Dead presidents: the music of elections, past, present and future

Well I ain’t broke but I’m badly bent, everybody loves them dead presidents – Willie Dixon*

As the Presidential electoral season shifts into full-throttle Aristotle mode, we need to gird ourselves for the incoming bombardment, and I can guarantee it will be vein-bursting. Candidates will glom onto anything that might give them an edge in the popularity stakes. Don’t expect them to limit their preferences to political rule only, which is punishing enough. They also want to pretend that they can feel our pain or understand our joys. After all, these are not totally self-absorbed people! They have the interests of the entire nation on their early bird, happy hour blue-plate specials. Music has always played a role here. That’s what this is about, with a bit of selective history along the way, as well as some predictions to boot.

My account starts in 1984, Ronald Reagan versus Walter Mondale for the highest office in the land. The Reagan people were searching for a big hit song to serenade his campaign. They settled for “Born in the USA” by Bruce Springsteen. They made two mistakes here. Firstly, they didn’t ask him. Secondly, they had no idea that it is an anti-war song. On top of this, Springsteen summarily turned them down. Walter Mondale perhaps then uttered the only cogent words of his disastrous effort: “Bruce Springsteen might have been born to run, he might have been born in the USA, but he wasn’t born yesterday.” Somewhat perplexed, the Ronald Reagan handlers opted for another popular song by Michigan rocker Bob Seger entitled Main Street. It was brought to their attention that this was all about action at a local bar, and the central characters were hookers, pimps, drunks, pole dancers, users, dealers and gangbangers. They abandoned this idea too. In that particular election, Reagan trounced Mondale, who only won his home state. This gave birth to the bumper sticker often seen around then. It read “Don’t Blame Minnesota.”

How tiring was it listening to the Fleetwood Mac hits from their huge 1977 album Rumors? If that music had any value, it was lashed to death. Other songs come to mind here: Hotel California by the bleeding Eagles, or the endlessly tedious Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin. So once it seemed like we had gotten over that Fleetwood Mac phase which lasted at least a decade or more on the Wurlitzer, Bill Clinton decided he wanted to be prez. His 1992 campaign tune was “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.” Clinton went so far as to remind us that, in his opinion, Fleetwood Mac was the greatest rock and roll band of all time. That should have been a harbinger of things to come. Luckily for Bill Clinton, most people, at least those who vote, weren’t thinking too hard about tomorrow, today or even yesterday back then. If they wanted clues, all they had to do was ask any Arkansas State Trooper (his personal car service drivers to the local knocking shop).

There is always a story within a story, and this one bears telling. The 1996 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago is remembered for Al and Tipper Gore dancing the Macarena on the stage at the United Center, where the Chicago Bulls play basketball. Prior to full-blown gentrification, this was a pretty rough West Side Chicago neighborhood. I know it well. I have two dear friends who ran a print shop less than half a mile away down Fulton Street. The Henry Horner Homes, a poor and entirely black housing project, was right around the corner. Immediately before the convention, this estate was temporarily cleared of all residents. Believe that. In a classic Stalin village maneuver, billboards of flowerpots, pussy cats, sausage dogs and budgies were placed in the windows. All of the local mailboxes were removed. My friends’ warehouse business building was visited and vetted by the cops. Snipers took up permanent position on the roof throughout the event. Nearby was Monroe Street, the scene of the 1969 murder of the young Black Panther organizer Fred Hampton by the Chicago police and the FBI. This was a dark and bloody ground. The misery that community suffered so that Al and Tipper could waddle with Hillary and Bill on national television is part of this presidential music narrative too.

As a reminder, Tipper Gore was no friend of salty and controversial music. She was the founder of the Parents Music Resource Center (the PMRC), the people who tagged records with warning stickers about explicit lyrics. They went after the likes of Public Enemy, Black Sabbath, Prince, Judas Priest, Madonna, and many others. Tipper Gore was nothing but a moralistic censor. Her hubby Al, regarded by some as an environmentalist, must have forgotten all of that clean air stuff when he was photographed during the Vietnam war as a junior army officer conferring with General William Westmoreland, the instigator of the scorched earth strategy and the architect of dispensing Agent Orange dioxin defoliant over there. The Macarena and the Inconvenient Truth came later.

This current crop has already cast their votes for their desert island discs. Thanks to the New York Times and the internet, we know their musical tastes, or what they think they want us to know about their musical tastes. The dropout Beto O’Rourke favors “The Clampdown” by The Clash. This is quite insulting, since his father-in-law literally owns a large chunk of El Paso, Texas. Bill de Blasio is also a Clash fan. (You see Strummer, you see what you started!) Amy Klobuchar likes “Bullpen” by Dessa. Don’t blame Minnesota (or poor young Dessa for that matter). Cory Booker, who exudes an exaggerated, irritating concern for the reputation of the Democratic Party above all else, has settled for Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day,” a beautiful number. Unfortunately, its message evokes too many memories of the male Clinton’s anthem back in 1992, feel-good stuff. Elizabeth Warren is a Dolly Parton follower of the “Nine to Five” variety. I don’t know what to make of this, other than it’s the old Harvard-educated lawyer friend of the working class routine. And Bernie… well he picks “Power to the People” by John Lennon, which is a step up from “Imagine,” the Kumbaya of anybody remotely to the left of David Duke.

I shudder to think what the Trump music volume could be – probably it’s made up of songs by musicians who pledge fealty only to the Bwana himself. Lest I am considered to be of the partisan persuasion here, I refer to a person far more qualified than myself to take a stab at this, Bill Carney (aka Clermont Ferrand) of the French band Les Sans Culottes. Bill is a smarty. He can predict the future. Here is a sample of his Donald Trump playlist: “In the Year 2525” by Ziegler & Evans; “Waiting for the End of the World” by Elvis Costello; “The Stinking Rich” by David Johansen; “Family Affair” by Sly and the Family Stone; “Do the Boob” by The Real Kids; and “Ball of Confusion” by the Temptations.

It should be noted that the Trump gang continuously finds devious ways to play particular songs at his rallies without the artists’ consent. They rely on obscure venue licensing laws to create loopholes in the intellectual property front. These weasels have even managed to piss off Axl Rose!

Consider this treatise as a primer for what is to come in mainstream politics. You can always hit the mute button or forget to don your Walmart reading glasses. I’ve done both. 

*”Dead Presidents” is a Willie Dixon song written in 1963, one of his good ones and there were plenty of those. Willie Dixon was the bass player in the Muddy Waters Band, a tough electric blues outfit. His intention in the song was no doubt to explain the difficult circumstances that many people found themselves to be in, mostly through no fault of their own. Willie Dixon was an imprisoned draft resister during World War Two. He refused to fight for a government that treated his community with such wanton abuse. He died in 1992. He is an American music legend.

Mike Morgan