Anthem singer Aaron Lewis apologizes for botched ‘Star-Spangled Banner’
It forever will be known as the “Stain’d Mangled Banner.”
Singer Aaron Lewis took to Facebook on Sunday night to apologize for messing up the national anthem before Game 5 of the World Series. Lewis’s big mistake — aside from getting a neck tattoo at one point in his life — came in the song’s second line:
O say can you see by the dawn’s early light,
What so proudly we hailed were so gallantly streaming?
Nope, that’s not it. He left out “at the twilight’s last gleaming.” The “gallantly streaming” was to come two lines later. The unfortunate gaffe created some responses from the players standing at attention, notably Tim Lincecum, who appeared to say something like, “He forgot up the words. Yep.”
Though it’s been a while, you might remember Lewis as the lead singer of the rock band Staind. This was a different kind of blemish.
To his credit, Lewis circled back and got on track with the rest of the 200-year-old tune, not botching any more lyrics, but also not really showing off much range, either. He probably felt relief at the end of two minutes when the song was over.
“The Star-Spangled Banner” is one of the harder songs to sing well. Adding to the degree of difficulty, it’s often played before 40,000 quiet people in a giant stadium on live television when millions more are watching at home. Sometimes, the singer has to coordinate with planes flying overhead, or skydivers parachuting into the stadium. Even without the bells and whistles, it’s easy to see how the song gets messed up, and it happens to the best of ’em.
Regardless, he’s already received criticism for his performance, some of it playfully harsh, so in response Lewis wrote a note on Facebook to assure everyone that’s he’s not only sorry, but also patriotic:
All I can say is I’m sorry and ask for the Nation’s forgiveness. My nerves got the best of me and I am completely torn up about what happened. America is the greatest country in the world. The Star-Spangled Banner means so much to so many, including myself. I hope everyone can understand the intensity of the situation and my true intent of this performance. I hope that the Nation, Major League Baseball and the many fans of our national pastime can forgive me.
What a strange note, and not only because he seems to be apologizing to the Nation, a political magazine. It’s just an odd reaction to think that people will think you are unpatriotic because you messed up the words. As if Lewis were some kind of musical double agent, sent by our enemies — the same people who ripped the flag before Game 3 — to make us disloyal to the United States through badly performed music.
It’s not like Jimi Hendrix at Woodstock, or Jose Feliciano at the ’68 Series, when they famously performed their own “take” on “The Star-Spangled Banner” and people got mad (and still get mad). Lewis’s performance and his Facebook note are ironic, though, because he’s been critical of how others have performed the anthem:
He’s referring to Aguilera at the Super Bowl in 2011, a performance for which she also apologized, also theming her contrition on love of country.
So Lewis comes to AT&T Park, just tries to get through the performance without much personal styling (unless his style was to have no style), and he misplaces the words anyway. And later he starts talking as if he’s in fear of being deported. Hey, Lewis already was on record having sung the song with the words in the right order at the Indianapolis 500 in 2006. That should keep him in good standing with Homeland Security.
It should be noted that MLB tried doing Lewis a solid by editing around his mistake in a video they published of his performance, adding interview footage in which he expressed an intention to wear his Red Sox cap to sing — until officials “frowned on it a little bit.”
Hey, no style means no style.
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David Brown is an editor for Big League Stew on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] and follow him on Twitter!
