Inaugurating a new "keep self and work-habits honest" feature: at least once a day, I'll post a photo of the view from wherever I'm working. That way, if I'm not working on a given day, I've got nothin' to show for it.
Also plays to the fact that, while I think the typical webcam shot (drawn eyeglassed paleface, sickly underlit by LCD glow) is boring as shit, the view from somebody's workspace actually says a lot about them. Or it does about me: I have to be away from home (too-great proximity to fridge, TV, or nappable-couch) and from campus office (too-great proximity to students who might come by "visitin'", and who I seem to be congenitally unable to ignore).
Anyway, herewith: front table at the neighborhood coffeehouse, five minutes' walk from home, where there's a fast, free wireless connection, and where a number of the "100 Greats" posts have been initiated.
Back to work!
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
New feature: "The Office" (Workstation Series) 01
Monday, July 23, 2007
"100 Greats" #063: Various artists: National Geographic's Songs and Sounds of the Sea"
Several years back Dharmonia and I had the exterior of our little Cape Cod-styled house repainted (pretty severely out-of-place on the High Plains of West Texas, but it feels at least a little more familiar, and a little more peaceful and comforting, as a result). Part of the job, offered freely by our fantastic renovation specialist (who took a year to do the job, but went over every inch of the exterior, literally, with a little blowtorch and a 1-inch scraper, taking off every bit of every layer of the scabrous old paint), was to renovate the decrepit kitchen door. He asked me if we wanted a replacement for the pneumatic door-closer, or if an old-style spring attached to the door jamb was OK. I thought the old-school vibe of the spring suited the original date of the house (and those pneumatic openers never work right anyway), so I told him to go ahead. The very first time I went through that door after he was done, I unthinkingly let it swing shut behind me, and it banged home against the door frame. And I laughed aloud, saying to Dharmonia and Darryl, “I can hear my mother’s voice yelling ‘Don’t slam the screen door!’”
Sounds can do that. The cognition specialists say that smell is the sense that most strongly evokes the lobe governing memory—and certainly smells are powerful for me too—but for a musician, I think sounds might be even more powerfully evocative. I know that if I hear the first two or three notes of any of the records I went to school on—any of the “100 Greats” records, for instance—I can instantly recall not only all the songs on the disc, but virtually every aspect of the performances, live or studio, brilliant or error-ridden, and usually also the circumstances in which I first imprinted on the disc.
Not necessarily the first time I heard the record—but damned sure the circumstances in which I listened to it again and again. I hear the opening notes of Born to Run, and I am in that dorm room in the East Village in 1976; the opening notes of Albert King’s Live at Montreux, and I am in that little dusty house on the east side of Midland Texas in 1979 ; the opening notes of the Planxty Black album, and I am in that damp dirty basement apartment in Brookline Mass in 1981. It’s an invaluable skill for a musician, of course, particularly a musician who is interested in learning a vernacular music: Lester Young went to school on Jimmy Dorsey records; Charlie Parker went to school on Lester Young sides; Eric Dolphy went to school on Bird solos; I went to school on Eric’s records (of which my revered teacher David Baker said, inimitably, “I think Eric just heard that shit”—evidently, so did I). It’s an act not only of homage but also of intelligent education—there is no way to learn a vernacular music from sheet music: ideally, you learn it from a live musician-mentor; failing that (and ever since the 1890s at least), you can learn it from mentors on records. When cultivated intelligently and consistently, it becomes the aural equivalent of a photographic memory. Those with such memories are not necessarily remembering semantic content, I’m told: more commonly, they are able to recall a visual image of the text in question—and thus reproduce it. What I’m talking about, then, is the aural equivalent: a kind of phonographic memory.
My home town was founded in 1629 by a couple of reprobates ejected from the proper Puritan town of Salem Massachusetts (where they were shortly to get down to proper Puritan business, fanning religious hysteria and persecuting witches): thrown out, two of the town drunks floated across the harbor in a hogshead, and set up housekeeping in that same hogshead. A woods-and-granite natural peninsula sticking out into
But when I was a kid, it hadn’t yet been totally gentrified: there were still crusty old fishermen putting out of the harbor, families still ran lines of lobster-pots on licenses they’d held for 6 or 7 generations (and it was still a given fact in local lore that if you were caught stealing out of someone else’s pots, they could shoot you—it was that serious a crime), and, though no kid ever realizes it, the sense of history, some of the oldest European history in the New World, came up out of the cobblestones, off the clapboards of the old red- and white-painted houses near the harbor, and out of the stories that the old-timers, the houses, and the town’s own records told.
The original of the Spirit of ’76 hangs in the town hall, the headstones in the old cemetery reach back to the 1640s, and the foul-mouthed fishermen (and probably smugglers) in John Glover’s Continental Regiment not only helped win the battles of Princeton and Trenton for George Washington’s Continentals, but got Washington out of New York, and into New Jersey, thereby turning the tide of the American Revolution. And then at the end of their enlistments they went back home and signed on as privateers: they weren’t done with those fuckin’ Excise Commissioners, and they weren’t above turning a profit in a good cause, either.
I remember my home town.
