For the latest installment of 360°Sound’s long-running “Author Talk” series, we chatted with John S. Garrison about his new 33 1/3 book on the 1990 tribute album Red Hot + Blue (out now on Bloomsbury Academic). The 20-song compilation features Cole Porter standards (e.g., “Love for Sale,” “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” “Night and Day”) interpreted by a wide variety of contemporary artists, such as Annie Lennox, U2, David Byrne, and k.d. lang. The record, which was accompanied by an ABC TV special, was one of the music industry’s first major AIDS benefits.
A resident of Los Angeles, Garrison is the author of seven books, including Glass and The Pleasure of Memory in Shakespeare’s Sonnets. In this exclusive interview, Garrison discusses Neneh Cherry’s evocative interpretation of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” U2’s haunting Wim Wenders-directed music video for “Night and Day,” and his own experience as a gay man during the AIDS epidemic.
Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity. To view the full video interview, scroll to the bottom of this article.
360°Sound: Please start by giving us some context for this 1990 album. What was going on with the AIDS epidemic at the time?
John S. Garrison: One of the reasons I wrote the book is because I wanted to provide a way for people to go back and think about how they were feeling at the time. But a lot of people weren’t there at the time, and it’s hard to understand how people felt and what it was like, and I really wanted to capture that. 1990 was a time when there weren’t viable treatments for the HIV epidemic. It was a time when there was no end in sight. Shortly thereafter it became the number one killer of Americans aged 25 to 44, and it was also part of this period when lots of people were being revealed to be HIV positive, such as Magic Johnson, Robert Reed, and Rock Hudson. It just seemed like at any moment someone would be revealed to be HIV positive, and a lot of these people would die shortly thereafter.
The album comes out at a time when not very much had been done by the music industry about fighting against the epidemic. A group of people came together and decided they wanted to do a big push for an album. There was a public awareness campaign along with Red Hot + Blue, and there was also a major television special that featured music videos by major directors.
Why were Cole Porter songs chosen as the theme of the album?
In some ways, Cole Porter is a surprising choice for an AIDS benefit album in 1990 because they wanted to target a lot of people who hadn’t heard of Cole Porter. Porter is from a much earlier era because his music is part of the Great American Songbook, these jazz standards came out post-WWI and into the WWII era. They seized upon these timeless love songs and used them as a way to talk about the enduring power of what Porter wanted to capture. Porter’s songs are about falling in love. They’re about loss. They’re about mourning. It ended up being a curiously accurate match for the period that was captured by those same emotions for a lot of people, feeling like folks were being lost left and right.
What’s also true is that Cole Porter himself was a closeted gay man, so he wrote a lot of these songs for either people he was in a relationship with or just expressing feeling like an outsider. Porter also had a tragic horseback riding accident, which crushed both of his legs. He experienced a lot of bodily trauma as well. So these songs come from a place of loss, injury, chronic pain, and love that wasn’t approved by society. They may come from an earlier era, but they’re talking about the same emotions and strife that people had on their minds during the AIDS epidemic.
The album opens with an interpretation of “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” by Neneh Cherry. The song begins with a rap and has lyrics that were written specifically for the AIDS epidemic. Discuss how that song communicated the project’s message.
It’s interesting because almost all the artists decided to keep the songs as they were, even though there’s a long history of changing Cole Porter lyrics and adapting them for the times. Neneh Cherry was one of two different artists on the album who adapted the lyrics and significantly adapted the song. It starts with a rap that tells the story about a woman she knows who acquires HIV through injection drug use. Injection drug use, like gay male sex, was one of these topics that people really weren’t talking about in the public sphere in 1990. She starts her song with it and talks about how sharing needles can transmit the virus, and it’s a behavior we have to talk about openly.
It ended up being really controversial, even though her song was actually one of the most well-known and best-reviewed songs on the album. When it came time to air the television special associated with the album in the U.S. on December 1, World AIDS Day, in 1990, ABC took that video out of the television special because it seemed controversial for its frank talk about HIV transmission.
What did you think of U2’s version of “Night and Day”?
When I think back to 1990, I don’t remember the album, but I can clearly remember seeing that video on MTV. It’s directed by Wim Wenders. It’s a really haunting vision. Bono is on a city rooftop singing. You get this real sense of him as this isolated lover singing out. It’s an amazing adaptation, but it’s also a song with a really interesting history. “Night and Day” was a song that Cole Porter wrote for his lover, Nelson Barclift, who was a soldier who went off to WWII.
It’s a song that’s genuinely about a love that some people in society might not approve of – same-sex love – during Porter’s life. It’s a song about worrying that someone you love isn’t going to survive your relationship, that saying goodbye to someone might be the last time you say goodbye to them with him going off to war. These are feelings that have allowed “Night and Day” to be adapted so many times. They’re universal feelings, but they’re also feelings that Porter had that map so well to what was going on with the HIV epidemic, where people felt like they couldn’t talk about the love they were feeling, but also people felt like at any moment someone they cared about might contract the virus.
The book is part cultural history and part memoir. You write about coming out in the ‘90s, and the book opens with your memories of seeing a gay male chorus perform a Cole Porter tribute. Talk about your approach to bringing life experiences to the book.
The book intertwines three different elements. On the one hand, it’s a book about Porter. It’s a book about why Porter’s songs have stayed popular and in the popular imagination for so long. It’s a reflection of his life and how his life informs different kinds of songs. So for anyone interested in Porter and the history of jazz, it’s going to really speak to things that they may have been curious about. But it’s also a book about the AIDS epidemic, and it captures what the period was like when we were at the peak of the epidemic before effective treatments were available.
For anyone curious what that was like, or for anyone who lived through it and wants to look back and reflect on the experience, they’re going to find a rich trove of incidents and feelings that will recall or evoke for them what the whole period was like. And then finally, I wanted to tell my own story, because I think that period when we’re exiting high school, when we’re in our teens and 20s, music’s so important to us and we’re trying to figure out who we are, what we want, and how we feel about our lives. I really poured my heart into this book when talking about what music meant to me at that time and still does, and how music helped me figure out who I was and who I wanted to be. I really wanted to help other people think about what music’s done for them.
You can learn more about author John S. Garrison on his website, john-garrison.com
