I took my clown class to a show last week: Taylor Mac’s A 24-Decade History of Popular Music: 1960s–1980s. Mac has been working his way through our country’s two dozen decades for a couple of years now; in October, in New York, he’ll perform the entire 240-song extravaganza, backed by a 24-piece orchestra, over what promises to be an extraordinary 24 hours. (Imagining the end of that marathon, Mac mused: “My cracked-out aesthetic will match my cracked-out voice.”) The three-decade-spanning show he brought to Ann Arbor was being performed in front of an audience for the first time. “I am totally underprepared and overconfident,” Mac said at the start. “It’s like being in the GOP.”
The show’s first song, Pete Seeger’s “Turn! Turn! Turn!,” set the stage for much of what followed. Mac appeared in white clown makeup and a beyond-fabulous outfit. (Costume designer Machine Dazzle is creating separate outfits for each decade of the performance. The evening’s initial costume featured an American flag and rubber chickens; later getups incorporated Campbell’s soup cans, bricks, and Christmas lights. One headdress looked a bit like a giant silver lollipop.) Mac’s goal, clearly, was to turn the world on its head—to stage a Feast of Fools in the University of Michigan’s Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre. He made the audience move around, ordering the straight whites to come to the front of the stage (in imitation of the white flight of the ’50s and ’60s), then asking those who remained seated to move up and take the vacated seats. “You don’t have to settle for what’s already there,” he told us. “You can make it better.”
I took lots of notes at the show, few of which I can now read. (My writing-in-the-dark skills, once pretty good, have deteriorated.) But I remember the songs: “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” “Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood,” “Freedom Highway,” “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall” (with a line—“the pellets of poison are flooding the waters”—that needed to be heard about ten blocks west of the theater, where Governor Rick Snyder has an apartment), and “Mississippi Goddam” (Mac: “The reason that I’m doing this show is because of two women: Nina Simone and Patti Smith”).
And that was just from the show’s first hour. Later, Mac turned “Born to Run” into a rousing gay anthem. (And if you’ve ever wondered if “Born to Run” might be improved by some slow-motion running in place, the answer, surprisingly, is yes.) “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” was imagined as having been played (“anachronistically,” Mac shrugged) on the Stonewall Inn jukebox the night Judy Garland died. (“Fuck you,” he said, “if you don’t want your history to be fun.”) Mac then designated an audience member to play the dead Garland and ordered five other spectators to carry her out of the theater. A few gasps were heard. “What about this”—he said, pointing to his outlandishly costumed self—“does not say trigger alert?”
“Oh! You Pretty Things” (performed without a trace of tribute) continued the theme of societal reordering: “All the strangers came today / And it looks as if they’re here to stay.” A straight-seeming guy who had arrived late with his date was brought on stage and serenaded with “Don’t Be Shy” (serenaded and caressed, and caressed again). “This is not a regular concert,” Mac stated, or understated. “Just remember, everything you’re feeling is appropriate.”
As the show headed into its third hour, Mac sang a stripped- and slowed-down version of “Snakeskin Cowboys” and asked the audience members to hold each other (in same-sex pairings, ideally). I ended up swaying with a student. Again, the sense of society’s rules having been temporarily suspended was impossible not to feel. And Mac had a further goal: “To metaphorically kill Ted Nugent.” (I’m almost certain it worked.)
“We are building something tangible out of an ephemeral art form,” Mac announced near the show’s end. It felt true. His clown makeup was cracking but his voice remained strong; he sang “Stayin’ Alive,” Laura Branigan’s “Gloria” (“the last song ever sung without irony”), “Heroes,” “You Took the Words Right Out of My Mouth,” “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” “Purple Rain,” and “O Superman.” He told stories about milk enemas and backroom sex parties. It was joyous and funny. A couple of my students hated it. More loved it. One student, a few days later, compared Mac to the gleemen of Medieval England. Gleemen were precursors, of sorts, to clowns—they wandered from place to place, entertaining audiences with singing, dancing, poetry, and acrobatics. As societal outcasts, they told truth to power, in veiled and not-so-veiled ways. A gleeman must have been responsible for a poster I saw as I exited the Mendelssohn Theatre on Saturday. It showed a same-sex pairing: Bozo and Donald Trump.