The Fort on the northeast headlands of the harbor, whose guns had protected the USS Constitution (and, for that matter, the US Constitution) during the War of 1812, where my father ran the local arts festival, and where I once saw an outdoor high-school production of Arthur Miller’s Salem - as - McCarthyism parable The Crucible which is still the most terrifying theater I have ever seen (in that place, with that ground's history, when those delusional girls started screaming about seeing “spirits in the trees” that surrounded the stage, you believed them);
The park about halfway down the harbor, whose bluffs looked east over the water, to the peninsula where the rich folks lived (and past whose Newport-style summer mansions we’d drag-race), to the Atlantic ocean, and beyond, to the places over the sea from where, generations before, most of our families had come from—and where, one summer night, Pete Seeger docked his sloop Clearwater, and gave a concert as the brilliant white full moon rose behind him;
The inlet we kids all knew as Screaming Woman Cove, where popular legend had it that the ghost of a woman kidnapped by pirates, who had drowned herself to escape rape, still held sway;
The tavern that had belonged to “Black Joe” Brown, a Continental-era free man of color, in whose pond there was a venerable and legendary snapping turtle whose shell was bigger than a trash-can cover (but whose presence didn’t keep us from swimming in the summer and skating in the winter), and whose wife “Mammy” Creasie (in the ‘60s, we didn’t know that that appellation was no longer OK), had baked gigantic, long-lasting “Joe Frogger” gingerbread cookies which were prized by the town's codfishermen heading out for a summer on the Grand Banks;
Redd’s Pond, named after one of the poor women who was tortured and martyred during the Salem Witch hysteria of the 1690s, above which loomed the old cemetery where my brother-in-music Larry and I spent more than one spooky night playing tunes, and where the worn headstones around us were marked with the crude skull-or-bones mementi mori of the old Congregationalists;
The beach at the foot of my childhood street, where in winter we would ride sleds down from the steep hills, and where—if we weren’t careful—we’d wind up skidding off the road and right into the harbor—closely followed by my Black Labrador, who thought it was all a great game. But where, in summer, we could still harvest uncontaminated clams and mussels, and, with lobster from family pots and corn from roadside farm-stands, dig a pit and have a real clam-bake—and across whose mile-wide harbor, one year, as a challenge to myself, I swam.
Thus this record. Just as the slamming of a screen door in West Texas in takes me back to my home town around 1966, so the opening of this disc (now, sadly, long out of print and attaining all the more admiration for its unavailability), takes me back too.
It’s simply the sound of leather-shod feet walking on a wooden platform. But I know that sound, and its specifics, exactly what produces it, and it instantly takes me back 40 years: to the worn, sun-bleached, salt-encrusted docks of the Atlantic seaboard where I grew up. I can not only hear that sound—and remember all the thousands of times my own feet made it, as I walked down at midnight to board a local lobster boat, so we could be out on the beds in time for sunrise, after which it was legal to pull (your own) pots; or to climb aboard one of Fred Hood’s boats and help set the sails his loft made and that helped win the America’s Cup year after year; or (as a very small child) to climb onto the ferry, strapped up in a life jacket, for the ride out to the island where the YMCA ran a summer day camp.
In memory, I can see it and smell it too: the smell of that waterfront, a compound of seaweed, dead shellfish, and salt water—and the clean, clean smell of the
This record captures that, as much as any audio-only source can do. Recorded in 1973 on and around working sailing ships out of Vineyard Haven, off the coast of Massachusetts, it included what seems, in hindsight, an absolute dream-team of folk-revival players and singers (most of them in the early flowering of their young, hungry, visceral musical conceptions):
the fantastic “sea-songs” duo of John Roberts and Tony Barrand, two musicians (voice, concertina, fiddle, guitar) who between them were absolutely fundamental to the New England folk revival (and, in the person of the indefatigable Barrand, “Mother” of the Marlboro Morris Men and author of Six Fools and a Dancer, of the Morris revival as well);
from the studio, the Scottish/Irish supergroup The Boys of the Lough, at that time just beginning to crack open the North American market for the explosion of “Celtic” groups who would follow in the 1980s;
the great Joe Hickerson, a New Haven native and later folk-music archivist for the Library of Congress;
the indefatigable Lou Killen, born in Durham but emigrated to the States with the Clancy Brothers in the ‘60s, who brought the spirit and intensity of Ewan MacColl’s songs and political stance to North America;
and [also from the studio] the great banjo-player Michael Cooney, whose version of The Dreadnaught (which also shows up in Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous), is a high point of the disk;
They sang shanties—forebitters and capstan shanties and “long-hauls” and short-drags and stamp-and-gos—and they played and danced hornpipes and polkas (favorite moment, “Oh, You New York Girls, Can’t You Dance the Polka?”), and they did it on-board ship. Those were the places that these songs and tunes were played and sung to make the work go faster, and you could tell the music was at home there.
The notes were good, as I recall, though at the age of 11 I didn’t really register the details, but I remember the photos in the elaborate National Geographic gatefold jacket as clear as yesterday: Roberts and Barrand with concertina and banjo in the foretop of a New England coal-bark, the whole crew of singers and players tailing onto and hauling away with the halyards the raised the mainsail. The interpolations between music (gulls, the sound of sheets flapping, waves slapping against a close-hauled heeling wooden hull) mesmerized me, because they were the sounds I heard around me on a daily basis (I still only register that I’m home when I hear the gulls in the morning)—they were the sounds of my childhood. I don’t think it’s going too far to say that this might have been one of the very first times I ever experienced the possibility that the sounds of my home town and of the “folk” musics I was just beginning to discover might actually emanate from—and belong in—the same place. I am indebted to this record for the realization of the astonishing creative resources that the history of my own home town, and the people of that history, might represent. One of whom is my brother.
My younger brother is one of the most manually talented people I have ever met: the ways in which he can visualize and then create objects of stunning physical beauty, usually on historical models, with nothing but his mind’s eye and a few hand tools, humbles me every time I witness it. He entered a museum-quality cabinet-making program at seventeen, built the Immigration Officers’ desks which were the focus of the
He’s also much more of a New Englander than I am, I think: having lived his whole life there, and married a State-of-Mainer, he’s still got much more of the accent, vocabulary, and mannerisms. That's why I'm always surprised--and enormously gratified--when people can tell we’re brothers.
