Somewhere In The Night, the American Dreamer Stands Tattered, But Tall
Michael Stanley
April 3, 2008
Tangiers Nightclub
Akron, Ohio. The American Dream hasn't completely rusted out and corroded; the ones who've been left shipwrecked and shattered by the shards of the promises made do their best to tie knots from the tatters and hang on. It isn't barren, not like Youngstown, but it is a vast expanse of nondescript strip malls, chain restaurants and giant windows displaying the overly draped, gathered tafetta dresses for a certain kind of prom.
The locals have figured out how to keep the faith... keep the spark of whatever it was that fired them, made them feel so alive back when... It is a hard way to believe, but these people have been doing it for years. Like Michael Stanley, the man who sold more tickets in a single run at Cleveland's outdoor amphitheatre than anyone, who went clean for a two-night stand at the Coliseum faster than Led Zeppelin.
He's always articulated their truth, told their stories, embodied their shot at the prize.
Back then, they had feathered hair, Jordache jeans, sticky shiny lipgloss applied too thick, driving Camaros with low rumbles under the hood. In the lobby of Tangiers, a faded '40s supper club in the once proud rubber town, very little -- perhaps only the waist bands -- has changed as they mill around, waiting to genuflect at the altar of what was once, but isn't now.
Or is it?
Michael Stanley, who wrote the songs for these less than recognized cogs in the blue collar wheel, has never stepped down, never quite given up. If the best there was was a Top 5 hit he didn't even sing, that wasn't what mattered. What mattered was connecting, being seen, being recognized for the heroism in your daily survival...
And so once again, for two weekends as winter finally dies, the local faithful can come and watch a man burn. Maybe you've never heard of him, but they have, indeed, they've not just lived, but breathed these songs. They come - 15 years now -- because that's what you do when you believe.
Fuck the economy... the prospects... the world closing in around you...
This is a night to stand proud. They order lite beer, booze on the rocks, shift in their chairs, waiting, knowing they're gonna get what they came for. Even if they can't quite tell you what it is.
Taking the stage in black pants and a black poets shirt, this man most have never heard of straps on a low-slung Telecaster, leans into his mic and intones, "There's rumors of angels tonight, but I'm not sure what to believe..."
It is the first song on a latter day solo album released on his own label. It is about the price beyond dollars paid to live with one's head -- and dreams -- held high.
"Soldiers leave their blood, lovers leave their hearts,
"Scholars leave their wisdom, poets leave their art
"We all leave something, every time we try to take the ground..."
Like so many of the new songs, it doesn't cut as deep into the audience's conscious past as the echoes of the songs they heard growing up, ingrained in those moments of becoming who they were, now central to reigniting that spark deep inside and perhaps forgotten. No matter how hard it may have grown, that germ of coming of age remains... and in this song they may not know cognitively, but somewhere a deeper truth is revealed.
Which is why they come... to a place that's seen better days... to see a man who is at best a footnote... But the man who - as he writes in his own anthemic "Midwest Midnight," a song from 1974 - "plays all the hits that you wanna hear," he also plays all night long... three hours and counting, reprising thirty years of making music, not for the fame or the glory or the money, but because he has to...
Having to says a lot about the way it is at the margins. It makes that need to be recognized, to flex the better - almost imagined valliant places - that much more necessary. It's a mandate.
And his band, a scrappy group of folks who flex and foment in the moments of musical reckoning, expand and glory in the flourishes, the solos, the tension created, does, too. They never got their shot, either. For them, this is the moment to believe in: right now, how sweet songs played can be... and it's not about how big or glaring, but how hard you can detonate those people in front of you with their own sense of how it was.
For reference, the Michael Stanley Band was the rock & roll capitol of the world's shot at the prize. If Asbury Park had Bruce Springsteen, Detroit had Bob Seger, the small towns of Indiana had John Cougar Mellencamp, Cleveland's contender was Michael Stanley, who wrote as well, looked as good and sang with a mahogany baritone of knowing, sex, desire and refusing to be the faceless factory man who was grateful for random scraps, resigned to a life where he took what was given.
It worked. At least in Northern Ohio.
His shows - buoyed by surging raves like "In The Heartland," about the rites of passage for working class kids, and searing ballads of ardor in the face of betrayal "Lover" - became altar calls. A sweat-stained stations of the cross before the best shot you - or one of your own - had of "making it."
Michael Stanley sang our songs.
He still does. Though rather than 25,000 people crammed onto the lawn at Blossom Music Center for five consecutive nights, it's several hundred in the chill of Midwestern April. But the passion is no less, the will - no, the need - to be restored is perhaps even more urgent.
It is not about how they play, though they give everything they can muster and find updrafts in places most would collapse from exhaustion, it is about holding the matches and maintaining the flame of their youth one more time. It is also about how resonant rock & roll, played tight with a real low pilot light that's slow burn packs more heat than a blaze of glory which flashes and is gone, can be three decades on.
And Stanley knows about the betrayal of the dream. This is not music for sissies. In college, he wrote "Rosewood Bitters," IDed on the legendary live STAGEPASS as "the first song on the first Michael Stanley album," a song that considered the rootlessness of a life on the road where one's reason for forging on was one's only constant companion: the songs.
It was followed by the cynic's book-ends, songs about the shattering indifference of "the business of music." Written as a fan caught within the centrifugal reality of commerce over art, "Midwest Midnight" and the hippie jam "Let's Get The Show On The Road" as acerbic an indictment of how the white-hot-right-now gets cast aside with no more thought than a used Kleenex.
