A few post-Thanksgiving thoughts

Van Morrison, The Last Waltz, Rattle & Hum, The late great Mimi Parker

Some scattered stuff :

1. Most importantly, this is by far my favorite Thanksgiving gif—Van Morrison with some kind of power kick to accentuate his performance of “Caravan” during The Last Waltz (which was filmed on Thanksgiving).

2. For a handful of years as a teenager/college kid, every Thanksgiving night, some friends and I did the opposite of watching The Last Waltz (a historically revered concert film that I like) by watching U2’s Rattle & Hum (a broadly despised concert film that I love). As this all happened pre-internet, I was wholly unaware of its criticisms (over-earnest, navel-gazing, arrogant, un-self-aware, pretending they’re the first band to discover America, appropriating Black American culture, too many cowboy hats, Bono is in it, etc); I loved it unequivocally and assumed the rest of the world did too. For a while, after I caught up with the critiques, I sort of hid my love of the movie and its attendant uncoolness. But I’ve come to realize a few things: 1) in the words of Dave Grohl, “You love what you love; there are no guilty pleasures”, 2) a lot of the art I love—like this specific era of U2—is mostly irony-free and painfully earnest, coolness be damned, and 3) the nauseating self-importance and arrogance of Robbie Robertson in The Last Waltz, while not ignored entirely (and amplified in recent years), somehow gets a pass, while everyone dogpiles on Bono, and that feels like hipster selective memory at its worst. Oh, and while I’m here being defensive for U2 and taking potshots at The Last Waltz, the synth sounds (which were new at the time) on The Last Waltz are annoying and dated. None of this to say I don’t love The Band (I do…in fact The Last Waltz version of “Don’t Do It” is an all-time favorite). More on U2 later, I’m sure. “Am I buggin’ ya? Don’t mean to bug ya…”

3. RIP the singular Mimi Parker of one of my favorite bands, Low. Few bands have taught me as much about patience & atmosphere, authenticity & evolution, courage & voice, simplicity & commitment...as Low has. Alan Sparhawk (Mimi’s partner and co-founder) once said something, as an artist, I loved, “When we started the band, we knew most people weren’t going to want to listen to this, or have the patience for this, but that there’d be a few people who would resonate with it the way that we do.” Nobody sounded like Mimi, whether she was singing or playing drums. We opened our recent show at Velour (where, coincidentally, I’d seen a fantastic Low show a few years ago) with a quiet version of “You’re The Song” in honor of Mimi. Here’s a playlist of some of my favorite Low songs.

4. As I’ve thought about and felt the losses of Mimi Parker, Taylor Hawkins, and—more personally—my dear friend and drummer Pat Campbell, I’ve centered on the tangle of the interpersonal (spouse, friend, etc) and the musical that we share (obviously in different ways). I’m working on a song that I plan to share once it’s, well, better, but some of the Mimi- and Pat-centric lyrics feel worth sharing:

When you sang I knew the truth
Laser beam that shot right through
Sunflowers and baby shoes
Two singing one

Saw you once in paradise
Your heartbeat was the angel choir
You beat back the ghosts awhile
You sang the sun

Now it’s just echoes
In metal and Holy Ghost
The reverb of time
And no last goodbyes

Count us in just one last time
Play the rests and walls and pines
Heart & soul & guts & spine

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