Holler If Ya Hear Me

100 Years of Robert Johnson

2011-05-17T12:30:00.005-04:00

Dave Marsh writes:

Somebody asked if Robert Johnson ever got to Chicago. I looked for the fact in a few places and then realized that what I was going to get was somebody's version but that it was more complicated than anybody's version. I'm not sure I have a version, certainly not one I'm married to, but if I did, this is what it would be.

There is no truth about hardly anything about Robert Johnson's travels. There are lots of stories. One is that he got as far north as Detroit and maybe even did a radio broadcast there.

If we could get our friend Greg Aldering to use his telescope for a beneficial human purpose in addition to the mere discovery of how new universes are formed, that broadcast is still out there, some minuscule distance--less than a thousandth of a parsec--out there, and you could hear it. If it exists.

In a certain sense, the Robert Johnson of our post-rock folklore never existed, and will always exist. The guy those mythologists found didn't smell unwashed or have bad breath and his back didn't ache and his fingers never scabbed and his shoes had soles and he was unhappy existentially but if he had another nickel he could get his ashes hauled so it was pretty close to happiness. And you can hear that. If you want to. If you want, you can hear something else, too.

One of those Robert Johnsons was in Chicago. Another one of them didn't get there 'til Johnny Shines did. And another not until Steven Lavere or whoever it is bought the copyrights. And another one, maybe further back, maybe more recent, never left the Delta--he left Mississippi, because you only have to cross the river to do that. But did he leave it riding in a Terraplane or did he swim it alongside Stagolee during the '27 flood or a weekend before he died? That's worth knowing too and you have just as much chance of being certain of the answer.

It's the same as figuring out a simple construct like "Homer was blind." He was? To what?

Los Cenzontles change the world one class at a time

2010-06-18T00:42:00.008-04:00

"The only Mexico I knew was of photographs of my family. I found Mexico here, in the music." - from "El Pasajero"
---
One of my favorite CDs a few years ago was "El Pasajero (The Traveler)," a soundtrack to a documentary by and about Los Cenzontles with violinist Julian Gonzalez. I picked up the disc at Down Home Music in El Cerrito, but my introduction was weeks earlier in the cafeteria of the children’s hospital where I work.

Los Cenzontles (the Mockingbirds) isn't a band per se, it is a performing group from a community center in San Pablo, CA located where the oil refineries belch into the mouth of the Sacramento Delta. The center was created by Eugene Rodriguez (who plays vihuela (oud) in the group) and Berenice Zuniga-Yap. (Eugene, Los Cenzontles, Lalo Guerrero, and Los Lobos received a Grammy nomination for the recording "Papa's Dream".) The touring group's music features sones jarochos and sones de mariachi, Eugene and Julian accompanied by Hugo Arroyo on guitarron, Tregar Otton on 1st violin, and Lucina Rodriguez and Fabiola Trujillo on voice and zapateado (foot percussion).

That day at the hospital was Cinco de Mayo, and with a neonatologist I'd arranged for Los Cenzontles to perform at lunchtime for patients, staff, and visitors. It was also the day that Mrs. Garner's 2nd grade class from Vallejo was visiting the hospital. Mrs. Garner's class held a penny fundraiser all year, collecting coins a fistful at a time to purchase beanie babies for our patients. I scheduled a visit to accept their donations, give them a tour, and share lunch.

These beautiful six-year-olds are as animated as I've met. I introduce myself and say I heard they had a special story to tell. One by one they hand me waxy gift bags covered with tumbles of curling ribbon, each bag sheltering a beanie baby and a hand-written note of encouragement for a patient. With only the littlest prompting, each child tells enthusiastically tells why they picked the bears they did -- this one is my favorite color pink! this is a lion and lions are strong and a sick boy needs to be strong! this is a parrot like my grampa has at home, it swears in spanish -- and I ooh and aah. Oohing and aahing is an important part of my job description.

I ask what they think are the two most important things a child needs in the hospital. Hands shoot up urgently. Bandages! surgery! shots! a new brain! Good answers, I say, sick people need good medicine; but what's the other thing? It's as important. Their mother! comes a late answer. I nod. Then I say that a child in a hospital needs the same things they have when they’re at home: family, games, friends, toys to play with.

I tell them our hospital is non-profit, and explain we don't have money to buy toys and beanie babies, we need donations of those so we can buy the bandages. They've done something important by thinking about what other people need and acting to fill that need. I tell them I am proud of them and I hope they feel that way inside.

Their eyes are big that they've made a difference, that they can make change happen. Within those wide eyes I see doors swing open.

I pass around a micropreemie diaper and demonstrate a baby that size by cupping my hand. One girl asks cautiously "Is this clean?" before touching the diaper. We chuckle and I assure her it's an unused diaper. "I was a preemie," says a black girl, the one who likes pink, her hand constantly shooting in the air. "I have diabetes," says a Pacific Island girl, the tallest in the class. "So do I" add a chorus of others. "I have asthma" says a smiling, skinny black boy in a football jersey and soon half of them, hands testifyin’, them too.

Then I show them the footprint from the smallest baby we've had, delivered at 22 weeks gestation, eyes fused, stomach unable to process food, lungs unprepared for months. I don't share those details; instead I show that the footprint is the same size as a paperclip. They're quiet. "Did it die?" asks the girl with glasses. "No," I answer, not offering more, but it comes anyway. "Was it okay?" "Many times children and babies may still need to come to the hospital some more." "That makes me sad," says a very small Hispanic girl who has been absorbing every detail of this visit. So I address her, "But maybe if the baby comes here again, it will be your beanie baby that makes it feel better!" A smile bursts through her dimples and she swings her braided head around to look at her classmates, her ponytail decorations clacking.

I show them where the emergency helicopters land (one puts on a show as it departs), and we go to the family resource center to look at displays of sugar in food and to touch the fake five-pounds-of-fat. They wonder aloud whether they should eat the chips and cookies they've brought for their lunch.

With that, the teacher retrieves their lunches -- carefully labeled paper sacks and a spare package of cookies and fruit juices -- while I seat the children at a large cafeteria table directly in front of the plywood floor Los Cenzontles have set up.

The band strikes up, the tumble of stringed percussion and melody I love so much, and the two female dancers smile at their young audience, encouraging them to dance. Several kids jump up without hesitation. One little girl looks at me for permission, and I nod, but she can't take her eyes off the dancers and the big guitarron. They shout and squeal when the players bring out the quijada, a donkey jaw bone used for percussion. Finally, the shy one gets up and dances til she throws back her headful of braids. I chuckle, imagining how the kids will describe this visit: the miniature footprint and the giant ass's jaw, the helicopter and the fake fat.

My answer arrives a week later in a manila envelope filled with hand-written letters.

Dear Mrs. Martinez, My name is Keith. I'm one of the class mates. Thank you for letting us watch the concert. The footprint was so cool that it changed my life. Thank you very, very much. Love, Keith

Dear Miss Martinez, Thank you for giving us an opportunity to learn about life. I've been to the Children's Hospital before because my Antie accidently dropped her hammer on my head. Now I have a lump in my head and I was only one year old. I will never forget that day. We went on another field trip to the Oakland Zoo and we all had fun. Love, Caiyante

Dear Mrs. Martinez,
My name is Viridiana and I am in Room #7. I enjoyed seeing the little diaper and feet print. Thank you for taking us on the tour and showing us the building of the helicopter and the pad. We hope you like the Beanie Babies. Thank you for letting us go to Children's Hospital. And I liked dancing with the Mexican band in the cafeteria because I'm Mexican. I hope we come back soon. Love, Viridiana

Dear Mrs. Martinez,
I liked the tour because it was pretty important. I liked the beanie babies. Oh, and I forgot to tell you. I'm Mexican. I hope you speak Spanish. I have pride for what I've done. I can never believe every thing I've done. I'm just so happy, I can Never forget. Did you know I play baseball? Love, Patty

--Susan Martinez

Oliver Schroer's Last Show on His Tour of This Planet

2010-05-21T02:12:00.003-04:00

Susan Martinez writes:

So this is the way it's going to be?

This is the way it's going to be. We don't know the how or the when -- sometimes we get some advance notice -- as did my friend, fiddle player, producer and inspiration Oliver Schroer -- but we know the deal's going down.

Along the way, on a good day we treat each other well, love and feel loved, and treat strangers with kindness also. It’s the living that matters, and the quality of each breath.

These words came from Oli, upon learning his leukemia was end-stage and he’d been removed from the BMT list:
---
Hi friends,

I have wanted to write more to all of you about my situation. I sentout a letter last weekend, but it was a pretty plain letter, and did not include a lot of stuff I feel is important to talk about at this point, for me and for everybody.

The gist of that first letter was that the doctors have run out of ways to treat my disease, which is particularly aggressive and ornery. They have thrown every combo of chemotherapy and nasty drugs at my cancer, and in incredibly high doses. The doctors admitted that they were surprised already that the chemotherapy had not actually killed me. It turns out that I am very tough. (My friend Teresa says I’m tougher than a boiled owl.) So if there are no treatment options left for me, what they can and intend to do is make me as comfortable as I can be in the time left to me, so that I am not in pain and not suffering in any way.

What I did not talk about in that first letter was how I feel about all of this & I guess I feel that life is not only about quantity. It is about quality as well. We all have to die some time. None of us will live on this planet forever. I think some people live very intensely and burn very brightly during their time here. I think
I am one of those people. A shining star while I am here. So I look at my life as I have lived it, and I feel very satisfied with all I have achieved and gone through. As a musician and artist I have found my voice on my instrument of choice. That is what any artist wants to do. Whether you are a musician or a painter or a dancer or a writer, the bottom line as a creative person is to find that unique voice and express it in your art.

I got to record many albums of my music, and to get that music out there, instead of just thinking about it. I had many great adventures with fellow musicians and travelers along the path. I have had a beautiful bunch of teaching relationships with a lot of students, not only individuals but entire communities of learning musicians -- the Valley Youth Fiddlers and the Twisted String in Smithers. I never got to have biological kids. But I did get to pass on my music in important ways to a whole generation of young people.

So between finding my voice on my instrument, and being able to share my music directly with so many, I feel like a very lucky guy. There is also the fact that in life, I like to concentrate on the positive aspects of reality. Look at what you do have, and thank the Creator for that, and enjoy it all to the max. This is a stance you take in life. With just a little bit of practice, that becomes an attitude you can easily stick to. Let’s put it this way: if I can think like this in my present position, I would hope that you all can do the same. I would even ask you to do this for me. Take that stance in life for me and from me, and concentrate always on the positive.

I have burned brightly in life, and lived life very fully. I feel I have achieved a great deal in life. And as I look back on the life I have lived, I am concentrating on all of the positive aspects, on all of the beauty I have experienced and generated, and getting a lot of satisfaction and pleasure from that. And the fact that my life is shorter than it might have been ceases to trouble me very much.

One very amazing thing about my position right now is how I get a clear insight into my own situation at this exact time. In the time left to me, I get to contemplate my life, and to ponder about what I would like to do in the time left to me. I can make a wish list of things I want to do in my last days here. Who do I want to spend time with? Are there things I want to finish up? Things I want to see? My end is near, but I have the feeling that it is also not going to happen super quickly. I still have time to focus and be myself and live as myself for the time left to me.

The very best, from the very edge,

Oli
---
A couple of weeks later, a new letter from Oliver: he wanted to perform one more concert. He booked Trinity St. Paul's in Toronto, hired the techs and equipment, and tickets sold out in a flash.

It was billed as Oliver Schroer's Last Show on His Tour of This Planet.

I would have given anything to be there, but I'd already made plans to take my mom to the Big Island, her first trip, for her 70th birthday. The night of his show, mom and I were hunkered down in Kona in the wildest storm I've seen, a combination of a Midwest tornado-comin' thunderstorm with the crackling of an east coast August electrical storm. Beautiful and violent, it stayed on top of us for hours, stuck against the top of Mauna Kea, lightning and thunder never becoming more distant, never moving on. I remember looking at my watch and calculating the time in Toronto, realizing that Oliver was onstage. Somehow, that calmed me. Finally, at what would have been his encore, the storm simply stopped. No drifting off in the distance, it just stopped as if clouds and rain and electricity dissolved into Madam Pele.

When I got home from Hawaii, friends had written about Oliver's show. It was a sauna. It was spellbinding. It was magical. One person wrote "...pushes and pulls and lulls and held breaths. It seemed a lot more tonal than usual though. Less tension-and-release and more smooth, flowing washes of sound. Pure joy all around. I find that Oliver has ghost notes...either they are purely scientific overtones or the result of imagination, notes created in my "mind's ear". Ghost rhythms, too. Rhythms that are there, but almost aren't. It really makes it sound like his music is all around you. But the second to last piece really did it for me - suddenly fiddlers popped up all over the audience (real, not ghosts), each playing the little melody that Oliver had started. It was a huge sound. And then little bursts of singing began, and soon the whole audience started singing too, just intuitively. Wow."

Another person wrote "The tunes seemed to last forever, but were over all too soon. At the end of the evening, Oliver closed his final encore with his love march -- first played on the fiddle, then joined with whistling, humming, clapping, harmonizing, singing, all quietly, then more quietly still, the audience making the music last long after Oliver had left the stage. What a wonderful way to give each and every member of the audience their own Oliver song to take home with them. Unforgettable is such an
understatement."

A few days after the show, Oliver sent this:

Well, today is a special day, in a strange kind of way. Today is the day I was admitted into the hospital last year. I remember my feelings of trepidation, my nurse coming in with the first round of chemo, dressed in a full body protection suit with goggles and all, because the stuff was so toxic they couldn't even afford to get a drop on their skin. And this was the stuff they were injecting right into me.

I have been so looking forward to the show, it is hard to believe it is over, and I am looking back on it. Well, what a concert it was. I was so happy with the way it went. Once I got to the venue, I remember thinking to myself: 'What did I get myself into here!' I sat on the couch in the green room and stared at the wall for 45 minutes before the show.

And then, suddenly it was showtime. It felt wonderful to be on that stage. I could feel a wave of love and beautiful friendship coming my way from the audience. We all felt quite emotional, and then I just dove in and started navigating through the music. I felt very much on my game, musically and performance wise. I will admit that about 2/3rds of the way through the second half, I was ready to tear my clothes off and jump in the pool to cool down. I understand that the upstairs was like a Bikram Yoga studio.

I feel like the concert left people in a good place -- there were lots of tears, but there was lots of joy as well, and it was not a bleak affair. There was one thing I forgot to say in the show. It should have gone in the intro to the friendship song. One of the things over the past year that has given me great joy is to see my various circles of friends connecting; I can only hope that that will all go on. That is human connective stuff of the first order.

Fiddlingly yours, (and resting up or a few days)

Oliver
---

On Sunday, June 29, 2008, Oliver left the hospital long enough to attend a performance by three of his young fiddle students, his pride and joy. He sat in the front row beaming, giving the thumbs up as they played.

That Wednesday night, he wrote his last tune, entitled "Poise."

That Thursday morning at 11:30, he was carrying on with the nurse in his usual fashion and said “Well, I guess no excursions today!” and left the planet. Peaceful, very fast, no suffering. And giving us one more joyous laugh.
---

I’ve been thinking a lot about Oli these days, journeying through my own cancer diagnosis this spring. Oli’s friendship and positive attitude have stayed with me these years and his music and spirit have been part of my fuel as I go through my own chemo treatments.

When I read the news of his diagnosis some time back, I pulled for him. My heart broke when he wrote he'd been taken off the transplant list and that his end approached; but that night I had the most beautiful dream. I dreamt Oliver had written his wishes on a piece of yellow notebook paper. The handwriting was flowing, relaxed, spirited, elegant, strong. It was like his bowing and was beautiful to look at. And the words were beautiful too, and at the end of his list he requested that his friends get three little tomato seeds. He wanted his cremated ashes to feed the tomato seeds, and when the plants bore fruit he wanted us to have a late-summer bbq and cook and chop the tomatoes a thousand ways to feed our spirit and to celebrate rebirth.

That dream still makes me happy. Those little tomato seeds are the dozens of young fiddle students he nurtured across Canada. I'm grateful for the memories and stories I had with Oliver, and for the thousands of tunes he wrote, but most of all I'm grateful for the joy these young fiddlers will find, and spread, in musicking.

I told him at the time, how odd that such devastating news gave me a dream that made me happy. But Oliver was transformative that way, and this is a journey about living, not a journey about not-dying. He and I, and everyone who reads this now, are kin in that.
----
“SILENCE AT THE HEART OF THINGS,” a documentary about the late Canadian fiddler Oliver Schroer, is available on DVD from Borealis Records, www.borealisrecords.com

Jason Isbell

2009-03-08T12:57:00.001-04:00

I would be remiss if I didn't note that Dave Marsh conducted two great interviews yesterday for Sirius radio.

The first was with Van Morrison.

The second was with Jason Isbell, former member of the Drive-By Truckers, current leader of the band, the 400 Unit. Dave was kind enough to let me sit in, and for someone as enraptured by the guy's music as I am, it was a total treat.

He's a big, quiet man, 30 years old, with dark hair slicked back, snaggly teeth, slightly pop eyes, and the big shoulders and neck of a worker. Thick Alabama accent. He's small town rural and smart as a whip. He has this quiet, slow way of talking where he considers your question and then puts complete answers together, confident but not arrogant. He looks like he doesn't much care for being interviewed, but he cares for the music and recognizes this is another way to get it heard.

The thing that Dave hit on and that struck me was the air of respect Isbell has. It's in his songs: his ability to see both sides of an issue like a soldier returning from war or a tough break-up. He listens. And he learns from all sides. And then he writes these big songs that don't lecture or even make points as much as ask questions.

That respect seems to come from where and how he was brought up. Like Drive-by, his perspective tends to be from the bottom-up. He said (or was it Dave?) that they were making not so much Southern rock as rural music. And in his case anyway, rural music refers to everything from Otis Redding to Muscle Shoals (where he recorded both his solo CD's) to Outkast to Jimi Hendrix. It's an outsider's, working person's take on the world.

Partly as a result of that and partly just cause he seems dead honest, he says he doesn't write too many happy or optimistic songs. He said that more often than not he finds himself facing dilemmas and worrying how things are going to turn out. I picture him writing songs the way you might look at a broken piece of equipment: "Damn! Now how am I gonna fix that?"

All of which may make Isbell sound far too serious and depressing. Last night, after the interview, I went to his show in NYC. And it was just this glorious, heart-felt, inspiring blow-out. He's got four other members in his band, including a little long-haired bass player who looks like he's from Star Wars (what were those fuzzy creatures?) and an angular, ratcheting fellow guitarist, both from Jason's part of the South. Drummer's from Northern Alabama, too; keyboard player presently living in Brooklyn.

His first CD was wonderful. But this second one is better: full of big pop hooks and a wide variety of styles all held together by the band's kick-ass approach and his big voice. There's what you might call a Percy Sledge ballad, complete with a tangy horn section; intense rockers that crescendo up and up; a country-western song or three but sung with no fake nostalgia, just dirt farm directness; and throughout (they played from 10:15 at night till 1:15, with a ten minute break) this amazing directness.

I see something similar with Ozomotli live. And Los Lobos. This sense of a band that's doing what it loves and recognizes it's work and is going to get it right both for its own self-worth and because it wants the crowd to get what they paid for. At one point, in the midst of a solo, Jason and the bass-player got into a quick balancing contest: each standing on one leg and seeing who'd be the first to fall over. This as the music teetered on what seemed like impossible heights and finally fell. On one of the great new songs, "Cigarettes and Wine," Isbell sings of the memory of this woman, saying it lingers inside him still: "wrapped up like a twenty dollar bill." Except you have to hear him drawing out the word "wrapped" till it's like winding up a rubber-band airplane, getting ready for release.

We talk a bunch about whether rock&roll is still alive. I stopped myself a couple of times last night to check that these five people playing guitars, drums and keyboards were really making this heroic, this demanding a storm of music. They were. Not a hint of nostalgia or condescension. Respect for what had come before but no sense that they were trying to duplicate it. Rather, the music seemed to say, times are tough. And this rock&roll thing is an honest way to talk about it.

You know that kind of loopy, dazed look someone gets when they're so deep into what they're doing that they're forgetting to breathe or swallow? Every member of Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit had it more than once last night. It was full fucking steam ahead; jump on if you want a ride.

Towards what? Ah. Their closing song, the crowd drenched and hoarse, was a cover: Into the Mystic.

The Bridge

2009-02-26T10:00:00.001-05:00

Dave Marsh writes:

People ask me why I remain devoted to rock/blues/rap/soul music. You can see it in their eyes, even if they don’t ask, that they wonder why an almost 60-year-old man would still be so wrapped up in things that are so flimsy and childish (to them). I have spent most of my career trying to articulate the reasons. This morning I read an email from a friend, who lays it all out with extreme clarity. Granted, this is in some respects a singular story and certainly an example of lousy shrink/great patient. (“Intact” must be jargon. Nobody who is at all informed about this issue could think that anyone who has been abused is “intact” psychologically. But professionals insulate themselves from their own emotions by pretending otherwise.) Abuse isn’t the only reason that I—or my friend—love the music. But it is a huge part of why we regard the music as something that has saved our lives in the truest sense.

I want to say this again, now, because I think there is a storm coming that will include more witch-hunts against hip-hop and maybe metal, especially with a Presidential administration run by someone associated with the Oprah Winfrey wing of punitive cultural criticism. I will join the fray again, on the side of free speech, and for as long as I am able. I hope people who read it will learn to think in the same terms. For every kid who needs what the email calls the “bridge,” we need to support this culture, no matter how off-track it may become in other ways. Somebody is surviving because of this and giving the worst parents an excuse to take it away (or for that matter, indulge in further abuse because of it) is unacceptable. Period.

This shrink that deals with the cardiology patients asked me what I do to alleviate my stress. I told him, "Get out on the road. I get away from all this, and just get out on Route 66, Arizona, New Mexico. Just get me out on that road. Everything else is secondary. I don't feel any stress out there." I added that I can only go so often, due to finances and time. But that is the thing that alleviates my stress more than anything else in the world.

Then he started asking me a lot of questions about my fucked-up childhood, and he asked me a lot of questions about how I could have survived all that.

He kept saying, "There must have been some significant person that cared about you as a child. Statistically, that is the only way abused kids come out of that intact."

I kept insisting to him that there was no such person. I never connected with any of my teachers as a kid. My grandmother on my dad's side cared about me, but she died of a heart attack when she was fairly young, when I was like 5 or 6 years old. And that was the end of anything with me and any grandparents.

The shrink kept saying, "There had to have been someone." He was looking for some significant bonding person with me who got me through it. I kept telling him there *was* no one.

I told him about when the cops came over, and how they did nothing.

No one ever did anything.

I said, "If I had grown up in the '90's or in this decade, I would have been removed from the home. Back then, no one did anything about this stuff."

When he finally accepted that I was a weird statistic, that despite what all the psychology books claim, I did *not* have a significant person in my life who cared about me, he was at a loss. (You are supposed to have at least one significant other that really cared about you for you to not end up as ultra-permanently damaged goods, beyond repair.)

I decided to just put it on the line at this point, because I had already told him enough examples of the horrendous abuse I suffered as a kid.

He seemed a bit dazed and stunned when I finally said, "Look. I didn't have a significant person. This is how I survived. It was my albums. It was my Rolling Stones albums, my Jimi Hendrix records, my Bob Dylan albums, Marvin Gaye, Zeppelin, Yardbirds, and whatever else I had. I listened to those albums over and over, and because of them, I knew there was some other world out there, other than the hell I was living in. I knew from listening to those albums there were people that existed out there, that did not have the warped values my parents had. And I was going to find those people one day. There was no doubt in my mind. Listening to those albums, I knew there was some better place, and one day I would be a part of it---away from all this. It wasn't like I was hoping, it was something I knew. There was no choice involved. One day, I would be out of that hell, and I would be in some other world, and that would be wherever that music came from. I listened to music constantly. Music was not my escape. It was my bridge."

I told him, "It got me out of there, mentally. It individuated me from my parents. That is what got me the fuck out of there, that is what made me not end up like my little brother, who became bonded to the violence, and who could never stand up to my parents, and who could never individuate from them."

I said, "Any guidance I ever got as far as coping came from those albums. That music was my significant person." I then quoted the lyrics from "Jumping Jack Flash" :

I was raised by a toothless, bearded hag
I was schooled with a strap right across my back
But it's all right now, in fact, it's a gas!
But it's all right
I'm Jumpin' Jack Flash, it's a gas!

I said, "If that is not about survival, I don't know what is."

He had this really stunned silence.

Then he said he was entirely appalled by what he was hearing from me about my parents, and that he found it to be very disturbing. He then told me that when he ran the monitor on me to measure my stress and how it effects my heart (I forget the name of the equipment or the name of the test), when I was talking about the abuse I endured from my parents, that I did not react very much physiologically, which he found really surprising.

I said, "Because it is just a matter of fact. Just like this wall here is white, or that the sky is blue, it is a matter of fact that I was abused to the point where someone should have removed me from that home."

He said that my stress level on the heart thing when I talked about my parents not having major variations in it means I am "coping" with what I had been through, and he said it is surprising given how bad the incidents I told him were.

He said most people would have had a far greater physiological reaction talking about things like that.

He then told me I am "extremely gifted and talented." I don't know where he got that from.

To my surprise, he told me I don't even need to come back to see him again. He said, "You have your survival skills as far as dealing with it. You know how to deal with what you have been through."

We Insist!

2009-02-25T00:10:00.006-05:00

Lew Rosenbaum writes:

This is a note I would have written to Strat a year ago, and copied to my sister Greta; or perhaps the other way around. The point on the triangle that was Greta is not available, except in my imagination or to communicate in some way with the ancestors as some are wont to say. My saying this to you in no way attempts to lessen the value of what I am saying, nor am I simply dwelling on a hole in my life, nor am I only saying how glad I am for the many years I had to do what I had to do and the years I have with you as well. Perhaps it's all of the above and more.

It's about a performance that Diana and I saw on the lucky Friday the 13th of February.

Last fall, as I sat contemplating the Symphony Center series ticket offerings and ticking off the many things I'd like to see and would never see in the coming year, and thought of the times Diana and I discussed going to concerts, and agreed that THIS YEAR we would, but that because of our hectic schedules we'd wait to the last minute so that we wouldn't be obliged to go out when we were too tired, and then of course when the time came we WERE too tired or forgot or had scheduled something else and so we COULDN't GO -- this year as I contemplated that multifaceted list of offerings, I told Diana it is time we made time for what we wanted to do rather than just let it go by, and the two of us scraped away the concerts we could do without and came down to five during this season: 3 classical programs and one dance program and the program we heard tonight.

We Insist! The Freedom Now Suite composed by Max Roach in 1960, a piece I had never heard before. I had no reference point to it except that it sounded interesting and I've heard Max Roach before and so we booked that.

First, the performers were superb. Julian Priester on trombone was one of the people who originally recorded the piece. Ron and Clark Bridgewater on Sax and Trumpet were great, Ira Colman on bass had a stunning solo to start one of the five pieces that make up the suite, and the three percussionists talked to each other throughout. Ray Mantilla (75 years old!) on the congas was on the original recording and, in the last section dueled back and forth across the stage with percussionist Nelson Clarke, and holding the whole thing together was drummer Lewis Nash, center back, where Roach would have been playing. He was phenomenal.

The most amazing phenomenon of the evening of phenomena was Dee Dee Bridgewater, who I thought wrung every ounce of emotion possible out of her not always verbal vocal performance -- at time shrieking what needed to be shrieked, and starting, in the first section called Driver Man, with a refrain that she hissed at the audience: "All I got in my mind, the driver man and quittin' time."

The unit played off each other so well, with Bridgewater opening most segments up and closing each segment with repeat refrain[ but always in between, as the musicians played to each other, melding a kind of dance and appreciation with the others that was emotionally exhausting. The lyrics, written by Oscar Brown Jr., were spare and demanding as the music.

The music howls, cajoles, screams in both birth pangs and the slash of the driver's lash, and wails as all good brass sections must. There is also something very sensual/sexual about the way a bass player makes love to his instrument, perhaps because the instrument is so life size that embrace, foreplay and orgasm seem to be happening on stage without any attempt to mask it. And in the long introduction to the one section of the suite Colman did make love to his instrument.

The suite ends with a section titled Tears for Johannesberg -- and as Bridgewater brought all the performers out at the end to receive applause, she closed by saying that there are no more tears necessary for Johannesberg, but we have tears in our own back yard that we have to deal with. If we stand together, we can deal with them. We Insist.

2009-02-22T02:02:00.011-05:00

Precious

Danny Alexander writes:

One of my favorite Kansas City musicians, one of my favorite musicians period, is a woman named Kristie Stremel. When I first saw her, she was playing guitar with the band Frogpond, which had some notoriety in the late 90s after Art Alexakis produced its album, "Count to Ten."

Stremel was the perfect foil for the somewhat reserved lead singer of that band, Heidi Phillips. While Heidi diffidently addressed the mic like Kurt Cobain's lost sister, Stremel would work the crowd, fist pumping, bounding around the stage, and eventually, climbing the rafters. It was a wonderful contrast live, but it never felt like it would last.

