The Great American Songbook

All this week, Doonesbury takes a look at aging rock stars who suddenly discover "The Great American Songbook." Today, the strip even asks, "Why do so many rockers record our grandparents' music?" Unfortunately, it doesn't provide a satisfying answer. I think the answer is that standards take us back to a time when the song had precedence over the performer. Songs had lives of their own, and singers would seek out the songs, usually performing and recording material that was already a known quantity. Singers usually had one or two signature songs, but the rest of their material was up for grabs. Even huge singers such as Frank Sinatra or Elvis Presley sang songs introduced by others. The Brill Building in New York was famous as a songwriting factory, with occupants such as Goffin and King, Bacharach and David, Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich, and many others.

And then the Beatles came along. They started out singing covers of other songwriters' songs, and some of the early albums were almost half covers, but it wasn't long before originals squeezed everything else out. This started a new trend of performers either writing their own music or getting original songs. The songs took a back seat to the recorded performance. You might have a preference for one performer or another, but anybody can play "Night and Day," "My Funny Valentine," or "Stardust" without paying deference to a previous performer. But anybody who sings "She Loves You" is singing a Beatles song. Even "Yesterday," one of the most-recorded songs of all time, remains a Beatles song covered by somebody else. From the mid-'60s on, most songs "belonged" to somebody, and that's who we wanted to hear sing them. More often than not, when a performer or band recorded a song, that arrangement, as well as the production, became the definitive version. "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," "Somebody to Love," "Stairway to Heaven," "Pretty Vacant," "Life During Wartime," "Falling and Laughing," "How Soon Is Now," "Fight the Power," "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Paranoid Android," "Can't Stand Me Now," and countless others were written, recorded, and finalized. Others performers could tackle them if they wanted to, but they'd be borrowing the original performer or band's cache as much as breathing their own life into the song.

Older rockers such as Rod Stewart, who's on his third album of standards if I remember correctly, are past their prime and aren't the draw as performers that they once were. Through no real fault of their own--all they did was get older and fall out of fashion, after all--they're not longer in a position to break their own new material. So they fall back on standards, songs that have their own appeal, to prop themselves up. A lot of times, such as in Rod's case, they have quite a bit of success with it. Some Baby Boomers feel betrayed when aging rockers turn to even older material. In their prime, many of these performers seemed to stand for being more than just entertainers, and for them to reveal their true identities as song-and-dance men or women can appear to be a letdown. But part of this is as much our own fault as that of the musicians. We invested them with power and expectations beyond what they deserved and probably desired. I'm not especially interested in hearing Rod Stewart's versions of these various standards, but I can hardly be surprised when he falls back on doing what he's always done--being a singer.