The harbor above which my parents live is widely regarded as the safest Atlantic anchorage for wind-powered sail north of
Closed and secure to the East, South, and West, it’s vulnerable only in one direction: to the very infrequent, but very ferocious storms which blow, contrary to the Gulf winds and current, out of the Northeast, down from Nova Scotia, and Newfoundland beyond. In that kind of weather, we’ve learned to tape the windows, lock the shutters, and lay in canned food—especially in winter, you don’t want to be out in a Nor’easter.
But one winter we had one. My brother had built, entirely by hand and by eye, a beautiful 18-foot lapstrake rowing dory, based on a Herreshoff design he’d found in our local library (itself the only place in my home town I felt safe, the topic of another “100 Greats” post, and the place where I first heard this record). He had it anchored at my step-dad’s inherited mooring, near the base of the harbor, and had carefully weighted the anchor so that there was no possibility of it dragging and fetching up against the rocks of the beach.
But some of those greasy little yuppies with the bloated plastic boats didn’t know what the fuck they were doing, or were too lazy, or too busy making money, or too unaware of what North Shore weather can actually be like, to do the same. And at the height of the storm, when the temperature was 12 degrees below freezing and the sleet was pounding horizontally into my folks’ windows, and anyone with any brains had long since pulled or double-moored their boats, a couple of those yuppies’ pieces-of-shit dragged their anchors. And they blew down toward the granite-fanged rocks at the base of the harbor. And they took my brother’s dory with them. And they fetched up against the rocks, and they began pounding his boat to pieces.
As I was told the story, he ran down the wooden stairs from the house, and was barely prevented from diving into the surf to swim to his boat and haul it out of danger. It’s a measure of the man that I am absolutely confident that, had he not realized the boat was already flinders, he would have succeeded: he would have fought his way out through that below-freezing water and howling wind and saved his craft. I know it.
My step-father, who's cut from the same cloth, was a mine-disposal engineer in the Second War: he lived 14 months in a job where the life expectancy was six weeks, and he came home in one piece. He’s a calm, taciturn man: after those experiences, I guess you’d learn to be. He sailed his own boats for years, until chronic pain made it too risky and too frustrating.
Now, past 90, he navigates himself around my folks’ house in an office chair because he refuses to use a wheelchair. He still works in his garden when there’s not too much snow on the ground, and still watches the barometer and the sky, and can still, infallibly, predict the weather. And at least one last time, before that Nor’easter storm, my brother and step-dad had a summer's day on the water, just the two of them, in the boat my brother had built himself, according to the old old patterns.
Because that’s how they do—and have done, for the past 350 years—up where I come from.
This is a poem about them, and about my home:
These Wooded Hills
These wooded hills and rocky shores
are the
memory of my childhood;
whipped by salt Atlantic waves,
traced by crumbling dry stone walls;
marked by cowshit and the cry of gulls,
gouged by retreating glaciers of a last Ice Age;
and the faint whispering voices
of old wars, old words, old violence, old victories.
Granite, oak, slate, and pine;
topsoil's topography ripped away,
leaving the bones.
--cjs 12.23.02
This post is dedicated to my younger brother and to my step-father—the carpenter, and the combat vet—two self-reliant Down-Maine saltwater sailors and Yankee men-of-their-hands who I am proud to call family.
Professional historian blogging
DFH ("Dirty Fucking Hippie") edition:
There is a reason that Sean Hannity and David Horowitz and Michael Savage and Rush Limbaugh and assorted other opportunistic loudmouthed professional blowhards hate and deride university professors, peddling the (false) imputations that (a) most university professors are "liberals" and (b) most university professors seem to "influence" their students' political perspectives in the classroom. Neither imputation is objectively or statistically true, but the hysteria with which Seaneen and Davy and Mikey and Oxy-Porky target us is revealing of a deeper truth: that they fear us.
The right-wing talk-radio hosts and White House stenographers in the "news-o-tainment" business fear us because they recognize that, as the great Wobbly songwriter and historian Utah Phillips said "The long memory is the most radical idea in this country."[1] What Bruce meant was that remembering things is the key to either retaining them (if valuable, positive, constructive, etc) or avoiding the same mistakes again. The Bush White House had an agenda in the Middle East, and they found a puppet king who was stupid, compulsive, and sociopathic enough to believe the sub-Hollywood "Crusades" movie they sold him.
But they knew that there were people out there in the population who actually understood the history, sociology, demographics, economics, and complex political balances of Iraq, and more widely of the whole Middle East, and who would not buy into the simple-minded millenialist tripe they were peddling. Many of those people are university professors. So those people had to be marginalized, intimidated, silenced, or derided.
Which is where the bullshit media trope of "liberal professors" comes in.
I'm a historian, and a good one. A historian has two charges:
(1) To deal accurately and comprehensively with the actual, verifiable, factual historical record. Such an historical record necessarily changes as ongoing scholarship uncovers new facts. "Cherry-picking" the evidence is not something an ethical historian is entitled to do--though it is the precise job description of a politician, a media pundit, or, it would seem, of any and every Bush Administration political appointee (Colin Powell, Conodoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Peter Pace, Michael Brown, Michael Chertoff, Tommy Thompson, and on and on and on and on and on).
(2) To construct, articulate, and defend viable interpretations of the patterns, meaning, and significance of the factual historical record. Such interpretations should and will change as ongoing scholarship uncovers new facts and as credible scholarly discourse presents alternate interpretations.
And an ethical historian has one obligation:
To tell the truth (both factual and interpretative) to the best of her/his ability, recognizing the contrast between fact and opinion, between informed opinion and mindless (or manipulative) propaganda. And to do so under all circumstances, no matter the cost or the penalties.
