Inauguration Soundtrack

Note: This is the first post since a few days after the election. Guest writer Jack Burden reports from Rhode Island where Trump made inroads in this very blue state. If you live in a town in Rhode Island that does not border the ocean in the Ocean State, your town voted for Donald Trump.

By Jack Burden

SCITUATE, Rhode Island – The Village Tavern on Route 6 in this town of 10,000 or so – a converted ice cream parlor and the type of place where an octogenarian can order a non-Rhode Island size slab of chocolate cake with a splash of Bailey’s in his coffee while three feet behind him a table of five teenaged girls are affixed to their phones and simultaneously wolfing down red-sauce plates from the Tavern’s renowned kitchen – is empty until moments before Donald J. Trump takes the oath of office, for the second time, as President of the United States.

It’s Martin Luther King Day, so no work for a lot of folks who are taking advantage to shelter from the cold rather than venture out, theorizes the bartender. But slowly, and then steadily, patrons arrive, some drawn by the Bruins-Sharks matinee on one screen, some watching the silent but closed-captioned proceedings unfolding inside the U.S. Capitol, the most recent battlefield for American treason, only four short years ago, the perpetrators of which will receive clemency within hours.

“I don't like the man, I don't like his ways, I don't like what he says, his words,” says Deb, a middle-aged public housing worker in a pinkish sweater who’s meeting a friend for lunch. “But it's a wait-and-see.”

The TVs are all muted, the Tavern’s decisionmakers having opted for a classic rock playlist or station, one of the myriad avenues through which music is delivered to the masses nowadays.

The sound is off, but a picture says more than a few words, the saying goes, and moving pictures inside the Rotunda of America’s fane to democracy perhaps moreso. Music speaks, too.

Franklin Graham, whose piety resembles his father’s the same way calamari in the other 49 approximates the Ocean State’s ineffably superior signature dish, delivers an invocation and the words appear on the screen. The Tavern’s sound system booms George Thorogood’s “Who Do You Love.”

The reverend says, “Mr. President, the last four years, there are times I’m sure you thought it was pretty dark, but look what God has done. We praise Him.” And Lonesome George snarls, “Got a brand new chimney put on top, and it's a-made outta human skull.”

Graham: “Father, when Donald Trump’s enemies thought he was down and out, You, and You alone, saved his life and raised him up with strength and power by Your mighty hand. We pray for President Trump that You’ll watch over, protect, guide, and direct him.”

The former frontman for the Delaware Destroyers: “I've got a tombstone hand and a graveyard mind … The night were dark and the sky were blue, down the alleyway a house wagon flew.

Hit a bump and somebody screamed, you shoulda heard what I'd seen.”
As first the Hillbilly Elegist and then the convicted and twice-impeached president take their oaths – and this observer swears his own oath this is true, and in hindsight wishes he had been wearing a GoPro to document – the Stones clock in with “Gimme Shelter,” rivaled only by Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower” and Barry McGuire’s “On the Eve of Destruction” as the most brilliantly apocalyptic song to came out of the Sixties and probably ever, with the possible exception of “Carmina Burana.”

The voice is Mick’s but Keith’s guitar drives it, and Merry Clayton, four months pregnant, poured so much into the haunting backing vocals that she suffered a miscarriage the day after the recording session.

There’s a quick moment of seeming disarray that one of the CBS commentators describes as “scrambled,” according to the closed-captioning, before Trump takes the oath, which he does without placing his hand on a Bible, an act not required by the Constitution but which is customary and the guy does, after all, sell “Trump Bibles” despite scant evidence he’s ever cracked one, and he rarely misses an opportunity to make a buck, and you’ve gotta think an inaugural Bible would keep him in high-end orange skin toner for years.

Trump: “I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”

Mick, with Keith behind him creating as sinister a sound as exists in rock ’n roll: “Ooh, see the fire is sweepin'/Our very street today/Burns like a red coal carpet/Mad bull lost your way.”

