By Stuart Mitchner
You found another home, I know you’re not alone on the nightshift…
My title turned up in a song by the Commodores written in memory of Marvin Gaye and Jackie Wilson, with a plea for them to sing their songs on the nightshift “forevermore.” With the title came the realization that what I’ve been doing here for more than 20 years is covering the nightshift, as if I were a DJ arranging memorial broadcasts.
However, this week’s group, all born on September 23, includes Bruce Springsteen, who is very much alive and actually recorded a version of “Nightshift” on his 2002 album Only the Strong Survive. Otherwise we have a curious mixture of 9/23ers: Ray Charles, John Coltrane, and Mickey Rooney, whose luminous madcap performance as Puck in Hollywood’s Midsummer Night’s Dream brings longtime Nightshifter William Shakespeare on board. Samuel Taylor Coleridge joins the Bard thanks to his interrupted opium dream “Kubla Khan,” inspired by Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis, born on 9/23/1215.
A Midnight Reading
I’d like to begin with a September 23 midnight reading of Coleridge’s poem. Among living actors, Ben Kingsley and Benedict Cumberbach are available, but since this is a fantasy, I’m going all out with Ray Charles, who was born 9/23/30 and joined the nightshift on 6/10/2004. Yes, he’s a singer not a reader, but there’s no way “the Genius” could read lines like “Could I revive within me her symphony and song” without singing them in his “Georgia On My Mind” voice.
Coltrane at 100
If you’re a whistler, try to stop whistling “My Favorite Things” once you’ve started. The tune first came to life for me when John Coltrane reinvented it one night at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre. In Visions of Jazz (1998), Gary Giddins calls it “the symbolic masterwork of Everyman’s Coltrane, … one of the most purely voluptuous records ever made.” As Giddins says, “everything about it is impressive,” beginning with McCoy Tyner’s “piano vamp,” one of the most famous intros in jazz. The only reason it didn’t become a “universally imitated cliché” is “because few jazz musicians could find much value in the song itself; its lineage” being “strictly by John Coltrane out of Mary Martin” [in Sound of Music]. A more “widely imitated” aspect of the performance was Coltrane’s use of the soprano saxophone and the sound he produced on it, which “combined his usual robustness with an eastern wail, underscored by the repetitive nature of the song’s melody and a triple-time vamp that was appealing, modern, and novel.”
Alluding to the way Coltrane maintains the basic arrangement of “the minor-key waltz that he introduced on the hit record,” Giddins calls the number his “good luck charm” — “all he needed was two-bars of the opening tremolo to bring down the house.” Giddins articulates what makes it “an enduring delight — almost erotic in its opulence, emotionally generous, technically flawless.” All I knew four years later on the night train to Benares was the way the music of the rails brought back the summer nights at the Village Gate when Coltrane and McCoy Tyner, drummer Elvin Jones, and bassists Reggie Workman and Art Davis were creating previews of the nightshift Indian moment, Trane as train.
Across the Hudson
As happened in “real life,” my night train was headed for New Jersey and the music of Bruce Springsteen, who was born 9/23/49. In his 2016 memoir Born to Run, Springsteen’s story is ours to comprehend and carry with us through life. This is the essence of the song that gives the book its title. While the “tramps like us” and the “Wendy” he’s singing to in “Born to Run” may be a composite of girls he knows, they’re also us, the audience he’s giving “proof of life” to. As long as we’re encompassed by what he calls “the raging wall of guitars and drums,” the sound of a singer “fighting to be heard over a world that didn’t give a damn” in “that 747-engine-in-your-living-room rumble,” we’re in the song, it’s about us, he wants to be our friend, ours the “dreams and visions” he’s guarding. Whether you call it a 747 or a Harley or a comet, “Born to Run” picks us up and roars off with us. Like he says in the chapter about the making of the song, “Get yourself a great riff and you’re on your way.”
Rooney’s Puck
Says Shakespeare’s Puck early on, “I am that merry wanderer of the night.” At the end, to the audience: “So, good night unto you all. Give me your hands, if we be friends, and Robin shall restore amends.”
When I heard the news of Mickey Rooney’s death in April 2014, my first thought was not of Andy Hardy or Boy’s Town or his MGM soulmate Judy Garland, but of his performance as Puck. By all rights, Max Reinhardt’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, co-directed with William Dieterle, should be a Hollywood milestone, universally acknowledged, admired, and discussed, like The Wizard of Oz, which was made five years later at MGM and has as its source a children’s book written by L. Frank Baum, with music by Harold Arlen. Dream comes from Shakespeare, with music by Felix Mendelssohn, an unbeatable combination, you might think. In fact the stigma of those names scared off audiences and alienated reviewers who either considered themselves protectors of Art while dismissing Warners’ Shakespearean adventure as overblown airy-fairy folderol. According to one of the most intelligent reviewers of the day, Otis Ferguson in the New Republic (October 16, 1935), any film that runs “well over two hours,” costs “more than a million,” and was “press-agented for months ahead” is doomed to be discussed by “culture clubs” and critics who “will put on their Sunday adjectives,” and as for “American husbands,” as soon as they “get one load of the elves and pixies,” they’ll go back to the “sports page.”
Ferguson singles out Rooney’s Puck as being “too ill instructed and raucous to be given such prominence.” Really? This is a 14-year-old half-naked youth in the grip of his demon, a creature David Thomson calls “truly inhuman, one of the cinema’s most arresting pieces of magic,” and he’s “ill instructed and raucous”? Rooney does have some raucous moments in the roles he played as the most popular male star of the late thirties, but if you revisit any of the MGM films that made him famous, you’ll see how thoroughly his lively genius has been contained within that studio’s polished production values. At Warners, whatever the genre, the writers and actors and directors are given more space, especially when adapting a work of word-drunk virtuosity, whether Shakespeare’s lines are chortled by Rooney or roared by Jimmy Cagney as Bottom. It’s fun to see two such in-your-face personalities mining the raw essence of their actor egos, giddy with glee, Cagney a fountain of laughter, Rooney’s “What fools these mortals be” laugh bubbling up through him with each fantastical prank.
“Something Special”
When I looked into the compositional history of “Nightshift,” I found Walter Orange, Dennis Lambert, and Franne Golde, who says the title came to her after seeing a film with that title starring Henry Winkler. “I think all writers feel something good will happen to whatever song they’re working on, but there was something different about ‘Nightshift.’ I was in the studio as it was being recorded and there was definitely something special going on. All the overdubs were magical and the energy was palpable. Hearing the final mix on the huge overheads, brought tears and instant joy, it sounded amazing and everyone knew it…. It’s one of those songs you can’t really take credit for. It comes through you. I just feel fortunate to have been present for the birth and continue to love it every time I hear it on the radio. Sometimes it still brings tears to my eyes…. Some songs have a life of their own” and “leave you feeling you shouldn’t take credit, that they weren’t written but instead flew out of you.”
“Kubla Khan”
If ever a poem had a life of its own, it was “Kubla Khan,” thanks to Coleridge’s prefatory story about being interrupted by a “person on business from Porlock.” There’s also no doubt that, like Golde’s “Nightshift,” it “flew out of him.” The aura of wonder and mystery Coleridge endowed it with, as with his “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” inspired immense tomes like John Livingston Lowes’s Road to Xanadu. Not to mention lending its name to the estate in Orson Welles’s 1941 masterpiece Citizen Kane.