Just after the US had sent US and UN peacekeeping forces into Somalia in 1992 (and let's remember that, although the disaster of the Battle of Mogadishu was laid at the Clinton Administration's door, the groundwork for that disaster was laid by the administration of Bush 41 and the imbecilic (and possible senile) Brent Scowcroft), an admired folklore professor with whom I studied, who had spent 40 years doing research on the narrative and poetic performance traditions of Somalia, was to be interviewed by CNN regarding the likely "success or failure" of the mission. That simple binary vision of an immensely complicated situation was reflected in both the media's and the White House's grasp of what they were getting themselves into. I remember speaking with John the day before the CNN news crew arrived, and hearing him say he had spent a whole day sketching out a description and analysis of how the Somalis themselves would likely view this intervention, of the things the peacekeepers should do and seek to do avoid doing, and how they might try to make themselves best understood to the indigenous populations. John knew he'd have to winnow things way done to brief durations and very simple, virtually telegraphic prose, and he'd done a good job.
The crew arrived, they taped for 4 hours, and told John that they would "probably have to edit down to two minutes." Of course he would have no input into that editing, and in fact would not even know what the final result looked like until it aired.
In the event, they aired about 12 seconds, of John saying "there might be some problems" and then they cut away to another Administration talking head spewing simplistic optimism. John was heartsick, not because they had butchered his presentation, but because he knew the disaster that such a mindlessly simplistic, anti-historical presentation, or grasp, of the situation could lead to.
And it did. It led to the Battle of Mogadishu, and the pointless, unnecessary, deaths of hundreds of Somalis, dozens of US troopers, and the inarguable failure of the peacekeeping mission. And then Junior's campaign had the unmitigated amoral gall to use that failure as an example of the "nation-building" Bush 43's Administration wouldn't engage in. And we know how that promise worked out.
I don't need to influence my students' political convictions: that's neither my job nor my intention. I'll let the study of history--real historiography, professional historiography, historiography that proceeds from the mandates above--shape their convictions.
And you want to know what Seaneen and Davy and Mikey and Oxy-Porky really fear? That, in modeling an ethical and professional approach to the study of history, I will inspire my students to, as the Buddha taught, think for themselves. And, in so doing, demonstrate the the liars and intimidaters and cynical greedy distorting hate-filled opportunists who populate their airwaves are damned before the bar of history.
Welcome to the Long Memory, you miserable bastards. Today's payoff is going to pale before the decades of condemnation ahead of you.
[Updated 7/24/07 to add:]
Atrios agrees:
"Having spent the last few years reading all of the elaborate and wonderful grand theories and strategies by the "liberal hawks" used to justify their own thinking and still suggest the dirty hippies were wrong even though they were right, I think I've finally come up with the Dirty Fucking Hippie Unified Theory of Foreign Policy.
- Don't be so fucking stupid.
[1] "Yes, the long memory is the most radical idea in this country. It is the loss of that long memory which deprives our people of that connective flow of thoughts and events that clarifies our vision, not of where we're going, but where we want to go." U. "Utah" Bruce Phillips. Yes, David: that's a footnote; it's something that real academics do to show the factual basis in the scholarly literature of an imputation or factual statement they're making. Suck on that scholarship, bitch.
Sunday, July 22, 2007
Saturday, July 21, 2007
"Bush Reclaims Power After Colonoscopy"
Yes, that CNN is more interested in Chimpie's colon than in his reinstatement of the CIA's authorization to torture is despicable, but let's be real: anything rather than President Dick Cheney.
Friday, July 20, 2007
Ink-and-NPR blogging
Sitting in my local fine skin-art emporium, getting ready to add some ink, during which session I'll take a long - distance call from a Seattle area radio station who want to talk live on the air about Coyotebanjo.
[Nimpkish raven; executed by Tim at Inkfluence]
From Wikipedia:
Raven steals the sun
This is an ancient story told on Puget Sound and includes how Raven helped to bring the Sun, Moon, Stars, Fresh Water, and Fire to the world.[1]
Long ago, near the beginning of the world, Gray Eagle was the guardian of the Sun, Moon and Stars, of fresh water, and of fire. Gray Eagle hated people so much that he kept these things hidden. People lived in darkness, without fire and without fresh water.
Gray Eagle had a beautiful daughter, and Raven fell in love with her. At that time Raven was a handsome young man. He changed himself into a snow-white bird, and as a snow-white bird he pleased Gray Eagle's daughter. She invited him to her father's longhouse.
When Raven saw the Sun, Moon and stars, and fresh water hanging on the sides of Eagle's lodge, he knew what he should do. He watched for his chance to seize them when no one was looking. He stole all of them, and a brand of fire also, and flew out of the longhouse through the smoke hole. As soon as Raven got outside he hung the Sun up in the sky. It made so much light that he was able to fly far out to an island in the middle of the ocean. When the Sun set, he fastened the Moon up in the sky and hung the stars around in different places. By this new light he kept on flying, carrying with him the fresh water and the brand of fire he had stolen.
He flew back over the land. When he had reached the right place, he dropped all the water he had stolen. It fell to the ground and there became the source of all the fresh-water streams and lakes in the world. Then Raven flew on, holding the brand of fire in his bill. The smoke from the fire blew back over his white feathers and made them black. When his bill began to burn, he had to drop the firebrand. It struck rocks and hid itself within them. That is why, if you strike two stones together, sparks of fire will drop out.
Raven's feathers never became white again after they were blackened by the smoke from the firebrand. That is why Raven is now a black bird.
