The ghost of Amelia Earhart haunts us. That’s what happens when you’re history’s greatest vanishing act, and the most famous face to ever appear on a milk carton. When Earhart and navigator Frank Noonan took off from an airfield in Lae, New Guinea on July 2, 1937 everyone expected them to come back down, on tiny Howland Island to be precise. Instead they disappeared forever into the realms of myth, legend, obsession and theory—the quarry of sleuths, both amateur and professional, many willing to spend fortunes in her pursuit.
Did her plane, having run out of fuel, land in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean? Was she captured, and die at the hands of, the Japanese Army? Was she devoured, as some say, by coconut crabs, a lonely castaway on a desert island? Or did she end up on another island? Or is she up there still, the wings of her silver twin-engine Lockheed 10-E Electra sending phantom refractions from the rising sun, eternally searching for that final landing strip?
It surprises me how few songs have been written about Earhart’s mysterious fate. The best of them are the Handsome Family’s “Amelia Earhart vs. The Dancing Bear” from their 1996 release Milk and Scissors, Joni Mitchell’s “Amelia” from her 1976 album Hejira, and “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight,” which was written by topical songwriter Red River Dave McEnery in 1939 and has been covered by the likes of Kinky Friedman, Ronnie Lane, the Greenbriar Boys, and the British country-rock band Plainsong, whose members of note were vocalist and guitarist Iain Matthew (a founding member of Fairport Convention and later of Matthews Southern Comfort) and guitarist and vocalist Andy Roberts, a Liverpudlian and former member of Everyone.
Matthews took his fascination with Earhart beyond merely recording “Amelia’s Last Flight.” He made her fate the centerpiece of Plainsong’s 1972 debut LP, In Search of Amelia Earhart. It’s not a concept album, unfortunately; the majority of the songs on the album have nothing to do with everybody’s favorite aviatrix mystery. But it’s as close as anyone has ever come to giving the intrepid Ms. Earhart her fair due. The Drive-By Truckers gave the Lynyrd Skynyrd plane crash the royal treatment on their 2001 triple-album Southern Rock Opera. And the plane crash that ended the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper got the super-deluxe treatment from Don McLean in his 1971 classic “American Pie.” I think my beloved aviation sweetheart deserves as much.
Plainsong’s In Search of Amelia Earhart is a good, but far from great, album, and like Amelia herself it seems to have been vanished without a trace. It hasn’t achieved cult status the way Amelia has, but it’s definitely worth a listen. Hell, at least you can listen to it, which is more than can be said for the innumerable radio distress calls made by Earhart after her disappearance, which were heard by everyone from the US Navy to 15-year-old Betty Klenck of St. Petersburg, Florida, who kept a notebook of the transmissions she picked up on her shortwave set.
Given that title and the Earhart-related material on the album you’d think Plainsong would get right down to Amelia, concept album or no, but instead they take their good old time. They open with the pretty and plaintive “For the Second Time.” This one’s heartbreak set to piano, and Matthews’ vocals are fragile but not brittle—he’s been “broken” for the second time in a year and he sounds it. The melody brings Gram Parsons to mind, as does Matthews’ vulnerability; the Brit has the better voice, but as is the case with Parsons his is a voice designed to make women want to mother him.
Follow-up “Yo Yo Man” is a blatant act of self-sabotage—an upbeat atrocity, bad perky James Taylor. It tries to be funky but isn’t, and the lyrics have somethin’ wrong with ‘em from the very start: “I’m a little tomboy, never felt free/I was tied to my job and tied to my people.” Huh? And the lines “Be a yo-yo man at the playground, puttin’ on a show/Talkin’ to the little kids, a-listen to my yo-yo” practically scream “Stranger danger!” This one shouldn’t be on the album, or any album for that matter.
“Louise” is head-on country rock from its acoustic guitar to its shuffling beat to its amiable, aw-shucks melody. Matthews has a mighty fine voice and he harmonizes well with Roberts, and the song has more than a touch of sadness to it, which is appropriate given the fact that poor Louise, a woman of easy virtue you could buy with “ten cent trinkets,” has up and died. Why, the second bridge is downright heartrending: “Now Louise, she rode home on a mail train/Somewhere to the South, I heard them say/Too bad it ended so ugly/Too bad, too bad she had to go this way.”
“Call the Tune” is a slow one and perhaps a bit too pretty for its own good. It plods too, at least until the chorus which is nice. Come to think of it Matthews’ vocals are a mite too pretty too. It’s only when his voice soars that this one takes off, and it doesn’t soar nearly enough. Call the tune a disappointment.
