We have plenty to catch up on, and we must do it before I forget all about it. It’s easy to do that when there’s constantly so much to add. Constantly so much. You can’t even imagine how many things have accumulated since I began typing this.
From time-to-time I have to remind myself to read things for fun. And there’s just … so much. The work material, which is interesting. Daily news, when it isn’t doomscrolling. And some of that turns into work stuff, in a variety of ways. Every day, it seems, there’s a new thing that will be an example in one class or another. And then there are the, no kidding, 200+ books sitting here waiting for me. (I just counted. I should be reading.)
So, let us make the smallest of dents. A few days ago, as we traveled to and from Chicago, I read The Great Rescue. It’s about the USS Leviathan, seized from its German master when the U.S. joined World War I, the liner turned into a transport shipping, moving doughboys back and forth from New York to the U.K. The book was released to coincide with the American centennial anniversary of the war. I bought a digital copy of it in 2020, and finally opened the thing.
This vessel was a luxury liner sailing under the Germany flag, christened as SS Vaterland. She was opulent, massive and fast. She first sailed in 1914, a three-funnel beauty built as the largest passenger ship in the world, meant to move 4,050 passengers, and some of them in the grandest style. The Vaterland had only made a few trips before her fate was forever changed. It was docked on the Hudson when the United States declared war. After a time, it was taken over and repurposed. As the Leviathan, the vessel made 10 round trips, carrying over 119,000 people over there, before the armistice in 1918. Nine westward crossings in the year after the war ended brought the survivors home.
Is there video of this legendary boat? Of course! It’s only 100 years old.
It was also crowded as a troop ship. And the passengers needed to eat.
As for the book itself, it’s a popular history read, and it moves well. Reading about World War I from this distance is interesting distance because, on one hand, we have things like those videos, but not a lot of the popular histories always want to go too deep on the human subjects. The Great War was so broad in scope that the best histories are observed at the division level. This one, despite the distance and the large sample size, we get a little bit of time with the captains, men named Joseph W. Oman, Henry F. Bryan, who commanded seven of the voyages, and William W. Phelps, who was in command when the armistice was signed. (She was in Liverpool at the time.) But not Edward H. Durrell. He was the last military captain of the Leviathan. He shows up in the index, but not in the text. John Pershing and his staff went over on an early voyage.
You can’t tell the American story of World War I without mentioning him, so the book veers away from the vessel now and again to talk about him, his war, and meeting the woman who would eventually become his wife. Douglas MacArthur came home on the Leviathan after the war ended, American readers know that name, so some of his combat exploits are included.
We meet Royal Johnson, who was a young congressman and briefly a soldier before he was wounded and knocked out of the war. You meet Freddie Stowers. He gets a nice treatment, but there’s apparently a fair amount we don’t know about his early life. Only in the epilogue do you learn that he was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. You meet the writer Irvin Cobb, who covered the war and probably had his exploits downplayed. And you also met Elizabeth Weaver, a nurse that went over to Europe and returned on the Leviathan. She plays a minimal role in the book, but it’s a second woman, one supposes.
Reading about World War I from this distance is also interesting distance because, on the other hand, it is so often short on those individual tales. And this is the case here, too. The book moves swiftly, and it probably does well to have the cutaways from the voyages to the short vignettes of these people’s stories. What’s the alternative? Writing about yet another day at sea? More smelly, cramped holds? A possible periscope sighting, again?
The other big character in the book was the influenza outbreak, and it comes up, but it feels like maybe it was tacked on as an afterthought, or cut down for some reason or another.
“The curtain was coming down on the wartime career of the Leviathan. It happened quietly, with none of the fanfare and news flashes that had accompanied the seizure of the ship in April 1917. The last entries in the log were made on October 29 as the vessel was tied to her moorings at Pier 4. Totally ignoring or missing the quiet end to her naval career, the New York papers devoted their front pages that day to the ongoing Senate fight over the peace treaty, a looming national coal strike, and how the prohibition amendment would be enforced when it went into effect in January. There was no mention of the Leviathan.”