Not thugz, but punk-ass bitches
As I said in an earlier post, I'm not talking about a Zen-hunter, "one shot-one kill" philosophy respecting the deaths that make life (vegetarian or carnivorous) possible. I'm talking about sick fucks who feel more important, more manly, or more impressive by forcing animals to suffer and die, or who torture animals themselves.
I don't have an opinion about Michael Vick's guilt or innocence--jury hasn't even met. But I will make a couple of predictive observations, and a statement of conviction:
- If he's convicted, it won't be because he's black--it'll be because the evidence against him is so massive and inescapable that not even the Falcons or Nike can buy him an acquittal. Vick represents so many millions in revenue that the entire legal system will bend over backwards to give him a more-than-fair day in court;
- If he's acquitted, it won't necessarily be because he's innocent--but because there is one law for the rich and another for the poor, in this country;
- I don't care whether it was his cousin who previously testified that he "knew nothing about any dog-fighting at the house in Smithfield Virginia," or the four un-named "cooperating witnesses," or the cops looking for his cousin's drug paraphernalia who found the evidence of a dog-fighting operation, who turned him in. The indictment alleges that Vick was directly involved in sponsoring and participating in these activities, since 2001; that is, that he pulled the trigger, more than once;
- That's almost seven years. It is impossible that, in seven years, no-one in the Falcons operation, or in Vick's own business organization, or in the Atlanta sports community, or in Vick's own posse, knew something illegal, exploitative, and despicable was going on. So, there's plenty of culpability to go around, whether any sticks to Vick or not.
Whether you're some inbred cleft-palated hyphenated old-money member of the decadent English aristocracy--or even some greedhead young Italian-suited dot-com punk who's bought a title, a horse, and a pink jacket; a trans-fat-saturated orange-capped camo-suited lardball sitting in a deer blind with 3 buddies, $2000 worth of gun, and three cases of beer; or a swaggering genetically-gifted punk from the Virginia projects:
Torturing animals doesn't make you a badass thug; it makes you a punk-ass bitch.
Blood sports are for cowards.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
"100 Greats" #062: Van Halen: 1984
Synthesizers, invented in the 1950s but only widely employed in rock from the 1970s, had by around 1980 become associated with some of the worst, most pretentious excesses of art-rockers like Emerson, Lake, and Palmer and Yes, as well as the sterile and rather antiseptic dance beats of 80s New Wave and disco. And so they were discredited for anybody who wanted pop music that was a little more visceral. Eddie Van Halen was the first musician since Pete Townsend (who virtually invented rock synthesizer with his definitive parts on Who’s Next) to understand that synths could rock: that—plugged into a Marshall amp and turned up to 10—they could deliver just as much visceral power as a Gold-top Les Paul.
At the same time, his virtuoso guitar style vastly expanded the potential of a technique known as two handed tapping, which in turn exploited the heavily-amplified electric guitar’s sensitivity and responsivity. Guitarists for decades had employed the techniques called ‘hammer-ons’ and ‘pull-offs’, in which the fretting-hand’s fingers would tap down upon the strings, or pull them sideways, thus providing two or more notes for each pick stroke. Eddie was the first metal guitarist to massively exploit the possibility of both hands tapping down on the fingerboard. This in turn let Eddie—a trained pianist who had grown up playing Bach and Mozart—to play very fast, two-part, widely-spaced, cascading, ‘classical-style’ solos at screeching volume. In his speed, imagination, ability to construct totally memorable guitar riffs, fantastic command of guitar tones, and telepathic communication with drummer/brother Alex, Eddie was unquestionably the most influential hard-rock guitarist of the late-70s/early-80s.
Van Halen happened at the place where speed-metal and punk-rock met; they were underrated by critics because they were too virtuosic and because Dave was too pretty for punk rock, and by metal fans because they were visibly having too much fun for speed metal.
The power-trio archetype that works is the one where guitarist and drummer are soldered together at the hip and are able to fill the maximal amount of sonic/orchestral space, while the bass player holds down the time. It worked magnificently in Hendrix's Electric Sky Church, where the great Billy Cox understood the value in playing the fuckin’ groove while Jimi and Mitch Mitchell went crazy. It worked less well in the Band of Gypsies, because despite Billy and Jimi's presence, Buddy Miles, while a great groove player, was not the orchestrator that Mitch Mitchell was. It worked pretty badly in Cream, because Jack Bruce’s ego was just too big for him to be satisfied with holding down the bottom end—he just “had to” compete with Clapton, who he should have left to duel it out with Ginger Baker. It worked in inversion in the Who, in which band, really, John Entwhistle ("The Ox") was the lead “guitar” and Keith Moon the orchestrator, while Townsend held down the grooves. It failed, heartbreakingly, in the Hendrix Experience, because frustrated guitar-player Noel Redding couldn’t be bothered to play fuckin’ time. It worked in the Police, because Sting, as a songwriter, knew enough to underplay and create a ethos of space around the song—and because of Andy Summers’s sense of ambience, and Stewart Copeland’s bad-tempered but virtuosic command of reggae drumming.
In Van Halen, the glue was the absolute, shoulda-been-identical-twins fraternal telepathy with which Eddie and Alex Van Halen played together. There is no substitute for that kind of joined-at-the-hip musical experience, which only comes from decades of playing together (and usually only from playing together beginning with one’s earliest musical experiences. It’s the telepathy of Buddy Holly and JI Allison, who learned to play, together, in Buddy’s parent’s garage just a few blocks from where I’m sitting: on 1984, see the Eddie/Alex interplay captured on “House of Pain.”