After Stremel left and formed her own band, Exit 159, I understood why. She'd woodshedded with her two new bandmates all summer and emerged early in the fall with a full set of poignant, catchy and hard-rocking material. I still have the newspaper I was holding in my hand during that first show, its margins full of notes on songs I had never heard before. I knew I'd be writing about them. And I did, early and often, as they toured across the country twice and found their way into regular rotation on local alternative radio playlists.

After the first year, the bassist left, and the band took on more of a punk style reflecting the sensibility of its newest member. They had a strong second year together, taking on yet another player, three of them having fronted their own bands before. They played the Viper Room in Los Angeles where, word had it, 26 labels were in the house. Nothing happened. And then the inevitable tensions tore them apart.

Stremel went on to record as a solo artist, and her songwriting grew increasingly sophisticated both musically and lyrically, but, unfortunately, without a consistent band to back her up, she never regained the kind of audience she'd had with Exit 159.

Friday night, Exit 159 reunited, and the show was fantastic. The band played to an attentive packed house, as hard as it ever did but with a more supple touch. The band members have all gotten better in the 10 years since they broke up.

The drummer was always good, but he used to play on the stiff side of Max Weinberg, with perfect posture. The perfect posture's still there, but what's unusual about Rob VanBiber's style is also key to his strength--he's precise as hell, and Friday night he played more dynamically, with a deeper pocket and a ton of surprising fills, all the while hitting hard as ever.

The bass player, Jamey Wheeler, was always a strong second vocalist for Stremel, kind of a warm, almost sweetening, complement. His vocals seem even stronger today, more self-assured. He takes a verse in one song, and it's a great moment, but the best thing about the two of them is a certain call and response between their vocals. I'd also forgotten how much his bass style, rooted in jam band fluidity, provided a unique counterpoint to everything else going on and helped define Exit's sound.

My wife Lauren had never seen Exit before, except that she had gone with me last weekend to watch them rehearse in the studio. That day, they ended with this new cover of "Simply the Best," the Tina Turner song, that got Lauren beaming.

Later, in the car, she said, "They need to play their own stuff the way they played that song."

I reassured her that, with the sound coming through a soundboard and with a crowd in front of them (rather than the two of us and the drummer's wife), it would all be at that level. I was hoping....betting...

And, fortunately, I was right. They came out with every bit the intensity of that cover. Stremel and the crowd were ringing sweat midway through the set, and it only built from there.

They played something like 90 minutes ending with covers of "Something So Strong" and "Little Red Corvette," an old rave-up of their own called "Cigarette Kiss" (the traditional set closer) and then "Simply the Best."

One of the great things about Stremel with a 3 piece is that she takes lead on guitar. And it's not that she's some great guitarist, but she knows how to make you feel a solo, even if she fucks it up she salvages it (which happened at some point Friday night).

That was always a highlight of the "Little Red Corvette" cover in the old days.... In that quiet bridge at the center of the song, she'd bend over and seemingly search for the notes on her lead--and it was always this moving moment, very hard and on the edge of atonality, but somehow perfect.

She had several moments like that Friday, but one of the wonders of the Tina Turner song (which has never before been a favorite of mine) was not only how she made it her own but also how she managed to make it a vehicle for one hell of an exciting guitar solo after the bridge. Everything exploded into the final chorus, and it was a perfect finale to the night.

Lauren, who never does this, went over to Lawrence to watch her play again Saturday. I'd already committed to reviewing the Pretenders show for our alternative weekly, the Pitch. I have an almost three decade old soft spot for Chrissie, but I wanted to be at Kristie's show again, watching the exact same set all over. Frustrated as I was, that's a good feeling to have.

Lester Bangs on Van Morrison's Astral Weeks

2009-02-12T11:15:00.009-05:00

Dave Marsh writes:

I think Lester Bangs' essay on Astral Weeks (from Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island, edited by Greil Marcus) is probably as good as Lester ever got, which is more than just considerable. I am not sure to this day whether his vision of humanity was extremely limited or the most expansive one that I know—it is maybe both, kind of alternately—or whether it's just that we arrived at different solutions to the same problem, which is the problem of thinking you're dying, dying of fear and isolation, and then not dying but also not feeling quite as fearful and isolated and starting to betray yourself by growing up, maturing. We traveled different roads but they had points of nearness where we could reach out and touch—or almost touch, Lester might say—and there was never a time when I felt like we were on different sides of the wars fought to preserve individual humanity. (I ain't speaking for what he felt; I don't know, exactly. I know some of it but not all that much for sure.)

Anyway, this is the guidelines by which the new Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl should be judged, IMO, especially this passage:

What this is about is a whole set of verbal tics—although many are bodily as well—which are there for reason enough to go a long way toward defining his style. They're all over Astral Weeks: four rushed repeats of the phrases "you breathe in, you breath out" and "you turn around" in "Beside You'; in "Cyprus Avenue", twelve "way up on"s, "baby" sung out thirteen times in a row sounding like someone running ecstatically downhill toward one's love, and the heartbreaking way he stretches "one by one" in the third verse; most of all in "Madame George", where he sings the word "dry" and then "your eye" twenty times in a twirling melodic arc so beautiful it steals your own breath, and then this occurs: "And the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves the love that loves to love the love that loves to love the love that loves."

Van Morrison is interested, obsessed with how much musical or verbal information he can compress into a small space, and, almost, conversely, how far he can spread one note, word, sound, or picture. To capture one moment, be it a caress or a twitch. He repeats certain phrases to extremes that from anybody else would seem ridiculous, because he's waiting for a vision to unfold, trying as unobtrusively as possible to nudge it along. Sometimes he gives it to you through silence, by choking off the song in midflight: "It's too late to stop now!"

It's the great search, fueled by the belief that through these musical and mental processes illumination is attainable. Or may at least be glimpsed.

It truly may be that this is pretty much everything I have ever sought from music, and to those who damn transcendence as an object of desire—or maybe i mean, as a prospective achievement—all that I can say is, the answer to the question of who is damned is obvious and universal, and yes, it's the wrong question. The goal of what Lester is writing about here—the goal of what Lester writes here—is to transcend not one's humanity but the conditions of the world that make it so painful; and he understands the fundamental principle, which is that there is no way around the universal state of humanity, there is only a way through it. And if that is not transcendence, then I have no idea what it would be, in (this is ridiculous but important) practical terms.

I say this all so defensively because, I guess, sometimes people think that what Lester wrote is dated; sometimes I think it myself. But I think that the best of it is as close to timeless as needs be discovered in our lifetimes.

More on Working on a Dream

2009-02-08T11:07:00.001-05:00

Barbara Hall writes:

There's so much to listen to in this record. My ears are all jammed up with it. I love the operatic nature of it. As much as anything, I love the long phrasing which allows Bruce the time and space to sing. I just love hearing him sing. Not the modern Bruce staccato singing but the old Bruce chasing down these endless melody lines singing, but with a brand new, or old school, understanding of how to do it. It strikes me as funny and sad and weird that he is one of the best soul singers of our time.

The romance of the record, and the phrasing, too, reminds me of The Wild, The Innocent and The E Street Shuffle. Not in a nostalgic way, but in a way where those songs finally figured out what they were really meant to accomplish.

There are only a couple of songs where he overloads the lines with lyrics. Mostly, he just creates this space to maneuver. I guess the overall thing, much as the last album, is the harmonics, the sense of space, and the unusual and unexpected forms of filling that all up.

But here's the thing. This record isn't like anything we've heard before. You almost can't compare it. It's of a piece, or mise en scene as the filmsters like to say. A friend was asking me what it was like and I said it was mostly like a film score. In the best way. In that you can't really break it down or take anything out of context. Listening to it while I drive makes me a little drunk. I wonder what I'd say if I got pulled over.

When I was studying film in school, I fell in love with it (Fellini, Bergman, Bunel, et al) because it was like entering someone's dream. This record is like entering some dream Bruce is having, too. Sonically, lyrically, atmospherically. I suspect it might take years to get it entirely.

I guess that's why he's Working On A Dream.

In Praise of The Cramps: Lux Interior R.I.P.

2009-02-06T09:31:00.002-05:00

John Floyd writes, in response to a question about what made The Cramps great:

Jesus, where do I start? They cut their first and best records in Memphis, and I read about them at the time in the local paper and bought the records the minute I could find them (Gravest Hits was the first I owned; the original singles collected on that record were sold out by the time I knew about them) and when I heard them, they ripped off my head. It was everything I grew up hearing, thanks to parents who loved rockabilly without knowing the music even had a name; my own interest in punk rock and the Memphis band Panther Burns, who were doing things similar to the Cramps' early work, had never met so definitively for me, and it all made sense. So the Cramps, for me, were rock and roll, forget about prefixes. I learned so much from them, through their ultra-obscure covers and the songs and artists they talked about in early interviews -- it was like a history lesson funneled through punk-rock noise, and that was right up my alley at the time, and probably still is. The Cramps helped to make me a rock and roll fanatic, one of those termites who cares about Link Wray outtakes and the Sonics and just how glorious weird rock and roll can be sometimes. They haven't made a record I've cared about since Smell of Female, which must be from '83 at the latest, but what they did to me as a fan is immeasurable. I've loved the Cramps like I've loved the most important music in my life, and even though he farted off the last 30 or so of his, musically speaking, I hate that Lux Interior doesn't have one anymore.

Rediscovering the Wonders of Music

2009-02-06T09:26:00.004-05:00

Danny Alexander writes from Overland Park, KS:

I stopped off at Target on my way home from work and bought Working on A Dream on the day it came out. I put it in, and "Outlaw Pete" lasted almost exactly the length of my ride home. It was a singular experience in my listening life. I didn't follow the lyric, aside from the refrains, but the music moved me close to tears at that first point where it grows quiet, and then the music swelled again, and I had that feeling I have watching an epic western, that I didn't know where it was going to go, but I was just glad to be along for the ride. I don't remember all the particulars of the sound swelling in my car, but at that point, where I turn off 95th Street onto Connell and wound through a neighborhood to 91st, I felt like I felt as a teenager-- when music told me of limitless possibilities, when I knew the feel of the key to the universe in that old parked car. But this was a different universe, and a different car.

From 91st, I took another jog through a neighborhood on a street called Knox until I reach 89th, where I live. The music was drawing to a close, and I'd moved close to tears twice more. What I knew, pulling into my spot, was that I wasn't ready to go on to the next song yet. I thought of that moment in "This Magic Moment," when you talk about exchanging glances, lifting the needle and starting the record again.

Fortunately, I didn't have to move on, or I had an excuse not to. I came in the house and showed the CD to my wife Lauren, and we went up to our room and put it on the beatbox. It reminded me how good music is when it's played by the side of your bed, filling up your room with worlds worth dreaming about. We wound up cuddling, and just listening. Lauren was beginning to doze by "The Last Carnival." but she was also surprised, in a good way, that it had flown by so quickly. Lauren also said she appreciated Bruce writing "Queen of the Supermarket" for her, longtime checkout girl that she is.

I haven't had this kind of reaction to a record in so long that I think I'd begun to think music couldn't do that for me anymore. It figures Bruce could prove that wrong. But even though I had a sense I was going to like this record more than anything since The Rising, I didn't expect this, this feeling of Christmas morning coupled with a starry night on section roads.

I suspect that's the happiness that critics keep noting. (I haven't read the reviews so much as comments about them, although I did read that lame Spin thing.) There's a joy here, but it's nothing so simple as a man being content. It makes me think of Sonny finding that brand new piano in his hands in James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues." The joy I hear is a man (and a whole crew I'd guess) who's rediscovering the wonders of music. I feel certain he had to go there to take me there so completely, so quickly. As I've said many times, I'm a slow listener. It's very rare I'm affected in any way approaching this so quickly. I'm a happy man tonight, and that's not a simple thing at all; just precious.

Springsteen at the Super Bowl

2009-02-02T15:37:00.003-05:00

Stewart Francke writes:

All the sanctimonious hype around Bruce Springsteen playing the Super Bowl rubbed me the wrong way. Why is anyone shocked or surprised by Bruce playing the Super Bowl? What is there to "come to terms" with? Name any major successful act and he's made exactly the same mercenary concessions to sales and fame and money that any other act has--maybe even moreso than others. The only thing that's different is that they don't make claims otherwise. If you listened to him at the press conference, he doesn't either, yet his fans seem to make them for him and get all hung up on the past.

He plays stadiums and has for 20 years; he pushes singles and records with more media concentration than anyone; he releases a Greatest Hits to the highest bidding retailer; he charges an arm and a leg to see him; he lets his music be cut up with football sounds--- wherein all this is there a "shock" he's playing the Super Bowl? And his 12 minute mini-set, in the end, was fabulous.

I guess it's because the biggest difference--and this is a big one--is that the music's a ton better, and a ton more meaningful and enduring than with other acts. His music has defined and framed our lives. But is it "selling out?" That's absurd. I have no problem paying an arm and a leg to see him; it's worth it, one of the few things in American life where that's so. But I don't get why the world keeps expecting him to behave like some fringe artiste, making decisions based on principles that would keep him out of the limelight. Everything he does is admittedly about the limelight. And it really should be no other way--the music is to be shared. And it's beautiful music. I'd do it exactly the same way, with as much honesty and class as he's displayed recently--he's doin all this cuz he loves it and needs it and wants the world to dig the music. No harm, no foul. As Greil Marcus famously wrote, and I paraphrase, the game of pop is not worth playing on a limited basis.

All the erroneous rhetoric in Bob Lefsetz's bitter pollyanna trip--two columns worth of kvetching over Bruce "selling out," bemoaning rock's lost innocence. Hell, I'm a long time fan and I'm happy Bruce is so exposed currently--I get to see more of him and hear more of his music. He's pimpin a killer new record and a great body of work...what's the problem? Great things are hard to find in this world.

I have to say I was turned off with the first couple listens of Working On A Dream. Now I've lived with it in my car for some long drives and many listens, and in a lot of ways it's the Bruce album I've been waiting for. I bitched about him doing the dry-as-dust cowboy songs when he was capable of such florid, ornate and moving music...and now he's done it. I really like a lot of the same things as a songwriter and record-maker: The fluid string arrangements (with real strings), the simple groove, the arcing, long melody lines, the arpeggiated guitars often doubled, the piano as response to the vocal, played on the upbeat; the harmonic innovation (this is what's really blowin my mind with this new record) and the lyrics about contentment--which is to say you gotta know the other side of contentment before you can write about it. You gotta know suffering to sing wisely of contentment.

I made my homage to the Beach Boys with Sunflower Soul Serenade, and it's hip to hear Bruce mining those same sounds in intros and bridges--the bass lines built on thirds (straight outta the Carole Kay/Brian Wilson cookbook) the spry quarter note piano stabs, doubled by harpsichord and organ, the sleigh bells and glock (nothing new to Bruce of course) and of course the lovely vocal arrangements.

"This Life" and "Kingdom of Days" are songs I wish I'd written and, in a weird way, songs I feel I've tried to write--"All The Love In a Day" and "Famous Times."

I wrote to my friend Danny Alexander that at first the songs seemed impersonal and benign. But I was wrongheaded with my first couple listens--It's maybe his most personal record since Tunnel Of Love, and the best lyrical commentary on a happy marriage ever in rock. Maybe it's the flipside to Blood On The Tracks or Shoot Out The Lights, those sad song cycles of marriages falling apart in bitterness and desperation.

But it's the melodic and harmonic construction, along with the lead vocal timbre, that makes me say Home Run. From the relative "ease" of "Surprise Surprise"--a major key melody built around flatted fifths that is as fine as any Bacharach or McCartney melody--to the descending flow of "Kingdom of Days," these are melodies that not only resolve--they anticipate the melody line to come. Brilliant gifts that he lets shine through by getting out of the way in the writing process.

It's almost not fair--just when you think of Bruce as a non-melodic "talking" songwriter, he pulls all these languid, gorgeous songs out. I could go on of course, about all the songs, but I really need to listen more. I don't really give a fuck if he plays in a Wal-Mart parking lot if he keeps making records this vital, this beautiful. I've always aspired to make "beautiful" music, because to my ears it works and there's a shortage of it in rock'n'roll. I hope he puts another another out in the fall. Keep 'em comin'.

I do have to say I don't get "Outlaw Pete," if there is anything to "get." I know the image of a baby in a diaper robbing someone is funny, but I'm not sure it's supposed to be funny. I can't imagine writing a song like "Outlaw Pete" in a zillion years, but if I did I woulda made the baby have a dirty diaper on top of it all. The music is epic--a lost cross between Kris Kristofferson and Morricone.

I initially thought this record would comment on our troubled times. Is it me or is this the longest, coldest, snowiest winter in 30 years? With the constant drone of job cuts, lawsuits, bailouts, plant closings, foreclosures and city corruption here in Detroit, this is a Turgenev Russian winter. Stark, lonely, frightening on one hand; on the other I see families and friends pulling together and at least trying to weather this. They talk about it being so bad in '82, but this is far worse to me. Dow cut 15% of its white collar jobs last week. We're all trying to find gigs but the climate is one of fear and abjuration. Everyone's just hangin on, and that includes me and my family, my band, many of my friends.

At first, truth be told, I was miffed with Bruce putting out such a record in these times, seemingly without comment on how fucked up we are. Then I got it--this is the kind of record we need. We don't need more headlines and portrayals of lives betrayed in meager economic times; they're everywhere around us. This record is a reminder about life's bittersweet longing--a personal statement that is inclusive in its vision and breathtaking in its scope. It's such a deeply felt, (and I hate this term but it really really applies) life-affirming circle of songs. Shaped like a life-saver for a reason. As passionate about life and living in its totality as those great lines in "Badlands."

Remarkable, really, when you think about how his motivation could so easily wane. More than any mythical thing surrounding him, or deals with stores, or support of labor, or the legendary 4 hour shows, or the legions of fans...the beauty and clarity and discipline and work ethic in these late-in-life records prove beyond any doubt how he's in it for the music, and only for the music.

I'd like to think if I had all the money in the world and access to private jets etc that I'd still make a record a year and tour all year. But a part of me thinks I might drink at a small cafe in Majorca for 6 months. Nah...I only care about music and family and town too. It's just as hard to maintain discipline when you're broke. In the end, I'm happy Bruce wanted to play the Super Bowl. It was an iconic meeting of American institutions. For 12 minutes I forgot it was winter in Detroit.

Voting

2008-11-04T23:41:00.001-05:00

Susan Martinez writes

We voted early yesterday, Sunday. The line wrapped around the county courthouse -- it had been that way all week and the previous weekend too. Weekend polling was extended 2 hours, and til the last minute people filled the line.

There were first-time voters of all ages and backgrounds, many-time voters with crutches and wheelchairs, but mostly, families with babies and little kids waving flags. People with absentee ballots drove to the courthouse to physically put their ballot in the box rather than mail them. "This is historic, for a thousand reasons," we all said.

I chatted with the fellow behind me for a while, but he tired of the line and was about to give up and try again on Tuesday. I talked him out of leaving and, in the end, he stayed and cast his ballot too. A woman held a sign with her wedding photo, asking us to vote No on Prop. 8 so her marriage wouldn't be declared invalid. Another woman was busy recruiting people to call undecided voters in swing states to vote for Obama; she did brisk business.

My mom has campaigned in Pennsylvania, my sister has campaigned in North Carolina, and both will be working the polls tomorrow, probably longer hours than they anticipate. My friend Don is traveling with the campaign covering it for radio. My friend Bill Bragin in New York had an online fundraiser ($41 campaign donation in honor of his 41st birthday, bring your receipt to his favorite bar and he'd buy your drink for his birthday, mitzvah style fine whether $4.10 or $82 or $4200...the email went viral and he raised many tens of thousands of dollars for the campaign). I've given money to this campaign, multiple times (every time I got an email saying "We're picking ten people to be in the front row at Grant Park on election night", I thought "I want to be there" and sent another $100). The calls, the emails, friends traveling to Nevada and Colorado to canvass door to door...I've never been so involved in a movement so large, but I felt it most profoundly standing in that line to vote on Sunday.

As I connected the arrow next to Barack Obama's name, I was overcome with emotion. I stared at the arrow to burn it in my memory. I sealed my envelope, signed it, and I paused. I don't know how many times I've heard Obama tell his story, but like mine it could only happen in this country. This day my vote was for my black great-great-grandmother working the underground railroad. This vote was for my Navajo grandmother who I look like and my white grandmother who I am like. This vote was for my Martinez grandfather who mined silver, and my immigrant white grandfather who mined atoms with the Manhattan Project. This vote was for my father, training in community organizing along side Cesar Chavez for farmworkers, and creating the first bilingual classroom in the state so that none of his students would be second-class citizens in their own school. This vote was for my parents, who couldn't get married because of miscegenation laws still being enforced. This vote was for the lunch counter sit-in my family staged when we couldn't get served at a Kansas HoJo unless we signed in as Martin. This vote was for the real working Joes chronicled by Studs, not the Joe the Plumber masquerade of Joe the McCarthy. This vote was for the 200,000 families I'll help at the hospital this year and the 900 volunteers I'll recruit to help me. This vote was for Saleh.

I thought of all these people and all the times they did not have a voice, and I heard Obama's words "there is not a red America or a blue America" and I put the ballot in.

2008-10-18T12:34:00.003-04:00

Fountain of Light

I've been hanging out with members of the Autism Self-Advocacy Network for the past 48 hours, so I want to say I'm perseverating over Jackson Browne. One of their great lines: "Where you are persistent, we perseverate...."

Anyway, I missed the Fred Martin & Levite Camp CD when it came around, and maybe that's why this new record is such a revelation to me. But my wife, Lauren, and I went to Browne’s band show in KC last night, and I feel what I've been hearing in this record was born out live. Lauren said, in fact, that she could see what I meant live (the jury's out from her on whether I'm crazy in my love of the record). But she did love the show.

The key thing really is the band, particularly its new members, Chavonne Morris and Alethea Mills. They play much more than the role of back up singers. They take verses, including the closing lines of "Culver Moon," significant pieces of songs recast by Fred Martin like "About My Imagination," the "sister's" response on "I Am A Patriot," and that brand new verse about 9/11 that Fred Martin's band wrote for "Lives In the Balance."

Browne firmly anchors that stage, but it's hard to say he's the star of the show. He's not even star as director because the band feels like everyone in it is vibing off one another as a band. "I Am A Patriot" was one song that was more or less redefined for me by that kind of interplay, which segued into a version of "It's Your Thing," focused on the elections. "Drums of War" is particularly explosive live, with that great simple thing Jeff Young is doing over there on the keyboards (what, two notes?) adding just the dissonance to turn all the questions as they get asked.

They played most of the new album, which surprised the hell out of me, to an enthusiastic seemingly-packed house in Kansas City, Missouri. And after the absolutely gorgeous "Far from the Arms of Hunger," which became a powerful visual prayer with all of the musicians bathed in these moving rays of golden light that came and went throughout the evening, it was amazing to me to hear "The Pretender" and "Running on Empty" reborn as songs about the contradictions at the heart of rock and roll, conceding the glass half empty, rejoicing in the glass half full.

But the most powerful sounds and images of the night, again, I will associate with Morris and Mills. You couldn't take your eyes off of them for long, and that wasn't a bad thing; that seemed like the balance the show was striving for, the emphasis on listening more than anything, the sense that this was about musicians doing what they do, not an aging rock star.

And the central image of it all was, for me, Chavonne Morris holding those hands up in those rays of light at crucial moments throughout the night, moments of testifying and moments physically expressing some rapture in the music, and she would do this thing where her arms would spread wide, like she could gather all those rays of light between them, and then she would bring her hands together in a clap of joy or rage or frustration, and the shadows made a sort of visual thunderclap that punctuated some climax in the music. It wasn't just one move she did, but it is that image I have to hold onto to try to suggest the kinds of things she and Alethea did time and time again. Those moments were key pieces of music as powerful as any I've experienced. The whole show was a reminder of what music is at its best--healing, soothing and bracing and invigorating all at once.

Jackson Browne apparently just turned 60 (he responded to the crowd's "Happy Birthdays" by acknowledging his age, with a proud smile--"I wasn't sure I'd make it"). I'd be proud too if I were him still making space for this kind of music. Running into the sun indeed.

Beautiful Day

2008-10-13T05:49:00.001-04:00

Last Friday, Barack Obama spoke at a rally in downtown Columbus, on the waterfront, at Genoa Park which is between the Center of Science and Industry and the banks of the Scioto River. I decided to go. The gates opened at 11; I made it downtown around 11:30, and imediately saw that I would have difficulty finding a place to park. Eventually I parked about a mile away and walked, part of the throng that seemd to be arriving from all directions and converging on the park. It took a good 35-40 minutes to get past the security gates and enter the park, which was crowded. As I got to the park’s entrance, U2's "Beautiful Day" – one of my favorite U2 songs -- was playing over the loudspeakers, and it was oh so appropriate, because in every respect it was a beautiful day. Sunny, not a cloud in the gorgeous blue sky, and all around me a diverse sea of humanity, a big smile on every face.

It was easily the most diverse crowd I have ever been a part of. Old and young, black and white, and asian and latino, gay and straight, poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, school kids of all ages, union members, office workers from downtown. Obama volunteers passed out free water bottles to the crowd – standing in the sun for so long was beginning to bake people. At some point, I left the paved area to go stand in the grass under a tree.

There I saw what appeared (based on clothing) to be a poor black mother with a beautiful little boy in a stroller who took refuge in the shade offered by the tree. A few moments later, a fashionably dressed (upper middle-class?) white woman, pushing a stroller with a beautiful little girl, also parked under the tree. As the music played over the loudspeakers, the little boy and the little girl started playing together, and then the two mothers started dancing to each other, and it was such a beautiful sight. I saw old white people, older than McCain, applauding this black man running for president, in the midst of a bunch of young black men, dressed "gangsta" style, who moments before had been wildly cheering the white governor. All around me their were happy, joyous faces.

Obama gave a good speech, but I don't really remember what he said, I was too busy taking in the sight. The elderly black couple next to me made eye contact with me several times, and we just grinned at each other. A really old white guy who was there with a sweet little blond-haired 3 year old girl at one point looked at me and said, "there's no way McCain is beating *this* guy!" and laughed. Earlier in the line, as we snaked our way up to the security check point, a 9- or 10-year old black girl with her mother was visibly excited to see Obama, she kept going on and on about how excited she was and how there was no way she was gonna miss this rally. I saw white "trailer park"/typical Ohio redneck folk who brought their whole brood to the rally, and thought, as I saw them enthusiastically cheering Obama as he spoke, that this is truly a miracle.

I know in my head that Obama's election is not likely to change lots of things, and certainly not the fundamentals of this system, but in my heart it felt like his candidacy has already changed much.

After the rally, I, with several thousand others, marched across the street to Veterans Memorial, the early voting polling place for Franklin County, and cast my ballot for Obama. Intellectually I may have had some doubts and reservations, but in my heart it felt perfectly right. Afterwards, I walked around downtown for awhile before making my way to the parking garage where I’d left my car. I am not used to walking downtown and having black faces (or even white ones) smiling at me -- usually, folks downtown walk with their face to the ground, or staring ahead absent-mindedly. But not last Friday. Everyone walked with their heads held high, and everyone was looking at and smiling at everyone else. What a beautiful day it was!

Chris

Getting Light From Darkness

2008-10-12T16:37:00.011-04:00

Ron Brown writes:

For some reason that I don't fully understand, I still have about a hundred or so aging music newspapers in slowly eroding cardboard boxes that I've now been hauling around with me for the past 30 years. I don't know and can't explain how they've survived. They've surely been somewhat mistreated. Other than a cardboard box, I can't say that I've protected them much, so they've seen extremes. Despite my lax attention to preservation, they managed to withstand lengthy stays in an open garage during brutally cold South Dakota winters, suffocating heat in a Mississippi storage shed during summer, assorted damp basements and dingy closets in tiny apartments. Everywhere I've been, they've been. Because I inexplicably refuse to throw them out.

I have a few Melody Makers, some now obscure publications like one called Gig, but the bulk of the collection of course are old Rolling Stones. That was essential reading, when I could afford to buy one at the newsstand. At some point in time, I don't recall when, I did think of putting those in protective plastic sleeves. I don't know why. It's not as if they're particularly valuable. If you want, you can get any single one of 'em on eBay these days for about 5 bucks on average. Based upon who's on the cover, I might be able to sell five or six in about six months time. But even if I sold a hundred of them, that works out to a profit of about 16 cents per paper, per year. So, obviously, money's not a reason that keeps me hanging on.

And it's not as if I really read them on any regular basis. I've found that I never take them out of the cardboard box except when I move. Recently we moved from an apartment to a house in Ridgeland, just north of Jackson, Mississippi. They've been sitting in the garage for three months.

I spent this past weekend moving boxes around, deciding once again what to keep and what to discard. The plastic encased Rolling Stones, they went into the house. But last night I discovered another old box in the garage and at the bottom of that raggedy box were some old Chicago music publications, including a free monthly newspaper called the Illinois Entertainer. Not much on content, it was mostly filled with ads for live music shows at Haymaker's and Mother's, The Wise Fool's Pub and Huey's.

