Music Magg

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Last night at 5:30 p.m. I flipped on the TV and found that MS-NBC was about to broadcast the commemorative concert for Joe Biden’s inaugural, which they made the mistake of beginning with Bruce Springsteen performing “Land of Hope and Dreams” as a solo acoustic number. Springsteen didn’t write this song for the Biden inaugural – he wrote it in 1998 but didn’t record it commercially until the Wrecking Ball album in 2012 – but it sure sounded as though he had. Indeed, the running theme of the concert was new hope, new renewal, emerging from the darkness into the light, and it’s clear the artists of America – most of whom had aligned themselves with anti-Trump rather than pro-Trump America (when Trump was inaugurated the biggest “name” he could get from the music world was country singer Toby Keith) – were seeing Biden’s assumption of the Presidency as redemptive. Fortunately we on the West Coast were

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved Needless to say, our Viral Dictator transformed the fare that was offered on TV for last night’s New Year’s Eve, including eliminating the New York Philharmonic’s annual New Year’s concert (ironically, orchestras in Europe are mounting full-dress concerts and even opera performances in the COVID-19 era with appropriate precautions, but large-scale public events in this country are still Verboten … unless you’re Donald Trump) and leading PBS to substitute a Washington, D.C.-based virtual concert called United in Song that took place in part at the otherwise empty concert hall for the National Symphony (conducted quite beautifully by JoAnn Falletta – one more glass ceiling cracks! There are at least three first-class conductors these days who are women, Falletta, Marin Alsop and the quite good Simone Young, who so far is the only person who’s been able to make Richard Wagner’s early opera Rienzi so

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved I had wanted to watch the show immediately after it on PBS because they were doing something involving Garth Brooks but I couldn’t remember what it was. When the show opened with Brooks himself and his touring band in a live video of a hot version of one of Brooks’ neo-honky-tonk numbers, “Ain’t Goin’ Down ’Til the Sun Comes Up,” that turned out to be a film clip from a 2008 concert video. The show was actually the celebration of Garth Brooks performing at the Library of Congress and being fêted by others in his realm of the business in honor of him being given the George and Ira Gershwin prize for songwriting – or at least the hype surrounding it says it’s for songwriting. The previous recipients, according to a Google search, are Hal David (Burt Bacharach’s lyricist for his glory years), undated; Carole King, 2013; Billy Joel, 2014; Willie Nelson, 2015; Smokey Robinson, 2016; Tony Bennett – who is