The ship was decommissioned that day, a day the ship’s final log noted was “clear, slightly hazy, light SW airs.” It sat in New Jersey for a few years. By then, there were more ships than anyone needed. It was overhauled and refurbished and in 1923 United States Lines landed a deal to take five trans-Atlantic voyages a year, but it was expensive and it was Prohibition. In a decade as a post-war cruise liner it never turned a profit. And then came the Depression. The Leviathan was retired in 1936, sold, and scrapped in the 1940s.
Since we’re catching up, let us return to the Re-Listening project, where I’m probably 17 albums behind. I’m playing all of my old CDs in more or less the order in which I acquired them all. I say more or less because this book is out of order. I had hit the 21st century, but right now I’m back in the 1990s. It doesn’t matter.
Anyway, I figured that since I was listening to all of these again I could write about them here. “What a great regular feature,” and I’ve only come to regret that it has taken forever, because I have a lot of music, and I don’t do this regularly. The idea was that I could pad this space, pull up an old memory or two, and then play some good music.
So it’s … let’s say 1997, maybe 1998, because I got the CD books out of order. And, today, we’re in a bit of a greatest hits phase. First up, “Words & Music: John Mellencamp’s Greatest Hits,” a two-disc retrospective featuring at least one song from each of his studio albums released between 1978 and 2003, some 17 records.
These aren’t music reviews. They certainly aren’t music reviews of 21-year-old greatest hits, so this will be brief because I don’t have any good recollections attached to this. Besides, everyone has the same John Mellencamp memories, anyway, and that’s not a bad thing.
So, quickly. This is the first track on the first disc. It was an unreleased song, and it immediately tells you your favorite pop artist has entered a comfortable phase. It’s the strings, and the rhythm.
There was another new song on the second disc. And it reinforces the notion you got from the first one.
That’s probably a little cynical. I’m sympathetic to a problem had later in the 1980s Mellencamp. Everyone wanted him to make Jack and Diane over and over. No one wanted to see the guy grow or change as an artist or musician. I’m neither of those things, but I understood his complaint.
So let me share my favorite song from Johnny Cougar, from 1987.
Mellencamp had a bit of a reputation in Bloomington. And I almost met him once, just before we left. He was donating his papers to the university, and they had a big ceremony in our building. It was all very locked down for someone selling a man-of-the-people gimmick. Hilariously, while all the old university people were thrilled, none of the students even knew who he was.
Entertainment is a tough business like that.
Anyway, here’s your new favorite John Mellencamp song. Someone there played it for me, probably one of the family members or handlers was within earshot at the time.
He doesn’t have any tour dates on his site for this year, just now, but Mellencamp did more than two dozen shows last year. He still paints. He does VO work. Not bad for a guy in his early 70s.
If you like Mellencamp, and you can find it, there’s a good documentary-concert that was released about 15 years ago titled “John Mellencamp: Plain Spoken Live from The Chicago Theatre.” It’s worth checking out.
The next disc up was another greatest hits effort, and it’s not even their first compilation, but it was a good one for me. Def Leppard’s “Vault” covers the 1980-1995 range, and somewhere there in the 1980s was when I started finding my own music. MTV, don’t you know. They were there, I was there, it was bound to happen.
“Vault” was eventually certified five-times platinum in the U.S. It went platinum in four other countries and gold in four more. And that’s why you release greatest hits. Sometimes you make easy money on music already produced.
Which is not exactly fair. There was one new track.
It was a post-grunge era power ballad. There was a lot of that in 1995.
To promote the record, the band did shows on three continents in one day in Morocco, London and Vancouver. This put them in the Guinness Book of World Records, under the larger category of Things That Don’t Need To Be Records.
The rest of the tracks are off “Pyromania,” “Hysteria,” or “Adrenalize.” They all figure into the Re-Listening project, and this is already very long.
I’ve never seen Def Leppard live, and I’m surprisingly OK with that. They’re still touring, some 48 years into the band’s life now. I guess they’re the Stones, but with more intricate instrumentation. They’re playing all over North America this year.
Tomorrow, another book (I know!) and probably some more music.
