Dreams, Idols, and Beatles

Did you know that Ann Coulter and Al Pacino are brothers?

I didn’t know it until my wife told me. She’d read it in a magazine on an airplane. So I Googled it and saw that everyone essentially already knew this, and nobody bothered to mention it overtly. I couldn’t understand why.

Then I woke up.

Turns out Ann Coulter and Al Pacino are not related at all, and since Ann Coulter is, in fact, a woman, she’s not anyone’s brother. But somehow, in my dream, all of this made perfect sense.

That’s what’s so nifty about dreams. It’s not the strange things that happen; it’s the fact that nothing seems strange at the time. Individual dreams only last a maximum of about thirty seconds, so there’s no time for exposition. You can be driving down a road made of orange peels and have a dandelion growing out of your nose, but the thing that catches your attention is that someone stole the Diet Coke from your cupholder. Then you wake up and it takes a few minutes to sort it all out.

I only remember the dreams that get interrupted, like last night’s Coulter/Pacino incident. On occasion, I have fleeting memories of other dreams, but they dissolve if I try to bring them into focus. On my mission in Scotland, one of my companions kept a dream journal where he’d write down what he’d been dreaming immediately upon waking up. Then, before we’d begun our scripture study, we’d have a five-minute dream report. I’d try to remember something, but usually it was just broad strokes, like “I was flying” or something.

His were always much more specific, with funky details.

I’ll never forget the morning when he described how he’d walked into the loo only to find Bill Cosby smoking a cigar in his bathtub. When my companion told him to get out, he grumbled a bit and then stood up and left, leaving a tub filled with wet dog chow.

You can’t make that stuff up. At least, not consciously.

_____________________

The Cornells are not American Idol freaks, but we’re watching it off and on, particularly to cheer on the Utah folks. David Archuleta was back on his game last night, and it’s going to take an awfully big upset to keep him from winning this thing.

What’s interesting to me these past two weeks is how Beatles songs don’t really lend themselves to a singing competition. None of the Beatles would have won American Idol in their heydey, because while they were unique and distinctive, none of them were particularly showy vocalists. (Maybe Paul could have won it, but John? I doubt it. And certainly not George. Ringo? Ha.) Watching Idol wannabes sing “Yesterday” and “Blackbird” underscored just how understated Paul’s original vocals were.

It’s the songs themselves that are the stars, not the singers. Or maybe it’s that the singers are inseparably intertwined with the songs, making it impossible for anyone else to do them justice.

Michael Whatsisname’s butchering of “A Day In The Life” is the perfect example. That song is indelibly Lennon with a smattering of McCartney in the bridge. Vocally, the melody is deceptively simple, and the original arrangement throughout the majority of it is pedestrian. It’s the weird Beatlesy edges and unexpected transitions that make it unique, and none of them work in a cookie cutter, straight rock rendition thereof. It just comes across as scattered when it’s ripped out of its context.

In addition, the songs that do fit the kind of singalong meme that Idol embodies are the early Beatles moptop tunes, which, to be honest, are thoroughly mediocre as standalone songs. So we had Ramiele singing “I Should Have Known Better,” and she was eviscerated by the judges for a dippy arrangement that they failed to notice was lifted note-for-note from the original recording. Chikizie’s weird ballad/hoedown version of “I’ve Just Seen a Face” had a variation on the same problem – he was trying to gussy up a tune that wasn’t very interesting to begin with.

It’s also worthy of note that almost all the songs chosen on both Beatles nights were McCartney tunes, with just a couple of Lennons and a single Harrison – although, admittedly, “Here Comes the Sun” is one of the best Beatles melodies written by any of the Fab Four. Pop culture hails John as the supreme talent of the Beatles, but I think that has a lot to do with the strength of his personality and the fact that he died a tragic rock star’s death. When you stack up the actual songs, you discover that most of the really great ones are McCartney’s.

You can try to argue this, but if you search your feelings, you know it to be true.

That’s not to denigrate John, who’s “Strawberry Fields Forever” transformed the Beatles from a really fun boy band to the indelible icons they have become. But notice that none of the Idols chose to sing “Strawberry Fields Forever.” As a song, it’s unwieldy and difficult and strange. Whereas “Yesterday” has been covered more often than any other song on the face of the earth.

That’s why David Archuleta could take a song like “The Long and Winding Road” and make it something magnificent, but no one tried to do anything with “I Am the Walrus.” I guess it’s too harsh to say one song is better than the other, but clearly, one stands on its own as a song, independent of its singer, and the other is forever locked in time with John Lennon and the Magical Mystery Tour. They’re just two very different things. And only the McCartney things work for a show like American Idol.