And then Trump launches into what, for him, passes as restrained rhetoric, the amuse-bouche before the id-venting speech he will deliver momentarily a short indoor walk away and stairway descension Emancipation Hall: “Our recent election is a mandate to completely and totally reverse a horrible betrayal, and all of these many betrayals that have taken place…”

Clayton, a renowned soul and gospel session singer who had was in bed when she got the call and showed up to the studio in curlers, has finished up by now: “Rape, murder/It’s just a shot away…”

And now the U.S. Naval Academy Glee Club is doing, presumably, mellifluous justice to “The Battle of the Hymn of the Republic,” of course inaudible inside the Tavern though legible onscreen. What the barflies and lunching crowd hear is Mark Knopfler’s epochal opening riff to “Money for Nothing,” and then – again, your humble scribe pined for a GoPro for verification purposes – Elon Musk materializes onscreen while Knopfler envies: “Now look at them yo-yos, that's the way you do it … That ain't working, that's the way you do it.” Jeff Bezos is there, too, while Dire Straits continue: “microwave ovens/Custom kitchen deliveraaaays/We got to move these refrigerators/We got to move these color teeeeveeees” (the song was released in 1985, but all of these things are available on Amazon. And with easy delivery if you pay up for Prime).

It is uncanny. Of course, any inauguration, but particularly one of a personality as indomitable as Trump calls for a moment of national introspection – global introspection, truly, because we are still where the buck quite literally stops and starts; and, if Musk has his way, Martian introspection in the not-too-distant future – and the metastasizing tendency of the once-respected political media to manipulate the affairs of state in procrustean fashion linking them to pop culture is a shameless quest for clicks, and a true hack’s hack, but we’re in a converted ice cream parlor, and the early crowd isn’t overly chatty, so what the hell.

“You're like the low tide before the hurricane comes and whips my ass,” the bartender tells a lunching and imbibing couple as the noontime hour is breached and the crowd picks up, the small barroom growing crowded, retirees and guys on work crews, Bruins fans and those there to watch as the 45th president becomes the 47th.

Trump decrees: “For American citizens, Jan. 20, 2025, is Liberation Day,” and refers to the July assassination attempt, crediting the Almighty but not missing the chance to grab a little shine for himself: “I was saved by God to make America great again.” Inside the tavern, Deep Purple rips through “Smoke on the Water” (the Tavern evidently goes for iconic guitar pieces; in 2023, a Guitar World magazine reader poll ranked Ritchie Blackmore’s unmistakable and “deathless” Fender Stratocaster riff as the fourth greatest in hustory): “No matter what we get out of this/I know, I know we'll never forget.”

Trump, as Deep Purple gives way to Steppenwolf: “We will drill, baby, drill.” Steppenwolf: “Git yet motor runnin’.”

Since Trump has mused recently about using “economic force” to make Canada “the 51st state” (status both many Puerto Ricans and D.C. residents have sought futilely for decades), though it remains to be seen whether that would take precedent over taking over Greenland and/or the Panama Canal, it seems thusly appropriate that Steppenwolf, the majority of whose founding members have Canadian roots, would exhort him lyrically, with a sop for Elon: “Take the world in a love embrace/Fire all your guns at once and/Explode into space!”

Trump: “Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents,” moments before bemoaning in Empancipation Hall the pardons Joe Biden issued to the likes of General Milley and Liz Cheney, and after months of vowing “retribution” against his enemies, tossing journalists in jail, and all manner of exercising the immense power of the state to persecute political opponents. “Something I know something about,” he adds, never too abashed to play the victim and the aggrieved.”

Steppenwolf: “We were born, born to be wild!”

From there, he veers into social policy, and Pink Floyd comes to Rhode Island in the form of “Comfortably Numb,” whose guitar solo ranks third on Guitar World’s list and which bassist Roger Waters wrote after receiving tranquilizer injections, a treatment and sensation millions of Americans are longing for at this very moment. Trump rattles off the hit list of what he sees as reverse social engineering projects: “end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life … it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female … I will reinstate any service members who were unjustly expelled from the military for objecting to the Covid vaccine mandate with full back pay.”

Floyd: “I'll need some information first/Just the basic facts/Can you show me where it hurts?... You are only coming through in waves/Your lips move but I can't hear what you're saying.”

Trump, now fully in stride and giving a little preview of the stemwinder he’ll unleash in a few minutes.

