Let the Sunshine In
It's the early 1980s and I'm in 3rd grade, living on Oak Street in Manitowoc, WI. My favorite TV show is Fame. We have a rotary phone. It is here at this house, in this world, where I start to explore my parents record collection, playing things like The Beatles, Wings, Bread, America, CSNY, on the record player in my room, imagining the shape of the world beyond as I listen, and it is here that I am struck by a record cover that contains the face of a person with a substantial head of hair in a mirrored negative image, half green on one side and half orange-red on the other. When I play this album in my room I am instantly pulled somewhere I don't quite understand. It takes a couple listens for me to determine it's not a band or an artist but a cast recording of a broadway show. I read the back cover. the album was released in 1968. There's a quote from a critic, along with song list, a sentence or two about each song's narrative function or subjective qualities, a list of the cast, and a credit: music by Galt MacDermot, book and lyrics by Gerome Ragni & James Rado, and a photo of all 3 of them in the bottom right in a recording studio. the subtitle of the album reads The American Tribal Love-Rock Musical, underneath the title: Hair. This album, oddly more than any other will shape my sensibilities, giving way to my appreciation of theatricality, of the individual versus society, of anti-authoritarianism, of big broad canvases in which to express yourself narratively. And since I listen to this album with zero understanding of the musical's narrative, piecing together from the lyrics who Claude is and how he fits in with the anti-war movement in the late 60s US, it gives full agency to the songs to be the sole engines of my understanding. Each exists in service of the whole. They are all intoxicatingly catchy, contain a few bad words, are built of frankness, wordplay, in jokes, cleverness. Songs titles like Hashish, Walking in Space, Sodomy. Lyrics like How can people be so cruel or breathe deep while you sleep and so on. All of it - each lyric and each song, and how each song fit into the album - spoke to me in a way nothing else had up to that point. But there was one song among them that called to me more than any other was the final song on the album, The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine in).
The sentence about it on the back cover of the album reads The Flesh Failures (Let the Sunshine in) is new, pop poetry, the finale and a marvelous and stirring song.
I am a big fan of songs that start simple and assemble themselves, typically building into something loud, operatic, moving, oppressive, sometimes all-consuming. The Seer by Swans, Cue the Strings by Low, I Want You by the Beatles. But this appreciation started for me with Let the Sunshine, which starts basic and builds to something more complex. The song begins with vocals bass and guitar, A simple riff in Bm with a kick ass bassline that holds the whole thing together. A man's voice begins "We starve, look at one another short of breath, walking proudly in our winter coats, wearing smells from laboratories, facing a dying nation" This character singing is Claude, sung by James Rado. Claude I will only learn decades later is dead as he sings, a victim of the Vietnam war, unseen by anyone on stage.
The first verse takes 33 seconds. Claude's voice continues with just the guitar and bass into the second verse, where he says "Somewhere inside something there is a rush of greatness, who knows what stands in front of our lives.. silence tells me secretly everything". At 1 minute 3 seconds the third verse begins and a new instrument comes in (a trumpet) playing a reprise of Manchester England (an earlier song that announces Claude's heritage). Claude sings the reprise lyrics and melody along with the trumpet. Now at 1 minute 12 seconds the entire song changes. The drums kick in as a trio sings call and response with Claude as he continues the reprise lyrics. The trio begins with lines from Romeo and Juliet - Eyes Look Your last, Arms take your last embrace, and lips oh, you the doors. sealed with a righeous kiss. And then as Claude says That's Me several times, the trio sings the last line Hamlet says in his play. That's me/The rest is silence. That's me/The rest is silence. The rest is silence.
Now at 1 minute 43 seconds the first verse repeats but it's a woman's voice, the character Sheila sung by Melba Moore. at the lyric Facing a Dying Nation at 1 minute 56 seconds she's joined by a second woman's voice singing harmony. Of moving paper fantasy, listening for the new told lies.
At 2 minutes 13 seconds, the song continues to build, the chorus comes in singing as one voice, along with a horn section, until the climactic release of the words Let the Sunshine in 2 minutes 29 seconds, with the full company in reverie, repeating Let the sunshine, let the sunshine in, over and over. This is the moment at 2:29 that transports me, no matter many hundreds of times I've heard it, no matter my feelings on the efficacy of the 60s counterculture or how well the hippy love movement has aged or for that matter the efficacy or aging of this musical. This song exists ouside of all that for me. (Especially the bassline. follow it across the whole song.)
The me in 3rd grade couldn't understand the implications of this song either as stand-alone or in the musical's narrative, that it spoke to Claude's death, Vietnam, the power and limitations of the peace and love movment all at once.Even then the me in 3rd grade responded to this track on a base level, to the the build, climax, release, the theatricality. Even then it existed for me - though I couldn't express this exactly - as an urging against authority and the structure of mainstream society but also one of endless hope and optimisim in the face of darkness, one that I carry still. I carried it from 3rd grade in Manitowoc Wisconsin all the way to this moment. A four-decade span that intersected with the recurring multiform unending darknesses of the world at large as well as my own personal darknesses, ranging from depression and anxiety, my brain tumor diagnosis and treatment, the death of family, the death of friends, the death of my dog, my unemployment now - whatever gradation of darkness, misery, hopelessness you are facing, to me this song is a planted flag, an active declaration to default to hope against all verifiable reason and evidence. To me, then and now, the song is a provocation and a celebration at once. You are here in this moment. It's better than being dead. No matter how far down the world has brought you or pushed you, you have full agency to stand and let light in, in whatever form that means for you.
(this was written for Songbook PDX, April 6 2024, at Salon Rouge)
