George Michael

Wham!

Since learning last night the news of George Michael's demise — Christmas Night, of all nights — I have been a little at sea and without knowing what to say.

Gen Xers treating the year 2016 like some kind of mummy's curse of a year due to the loss of so many popular icons need to come to grips with the fact that all their childhood heroes are going to die someday. It's called time.

My own personal feelings of grief were better described when I said it feels as though all the doors of my life are closing behind me.

But there's more to that with George Michael, because he became my personal totem, in spite of or perhaps because he was widely seen as a has-been.

"You're a joke, George!" yelled James Cordon in a very funny scene he and George Michael performed together for Comic Relief five years ago. When George was regarded as a lightweight 80s pop star, I protested without irony that I love him and I love his work as my way of keeping it real.

He has such an incredible voice. At the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in early 1992, artists like Roger Daltrey, Robert Plant and Axl Rose embarrassed themselves trying to sing the songs of Queen. Only George Michael had the range and the soul to match the powerfully angelic Freddie.

Halloween 1988:
The year everyone dressed like George Michael.
(Click to enlarge.)

Like Freddie Mercury, George Michael's success in America was much shorter than it should have been due to lingering homophobia which, while it hasn't entirely gone away, no longer necessarily dooms one's career in the United States. First, artists simply passed as straight, but in the 1980s as many took risks walking that line of sexual ambiguity, George bravely or foolish stepped over it several times.

Finally forced entirely out of the closet in the late 90s due to a charge of cottaging, the American issue of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Best of George Michael was missing an amazing duet with Mary J. Blige of Stevie Wonder's "As" — again, who on earth could dare out-sing Stevie Wonder? — which led to rumors at that time that Blige's management did not want her associated with this "controversial" artist. Regardless, as an original single on the collection, it should have been a hit in the United States. It went to number four in Britain,

As my feelings about homosexuality evolved, as they have for so many straight men of my generation (I have written about this) George Michael kept pushing me in the direction of acceptance and understanding.

And there is more to it than even that. The fact is, I started to love both Wham! and then his solo work after the first tremendous blush of his popularity. In 1986, I dated someone who really liked his work, and I am nothing if not an emotional chameleon who immediately conforms to the artistic and cultural interests of the women I find appealing.

So, though I knew all the Make It Big hits that inundated the airwaves and MTV during my junior and senior years, it wasn't until "The Edge of Heaven" that I began listening to George Michael, you know, without prejudice. That one is aggressively sexual, but also suggests a fatalistic view of relationships, identifying sex as the one thing that keeps some of them together (see also, that summer's Peter Gabriel single, "Sledgehammer.") Not exactly the best lesson for a callow fellow about to enter college.

Highgate Cemetery (2024)

Working backward, the betrayal and deception inherent in hits like "Careless Whisper" and "Last Christmas" and the child-like response to a one-night-stand described in "Nothing Looks The Same In The Light," are a template for poor interpersonal relationships. Lying awake last night, thinking of songs like those and pretty everything on the album Faith, I was struck by how easily dismissed his music, production, performance and appearance was, while his lyrics tapped into this dark and shamefully honest corner of human behavior.

My new work, The Way I Danced With You, the one I took to Alaska and was further developed at Playwrights Local, was originally titled The George Michael Play. Several of his songs get name-checked, but it is really the underlying theme of his songs themselves which provided the inspiration for the script. While I never had any illusion about sharing this script with him, it is another thing altogether to have to accept that I never can.

UPDATE 5/3/2023: George Michael is now a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductee

Rock Hall, Revisited

Happy 65th Birthday, Sir.
Photo: Janet Macoska, Cleveland (1976)
Took the boy to see the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum today. Always been a big supporter of the Rock Hall, glad it's here where rock and roll, well, you know. Has always been really popular. Moondog Coronation Ball, Alan Freed. Brooklyn High. You know.

My wife and I checked out the hall shortly after it opened in September 1995. As the years have progressed, aspects of the hall remained firmly in the mid-90s. The 500 Most Influential Songs exhibit featured only a half-dozen tunes from that decade, and none since. The opening film, Mystery Train is an excellent short film, which shares, without narration, the different forms of early 20th century, American roots music which came together to inspire rock and roll by mid-century. But it was followed by another film (which felt much longer) called Welcome to Rock and Roll which attempted to describe the lasting legacy of rock, but was really an irritating collection of white, male artists (many now dead) lecturing us about why rock music is so important.

The upper floors change all the time, and is where most temporary exhibits are displayed, but the vast, main floor stayed in this time warp. No longer. Along with his new drum set, we gifted the boy tickets to the Hall (the boy is six, in reality he gets in free, we gave him the idea of going to the Rock Hall) and I was delighted to discover upon exiting Mystery Train that the second film had been eliminated! The other theater wasn't even there.

The Early Influences exhibit used to be a gallery of photos and a lot of reading about the pioneers of popular music. It now features touch screens to choose music by these artists, and for a time I thought I was never going to get the boy away from them. He wanted to hear everything from Woody Guthrie, and was seriously bopping to Willie Dixon's I Ain't Superstitious. I did my best to explain when he asked what Waist Deep in the Big Muddy is about, but the reasons for our involvement in Vietnam (and our enchantment with The Smothers Brothers) was a little complicated when there were so many pleasing diversions to be attended to right then.

A small boy is not so interested in artifacts; costumes and hand-written lyrics. When DMC's glasses were pointed out to him, he stated flatly, "I know, I saw them in a video." That's good enough, breathing the same air as Run's Adidas (His! Ah! Didas!) does not impress. The boy was much more enamored of the interactive exhibits, the escalators, and anything that had to do with technology that he could grasp and appreciated.

For example, guitars do not interest him. John Lennon's mellotron would be interesting, only you can't tell by looking at it how it works (it is actually quite fascinating) he was more into bass drum heads with the band's name painted onto them, and the exhibit featuring the advancement of sound reproduction from the wax cylinder to the iPod. He could also listen to Funkytown a thousand times straight, but didn't we all?

Concluding our tour in the Hall of Fame, watching short films of all of the artist, the boy observed, "They all smoke."

Yes, son. They do. That's rock and roll. And if you so much as touch a cigarette, I will kill you.