All the previous VH albums had contained great moments, from the very first 1978 eponymous disc, which included the pattern of overpowering covers (“You Really Got Me”) and which reached its apotheoses with Diver Down’s “Dancing in the Streets” and the fantastic “Pretty Woman”; of titanic guitar solos (particularly in the archetypal unaccompanied “Eruption” from VH1, a boundaries-smashing catalog of Eddie’s innovations); and of David Lee Roth’s consciously Cro-Magnon lyrics (one of the great weaknesses of heavy metal and hard-rock has always been the tendency for the guitar riffs to be written first, and the lyrics composed as afterthoughts, usually by the lead singer, to the existing musical tracks. This has typically led to great riffs and dumb lyrics. Van Halen, and Dave’s lyrics, certainly conform to this pattern.)
In Roth’s “Tony-the-Tiger”-esque cartoonish persona, the band had their ideal foil. Roth—who no one mistook for a powerhouse singer—nevertheless understood the real job of the rock front-man. Which is, quite simply, to be the coolest guy in the room, the baddest motherfucker at the kegger or in the stadium. A trained acrobat and kickboxer, with a swaggering sense of self-parody (and a knowledge of pop singing that went all the way back to Al Jolson), Roth, as lyricist and lead singer, would always counterbalance the ferocity of the band, coasting along on the top of their grooves just like the expert surfer that he was.
Dave’s primping went beyond the worst excesses of bikini’d Malibu beach bunnies and vacuous Valley Girl monologists, but he offered it with a grin-and-a-wink: it’s even mocked in the “Panama” video (which catches him adding still more mousse to his hair onstage during an Eddie solo). And it was grounded by the fact that, no matter subsequent VH singer Sammy Hagar’s adolescent chest-pumping, Dave was three times tougher than any other posturing metal front-man (black belt in muay thai, extreme sports, rock-climbing, you name it—you just knew that if you put Dave in a locked room with any three of these guys, he would be the one who walked out under his own power). It’s exemplified in this video, after Eddie’s great guitar solo and the Bach-on-steroids synthesizer passage, by a slow-motion shot of Dave executing a textbook high spinning back-kick, and with clips of him performing a beautiful
Dave’s post-blackface “Jolson-on-steroids” shtick (which, being a nice Jewish boy, he came by honestly, which was charming in DD’s “Big Bad Bill (Is Sweet William Now) and absurd in his solo takes on “California Girls” and Jolson’s own “Just a Gigolo”) is captured most perfectly in the video to “Panama,” which intercuts shots of Dave on stage, sliding down firepoles, and being hauled, wearing only a towel and obviously drunk off his ass, out of a dressing room by a trio of LA cops. Later on, he became a parody of himself (that is, a parody of a parody), but in the '80s he was an authentic badass.
1984 is the classic Van Halen record, the one that manifested all their collective strengths and minimized their collective limitations.
There’s the Kinkisan power of “I’ll Wait” (one way in which the VH boys disqualified themselves from the cool-to-the-critics speed metal and punk clubs was their gleeful appropriation of past rock styles);
The brilliant insouciance of both the drum/guitar solo that opens the blues-on-overdrive of “Hot for Teacher,” Dave’s brilliantly knuckleheaded lyrical take on adolescent testosterone (guilty pleasure: the video which accompanied the song, which simultaneously realized every junior-high-boy’s fantasy of the hot-librarian substitute teacher who flips out and strips, and for the casting of four 11-year-olds who were a really remarkable comic match for Eddie, Alex, Michael, and Dave), and the flaming-hot double-time guitar riff;
The beautiful, unmistakable California-rock-out-of-the-Beach Boys vocal harmonies of “Drop Dead Legs” (and which show up again in the metal-cred-shattering—but undeniably beautiful—vocal parts on “Why Can’t This Be Love?” from the followup 5150, which also boasts the astonishing Buddhist heavy metal of “Right Now”);
On “Hot for Teacher,” the kicked-in-the-gut (or gonads) “Ooof!” with which Dave sets up Eddie’s second guitar solo, Alex's staggering double-bass-drum sixteenth notes, and the perfect, Valley-esque “Oh my Gaaaahhhd!” with which Dave closes that track;
The beautiful cascading ostinato, played by Eddie in harmonics and powered by Alex’s great ride-cymbal patterns, and the sinuous guitar squeals that open the hyped-up rockabilly of “Top Jimmy”, a remarkably generous tribute to LA stalwarts Top Jimmy and the Rhythm Kings;
The old-school balls-to-the-wall 4/4 thunder of “Panama,” which boasts yet another fantastic Eddie riff, an magnificently singalong-able hollering chorus, and a great, old-school, blues-rock solo from Eddie—and the riotous accompanying video, simply a compendium of clips of the band goofing around on stage (Mike flying across the stage drinking Jack Daniels’, Dave’s backflips and pouting, Alex’s sweat-dripping ferocity).
Not quite so successful are “
But which leads into 1984's second track, which along with “Shelter from the Storm” (Dylan), “Like a Rolling Stone” (Hendrix at Monterey version), “Voodoo Child (Slight Return)” (Hendrix again), “Won’t Get Fooled Again” (The Who), “The Weight” (The Band), “Lola” (The Kinks), “Eight Days a Week” (Beatles), “Honky Tonk Woman” (Stones), “History Lesson (Part 2)” (The Minutemen), “Sweet Jane” (Lou Reed), "Whipping Post" (Allman Bros.), and maybe a few others [feel free to suggest your own favorites in "Comments"], is one of the greatest rock songs ever recorded.
There were two great songs called “Jump” released in 1984. One was the Pointer Sisters’ fantastic, sexy, grownup dance-hall hit called “Jump (For My Love)”, which though it employed all the thumbprints of Richard Perry-produced disposable ‘80s dance pop (mindless drum-machine, live conga-playing to sweeten the mechanism of the rhythm tracks, Yamaha synth pre-sets--all the things that gave a sheen of sonic competence to '80s Madonna, who was anything but), yet drew upon the grit, sass, and angelic sibling harmonies of Ruth, Anita and June—and its video, the simplest one-day-wonder of the three girls dancing and lip-synching, interspersed with archival footage of great black track & field athletes,--to depict all the artistic strength and hard-won self-confidence those beautiful strong women exemplified.