But when I opened one of the papers from September 1978, there staring back at me was this beautiful full page ad:

What makes this page extremely relevant to me is that it's an advance ad for one of the greatest rock and roll shows of my life: "APPEARING AT UPTOWN THEATRE SEPT. 6" I'd seen Bruce twice before, once in Chicago at the Auditorium in '77 during the chicken scratch tour, and again in Wisconsin earlier in this tour. But this was a show that still lives with me. I was 19 years old working in the packaging department at Bodine Electric, the same factory where my mom worked in the winding department. I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but I knew damn well that I didn't want to do that, if I had any choice in the matter. I had never felt more alive than those first few Springsteen shows. I guess I didn't know it then, but what I saw in those shows was a glimpse of my future. I didn't want to become a musician. I can't keep steady time on a three-chord country song. It's not that I dreamt of becoming a song writer or performer. Seeing Springsteen sing Adam Raised a Cain made me realize that I wanted take risks. That I needed to take risks.

It literally changed my life.

How many times over the past 30 years had I opened this paper and seen this very same ad before? I don't know, maybe six, seven or eight times. Maybe not even once. But I know that last night it finally hit me right between the eyes.

What's it worth to me now? You can probably guess. And there isn't a single dollar sign involved.

It won't be another ten, twenty or thirty years before I see this ad again. I'm framing the sucker. And you know what I'll see? "APPEARING AT UPTOWN THEATRE SEPT. 6: THE BIG BANG."

It only took me 30 years to realize it. That, and a couple of old cardboard boxes that I probably should have thrown away years ago, but for some reason, just couldn't.

Why Does Barack Obama Hate My Family?

2008-07-09T23:46:00.005-04:00

Kevin Alexander Gray writes:

Addressing a congregation at the Apostolic Church of God, one of Chicago's largest black churches, on Father's Day, Barack Obama said:

"Too many fathers are M.I.A., too many fathers are AWOL, missing from too many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men."

This was his "Sister Souljah" moment. Just as Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign tried to reassure whites that he wasn't too cozy with blacks by denouncing a rapper, Obama was appealing to whites by condemning his own.

Even so, I wasn’t surprised to hear him referred to black men as “boys.”

Obama has often taken to “playin’ blacks.” Playin’ in blackspeak means to fool or use a person or persons. (George Bush’s selling of a war on the Iraqi people to America is an example that readily comes to mind or - “Bush played us cheap" or “he played us for fools.” )

Early in the campaign year, Obama used one of the oldest racial stereotypes in a speech to black South Carolina state legislators: "In Chicago, sometimes when I talk to the black chambers of commerce, I say, 'You know what would be a good economic development plan for our community would be if we make sure folks weren't throwing their garbage out of their cars'.” Translation; black people are dirty and lazy.

One would think getting money is a better plan.

Then, the day before the Texas primary, he let loose again, in a predominantly black venue: "Y'all have Popeyes out in Beaumont? I know some of y'all, you got that cold Popeyes out for breakfast. I know. That's why y'all laughing. ... You can't do that. Children have to have proper nutrition. That affects also how they study, how they learn in school." Translation; black people are fat, stupid and lazy.

How would people respond if John McCain (or any person of a different race, nationality or ethnicity) threw out stereotypes like these? What would we say if a white person had stood in the pulpit of a black church, or anywhere else for that matter, and referred to black men as “boys,” in any context?

But since it’s Obama, sounding like Bill Clinton before his fall from black grace, or Bill Cosby speaking out of his own personal pain, the change candidate’s remarks were met with hosannas mostly by a vapid, racist, white-dominated corporate media, the black people who say what their white bosses want to hear, and blacks and whites alike who shout amen even when Obama’s saying something plainly contradicted by their own life experiences.

It was no big surprise that after the speech those critical of Obama were dismissed “as out touch” with the new “post-racial” illusion. Bob Herbert of The New York Times appearing on MSNBC’s Hardball went so far as to say that anyone who disagreed with Obama’s Father’s Day admonition to black men was living in a racial “fog” of the past. Newspapers across the county affirmed the smear with headlines like “Obama tells black men to shape up” or “Obama speaks ‘inconvenient truth’ to black men” or “Obama calls black men irresponsible” or “He's saying things people don’t want to hear” - with the inference that truth was flowing from his tongue.

I saw no headline lead with the word "some" black men.

Playin’ folk on any day is bad enough. But, as a father, grandfather and a black person, I see playin’ black men on Father's Day as even more repulsive. The day is for honoring fathers. We don’t honor the vets on Veteran’s Day by pointing out those who choose not to fight, or the cowards, or even the enemy.

The Obamalife narrative highlights that his dad abandoned him as a kid. So, maybe it’s his abandonment issues that he’s laying on the rest of us. That would explain why he kicked his father “under the bus” implying he had acted like a “boy” when he and his wife divorced each other. Was she acting like a “girl” at the time? It is as simple as one parent being good or a victim and the other a bad victimizer? And, what of the fact that both his mother and father remarried? Is it his wish that his mom and biological dad had remained unhappily married? Does he wish his half-sister had never been born? Is he against divorce? How does he feel about forced or even loveless marriages? Maybe he believes there should be a required economic declaration before a woman gives birth and that two signatures on paper are required before conception?

No doubt, there’s a difference between being a sperm donor and being a nurturing, involved parent. But you don’t have to share a living space with a child to have an influence on him or her. And you can share a living space and be a lousy father or mother. That’s life. I was very young when I first heard the phrase “staying together for the good of the kids.” As I grew I learned that oftentimes living arrangements between ex-lovers have to change for the good of the kids.

I’m not claiming to know the story behind the picture of Obama and his father at the airport, but I suspect that joint custody between Hawaii, Indonesia, Massachusetts, Kansas, New York, Illinois and Africa would have been tough.

Writing about Obama’s speech gave me a headache. I found myself getting testy just thinking it through and what it means to me and those around me. A lot of people have approached me to talk about Obama’s speech. People walk up to me at the gas checkout line and strike up a conversation about Obama. Just the other day, a black woman behind me in line pipes up and says, “Things sho’ gonna be better when Obama gets elected.” She was not pleased with my response to her uninvited optimism. But I don’t think what she said was or is helpful in real terms.

I was speaking to a single, black woman lawyer about my unease with the speech and she immediately went off on black men in general. Now, my lawyer friend is a smart, progressive person. She’s a former New York State prosecutor but I’ve never consciously deducted points from her humanity for her past employment choice. But in our conversation she threw out all the standard lines, “black men aren’t taking care of their kids,” and “they are sorry.” I countered by saying most social scientists believe that an adolescent girl is more mature than an adolescent boy, so, who do we pin being the most irresponsible on? I asked her: If we believe that it is a woman’s right to chose whether or not to be a mother, then why should irresponsible black fathers be the sole point of Obama’s attack? And why should any aspect of black male-female relations be grist for the campaign mill?

What Obama’s "bash the black man" game leads to is an environment where black people – separate and not equal – is the issue.

Moreover, it passes on one of the lowest of all the smears and stereotypes: the lie that black men have no morals. It reinforces the white supremacists’ notion of blacks as irresponsible, overly sexual beasts; a notion that far too many black folk as well as white unwittingly buy into.

I happened to have what turned out to be a very short breakfast meeting with a white female friend who was also a former Hillary Clinton supporter. She’s now onboard with Obama. As we spoke, after not seeing each other for more than a month or so, the topic quickly went to Obama with me telling her I didn’t plan to vote for him, his speech being just one of the reasons. She responded by threatening to never speak to me again if I supported Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney. I don’t know if she was serious or not.

On the subject of the Father’s Day speech she followed up by asking in a somewhat careful way, “Aren’t black women more responsible than black men? That’s what I’ve always heard.”

She’s been married 3 times and has kids by her first husband.

But I didn’t mention that. Instead, what I think might have ended our breakfast prematurely was my black man race card response to the "irresponsibility" question. It’s the answer I give to anyone – black or white - who raises the question: A black man would have to be full of self or group hate to believe that black men are more irresponsible then white men or men of other races or ethnic backgrounds. George Bush, Dick Cheney, and a host of other white guys who lied America into the Iraqi war, which has resulted in countless deaths, prove the point. And that’s just the most recent example of white, male irresponsibility. The history of the United States is drenched in blood due to the decisions of immoral, irresponsible white men.

A couple of weeks after the Father’s Day speech while waiting for a plane at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, I found myself in a conversation with a white, female airport worker. The woman, also a mother of mixed-race children, worked out on the pad, most likely unloading baggage and other such laborious tasks. She was sitting down resting between flights in the employee section, just a couple of seats away from me. She overheard me talking to a friend about the Lorraine Motel in Memphis and the 40th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death. This prompted her to tell me about her taking her two kids on a trip to the historic site. I felt her pride as she told her story of her trip. She remembered how she welled up with tears looking up at the balcony, and her kids asked why she was crying. She recalled how her kids responded when they got on the old ‘50s city bus and the recording yelled out, “Niggers move to the back of the bus!” She said it was then her kids understood why she had cried earlier. It presented her the opportunity to tell them how far things have come and what it took to get here. It was one of those moments when a parent feels like they’re teaching their kids something important.

At some point we started talking about Obama’s black man speech. She supports Obama. She told me of the pride her mixed-race kids felt in Obama’s success, him being mixed race like them. But at the end of our conversation she too concluded that Obama’s speech was aimed at white people.

When I first heard Obama’s Father’s Day speech, my immediate thoughts were of Camille, my recently married 30-year-old daughter. Around the time she turned 25, she informed me and her mother that she planned to have a baby. I simply told her it was her choice since she had to bear the primary burden of raising a child. Or, as the song goes, “if you dance to the music, ya gotta pay to the piper...”

When my daughter came to us, as parents, what we consciously didn’t do was lay a single-parent stigma on her, since nobody really raises a child alone. At least where I come from. So, we got a granddaughter to help raise and nurture along with our two other grandkids by my son and his wife who, coincidently, was a teenage mother before she and my son began dating in high school.

One of the jobs of a parent or grandparent is to prevent a child in their care from being saddled with guilt, self-hate or any other baggage society would strap on their backs – regardless of the circumstance of their birth, which a child has no say in. I see our job as rejecting the stigma, which paints a child as “a mistake.” Or, in political terms, it’s as simple as reinforcing Jesse Jackson’s “I am somebody” in a kid.

You don’t need to be Alvin Poussaint to know that a child – any child, regardless of color or economic status- who doesn’t value their life or feel their worth as a human or feels unloved grows up to be an adult who doesn’t value life – theirs or anyone else’s.

When Camille and her child’s father were going through their breakup, I had one of those heartfelt talks with the both of them. She and the young man had dated since middle school. And, although they had a child together, they were at a fork in the road with one another. It was one of those moments when young people learn adult things, such as the fact that a child does not always make a relationship better nor can it keep an unhealthy or loveless relationship together. And, when a couple splits, in the heat of it all, it’s important not to do or say something stupid that would scar not only their individual lives, but their child’s future as well. We told the young man that he was the father of our grandchild and nothing could alter that fact. We assured him that we didn’t expect anything less than him having a full relationship with his child. He has done just that over the years. But we didn’t call him an irresponsible boy. That seemed not only counter-productive but holier than thou. Of course, we weren’t running for president; we were just trying to give a kid a chance.

Camille married 5 years after NyAshia’s birth, but it wasn’t to her child’s biological dad. It was to a fellow who has three children of his own. He also shares joint parental custody with his ex-lovers. In the three or four years of his courtship of my daughter, his kids called my wife and I grandmama and granddaddy. While a marriage license and church service made it official, it didn’t take all that for us to be family. Everyone in this blended situation – the biological father of my granddaughter, the biological mother of our blended grandkids, and the rest of us – have always shared parental responsibilities.

Now, I’m not trying to universalize my family’s experience. But I sure wouldn’t lay Obama’s take on responsibility on the people around me. Nor would I suggest that they adopt his worldview of what a family is or should be. Because by his two-biological, heterosexual parents residing in same household definition of a family, every other type of family setup is inherently deficient in every sense of the word: economic, social, moral.

In the days after Obama’s speech, Ishmael Reed, Dr. Ron Walters and others rebutted the candidate’s targeting of black men with a Boston College social psychologisit's study which revealed – surprisingly to some – that black fathers not living in the same domicile as their children are more likely to have a relationship with their kids than white fathers in similar circumstances. Walters, an Obama supporter, warned his candidate, “Black people are not voting for a moralist-in-chief.”

So, in light of the Brown study should we conclude that white men are more irresponsible than black men when it comes to spending time with their kids? Maybe Obama should find a white church and offer white men advice on Father’s Day? Can we expect to hear him call them “boys?”

Or maybe he should take a trip to the hollows of Appalachia and tell the “trailer park crowd” that if they would just “pick up the garbage” from around their trailers and “stop engaging in incest” (or whatever other stereotype that comes to mind) they would not have it so bad.

And shouldn’t he be advising the polygamist families out west? Or, hopping on a plane to Massachusetts to lecture the fathers and parents of the pregnant teens in Gloucester?

According to Health and Human Services, “throughout the 1990s, black teens have had the largest declines in teen childbearing rates of any group” while "Latinas have had the highest teen birth rate of any major ethnic/racial minority in the country since 1995." Why doesn’t Obama take his message to the barrios? Maybe he could go to a Catholic Cathedral in the heart of an East L.A. Latino community and challenge Latino men’s machismo. He should use “boys” in his speech and admonish the parishioners not to eat so many burritos.

Truth be told, I don’t wish to see a particular racial, sexual, religious or ethnic group singled out for derision or used as a campaign prop. Stereotypical remarks about blacks, Latinos and whites in Appalachia are just as inappropriate as remarks about Jewish materialism or Irish drunkenness.

I’m old fashioned about some things. My mother is prone to say, “Keep your business out the streets.” I’m only putting out my family’s personal stories to illustrate why I’m leery about Obama.

Many of those around me plan to vote for him. For the most part, my response is to ask folks to look at their lives and check whether or not what Obama is saying squares with their reality. Never mind how they “should” be living – never mind how Obama’s “current” family looks. I just ask if, with all the troubles of getting along day to day, is it helpful to have his polish on how they should be living piled on top?

My new son-in-law has two young boys and a daughter. Like so many other black teens who weren’t as lucky as Obama, he got busted in his teen years and did a little time on a drug arrest. Obviously his life has turned around. Luckily, he’s a brick mason. If he didn’t work for himself in a skilled trade, it would be hard for him to find work. He knows that because he went to jail his sons have 60 percent likelihood of going to jail. He has to fight extra hard to make sure his kids are not that statistic. And it’s a tricky thing. You want your kids to understand the many race traps but not be defined by them.

After Obama won the South Carolina primary, whenever I was asked, I’d say that in the general election my vote was his to lose. Prior to and after their wedding, my ex-offender son-in-law, somewhat of a race man (he planned to vote for Obama "because he is black"), who just recently found out he could vote despite his conviction, constantly reminded me of what I had said, “Remember, you said your vote was his to lose.”

Shortly after his and my daughter’s wedding, a couple of day after Obama’s Father’s Day speech, we were sitting together with a friend of his, a young, married father of one, who was in their wedding party. Once again he reminded me of what I had said about "my vote to lose." I let loose with just about everything I’ve said in this article. I told him to look at his own life and then tell me what he thinks about Obama.

I asked my son-in-law to think about his wedding and the people who were there. There were lots of young mothers and fathers and children, divorcees, second marriages, common-law arrangements, ex-lovers, step-parents and grandparents, etc. Many of those people, if they believed Obama, could be passed off as being “irresponsible” and their kids dismissed as “mistakes.” I asked him: Did he truly believe that many of the people in that church, whose lives he knew, were less moral or responsible than others, as Obama inferred? Ex-offender, former unmarried father of three, rap music producer, isn’t he who Obama is condemning? On paper, anyway. Yet, he has raised three good kids.

Whenever I suggest to Obama insiders that he’s a lot like Bill Clinton, they go apoplectic. Yet, as race-baiting and race politics goes, Obama has proven himself to be as good, if not better than Clinton, long considered the modern master of race politics. If you believe, as I do, that he “played black men to court white voters,” then all Obama’s protestations about Bill Clinton’s race-baiting were just a ruse. And, in that light he is no better than Clinton when it comes to using race fears. He may even be worse than Clinton because he plays it both ways – assaulted and assailant. I’ll be willing to bet that if Clinton were honest in revealing how he really felt about Obama, that would be at the heart of his grievance.

No doubt, people are excited about the prospect of a young, vibrant, black person as president. They see their choice as between John McCain and Obama, and conclude that Obama is “the only option,” or say “He will never be as bad as Bush. He will never be bad as Reagan.” Or they say their man Obama “has a chance to win. We need to give him some latitude.” “We need to let the man do what he needs to do to win.” “We should trust him.” “Barack is one of us, no matter what he sounds like right now.”

As critical as I am, I actually want to believe he’s “one of us.” But I don’t see it.

That isn’t necessarily a bad thing for Obama. If people like me don’t see Obama as “one of us,” that strengthens the powerful’s belief that he is “one of them.”

For sure, Obama has most black voters in the bag. I’m pretty sure that my vote falls in the "doesn’t matter so much" column. And from listening to Obama, a whole lot of my family members’ lives don’t matter much either.

I’m not really looking for change from Obama should he win. I’m looking for the fight to come.

Tom Who?

2008-04-12T21:32:00.003-04:00

Karen Brown writes:

I'll admit it. Although I've certainly heard of Rage Against the Machine, I'd never heard of Tom Morello and never heard him play. When Lauren Onkey supplied this You Tube link of Tom Morello playing with Bruce Springsteen in Anaheim, I wasn't all that eager to watch it. Why? I didn't know who Tom Morello was and as I read comments from others who'd been sent the link and heard that it was about his guitar solo, I thought, "I'm not going to get this." I seldom "get" musical solos because I have no basic understanding of what a good technical performance means. I know about singing; instruments not so much. It's why I don't participate in discussions about musicians and their abilities. It's beyo nd my area of expertise, over my head, out of my league. It would be like me showing up at the Indy 500 in a Model T Ford. But, finally, curiosity got the best of me and I thought I'd just privately watch and listen and see if I could decipher any nuance of brilliance out of Morello's sharing the stage with Bruce.

At first, nothing. "Yup, as usual I don't get it," I thought with this sense of resignation. Then slowly, then quickly I started to get it. The hair on the back of my neck stood up. My heart seized up and filled up my chest. I drew in breath and didn't let it out again until I realized I was beginning to feel lightheaded. When Morello took the song away from Bruce, I felt whole. Completely whole. It was amazing. I still have no idea if what he did was technically brilliant but spiritually brilliant? Absolutely.

Ghosts In The Eyes . . .

2008-04-04T17:29:00.006-04:00

Lorenzo Wolff writes:

So my old Buick Le Sabre broke down a bunch of times coming back from gigs or rehearsals in New York and I decided that it’s time to put the old girl to rest. Me and my Pops go down to the local used car dealership and after looking around for a minute we walk into the office and sit down in front of the salesman. He’s a shorter guy with a goatee that was probably hip five or ten years ago, smoking a chewed up cigar and staring at a computer screen, looking tired and a little unhappy that customers are coming in right when he’s trying to close up. He grudgingly starts to talk about what kind of car I want and I mention that I’m a bass player and I play a giant Hartke bass rig, so the car has got to be pretty big. His eyes light up as he puts down his cigar, smiles at me and asks me to follow him into the back room. Through the door and I see six or seven electric basses and a big electric upright on a stand. He tells me that he spent three years of his life as a session bass player, living on the Lower East Side and paying rent (barely) with money from music, and a day job at a guitar store. He never quite got that big break and had to quit for a job with a little more security. I talk to him for a minute about the things that musicians talk about, what kind of strings he uses and what bands he played with, more out of habit than interest. He tells me about the tour than he went on with his band where Blink 182 opened for him, and how he could have made it, if only the guitar player had been a little bit better. Eventually the talk comes back to cars so he shows me a few and I thank him and I leave.

The next day I go to see Bruce Springsteen play at Nassau Coliseum. The crowd files in and the place is packed, I mean more drunk white old people than I’ve ever seen in one place. I’d never been so conscious of being eighteen in my entire life. It’s the Magic tour, so he’s playing with the E Street Band and they sound great. One look at Bruce and you can tell that this is what he was born to do, and this night is special. Just like every night when you step on a stage is special. But for some reason I can’t seem to enjoy myself like I ought to be. There’s something unsettling about the look on Garry Tallent’s face. He looks like a Vietnam vet tonight. Not that fresh shell shocked look, but that look of someone who’s had to think about the war every night, for thirty years. Thinking about his experiences and the experiences of his friends who were chalked onto the MIA column. I try to shake it off as Thunder Road hits the first pre-chorus. “Woa, Come take my hand, riding out tonight to case the promise land…” but Garry still looks exhausted and haggard. When the second chorus dies down I finally know what I’m feeling. I’m not just seeing Garry up there, I’m seeing all of the other bass players who didn’t make it. The old guys in Asbury Park, working at garages, telling anyone who’ll listen that back in 1973 Bruce Springsteen opened for them. And then the third verse starts, and I can hear Bruce’s voice, explaining it to me:

“There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away,
They haunt this dusty beach road and the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets”

(Lorenzo Wolff can be reached at lorenzowolff@gmail.com)

The State of Live Performance

2008-01-25T00:44:00.001-05:00

Mike Felten writes:

I started in 1965 singing House of the Rising Sun at a place called Snoopy’s Lounge. Since then I picked up and started several different careers. Cover bands, country bands, solo singer/songwriter gigs, blues bands, metal bands. The last time I did it steady was ten years ago with a blues band, but I put out one CD and then did another and wanted to go out and sell it. Times have changed

When I went back up to the UP last fall, I had hoped to look up some of the guys that I played in cover bands with. Always in the back of my mind, I figured that I could go up and play Proud Mary for a couple of weeks in hunting season and make a few bucks. We were the hot band in the mid 80's. We worked seven days a week, four hours a night and six on Sunday and got paid pretty well.

There used to be a "what to do" page in the local newspaper that was basically a listing of who was playing at what bar. That was gone. It seemed like a lot of the bars were gone too. In the few bars I stopped in there was karaoke and DJ's. From talking to the bartenders the attitude seemed to be why hire four guys to play CCR when one guy could play the real thing on his I-pod. The only thing wrong was that DJ was playing Nelson.

I wanted to get up to my favorite venue - the Amasa Hotel. We christened the place the Tiltin' Hilton because the floors sloped so badly we had to put blocks under our amps so they wouldn't roll out on the dance floor. When we plugged in - the lights of the town dimmed. The place was always packed with guys and girls from the sawmill. Al Kooper was trying to tell me about playing the Fillmore and I responded by telling him about playing the Amasa Hotel.
I remembered that the place was purchased by a couple who fixed the place up. They had adopted a couple of cute little Asian girls who I'm sure are college age by now. The future looked bright but the place was shuttered now.
I didn't know if the lumberjacks in Hardwood were out dancing to club DJ's playing Tupac. It would be so bizarre if that was the case and worth the trip to see.
The reservation bars were always steady work. Tough, chicken wire and fights but they needed a band on weekends and they paid. The Escanaba Hotel was shuttered too. We used to get the guys off the ore boats mixing it up with the Indians. Now there is a casino down the road in Hermansville. You drive out of the woods and it looks like five acres of Vegas. The first night that I played at the coffeehouse in Esky the owner said the turnout was light because ZZ Top was playing the casino. I didn't think our fan bases overlapped. I was more worried about conflicting with the high school football game or the stock car races or the county fair.
On the other hand, you used to have to drive to Green Bay or Marquette to see a ZZ Top before. Ted Nugent would come up hunting and do a show or two in Marquette. Kiss had a dedicated fan base and Seger used to come up and vacation. All the folks had was bands like us. They talked for months about Tammy Wynette's tour bus stopping for donuts. Somebody had written Neil Young’s name on a bathroom wall and people were convinced that it was him. Ruby Starr who sang the “go Jim Dandy” line with Black Oak Arkansas was a star. Maybe the people actually deserved something better than what we gave them.
Our annual gig up at Copper Harbor would draw people from about a hundred miles away. I remember one guy requesting "She Belongs To Me" and we did it for him. "Pretty good," he said, but Dylan does it in a different key." He was sitting somewhere in this remote end of the world and listening not only to Dylan, but figuring out the keys. There was a passion about the music then. I wonder if it is still there. Maybe that is the test. Are they still pulling the bounce in from Newfoundland to hear the BBC. Is the guy out there still downloading new stuff, like the guy who laid early Lucinda Williams tapes on me. Or did he give up?
Are all the Sunday jam sessions gone? Was it all gone? It sure seemed to be

So it is 2008,Chicago and I mean the city proper, is one of the worst places to have a band. There are 10,000 kids in Iowa eager to come here and play for nothing so why should we pay you? The blues is by and large a tourist industry. When I had the blues band we had a regular Wednesday night gig. On weekends the place would employ a lot of the old Maxwell street guys. In what I thought was a humorous reverse racism, the club owners wanted Black faces on the stage for the weekend. We'd go and jam and sometimes play most of the night and that was OK as long as our white faces weren't on the window. We were playing Kingston Mines one afternoon when a nervous Japanese fellow asked us if the evening band was going to be Black American soul men. He was relieved when we assured him it was. You had to play ‘Sweet Home Chicago” and look the part.
Then we'd get the hot shot suburban guitarist who would sit there and say Johnny Dollar or Johnny B. Moore sucked because they were out of tune. Well, dickwad, this is the blues. It’s not any good if it is in tune.
Looking at the nurturing scenes in Austin or Detroit, I know it is not the same way everywhere. In Ferndale I had a guy pointed out to me who was Lenny from Lenny and the Thundertones. I guess Bob Seger used to hang around their garage. That doesn't happen in Chicago.
I wandered into a guy who used to play with Ral Donner and went on to play bass with everybody from John Lee Hooker to Bozo's Circus. Nobody gives a shit in Chicago, he’d be signing autographs in Detroit. Hayden Thompson, the rockabilly guy drives a limo in Chicago, in Europe he is driven in a limo.
You can make money in the burbs with tribute bands and blues bands that tend to the Stevie Ray type of blues. You can be the Blues Brothers. I hosted a jam session one night for a friend of mine and a lady came up and thanked me for playing authentic blues. I wanted to ask her if she was crazy.
I had a buddy who booked corporate events. They did their Elvis shows and disco bands and a lot of the putrid stuff you hear at the street fairs ( a guy singing "Like A Virgin") It is lucrative to a point, but he gave it up after twenty something years and bought a GOT-JUNK franchise in Phoenix.
Chicago used to be a folk mecca. Now there is only a few places that book it. They actually made a commercial about one of them with a depressed looking blond getting ready to strum, "another song about my ex-husband". Irish bands do better. The Old Town School has kids strumming Beatle tunes en masse and then doing a recital. They hit the world music pretty hard.
One of the saddest chapters was Fred Holstein. Aside from Bob Gibson and Hamilton Camp, he was THE Chicago folksinger. He couldn't make a living at it anymore. He tended bar down the street from my store and couldn't earn enough to get his teeth fixed.
The last time that I saw Jimmie Lee Robinson, one of the fixtures on Maxwell Street, he was playing a Borders and half of the people had their backs to him.
Thinking of Fred and Jimmie Lee, I can't be in my right mind to want to go out and play for people. The biggest apprehension that I had about resuming performance was my age. Just who is this old bastard standing her instead of an angst ridden teenager?
And then some kid in Tulsa asks me what I'm doing with that metal thing on my finger and what kind of music that is I’m playing and did I really talk to Willie Dixon and then climbing these mountains seem to be worth while.

A Kinks Kristmas

2007-12-24T16:34:00.000-05:00

Bill Glahn writes:

A case could probably be made that Ray Davies is the Charles Dickens of rock 'n roll. They're both British. Both tell stories entrenched in the landscape of the British working class. Both are great writers who draw their audience in with the richness of their characters. Both celebrate the spirit of humans and the working class in particular.

"Yes, and both have surnames that start with D," some stuffy Dickens scholar might scoff. But put academic prejudice aside, and the case could be made – with some notable differences.

Dickens' influence on Davies shouldn't come as any great surprise considering Dickens' status in the world of British literature (second only to Shakespeare). Any British author who chooses to address the issues of class would almost have to be influenced by him to some degree. Davies body of work bears more than a casual resemblance.

But to say that Davies is simply putting a new tread on an old tire, would be a huge misconception. The reasons are no more apparent than two short stories based in the Christmas season - A Christmas Carol and the Kinks "Father Christmas." In the Dickens story, Scrooge is redeemed. In the Kinks holiday single, the antagonist is not.

The philosophy in Dickens' Christmas Carol is more black & white – the ruling class is redeemed when confronted by an outside manager or controlling force – a holy trinity of ghosts. In the Kinks' song, there is no outside manager and the antagonist is motivated by real life events – his father is out of work. In Dickens' moralistic world, Davies would be a schoolboy in disgrace. In Davies' pragmatic one, Dickens would be a used car spiv.

