The soft-rock President - Bill Clinton's taste in rock music is satirically examined - Column

National Review, April 12, 1993 by Andrew Ferguson

As if Bill Clinton didn't have enough problems, grumblings about his tenure are already being heard within the rock 'n' roll community. Members of the community, you'll recall, supported Clinton with an ardor matched only by the Esperanto-speaking and clothing-optional communities. His was supposed to be the first rock 'n' roll Presidency, carried in on a euphoric wave of Arsenio and MTV, jokey allusions to Elvis, and a reunited Fleetwood Mac.

The Carter era had once held out the same promise--Willie Nelson, after all, smoked a joint with one of Jimmy's spawn on the White House roof. But Clinton seemed capable of so much more. The possibilities were breathtaking: Sting chanting tribal songs in the Rose Garden, Axl Rose terrorizing chambermaids in the Lincoln Bedroom, Ozzy Osbourne munching bats outside the diplomatic entrance to the West Wing.

Now, alas, reality is settling in. The first discordant notes were sounded in Rolling Stone's exhaustive coverage of the Inaugural extravaganzas. Community members bristled when lightweights like Michael Bolton and Kenny G took the stage and valuable airtime. "Just because Clinton can play the sax," groused a member of Megadeth, "doesn't mean he knows what rock 'n' roll is about." Another rocker was even more dismissive: "Bet Hillary Clinton likes James Taylor and Dan Fogelberg. Every victory has its price, folks, and this one's gonna make your head blow up."

I'm not certain what this last remark means, precisely, but the derisive tone is unmistakable. Members of the rock 'n' roll community, like members of all communities, can be difficult to please, but why, one wonders, are they so easy to surprise? To serious students of candidate Clinton, the rock affectations seemed as spurious as his devotion to a middle-class tax cut or Haitian refugees. The evidence was plain. At a campaign fundraiser, Barbra Streisand serenaded the candidate with a rendition of "The Way We Were"--a song that doctors who treat rock 'n' roll fans use routinely as an emetic. Yet, as Miss Streisand threw her head back and squeezed the melody through her sinuses, Clinton didn't flinch. He beamed. His eyes watered. He mouthed the words.

Even more definitive was an interview the candidate granted People last summer. Surveying the record cellection in the governor's mansion in Little Rock, the interviewer asked Clinton "what album he would save if his house caught fire." After what must have been an interminable period of lower-lip-biting, the governor replied: "That's a tough choice. [Aren't they all!] But if I had to take only one, it would probably be Judy Collins's Colors of the Day."

As it happens, this album, though it was released in 1971, is still in print, available to any person who seeks a window onto our President's tastes-- or who himself has a taste for 1960s folkie nostalgia. The cover shows Judy Collins at her most fetching, wandering a deserted beach, alone with her thoughts--the implication being that her thoughts are not small ones. The cover photo, in fact, is indistinguishable from a dozen others of the same vintage. Twenty years ago deserted California beaches were swarming with pop stars trying to get their cover photos taken as they wandered alone with their thoughts--Neil Young might trip over Richie Havens, who had just stepped on Joan Baez's foot, after she had backed into Joni Mitchell's photographer. This is one reason they all moved to Aspen.

Open Colors of the Day, and that distant time comes alive. On the inside cover, in a typescript familiar from Hallmark greeting cards, Judy Collins has reprinted a verse of her song lyrics, which also bears that special Hallmark touch:

  What I'll give you since you asked
Is all my time together
Take the rugged sunny days
The warm and rocky weather
Take the roads that I have walked
    along
Looking for tomorrow's time
Peace of mind.

The lines are indicative of the album's unvarying mood. Most of the songs are in a minor key, sparsely arranged, humorless, self-absorbed, skirting the edges of intelligibility. One tune stands out: "Farewell to Tarwathie," a sea chantey sung over a background recording of humpback whales. At the time the song was considered an eloquent plea for the survival of the bulbous beasts. Today it seems almost designed to make an MTV viewer's head blow up.

It is a hard image to dislodge: the President of the United States, leader of the world's sole remaining superpower, listening with eyes closed to the groans of humpback whales, echoing through the briny deeps. I doubt that Colors of the Day is much listened to any more, outside the White House and those progressive college towns like Ann Arbor and Madison and Lawrence, where aging doctoral students sit cross-legged on futons in rental housing, sipping Celestial Seasons and daydreaming of the earlier, happier days that Colors evokes so effectively. It is with them, with Judy Collins and the balding teaching assistants, and not in the more bumptious precincts of rock 'n' roll, that our President's heart unquestionably lies. Their happy days are here again. And Megadeth, like the rest of us, is just going to have to live with it.