UPDATED WITH DAY 2 AND DAY 3, BELOW
First, to explain the headline: Central Texas band the Dedringers has a song called “All My Friends Are Goin’ Into The Institution”, a clever and supremely catchy little ditty about watching all their compatriots go off to college. At some point a few days ago, upon hearing someone remark about how many people they knew who were planning to attend Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, a rhythmically precise adaptation of the Dedringers’ chorus popped into my mind, and now I can’t get it out. Here’s the original:
….and now try singing it this way:
All my friends are goin’ to the inauguration
Lookin’ for a short vacation
Talkin’ bout a revelation
Head up east
To the D of C
To the Washington streets
You know what they’ll see….
So, with that as our theme song, we’ll commence a brief diary of the journey.
Day 1 (of 3): This afternoon we set out toward Washington from North Carolina via the back roads, making our way along Highway 29 during the midafternoon hours when the big musical-political hoo-hah was all taking place at the Lincoln Memorial. You probably saw it on HBO, or online, or, if not, you probably will see it somewhere over the next few days, or at least clips of it. We just now took in the replay, from a roadside inn on the outskirts of Charlottesville, Virginia home of the University of Virginia, the Dave Matthews Band, and also the one thing we decided to visit en route to the Capitol: the illustrious abode of our nation’s third president, Monticello.
We visited D.C. last year and had the typical stroll around the Mall which I’d done once before, back in the ’80s but this time we took the extra step(s) around the tidal basin to the south in order to see the Jefferson Memorial. (A nice surprise along the way was the more recently completed and quite impressive FDR Memorial, a diverse labyrinth which winds along the basin’s edge for several hundred yards.) Thomas Jefferson’s memorial is probably the most architecturally interesting of all the D.C. monuments, and appropriately so, given the renowned building-design marvels of Monticello. We’ll get a chance to check that out firsthand tomorrow, as we’re booked for one of their special architecture-focused tours.
Charlottesville seems like a pretty charming town, around 5o,000 population nestled in the mountains and no doubt dominated by the university (which has about 20,000 students). A friend who went to school here was recently explaining to me how unusual the city has become in musical circles, on account of Matthews’ rise from these environs; apparently he’s invested quite a bit back into the local community, and has helped to put Charlottesville on the map for touring acts, who stop here a lot more than they used to. We’re staying in tonight, planning an early arrival at Monticello before we head on to D.C.; but had we ventured out, we’d likely have found a packed house at the Gravity Lounge, which plays host tonight to, fittingly enough, a jam-band. (This one’s an apparently on-the-rise ensemble from San Francisco called Tea Leaf Green.) And, just to nail home the point of the playing-field here, a full-page ad on the back of this week’s C-Ville (the local alt-weekly) is a plug for the Dave Matthews Band’s upcoming spring tour. Pass the patchouli!
As for that Lincoln Memorial shindig this afternoon we’d thought about leaving a couple days earlier in order to be there for that, and maybe we should have, but my sense is that we’ll end up feeling like one full cold day spent standing around the National Mall will be enough. The swearing-in is the historical moment I’m making the trip for….but, that said, there were some pretty cool moments musically on those Lincoln steps this afternoon.
None more so, certainly, than U2 getting the chance to perform “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” from the exact same spot where the song’s inspiration delivered his most memorable public address. The momentousness of the situation did not seem to be lost on Bono, the Edge, Adam Clayton, and Larry Mullen Jr. (though you’d hardly know Larry was there; the camera crew should’ve better understood the importance of the band aspect to U2). Bruce Springsteeen’s show-opening solo-acoustic-guitar-backed-by-a-huge-choir rendition of “The Rising” was also something special, and seeing him joined by 89-year-old Pete Seeger (plus Pete’s grandson Tao Rodriguez-Seeger of the Mammals) for Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land” probably made the whole two hours worth watching in and of itself.
Other not-quite-as-humongous stars proved well worthy of their place onstage notably John Legend, who gave James Taylor’s “Shower The People” more soul than it had ever been blessed with, on the verses he was given to sing; and will.i.am (he of the brilliant “Yes We Can” oratory-adaptation song/video), who saved Bob Marley’s “One Love” from being dragged down by a trying-really-hard-to-be-funky Sheryl Crow.
And there were wrong turns, of course. Garth Brooks’ medley of “American Pie” and “Shout” and… whatever that last bit was?…. got the crowd moving but was like pushing auto-memory-recall buttons with no real weight or reason behind it; might as well have had Billy Joel doing his seemingly profound but ultimately empty “We Didn’t Start The Fire”. Elsewhere, handing over the bulk of the vocals on “Higher Ground” to Usher (who, to his credit, did rather well) and Shakira (er, not so much) was a real bad idea given that the song’s creator, the legitimately legendary Stevie Wonder, was sitting right behind them playing keyboards and thus only got to sing the latter end of the song. (If you bring the big guns out, folks, use ’em to the fullest.) And while “America The Beautiful” was a perfectly fine closing anthem, handing it off to Beyonce who, of course, American-Idolized it was antithetical to the spirit of the event. Want to see a much more beautifully communicated version of that song? Check out Caitlin Cary’s rendition as delivered a week or so ago at the inaugural address of new North Carolina governor Bev Perdue (go to the 3:00 mark of this video).
