Music |
Tom Rush
By
Published: Jan 01, 2008
Category:
Rock
Tom Rush
Videos
The Circle Game
Remember
No Regrets
The Child’s Song
And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return, we can only look
Behind from where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game
When Joni Mitchell showed those lyrics to Tom Rush, she was a 23-year-old nobody. He was the most famous folk singer ever to graduate from Harvard — the king of a category of one. But he had a record deal, and she was two years away from one. And so, when it came time for him to go into the studio again, he not only used three of Mitchell’s songs, he took “The Circle Game” as the title of that 1968 record.
1968. If you’re of a certain age, that year sparks so many memories. But if you’re younger, just the opposite — you’re almost surely sick of hearing about “The Sixties”. Well, here’s a surprise. I’m of a certain age, and I published a book about my generation in 1968 — Notes from the New Underground, if you must know — and, believe me, I too am way over that terrible/wonderful year.
Or was, until I started listening to Tom Rush again. “The Circle Game”, his first record to get a big label push, was released late in 1968, and it sure fit the mood of my gang. Rush was a baritone, his voice reassuring as oatmeal. He was as unhurried and relaxed as Leonard Cohen. But he was a folkie who was only gently electric; this was no Dylan, rocking your world at every turn. And Rush had an ear for talent. In addition to Joni Mitchell, he more or less discovered the as yet unrecorded James Taylor and Jackson Browne.
But there was something more. Tom Rush was just 27, but he seemed to… know stuff. For “The Circle Game” was a song cycle. Not trippy like “Sgt. Pepper” but oddly mature, charting the enthusiasms of youth — love and energy and what Joni Mitchell call the “urge for going” — and then moving on to breaking up with a lover and leaving your parents and being okay about being alone. And maybe, given the title song, even looking down the road a few years. Or decades.
Now the decades have passed, and Tom Rush is still at it. In his 60s, he has a young daughter — “I thought I’d have my own grandchild and cut out the middle man” — and gives a sane number of concerts a year. He has impressive restraint. He made ten albums in the first dozen years of his career, but either the stream dried out or he became allergic to recording. No matter. New material is unimportant when we’re talking about Tom Rush; the old more than suffices.
You have only to watch the video of Remember, the novelty song that is a winner when he performs and is closing in on four million viewers on YouTube, to grasp his appeal. The guy who more or less invented the persona of the laid back singer/songwriter — the performer who was James Taylor before there was a James Taylor — is an evergreen. His voice holds up. His guitar is still spare and evocative. He still has the wry wit that would go so well with a mug of coffee and a thin smoke around a campfire.
That Tom Rush still it has to be reassuring to his aging audience. His confident survival sends the clearest possible message: “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better.” But the coin has another face. We are, as the song says, “captive on the carnival of time.” And so, when boomers consider who we were when we first heard certain songs and who we are now, we blink and ask ourselves: Why do I need glasses and wear relaxed-fit pants — where did the years go? So every Rush concert is an irony; his fans are people who first heard his music when they were leaving home and are now the ones being left.
Tom Rush isn’t flashy. He never had the hit song everyone can hum. But if you’re looking for a Harvard man who knows how you feel and wouldn’t mind singing your feelings for you… well, here’s an overlooked boomer god tipping his hat and inviting you to settle in for a listen.
To buy “No Regrets: The Very Best Of Tom Rush” from Amazon, click here.
To buy “The Circle Game” from Amazon, click here.
To buy “Tom Rush” from Amazon, click here.
To visit Tom Rush’s web site, click here.