I've always found Davies' body of work to be the more complicated to decipher – more shades of gray. More unanswered questions. At first glance, it's a darker world where it seems everybody has an agenda. And that agenda usually involves control of the working class.

Unionists tell you when to strike.
Generals tell you when to fight.
Preachers teach you wrong from right.
They feed you when you're born.
And use you all your life.
(Uncle Son)

The workers told the unions who blamed it on the government
The politicians blamed it on the strikers and the militants
And everybody's guilty and everybody's innocent
Nobody gives because nobody gives a damn anymore
(Nobody Gives)

That's some pretty cynical stuff.

Or is it? There's just too much in the Davies canon to suggest otherwise.

Dickens' work is rooted in moral failures that transcend class boundaries. Davies work targets systemic problems in our society.

To be fair, A Christmas Carol was written very early by Dickens (1843), while Father Christmas was written by Davies several years (1976) after his most notable commentary on class issues – The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society (1968) through Preservation (1973). Father Christmas is more like a coda where Christmas Carol is far less mature in nature. By the time Dickens gets around to writing Hard Times (1854), much of his criticisms fall in line with Davies'. A school system that stifles creativity in the name of economic progress. (Dickens gets the nod for creative names with Mr. McChoakumchild). An uncaring upper class who justify their importance with myths (industrialist and banker Josiah Bounderby). A perverse thought process that makes pollution a healthy commodity. But in the end, as with all of Dickens work, he hangs on doggedly to morality as if were synonymous with salvation. Bounderby dies of a fit. His cohort, Mr. Thomas Gradgrind is saved by renouncing his "just the facts" obsession and replacing it with a code of faith, hope, and charity. All's well that ends well.

In 1856, British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) wrote… "The thing for mankind to know is not what are the motives and influences which the moralist thinks ought to act on the labourer or the artisan, but what are the motives and influences which do act on him." She goes on to criticize Dickens, ""if he could give us their psychological character . . . with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies."

Father Christmas is not the first time Davies utilizes dark humor to illustrate a truth. In Muswell Hillbillies' "Complicated Life" - he hits a bulls-eye with the story of an ill worker who is told by his doctor that he needs to slow down or face death. "Cut out the struggle and strife." So the guy quits the rat race and finds…

Like old Mother Hubbard
I got nothing in my cupboard
I got no dinner and I got no supper
I got holes in my shoes
I got holes in my socks
I can't go to work cause I can't get a job

When it comes to quality of life for the working class, capitalism is a deadly calamity. As for psychological evaluation – on Muswell Hillbillies Davies introduces the idea of mental illness as purposefully inflicted on workers by the ruling class (Acute Schizophrenia Blues). It's a reoccurring theme in Davies' writing, including his "autobiography," X-Ray – a book written in 1994 but culminating in his personal history at Preservation.

On Preservation, Davies restrains from preaching (the domain of moralists). He, instead, looks both backwards and forwards in a pragmatic way and correctly predicts a more totalitarian existence should social change be directed by ideologues and moralists.

At the beginning of X-Ray, Davies proclaims "I was born a king." His most affecting song opens with the words "Everybody's a dreamer and everybody's a star" Despite its title (Celluloid Heroes) and story line, it is not simply a song about Hollywood stars and starlets. It is a song about struggle. And it recognizes that, while struggle is not always successful, neither is it futile. We are not born cogs in a corporate reality. That is learned behavior. That is mental disease.

Not too many people would call Dickens' feel-good endings to Christmas Carol and Hard Times cynical. But which is cynical? The idea that we are forever bound by a class system not of our making or that we are all born kings?

Unlike Dickens' morality, Davies work offers no cure-alls for society. In fact, he often sounds as confused as the rest of us. But he does offer a starting point. Here's to the birth of kings.

On Lessing and Lawrence

2007-11-18T13:38:00.000-05:00

Barbara Hall writes:

I dug up my copy of Lady Chatterly's Lover with the Doris Lessing introduction (not preface, as I originally said . . . I think I also said reissue instead of reprinting . . . too much record talk, I guess . . . btw, scholars, what's the difference between a preface and an introduction? I'm sure I used to know when I was an English major instead of an unemployed writer . . .) and I have to stump again for people to check it out.

All I can say about Lessing is that I still want to be her when I grow up. Anyone who reads her autobiography has to agree that as regards her own life, she can be more than marginally full of shit--maybe some of the most eloquent writing she's ever done is in her justification of leaving her children behind with her marriage — eloquent yes, convincing, no — but I sincerely hope I still have her clear-eyed, unsentimental point of view when I'm her age . . . which is about 88? I have always felt that she was weirdly disconnected from any point in time--The Golden Notebook transcends all those constraints, even as she writes so particularly about a specific period in history. I suppose her science fiction work illustrates her inability to be bound by the time-space continuum. She seems to me somewhat supernatural. And it's very well illustrated in the following excerpt about education:

"The other thing taught from the start is to distrust one's own judgment. Children are taught submission to authority, how to search for other people's opinions and decisions, and how to quote and comply....It may be that there is no other way of educating people. Possibly, but I don't believe it. In the meantime it would be a help at least to describe things properly, to call things by their right names. Ideally, what should be said to every child, repeatedly, throughout his or her school life is something like this:

'You are in the process of being indoctrinated. We have not yet evolved a system of education that is not a system of indoctrination. We are sorry, but it is the best we can do. What you are being taught here is an amalgam of current prejudice and the choices of the particular culture. The slightest look at history will show how impermanent these must be. You are being taught by people who have been able to accommodate themselves to a regime of thought laid down by their predecessors. It is a self-perpetuating system. Those of you who are more robust and individual than others, will be encouraged to leave and find ways of educating yourself--educating your own judgement. Those that stay must remember, always and all the time, that they are being moulded and patterned to fit into the narrow and particular needs of this particular society.'"

She just never bought in. Probably because she was the product of so many different cultures, she avoided assiduously connecting with one. She just saw stuff. And had the great ability to tell about it. She reminds me of Chrissie Hynde, who just never got the memo that women couldn't play the electric guitar and lead a band. Well, not just a band, but a great band.

Anyway, the cover art of the Penguin Classic reprint is a series of comic strips by Chester Brown which are worth the price of admission all by themselves. All these things threaten to eclipse the importance of the book itself but re-reading Lady Chatterly's Lover is another interesting experience. Some of the writing is fit-like, but much of it is still so pertinent and certainly as dirty as it ever promised to be. Love among the class structure is a subject I never tire of. My first novel (and one could argue all the subsequent ones) was about a poor person growing up in a rich place. My story, too, and I forget who said we just keep telling the same story over and over, hoping it will end differently. Anyway, the last name of my first protagonist was Collier. I didn't even know at the time that that was the what coal workers were called. Or maybe I did in that Jungian collective unconscious kind of way.

The great quote that Lessing pulled from the text to illustrate Lawrence's sense of humor, or at least irony, was this: "Ours is essentially is a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically." Does that somehow relate to the discussion of Bruce's nostalgia in "Long Walk Home"?

Lessing maintains that Lawrence still provides one of the greatest texts ever written on sexual politics, the push-pull of the male-female dynamic. As the song goes, who am I to disagree?

Long Walk Home

2007-11-18T13:31:00.000-05:00

John Floyd writes:

Bruce Springsteen's "Long Walk Home" is the song I can't stay away from at the moment. My dad was in a hospital on the edge of the part of Memphis where I grew up, a part of town I haven't seen in a long time and that has changed in every way imaginable. I drove there during a work break on Saturday, mostly to see my mom but to also get the lowdown from the doctor. After seeing my dad more or less dead and driving back through town, "Long Walk Home" came up on a comp of stuff I burned just to have in the car (where Beny Moré and Gang of Four are always close friends). I listened to that song all the way back to work, over and over, crying for the first time, losing it completely when the line comes about the town wrapping its arms around you. Jesus, I'm losing it now, just thinking about that line, and the one after it -- nobody goes it alone. Not among the folks here, that's for damn sure. I've been leaning a lot on "Girls in Their Summer Clothes" of late, I guess cos I feel like an insecure and unattractive and unworthy forty-something, but this last week or so, "Long Walk Home" has just obliterated everything else I've wanted to hear, give or take Mable John's "Take Me." Go figure.

Anyway, one more thing, then I'm done: I had to go to the funeral home today to take care of the cremation paperwork. Turns out the funeral home is located in the building that once was my father's favorite restaurant, Monte's, an Italian joint that's been closed for 20-plus years. I'm driving down Summer Avenue, address in hand looking for the home, knowing the neighborhood but none of what's around me, if that makes sense, and when I figure out where I'm at, I think to myself, you've got to be fucking kidding me. The women at the home must've thought I was crazy, looking for the spot where my dad's favorite table used to be.

Found it.

Terry's Song

2007-10-11T01:04:00.000-04:00

Dave Marsh writes:
(This is a story I originally told on my Sirius Radio show, Kick Out the Jams, and then wrote down at the request of Danny Alexander. It isn’t exactly what I said, but pretty close.)

At the last E Street Band rehearsal show, at the Meadowlands, I was standing behind a barricade to the left of the pit (Clarence’s side of the stage) about 30 or 40 feet out. There were a bunch of ALS patients there, all in wheelchairs.

If you don’t know that disease, it’s the worst one I’ve ever run across; if there’s worse to run across, I don’t want to know about it, ever. What happens, essentially, is that slowly, bit by bite, day by day, but really sloooowly, your nervous system shuts down. Maybe first you lose a little of your motor control or the tips of your fingers are numb or something. Eventually, it’s all gone. The trajectory is 18 months to maybe eight years. Most of the victims--and they are victims, there is no greater betrayal of life by the body—are women, although the most famous ALS victim was a man, Lou Gehrig.

I know a reasonable amount for a lay person about the contours of ALS, because when Terry Magovern’s fiancé, Joan Dancy, was diagnosed, I did an intensive five hours of research. Did it the way I usually do medical stuff, get up early and keep at it from four to nine AM. When I was done that day, I went out to the kitchen, where Barbara was having her cup of tea. She said, “Did you find much?” I said, “I printed out 75 pages.” Then I turned and dumped it all in the trash. “There’s not a word here that Joan or Terry needs to hear. Compared to ALS, there’s as much research going on for sarcoma as there is for curing AIDS.” There was nothing. The whole NIH clinical trials database (http://clinicaltrials.gov) had three studies, all being done by the same person, who I believe was Joan’s doctor at Columbia. The rest was all coping strategies, and none of them were something a newly diagnosed patient needed to know about yet.

I had to say all this to Terry at the time, and he took it like the hero he was, and Joan did, too. At her funeral, there was a lot of talk about how smoothly everything had gone, how buoyant Joan’s spirits had been (and they were), how she held everyone together (and she did). Terry asked me to stand up and talk about the horrors they had confronted. I don’t know exactly how I did it, except I’d rather have died myself than let Terry down. (As I said on the show, we were perfect for one another: I never shut up; he never talked.) I never get very nervous before I speak but being called to rain upon the parade was nerve-wracking. But it needed to be said because it was not just Joan’s beautiful life but also her horrible death that was going to move people to get something started for other ALS patients.

And so they now have the Joan Dancy and People with ALS Support Group. Terry put it together, and but he died this summer, which nobody who knew him to get over (listen to Magic track 12, believe it all and know that that’s just the outline). Sean, Terry’s wonderful son, carries on the project. He says he’d do it anyway but knows without question that Terry would haunt him if he didn’t do it and do it right. Sean brought the ALS patients I saw to the E Street rehearsal show.

All the patients I saw that night were women, adult females in, I’d guess, their late 30s to early 60s. Each of them was accompanied by a caregiver. One of them, one of the younger ones, had an oxygen tube on which she repeatedly sucked desperately.

The woman I talked about on the show was almost prone in her wheelchair, her head on a head rest, which means she had lost control of the muscles in her back and couldn’t sit up. Like an infant, right? And she had her hands crossed in her lap, perfectly straight.

Beautiful hands, long long fingers, flawless. But she could no longer move them. Lovely face, with the common elongation of features that comes as the muscle tension in the face disintegrates. When her friends talked to her, she lit up the place with her smile.

I happened to look over at her during Born to Run when the house lights were full up. She was singing along. I don’t mean just mouthing the words. She was singing. And her eyes flashed and her beautiful face smiled. And I thought, “The meaning of it all is right here. A woman who can’t walk, or even move her hands, or hold herself upright, is singing that she was born to run.”

She was my hero that night, and afterward, I went over and told her so, though she didn’t seem to know what to do with the information. I said “thanks, and she beamed that smile again, so it felt like I got two rewards--the song and that smile--and maybe she at least got one.

I don’t remember how I got out of this story on the show, because writing it down makes you think a more about what you’re saying. What I think now is that I don’t think I’ll ever get out of it, altogether.

Don’t want to either.

(Contact the Joan Dancy and People with ALS Support Group at Riverview Medical Center, Riverview Terrace Bulding, 2nd Floor, Front Street,Red Bank, New Jersey 07701 or phone 732.450.2677)

Iris Dement in Columbus

2007-09-16T19:41:00.000-04:00

A couple of weeks ago, in the midst of a conversation on Strat, I asked if anyone knew what Iris DeMent was up to. Daniel forwarded Iris' touring schedule, and lo and behold, she had an upcoming date in Columbus. So last night I was fortunate to see Iris perform (unlike the last time she came to Columbus, when I found out about it so late that the show was sold out). The venue was the auditorium of the Fawcett Center here at OSU, which held perhaps 400 people, and it was packed full. My friend, Lynn, and I were able to sit in the front row, which was quite nice.

The last time I saw Iris (which was an unbelievable 9 fucking years ago!), she was touring solo. This time around, she had John Prine's bass player, Dave Jacques, with her. While he was clearly a very competent bass player I can't honestly say he added much to the show, however.

Iris' "The Way I Should" was a very significant song in my life. As I wrestled years ago with coming out of the closet, I kept coming back to Bruce's "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (and its lyrics about secrets you can't face that weigh you down) and this song of Iris', with the lyrics "if each life is but a grain of sand, I'm tellin' you man, this grain of sand is *mine*... I live just the way I want to, and that's the way I should." It just made so much sense.

And so I was so happy when she opened the show with it.

It was a wonderful show, and she actually played some new songs (well, new since the last time I saw her 9 yrs ago, maybe she wrote them 8 yrs ago... or maybe this past year). Each of them was moving. One she wrote about her mother (who she said was 89 today), and how her mother always spoke the truth. Another had me nearly in tears, about a brother she lost when she was about 4, and how that was the night "I learned not to pray / because God's gonna do what he wants anyway" (or something close to that). There was another new one that she said was about an anniversary (perhaps a 3-yr anniversary), that focused on images of her man doing different things, ending with the line, "I think this love's going to last".

Two things I didn't quite like about the show: many (most) of the songs, esp. the ones she played on guitar, were slowed down considerably. Secondly, she 'dylanized' most of her old songs, singing around the melody, changing the phrasing, singing lower instead of higher, etc. so at times, the songs were barely recognizable. I don't know if she did this because she can't hit some of the high notes anymore, and this is her way of covering for that, or if it's because she's sung these so many times, she needed (for herself) to find some way of making them different or fresh. At times it was very disappointing, as on "Sweet Is the Melody" -- one of the most beautiful songs about songwriting ever written -- where the sweet melody was largely demolished.

She didn't play any of her songs that were politically or socially oriented, (apart from the original gospel song, "He Reached Down" she wrote for her last album Lifeline, the one about the good Samaritan, which was gratifying to hear). I found it a bit odd she shied away from the social commentary, because in the current climate, those songs probably would've gone over very well.
Instead, many of the songs seem to focus on her mother, and on loss. All in all, as I think about it, it was a pretty bleak show... "Easy's getting harder every day" (certainly one of the highlights as performed last night) has never sounded so depressing.

"When My Morning Comes Around" (perhaps my favorite Iris song) opened the 2-song encore, and was majestic as always, injecting a bit of optimism into the show. And she ended the night with a beautiful rendition of "Our Town".

I hope she's finally past her writer's block and is able to put out a new album sometime soon.

Radio Everywhere...

2007-08-28T10:08:00.000-04:00

Stewart Francke writes:

I wanted to share this with y'all because Bruce's new single has just floored me...inspired and rejuvenated me. This all initially came up in a multi-conversational exchange on the Strat email list, Holler's starting place for many things eventually blogged here.

A couple things after several more listens to "Radio Nowhere."

1. Most encouraging is that my daughter and her five 13 year old friends that just listened to it with me loved it and downloaded it. Reminds them of Fall Out Boy. OK, I'll live. Fall Out Boy ain't as jive as a lot of the other younger rock bands by any means.

2. Centerpiece solo "bridge" is both sax & lead guitar, in unison. So in the Brian Wilson/Phil Spector way of hearing things, it's a whole new instrument (combining two or more playing the same part, like a bass harmonica and a banjo in Brian's case). So forget my previous talk of CC's sax tone. It's a hip sound and one of the great lost arts--the instrumental bridge.

3. Nobody's really discussed the vocal performance--one of Bruce's finest. Why? Well, restraint for one, exemplified by the natural confluence of the Tom-Joad-cowboy-campfire-Woody-
Seeger-Sessions-roof-of-the-mouth-voice-cracking with the full throated Roy Orbison-Dion somber clarity found in his earlier Born To Run/Darkness On The Edge Of Town singing.

4. But the biggest reason for my excitement? He must've recently listened to a ton of Sinatra, Billy Eckstine, Nina Simone, Al Hibbing, Nat Cole, Willie Nelson--singers who break the melody apart with natural syllabic finesse. But it's quite another thing to also write your own songs, and THEN break them down with that same finesse--that's bad. Superbad...and that means good. He shows great skill in not marginalizing meaning for singability (what his detractors, particularly in the don't-like-Joad-crowd, refer to as "mumbling.")

It's a technical issue, not one of lyrical meaning--When he sings "But all I hear-a-waaha-za drone," he lays back in the pocket, behind the beat and the result GRABS your head.

Same with "I just wha-haana hear some rhythm" If he'd hurried the "wanna" and stressed the "hear" he woulda been singing out of the pocket about wanting to live in the pocket and "hear some rhythm."

And he didn't write too many words! The only bit that's even close to forced is "drivin through the MISTY rain"...he coulda said "drivin through the night rain" or any other single syllable adjective...it wouldn't have worked as well, poetically ("misty rain" becoming as it does, beautifully, "mystery train") or rhythmically.

Although "Radio Nowhere" might seem like minor Springsteen to his detractors, along the lines of "Murder Inc." or "Jackson Cage" or "Cross My Heart," it's major Springsteen... and will endure as such. IMHO.

The vocal is the work of a master:
1. Less is more.
2. Content dictates form.
3. God is in the details.
4. Lyrics are clear, singable and impeccably rhythmic...there's such a natural pocket to his singing and Max's joyous drumming.
5. The modal changes appear to be major thirds or fifths--a pop thing, really, and not a true key change modulation a la Hungry Heart. The vivid dream of the song is never jarred out of its running time.
6. He sings the notes straight, without melisma or fucking around with pitch, in tune, with the emotion of a real man, not a star.

Another, more empirical effect of the song: There's a guy on my block who is a Brucephile and an old friend--an uberfan, a dedicated cat that has structured worldwide trips around tours and owns damn near all the important bootlegs, belongs to Bruce boards and just loves loves loves Bruce and his music. In any format. Beautiful guy--keeps me informed.

So tonight I walked down and asked him if he'd heard "Radio Nowhere." He says, "I never want to listen to any new stuff until I hear it live first." Interesting, I think. Warms to the studio records only AFTER first hearing it all live. Pretty cool...and something I could never do. But then again he sees a ton of shows each tour. Usually makes the trek to the first couple tour nights etc. Went with his wife to Dublin for the taping of that Seeger Sessions Live in Dublin DVD. And I still see it the other way around--the live versions change and grow and become something else, but they're essentially representations of the studio recordings.

So I go,"aw c'mon man it's just me...I wouldn't steer you wrong--this is some of the best shit he's ever done in my mind." I finally talk him into hoppin' in the car and we go out on to Woodward and around the neighborhood with the windows down, iPod cranked, beautiful night, full moon, song jammed up beyond any normal aural values. Volume is giving us dirty looks from old men in wifebeaters drinking beer on their stoops.

He says, "I've read that people are sayin' it sounds like 867-5309."

I say, "That's way too fuckin easy and they're just bitter it ain't 'Backstreets' again and again--just listen. Suspend judgment for a minute and listen."

So we cruise and listen and he's obviously very moved.

"He sounds fuckin' desperate--that's when he's at his best," my friend says. "I can see his veins on his neck stickin out lookin' like a fuckin' rope when he sings this live."

Me too, now that he mentions it, but that anatomical anomaly is not what I was really thinking about...I was thinking that I was fucking happy! I was experiencing what Bruce desperately wants in the song--friendship, connection, hearing some loud guitars and some fuckin' rhythm. Feeling vital. And I was thinking, conversely, that I've felt awfully isolated, scared and lonely lately, unable to finish what I've begun, like the cat in the song (Bruce's construct--a character, or actually him? Does it matter?). As Warren Z sang, "My shit's fucked up."

"This has GOTTA be the first song live, right?" I say, happily bowing to his expertise. "Oh yea man...unless there's better shit," he says, "and that would be beyond words, right?"

By now, in the middle of a second listen, he can't really speak. He's bangin' the outside of my car door through the open window with his hand--hard.

"Play it again," he yells.

We play it a third, fourth and fifth time. We're up & down Woodward twice.

I say "You're gonna think I'm fuckin nuts, but this is in the thematic and sonic continuum of 'Born To Run.' It's as good, in its own way, as 'Born To Run'."

It's HIM, not a character, and he wants to--needs to--connect. Socially. Intellectually. Musically. Maybe he wants to redefine what it means to connect. With these drums and these guitars and faith in the magic of the night. OK so I'm now I'm getting carried away...but it was all TRUE right there, and then...gone. Magic? Who cares?

Now I'm yellin over the song.

"I think I get it," I yell.

"He/we needs to know if love is not only real, but if it lasts...can rock & roll & love still deliver him/us from nowhere? As we get older but still try to stay alive & vital? His theme is consistent, but the sound and his delivery are new, very relevant...I really do think it's among the best 15 things he's ever done."

I expect a harsh look from him for saying that. But as I look over at him, a now white haired middle aged guy...I see he's smiling and cryin'. It's all there, and it's all tumblin' out.

"God I'm so fuckin' excited," he says as he gets outta the car. He's not workin' right now--Michigan is fucked up, and has been hard for a couple years now.

Anyway, that's my story. That's what a new Bruce single can do, as far as my life goes anyway....and I'm no superfan or Bruce bulletin board guy. I'm just a fan and fellow artist who admires his work and his integrity.

This does not happen all that much in any other area of life for me. Maybe watching/helping people recover from the treachery of cancer, surely my kids being born or my wife & I getting married, probably playing my own shows and writing and recording my own stuff...maybe the occasional brilliant summer night with friends & family & music.

I certainly didn't expect a new song from Bruce and the E Street Band to make me feel like there is still a lot on the line--like maintaining guts & grace still really matters, for a ton of reasons. But that's what happened, exactly as it happened. Radio Nowhere, the existential reminder.

stewart francke, August 28, 2007

Splashdown! Barry Bonds and the witch hunt

2007-08-13T20:31:00.000-04:00

Well, old Mitch Albom finally pissed me off enough that I fired off a letter.

I'll note, before getting to the letter, that Albom is hardly alone in devoting multiple articles to pontificating on the evils of Barry Bonds. Never mind that Bonds just set the all-time record, or that -- 3 years after the implementation of steroid testing -- he is having, by a wide margin, the greatest season ever for a player of his age. Never mind that, in their disgust over a man they don't like and their "I'm shocked!" reaction to various as-yet unproved (and uncharged, in any official sense) allegations, they seem to be unable even to see what happend on the field.

Last week, I was subjected to Bob Costas speaking decisively on multiple forums. "Absolutely," he said to Wolf Blitzer on the CNN show "The Situation Room" when Blitzer asked if Bonds used steroids, as if Costas had been right there in the room with Barry. Costas added that there was "no other possible explanation." Never having been one to declare guilt by process of elimination, I reject this argument, but at least I understand that Costas may be sincere in his approach.

So then we get to something that's unfortunately more typical. The article that pissed me off is here: http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=200770805001. If you decide to click, be prepared: Its title is "755! But feat will become farce." Lori was actually somewhat swayed by it. After all, Albom wouldn't mislead or accuse someone who's not guilty (though he might be able to say a thing or two about showing up for sporting events).

Albom then managed to swipe a 2nd time on Wednesday, that one is titled "KING BARRY: Home run record's glory will be disputed forever" and it is at http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2007708080433. It contains the remarkable claim that anyone who dares to disagree on certain basics of the discussion (e.g., is RACE a factor?) don't even deserve to be in the discussion. Fortunately, I don't need Mitch's approval to discuss.

Photo by Lisa Blumenfeld/Getty Images

Anyway, here's what I fired off:

From: matt@orel.ws
Subject: 755! But feat will become farce
Date: August 10, 2007 1:22:19 AM EDT
To: malbom@freepress.com

Interesting article.

But if there's one thing I despise, it's when statistics are mangled or distorted, and worse, by people who should know better.

For example:
You choose to ignore the mind-boggling fact that, for his first 13 seasons, Bonds averaged 32 home runs and a .290 batting average, but, beginning when he was 34 -- an age that foreshadows retirement for many ballplayers -- Bonds somehow averaged 49 home runs and a .329 average for the next six seasons.

C'mon, Mitch. You're giving equal weight to Bonds's 1986-1989 seasons? That's just statistical silliness, and you're way too smart for that.

The steroid allegations are that he started in 1999.

So, let's look at comparable data.
Now let's look, say, the 7 years before the allegations, 1992-1998.
They will show that Bonds batted .307 during that period, with a .618 slugging percentage, 39 HRs and an average OPS+ of 185.

You choose to ignore that Bonds, who, in his 20s, never hit more than 46 home runs a year, suddenly, when he was 37, hit 73 in one season.

He hit 46 home runs playing his home games in Candlestick Park. He had 37 the following season when the strike hit, which put him on a pace for 52. That's what you choose to ignore. His 365 total bases in 1993 were the highest NL total since the 1970s, and his slugging percentage of .677 and OPS of 1.136 were the highest since 1948. His back to back seasons over 200 OPS+ in 1992-1993 were the first time an NL player had surpassed 200 OPS+ in consecutive seasons since Rogers Hornsby in 1924-25. That's what Barry Bonds did in his 20's, just on the power end of it.

You might also note that Hank Aaron's career high in HRs was also at age 37 -- even though he played 20 fewer games that year than when he was younger. You may also note that Aaron, who averaged 34 HRs per season from ages 30-34, averaged 41 HRs per year from ages 35-39. At ages 30-34, Aaron averaged 17.6 ABs/HR. From ages 35-39, he averaged 11.8 ABs/HR. So, beginning at age 35 -- "an age that foreshadows retirement for many ballplayers" -- his HR rate increased by 49%. Which is comparable to Bonds's increase in HR rate, during the years you cite (54%).

Should we accuse the Braves of cheating? It was their decision to move in the left field power alley by 10 feet those seasons to a ridiculously short 375 feet, a decision that clearly helped Aaron in the pursuit of Babe Ruth. Aaron had never hit more than 23 home runs at home in his "prime" years, but somehow managed 31 at Atlanta's Fulton County Stadium in 1971. Should we asterisk 8 of them? What about for the other 4 years the fences were in?

You choose to ignore the common-sense argument that players don’t suddenly become more powerful and more productive as they approach 40.

Have you checked in to the performance stats of Roger Clemens lately? How about Carlton Fisk? Didn't Aaron's former teammate Darrell Evans play for the Tigers and have a huge power surge at ages 36-40 (his HR rate increased by 79% over his age 31-35 seasons), or did I imagine it?
I don't recall anyone batting an eye when Nolan Ryan, who hadn't exceeded a strikeout per inning rate through his mid 30's, managed 11.48 at age 40, and then 11.32 at age 42. Ryan's strikeout rate at ages 40-44 was more than 40% above what he had managed a decade earlier, and his best 3 WHIP years were at ages 42-44. Was he not more powerful? Was he not more productive?

In yesterday's follow-up, you wrote:
But there are a few things this is not. It is not about race. It is not about personality. If you cannot get past those stumbling blocks on such an important issue, you don't deserve to be discussing it. You really don't.

Sorry, you don't get to shut down discussion like that. You really don't. Maybe in The Free Press, since you're the one with the column, but not out here. 'Cause if you write things like "the common sense argument" without at least acknowledging that it's not unprecedented, without at least acknowledging that the other (mostly white) guys above had late career spikes that are comparable in degree to Bonds but are absent from these discussions, then what else is there to conclude? The choices aren't pleasant here.

None of which is to proclaim Bonds as innocent. I don't know, and I suspect that you don't, either. (I can, however, proclaim Bonds to be the best baseball player I have ever seen. I can do that without any hesitation at all, though I confess that Willie Mays was past his prime by the time I saw him). If you happen to know Bonds's hat size pre- and post-, I'd love to know it. I see that accusation all the time, but somehow it always lacks the specifics.

