Two weeks ago, the singer/songwriter Eric Carmen passed away at the age of 74. Carmen was the frontman for early Seventies power pop pioneers the Raspberries (“Go All the Way”) and had solo hits like the FM staple “All by Myself” (1975), “Never Gonna Fall in Love Again” (1976), and—less iconic but still an earworm—“Hungry Eyes” (1987).

So what was the headline on NJ.com?

“Trump Supporting Singer, Songwriter Dies.”

Wow. Setting aside the question of comma usage, that one really made my brow go up.

I wasn’t a particularly big fan of Carmen’s, though I liked the Raspberries fine, and since his death we’ve been regaled with tales of how all kinds of critically revered rockers from Lennon to Springsteen were fans. And frankly, if you support or supported Trump, I don’t really care if your reputation gets besmirched: in my book, you’ve already besmirched yourself—bad.

But still, that headline was striking.

You can live a whole life, accomplish some pretty significant things, and when you die, still be reduced to a single incident or aspect of your time here on Earth, if that thing is explosive enough.

Whatever happened to nil nisi bonum?

I suppose one could argue that the headline is not derogatory—that that’s just my bias. Indeed, right wingers might even consider it complimentary. Carmen was undeniably a Trump supporter; that is simple fact, not a qualitative judgment. (In theory.) NJ.com later amended the headline to read, “Legendary Singer/Songwriter, Who Faced Widespread Backlash for Supporting Trump, Dies at 74.” That is also purely factual and 100% accurate, and as a bonus, correctly uses the slash in place of the comma.

So if that verdict on Eric Carmen’s feels damning, maybe it’s just karma.

As my friend Tom Hall says: Sow –> Reap.

BLAME IT ON THE RAIN (OR IMMIGRANTS)

Carmen’s death put me in mind of another obituary, from almost 26 years ago—the one the New York Times ran reporting on the death by overdose of the singer Rob Pilatus, one-half of the‘80s pop duo Milli Vanilli. MV, you may recall, imploded when it was revealed that Pilatus and his partner Fab Morvan had not actually sung the vocals on their hit second album Girl You Know It’s True (1989), or presumably, the one before that, if anyone cared.

The obit’s headline read: “Robert Pilatus, 32, Performer In Disgraced Band Milli Vanilli.”

Really, New York Times? Is it not enough that this man suffered that public humiliation that ended his career? Do you have to bring it up in the headline of his obituary? Jesus Christ, do you have to put the word disgraced in there too? Ya didn’t even call him a “singer,” just a “performer.”

(Fwiw, the Gray Lady’s more respectful obit of Carmen was titled, “Eric Carmen, Raspberries Frontman and ‘All by Myself’ Singer, Dies at 74.”)

In retrospect, the idea that once upon a time a pop star could suffer career-ending scandal over lip synching is as quaint—and sad—as the idea that a politician could have his career destroyed because he once sought treatment by a psychiatrist, or because he teared up in front of reporters. Subsequently, the German producer Frank Farian, the svengali behind Milli Vanilli, put out an album featuring the actual session singers under the name The Real Milli Vanilli, which got them in copyright trouble with the Irish Republican Army offshoot The Real IRA. And both got sued by The Real Real.

For my money, Rob got a much crappier deal than Eric, whose sins were considerably uglier.

Carmen was fairly combative about his support for Trump. (I’ve been trying for days to come up with a decent pun regarding “Carmen” and “karma,” without success.) Faced with the aforementioned backlash, and threats of boycotts of his music, he tweeted:

If you want to hate me, just know this. I love the USA, I support our brave military men and women, I support the police and firefighters, I support our President and the First Lady, I believe in civility, and I do not want to live in a Socialist country. That is what I believe.

This is classic Trumpist bullshit, of course: professing a belief in “civility” while supporting the most vulgar and divisive US president in American history; and crowing over alleged support for the military and law enforcement while deifying a man who derided American war dead as “losers and suckers,” and who “backs the blue” by lionizing the January 6^th insurrectionists who attacked the Capitol Police.

Carmen even feuded online with Peter Frampton about Trump. Evidently, Eric did not feel like Peter do:

I love your music, Pete, but I would never presume to tell you, or anyone else, what network they should watch. I respect your right to disagree with me, and you should respect my right to disagree with you. That used to be the way things worked here in the USA. Carry on.

This, too, is classic Trumpism: claiming to respect the rights of others while backing a politician who would gleefully trample all over those rights, and professing to have the vapors over telling someone what to think while cheering an authoritarian regime. Though English by birth, Frampton is a US citizen, so there may also have been some “Fuck off back to Blighty” subtext in Eric’s response. Trumpies don’t like immigrants, you know.

But I am not here to engage in an online debate with Eric Carmen’s ghost. (I’ll do that later, over on Reddit.)

There are a fair number of pop musicians who are pro-Trump: Kid Rock, Ted Nugent, Mike Love, to name just a few. Spot the commonality? I dunno why, but conservative politics somehow correlate strongly with shitty music. On that point, the artists whose right wing politics really sting for me are folks like Exene Cervenka or Moe Tucker of the Velvet Underground, who actually gave us something worth listening to, once upon a time anyway. (But neither of them have made noteworthy music in years.) I won’t count Kanye, because of his self-evident mental illness. Expanding to the UK, I’ve written about my angst over Morrissey’s open embrace of neo-fascism, and we need not even discuss Eric Clapton. Going into an older generation, we find the likes of Wayne Newton. Pre-dating Trump, Andy Williams was a virulent Obama hater, but he was approximately 147 years old at the time, and died in 2012, so I don’t forgive it, but it’s a bit more understandable. The strain of Trumpism in country music speaks for itself, but in rock and hip hop it just seems weird and counterintuitive. Trump has also gotten in trouble with rockers ranging from REM to Neil Young to the Stones, Rhianna, Adele, Pharrell, and Queen for playing their hits at his rallies without permission. (“When you’re a star, the let you do it,” right? Not according to entertainment attorneys.)

