HUMAN WRECKAGE

Comfort and Joy in a Melancholy Month 

Remembrance Day colours November, a grim grey month anyway.

My father died on Remembrance Day. Eight years ago now – man, I was inclined to type six or four. He was a Royal Canadian Air Force flier, one half of a Mosquito night fighter crew. His wartime portrait is on my library shelf, positioned by my collection of works by his favourite author (and one of mine), John le Carre. The photograph was his parents’ print. When I contemplate and commune with my father’s teenage face, I cannot help but fret that he’s missed out on five le Carre novels, a memoir and a scholarly biography. This may be the aspect of his loss that saddens me most; time did not permit conversations about A Legacy of Spies or The Pigeon Tunnel.

This was my state of mind when I swung by my south side indie record shop after “The Last Post.” Bruce Springsteen’s new album of soul and rhythm and blues covers dropped on Remembrance Day. I didn’t know what to make of the October news regarding Only the Strong Survive. His last two albums were music press clichés: each one was dubbed a “late career renaissance.” A covers album suggests a dry well. Then again, His Bobness took a bizarre and compelling three album detour into the pages of the “Great American Songbook.” The Stones surprised with Blue and Lonesome in 2016, an album that could easily be mistaken for their 1963 debut, before Mick and Keith had figured out how to write. Springsteen himself released The Seeger Sessions and followed it up with a live album. Both of those records sound as relaxed as kitchen reels, fruit jar moonshine and laughter.

The second advance single from Only the Strong Survive was a Commodores track, “Nightshift.” After Lionel Richie quit the band, the Commodores resembled the J. Geils Band without Peter Wolf, beached with no hope of an incoming tide. Somehow, they survived long enough to release their best-ever song. Springsteen’s version is affectionate and faithful to the original arrangement, a tribute to a tribute. It’s a simple song on its surface, a tribute to Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, gifted angelic vocalists. But the night shift metaphor is grittier and more utilitarian than any rock ‘n’ roll heaven the Righteous Brothers harmonized about. “Nightshift” has never received the attention and veneration it deserves.

Since I’m the baby of the family, it’s still permissible for me to pester my sister. Because we’re both in our sixties, I pretty much stick to music. Have you heard this? Do you remember that one? Her Capitol Beatles albums and London label Rolling Stones 45s altered the course of my life. We are the survivors. Our parents died still mourning the death of their eldest, our brother. My sister too has suffered the same terrible fate of outliving a child, her eldest, my niece and goddaughter.

I sent my sister the video link to Springsteen’s “Nightshift.” I wrote that it made me a little misty-eyed, God, you know, the absence of Marvin Gaye. But that eyeball softness was literal too. I spent five years working on the night shift during the eighties. I hated my job but I confess to enjoying the isolation and my being out of sync with the rest of the world. As a newlywed, I wanted that after dark paycheque premium; I was willing to do anything to give my wife and me a good start. Suck it up and tough it out. Maybe, just maybe, I should have consulted with her first. All I did was wreck our marriage, defer my career in advertising and waste precious years of her life.

My sister wrote back complaining about the curse of the Moore weepy gene. She made the figurative leap to the universality of “Nightshift.” All of us live with loss and grief. She noted too its comforting suggestion, that maybe the souls of the dearly departed are busy behind the scenes, punching the clock at midnight for another workaday on the night shift. They’re looking out for the rest of us; guardian angels but hipper, not so tied up by doctrine.

I don’t recall my brother having any vinyl in his room when we were all growing up in the same house. My sister was the source. My brother moved from Montreal to Edmonton before our parents divorced. My sister moved out during the process. In the aftermath I was flown west every summer for “smartening up.” My brother insisted the Dave Clark Five were better than the Beatles. He thought the Stones should’ve packed it in after “Gimmie Shelter” although their later amphetamine butchery of the Temptations’ “Just My Imagination” amused him. My memory is flawed, but I want to say he had just two white artists in his modest Edmonton record collection, the Beach Boys and Van Morrison. The rest was all Black, stuff I’d rarely been exposed to in its primary, primordial form: Sam Cooke, Sam and Dave, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Booker T., Aretha, Otis, James Brown and Wilson Pickett. They blew my mind.

As with my sister’s stuff, my brother’s stuff hit me in my age of absorbency, that fertile time when my ideas and opinions were neither fully formed nor coherently complete. I believe there was reciprocity. I used to record mix tapes. I knew my brother had an ear for a clever lyric and a nose for a hit, a beer bash song. I like to think I introduced him to some of my stuff. I was a careful curator. He thought the Simple Minds singer had a great voice. “Keep Your Hands to Yourself” by the Georgia Satellites teeter-tottered between novelty and genius. Lou Reed’s “Turn to Me” was deadpan hilarious. He came to appreciate Springsteen.

I’m older now than my brother ever was, but he and Springsteen are about the same age. He understood where the sparks flew from on E Street. Springsteen did not choose the mix tape obvious for Only the Strong Survive. His homage to that “soul noise,” that magic, peels the plaster and paint for nearly an hour. It is music defined by record label shorthand, Motown, Stax/Volt. Do you know what I mean? Yes, you know what I’m writing about. It is Friday night music, nothing more, nothing less. Joyous sounds! Music to wake the neighbours! My brother would’ve loved this album. I can see us in his living room, crying with laughter at the start of another night shift.

You found another home, I know you're not alone...           

meGeoff has been your most unreliable, unbalanced and inaccurate alternative source of reflection since 2013. The novella Of Course You Did is my latest book. Visit www.megeoff.com for links to purchase it in your preferred format from various retailers.