of Bacharach’s compositions and arrangements. I can’t prove it, but I swear Animal Collective had this part from “San Jose” in mind when they wrote “Prospect Hummer,” the title track of their wonderful collaborative EP with Vashti Bunyan, a companion piece of sorts to Sung Tongs. I didn’t intend for this section to be a nested list, but now I have two things I want to say about “Prospect Hummer,” both having to do with my recent AnCo review in Pitchfork.

   1. I mentioned in the review how good they are at assimilating rather than replicating their influences. If I’m right about the “wah wah wah wah”s in “Prospect Hummer,” it’s one of the better illustrations of that idea I can think of. It’s lifted straight from Bacharach, and yet it sounds nothing like him in context. 

   2. Here is more evidence for my claim in the review that Panda Bear is probably underappreciated as a drummer. The percussion in this song is pretty minimal—just a bit of kick and closed hi-hat—but the rhythmic feel is out-of-this-world good. Sexy, even. There’s an interview where he talks about being influenced by the rhythms of Destiny’s Child and Aaliyah in the band’s early days, and you can really hear that here.

OK, there were a few more songs I had in mind, but now that we’re back at Animal Collective it feels like a good place to stop. I reward those of you who made it this far with a hint about the next installment, which will feature the very first published interview with one of the best rock bands going right now. It will come out more quickly than this one did.