“Diesel on My Tail” is a victim of Matthews’ folkie vocals—the song moves along at a nice clip (and so would you if you had an 18-wheeler riding your ass at ninety miles per hour, horn blaring) but Matthews’ voice is too thin and pretty and he may say he’s scared shitless but his vocals are too prissy for me to buy it. He sounds polite, and polite isn’t what you sound like when death’s tailgating your ass.
You’re six songs in by the time Plainsong gets around to “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight,” and finally, right? But what a number: it’s more fond adieu than dirge, an affectionate fare-thee-well complete with fancy guitar and a humdinger of a chorus that goes “There’s a beautiful, beautiful field/Far away in a land that is fair/Happy landings to you, Amelia Earhart/Farewell, first lady of the air.” That beautiful field isn’t the airstrip on tiny Howland Island, but Heaven, and the song is so downright friendly and elegaic at the same time you’ll be wishing her happy landings too. The lyrics put her in a shark-infested, watery grave, and that’s certainly one theory, but the song’s too amiable in tone for the lines to bum you out—you’ll be too busy joining the boys on that chorus.
“I’ll Fly Away” is pure perty acoustic folk-gospel, a cover of a song written by American shape note composer Albert Edward Brumley, and it makes for the perfect follow-up to “Amelia Earhart’s Last Flight.” It’s about dying, of course, and finally slipping the surly bonds of earth, hallelujah, and the boys sure do harmonize real nice. There’s even a part where they stop and some churchy hand-clapping ensues, and there isn’t a reverend in all of Christendom who wouldn’t say Amen.
“True Story of Amelia Earhart” is a slow, elegiac and detail-laden topical song that makes it obvious Matthews did his research, although I’m not sure where he did it, because some of what he says is news to me, and believe me bubba I’ve done MY research. He’s a proponent of the “Japanese prisoner” theory but—if I’m getting the lyrics right—with a twist, namely that Earhart actually WAS a spy and the distress signals were a ruse to enable the US government to say she crashed in the ocean instead of ending up in the hands of the Japanese Army.
It’s a creaky conspiracy theory but that’s not the song’s real problem. The problem is the melody isn’t compelling enough—it lacks sufficient horsepower to get the heavy payload of a story off the ground. Gordon Lightfoot understood this when he wrote his disaster song “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” and Bob Dylan understood it when he wrote “Hurricane.” A song like “True Story of Amelia Earhart” requires some real push. Instead it just sort of crawls across the airfield until it runs out of fuel. And it doesn’t help that you practically need to read a book to get the gist of Matthews’ argument.
“Even the Guiding Light” is all piss and vinegar—it’s nice to hear Plainsong finally rear up on their hind legs and do some kicking. Relatively speaking, mind you—it’s a midtempo number and hardly what I’d call a rocker. But the guitar’s in a surly mood and the drummer hits the skins like he means it and what it reminds me of is the Eagles’ “Already Gone,” albeit with only half the gusto. The song doesn’t seem to have anything to do with Amelia until the bridge, when Matthews sings, “There’s no way to touch upon/This understanding had we known/How close it was to be the sea of sand/And heaven knows, we had the time/And as I see, the only crime/Is being just a little short of land.”
And speaking of the Eagles, “Side Roads” has a bit of “The Best of My Love” in its DNA—you get the same yearning guitar and romantic melody, but once again Matthews has a bit too much folkie in his voice for his own good, and the harmonies are lush but too much so. Can you have too fine a voice? Listening to this one makes me think yes, although if you have a big mushy heart you’ll probably love it and good for you.
“Raider” is pure Fairport Convention right down to its folk-rock bones—it has the requisite oomph and comes complete with a kind of Irish jig of an interlude and if you’re a fan of Fairport Convention it will make for a nice addition to your musical library. The harmonies are a bit too delicate for my tastes, and I wish it had a bit more Richard Thompson in it. Lyrically it’s a pure dead bummer about a person whose grin seems to provoke despair: “Sometimes you make me feel/Like I am living at the edge of the world/Like I am living at the edge of the world/”It’s just the way I smile” you said.” I’ve known people like that. Come to think of, I am people like that.
In Search of Amelia Earhart was Plainsong’s only release during their original incarnation, and I can understand why. It’s a good album but not a very good good album, and it has undeniable shortcomings, the key one being it falls short in the memorable song department. I can’t help but see it as an opportunity lost—had Plainsong gone full concept album I think it would have lingered longer in the public consciousness. By watering it down with the likes of “Yo Yo Man” they did themselves, and Amelia Earhart, a disservice.
Earhart is one of the world’s greatest enigmas and her legend has an undeniable spiritual dimension—it’s almost as if she flew straight to heaven. Where’s Amelia? Everybody has their pet theory. Me, I like to think she’s sitting at a tropical Pacific seaside bar somewhere, swapping stories with D.B. Cooper. If you ask me that’s as good a theory as any.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B-
