I grew up in the 1970s, with some great, classic music – Zeppelin, the Cars, Elvis Costello – as well as some crap. And I’m ashamed to say that I couldn’t always tell the difference.
Do any of you remember “Shannon”, by Henry Gross? For reasons I can no longer explain, I thought it was a pretty song; I even had the sheet music. Listening to it again, today, it’s a diabetic’s nightmare – three and a half minutes of sticky, sugary syrup. (And the sidebar of the YouTube page that’s the first hit on Google has, among other recommendations, “Please Come to Boston”, by Dave Loggins, which could be used to frost a cake. Oh, you naughty decade, you.) The chorus goes like this:
Shannon is gone, I hope she’s drifting out to sea
She always loved to swim away
Maybe she’ll find an island with a shady tree
Just like the one in our backyard
So, who the hell is Shannon, anyway? And where did she go? The song is frightfully vague about this crucial issue. So I took it at face value: Shannon was gone. The Beatles wrote “She’s Leaving Home”; Henry Gross wrote “Shannon”. And for the next thirty five years or so, I left it at that.
Some of you may know where this is going.
A couple weeks ago, my wife, She Who Must Be Taunted, and I were making our quarterly trip to BJ’s to purchase obscenely cheap pharmaceutical products, and somehow – and I cannot even begin to reconstruct the preceding conversation – “Shannon” came up. And SWMBT casually mentioned to me that it was about a dead dog.
I had two immediate reactions to the revelation. First, I felt like an idiot. Sure, the song doesn’t say that someone had died, but the rest of the song makes it clear that it’s about something more serious than some sort of extended vacation. On the other hand, it does err on the side of poetry at the expense of clarity – I mean, I understand that singing “Shannon is dead, etc.” would have kind of put a morbid crimp in the imagery, but really, people, it’s kind of hard to imagine Shannon finding an island if she’s no longer able to move. Or respirate. Or do anything associated with self-induced locomotion.
And my second reaction was: yeucch.
I don’t do morbidly mawkish. I can’t stand it. Lots of art puts heartbreak on a pedestal; but putting death on the pedestal, for me, is just beyond the pale. It’s like cutting yourself so you can feel pain. I understand that the fondness for this sort of thing isn’t unusual – the world is full of morbidly mawkish books, songs, movies. And clearly, many people love this. But I don’t.
You never can tell where people draw the line about art. When Elton John’s album Too Low For Zero came out, I had a college friend who went around for months yelling “I guess that’s why they call what the blues?” every time “I Guess That’s Why They Call It the Blues” came on the radio. Me? I can’t get on board with Shannon finding an island, but as far as I was concerned, Bernie Taupin didn’t need to make any sense at all for me to enjoy the music (and he frequently didn’t – I’m looking at you, “Someone Saved My Life Tonight”). And while I’ve memorized a number of Woody Allen routines and still find every one of them a riot, I went out with a woman once who told me that she never laughed at a joke more than once.
And I do get it that people miss their pets. Although it’s not clear who’s missing which dog in the backstory about “Shannon”. It’s either about Beach Boy Carl Wilson’s dog, or about Henry Gross’s dog, or both, and either one or both of the dogs were named Shannon, and either one or both of the dogs were dead, or something. In fact, I can’t rule out the possibility that no dogs were deceased in the making of this song, which would make it even more mawkish than it actually is.
I’m not trying to pass judgment here. I’m just kind of appalled that I used to like a song about a dead dog. So in case you’re wondering why my own songs are so relentlessly unsentimental, it’s mostly because I don’t want to hear them and think: yeucch.