PBS Airs O.K. "Capitol Fourth" Concert at a Fraught Time for American Liberty and Independence

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Yesterday (Thursday, July 4) I turned on KPBS for the 44th annual A Capitol Fourth concert despite my weird misgivings about this country and its likely fate. America is celebrating the 248th anniversary of its independence just three days after the U.S. Supreme Court spectacularly reversed one of the central tenets of why we were fighting the revolution in the first place: to have leaders we could hold accountable instead of untouchable kings. Earlier in the day I’d seen an interview clip with Kevin Roberts, executive director of the Heritage Foundation, which has put together a blueprint called “Project 2025” which they propose to have Donald Trump implement on his second term (the way they did a similar blueprint in 1980 for Ronald Reagan). Roberts calls it a “second American Revolution,” though it would be more accurate to call it the “American Counterrevolution.” Among its objectives are a nationwide ban on abortion, reversal of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion drug mifepristone (even though the approval was granted in 2000 and the drug has been used safely since), and aggressive enforcement of the 19th century Comstock Act to ban not only abortion but also contraception and pornography. They also want to change the name of the Department of Health and Human Services to “Department of Life,” “life” being used here in the sense the radical Right uses it seemingly to cover only life between conception and birth. I didn’t mean to turn this into a political rant, but even without the sense of gloom and doom hanging over this country right now it wasn’t that great a Fourth of July concert.

It began with the host, African-American Alfonso Ribero, singing a song apparently called “Oh, What a Feeling” (chyrons? Are you kidding?) backed by a hot-looking white dance troupe of both (mainstream) genders, followed by Fantasia doing a pretty good soul version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” a.k.a. “To Anacreon in Heaven.” At least she nailed the two most difficult parts of the song: the upward leap at “And the rockets’ red glare” and the big high note on “free” in “the land of the free.” Then came what was predictably the high point of the show: Motown legend Smokey Robinson doing a medley of his legendary hits: “I Second That Emotion,” “Tears of a Clown,” “Get Ready,” “My Girl” (which Robinson actually wrote in the early 1960’s for his own group, The Miracles, but he let The Temptations talk him into giving it to them instead) and “Tracks of My Tears.” Robinson was dressed in a baby-blue outfit and still both looked and sounded great, even though my memories of Motown are considerably more jaded than most people. In the 1960’s it was the music of the Black kids at my junior high school who were bullying me (thanks to a weird social experiment on my mother’s part; when she and my stepfather broke up she moved my brother and I to Marin City, Marin County’s Black ghetto, where we lived for six years and my already introverted disposition became even more so as I grew up around people with whom I had almost nothing in common), and later on Berry Gordy’s whole operation had the whiff of the plantation about it even though this time the plantation owner was of the same color as his sharecroppers. (Gordy confirmed every awful thing I’d ever heard about him when in 1972, suddenly and without any notice whatsoever, he closed the fabled “Hitsville, U.S.A.” studio in Detroit and moved his whole operation to Hollywood, leaving his session musicians high and dry.)

After Smokey Robinson anything short of a Beatles reunion with John’s and George’s kids filling in for their deceased dads would have been a comedown, and what actually happened was a nice-looking but mediocre white singer named Darren Criss doing a bleached (in more ways than one) cover of The Pointer Sisters’ “I’m So Excited.” Then came a biracial duo (a white guy with a shock of dyed white hair, and a Black woman) called Fitz and Noelle doing two nondescript songs, one that appeared to be called either “Sha La La, Hey Hey Hey” or “I’m in the Mood” (the latter also the title of a far better song by the late blues legend John Lee Hooker) and one called “I Can Make Your Hands Clap.” (It didn’t work for me.) After that MC Ribero introduced 2008 Summer Olympics gymnastics gold-medal winner Shawn Johnson East, who in turn introduced some of the athletes who will be competing for Team USA this summer in Paris. To their credit they showed not only Olympic athletes but Paralympic athletes as well, including some of the runners in wheelchairs. (I remember watching a TV show featuring a wheelchair race; they interviewed the winner while he was transferring from his racing wheelchair to his normal one, and I realized that a racing wheelchair has about as much in common with a normal one as a racing car does to a normal one.) Then they continued the Olympics tribute with the U.S. Army Herald Trumpets and the National Symphony Orchestra (Jack Everly, conductor) playing John Williams’ “Olympic Fanfare,” a suitably heroic and bombastic piece that was actually one of the better items on the program.