It's about all of those things. Isn't it? Though I'd prefer it to be about baseball. It still could be that, I believe.

Best regards,
Matthew Orel
West Bloomfield, MI

Carey Bell 1936-2007

2007-05-10T08:04:00.000-04:00

Steve Messick writes:

Carrie Bell was a wonderful harp player, and really, the last of that generation. He was no Little Walter, but nobody ever has been. I'm not sure if he was as good on harp as Big Walter, but he was a much better singer. Unfortunately, the one time I saw him, he wasn't very good and he was rude to me personally.

It was at an all-day blues thing about twenty minutes away. Bell was headlining (two sets), and hanging out, signing fliers, and generally being pretty cool. I didn't say anything to him, but we had nodded at each other. Somebody bought him a drink, and then some more. By the time he got on, he was lit up pretty good, and not focused, but playing well enough. He said that between sets, he would sign copies of his cds, available at the stage.

I had the cds at home, but hadn't thought to bring any. What i wanted was for him to sign a harp. I stood in line and when I got up, he looked at me like I was an idiot, and wanted to know why I didn't buy an album for him to sign. I said I had 'em at home. He said if I wanted him to sign something, I needed to buy one of those.

His second set was worse than the first, messing up and restarting songs, messing with effects to the point of distraction, and just kind of being drunk.

I found out later that his guitarist talked to some friends. Seems he had stopped drinking (more or less), but on that day, decided to indulge. They (his band) knew he wasn't playing well, and they felt embarrassed for him. The funny thing is, the crowd really couldn't have cared less.

It bugged me for a bit. After a while, I realized a) he was drunk. and b) he wasn't getting rich out there, and he probably needed every cd sale. All he saw was some fucker who wanted something from him, but wasn't giving anything in return. Fair enough.

I've talked to folks who met him in other situations, and swear he was one of the nicest cats in the world. I believe that. He just wasn't that day.

But he could play harp like a motherfucker. I got the albums to prove it.

What Is This Shit?

2007-04-13T18:14:00.000-04:00

Dave Marsh writes:

This Amy Winehouse is really being peddled as the next big white soul star? The next Joss Stone? I don’t think she’s the next Belinda Carlisle.

You know who she really sounds like? That faux jazz singer the Brits shipped over here for a spell, Cleo Laine (who did a Porgy and Bess with Ray Charles that might be the worst Porgy ever done solely due to her contributions). Or if you want kinder, maybe Shirley Bassey.

Unpleasantly mannered, no swing (the drummer sounds like his idea of a light touch is substituting a wooden mallet for his usual cudgel).

I don’t know about anybody else, but that “Back to Black”—though it mirrors my response to the record perfectly—sure does sound, in the piano melody, like something that charted for the Supremes around about the fall of ’66, and for Vanilla Fudge a few months later, too.

Would ONE of the radio stations and critics who’ve fawned all over this clumsy pastiche have played it if the name on the cover was Bettye Lavette and the picture of a woman Bettye’s age? Maybe one; it’d be a lot better record of course.

Download This . . .

2007-04-04T10:48:00.000-04:00

Market research cited in an article in Monday's New York Times says that users of peer-to-peer downloading networks—BitTorrent, LimeWire, and the like—downloaded ten times more songs than users of "legit" download services like iTunes. More than 5 billion songs were downloaded from P2P source in 2006, as opposed to 509 million legal downloads, said NPD Group, a market research firm.

Those numbers didn't ring true to Holler's Matt Orel, who set out to prove it and managed to do so pretty quickly. He writes:

I would guess that 10:1 is seriously understated—I wouldn't be surprised if it's closer to 100:1.

The article doesn't capture how these ratios work out when considering "officially released" content as opposed to "bootleg" content. For example, the torrent site Dimeadozen.org (capped at 100,000 free members) has a strict policy banning any material that is either in official release or likely to become officially released.

On March 21, the files for a full-length Bruce Springsteen concert DVD from Paris 1985 went up. Not just a handheld thing, this was from the monitors, first-generation. 28 songs. 12 gigabytes of data. And many hundreds of people logged on, downloading the whole thing. How many song downloads is that, just for that one show? Well, I'll count: Dimeadozen reports that there have been 769 downloads so far. In addition, a Springsteen-only torrent site called Jungleland has had 956 downloads. That's 48,300 song downloads, just for that one show. In addition, there are currently another 122 people in the process of downloading the show from the two sites (and there are likely other torrent sites hosting it as well), so that'll be an additional 3,416 downloads, for a total of 51,716 downloads, or about 20 terabytes of data. And that's in less than two weeks, for a single 22-year-old concert.

There's a Simon and Garfunkel show from 2003 that's generated more than 130,000 downloads. Bob Dylan's show in Sweden on Sunday had already produced 2750 completed song downloads with 3200 more in process as of Monday afternoon; his club-gig show last Tuesday is nearing 20,000 completed downloads. Pretty much every show he does will do similar numbers—at 3 shows a week, that's nearly 3 million song downloads just for Dylan on an annual basis, just for his new shows. You get the idea, I guess; there's nothing on iTunes or similar services that will be remotely in the same order of magnitude.

Of course, those numbers are global; the Jungleland numbers, in particular, are majority outside the U.S. But the general concept remains (and Dimeadozen is majority U.S., in any event).

Something after St. Patrick's Day

2007-03-19T22:28:00.000-04:00

Lauren Onkey writes:

As an alternative to all the Irish crap that's peddled at this time of year, I recommend Mick Moloney's cd McNally's Row of Flats, which came out last year on Compass. Mick is a musicologist/folklorist at NYU. His book & cd Far From the Shamrock Shore: The Story of Irish-American Immigration Through Song, which came out in 2002, is a study of 19thc. Irish immigrant songs. He plays banjo, mandolin & guitar, and is a beautiful singer.

McNALLY'S ROW OF FLATS is a collection of songs by Ned Harrigan & David Braham, made popular in Harrigan & Hart's musical comedies on Broadway in the 1870s and early 80s. Harrigan's shows were wildly popular among working class Irish Americans in New York--a mix of minstrelsy (Harrigan & Hart were in minstrel shows early in their career) and vaudeville. They've sort of disappeared--the plays were never published, and this isn't the kind of pseudo traditional music that gets hauled out for St. Patrick's Day, what with the minstrelsy and all.

Moloney did an interview on NPR's Fresh Air last year when the cd came out; he talks about the collection and 19thc. Irish American music, and he sings a couple of songs from the set:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5289944

I published an essay on Harrigan a while back in jouvert where I tried to sort out the relationships between Irish and black characters in the play.

http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/Jouvert/v4i1/onkey.htm

Making Red Cents

2007-03-09T09:13:00.000-05:00

In a response to "Not One Red Cent", I wrote, in part: "... if I'm in the market for an item [iPod nano] that's in the RED line-up, and the only differences between the RED version and the non-RED version are the color and the earmarking of some funds by the corporation to the charity, then why not choose the RED one?"

Dave Marsh responds:

The only argument against it that I can see is that you'd be encouraging Bono and those who think like him. I've never made arguments against the Red products. No need to. (A nano is not sufficient for my needs, so that's taken care of.)

A secondary argument would be: What is that $10?

Let's assume, which is not a correct assumption, almost an impossible one, that all $10 goes to some sort of African program designed to treat, prevent or (least likely) research new treatments for AIDS. There's no GFund overhead, the expenses of the Red board are covered some other way, the ads come out of the Apple not the Red/GF budgets.

You've made your purchase, a couple hundred dollars I think. Where is that $10 in the Apple scheme? Is it over and above profit? Does Apple make $10 less on a Red I-Pod Nano, than on any other model?

Not exactly. Even if they do make $10 less direct profit, they write that $10 off as a business and/or charitable expense; so $5 (or probably more) of it comes out of every U.S. (etc) taxpayer's pocket, one of the reasons that Bono et al dig the project so much, they're playing with other people's money in more ways than one. The consumer, of course, gets no such deduction. (Well, I would, because it's a business tool for me. Honest. But I recognize this as an exceptional case and so should you, or else I'll put on my dark glasses and recite AIDS statistics to make you feel guilty until you stop.)

But even if I'm wrong about that, which I'm not, that $10 symbolizes how much excess profit Apple finds in I-Pod Nanos, of all colors. Where does that profit come from? To know that in detail we'd have to know the wages of Apple workers, the wages of the people who make the parts, the wages of people who mine or otherwise develop and extract the raw materials from which the parts are made. They are making a non-tax-deductible donation too. I guess. Some of them are almost certainly African, given what raw materials are used in computers; some have AIDS, no doubt about that.

It doesn't sound to me like the Apple shareholders and corporate officers are making a contribution. I don't think the share value or the profit picture is adversely affected. Maybe it's conscience money.

On the other side of it, the $10 makes a statement. One of those statements is "I care." A worthy statement and when logically worked out as a conscious choice, laudable because heartfelt. I reserve my applause however because of the other statements made by buying Red, I-Pod or otherwise (since every corporation in the Red scheme has the same situation).

One of those is "Red is a worthy, functional program that leverages our purchasing dollars in a useful way." Perhaps.

Another is "Red has the right idea." Here I disagree very strongly with the premise--I think it's a very bad idea for reasons already cited ad nauseaum -- because it seems to me that there are very many better ways to provide AIDS relief. I think that the claim that Red is a means to create an Africa in which the overall standard of living is raised for everyone, which Bono consistently implies (and all other Red rhetoric sort of glides on by with a finger to its lips to encourage the hush), is too silly to be taken seriously by anybody with a speck of knowledge of how either international investment or international philanthropy works.

But you are voting "Yes" on that implicit question, too.

Which is more important, getting a lot of money to people with AIDS in Africa via vehicles like the Global Fund or opening people's eyes to what really causes there to be an epidemic of untreated AIDS anywhere in the world but particularly Africa? We can disagree about this. It can be a productive disagreement. But only if we have the dialogue.

Red says several things about this.
A) You don't need to have the dialogue, this is all being decided at a higher level. (One of the reasons what I wrote angers responders so much may be that I insist throughout that there is no higher level than the polis at large).
B) Demanding the dialogue expresses a callous indifference to the everyday plight of PWA in Africa. (Bono says this explicitly to the Times columnist.)
C) Such dialogue will not be effective; it's a fool's play, even damaging because the ONLY way we can achieve any relief for PWA in Africa is through this process. (Which is really a piece of circular logic leading us back to A)).
D) People will always be poor and diseases that are treated in rich places will not be treated in poor ones unless by the largesse of the rich. (This assumption underpins the logic of A leading to C.)
E) If we ask too many questions of our betters, the program will fail and then NOTHING will be done, because only our betters--those already rich and powerful--can do things. (This is the threat, the iron fist in Bono's velveteen glove.)

I think those are some very good reasons not to buy Red. But admittedly, if all you're looking to do is shift some of your excess cash to somebody who is "doing something about" whatever social problem has your attention at the moment, it'll get the job done. If you think that contributing excess cash (yours, mine, Bono's, Phil Knight's, Steve Job's, Bill Gates') is the right way to alleviate social ills, I'm dead wrong.

And yet, we have been doing things this way for 50 or 150 years and how much have things improved as a result? I do not think that the philanthropy of Jay Gould and the Rockefellers and Andrew Carnegie or even Alfred Nobel lead to the development of antibiotics.

OTOH, I've helped raise about $6 million to try to solve a medical problem within an institution created and still largely controlled by Rockefeller and DuPont/GM financial interests. I didn't and don't see anywhere else to go on that one. And I looked for the alternatives.

In Africa, and on broader social questions in general, I think there are other approaches. I think $10 to the World Social Forum organizations would bring more benefit. To Africans. Poor ones. (Not incidentally to the real bogey man hiding behind Red rhetoric: The poor everywhere else.)

But that's me. This is how I think. It's OK to react to it any way you need to, including despising it for its double standard, if that's what you think the previous two paragraphs reflect.

Not One Red Cent

2007-03-06T12:26:00.000-05:00

Dave Marsh writes:

I read with growing dismay each successive paragraph of David Carr’s fawning New York Times business section piece on Bono, the Red Campaign and Vanity Fair yesterday morning. Later, I read the more interesting piece from Advertising Age that shows that all the sturm and drang from Red has generated $18 million for African relief—I wonder if that’ll even be enough to replace the condoms Bono’s “effective” friend the Shrub refuses to allow U.S. government-supported agencies to deliver. You can be dead certain that it is hardly a match for the combined profits that the corporations for which Red fronts expect to pull out of all those products.

What maddens me most is that articles like this are built upon a cascading series of false premises, so I thought I’d catalogue the ones in the Times column.

· Bono is a "rare" rock star. Almost every rock star has some kind of charitable endeavor.

· Only the opinions of celebrities (the Pope, Bill Gates) are of any consequence in getting the job done.

· Wealth and charity are somehow a "contradiction." Unless there is wealth, there can be no charity in the sense that Bono and Carr use the term (which is quite a bit different than, say, St. Paul's definition).

· Bono is not part of the "Sally Struthers" thing. But of course, his entire project depends on sustaining the image of Africans as unable to fight for themselves, which is one reason one encounters no Africans—certainly no poor ones--writing for these Bono guest edits. It also depends quite a good bit on their continuing to be humiliated by their poverty (presuming they are, other than in the minds Bono loves most).

· "The crucial role that commerce will play" as a new thing. That has been the barking sales pitch of imperialism and its missionaries from the first day that Europeans landed in Africa. (If Bono didn’t think that history began when Jeffrey Sachs conned his first Russian, he’d know this.) Bono doesn’t really contend that corporations have a “crucial role,” anyway. He premises this statement on his insistent, addled idea that they are the only vehicle by which the problems of African poverty and disease can be solved, despite the fact that everywhere on Earth that these corporations exist, there is a great deal of poverty and disease.

· The bizarre assertion that, in this case (but there is always something equivalent to this), China wants to invest in Africa as somehow a boon to the poor. It is either the opposite (the Chinese invest in Africa because they can exploit African workers even more than Chinese ones) or irrelevant (since the profits will go to China, not whatever part of Africa the Chinese are invested in.) By the way, Bono knows that there are a couple dozen nations that comprise Africa and that Chinese and other corporations invest in one or more of those, not the continent as a whole, right? I read the whole Independent issue and never heard a peep about this reality.

· "Africa is sexy." How many hundred years of racism does that tightly packed cliché contain?

· "People need to know it." If, after all these years of grandstanding, even the kind of person who reads Vanity Fair doesn't know it, what does that say about the Red approach?

· Changing the subject as soon as the topic of extreme wealth comes up—changing it to AIDS, the only time (it would appear) that AIDS comes up in the interview. Talking from both sides of his mouth as usual: If 5000 people a day are dying, as they are, for what, exactly, do Bush and Blair and Bono’s other powerful cronies earn their high marks?

· Refusing to discuss his ownership of Forbes, ostensibly because it's off the topic. It couldn't be more on topic given that Capitalist Tool Bono is about to edit a slick magazine, claims he lives in the world of media, claims that such commerce-friendly publications have a "crucial" role to play.

· Bono sees the world through rose-tinted glasses. The Red campaign is based on an entirely cynical view of what motivates humans

· Bono would have been a journalist. In fact, he did freelance a few pieces, universally undistinguished ones; his more obvious career choices would have been either a priest or a pimp

· "Striking fear in the hearts of writers." As if this piece weren't an example of how he carefully selects easily intimidated stenographers to do his bidding. (Would a real journalist have stopped at "I don't want to talk about" Forbes or let him get away with changing the subject to AIDS when the topic of his own arrogance comes up? Or that if he did quote Bono in those cases that he shouldn’t have written a little detail about the contradictions Bono is avoiding, as I have managed to do in about a sentence each here?)

How long before people will call a con a con? How many more people have to die in Africa before we acknowledge that this process is a fraud and a failure and that the evidentiary trail is not short but quite long (it's been 22 years since LiveAid)?

Missing Molly Ivins

2007-02-04T08:13:00.000-05:00

CJ Janovy writes:

this news breaks my heart bad. over the last few days i've been wanting to write about how i met her at a bar in austin back in, i think, 93--it was at a convention of the association of alternative newsweeklies, and the bar had an outside stage under a long, corrugated tin roof, where lucinda williams was playing--that was the first time i ever saw lucinda, and i was blown away by her live version of "change the tracks underneath the train" (or whatever's the name of that song). inside, molly was holding court at one end of a long oval table. when i spotted her, i thought: oh my god, there she is. i hung around at the bar for a long time, watching her and hoping she'd get up so i could say something, and chatting with kit rackliss. finally he said "just go up and interrupt." so i did, bending down next to her and introducing myself. she smiled real big and patted me on the back--rubbed my back, actually--and told me to keep up the good work.

a few years later, the greater kansas city coalition against censorship managed to bring her to town to be a keynote speaker for a big event they put on. coincidentally, that was the same year they gave me the award for first amendment defender of the year (an award previously bestowed upon danny alexander and david cantwell). before molly's speech i had to go out and accept the award, so we were both backstage for awhile. molly stayed off in the shadows, pacing sort of, and seemed unapproachable. i couldn't bother her to remind her how much that moment years before in austin had meant to me--actually, it had been one of those moments that kept me going in a sometimes very difficult career (another one of those moments was with dave at folk alliance in albuquerque, but that's a different story). finally i just introduced myself again, told her i was that year's first amendment defender, and that it was an honor to meet her. again, she smiled warmly. "oh, you're doing such good work." but she seemed distracted, thinking about her speech i guess. it didn't matter--to this day i'm blown away that i was on the same stage with her.

she's influenced my own column writing more than anyone. i'm going to miss her bad.

Ahmet Ertegun

2006-12-16T08:50:00.000-05:00

Dave Marsh writes:

In 1998, Yves Beauvais, then Atlantic's A&R man in charge of jazz and soul reissues, asked if I'd write an essay for a box set the label planned for its 50th anniversary. I said I'd do it, if I could write about the label in terms of how it reflected one man's vision-that man being, of course, Ahmet Ertegun. As I remember, I said he was a greater visionary than Sam Phillips and Berry Gordy--and I'd be glad to defend the statement today, because it's true. Ahmet's vision lasted much longer, for one thing, and it extended to a much more diverse body of music, for another.

The project soon enough morphed into notes for the anniversary concert program and then, if I remember right, just vanished-nothing at all ever came out, at least not with my piece. But it's especially memorable for me for two reasons.

The first is that, as I embarked on the piece, doubts about the premise crept in. There was Jerry Wexler, there was Tom Dowd, there was Arif Mardin, there was Nesuhi, Ahmet's elder brother. All those people, and a few more, were indispensable to the story. But when I went back and surveyed the story of the label, it was Ahmet's imprint on all of it. It wasn't just that he produced the first hits by Ruth Brown and Ray Charles, or that he signed the Rolling Stones and made the deal that gave the label Cream, or that it was his continual interest in black dance music, from "Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee" to "Le Freak" that sustained the label after that, for as long as it had an identity. (It doesn't any more but neither does anybody's else's label.) Others came and went. Ahmet remained, and as long as he remained, Atlantic had a unique focus on the world of music. It was all touched by his sense of elegance, raunch and grace.

The second reason is that when Ahmet read the piece-which I obviously wrote to make sure he'd know how I felt about what he contributed to music-he went to Yves and said, "This is good stuff. Maybe we should offer him more work and he'd get off our back about the royalty shit." Yves explained that it didn't work that way.

What I had to say-and say, and say, and say--about the disgraceful treatment of Atlantic artists on royalty issues irritated the fuck out of him. Once, a few years ago, we were in the middle of a splendid interview for the PBS roots music TV series. He told me the story of how he'd found Stick McGhee to sing "Drinkin' Wine," by calling up his friend Brownie McGhee, who said, "Hell, that's my brother." He told me about Nesuhi taking him to his first jazz concert, in London when Ahmet was 12, and how what impressed him most was how loud the music was, and how much of early jazz and blues recording was simply about trying to capture the physical impact that music had live. (I would not have written my latest book, about a career on stage, without that conversation.) He told a bunch of stories I've heard before and you might have too, about Ray and the rest. He told a hilarious story about why he didn't like signing singer-songwriters, which ended up with a French promoter refusing to book Sonny and Cher because Bob Dylan's incomprehensibly wordy show had bored Paris beyond further endurance.

He broke off in the middle of the interview to deliver a chastising lecture about how the business was in the old days. Basically, he tried to rationalize why Ruth Brown wound up cleaning windows and LaVern Baker ended up running a bar on a military base in the Philippines. Well, he didn't actually get down to cases, because there wasn't any justification for how those lives got lived, for what Atlantic did to and didn't do for its veteran artists.

The record business is a nasty place and the people in it have to create callouses where there should be none in order to survive in it. Thirty years ago or something like that, I wondered aloud if he'd miss Nat Weiss, his good friend, who was taking his Nemperor label from Atlantic to CBS for distribution. "He'll miss the billing," said Nat. Both of them laughed, 'cause it was true.

But when my wife left her job at Atlantic because she'd hit a glass ceiling, and wound up making more money in a job she hated, the situation was resolved by Ahmet simply walking up to her after an Eric Clapton concert and saying, "I think it's time that you came home." Later, when she got fired, very unjustly, he couldn't fix it but he did give her everything she asked for in the way of compensation (and I will always believe that he made sure that the jackass who fired her paid with his job not long thereafter).

I know how much Ahmet loved the music. In the mid-70s, he barely paid attention at various receptions the label held. For one of them, I made up some tapes of music from the label's glory days: Aretha, Otis, Joe Tex, Sam and Dave, Ray (always Ray), Drifters, Clovers, Coasters, Ruth, LaVern, the MGs.if you don't know the list, you can get the highlights from every other obituary. Ahmet came to the event that evening and he not only stuck around, he regaled a bunch of us with another great set of stories about making that music, hearing it for the first time, trying to get the world to hear it.

So the man wasn't perfect. But the music is. In the greatest era of American music that has ever been, Ahmet Ertegun took his passion and brought that music into the world-the whole world, not just black America, not just America, for that matter--and showed the rest of us how great it could be. The music lasted. So should his memory.

Fred Wilhelms writes:

As it will probably come as no surprise, I had a much harder time than most reconciling what Ahmet accomplished with what was done to artists with his full knowledge. I particularly hated that I had to essentially beg him have Atlantic pay benefit contributions to AFTRA for LaVern after her stroke to keep her coverage active.

This, however, is my best Ahmet story:

In 1995, I attended the R&B Foundation Pioneer Awards dinner in Los Angeles. As luck would have it, I was seated between Sam Moore and Charlie Thomas of the Drifters. Across from us was Ahmet.

Charlie was telling us that he never knew the Drifter's "White Christmas" was used in "Home Alone" until he went to see the movie, and that he never saw a dime of the license fee. I told him and Sam to look under the table at Ahmet's feet. They both ducked under the tablecloth. Ahmet, of course was wearing some gorgeous custom-made slipons.

"See those shoes, Charlie?" I said. "There's your "White Christmas" money."

They started laughing while their heads were still under the table. It caught Ahmet's attention. Sam looked at him across the table and said "Omlet, Charlie wants his shoes." Ahmet had no idea what he was talking about, and Charlie and Sam collapsed again in laughter.

During the evening, Sam tells the story of Charlie's shoes to Junior Walker and Lloyd Price. Both of them tell Ahmet that Charlie wants his shoes. By the end of the night he is completely befuddled by the people coming up and telling him that Charlie wants his shoes.

A couple months later, I had to call him to get another contribution made for Lavern. He wouldn't agree until I told him what the business was about Charlie's shoes. I told him. He didn't think it was funny.

Tackling the News from New Orleans

2006-12-15T08:01:00.000-05:00

Daniel Wolff writes:

Let's see if we can make any sense out of three of the top stories in the New Orleans Times-Picayune this morning. I think of them as kind of pincer attack -- maybe in the shape of a trident? -- that point out where the city's heading.

First, there's a story about how small many of the reimbursements turn out to be from the federally funded "Road Home" program. Title: UNHAPPY ENDINGS. You can read the whole thing here.

But the quote I've pulled is from the grown-up son of middle-class, octogenarian parents who received a letter saying the only money they'd receive for their totally destroyed, $200,000-plus house, was a little over $500.

"My concern is, the people we need in this city are going to say, 'Screw it,' and leave," said Alan Rubin, a Metairie resident who bristled with anger during a recent visit to his parents' ungutted home. "If they don't have time to do this thing right the first time, when are they going to find time to do it?"

We could credit these screw-ups to bureaucratic blunder, but it's also possible that delayed, miniscule payments are meant to do exactly this: residents say screw it, leave, and the new New Orleans gets built -- by developers, not homeowners.

***
From there we go to an article called: MILLIONS EARMARKED TO CREATE HOUSING. You can read the whole thing here.

Seems there's a fast approaching deadline for the city to use federal housing credits or lose them. So the city passed a plan to create housing, which includes tearing down the former low income housing units and replacing them with "mixed-use." That is, mostly middle income rental apartments with some low income units available. The effect of that will be .... ah, you'll see below: "get rid of concentrated poverty." Note the phrasing. Put this way, the new plan won't get rid of poor people, just poverty.

Clarence Williams, 40, a former resident of the St. Bernard development, cried as he told the housing agency his story. A former maintenance worker at Ochsner hospitals in New Orleans, Williams has found work in Baton Rouge, but he can't find an affordable apartment. He said he wants to move back to New Orleans, where he used to spend $40 a month for his subsidized apartment, but he hasn't been able to find anything for less than $800 a month. He said he has been forced to spend many nights in his pickup truck.

Williams said he doesn't oppose the creation of mixed-income developments, but he asked the housing agency where he is supposed to live if all of the public housing units are demolished to make way for them.

"I don't understand how a building can survive something like a hurricane and then you want to tear it down," Williams said.

State Treasurer John Kennedy said he also questions the wisdom of handing out so many tax credits to mixed-use developments. The agency approved about $56 million for mixed-income projects Wednesday, almost three-quarters of the total.

Kennedy said the agency was merely taking its cues from the Blanco administration, which has pushed mixed-use projects as a way to rid New Orleans of the concentrated poverty that has plagued it for decades.

"Will it work? If we ever get something built, we'll find out," Kennedy said. "But we have to do something or we are going to lose those credits."

***
Finally, in the same paper, an article called $15 MILLION GUTTING EFFORT GETS UNDER WAY to be found here.

Below the headline, it explains: "N.O. program to help seniors, low-income residents obey law." The new local law is that you have to gut, secure and maintain flooded homes. There are 9,000 homes targeted for gutting. You may recall that this was mostly being done by volunteers from agencies like Acorn and Common Ground. Now, the city's hired outside contractors to do the work for those who qualify under HUD guidelines. So, the city guts your home for you (if you're poor and/or old), but there isn't money to rebuild. The gain? See quote below.

Oh, and some of the money will also go to demolishing houses: the city has declared some 17,000 have to come down.

"It's good for the person in this house, and that one," City Planning chief Tony Faciane said, pointing to the houses under renovation on both sides of the one being gutted on Pauline Drive. "It just gives everyone else a little encouragement to keep going."

Mitch Ryder's new record

2006-09-15T19:06:00.000-04:00

Stewart Francke writes:

I just returned this morning from Tempermill, the studio in Ferndale where I've cut most of my music. I wasn't recording, not yet anyway; I was listening to my friend Mitch Ryder's new record, The Acquitted Idiot. Mitch & I have developed a close friendship since first recording together on House Of Lights ("Upon Seeing Simone") and then playing several live shows together.

Our friendship is a joy to me...I don't know what else to call it except a part of a realized dream. Being friends with one of your heroes is an unexpected point of arrival I guess; it's a great thing, knowing the guy behind the voice I grew up hearing as a defining voice for what was real, for what was exciting, and most of all, what was Detroit. When I moved here from Saginaw now 27 years ago, the name & image associated with Mitch Ryder was daunting to a young musician. He had cut some of the most exciting singles in history and was a dynamic, intense, sweaty presence on stage--an iconic figure. Hell, Bruce called him a hero and continually paid homage to him with his "Detroit Medley."

Then his "comeback" came around in '82 or '83, with John Mellencamp at the helm, another hit with Prince's "When You Were Mine," and further fodder for the legend. I now know him as a gentle, spiritual, ironic, humorous guy, with a marriage that works, and maybe saves him from himself (we share that, among many other things). He regularly tours Germany, where he's a God, and the USA, on packaged oldies tours in the summer.

He's among the three best singers I've ever heard in my life. Not only have his chops remained; he now has a bittersweet falsetto and a low end that can finish a phrase with stunning emotion. He records for a label in Germany, Busch Funk, but should be putting these records out--he's making them at a rate of nearly one a year--on a major US label.

Why do I say that? Because he's transcended his image, his legend and his "sound" and grown into one of the finest artists & songwriters we have working today. After a bundle of records over the years that rocked, he's returned to his spiritual & musical "home"--blues, R&B and gospel. As artists we're both lumped into what critics and fans call "blue eyed soul"--white guys making black music or working in black forms. But Mitch sings blues & R&B as well as anyone of any color, ever.