"Chasing the fame keeps'em all in the game
But money's still the way they keep score
And nobody told you that you would grow old,
strung out like some avenue whore"
It's not about looking back in anger, it's about tempering one's view.
Shit happens. The roof caves in. The team strikes out. We're here now. Let's live.
And live they do. Even as they string a wire from back then to now... As guitarist Danny Powers hurls his voice over the high wire of departed bandmate Jonah Koslen's fidelity beyond forever ballad "Nothing's Gonna Change My Mind," or knowing coquette Jennifer Lee slows down and softens the want of StanLey's "I"ll Never Need Anyone More" to a sultry puff of desire, this is the proof that these songs will last, stand up, hold their center even as the world hurls toward places we'd never steer towards by choice.
It also proves that personal insurgency comes in many stripes, shades, rhythms.
To not just make Lou Reed elegant - as the languishingly plucky "Sweet Jane" is rendered - but to insert an Indian peyote chant is to demonstrate the elasticity of rock and roll when it's understood. If you know the canvas you're painting on, anything is possible... and it is a lesson for those gathered.
Indeed, in the elegance, there is elegy. For a man who was always a cautionary rocker - "In Between the Lines" was about recognizing how much more there is than what they show you -- the reckoning now is tempered with sweetness.
"You can't take prisoners when you live on the run," he exhales in the final verse of "Spanish Nights," the love that can't be's pool of stoic survival and winsome embrace, "and this town it will finish anything you've begun."
Head held high, there is dignity in maintaining one's poise in the backdraft of emotions.
But there is also - and the couples who the entangled slow dances and first kisses that seemed to be all one would require - redemption. If the late '70s "Falling In Love Again" prompted the portly man before me to run his hand up the leg of the absolutely middle aged woman he'd come with, seeking something more than carnal purchase, it was "Somewhere In The Night" that offered a map for the future from the past.
Having left the stage after 2 hours and 45 minutes, Stanley same back with just original keyboardist Bob Pelander, who played rippling runs as the guitarist considered what it all meant. Talking softly over the shimmering piano notes, the man who - like most everyone in the room came up short of where they dreamed they would be - offered a truth so far beneath the surface, it struck a blow for the defiance of hope in ways most churches, self-help groups and obfuscators for the haves can't glimpse.
"You know, the truth is you just don't know...," he began, talking to the audience in that smoky baritone. "You never know. Tonight just might be the best night of your life... Maybe you'll fall in love, or write a great song... Maybe your kids'll do something you'd never imagined... or your baby will be born... or the band will play the best show of their lives.
"You can't know, but you gotta be open to that... and the reason you know it might is because of everything that's already happened."
He refers to every moment that's ever made you feel alive. "Somewhere In The Night" was born a glistening bit of AM pop splendor celebrating the moment you know what love is, your absolute surrender of heart and hormones, your innocence engaged and engorged. It is that euphoria of emerging from frustration and feeling misunderstood to be cherished and realizing something greater.
"People say that I'm crazy," he intones slower now, "livin' in the past,
"But all you get to keep are the mem'ries
"So you gotta make the good ones last..."
His voice is tired, It is as naked a vocal performance as any, staying with the words with whatever breath is left, yet in that moment, Stanley is manly, tender, willing, but especially appreciative of life's rich pageant. He understands the tides, recognizes that while avarice creates certain bounties - bounties that are flagrantly apparent in this age of greed and justification - there's a soul tax that can't be measured. It is a tax he's clearly avoided - and in his truth, the audience's state of soul is also reflected.
Guitarist Marc Lee Shannon, who'd performed a song from his own record earlier in the set, emerges from the wings and the pair trade vocal lines, circling and rising and falling until the circuitry of music had no beginning or ending, just the moment of being. Being and everything.
After all of the glory, all of the hardcore downstrokes on Telecasters and Les Pauls, the bleeding sax solos spilling over the melodies like syrup on pancakes, drenching them with warmth and sweetness, it comes down to this: know what you have, know what it's worth, cherish that rather than wasting time seeking what you can't have and losing your life in the bitter unrealized process.
As the ultimate punctuation of the spell he's weaved, Stanley reaches not for his own songbook, but for the Glimmer Twins Keith & Mick to close out the evening. Slowly unwrapping an incredibly pensive redux of "You Can't Always Get What You Want," the catharsis of having one's needs met becomes the ultimate release. It is about a loping groove that is almost part of the cultural DNA, but also the profound truth of knowing you shall have what you need... if you're willing to want it, to see it, to recognize it.
In Akron, Ohio, where there's not much reason to believe, a 60-year old almost rock star may not seem like much. But as the sound of that last chord dies out and the assembled crowd spills into the frosty night - a little drunker, a little taller, a little more looking to get a little - they got what they came for, and more.
Sure, they remembered when. Yes, they mainlined the glory of working proud, loving hard, being enough. But they also had that flicker of knowing what was isn't over: it's right there inside. All they have to do is turn up the music and let it drift up to the top.
Facts aren't feelings. But feelings -- like memories -- are the one thing no one can take away.
Michael Stanley may not be living the dream, but he's living proof. Three hours later, proud, defiant, strong, he believes in the songs, the people, the reasons to play. If he can, they can... and in that, there is a future worth living within the bleakness.
