Baby, Can I Hold You—Tracy Chapman

#365Songs: February 6

Tracy Chapman is getting all the love right now, and deservedly so. Few artists genuinely deserve to be called a “national treasure,” and neither does Chapman—she’s a global treasure.

I first encountered her like everyone else, via the song “Fast Car.” I was quite the folkie at the time, and it hit me right where I was living. Which, incidentally, happened to be Berkeley, California—as good a place as any to be a folksinger.

But that wasn’t actually the moment I became a Tracy Chapman disciple. That happened on Friday, September 23, 1988. That was the day of the Amnesty International concert at the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum Arena.

I wanted to go mainly because I thought it would be my only chance to ever see Bruce Springsteen live. In 1988, Bruce had just released Tunnel of Love, and if that was the direction he was going to go, I didn’t want to wait any longer to see him in concert.

The show was part of a 20-concert tour called Human Rights Now!

(Yes, there actually was a time when artists embodied ethical courage in ways other than buying their catalogues back.)

The line-up was seriously remarkable. In addition to Springsteen, there were heavy hitters such as Peter Gabriel and Sting, not to mention the otherworldly talents of Youssou N’Dour.

Sandwiched in the middle of all that arena rock royalty was one young woman with one acoustic guitar.

Springsteen’s set was as powerful as you’d expect it to be. Say what you will about his albums, he gives it all in performance. And Peter Gabriel was an absolute revelation. His show was unbelievable. It felt huge. It sounded huge. Everything that day sounded huge.

And then along came Tracy Chapman.

If she’d have been able to look about 45 degrees to the right from her microphone, she’d have seen me about 100 rows back. There weren’t actual rows, of course; we were all standing. But that’s roughly how far back I was. So I could definitely see her. No big screen required.

And she looked tiny. The stage was huge. The crowd was huge. She was not huge. She was small, and honestly, she looked terrified. I really felt for her. I don’t know how she did it.

But she went up there, and she started to strum her Martin acoustic guitar, and she almost instantly turned thousands and thousands and thousands of people in an outdoor area into a baker’s dozen of cafe denizens listening to someone sitting a few feet away.

It was that intimate. It seemed impossible.

But when you listen to a song like “Baby, Can I Hold You,” it doesn’t seem impossible at all.

Listen to her debut album with headphones on. When her voice enters the song, you will feel the presence of god, whatever that might mean to you. She channels a beauty that is simply too big to handle. It’s like you die in its presence through coming alive in its presence.

The performance has an incandescent stateliness to it that is almost spiritually seductive—it’s a holy march among clouds of feathers and tears, and you want to join in with the mendicants, walking wherever the song will lead to.

It is the greatest art of the greatest artists to make the grandest statements in the smallest moments. The painter who renders a weakened, wrinkled hand against rumbled sheets and tells us everything we need to understand about grief and death. The sculptor who, in delicately crafting a child’s broken shoelace, explains what it means to be both innocent and angry. The Haiku poet who writes of white chrysanthemums and reveals the interconnectedness of all life.

Carol Hanisch may have popularized the idea that “the personal is political,” but Tracy Chapman embodies it in this song. I don’t know what all else we really need to understand about humanity beyond this:

“Forgive me”
Is all that you can’t say
Years gone by and still
Words don’t come easily
Like forgive me, forgive me
But you can say, “Baby
Baby, can I hold you tonight?
Maybe if I told you the right words
Ooh, at the right time
You’d be mine”

1988 is almost 40 years ago, and we’re still catching up to how great Tracy Chapman really is.

Years gone by and still …

~

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