He made a record in the early 70s with Steve Cropper, Booker T, Duck Dunn, Al Jackson and the Memphis Horns (The MGs) called The Detroit-Memphis Experiment that is a strong part of my musical bible--a record I return to when I need to figure out who I am, where I come from and where I might be headed. It's a clear and inspiring map, every time. The singing, the grooves and the horn charts remain a standard of sorts for me.

Sitting and listening to The Acquitted Idiot made me think that it's somewhat of a followup, 35 years later, to The Detroit-Memphis Experiment. It begins with "If You Need The Pain," pure gospel, a seeker's song, a combination of the lament found in the Five Blind Boys and the social glue in Curtis's "People Get Ready." Full blooded gospel piano with Mitch's sanded clarion voice. The phrasing and sustained vibrato of a master. "You trust in the word of love and so you stay," he sings.

It ends with a bonus track, cut in 1969 with the Funk Brothers, called "Hit & Run Lover." The song is from the ill fated last sessions with Bob Crewe, where Crewe wanted Mitch to front a stylized big band and Mitch wanted to stay on course as an R&B guy, the white James Brown. Crewe won out, and the rest is history--Mitch's career took a deep plunge that took 15 years to rectify. The track is amazing--the best Motownish track to never be a hit. Except for the fidelity of the overall recording, Mitch's voice sounds the same, cutting through the band or howling above it with a falsetto scream. I was excited to hear a track like this, Mitch fronting the Funk Brothers; Mitch just said he's got a "whole record like that on a shelf at home."

The Acquitted Idiot is a record about pain, sin, sex, spiritual yearning and doubt, materialism, home sickness, forgiveness and faith. It's Teutonic in tone, because he's often singing for German audiences. Anthems follow parlor songs; waltzes bump up against a Christmas song sung in German. In that way it's almost a companion piece to Dylan's new "Modern Times" in its variety and acumen. That's where I put Mitch--up with his peers, writing and singing and making records on par with Dylan, Van, Bruce, Seger, or with Sam Moore and Jerry Lee Lewis. He's not resting; he's relevant, continually making new work, reinventing his own reinventions.

I left Tempermill quite moved, wondering about the perfectibility of humankind through music and understanding. You know the feeling, however brief it lasts...until the world's hard reality slams the door. But a record like this can always dent that reality; it's music to survive by.

I didn't think about the fairness of an artist like Mitch releasing records on small European labels and what passes for hit records these days. Then on my way home, I walked into a gas station and heard Uncle Cracker's remake of Dobie Gray's great "Drift Away." And he was basically talkin it, keeping the melody flat because he couldn't sing it, with no vibe, sense of tradition or articulation. Pretty shitty record. And I did get a bit dejected about how this business works today.

But that's for another day. Today I'm gonna let the gospel vibe and the floating falsetto of this record wash over me. I'm gonna let his ideas of life and death, sin and salvation--the big deal--move around inside my mind. It's the kind of music I love, songs concerned with what's true, right and real. Wish I could walk into a gas station and hear one of Mitch's new songs.

Stewart Francke
September 13, 2006

Further proof that my generation best get out of the way...

2006-09-06T17:04:00.000-04:00

Danny Alexander writes:

So, I'm at the neighborhood grocery store where two 14-year-old (at most) boys are scanning and sacking my groceries.

The checker looks East Indian and he seems to be giving a hard time to the overweight white boy sacking, but they find something they can agree on.

The checker says, "I like your shirt," referring to my Marvin Gaye tee.

The sacker says, "Marvin Gaye, he's my boy!"

The checker says, "I like his version of "Heard It Through the Grapevine" a lot better than Gladys Knight's."

I'm thinking "you and a lot of other people," in a good way, you know, but then I just look at these two kids. The reason I know they're 14 is cause they look like they're 12, and I just say, "you know your stuff."

They grin.

Gate 9

2006-08-10T18:05:00.000-04:00

Bill Glahn writes:

I needed a little extra cash so I signed on with the Ozarks Empire Fair as a ticket taker for the 10-day duration from July 28 to August 6. The car payment was overdue. So were the phone and Internet service payments. The $5.35/hr pay sucked, but there was an opportunity to put in a lot of hours in a short period of time. On my first day at work. they took one look at me and reassigned me to Gate 9. They explained that it was a parking lot job, but that they would still pay me the $5.35 rate instead of a drop to $5.15. Thanks.

Instead of handing me a little red flag to wave cars into open spaces, they handed me a walkie-talkie programmed to Channel 3. Channel 3 is the security channel. “Don’t let any traffic proceed down Smith Street past the Gate 9 entry,” I was told. Gate 9 is the entry to the west parking lot, by far the biggest at the fair. Smith Street is designated one-way during the fair. At Gate 9 a wooden barricade blocked the northernmost lane of Smith. An orange barrel, the other. I was to move the orange barrel only for fair operational people, emergency vehicles, and the crew and performers for the grandstand shows. In short, I was the last line of defense against traffic that wanted to continue down Smith to Grant Ave, a main artery. Or the fans who wanted to get to the backstage area at Gate 10, just 100 yards down the road. Or the farmers who wanted to take a short cut to Gate 7, which lay beyond Gate 10 close to Grant. All these people I had to direct through the west parking lot and instruct them that they would have to head south through the parking lot, exit, and then make 2 or 3 left hand turns to get to the place they wanted to go. That place was clearly visible a couple of football fields downhill on Smith from Gate 9. Not many wanted to hear that, from Gate 9 onward, Smith was closed to traffic by order of the Springfield City Council.

Gate 9 has history. “Last year, the Gate 9 attendant walked off the job on his first day,” Ellen, one of the supervisors in security told me. “He said he wasn’t getting paid enough to take so much abuse. I had to finish his shift and find somebody else.” Of course, she told me this four or five days into my employment, and by that time I already knew as much. On day two this year, a taxi zoomed through the barricade during the morning shift and sent the orange barrel airborne, hitting the golf cart of one of the supes riding to the gate to explain why he couldn’t go through. The morning shift attendant had little desire to stay after the incident.

My shift started at 3 p.m. each day and ran through 11 p.m. During one of the year’s worst heat waves, Gate 9 offered no shelter from the elements. By the time I reported to work each day, the asphalt was melting. A pair on sandals ruined by day 2; a pair of sneakers by day 4. And the tempers of the people in the cars were already frazzled by the time they got to Gate 9. I couldn’t blame them. I couldn’t let them through either. I needed the paycheck. So, no matter how much abuse was hurled my way, I remained polite.

“No, ma’am, I can’t move the barrel for you. You have to exit through the parking lot and take Norton to Grant.”

“No sir, there are no exceptions.”

“Yes sir, I realize your hogs are just down the road inside Gate 7. City Council has designated this stretch of road for emergency and operational use only.”

Sometimes, expletives were hurled at me in response. Tires screeched as frustrated drivers stomped on the gas as they entered the parking lot. A couple of farmers threatened to kick my ass if I didn’t move the barricade.

“No, sir. I can’t do that. I need this job.” Neither followed up. Sometimes there is an advantage to being physically intimidating. Even when you don’t mean to be.

I lost my composure only once.

It was on Sunday July 30, day three on the job. At about 6 p.m., a new Cadillac DTS pulled up to the barrier. I approached the driver’s side window.

A cool blast of AC hit me as the driver rolled down his window. He seemed to be in his late 60s or early 70s. A woman of similar age sat in the passenger seat. Both wore scowls that seemed permanently fixed. They were obviously well-off, dressed in conservative finery. Neither seemed as though they had allowed themselves the discomfort of exiting their air-conditioned domain for any time longer than it took them to go from their house to their car.

“I don’t want to go to the fair. Move the barricade,” the man barked at me in a manner that indicated he was used to getting his way.

“I’m sorry, sir. Smith Street is closed to all traffic from this point onward. You’ll have to proceed through the parking lot to Norton and exit there.”

“I am going down to Grant. Move the barrel.”

“I can’t do that, sir. Please proceed through the parking lot.”

The guy looked at my name badge and took note. “I know many important people in this city. I can have your job. This isn’t a request. I said move the barrel.”

I gave him the city ordinance spiel. He reiterated what an important a member of the business community he was. I would “have to make an exception."

By now I was ticked off. “Well, sir, if any of your important buddies are on city council, take it up with them. But if you want that barrel moved, you’ll have to get out and move it yourself. And there will be another barricade further down the road. You’ll have to get out of your air conditioning and move that one too. Do you think you can handle it?”

“Look. If you don’t move the barrel, I will sit here until traffic backs up to the zoo.”

The zoo is about a mile back on Smith; by the early evening rush, traffic was probably backed up to the zoo anyway. So I called his bluff with one of my own. “Then I guess we’ll just have to get a tow truck.” I pressed the button on the walkie-talkie. “Gate 9 to security. We have a car that won’t move and it’s blocking traffic.”

As the guy turned his wheels to pull into the parking lot, his wife leaned over and said, “This makes you not even want to go to the fair.”

“Ma’am – the first thing your husband told me was that you didn’t want to go to the fair. No loss there.”

I returned to being Mr. Polite. But no matter how many cars offered up some bottled water or Pepsis to this beleaguered “ticket taker” (and there were several), there weren’t enough random acts of kindness to make me like this job any better.

Then came Tuesday night.

Miranda Lambert was the headliner. Although I’m unfamiliar with her music, she did a fine version of The Band’s “The Shape I’m In” during her sound check. Come downtown / Have to rumble in the alley. I laughed to myself. Out of nine lives, I spent seven / Now, how in the world do you get to Heaven / Oh, you don’t know the shape I’m in. It was perfect dark comedy – this heat was about to burn number eight right out of me.

I had been instructed to let the wife of one of the fair board members through Gate 9 to meet Lambert and view the show from backstage. Rank has its privileges.

She proceeded through to Gate 10 at around 7:30. The show started at 8 p.m.

About 8:10 a ragged-looking car approached the gate. An old Dodge (I think) from the mid-80s. One of the cheap models. Definitely on its last legs. Definitely the car of a person who is struggling. I motioned the car into the parking lot but it stopped. I approached the driver’s window. It was a lady, slightly overweight, not well-dressed.

“I’m late. I got lost. I need to get to Gate 10. They’re waiting for us there.”

“Who is ‘us’?”

“The name on the guest list is Gypsy Rose [I don’t remember the last name]. This is Gypsy Rose and she’s a big fan of Miranda Lambert’s. We’re backstage guests, and Gypsy Rose is supposed to meet her tonight.”

I glanced over at the passenger seat. Gypsy Rose might have been 10 or 11 but her frail body was more that of a 6-year-old. She was dressed in a new t-shirt and new baseball hat, probably the best “duds” her mom could afford. There was no hair protruding out of the cap. She had what looked like a surgical wrap around her neck. She didn’t say anything. She just looked at me with wide hopeful eyes.

I got on the walkie-talkie. “I have Gypsy Rose at Gate 9. She doesn’t have a Gate 10 pass, but she was told to go to Gate 10 for entry.”

The response was what I expected. “Gate 10 is shut down. We’ll check to see if she’s on the guest list and then she’ll have to go to Gate 5A.”

Then word came back that she wasn’t on the Gate 5A list.

I wasn’t going to dash this girl’s dreams. “Bill, can you come down to Gate 9?”

Bill Cantrell was my direct supervisor and I had grown to know him as a genuinely nice guy who had enough years (16) with the Fair to get things done. I told Gypsy Rose and her mom not to worry. Her mom kept apologizing for being late. Gypsy Rose never said anything, and I realized that she couldn’t vocalize. But, damn, she could communicate. And what she kept saying with her eyes was that this was the biggest thing in her life. She was excited and kept bouncing up and down in her seat with anticipation. She wasn’t discouraged. She gave no indication that she had anything but the highest appreciation for life.

I explained the situation to Cantrell. He broke through the red tape – got hold of one of the stage crew and found out that Gypsy Rose was indeed expected and that everyone was worried when she didn’t arrive. While Bill arranged for a customer services vehicle to transport Gypsy Rose and her wheelchair to Gate 10, I chatted her up with questions that didn’t require more than a shaking of her head. Her body language spoke so much more.

“Have you ever seen Miranda Lambert before?” (No)

“Do you like her CD?” (Big shake yes)

“Are you excited?” (Her whole body started bouncing up and down and her hands clapped together as she put special emphasis on her yes nod.)

The customer services guy lifted her onto the cart and as she sped toward Gate 10, I yelled “Have fun!” The smile she flashed back to me was only surpassed by the one she had on her face the next day when she and her mom stopped by to show me pictures. It was a smile that will be embedded in my brain forever.

The rest of the week was a breeze.

Mr. & Mrs. Cadillac DTS are probably still miserable people. But that’s their problem. I’m feeling just fine.

Playlist, 7/15/06

2006-07-15T11:17:00.000-04:00

Dave Marsh
Mike Younger, Every Stone You Throw (moving into his early Faces period now)
Busta Rhymes, The Big Bang
Ennio Morricone, Once Upon a Time in the West (still the greatest soundtrack
album of all time)
Quetzal, "Migra" (what 4th of July will be about next year) [advance]
Mi Gente, Ozomatli with A.B. Quintanilla III and Kumbia Kings (what 4th of
July is really all about this year)
One Time, One Night, Los Lobos (my favorite 4th of July record)
Ray Wylie Hubbard, Snake Farm (the essence of Texas folk-rock--'cause it
rocks) [advance]
Jennifer Glass, Little Shout (EP) (stunning up and coming singer-songwriter)

Charanga Cakewalk, Chicano Zen
The Brandos, Gettysburg (Bring 'em home!)
Brook Benton, Rainy Night in Georgia (in memory of Arif Mardin)

Chris Papaleonardos
Johnny Cash, American V: A Hundred Highways
Dixie Chicks, Taking the Long Way
Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam
Joe Ely - "Settle for Love"
Social Distortion - "Ball and Chain"
Mikis Theodorakis - "Changer la Vie" (anthem of the French Socialist Party)

John Floyd
River City Tanlines, I'm Your Negative
Mouserocket, Mouserocket
Various artists, American Primitive II
Parliament, Osmium
Funkadelic, Music for Your Mother
The Complete Motown Singles Vol. 4
Wreckless Eric, The Whole Wide World for England
AC/DC, Powerage
Led Zeppelin, Presence
Ian McLagan & the Bump Band, Spiritual Boy
Ron Wood, 1234

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
Greg Graffin, Cold as the Clay
Bright Eyes, Motion Sickness
Nelly Furtado, Loose
The Kinks, The Kink Kronikles
Pet Shop Boys, Fundamental
Waylon Jennings, Honky Tonk Heroes
Buzzcocks, Flat-Pack Philosophy

APS
Chris Thomas King, Rise
Alice Peacock, Who I Am
Shawnna, Block Music
Luther Vandross, "Shine"
Jin, "Long Winding Road"
Ray Cash, "Livin' My Life"
Ludacris w/ Lil' Wayne, "Down South"
Ani Difranco, "Millenium Theater"

Bill Glahn
Roy Harper, Stormcock
Leon Russell, Gimme Shelter - The Best of Leon Russell
Terry Allen, Human Remains
Townes Van Zandt, The Late Great Townes Van Zandt
Mississippi John Hurt, Live
The Groundhogs, Live at Leeds '71

Playlist, 7/5/06

2006-07-05T17:48:00.000-04:00

APS
Lord Jamar, The 5% Album
Pet Shop Boys, Fundamental
Outkast - "Idlewild Blues"
John Mayer - "Waiting for the World to Change"
Pete Yorn with Natalie Maines - "The Man"
Jazze Pha ft. Bobby Womack & Cee-Lo - "Long Time Coming"

Matthew Orel
Bruce Springsteen, The Seeger Sessions In the convertible, top down, monsoon sound system, volume up, and a big bad string bass.
Beatles, The Capitol Albums, Vol. 2. I switched over from US to the imports when I was a kid, so these are somewhat foreign to me. There's so much that's so wrong with them, almost comical in places...but it's still good campy fun rediscovering them. And at least now all the early stuff is out in stereo (excepting There's a Place and Misery, but who's counting?).

Danny Alexander
Soul Asylum, "Stand Up and Be Strong"
Busta Rhymes, The Big Bang
Ice Cube, Laugh Now and Cry Later
Springsteen, The Seeger Sessions, Etc. (Homemade Des Moines mix)
The Persuaders, "Thin Line Between Love and Hate"
The Pretenders, "Thin Line Between Love and Hate"

John Floyd
V/A, The Complete Motown Singles Vol. 4
The Isley Brothers, Brother Brother Brother
Mott the Hoople, All the Young Dudes
Alejandro Escovedo, The Boxing Mirror
Small Faces, The Ultimate Collection: The Decca Sessions
Rolling Stones, Some Girls
Big Star, Radio City
Ronnie Lane, Anymore for Anymore

Dave Marsh
Silver Lining, Soul Asylum - Not just a return, as good a record as they ever made.
Laugh Now and Cry Later, Ice Cube - Not just a return, as good a record as he ever made.
Celebrating 40 Years of Music, Arif Mardin - What you remember is corny ballads like "Wind Beneath My Wings." What you forget is the magnificence of "Good Lovin',"
"Rainy Night in Georgia," "I Feel for You," "Jive Talkin'," "Son of a Preacher Man" (Dusty's and Aretha's), "She's Gone," "Pick Up the Pieces," and John Prine's original "Hello in There." A great record maker, a great lover of music, a great human being. (This is a sampler from a Nordoff-Robbins charity dinner five years ago.)
Chicano Zen, Charanga Cakewalk - A zealot's tour de force, straight-up Latin dance music and ballads from Los Lonely Boys' current keyboard player.
Songs from the Longleaf Pines: A Gospel Bluegrass Collection, Charlie Daniels - The present-day jingo refuses to stop praying.
Black Yankee Rock, Chocolate Genius - Genius, maybe; hoarse visionary, unquestionably.
All Summer Long, The Beach Boys - I like this 10 times more than I like Pet Sounds, just like I like its best track, "Don't Back Down," ten times (or 100) more than "Good Vibrations." See which one shakes your ass more
Night Train to Nashville: Music City Rhythm & Blues 1945-1970, Vol. 2 - 39 more reasons De Lawd might have to spare the place despite its current iniquities.

Stewart Francke
Marvin Gaye, Let's Get It On Reissue
Barbara Payton, Barbara Payton
Jill Jack, Moon & The Morning After
Paul Simon, Surprise
Frank Sinatra, Monlight Sinatra
Little Willie John, Greatest Hits (King set)

Susan Martinez
Shel Silverstein, Freakin' at the Freakers Ball
Django Reinhardt, The Classic Early Recordings in Chronological Order (JSP Jazz Box)
Peter Ostroushko, Postcards
Various, I Like Be I Like Bop: Odds & Svends of Early Bebop Violin and
Contemporary Violin Curiosities (AB Fable box set)
Various, New Orleans Revival 1940-1954 (Fremeaux box set)

Bill Glahn
The Who, Fillmore East [bootleg]
Led Zeppelin, Collage [bootleg]
Ron Wood & Bernard Fowler, Breathe On Us [bootleg]
Slobberbone, Dignity and Aplomb, covers compilation [bootleg]

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
None More Black, This Is Satire
The Buzzcocks, Flat-Pack Philosophy
The Tragically Hip,Yer Favourites
Ice Cube, Laugh Now and Cry Later
The Bellrays, Have a Little Faith
The Replacements, Don't You Know Who I Think I Was? The Best of the Replacements

Playlist, 6/25/06

2006-06-25T13:00:00.000-04:00

Fred Wilhelms
The Mighty Hannibal, Who Told You That? [Bad Records]
Various Artists, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of
Various Artists, One Kiss Can Lead To Another: Girl Group Sounds Lost
Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
Bruce Springsteen & the Seeger Sessions Band, Milwaukee, 6/14/06 [bootleg]
Bouncing Souls, The Gold Record
The Lawrence Arms, Oh! Calcutta!
A.F.I, Decemberunderground
The Twilight Singers, Powder Burns
The Buzzcocks, Singles Going Steady

APS
Nelly Furtado, Loose
Julieta Venegas, Limon y Sal
Grupo Batuque, Ole Ola - Futbol Bonito!
Puffy AmiYumi, "Radio Tokyo"
Wu-Tang Latino, "C.R.E.A.M."
1Dance & Sample King, "Bird Flu"
Jackie Greene, "So Hard to Find My Way"

Stewart Francke
Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
Paul Simon, Surprise
Mark Knopfler & Emmylou, All The Roadrunning
Howlin Wolf, London Sessions
Fank Sinatra, No One Cares
Marvn Gaye, Here My Dear
Van Hunt, Character (single)
Tracy Chapman, Telling Stories

John Floyd
Isley Brothers, Brother, Brother, Brother
Small Faces, The Ultimate Collection, disc one (Decca sessions)
Mott the Hoople, All the Young Dudes and Mott
Alejandro Escovedo, The Boxing Mirror
The Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra, Stomp It Off
Lynyrd Skynyrd, Second Helping
Ian McLagan, Spiritual Boy

Susan Martinez
Mark Knopfler and Emmylou Harris, All The Roadrunning
Lila Downs, La Cantina
Nuru Kane, Sigil
Luisito Quintero, Percussion Maddness (features Hilton Ruiz)
Link Wray, Rumble! The Best of Link Wray
Amadou & Mariam, 1990-1995: L'Integrale des Annees Maliennes (box set)
DMC, Checks Thugs and Rock'n'Roll
La Bottine Souriante, Cordial
Irma Thomas, A Woman's Viewpoint
Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere

Lauren Onkey
Jimmie Lunceford, Jukebox Hits 1935-1947
The Beach Boys, Surf's Up
Bob Dylan's Theme Time Radio Hour, Episode 4: Baseball
Darondo, Let My People Go
Pearl Jam Pearl Jam

Danny Alexander
Ice Cube, Laugh Now, Cry Later
The Starkweathers, "Burn the Flag"
Bruce Springsteen, "Countin' on a Miracle"
Kristie Stremel, "Working on a Miracle"
Roberta Flack, "Gone Away"
The Impressions, "Gone Away"
Memphis Minnie, "When the Saints Go Marching In"

Dave Marsh
Richard Thompson: The Life and Music of Richard Thompson
Arguably the best single career box set of all time; ask me in six months when I'm done listening to it.
"Red White and Black," from Harpo's Ghost, Thea Gilmore (pre-release; August)
A great antiwar song.
"Clarksdale Moan" and "Mississippi County Farm Blues," Son House from The Stuff That Dreams are Made Of
Two discs of breathtaking rarities highlighted by the Grail of country blues collecting, both sides of a 78 by the greatest of all country blues singers, which has existed only as a catalogue listing for the past half-century.
Ice Cube, Laugh Now, Cry Later
This is what a great artist's return to form sounds like
"What's Going On," featuring Chuck D from What's Going On, The Dirty Dozen Brass Band (pre-release September)
So's this.
Charanga Cakewalk, Chicano Zen
A very bold concept of what's possible in contemporary Latin music. Highlight: "No Soy Feliz," a duet between Ruben Ramos and Patty Griffin.
Charlie Daniels, Songs from the Longleaf Pines
A beautiful bluegrass gospel album dispelling all stereotypes about the frequently obnoxious jingo.
Crooked Still, Shaken by a Low Sound (Signature Sounds Recordings)
A group of conservatory trained musicians (except for the banjo player, who's got a Ph D in microbiology). Defying the odds, their "Come On In My Kitchen" whups both Eric Clapton and Rory Block's whole albums of Robert Johnson material, and does it on the basis of greater heart.

Bill Glahn
Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions
Hamell On Trial, Songs For Parents Who Enjoy Drugs
Chip Taylor & Carrie Rodriquez, The Trouble With Humans

Tuli Kupferberg's Parasongs

2006-06-22T13:47:00.000-04:00

Dave Marsh writes:

I just heard from Tuli (Fugs, general East Village intellectual zany, maybe the missing link between the Yippies and the beatniks if you don't count Ed Sanders). Anyway, he is redoing a songbook of his, Listen to the Mockingbird, which has been through many small press editions. He now wants to solicit contributions from others.

What he wants are "parasongs," which he defines thus: "a song using new and original lyrics set to an older (generally a popular) melody. Martin Luther set many of his religious hymns to the popular songs of that period. His reasoning: 'Why should the devil have the best of tunes?' And in our time the Wobblies repaid the compliment by resetting many old hymns to new
radical Labor anthems!"

(This marks Luther as a candidate for prosecution by the present-day music industry of course. )

If you know of any parasongs, or feel compelled to write one of your own, send them to Tuli here:

Tuli Kupferberg
Vanity Press
160 6th Ave
New York, NY 1001

And we'd love to hear about them here, too!

Weekly (More or Less) Playlist, 6/10/06

2006-06-10T19:27:00.000-04:00

Dave Marsh
Richard Thompson, "Wall of Death," on the Finding Better Words disc from The Life and Music of Richard Thompson [Free Reed Us]
Jo Serrapere and the Willie Dunns, "Jesus in a Snowball," Tonight at Johnny's Speakeasy [self-release]
Charanga Cakewalk, Chicano Zen [Triloka]
Donovan Frankenreiter, Move By Yourself, (advance)
Bouncing Souls, Gold Record [Epitaph]
Gnarls Barkley, St. Elsewhere [Downtown]
Jon Dee Graham, Full [Freedom]
Susan Tedeschi, "You've Got the Silver," from Hope And Desire [Verve Forecast]
Mike Younger, Every Stone You Throw [The Orchard]
Rahsaan Roland Kirk "Bye Bye Blackbird," from Does Your House Have Lions? [Atlantic]

Chris T. Papaleonardos
Pearl Jam, Pearl Jam [j]
Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions [Columbia]
Dixie Chicks, Taking The Long Way [Sony]
Alejandro Escovedo, The Boxing Mirror [Back Porch]

APS
C.J. Chenier, The Desperate Kingdom of Love [World Village]
Drew Landry and the Dirty Cajuns, Tailgaten Relief & Hurricane EP [Drew Landry BMI]
Cheap Trick, Rockford [Big3]
Various Artists, Panama! Latin, Calypso and Funk on the Isthmus [Soundway]
Various Artists, Brunswick Top 40 R&B Singles 1966-1975 [Brunswick]
Busta Rhymes feat. Stevie Wonder, "Been Through the Storm" [download]
Rhymefest feat. ODB, "Build Me Up" [download]
Nichole Jean, "A Song" [download]
India Arie feat. Akon, "I Am Not My Hair" [download]
Lord Jamar, "The Corner, The Streets" [download]

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen
Bouncing Souls, Gold Record [Epitaph], "Letter from Iraq," with lyrics
by Iraq vet Garett Reppenhagen is just the highest point on an album full of
high points.
Thursday, A City by the Light Divided [Island], A punk-metal version of
The Cure.
Beth Thornley, My Glass Eye [Stiff Hips], Her originals are smart and
bittersweet, and she manages to slow down Joe Jackson's "Got the Time" and
make it work.
Todd Snider, The Devil You Know [Hip-o; available for digital download now
and in stores in August], "You Got Away With It (A Tale of Two Fraternity
Brothers)" is the story of every piggish frat boy I ever met, the kind who
fuck people over and come out smelling like a rose. Too bad one of 'em is
president.