Still, the idea that this piece of Eric Carmen’s life should overshadow everything else is noteworthy. Maybe it looms largest because of how raw and volatile American politics are at the moment. The aggressiveness of his pro-Trump stance late in life did overwhelm his musical career, so perhaps the headlines were an accurate reflection of that. Or maybe if he had been a bigger star, his politics would have been less prominent in his eulogies—or maybe that would have made them more prominent. The rise of Trump created a litmus test in America, as a measure of susceptibility to race-bating, xenophobia, and demagoguery, as well as an affinity for autocracy. It is shocking how many of our countrymen, famous and not, including our friends and neighbors and family members, failed it.

I suppose it’s better to know that about them than not know it.

LOWFALUTIN

Obituaries are an odd and curious thing. For a brilliant look inside that world, I recommend Obit, the 2016 feature documentary about the New York Times’s obituary desk, directed by my friend, the filmmaker and composer Vanessa Gould. Watching these writers craft little mini-novels out of the life stories of the recently deceased who have been assigned to them offers a strangely profound insight into the melancholy and ephemeral nature of our lives. Not to get too highfalutin about it.

Some years ago, my wife Ferne Pearlstein and I interviewed Carl Reiner for our feature documentary The Last Laugh (2016). He was 90 or 91 at the time, and told us, “Any morning I wake up and don’t see myself in the obituaries, it’s a good day.” (Words to that effect have been widely circulated and attributed to Carl; they even provided the title of a documentary about him called If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast.)

Asked how his obituary writer would reconcile his dark solo work with his Oscar-winning songs for Pixar, a characteristically lachrymose Randy Newman dismissed the whole premise, opining glumly that his obituary will inevitably be titled, “Randy Newman, Composer of ‘Short People,’ Dies.”

He’s probably right. But it would be like a headline reading, “Paul McCartney, Co-Writer of ‘Ebony and Ivory,’ Dies.”

But here’s the thing. Life is unforgiving. The editors—or junior staffers—who slap a headline on an obituary (the obit writers themselves usually do not handle that task) are naturally seeking to distill an entire human life down to its essence—in the piece itself, usually just a few hundred words, and even more so in a succinct header. It would be almost journalistic malpractice to do otherwise. If one were able to look down (or up) from the afterlife and read one’s obit, it might be a sobering summary of what we did or did not do with our time here on Earth.

In other words, be careful what you do in life. 

“In the years since I made Obit,” Vanessa Gould told me, “I’ve noticed a slightly unexpected thing about obituaries in the digital age—that they do begin to serve as the de facto record of someone’s life, in a way they aren’t necessarily designed for. A kind of Twitter effect. Often I’ll see language cut and pasted from an obit and later repurposed as a bio, and soon it’s the primary source. A kind of successive diminishment due to the instantaneous nature of digital information and ease of repurposing. In a way, the original motivations behind an obit aren’t really designed for that.”

“In particular, I think the fuss around obit headlines shifted in the Internet age when clicks became trackable and measurable. I’m no authority, but often it seems they invoke the simplistic cultural myth the person might eventually embody….and that, of course, has much more to do with dominant culture than with the person.”

“None of this is really the fault of the obit or its design, by the way. It’s about the way we fling content around on the Internet.”

What are the headlines for controversial figures like Woody Allen or Louis CK going to look like when they die? The question speaks to the dilemma of separating the art from the artist, and which takes precedence. Already history is going back and revising its assessment of “problematic” figures (to use the popular term) like Picasso, Celine, Woodrow Wilson, the Founding Fathers, and just about any other powerful white male you care to name. It really gets tricky when you track back to the ancient Greek philosophers.

When Trump dies, his own obit will be cause for rejoicing by tens of millions of Americans. Recall the dancing in the streets of many cities—in the US and abroad—when it was announced that Biden beat him in November 2020. When you’ve lived your life in such a way that millions of people rejoice at your defeat and failure, that does not speak well of you. But I am not overeager for the arrival of that event: I want Don to face accountability in this life, not just the next (if you believe in that sort of thing). A premature exit would rob us of justice—and Aileen Cannon, Sam Alito, et al are already working on that. His bungalow in the Ninth Circle of Hell can wait; first comes the Supermax federal prison in Florence, CO.

NOT WITH A BANG

Somewhere I have a book of poems by T.S. Eliot (frontman for Tommy and the Hollowmen, who also had a solo hit with the Allman Brothers cover “Eat a Peach.”) After the title page and before the main body of the text, there is a simple, mostly blank page that simply reads, “T.S. Eliot, 1888-1965.”

That always struck me. Is that all there is to say about the man? Might not that piece of information be rolled into a longer biographical sketch….and if not, is it so important that it merits a standalone page?

The dark view is that, for most of humanity, the bookends of our time on this mortal coil are about all there is to say: all we are is dust in the wind, as some of Eric Carmen’s late Seventies AOR contemporaries once sang. But a more humane view is that each of us leads a rich and complex existence that touches everyone around us, and every one of our actions ripples out in ways great and small.

As the lawyer and human rights advocate Bryan Stephenson says (in his 2014 book Just Mercy), each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. I certainly do not want to be judged by or remembered for my worst act or moment. But ongoing support for a vile, neo-fascist political candidate is more than just a single aberration or one bad afternoon. It’s a pattern of behavior that speaks to the whole person.

So don’t be remembered for supporting an asshole who is doing his damnedest to ruin this country.

*********

Photo: NJ.com story about Eric Carmen’s death, March 12, 2024

Thanks to Joe McGinty for the thought experiment re Picasso et al.