And then there was this one, "Jump," a virtually perfect compendium of everything that made Van Halen great, from the sublime to the banal.
Some music can be spiritual without intending to be. This song, in the pure beauty of its musical construction, is one such, and reminds us that one of American pop music’s great teachings has been that the sacred and the profane are not separate, are not antithetical, but are two sides of the same coin of human experience. There is no such thing as "good, lasting music which high-class people listen to" or "bad, disposable music which only stupid, low-class people listen to." If music moves people, if it speaks to and for them, it's good music. As Ellington said: "if it sounds good, it is good." In the simplest, most materialist, most profane pop music, there is still the possibility of transcendence. “Jump” may be Dave Lee Roth’s knuckleheaded writing-to-order over the powerhouse Van Halen sibling tandem—but when I hear Eddie's gorgeous, pedal-point, Mixolydian opening synth riff over Alex's clean-as-an-ax-stroke snare, it makes my heart leap.
Not everything about the 1980s or about MTV was rotten (well, OK: Ollie North, Ronald Reagan, and Iran-Contra all were, and Poison, Winger, Ratt, and innumerable other hair bands were all pretty bad): particularly in its early golden days—say, just after they started programming black artists (and Eddie Van Halen had a hand in that too: Jon Landis direction and million-dollar-budget notwithstanding, Eddie's off-the-cuff guitar solo on Michael Jackson’s 1983 “Thriller” is the best part of that video, the first by a black artist to appear on MTV), and the rise of ‘80s synth-pop and metal hair-bands (both idioms that depended much more upon quality visuals than upon quality music)—it could also provide artists with actual imagination (say, Kate Bush, or Thomas Dolby, or even—guilty pleasure—Men Without Hats’s great Renaissance-themed “Safety Dance”, complete with Morris, Maypole, and "Mad Girl") a parallel medium in which to convey the music’s intent.
That’s what VH’s “Jump,” and the “Jump” of the Pointer Sisters, actually do. They’re art, and they both do what art is supposed to do: to expand your sense of what is possible to do and to feel.
One of the most amazing pieces of spontaneously brilliant performance I've ever seen—one that recognized that the performance is not just the music, but also the visual and communal experience--was at the end of a concert of Renaissance “loud-band” (e.g., outdoor festival) music by the great wind ensemble Piffaro, in the brand-new big Auer Recital Hall at
But as the finale, they did what “loud-bands” have done ever since the Renaissance: they played a set of simple dance tunes, and dragged some volunteers out of the audience onto the stage to dance. They played these simple, repetitive, hypnotic dance tunes, faster and faster, their volunteers dancing in a circular line after them, until they came to the final crashing cadence, back in the center of the stage, and at that last chord, Adam Gilbert hurled his bagpipes forty feet straight into the air above the stage—and I, and I think most of the people in that audience, felt my heart leap.
That’s rock ‘n’ roll. That’s what the music of Piffaro, and the Pointers, and of Eddie, Alex, Michael, and Dave, and, indeed, everybody on the "100 Greats" list, did for me.
That’s what great music should do to us: it should make your heart leap.
Or,
"...Jump."
This post is dedicated with admiration to the memory of Sister June Pointer, who left us too soon, but who, in her life and music, absolutely lived up to the legacy of the great women and great musicians who preceded her.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
This is what Democracy looks like
Dems put Republicans' backs against the wall, insist that R's must actually go on record as either supporting or rejecting Bush's war:
11:30pm and there are still crowds waiting to get into the Senate visitor's gallery to watch the all-night Iraq debate.
Link.
"Pelosi to lead House Democrats on March to the Senate"
Madame Speaker takes one out of the West Wing playbook. You go girl!
- The President is holding firm so Leo calls the estranged First Lady who comes back to talk to him. Josh suggests,
- "Let's go up to the Hill and see 'em.... The country's waiting for someone to step up. It should be us."
Against Leo and Toby's advice, the President says to Josh, "Let's go."
Help--via "Comments"--from "100 Greats" fans
Friends:
Some of you have been kind enough to express positive reactions to the "100 Greats" project. In service of a future stage of that project (one that might even involve dead trees and radio waves), I wonder if I can enlist y'all's "hive-mind" editorial assistance? I'm looking for votes for "Top 5" 100 Greats posts (think of yourselves as participating in a virtual version of the "Top 5" arguments in Stephen Frears's hilarious High Fidelity).
Here's how it would work: if you're reading the "100 Greats" posts, and you read one you particularly like, would you send a note to that effect (just something like "One for the Top 5!") via the "Comment" function on that particular post? That way I'll have a reliable digital record of which posts the most people responded to most favorably.
You can get the complete set of "100 Greats" posts isolated from other Coyotebanjo material by clicking on this link, or on the "100 Greats" tag at the bottom of an individual post.
Many thanks!
Minor musical insight: Albert rules
Just listening again, for perhaps the 500th time, to the Allman Bros. version of T-Bone's "Stormy Monday" from the seminal Live at Fillmore East. This is a record I've been listening to literally since 1976, but until this morning, 31 years later, I never noticed how much Duane's solos on slow blues (on this tune, particularly the last chorus of the last solo before the last verse) build out of Albert King's vocabulary. Though, in my youth, BB (and even Freddie) were more frequently cited as influences on the white blues players, I continue in my seniority to hear Albert in the greatest of the younger blues guys, including especially Buddy Guy, Hendrix, Stevie Ray, and now, I realize, Duane as well.