Fred Wilhelms
The Mighty Hannibal, Hannibalism [Norton]
Various Artists, The Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of [Yazoo]
Mamadou Diabate, Behmanka [World Village]
Irma Thomas, After The Rain [Rounder]
Ivory Joe Hunter, I Almost Lost My Mind 1945-1950 [EPM/Blues
Collection]

John Floyd
Faces, Ooh La La [Warner Bros.]
Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance, You Never Can Tell: The BBC Sessions [NMC]
Alejandro Escovedo, The Boxing Mirror [EMI]
Ian McLagan, Spritual Boy [Maniac]
Above the Law, "Pistol Grip Pump" (burned copy)
Globe and Whiz Kid, "The Payoff Mix" (burned copy)
The English Beat, "Stand Down Margaret" dub mix [Go-Feet]
Neil Young, On the Beach [Reprise]
The Clash, Elvis Has Left the Building [bootleg]
The Slits, Cut [Island]

Susan Martinez
Marc Broussard, Momentary Setback [Ripley Records]
The Subdudes, Behind the Levee [Back Porch]
Lila Downs, La Cantina Entre Copa y Copa [Narada]
Irma Thomas, After The Rain [Rounder]
Gnarles Barkley, St. Elsewhere [Downtown]
Various, Cheatin Soul and the Southern Dream of Freedom [Trikont]
Johnny Cash, Personal File [Columbia]
Blind Alfred Reed, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order 1927-1929
[Document]
Alejandro Escovedo, The Boxing Mirror [Back Porch]

Bill Glahn
VHS "Dutch Tape" [bootleg video] I found this weeding through a box of video I've had in storage since 1989 and can't for the life of me remember where I got it or even having watched it before. A fair amount of what's on it turned out to be Beat Club (German TV) performances which are now circulating in much better quality thanks to VH-1. But much of it is concert footage from Dutch TV and new to me. Among the revelations: The Rolling Stones were not the best live band Dick Taylor ever played in. Not by a long shot. The Small Faces were a riot in concert. Jimmy Page was reinventing guitar playing well before Led Zeppelin (Yardbirds stuff is amazing!). The Monks are the best garage band I'd never heard of. You could blackmail The Lords with this (for their wardrobe, not their playing) if it weren't for the fact that The Snobs appear on the video as well. And if you didn't want your daughter dating a Rolling Stone, you didn't want her within 100 kilometers of The (Dutch) Outsiders.
Tracklist (years where known):
Golden Earrings "Daddy Buy Me A Girl" (1966)
Motions "Wasted Words" (1965)
Outsiders "Lying All The Time" (1966)
Outsiders "Thinking About Today" (1966)
Small Faces "Tin Soldier"
Untamed "One More Heartache"
Untamed "I'll Go Crazy"
The Move "Sunshine Help Me" (1969)
Pretty Things "Why" (1969)
The Move "Flowers In The Rain" (1969)
Pretty Things "Honey I Need"
Pretty Things "Don't Bring Me Down"
Pretty Things "Big Boss Man"
Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick & Tich "Hold Tight"
The Lords "Wishin' and Hopin'" (1966)
Pretty Things "Midnight To Six Man" (1966)
Remo Four "Like A Rolling Stone" (1966, Maybe too much signifcance has been given to the "Judas shout." Mere months after Dylan introduced electric folk to the Brits, this Liverpool quartet is rocking out on a Dylan tune.)
Status Quo "Technicoloured Dreams"
Crazy World of Arthur Brown "Fire"
The Move "When Alice Comes Back To the Farm" (a templat for Cheap Trick)
The Rattles "The Witch" (1970, fronted by the female Ozzy)
The Lords "On A Sunday Evening"
The Lords "Don't Mince Matters"
Yardbirds "Shapes of Things" (1968)
Yardbirds "Happenings Ten Years Time Ago" (1968)
The Monks "Complication"
The Monks "I Can't Get Over You"
The Monks "Cuckoo"
Pink Floyd "Astronomy Domine"
Small Faces "Hey Girl"
Small Faces "All or Nothing"
Small Faces "Watcha Gonna Do About It"
Small Faces "Sha La La La Lee"
Shocking Blue "Venus"
The Snobs "Buckleshoe Stomp"

Stewart Francke
Frank Sinatra w/the Count Basie Orchestra, Sinatra at the Sands [Reprise]
Julieta Venegas, Limon y Sal [Sony BMG]
The Ultimate O'Jays [Sony]
Chuck Berry, St. Louis to Liverpool [MCA]
Anthony Hamilton, Comin' From Where I'm From [Arista]
Willie Nelson, Stardust [Columbia]
Van Hunt, On the Jungle Floor [Capitol]
Amp Fiddler, Waltz of a Ghetto Fly [Pias Records]
Bruce Springsteen, We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions [Columbia]

Weekly Playlist, 6/2/06

2006-06-02T08:17:00.000-04:00

APS:

Chris Isaak - The Best of Chris Isaak [Reprise]
Don Omar - King of Kings [Universal]
Red Hot Chili Peppers - Stadium Arcadium [Warner Brothers]
Busta Rhymes ft. Stevie Wonder - "Been Through The Storm" [download]
India.arie ft. Akon - "I Am Not My Hair (remix)" [download]
Rhymefest ft. Prince - "Sign of the Times" [Plug City mixtape]
Lord Jamar - "The Corner, The Streets" [download]
The Procussions - "Miss January" [download]

Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen

Tom Zé - Estudando o Pagode[Luaka Bop]
T-Bone Burnett - The True False Identity [Columbia]
Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam[j]
Tool - 10,000 Days [Volcano]
Scott Walker - Drift [4AD]

Craig Werner

Paul Simon – Surprise[WEA]
Willie Colon and Ruben Blades – Siembra[import]
Various Artists - A Cellarful of Motown! Volume 2 [UMVD import]
Various Artists - Eccentric Soul: The Big Mack Label [Numero]

John Floyd

Ian McLagan - Spiritual Boy: An Appreciation of Ronnie Lane [Maniac]
Ronnie Lane & Slim Chance - Anymore for Anymore [Alchemy]
The Parliaments - Testify! The Best of the Early Years [Connoisseur Collection]
Various Artists - I Have to Paint My Face: Mississippi Blues: 1960 [Arhoolie]
Leroy Carr - The Best of Leroy Carr [Columbia/Legacy]
Muddy Waters - Rollin' Stone: The Golden Anniversary Collection[MCA]
Jimi Hendrix Experience - Electric Ladyland [Experience Hendrix]

Dave Marsh

Conjure - Bad Mouth [American Clave]
Antje Duvkot - My Beautiful Dream [pre-release]
Pearl Jam Pearl Jam[j]
Candi Staton - His Hands[Astralworks]
Irma Thomas - After The Rain[Rounder/PGD]
Afrika Bambaataa - Beware! The Funk is Everywhere [DBK Works]
Alejandro Escovedo - The Boxing Mirror [Back Porch]
Thea Gilmore - Harpo's Ghost (pre-release)
Gnarls Barkley - St Elsewhere [Downtown]
Roy Hargrove and the RH Factor - Hard Groove [Verve]

Fred Wilhelms

Eddie Hinton - Dear Y'all: The Songwriter Sessions [Zane]
Dan Penn – Blue Nite Lounge [Dandy]
Donnie Fritts – Everybody's Got A Song [Oh Boy]
Various Artists - Country Got Soul Vol. 2 [Casual]

Comment: in a rut and loving it.

Lauren Onkey

These were in heavy rotation as I drove around the southwest:

Miles Davis - Bitches Brew[Sony]
Joni Mitchell - Hejira [Elektra]
Nortec Collective - Tijuana Sessions, Volume 3 [Nacional]
Various Artists - Early Tejano Classics [Arhoolie]
Various Artists - Tex-Mex Conjunto Classics[Arhoolie]

Chris T. Papaleonardos

Bruce Springsteen - We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions [Columbia]
Bruce Springsteen - St Luke's Church, May 9th 2006, London (live BBC Radio broadcast) [bootleg]
Social Distortion - Stuttgart Germany 1997 (live radio broadcast) [bootleg]
Rolling Stones - Brussels 1973 (live radio broadcast) [bootleg]

Susan Martinez

Candi Staton - His Hands[Astralwerks]
Irma Thomas - After The Rain[Rounder/PGD]
Lila Downs - La Cantina [Narada]
Gnarles Barkley - St Elsewhere [Downtown]
Various Artists – Gettin’ Funky: The Birth of New Orleans R&B (box set) [Proper]
Dixie Chicks - Taking the Long Way[Columbia]
Johnny Cash - Personal File [Columbia]
Rosanne Cash - Black Cadillac[Capitol]

Bill Glahn

Daniel “Slick” Ballinger – Mississippi Soul [Oh Boy] It’s “sin and salvation” on this one, starting off with “Sugar Mama Blues” (Your sugar’s so sweet it’d make a dead man cum) and finishing up with the unlisted “Talkin’ Bout Jesus.”
Bruce Springsteen - St Luke's Church, May 9th 2006, London (live BBC Radio broadcast) [bootleg]
Hammell On Trial – Choochtown [Such A Punch Media] At least until his newest arrives in my mailbox.

Playlist--Special Revival Edition

2006-05-23T22:52:00.000-04:00

Playlist -- Special Revival Edition. May 23, 2006

Matt Orel

every recording I could find of "Bring Them Home" and "Long Black Veil." I'm just about veiled out, Marijohn shoulda worn orange. Results I've been listening to will be up on my site (http://bruce.orel.ws/seegersessions/audio.html) tonight or tomorrow.

Fred Wilhelms

Bruce Springsteen - Born To Run (30th Anniversary Edition) [Columbia]
Irma Thomas - After the Rain [Rounder]
Various Artists - American Primitive, Vol. 2 (Prewar Revenants 1897-1939) [Revenant Records] - Music from some of the neighborhoods Harry Smith missed. John Fahey's last project.
Lost Country - Down On The Borderline [Cool Groove] My friend Jim Colegrove sent this one to me after I wrote to him about "American Primitive." "Borderline" may have the only other recorded version of "I've Got Your Ice Cold Nugrape." Honest music, well played.
Bargain bin special - "The Very Best of Soul" 10 CDs, 200 tracks, under $20. Some of the better known stuff is represented by re-recordings, but there are enough original and usually overlooked gems on each disk to still make this a lot of fun.

Susan Martinez

DMC - Checks Thugs and Rock N Roll [Romen Empire Records]
La Bottine Souriante - Cordial [Les Productions Mille-Pattes]
Irma Thomas - After the Rain [Rounder]
Butch Cage and Willie B. Thomas - Old Time Black Southern String Band Music [Arhoolie]
Bruce Springsteen - We Shall Overcome/The Seeger Sessions [Columbia]
Beth Orton - Comfort of Strangers [Astralwerks]
Various Artists - The Pilgrim: A Celebration Of Kris Kristofferson [American Roots Publishing]

APS

Gnarls Barkley - St. Elsewhere [Atlantic]
Various Artists - Voices From the Frontline [Crosscheck]
Marit Larsen - Under the Surface [EMI Norway]
Dixie Chicks - Taking The Long Way [Sony]
Outkast - "The Mighty Oh" [Download]
DMX - "Lord Give Me A Sign" [Download]
The Fugees - "Foxy" [Download]
Nelly Furtado (ft. Timbaland) - "Promiscuous Girl" [Download]
The Pipettes - "Pull Shapes" [Download]
Soul Asylum - "Stand Up And Be Strong" [Download]

Stewart Francke

Chuck Berry - Rock 'n' Roll Rarities [1986 UMG] The Bible.
Chuck Berry - St. Louis to Liverpool [2003, MCA] The Other Bible.
Chuck Berry - The Chess Box [1988, Chess/UMG] The Bigger Other Bible.
Neil Young - Living With War [2006 Reprise] Good songs, first takes, ya know-hard rockin' Neil. In its way an answer to The Rising.
Bruce Springsteen - We Shall Overcome [2006 Columbia] Not what I expected by a long shot. Complete artistic rejuvenation from the most important artist of our time. Rolls more than it rocks, like The Band on nitrogen. Songs of my youth, this time in color.
D'Angelo - Live at the Jazz Café [2000, Japanese import, Def Jam] When will there be something new from D'Angelo? This is him and his band pre-Voodoo with the drummer from The Roots. Killer.
Roy Hargrove - Nothing Serious [2006, Verve] His tone is as fine as his composing.
The Stylistics - The Best of the Stylistics [1990, Amherst] The only slow dances I recall were to their songs. Betcha By Golly Wow...
Liam Ó Maonlaí - Rian [2006, Rian Records]. Traditional Irish music from the voice of Hothouse Flowers. Songs he learned from his mother. Gets at something deep inside you.

Bill Glahn

Drive-By Truckers - A Blessing And A Curse [2006, New West] A little less Skynyrd influence this time, a little more Faces. Neither the lyrics nor the music jumps out in the same way it did on their best release, Decoration Day. It'll require closer listening before I have a clue what they're up to this time. But it's good enough to make the investment.
Terry Allen - Smokin' the Dummy/Bloodlines [1997, Sugarhill two-fer reissue]
Terry Allen - Salivation [1999, Sugarhill] Salivation is Allen unshackled. His take on Christianity is always interesting. Sacrilegious if you're a fundamentalist. Sacrilicious if you're not.
Mike Felton - Working demos [unreleased] Felton gears up for his follow-up to 2003's "Landfill." Edgier than his last batch of songs, his targets more focused. Depending on what songs make the final cut, themes might be "perdition in the promised land" or "gospel music for the unredeemed (or unredeemable)."

John Floyd

Ian McLagan - Spiritual Boy: An Appreciation of Ronnie Lane [Maniac]
Bruce Springsteen - The Seeger Sessions [Columbia]
Muddy Waters - Hoochie Coochie Man: Complete Chess Masters, Volume 2 1952-1958 [Hip-O Select]
Various Artists - Nuggets II [Rhino]
Various Artists - American Primitive, Vol. 2 [Revenant]
Faces - Ooh La La [Warner Brothers]
Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance - Ronnie Lane's Slim Chance [Acadia]
Pearl Jam - Pearl Jam [j]
Wynonie Harris - Rockin' the Blues [Proper]
Reigning Sound - Live at Goner Records [Goner]

Always Leave Them Wanting More

2006-05-21T18:33:00.000-04:00

Craig Werner writes:

Charlie Parker stated the guiding principle for making CD mixes: "always leave them wanting more." I think of one artist mixes as missionary work. Given the number of students I encounter, I run into folks with surprising frequency who don't like (or, really, don't know) Ray Charles or Curtis or Merle Haggard or Mary J or Donny Hathaway. My experience is that most of them just need the intelligent introduction and that if they get it, they'll move ahead on their own. So I try to do a mix of a.) indispensable standards (no way you're doing Ray without What'd I Say or Curtis without People Get Ready); b.) my favorites of the non-quite-indispensables, chosen to reflect range of style; c.) almost always a sequence that points to influences (often cover versions or early songs--Los Lobos' mariachi suite, for example); d.) when it works, a live version or two (the keystones of my Sam Cooke mix are the Harlem Square, Copa, and Shrine performances); e.) some quirky shit even the afficionados aren't familiar with (I'm currently making a Chuck Berry mix and I'm putting on live versions of Route 66 and St. Louis Blues).

But the real key to a good mix is sequencing, transition, and meta-themes that are there for those who are looking. I like conversations between seemingly disparate styles a whole lot (bet that shocks everyone....). And I'll work pretty obsessively to find the transitions that have both a musical, historical and thematic logic to them. That provides a lot of possible paths into and through the sequences. My hope is that most of the listeners I'm proselytizing to will relate to one or another of those paths; and that listeners who are as aware as I am of the music will find them amusing and occasionally enlightening.

In a very real way, mixes are what I do instead of academic essays.....
--Craig Werner, May 20, 2006

Dave Marsh talks to Socialist Worker Online about the new album by Bruce Springsteen: We Shall Overcome

2006-05-18T19:58:00.000-04:00

The following article originally appeared in Socialist Worker Online -- http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/589/589_11_DaveMarsh.shtml

Dave Marsh on a new album by Bruce Springsteen:
We Shall Overcome

May 19, 2006 | Page 11

ON HIS new album, Bruce Springsteen sings some of the most celebrated songs of struggle in U.S. history.

We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions honors socialist folk singer Pete Seeger, collecting a small part of the music Seeger helped to spread during his decades of making music and political activism.

Some of these songs--like “We Shall Overcome” and “Eyes on the Prize”--are inseparable in anyone’s mind from the great struggles for justice and social change in U.S. history. Others--the early 19th century antiwar ballad “Mrs. McGrath,” or “My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away,” about the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression--are less known, but shot through with a political message that could be about today’s headlines. Still others--like “Erie Canal” or “Shenandoah” or “John Henry”--probably reside in the recesses of your brain from singing them in grade school.

Springsteen makes all of them his own, setting them to a comprehensive range of American musical styles, all performed by a rollicking 18-piece band, complete with fiddle and horn sections.

The life of these songs-out-of-the-pre-musical-recording-past is documented in liner notes on Springsteen’s Web site (go to www.brucespringsteen.net and click on "Liner Notes") by DAVE MARSH, author of two biographies of Springsteen and numerous other books on music, and editor of Rock & Rap Confidential, a monthly newsletter on music and politics. Dave talked to ALAN MAASS about We Shall Overcome.

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CAN YOU talk about the sources for the music on this album?

BASICALLY, THE songs come from three traditions. The most important are the African American tradition and the British Isles folk tradition.

There’s also a category of work songs, which overlaps. “Shenandoah” is a work song, even though the lyric isn’t anything to do with work. “Pay Me My Money Down” is a work song that started out in South Carolina, and then gets adopted by sailors and becomes a work shanty for sailors, especially in the Caribbean. It’s usually done with a calypso beat--that’s how the Weavers did it, and that’s how the Kingston Trio did it.

The oldest songs are the songs from that Anglo-Scottish-Irish tradition. The oldest of all is “Froggie Went a Courtin’,” which was first written down and published in 1549. But I would be willing to bet you that by then, it was probably very antique.

The songs from the African American tradition divide into two categories. One category is spirituals and hymns. There are four of them on the album: “We Shall Overcome,” “Eyes on the Prize,” (which is more commonly known as “Gospel Plow” or “Hold On”--it has many names), “Jacob’s Ladder” and “O Mary, Don’t You Weep.”

All of these songs were used as freedom songs during the civil rights movement. “We Shall Overcome,” of course, has been used in many other movements. There’s a whole history of that song in the labor movement, and how it got from the church to the labor movement is a very fascinating story.

But there are other songs, too, that are based in the African American culture. One would be “Pay Me My Money Down,” because that was originally sung by Black stevedores on the South Carolina coast. Also, there’s “John Henry,” who has always been understood to be African American, even though none of the lyrics in this version and very few of the lyrics in any version ever say so explicitly.

THESE ARE songs that tell stories, but they’re also protest songs. Can you talk about how politics comes through in a song like “Mrs. McGrath”?

“MRS. McGRATH” is an Irish song that actually sounds like it should have been written in the early 20th century, around the time of the 1916 Easter Rising--and in fact, it was used then.

But it actually comes from the Napoleonic period--from the time of the peninsular campaign in Spain and Portugal against Napoleon. There were tens of thousands of Irish natives inveigled into the British Army, and this song simply reflects that. But, of course, the story is so universal that it sounds like it could be about now.

But I want to go back to your question, because the songs on this album are not protest songs--with the exception of “Pay Me My Money Down” and, metaphorically, “Mrs. McGrath.”

“We Shall Overcome” is not a protest song. “Eyes on the Prize” is not a protest song. They’re much more complicated than that--the ones that have been used for expressly political purposes. “John Henry” isn’t a protest song, although it makes a very strong criticism of the way capitalism works people to death.

The reason to me that this is important is that these songs have all sorts of purposes. And the purpose to which Springsteen has turned them, I think, is almost the opposite--a celebratory purpose, an affirmation.

At the end of “John Henry,” when his wife, Polly Ann, picks up the hammer, that’s an affirmation of all sorts of things. It’s an affirmation of the power of labor. It’s an affirmation of solidarity. It’s an affirmation of female power. It’s a statement that we won’t quit.

So calling them protest songs makes them sound like something much more limited than what they are.

Look at “We Shall Overcome,” which is the most famous so-called protest song of them all. I think it’s probably the most famous American song of the 20th century worldwide--and not incidentally was never widely recorded, was never played on the radio, except in news clips.

If you look at “We Shall Overcome,” there are protest elements, but it contains everything. There’s the verse “We are not afraid,” and that’s not a protest. That’s something else--that’s spitting in the eye of the people who want to keep you afraid. There’s a fascinating story about how that verse came to be written, at the Highlander Center [a civil rights training school] in the late 1950s, and a girl came up with it during a Klan raid.

Listen to “O Mary, Don’t you Weep,” and imagine that you’re a Mississippi prison guard in Parchman penitentiary. You’ve got all these Freedom Riders locked up in their cells, and what they’re singing is “Pharaoh’s army got drownded.” Well, you’ve got to understand that you’re working for pharaoh.

Actually, there was this whole history in the civil rights movement of jailers and prison guards punishing people for singing these songs. Southern Black people, when they sing these songs, in church or in protests--they’re loud, and they’re aggressive.

So it’s not as simple as protest. I think that’s a prime political point.

CAN YOU talk about how songs like “We Shall Overcome” grew and changed over the years?

THEY USED to call it the “folk process,” which sort of gilded the lily a bit, but the idea was that these songs sort of sprouted up out of the people, and then the people carried them forward, and changed them as circumstances or imagination warranted.

They didn’t get the beginning of the process right. I think every song probably has, initially, an individual creator. But it’s also true that every song, once it’s sung, becomes part of the cultural storehouse of the whole human species. And this speaks directly to the intellectual property wars of our time, and the attempt to impoverish and incarcerate people for listening to or using music.

So every song has its individual, specific history. But the history of all of them, if they’ve survived for any length of time, is that somebody picks them up and puts themselves into them. It’s always particular to the people who are singing them, and it’s always a link back to the origins--you’re looking backward while you look forward.

The example I’d use is the least recorded song that’s on the album, which is “My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away.”

It was written by Sis Cunningham, who edited Broadside magazine, which was a magazine of topical and protest songs--songs that were written mostly about immediate social issues. It was a very left-wing publication founded by Pete Seeger and Malvina Reynolds, another folk-style songwriter. And then Sis Cunningham and her husband Gordan Freisen ran it for about a decade, in the midst of both the folk revival and the civil rights and antiwar movements.

I think what happened is that Sis and her brother wrote a version of “My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away” that Pete Seeger recorded in 1961, but never put out on a record. Then Sis put the lyrics in Broadside late in the game--in 1966 or 1967.

Broadside would often put out compilation albums of its songwriters, and one of the compilations had her singing this song. Then that song was put out on a Broadside collection--a box set that Smithsonian Folkways issued.

So what you’ve got is the originator’s version, which actually comes after the first adapter’s version. And then the song lies there for 30 years, and nobody sings it, and nobody hears it.

In 1994, there was a box set of Pete’s stuff issued on Columbia, called A Link in the Chain. It had a few un-issued tracks, and the first of them was “My Oklahoma Home Blowed Away.” I wrote the liner notes, I can remember listening to the song over and over, and thinking, “Wow, how did I miss this?”

The automatic assumption of everybody was that it was a Woody Guthrie song. Bruce assumed it was a Woody Guthrie song until I told him otherwise.

But Bruce finds it, and his version is radically different from either of the other versions, and the reason it’s radically different is he sings it as if it’s a Bruce Springsteen song, and he puts the whole force of his personality through this story. And I think that’s the process right there. Because that song now will find a life, I believe.

Another great example that’s also on this album is “Buffalo Gals.” “Buffalo Gals” was a canal song from the Erie Canal period. The Buffalo gals had nothing to do with Buffalo soldiers. The song is about prostitutes on Canal Street in Buffalo, New York, at the end of the Erie Canal.

It was written in 1844, and it was widely sung on the boats. Then it sort of vanished after its time was up. Then, in 1944, it was revived by a dance band and recorded as “Dance with the Dolly.”

And now, this Christmas, when you see It's a Wonderful Life,you’ll notice that not only do Donna Reed and Jimmy Stewart sing this song while they’re skipping down the street at the beginning of the romance, but it’s the overture to the whole movie. The theme song of It’s a Wonderful Life is “Buffalo Gals.”

That’s exactly 100 years from its inception, and it’s a totally different musical landscape.

Plus, Pete would sing it, as well as various other people, and then “Buffalo Gals” comes around to this version, which is somewhere in between--actually closer to that dance version of the 1940s, but Bruce has got this big folk band playing it.

That’s another thing--why this is a folk album in people’s heads has a lot more to do with its title than with its music. That’s partly what’s tricky to explain to people about it.

It is a folk album, but there are also the song origins and these other things. For example, when you get into Sam Bardfeld’s klezmerish-jazz fiddle, it evokes a certain kind of music that’s actually Eastern European folk music. Sam doesn’t consider that to be his style, but I don’t know how you can listen to the beginning of “O Mary, Don’t You Weep” and not hear that.

THERE’S A perception about folk music that’s it’s musically tame. Bruce himself in the liner notes talks about how “rock n’ roll kids” like himself didn’t know much about Pete Seeger’s music. But then you hear this album, and right from the first song, it’s anything but tame.

I DID an interview with Bruce for my Sirius satellite radio show, and he talked about this in a much more complicated way. He said that when he was a kid, he would be at the beach, and young people would be standing around with a couple of acoustic guitars, singing folk songs. And he said he always wished he could be in that circle.

I think that’s a great social metaphor and political metaphor, if you want to understand where he comes off.

But this side of the music has always been there. It’s the side of rock and roll that’s not about individual, self-destructive rebellion.

At the same time, though, the specific folk repertoire has been captured by what I call--in Forever Young,a book about Bob Dylan in 1964--the folk police, who are there to make sure that these songs remain desiccated and drained of fun and vitality.

Basically, Bruce’s idea was that everybody knows these songs--or at least some of them--but they don’t know what to do with them. Well, the answer of what to do with them is in the last line of the album, from “Froggie Went A Courtin’”: “If you want any more, you can sing it yourself.”

That’s the other exciting idea that’s here--that music is not about crafting, in a very specialized-labor kind of way, songs and recorded performances. Music is an activity.

There’s a great musicologist called Christopher Small, who wrote a book called Music of the Common Tongue, where he talks about why African American music replaced what we now think of as European classical music as the vernacular music of its time. He begins by saying that English is a deficient language for explaining music, because it thinks that music is a noun, and music is really a verb. We need the verb “musicking.”

Musicking is what this album is about. Bruce talks about this in the liner notes--that this album is about the making of the music.

But we forget that we’re living in this kind of ass-backwards period of history. Throughout the history of human beings, from the earliest campfires, we’ve had music--at least as long as we’ve had spoken language. Actually, there’s one study I’ve read that suggested that we’ve had music longer than we’ve had fire.

There was a great column by Sharon Begley in the Wall Street Journal, saying that this was a survival thing--because music is about cooperative labor, and it was a way to bind us together. So all those work songs take on a much more central importance, among other things. And the idea of possessing those songs and treating them as property becomes even more outrageous.

Before 1890 or so, there was no recorded music, so if you wanted to hear something again, you had to do it yourself, or someone had to do it in your house, so that was a much more participatory event.

Even up to about 1950, music was still dominated by music publishers--people who produced written scores. That was the performance. It’s when the recorded thing becomes bigger than the published thing that the tail begins to wag the dog, and people stop performing and become much more passive about music.

The folk revival and Beatlemania were sort of the last gasps of a kind of different relationship. And in England, with punk rock, the do-it-yourself thing had many meanings, and one of them was to make your own music. That becomes much more of an activity. I think that’s another part of what this record does.

DID SPRINGSTEEN listen to a lot of the earlier versions of these songs, or did he come up with his own ways of arranging the music?

THAT WAS one of the smartest things he did--he sort of went into it with a willful ignorance.

He certainly heard Pete’s version of many of the songs. But when I interviewed him, he talked about how he didn’t go back and listen. He was trying to find his ways through the songs, and I think that’s another reason it works--because it’s completely out of bounds. I’m actually surprised that he hasn’t been attacked more by folk purists--by people who think there is a right way to sing these songs.

One of his assistants went on the Internet and grabbed lyrics for the songs. On a song like “Froggie Went A Courtin’,” there’s like 200 verses. A verse is two lines long in that song, but still, that’s a lot of lines. So he picked and chose.

Some of the stuff is hybridized. Not every version of “John Henry” has Polly Ann. Similarly, many versions of “Froggie Went A Courtin’” end with a snake and a cat coming in and eating everybody. And at least one version that Pete Seeger sings has the frog and the mouse reproducing and creating furry tadpoles.

I had my own problem with the album in one respect. If you understand “We Shall Overcome” as a movement song and an expression of the “beloved community” of the civil rights movement, here’s a guy who changes the key line from “deep in my heart” to “here in my heart,” and adds in front a “darlin’.”

And it’s sung very quietly. It’s everything that a movement version wouldn’t be. It felt almost solipsistic to me.

Until I saw him sing it live in New Orleans--where even Soozie Tyrell, the violin player, was wiping tears out of her eyes--I didn’t really understand why this is a time to sing “We Shall Overcome” that way.

Bruce has said that his theory behind doing this song is that it’s about a guy hiding in an alley. And he knows right from wrong--he knows what the possibilities of human beings are. Well, first, he has to convince himself. And then he has to convince the person he loves most in the world. And they have to go out and convince a few more people.

He did exactly the same thing on “Eyes on the Prize.” On the version of “Eyes on the Prize” on the album, you can hear him building the song like that--which to him is a metaphor of building the movement.

Bruce is in an interesting place right now. I was shocked a little by the middle verse that he wrote for the song “How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live,” which he’s playing in concert. And I was also shocked by the lack of reaction to it.

In it, the guy goes out and gets his 16-guage shotgun and shells to deal with the flooding of New Orleans. To me, the implication of that is armed revolution. And that shows you the bind we’re in, because now we’re back to that isolated guy in the alley, with just his wife and him, going to fight it out, until they can find some allies.

I was actually very surprised that this verse didn’t excite some Bill O’Reilly frenzy.

THE OTHER undercurrent to this album is that it’s a tribute to a singer who was a communist, and who was blacklisted for it. It’s a pretty serious statement for Springsteen to champion Pete Seeger’s music, isn’t it?

THIS IS my interpretation of it--not Bruce’s, because I don’t know his--but Pete cuts several ways. The other thing that’s in there is Pete Seeger, great American, which he is--Pete Seeger, patriot even. Pete Seeger, lover of American culture, teacher of American culture. And beyond that, Pete Seeger, world citizen and person of courage.

So I don’t think it’s as simple as Pete Seeger the communist. But I don’t think that Pete Seeger as a communist is eliminated either.

How you reconcile this with working for John Kerry for president, as Bruce did, is a very good question. But a better question is what does releasing this record have to do with Vote for Change, and what does this portend for the next group of Democrats who try to swindle artists into supporting them.