All things considered, though, the mere effort of putting on an event such as this in conjunction with the inauguration is very much to be commended. It’s part of the rallying cry, part of the symbolic push forward that Obama is engineering. Perhaps not surprisingly, when we switched stations just after the program was over, we stumbled upon a Fox News ticker-crawler which cited GOP stalwarts such as Tom Delay contending that such a celebratory event was uncalled-for, or in some way undignified. Which underscores the very obvious: Delay and his ilk have no concept whatsoever of the purpose, and the power, of music.
Day 2 (of 3): A quick update on Monday not much to add, and nothing musically, but Monticello proved well worth the visit. Funny fellow, Jefferson he goes to all this trouble to build a spacious and wondrous dome-room on the top floor of his house, and then hardly ever used it for anything, apparently. Still, a marvel just to take it in.
Lastly, a warning: Perhaps best not to try to use a GPS when you’re specifically seeking to avoid the interstates in favor of the backroads. Ours led us almost all the way back to I-95 before we figured out what a sneaky trick it had pulled. Eventually we arrived in Arlington, about an hour behind schedule, which leaves little time for blogging as we’re aiming to rise around 4 a.m. to board a pre-dawn Metro in to the Mall. What we find there at that hour is anyone’s guess. Probably at least a few thousand people already, if not tens or hundreds of thousands … and certainly well past a million as daylight appears and the new president’s date with destiny nears. More tomorrow, then….. if probably later tomorrow!
Day 3 (of 3): The consensus figure which appears to have emerged regarding attendance on the National Mall at Tuesday’s inauguration was 1.5 million. It’s probably impossible to determine such a total with any sort of precision but, for what it’s worth, from an on-the-ground perspective of the proceedings, that feels like it was probably about right.
As many people as 1.5 million is, when you’re standing in the midst of them and our position, in front of the Washington Monument but still a good ways back from the Capitol, was probably very close to being right smack in the population center-point it’s still very much a community-level experience. People were, almost uniformly, polite. Respectful. Joyous. Most of all, just clearly very happy to be there. For a few hours, we all stood in the brisk winter chill, basking in the welcome rays of sunshine….and watched the world change, right before our very eyes.
Now, as for actually getting there and leaving? Well, that was more like boot camp. In a way, the time on the Mall was all the more precious for the effort spent arriving and departing. And even at that, we felt fortunate to be there at all. As statistics among the reported 930,000 riders of the Metro rail service on Tuesday, we resorted to workarounds that involved going in the opposite direction of our destination, so as to get to a station where we could actually board a train that had room for passengers. In the morning, this meant riding two stops further out-of-town, then riding back in on a train that was fully packed by the third or fourth stop, leaving passengers trying to board at the subsequent dozen or so stations plumb out-of-luck. I’d estimate that tens of thousands of folks who tried to get to the Mall via Metro yesterday were not able to do so, simply because there was no room.
The return was a different kind of ordeal, involving walking out of town in the wrong direction until we found a station with lines that were something less than hours long. It was quite a hike but we had plenty of company, particularly at what we deemed the “Third Street Crush,” a human traffic-jam at the intersection of Third and C streets which took at least a half-hour to make our way through. In the latter stage of the journey, a couple of kind residents along the route proved to be lifesavers by offering hot chocolate to those hoofing it to the outlying Metro stops. Never has hot chocolate been so welcomely received.
A couple of quick notes about the music at the inauguration:
I’d never heard Aretha Franklin sing in person, and really didn’t expect there’d ever be an occasion when I would but there she was, shortly before the swearing-in, singing “America The Beautiful”…and I realized how special it was to not only be able to attend this historic event, but to get to hear one of the great voices of our time, right in the middle of it. My wife’s own epiphany came a few moments later, with a classical piece that included one of her heroes, cellist Yo-Yo Ma (as well as the great violinist Itzhak Perlman). Their piece was, indeed, beautifully rendered, and fit the mood of the morning perfectly. It was, in a word, hopeful.
We were all, stretching across the Mall, full of hope. And yet hope tempered with grave understanding about what lies ahead. Obama, it seems, realizes this all too well; his speech, gracious and graceful, but firmly sobering, underscored that while we may fully appreciate the weight of what happened on this Tuesday in Washington, what matters most is what comes next.
Darcy McGee, who left the first comment to the Day 1 entry of this diary, said, “Goddamn it, I hope Obama doesn’t wind up lettin’ y’all down.” I know not McGee’s situation or persuasions, but I think I can appreciate that comment. Still, I walked away from the Mall, with my million and a half fellow Americans, believing this:
We’re in good hands.