Trump then spends what surely must be the highest number of words devoted to President William McKinley during any inaugural address since within hours of the body cooling (McKinley took one in the belly, not the ear), perhaps because “The Napoleon of Protection” was also a big fan of tariffs, and helped cost him his seat in Congress before his 1896 election to the White House over William Jennings Bryan. Podcast campaigning is the new front porch campaigning. Trump seemingly shortchanges Teddy Roosevelt, a curious choice to exclude a denizen of Mount Rushmore, and a versatile commander-in-chief thoroughly venerated by historians of all political proclivities. Like Trump, T.R., too, dabbled in different political parties.

Floyd: “There is no pain, you are receding … The dream is gone/I have become comfortably numb.”

Except for an invocation of “manifest destiny … launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars” – a term-limited promise as self-delusional as any recreational pharmaceutical ingested by a member of Pink Floyd, its roadies, or the band’s fans – the next few sections are fairly boilerplate, name-dropping rugged American occupations (farmers and soldiers, cowboys and factory workers, steel workers and coal miners” and bold achievements the cosseted, pancake makeup-wearing, effete Manhattan socialite would never even dream of attempting, or deign to, he returns to his favorite themes: self-aggrandizement and his very existence as the inexorable byproduct, if not cause of, American greatness, exactly as the Founding Fathers intended.

American greatness, represented in avian form by the bald eagle. And, appropriately, perhaps inevitably, come now the Eagles themselves, with Joe Walsh cranking Guitar World’s 43rd-ranked riff, and Don Henley on lead vocals: “He had a nasty reputation as a cru-el dude/They said he was ruthless, they said he was crude … Life in the fast lane.”

Trump: “We stand on the verge of the four greatest years in American history. With your help, we will restore an American promise and we will rebuild the nation that we love. And we love it so much … I am with you, I will fight for you and I will win for you. And we're going to win like never before.”

Henley: “...surely make you lose your mind/Life in the fast lane/Life in the fast lane/Everything, all the time.”

Trump: “Our golden age has just begun.”

And, after a cursory mention of the God he credited with saving him for the purpose of national restoration – a grace note that longtime Boston journalist and current Hub Blog author Jay Fitzgerald observed “begged for a comparison” to a heavy-handed leader from the last century, who enthused after surviving an assassination attempt, “Must I not recognize therein the governance of a higher power which protects me, so that I can lead the German people to victory?” – there are actual prayers by men of the cloth, including Detroit’s Reverend Lorenzeo Sewell lengthy quotation from MLK’s “I Have a Dream” speech. Trump has a dream, too, certainly, it’s just … different from Dr. King’s. Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” and Bad Company’s “Bad Company” accompany, and then Trump retires from the stage to Emancipation Hall, where he really gets the led out, but not before the Tavern once again pairs its soundtrack impeccably with what’s unfolding onscreen.

We see Trump’s back as he retreats from the Rotunda, where Americans great and controversial – and what’s greatness without a little controversy – are statued, and Gregg Allman is downright defiant: “No, I'm not gonna let 'em catch me, no/I'm not gonna let 'em catch the midnight rider/

Not gonna let 'em catch the midnight rider.”

Tom Petty’s “Breakdown” comes on just as CBS flashes to a shot of Elon chortling like a man who has just purchased the entire American government: “It's alright if you love me/It's alright if you don't

I'm not afraid of you running away, honey/I get the feeling you won't / You see, there’s no sense in pretending … Break down, go ahead and give it to me.”

Then we see Joe and Jill Biden walking toward Marine One on the fourth coldest Inauguration Day on record, cold enough that the official transfer of power took place indoors. At 27 degrees, still five degrees warmer than when JFK, in a nearly precise inversion of Trump’s theme, implored Americans to “ask not…”; but, then, JFK employed his father’s political connections to enlist in the Navy prior to Pearl Harbor despite having been previously classified 4-F by the Army for chronic back pain, ulcers, and asthma (see previous footnote for an exhaustive and complete record of Trump’s military service).

A trip to Rhode Island that does not yield the state’s signature dish is no trip at all.

Again, the Tavern does not disappoint, and as the 46th president walks brittly toward the helicopter, Floyd is back: “Hey, you!/Out there in the cold/Getting lonely, getting old/Can you feel me? …. Hey, you!/Don't help them to bury the light/Don't give in without a fight.” He certainly did not give in without a fight, reluctantly handing over the mantel only after extreme pressure from party mandarins and the guy from “Ocean’s Eleven” and the tequila ads – resistance which, paradoxically and contrary to the song’s message, by most reckonings helped bury the Democratic Party’s light.

