Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
The Mountain Goats invade the pilot's airspace. Also: Will the new all-luxury airlines survive?
Nov 11, 2005 | "Love the column; been reading it since you started. But the obsessive music posts have got to go. I own 1,500 CDs, so believe me I sympathize with the need to talk about music. Nevertheless, this week's article was excruciating."
That from reader Matt Miller on the heels of my Nov. 4 airplanes-in-music segment. This column is known and hopefully appreciated for its frequent diversions, and while nobody has asked that I justify this practice, allow me to do so anyway:
Salon is a magazine covering news, politics, lifestyles and the arts. It's not an aviation site. Frankly, I have no desire to write for an audience with a predisposed interest in flight, but fitting a weekly article to the appetites and curiosities of non-aerophiles requires some creative handiwork and a need, at times, to chart an unusual course. Across the world, more than 3 million people fly every day; air travel impacts our lives, cultures and economies like almost nothing else. Yet there are very few media sources out there willing to peer beneath the tarmac, as it were, and take people beyond the typical business page reportage on bankruptcies, labor troubles and safety scandals. At heart, my mission has always been to make airplanes, airports and the airlines fascinating in ways that people do not expect -- to uncover the strange beauty of what, to the layperson, appears to be a purely mundane and prosaic industry. To that end have come conversations, some more tangential than others, about everything from religion to graphic design to, yes, music.
And with that taken care of, a complimentary copy of "Ask the Pilot" is presently winging its way to David Pille of Houston, who was first in line to correctly name the two 1980s songs that paid a lyrical tribute to the band Hüsker Dü. The answers:
1. "Somethin' to Dü," by Minneapolis rivals the Replacements, from the scrappiest garage record ever made, "Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash." Released in 1981, the song predated the Hüskers' rise to art-rock sainthood by at least a few years. "It ain't nothin' new," growls Paul Westerberg in an underhanded salute. "It's somethin to Dü!" (It's a serviceable cut, but the album's strongest moment comes at the end with "Raised in the City," one of the most euphorically raucous anthems of all time .) A Replacements discography also includes at least one airplane song, "Waitress in the Sky," from 1985's "Tim." In the final stanza, a reference to the old Republic Airlines, today part of Northwest, was switched to "Reunion" after worries of libel.
2. "The Thing That Only Eats Hippies," by the Dead Milkmen. This was never a band to take very seriously, but the Milkmen are owed acknowledgment for the line: "Now he's got a sweet tooth for long hair/ So Bob and Greg and Grant you best beware!" It's a playful recognition of the Hüskers' genre-busting blend of sonic power and hippie sensibilities. And, of course, there was Grant Hart's hair.
Numerous e-mailers cited Sonic Youth's "Screaming Skull," as well as the Posies' rather lovely "Grant Hart." However, both of these are 1990s vintage. I chose to have an '80s cutoff because I've always despised Sonic Youth so much that I refuse to let them into my contest. All told, no fewer than 14 different songs have, at one time or another, referenced Hüsker Dü.
Oddly, perhaps, in three separate discussions of aviation-themed songs I've neglected to mention one of the most enchanting, and perhaps my personal favorite. The honor goes to a beautiful and in some ways terrifying song called "International Small Arms Traffic Blues," from indie rock darlings the Mountain Goats. "My love is like a Cuban plane," sings John Darnielle in an eerie, bewitching deadpan, "flying from Havana, up the Florida coast to the 'Glades; Soviet made."
Darnielle scores extra points for remembering that Cuba's aircraft are primarily of Russian construction, though the country's national airline, Cubana, now leases the occasional Boeing and Airbus to augment its graying fleet of Antonovs, Yaks and Ilyushins.
Mountain Goats bassist Peter Hughes grew up with aviation. His father was a flight-test technician for McDonnell Douglas, and worked on everything from the DC-10 through the military C-17 programs. That may or may not explain why the band's songs are so perfect for the iPod while traveling, or why Hughes, to my pleasant surprise, turns out to be an "Ask the Pilot" reader.
"My feelings about flying are complicated," he explains. "What I like best are those rare occasions when, at the airport, the outside world punctures that hermetically sealed bubble of bad food, bad books, bad movies, bad overheard cellphone conversations: When there's no Jetway, and suddenly you walk off the plane into the open air. When you're sitting on the tarmac while a guy in a hovering pod floats over you, twin beams of light piercing the murk of de-icing fluid. That's my airplane fantasy. I want to be that guy!"
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