I frankly don’t know. If Hillary Clinton was counting on that support, I’d say she’d be in some trouble--that’s just a guess. But none of the Democrats are going to address the stuff that’s on this album.

The other political undercurrent in this record is the war, which except for “Mrs. McGrath,” never comes up. And yet, I think it’s probably in every note on the record. And in the concerts, it’s explicit and getting more so. The other night in Paris, Bruce sang “Bring ’Em Home,” Pete’s antiwar song.

What do we know if we’re serious about our politics? We know that we need a movement, and we know that movements start out of human need. Therefore, writing the right song or singing the right song can’t start a movement.

But it can do about a hundred other things as the movement gets rolling. It can spread the word. It can enliven spirits. It can express the issue. It can give you comfort when, inevitably, you lose a battle. There are a whole bunch of things a song can do.

This isn’t going to generate a more productive antiwar movement--that’s up to the rest of us. But we have another tool.

Nellie McKay: The Open Door

2006-04-04T07:05:00.000-04:00

Craig Werner writes:

Nellie McKay’s door was always open.

Part of me wants to leave it there. The students whose voices grace the branches of this tree of words know what I mean. In an academic world all too often fixated on individual stardom, she devoted herself to community, to nurturing the next generation of African Americanists, the students she called her “children.” Nellie often came to campus before the first ray of light lit the Wisconsin winter sky and stayed past sundown when she called Union Cab for her evening ride to her refuge on West Lawn Avenue. She helped students grapple with the complexities of Beloved and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, figure out ways to teach Baldwin and Faulkner to students from the farm towns and suburbs as well as the invisible ghettoes of Madison and Milwaukee, and imagine ways of entering the profession without surrendering their sanity or integrity. If there was a path through the swamp, a way out of no way, Nellie would make sure her students found it.

Or, to phrase it in a way that reminds us that she was a part of the Civil Rights Movement, one of the courageous foot soldiers who marched into spaces where black people were most definitely not welcome, she made sure students kept their eyes on the prize. Nellie understood what she was doing as a response to the call of the elders and the ancestors, those who had come through the unimaginably dark and lonely and hopeless-seeming nights of Middle Passage and slavery and white supremacy in its myriad forms. She understood herself—and, crucially, her students—as part of the tradition forged by Phillis Wheatley and W.E.B. DuBois and Anna Julia Cooper and James Baldwin and June Jordan. She kept faith with the ancestors and now she has joined them. Their call to us is forever altered and enriched.

African American students had a special place in her heart, but her door was open to everyone who shared the vision of a better, more democratic world. She could be tough, demanding, even (as I’ve heard more than one student say) intimidating. She brooked no nonsense, accepted no evasions. She sympathized with students’ struggles, but the point would come when she would say: “yes, but you have work to do.” The work got done.

The real tribute to Nellie McKay lies precisely in the work that her students have done and will do. The books and essays are part of it. Their teaching—both inside and, especially, outside the walls of academia—is part of it. But the tribute that would have made her smile her wonderful smile will be the way her students, those whose words you’ve just read, are weaving the values she lived by into their everyday lives. Most of all, it will come when her children’s children find themselves lost and despairing, and come to an open door.

This essay is the final piece of special section of tributes to Nellie McKay that will appear in an upcoming issue of African American Review. McKay, one of the leading scholars of and advocates for African-American literature, died in January 2006.

Rambling About Scott Walker, Elvis, and the Twin Towers

2006-03-31T16:37:00.000-05:00

Thom Jurek writes:

I spent last night being utterly confounded, unsettled, and blown away (in the sense of wondering just what I was hearing) by Scott Walker's new album, The Drift on 4AD--there's a jump eh?

While I know Walker's last excursion into dense, art-damaged experimentalism (Tilt, in 1995) may not be anyone's thing here; it did move me because of my interest in Cage, Feldman, Lester Bowie, Xennakis, Braxton, Crumb, Threadgill, Anthony Davis's "Malcolm X" opera, Roscoe Mitchell and Sun Ra. I listened to all 68 minutes in one sitting.

Anyway, there is a tune here called "Jesse," written in October of 2001. Rather than look at the the event reflectively, Walker looks at American power and its mythological constructs as a dream sequence. He uses a baritone guitar detuned to play the "Jailhouse Rock," sequence and undoes the drum riff by using whispered "Pow! Pow!"'s to signal the planes hitting the towers as three detuned basses roar like the planes themselves. He then has Elvis sitting under the Memphis moonlight whispering to Jesse about what it all means. Here is the gone-dead Elvis speaking to the stillborn Jesse about this now disappeared, mythical symbol of American power and commerce falling to the ground in ruins and speculates in short, clipped lines about the death of American myth as the death of America itself.

Is it pretentious? Hell yes. But it's compelling too. I played that track two, then three, then four times, and was just knocked out by its sound, Walker's gentle singing, as if he is encountering all these things at once, as it all happens in some nightmare. Hearing those "pows!" chilled me to the bone and I went outside looking for the moonlight, thinking about the new unmasked America, as some new myth was being attempted to be constructed from the ruins of the old. I then played "Jailhouse Rock" by Presley and found myself both angry at Walker for his use of a song I loved so much to depict something so horrible, and tipping my hat to him too; not because he was slamming Elvis, but who better to talk about American myth; to a person he supposedly trusted enough to speak to regularly, a mythical twin, yet never knew?

Standing at the Crossroads - Race, Class, and Art

2006-03-05T21:53:00.000-05:00

Kevin Alexander Gray writes:

By and large I count myself among those who believe that what is generally promoted as a race discussion usually ends up a waste of time. Now that we’re past Black History Month, during which columnist Clarence Page suggested that his PBS NewsHour viewers might look to the 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin for racial guidance, maybe we can also get past sepia-toned reminiscences of slavery and eulogies for Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King to the real grainy Technicolor ways folk live today, or try to. It’s an understatement that the ravishment of the Gulf Coast, destruction of a major American city and dispossession of its majority-black residents have set conditions for more than talk. But that ongoing catastrophe also demands that when we do speak, we better tell it like it is.

Whenever people say things like Hurricane Katrina “ripped the veil off racism and poverty” I am reminded of a line from a song in Craig Brewer’s film Hustle and Flow: “It might be new to you but it’s been like this for years.” In fact, the film pricked my race/class sensibilities more than anything else in the midst of the latest round of race talk.

Shot in the working-class neighborhoods of Brewer’s hometown, Memphis, Tennessee, Hustle and Flow is the story of DJay (played by Oscar nominee Terrence Howard), a pimp having a “midlife crisis.” He’s 35, the same age as his father when he died, and he fears his life will soon be over unless he changes course.

The film’s look, feel and sound are all intimately familiar. From the dirt on the walls of a shotgun house to the hot, wet, sticky red clay-tinted heat of a Southern summer and the ever-present, almost useless dirty portable fan. From the train track separating the haves from the have-nots to the get-by job that gets you to the weekend to the juke joint where anything happens. From the sound of the blues – even in rap music - right down to the neighborhood, language and attitudes, Brewer puts a face on the people that those such as Bill Cosby wish to be invisible. Some of them are even white.

Brewer’s people could be among the 35 percent of blacks currently living below the poverty line in the United States or the poorest 20 percent or so of Louisiana residents. Hustle and Flow reveals what Katrina revealed: those who’ve been left to fend for themselves. In New Orleans almost 40 percent of New Orleans’ households, nearly all of them black, earned less than $20,000 a year.

I have lived in either a predominately black or all-black neighborhood for most of my forty-nine years. It is not an endorsement of segregation; it’s just the way it is. Yet, there are a couple of things to appreciate about longstanding southern black neighborhoods. For one thing, different economic classes still live amongst one another. They intermix and interact. This social interaction is represented in the film by DJay’s relationship with Key, played by Anthony Anderson. Key, an old school friend, has become a middle-class audio technician. In addition, many of us move up and down – on and off the economic ladder throughout our lives. And most demographic data not only bear out that class intermix but also the precariousness of paycheck-to-paycheck living. Moreover, the typical black family doesn’t conform to the 2 parents, 2 kids model. Single women head 62% of black families and 67% of black children are born out of wedlock. Moreover, blacks more readily accept whites into those communities than vice versa, even poor whites, even gentrifying white “pioneers.”

Although there has been racial progress in the United States, for many African Americans life is like ice-skating up hill. According to the most recent American Housing Survey only 49 percent of blacks are homeowners as compared with 76 percent of whites. Even with comparable credit, blacks are 210 percent more likely than whites to be rejected for a mortgage. When black borrowers are fortunate enough to get a non-government home loan, a little less than a third of them will have to bear high-interest sub-prime financing, which usually doesn’t mesh well with a sub-prime car loan and/or the interest on a payday loan. No surprise, the national foreclosure rate for blacks sits right at 50 percent, and half of all African Americans live in unaffordable, inadequate or crowded housing. Among people living on the street or in their cars, 40 percent are black.

Wealth, equity, control over property – these markers of the “American dream” are largely white privileges. At the onset of the last recession, between 1999 and 2001, the net worth of Hispanic and black households fell by 27 percent. As of 2002, the Pew Hispanic Center reports, the median Hispanic household had a net worth of $7,932 and the median black family had $5,998, while the median white family had $88,651. And, almost a third of black households and more than a quarter of Hispanic ones had zero or negative net worth.

The meaning of the numbers is obvious: a sizable number of households and the individuals in them are barely getting by. And those in the middle class are seldom permanently middle class. That is not to say there are no recognizable class lines. Lots of black families lead economically stable lives and have decent credit.

Yet the majority of blacks live under conditions where any little bind affects their whole life. They are the people who lose their sub-prime loan homes, choose between car repair or insurance, gas or taxes, food or medicine, and frequently need an extension on the electric or phone bill. They rent the cheapest place they can find and try to hold on in traditional neighborhoods in the face of just about everything – from economic redlining to strict property code enforcement to urban pioneering to population disbursement or marginalization. They routinely face racial profiling and aggressive, if not brutal, law enforcement, jail and unemployability. A majority is in the South, where 54 percent of blacks still live. Others are concentrated in the ghettos although many cities have driven poor people out of the core of metropolitan areas all across the country. And then there are those holdouts who occupied the waterfront – be it the bayous, the barrier islands, along a lake or river, because that’s where their ancestors fled to – only to have that land taken by developers, or a storm, because it is waterfront.

That’s why Hustle and Flow is such a notable picture. It is not just the story of a pimp in Memphis who needs to make music. It is the story of another city on the Mississippi delta. New Orleans was built on race dating back to the day when the first Africans fled out to the bayous to be free just as a runaway Jim in Huck Finn was attempting to do. It’s that superficial sense of freedom and abandon that still draws tourists to a battered New Orleans, although the benefits of an economy based on the arts and nightlife never will trickle down to everyone. That is, unless you consider the four-man stand-up band that used to live in the Ninth Ward and is now playing and dancing in the street on a weekend night in The French Quarters for the money out-of-towners throw in the collection box as trickle down economics.

The film’s climax has the police at DJay’s doorstep after his encounter with rap mogul Skinny Black, played by rapper Ludacris. And, as the story’s end DJay is behind bars. Neither situation is unfamiliar. DJay is from that big neighborhood where, according to the U.S. Justice Department, the 12 percent of African-American men ages 20 to 34 who are in jail or prison live before and after their release; where lifespans on average are six years shorter than those of whites; where having the police at the door, going to court every now and then or having a family member in jail is not so uncommon.

My father’s dad was married a number of times, legally and not. My pop had three brothers and a sister by his mom; one brother died young, and the other two served time on the chain gang, both for murder. One killed a woman, the other a man, both of them black. My father’s sisters had four sons and four daughters. Three of the males and two of the females served time for offenses ranging from the ridiculous to the serious. My three brothers went to jail in their youth for non-violent offenses, and I have a few relatives in jail now. Maybe it’s just the odds, because it almost went wrong for me many times, but I have never been in jail overnight, although I have been handcuffed more than a few times and in leg irons once. But I have visited more chain gangs and work camps, jails, prisons and courtrooms than I care to remember. Whenever I see the 1967 film Cool Hand Luke it conjures memories of family visits to take cigars or a carton of cigarettes to one of my uncles in the camp, or spotting someone familiar on a road crew, or having a Sunday family picnic lunch under the pine trees while my incarcerated eldest brother had a conjugal visit with his girl.

This is not to cop to some inherent criminality in my family in particular or black people in general or to offer apologies, regrets, excuses or blame. Sometimes getting caught up with the law is as simple as making a bad choice. Others times bad programming gets the best of a person. Or, when folk are raised in and around violence it should be no surprise when they commit or accept acts of violence. He or she might be at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong people and just gets caught up in it. And there are those times when an offense is an act of rebellion against it all, a straight-out scream because regardless of how racists view blacks or how defeatists view themselves, all the negative indices of black life are too huge to be coincidental.

After Katrina, rapper Kanye West famously quipped, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.” Most black folk believed it, and Princeton’s professor Cornel West affirmed it, adding, “...you have to distinguish between a racist intent and the racist consequences of his policies.”

But labeling Bush and placing the problem solely at his feet is far too simple. Poor people of all hues are disregarded in both good and bad weather. Though it was class more than race that determined who got left behind in New Orleans, African Americans also take it as a matter of fact that the class structure of this country is built on race. Under the “racist consequences” standard, Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco, a Democrat who gave the “shoot to kill” order to a police department with a violent history, and Ray Nagin, the black Democratic mayor who before Katrina had not factored poor people into any of his political calculations, would also make the list of failed leaders.

So would former president Bill Clinton, who typically polls in the high 80 percent approval ratings with blacks. Clinton’s policies and attitude on due process, equal protection and equal treatment – otherwise known as civil rights – were horrible. One initiative required citizens, mostly black, in public housing to surrender their Fourth Amendment or privacy rights. Another was the “one strike and you’re out” policy under which public housing residents convicted of a crime, along with anyone who lives with them, are now evicted without consideration of their due process rights.

Black incarceration rates during the Clinton years surpassed Ronald Reagan’s eight years. He stumped for “three strikes and you’re out” in the federal crime bill, for restrictions on the right of habeas corpus and expansion of the federal death penalty, and he got them. When Clinton went into office one in four black men were involved in the criminal justice system in some way; when he left it was one in three. DJay represents the one in three.

So what does all this mean? Once again art provides a clue. Hustle and Flow depicts a society without leaders and how people cope.

Brewer likens the lead character DJay to Rocky Balboa. But I see DJay as more like Tom Joad in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. Joad returns to his Oklahoma home after a stint in prison to find that his family is leaving to escape not only the drought but also, a state and class system that is crushing them. As the 1940 movie adaptation of the novel begins, Henry Fonda stops in front of a country store named for its location, “Crossroads.” DJay is at that same place, as is his woman Shug (played by Taraji Henson), pregnant by Lord knows who, tormented by dreams of giving birth to “dead dogs” and “nursing a big old catfish,” worrying that her unborn child is doomed and sensing for the first time her own creative power.

Standing at the crossroads is the obvious metaphor for where America is today. There is a feeling across the country that we are headed in the wrong direction and need to choose a better path.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson said the passing of Coretta Scott King marked the “end of a ‘black leadership’ era.” I would mark its demise some thirty-odd years earlier. But often the good thing about the end of one thing is the start of something new. The idea that African Americans and the poor must have someone who speaks for them is at the least annoying and at worst racist. Who speaks of white leaders? And the problem with most contenders for the role of national black leader – regardless of who they are - is that they don’t necessarily rail against what exists. They usually speak from a privileged perspective and often wrangle over symbolism or shout over not having a bigger piece of the pie. But effective social change happens when people from the bottom, speak for themselves, put pressure on the middle and the top, promotes a set of values and enforces them. Rosa Parks’ legacy isn’t a solitary act. Parks, trained in non-violent activism at the Highlander School in Tennessee, is part of a peoples’ movement that included folk like Claudette Colvin, who at 15 was arrested for refusing to take her place on a Montgomery bus nine months before Parks. And it wasn’t just Martin Luther King Jr. dreaming out loud. The kids who filled the jails, the “Freedom Riders” and the grassroots voter registrars were leaders.

African American opposition to the Iraq war today is black leadership. All those families and individuals discouraging their kin from joining up to fight have resulted in a decrease in black recruitment and a crisis for the system. And it didn’t take a leader (other than George Bush) to set them on course.

The issue of race in America is hard to face, but it is inseparable from class, which might be why so many African Americans support the concept of reparations. But though black communities are hit the hardest, amid staggering wealth disparities and social insecurity rampant in the land, they are not alone in need of repairing. W.E.B. Dubois in a 1960 speech at the University of Wisconsin, when presented with the question “What then is the next step?” called for ”the stopping of a government of wealth for wealth, and by wealth, and a returning of governmental power to the individual voter, with all the freedom of action which can be preserved, along with an industry carefully organized for the good of the masses of people and not for the manufacture of millionaires.” Seven years later King, pushed by black discontent in the cities and mass dissent from the war, called for “a restructuring of the whole of society.” That was his Crossroads.

Some complained he was taking a radical path, but it was the only realistic one for society, as is plain today. The path for government now should be made clear, make the unwhole whole, not just Katrina victims in Louisiana and Mississippi but also the victims of life-changing storms over the past four years from Florida to North Carolina and the millions of structurally poor Americans of whatever race for whatever reason. Now is the time to demand serious public investment, full employment, debt forgiveness and a national housing policy in which homesteading is a significant part the plan.

Of course, grassroots advocacy for a new plan begins with Gulf Coast victims. For the renters and homeowners who lost everything the demand is simple: Homes. That is not to suggest that those who were well below sea level for reasons of history should be encouraged to rebuild in an unsafe area. New Orleans has the opportunity to rebuild an economically and racially integrated city if America has the will. That is, rebuild it in a new, more equitable way. As for the Gulf Coast rebuilding effort, citizens should insist that federal, state and local officials take the profit out of public works and put the money in the pockets of those who need it most instead of making rebuilding efforts into another welfare program for millionaires.

Finally, while promoting Hustle and Flow on the The Late Show with David Letterman last year, Terrence Howard commented that the Hurricane Katrina victims in that city were “waiting on someone to give them something, instead of doing for themselves.” If he was referring to those trapped on roofs, in attics and at overcrowded shelters, he was way off base. If he was referring to the need for poor people to organize, make a demand and speak and represent themselves, he’s right.

Gray is president of the South Carolina ACLU and contributing editor to Black News in Columbia, SC. Thanks to JoAnn Wypijewski and Daniel Wolff.

Fall Inside Your Eyes

2006-02-20T21:25:00.000-05:00

Susan Martinez writes:

I didn't notice it was happening at first. Percy Sledge's Shining Through the Rain CD arrived in the mail, and I'd slipped it in the car player, where it got spun an errand at a time for weeks. One day my husband came home from a grocery run, going on about "that song in the car" and humming to himself. That evening headed for dinner out, we idled the engine and listened to Percy's version of "Fall Inside Your Eyes", the bass pulled tight to the percussion in a lovers' slow dance. Percy's voice was tender and sweet:

And I fall inside your eyes
And I'm drowning in your love
I can't bring to my mind
What it was that I was thinking of...

When the song ended, he looked at me with a gush I hadn't seen in a while. You'd think we were young lovers hidden on a romantic hilltop on a starry night, rather than a middle-aged couple together 21 years, parked in a loading zone with a line of cars impatiently signaling for our space.

Whenever I went for a drive, I could tell he'd been listening to that song, it'd just be fading out. Sometimes I knew because of the way he'd come up to me when he got home, wrap his arms around my waist and nuzzle my neck. When he picked me up at work or to go out, the song would be cued as I opened the door. He'd even find excuses to drive me places. One summer evening, he surprised me as I was walking home: waiting at an intersection, the sunroof open, sunglasses on, his arm resting on the window. I walked to the passenger side and said "Hey sailor, is this jitney taken?"

"Hop in for the ride of your life, little miss," he grinned, and he hit the play button. We drove two blocks home:

I can't explain why I feel this way
Just one look from you
And there's nothing I can do...

The first year we lived together, he was in the trenches of his graduate thesis. He'd work until 1 or 2 a.m. and be back at his office before I woke in the morning. Some nights I cried myself to sleep, desperately lonely but deeply in love. But that May when the lilacs bloomed, he'd pick a cluster of blossoms on his midnight walk home and rest them on the pillow next to my cheek. In the morning he'd be gone by the time I wakened to the lilac on the pillow, flowers wilted but the perfume still sweet. I knew he would always be there for me.

I send this out as a dedication to my co-blogger Danny and Lauren, a toast to their wedding this spring. My best friend told me that on my wedding day I should stop every once in a while, look around, and take it all in a snapshot at a time. I'm so glad I listened. From that day I remember my mother starting to cry as she walked me down the aisle; my husband's full heart as he said "I Do"; my 3-year-old nephew playing hide-and-seek in the skirt of my wedding gown as Claudia Schmidt, Peter Ostroushko, and Oscar Lopez played "At Last"; the magnificent red strawberries dipped in chocolate as waiters passed them on broad silver trays; the glow in the face of my friends from The Ark and WDET who conspired to hold a surprise folk festival in our honor the night before.

My friend gave me good advice that day, and she gave me a kind of peace as her gift when just before we walked down the aisle, she held my face in her hands and said "No matter WHAT happens I will always be here for you." I pass her spirit and that peace to Danny and Lauren. I wish you lilacs, and moments of clarity, and a beautiful song breaking through just when you need.

Congratulations and love,
Susan

Normal

2006-01-31T19:07:00.000-05:00

Karen Brown writes:

What is your definition of "normal?" Mine has changed over the years, just as my life has evolved.

But "normal" really took on new meaning when I was five months pregnant with my first child. That's when an amniocentesis revealed that the baby I was carrying was a boy with Down syndrome.

His father and I grieved and wondered whether we were up to the task of raising a child with disabilities. Thank God, it turns out we were.

As first-time parents, our baby, Casey, became our "normal."

After spending the first three weeks of his life in intensive care, we got our boy home and into the Brown family routine. Most babies learn to sit up when they're 5 months old. That's the norm. Casey did it when he was 10 months old. I was so proud.

Casey wasn't walking when other babies were. My husband, Ron, told a friend, "My Mom tells me that I didn't walk until I was 18 months old so I don't know whether Casey isn't walking because he has Down syndrome or Brown syndrome."

At 19 months, he started walking. I was so proud.

When I was pregnant with my second child, Casey's pediatrician made a remark that hurt me deeply, although it certainly wasn't his intention. He said, "When this next baby's born you'll see what 'normal' really is."

Wrong. I knew what "normal" was. As Ron would say, "Casey is perfectly normal for a child with Down syndrome."

Casey started losing his hair when he was 20 months old. Now, he has no hair, no eyebrows or lashes or body hair of any kind because of an autoimmune disorder that may or may not be related to his Down syndrome.

He's not sick, but people sometimes look at him with pity or even alarm. I don't mind the stares. There's a natural curiosity about seeing a bald 9-year old. But I sure don't care for the pitying looks. I want to say to those folks, "He's bald, not dying."

Again, having a bald 9-year old is "normal" for us.

Sometimes people make a comment about Casey such as, "Down syndrome kids are so loving." They're right. Casey can be very loving. He can also be crabby, sad or mad. What a statement like that really does is take away Casey's individuality. Most people with Down syndrome or their parents will tell you that it's not the disability that defines the person, just as it's not hair or eye color that makes a person be whom they are.

People usually respond to Casey in a positive and enthusiastic manner. I assume that's because it's what Casey projects. All parents think their children are exceptional and I'm no different with my sons. They're amazing and remarkable boys, both of them. But in an interesting twist on "normal," my younger son, Jesse, is sometimes jealous of his older brother. He thinks that having Down syndrome gets you noticed. He'd like to get in on some of that center-of- attention action.

That's sibling rivalry for you and, another aspect of what's normal in the Brown household.

Wilson Pickett: 1941-2006

2006-01-24T13:09:00.000-05:00

Daniel Wolff writes:
1/20/06
I listened, this morning, to “The Exciting Wilson Pickett,” the Atlantic album from 1966. I have it on vinyl, and it played its lopsided self while my wife, my 16-year-old son and I read the morning papers.

In southern India, “indigenous people” armed with bows and arrows fought the construction of a $12 billion steel mill. Said one of the leaders of the resistance, “They are trying to turn us into beggars.” On Africa’s Ivory Coast, thousands of young people protested an international decision to disband their country’s National Assembly: one kid without a shirt beating against the UN’s iron-walled compound with a sledge hammer, another declaring, “We don’t listen to anybody. We want the complete liberation of Ivory Coast.” A full-page ad on the next page called for people to “bring the noise and drown out Bush’s lies” in a nationwide protest scheduled to coincide with the State of the Union address.

Pickett’s obituary, on page B8, mentioned “In the Midnight Hour,” which is on the Atlantic album. It hinges on a gospel catch-phrase, and that only makes sense: Pickett, born in Alabama, helped found a gospel group called The Violinaires after he’d moved up to Detroit. He was with them from the age of 14 till he was about 18.

After I drove my son to high school, I put on some Violinaires. They continued long after Pickett had left to launch his soul career. But Robert Blair, their lead singer, sounds like Pickett. Or, maybe it’s the other way around. Or, more likely, both of the raspy, driven vocalists sound like they’ve listened long and hard to gospel greats Archie Brownlee and June Cheeks. “Hard” gospel singers, their music seemed to roar along on sheer will power. They didn’t beg God for mercy, or plead with Him for forgiveness. They shouted Him down, kicking at His front door with their big, heavy voices.

In gospel music, the midnight hour is the hour of reckoning, the hour of the wolf. It’s when you confront your God. Steve Cropper, Pickett’s co-writer on the pop tune, listened to how the singer would end his gospel tunes by riffing on that idea. The two of them wrote a secular version powered by horn lines and an unrepentant bass. The phrase that always gets to me is how Pickett’s gonna wait till the midnight hour to get together with his girl, because that’s when his “love comes tumbling down.” As if love was an outside force that happened to him. Like a landslide. But a landslide with a schedule: it always tumbled at midnight.

Though Pickett borrowed religious language for the pop song (and for another off the same album, “Ninety-nine and a Half Won’t Do”), it’s the sound -- more than the words -- that ties his soul music to his gospel. He was a master of the ragged shout. On songs like “Mustang Sally,” “Land of a Thousand Dances,” “Funky Broadway,” he declared himself with a roar and then took that roar apart, examined each sinew, stretched it, cut it short with a gruff pop, could soften it down to almost a purr, then crank it back up till it rattled the iron bars in the windows.
And the windows always had bars. His voice made sure you knew that. Listen to his soul hits and how he steers the music – how he presents himself against the beat – and you hear a voice of resistance. A sledge hammer. A half-naked man trying to stop a steel mill. Which is to say, a gospel singer.

I didn’t read Wilson Pickett’s obituary in the midnight hour. It was more like eight in the morning. This side of the world had sunlight on it.

Helluva Gorilla

2006-01-14T18:49:00.000-05:00

Danny Alexander writes (with thanks to David Davis):

Seeing King Kong for the third time, weeks later, is the best experience. Peter Jackson's really not to be underestimated. I've been a fan of Hayao Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke for a long time, but I've been particularly into catching some of his movies I hadn't seen before on TCM the past couple of weeks, and I just realized on this viewing how much a debt Jackson owes to him.

It's that sort of a movie, deeply textured, giving up more with each viewing--just as the Lord of the Rings movies did, and the Asian influences are so obvious to me now, and the way they are in dialogue with western cinema. There are plenty of scenes that seem like they're straight out of Peckinpah but with the magic realism of Woo (or Miyazaki). And it all makes sense because, as much as anything, Kong is a movie about movie making--from its premise to the central theme of beauty vs barbarism (vs capitalism the way I see it).

Some of the final shots at the top of the Empire State Building hearken back to Hitchcock, particularly Saboteur and Vertigo, including Naomi Watts standing in what may as well be Jimmy Stewart's stance at the end of Vertigo.

And that's an intriguing connection for me because Vertigo became one of my favorite movies around the same time I fell in love with Princess Mononoke, during a dark time for me when these rich, violent, yet musical movies were among the few things speaking to me (watched like every Hitchcock movie over just a handful of months, some twice--there's some obscurities I still haven't seen, but they're truly obscure). Anyway, I fell in love with Vertigo probably the fourth time I'd seen it all the way through in my life. Thought it was a little slow before that, maybe pretentious, but on this fourth viewing, in this very dark state of mind, I suddenly felt every nuance of the movie was earth shatteringly precise.

It seems to me that Jackson is at his best working with the possibilities of the medium as it’s changing--from a one time cinema event, into a repeated home viewing experience, giving up layers and layers of meaning with each viewing. And it occurs to me that this is as difficult to talk about as music can be to talk about because it's not simply what's in the screenplay--it's the music of the images as well as the soundtrack and the music of the sound effects, the color, light and shadow and texture, the visual composition.
I know these are not new concerns in the discussion of film, but they are in the DVD or digital era, when the theater has more or less become simply an introduction to an experience that will be oft-repeated at home. Jackson flipped that script with the way he handled the Rings trilogy from day one, and I think Kong reflects the way he's continuing to synthesize the new possibilities of the form. I find it really exciting.