Vocal Bombs Bursting in Air
Song Diary #5: Star-Spangled Banners! (Ft. José Feliciano, The Grateful Dead, and Marvin Gaye)
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Hello sports fans. In last weekend’s New York Times Magazine I had a short piece about the history of the national anthem at sporting events, with a special focus on the sub-history of celebrities getting mocked for doing a bad job.
For research, I watched so many bad (tacky, misconceived, lyric-mangled, off-key) performances of the anthem (see: Roseanne Barr, Fergie, Steven Tyler).
Even among famous anthem “successes", I didn’t find a lot to like. Whitney Houston’s famous performance at the 1991 Super Bowl, a mere 10 days into the Persian Gulf War, is technically impeccable, even innovative, but simply … not for me. The fusion of sport and spectacle and war is just too much. I mean, why are F-16s flying overhead at a football game? (Rhetorical question, no need to write in with answers.)
But I did find a few anthem performances that I really loved, and I thought I’d share them here. Some of these are mentioned in the piece, some are not.
ToT Diary #005: Star-Spangled Banners
José Feliciano, live at Game 5 of the 1968 World Series
This is basically the starting point for the modern tradition of reinterpreting the anthem to catch the winds of social change. It’s part Latin jazz, part Sixties folk revival, completely recognizable as THE NATIONAL ANTHEM, completely its own thing. In other words: a perfect cover. Back in 1968 it made a lot of people lose their minds: boos from the audience, people calling in to bitch to NBC. There were reports of guys at veterans homes throwing stuff at the TV. It’s probably my favorite anthem performance. ✹
The Grateful Dead, live at Candlestick Park (1993)
An extremely straightforward a cappella rendition. Feliciano’s reimagination is great (ditto for Jimi Hendrix’s, ditto for a few others), but so many of the contemporary big-game performances see the singer treating the song as a chance to show off their chops (“chops”), mostly by adding notes, stretching notes out, and dropping wiggly flourishes all over the place. It’s “their take” — but not really. They’re not digging around in the song to see what they can find there, they’re hanging out on the surface, strutting their stuff. Even though I think our anthem is a pretty mediocre song, and I’m not much for performed patriotism, there’s something nice about seeing The Grateful Dead show up and just… sing it straight. They don’t Dead-ify it. They’re not virtuosic singers. If you didn’t know, you might think it was just a few guys from the neighborhood who got roped in because they could (basically) handle a tune. 10/10. ✹
Marvin Gaye, live at the 1983 NBA All-Star Game
This is widely recognized as an all-time great, and with good reason. I had it going on repeat for a long stretch of work on this piece, and my recurring sense was that Gaye wouldn’t get away with it today. I can’t prove it, but … he wouldn’t, right? It’s too minimal, too radical, too unpredictable, too searching — our contemporary sports spectacles just don’t have the metabolism to accommodate this stuff. Or am I wrong? You can let me know in the comments… ✹