After that came Sheila E., one of the many disciples of the late Prince Rogers Nelson who’s gone on to a career of her own. She was originally his band’s drummer, but last night she played timbales, the standing drums that are a basic part of Latin-American music. She sang a version of Prince’s “Hey, Look Me Over” (or whatever that thing is called) in between two nondescript songs apparently called “Leader of the Band” and “Without Love, It Ain’t Much.” After that Loren Allred sang a tasteful version of the 1939 classic “Over the Rainbow,” though she left out one verse (possibly by accident) and did some tasteful soul-style ornamentation, though nothing like the havoc Patti Labelle wreaked on this song in the early 1980’s wearing a wig that made her look like an upturned lawnmower. (I hadn’t realized until I saw her clips in the PBS miniseries Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution that she’d actually first recorded that song in the 1960’s, as lead singer for Patti LaBelle and the Bluebelles, and did it a lot more tastefully than she did later.) Then the U.S. Army Chorus and Herald Trumpets came out for a ghastly “patriotic” song called “This Is My Country” which started turning up on these occasions several years ago. After a brief presentation by Jim Barron, one of the few surviving U.S. veterans of the D-Day invasion, and May Giger, a real-life “Rosie the Riveter” who worked for Boeing (she still has their pin!) building B-17’s and B-29’s, classical pianist Chloe Flower joined the National Symphony for a severely edited version of George Gershwin’s iconic “Rhapsody in Blue.” (She played O.K. but not at the level of Lang Lang, who did a similarly abbreviated version of this piece that was good enough to make me want to hear the whole thing.)

After that Darren Criss returned for a good, solid version of Journey’s song “Don’t Stop Believing” and Fantasia came out to do Stevie Wonder’s “I Wish.” Then former disco star Sister Sledge came out with a backing group called Sledgerday (I’m not making this up, you know!) for a two-song medley featuring something apparently called “Everybody Dance” (one of those quasi-fascistic disco command songs that made you feel like you were being ordered to dance) and her one hit, “We Are Family” (actually one of the better songs from the short-lived disco era). The big fireworks display actually began during the closing bars of “We Are Family” and continued through the rest of the program: the National Symphony playing their usual snatch of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture (a classic bit of mixed messaging: a piece celebrating Russia’s successful defense of Tsarist autocracy against the equally authoritarian but much more progressive Napoleon); the U.S. Army Chorus doing a song called “Let Freedom Ring” that was just as dreary as “This Is My Country”; the U.S. Army Band doing a medley of “The Caisson Song” (which isn’t called that anymore because who the hell these days even knows what a caisson was? It was a little trailer containing cannonballs used by artillery units to haul their balls into place, no pun intended) and George M. Cohan’s “Yankee Doodle Dandy” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag” (a reminder that once upon a time American songwriters could actually write good patriotic songs!); Loren Allard singing an O.K. version of “America the Beautiful”; and the full cast reuniting for “God Bless America” before the orchestra ended the proceedings with John Philip Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever.” It was an O.K. program, with nothing as irritating as having a guy in a Big Bird suit conduct the orchestra but also nothing as iconic as the Beach Boys medley done one year by the rump group of that name (with Mike Love as the leader and the only original member) or Lauren Alaina’s impassioned rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land Is Your Land.” (Of course she did only the “safe” verses, but it was good enough to make me wish she’d record the whole song.)