Floyd: “But it was only fantasy/The wall was too high as you can see/No matter how he tried he could not break free/And the worms ate into his brain.” Would it be too much to ask for an RFK Jr. shot here from CBS, brain worms being his bailiwick and all? It’s a rare instance of the Inaugural Committee, CBS, and the Tavern playlist falling out of rhythm.

Just before the chopper’s rotors begin to whir, Pink Floyd has a farewell message for Scranton Joe that seems more like an admonition for the rest of us: “Hey, you!/Don't tell me there's no hope at all/Together we stand/Divided we fall.”

Perhaps having his fill of the pomp and circumstance, or maybe at the request of a patron among the still-robust crowd, the bartender switches over the “The Pat McAfee Show.” But the D.C. doings are still streaming online, and a good thing, too, because the Scituate-Beltway coordination still has a few pairings left for us. And in what he describes as “a better speech than the one I made upstairs,” Trump lets it rip. He plays the hits. The 2020 election was “totally rigged.” As War’s “Low Rider,” perhaps the ultimate rock ’n roll conga line tune, plays at the Tavern, he laments the current border wall: “So unattractive. This is Trump in rally mode, playing to his ardent and most affluent sycophants, and the man knows how to give an audience what it wants. The wall gets about eight minutes unto itself in a discombobulated soliloquy that runs more than a half hour.

“I just want to say you're a younger, far more beautiful audience than I just spoke to, and I want to keep it off the record,” he told the crowd of mostly adulators, thinned of the Democratic and bipartisan luminaries for whom an inaugural address is something of a command performance. “I want to keep that off the record, because I don't want to have all those big shots up there, I don't want them to think… You're more powerful than them, you look better than them, and I love you.”

It’s the rambling, unscripted Trump that cable news channels have used for ratings for a decade now. Liz Cheney a “crying lunatic.” He decries the pardons for Cheney and retired Army General and former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark A. Milley, whose portrait hung in the Pentagon next to his predecessors’ for less than two hours after Trump took the oath.

Finally, the coup de grâce, and it’s enough to make you wonder whether there is, indeed, collaboration between the Washington swells and the cozy roadside watering hole with a capacity of maybe 50 people. As the camera pans to Eric Trump, Don Jr., Ivanka, and the creature identified as Saudi doormat Jared Kushner, Creedence arrives at detectably higher volume, raging against class stratification and the

Some folks are born silver spoon in hand

Lord, don't they help themselves, Lord?

But when the taxman come to the door

Lord, the house lookin' like a rummage sale, yeah

It ain't me, it ain't me

I ain't no millionaire's son, no, no

It ain't me, it ain't me

I ain't no fortunate one, no…

Yeah-yeah, some folks inherit star-spangled eyes

Hoo, they send you down to war, Lord

And when you ask 'em, "How much should we give?"

Hoo, they only answer, "More, more, more, more"

And then he’s done. “Bye-bye. I gave you the A-plus treatment,” he informs the faithful. And then he’s gone, but the Stones are back. Despite significant strides in gender equity in the intervening six decades, for reasons the Internet ascribes to Romance language customs dating to Latin, the United States is, when gender pronouns are applied at all, “she” or “her” – which likely sits with Trump about as well as the Gulf of Mexico still being called the Gulf of Mexico. Thusly, the 1966 Aftermath album’s fourth track, described by Boston Globe contributing critic William Alford as “joyously insecure revenge,” seemed dismally felicitous as the walkoff song for a newly sworn-in president who has been impeached and convicted and whom many believed was finished with electoral politics but has made clear that vengeance is an animating spirit behind his second term: “Under my thumb/The girl who once had me down/Under my thumb/The girl who once pushed me around/It's down to me … Under my thumb/Is a squirmin' dog who's just had her day/Under my thumb/A girl who has just changed her ways…”

Note: Quotes from Trump’s inaugural address have been taken from the Associated Press transcript of the speech. Most uotes from his Emancipation Hall remarks have been taken from rev.com, which uses AI to provide speech-to-text services. The remainder have been taken from CBS’s closed-captioning.