A Gute Nakht!

Assuming you've actually spent time in Kinderland, you don't need me to tell you that the Tolland scene is rife with incongruities (look no further than the fact that we refer to eleven-year-olds as "seniors"). Quirkiness in camp is a given, but the quirks themselves have become so institutionalized that it usually takes a moment to spot them. Or in some cases, hear them. Which brings me to my burning question of the moment: why do we have a standard in the canon for saying "goodnight," but not a single tune for saying "goodbye?" Allow me to expound a few thoughts. . .

1. We say goodnight to each other a lot more than we say goodbye.

Makes sense, no? Over a seven-week summer, we regularly have cause to wish each other goodnight. It's both a pleasant way to close the evening and a formality, given that we'll almost certainly reconvene mere hours from having made the gesture. That makes a round of Goodnight Irene perfect for the occasion: modest, topical, and can be hammed up just enough without descending into abject schmaltz. By contrast, there are really only two formal occasions for saying goodbye to each other with any sense of finality. (It really wouldn't pay to sing off a group leaving on an overnight, or even a quick run to Scoops.) (Although if someone found a way to make that happen, it would be undeniably awesome.) (Bonus points for writing an original song to be sung exclusively for Scoops runs.)

All that may be true, but it still rings a bit hollow given that the end of a Kinderland session is a rather momentous occasion. It's the kind of experience that's all things to all people, but since camp is so decidedly personal, I think we generally expend the last of our energy seeing to our more intimate friendships, which subsequently causes any campwide sayonara to feel lacking, or at the very least, a scattershot affair. Hey. . . I love standing on ceremony. I was there when the seven-weekers first started ritually tossing the four-weekers as they pulled out on the bus. I still can't eat a Tootsie Pop without getting a warm fuzzy feeling. But that final campwide share – with everyone distracted with crying and hugs and crying and signing pillowcases and crying – just doesn't cut it. Something more definitively ceremonial would go a long way towards generating a coalescing moment, and a "Goodbye Irene" song might just be the best way to make that happen.

2. It gets the job done.

One of my all-time fave bands – the early-90s pop-punk outfit Too Much Joy – wrote themselves a theme song (appropriately titled Theme Song) to close out their third album. It's an immensely catchy tune with a sing-along chorus that even the most inebriated fan couldn't possibly forget, and it quickly became their standard for closing out all their shows. The brilliance of this was twofold: it guaranteed that every show wrapped with wildly spirited mass audience participation, and it conclusively marked the end of the show. No lingering around for a possible second encore, no idiot fans calling out requests even after the lights came up, no ambiguity whatsoever.

That kind of rock-steady certainty isn't required for saying goodbye (the implied threat of missing the bus takes care of that). But try getting a group of kids up from a campfire or out of Robeson to face the prospect of lights out. It's like herding sheep, if the sheep were mules. Or G8 Summit protesters. So. . . cue up Goodnight Irene. No one can argue with the unequivocal power of a universally recognized finale. I guarantee that if you've ever heard Ira play this, it was the last song on his set list that evening.

Too Much Joy: Theme Song [live]

3. It's how The Weavers did it.

I won’t claim to be an expert on this, but I'm willing to bet that of all the pre-1960 songs in the slices, over half were Weavers standards (three-quarters, if you don't count the Yiddishkeit songs). Especially the more obscure stuff, where authorship is unclear or not well known: Miner's Lifeguard, Drinking Gourd, Midnight Special, Eddystone Light, Banks of Marble, etc., etc. Goodnight Irene, released on Decca in 1950, was their debut single.

Look, I get it. They were the vanguard of the folk-revival movement, and almost everybody took cues from them. It's not an uncommon thing in music – think about how Bob Marley dominates people's understanding of reggae, or how Dylan has become the gold standard against which all other 60s folk acts get measured. Besides, what else was the Hopewell Junction crowd supposed to sing 'round the campfire? Louis Jordan? Gene Pitney? The Andrews Sisters? And above all else, Pete, Fred, Ronnie and Lee made some great music. Really. Still, a pretty justifiable knock on the old left is that they routinely let political-minded groupthink determine their artistic preferences, and fealty to The Weavers as the alpha and omega of recorded music is no exception. (Before anyone commences to tear me a new one in the comments, answer me this: how many Ralph Fasanella prints do you own? I rest my case.)

4. There's a dearth of iconic goodbye songs.

At least not that many that fit our criteria. Remember that it's got to be a song that can be played on acoustic guitar and sung (the chorus, anyway) by a large crowd. It'd help if an artist about whom Ira retains some archaic trivial knowledge had performed it (trust me – it just would). It also needs some general relevance. Most goodbye songs are written from a personal perspective, with the singer's farewells going out to a particular somebody with a particular backstory. A song like Every Time We Say Goodbye is a true classic, but it completely fails on every count. (Although it'd be pretty damn cool if Ira turned out to be a closet Cole Porter fan.)

(While I'm on the subject, something needs to be said about the miscasting of In My Life as an appropriate goodbye song. I'll admit to having some very mixed feelings about The Beatles, and I apologize to anyone whose sacred cows I'm about to grind to hamburger, but c’mon. . . It’s a song that's specifically about not getting bogged down in sentiment at the expense of real present-tense emotional attachment. Singing it as a Kinderland sendoff is as fitting as performing Draft Dodger Rag at a USO benefit. Plus it's maudlin, in the way that all pop songs with harpsichords are maudlin. Maybe it's actually only sung sporadically in camp, but it's got the staying power of a recurring abscess. I suspect that someone's taken a stab at this every year since it's release in 1965, and I suspect that there are still people for whom no summer is complete without another mawkish rendition. Further proof that The Beatles will never leave us alone. Ever.)

Anyway, lucky for y'all, you can count on the KassaNostra to come through for you once again: I Don't Want to Go Home, by Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes (title track from their 1976 debut album). I don't like to brag, and I don't believe in making definitive statements (at least ones that aren't intended to stir up trouble), but really, this song is ideal. Listen to it, and then close your eyes and imagine all of camp singing it together. . . maybe at a slightly slower tempo, maybe with even more gusto on that recurring maxim than even poor Johnny himself can muster. Perfect, is it not?

Southside Johnny & The Asbury Jukes:

I Don't Want to Go Home

Toldja so.

And yet somewhere between my caustic harping and my unrealized musical utopian fantasies, there's a warm place in my heart for all you purists out there. So to you, I offer a summer's worth of forlorn lullaby melancholia: ten takes on what truly is one of the sweetest and saddest songs ever written. Use them wisely.

The KassaNostra Presents:

GOODNIGHT/GOODBYE

(click HERE to download the zipped file)

Have a wonderful summer – your assignment is to fall in love with at least one new song by the end of August and tell me about it.

Peace & Vinyl,

The KassaNostra

CODA: Just when I thought I was out. . . I was all set to put a wrap on this post and send it out over the intertubes. And then Michael Jackson died (maybe you heard something about that). I was never a big MJ fan – grew up without MTV but with two (count 'em) classic rock radio stations, so I never had a fighting chance to be mesmerized by that famous Jackson charm. But I got no problem with the "troubled genius" epitaph that everyone else seems to have settled on. Frankly, one mark of a true genius is when their body of work is adaptable to any given situation. As it turns out, Jackson and his brothers recorded an excellent goodbye song of their very own: 1971's Never Can Say Goodbye. So long, Mike. And remember kids. . . We are here to change the world!

Jackson 5: Never Can Say Goodbye