Thanks, Albert.
Photo by Kevin Reynolds (http://www.route-online.com/kevinreynolds/)
Monday, July 16, 2007
"100 Greats" #061: Public Enemy, Greatest Misses, 1986-1991
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Now playing: Public Enemy - Fight the Power
By the spring of 1977, I had figured out
So I walked. Everywhere:
Washington Square Park south through Little Italy, the Bowery, and Chinatown, all the way Battery Park; across lower Manhattan from Alphabet City and the East River all the way down Christopher Street past the gay couples cruising, shopping, and gossiping (Christopher Street had been Ground Zero for the 1969 Stonewall Riots that were the first, long-overdue public face of the Gay Liberation movement), up Bleeker to the 8th Avenue hot-dog stands and bodegas (and where I got my first piercing on a hot spring day in ‘77) west to the Hudson docks and the view across to Jersey.
And I lived and died by the Village Voice’s “Free or Under 2 Bucks” back page. Back in the day, the Voice (still the greatest city-arts-rag I’ve ever read) would fill the second-last page of the edition with a long listing of all the arts & culture events going on around the island that were either free-admission or cost less than $2 to get into. It was great for me: for the price of the hike, or when I was feeling flush, 50 cents for the subway, I could hear all kinds of great music I’d never heard before, taking me into neighborhoods I would never have known existed. I heard Cecil Taylor in the basement of an uptown church that way, as well as hearing the Ramones and the Patti Smith Group at CBGB before anybody outside
That’s also how I heard hip-hop for the first time, before almost anybody in the white community—I think—could have heard it. In the early ‘70s, and particularly in the wake of the political turmoil that convulsed Kingstown prior to the Seaga/Manley elections and which almost killed Bob Marley, many, many people were getting the hell out of Jamaica and coming to the States. And a lot of them wound up in
I was assisting one of my Freshman Year Program colleagues, as a volunteer teaching literacy at a school in
I stopped on the corner, waiting for the light, and realized there was music coming from the playground behind me. It was not a style I was familiar with, but I already knew how to recognize a killer groove when I heard one.
I turned around, slung my rucksack over the other shoulder (basic NYC survival tip: never carry your bag zipper-outward—only inward, against your body), and crossed the sidewalk and walked onto the playground. Under the raggedy basketball hoop (battered and pockmarked backboard, rusty chain net), a group of kids wearing Knicks T-shirts and baggy jeans bobbed and rocked back and forth. In the center, there was a tall, skinny, dreadlocked guy with a microphone in his hand, chanting rhymes of the sort that I associated with the Dozens (variants of which I’d heard on records by Lenny Bruce and Lord Buckley). But this guy’s accent was definitely not
But my attention was immediately riveted by the heavy-set kid behind him, at the base of the hoop, who was crouched over a couple of battered turntables perched on a couple of milk crates (back in those days, plastic milk crates were an essential part of almost all NYC exterior or interior decoration—my bookshelves in the NYU dorm were built out of ‘em), with a set of headphones on, swaying back and forth and doing something with his hands to the LP’s themselves. I realized he was manually moving the discs with-and-against the turntables” motors.
I had never seen this before, and at the time I didn’t really know what I was seeing—my understanding of black music stopped way short of the contemporary (a fact I’m embarrassed about—I’m still ashamed of the “Disco Sucks” T-shirt a friend gave me, neither of us realizing the racism behind the NYC rock stations” derogation of that latest 1970s trend in Great Black Music). But I was an instrumentalist, and even if I was too much of a suburban folk-music head to realize the artistry of the toaster, I knew even through ignorant observation that the kid on the turntables (the “Wheels of Steel” as Grandmaster Flash immortalized them) was some kind of virtuoso. There’s an unmistakable visual power that emerges just from the physical motion of someone who is that much in command of his instrument. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I knew that that kid was absolutely rockin’.
I have a bad tendency to be obtuse about great music that’s right in front of me. I grew up outside
But now I think back to those kids rockin’ the wheels on a hot day in Spanish Harlem in 1977, and the tall skinny Jamaican guy toasting, and the break-dancers and graffiti artists whose art was just beginning to transform New York’s street culture, and I see their forebears' generations standing behind them like echoes or sepia shadows: from the doo-woppers harmonizing on Queens street-corners and the toasters driving sound-system trucks up into the hills of Jamaica's Cockpit Country, to James Brown tapdancing for tips outside Atlanta movie theaters, to the jug bands and hokum bands on the streets and in the speakeasies of Memphis, to the lone blues guitarists and pianists rocking the juke joints of Clarkesdale and Dockery’s Plantation, to the “novelty” dancers doing the hoochie-koo in the vaudeville houses and tent-shows of the chitlin’ circuit, to the Upper South black musicians from whom George Washington Dixon and Thomas Daddy Rice and Dan Emmett learned their music—and whose blackface imitation was conventionally derogated as noxious racism but was maybe—also—the era’s sincerest expression of awestruck admiration for black musical genius; all the way to Master Juba dancing in the Bowery for Charles Dickens and the slave fiddlers lighting up harvest dances in Louisiana Big Houses, and I see the tradition reaching back even farther—before Reconstruction, before slavery days, before the Middle Passage, and all the way back to the griots and jugglers, sorcerers and blacksmiths of West Africa, and I am reminded—again—of the transcendent power, stamina, and resilience of Black culture.
In James Cameron’s surprisingly great 1994 Strange Days film, a more imminent, American, and believable version of the Bladerunner/dystopia trope, a race war is catalyzed by the unsolved murder of a political rapper by two rogue white LA cops. Aside from the chilling timeliness of this story vis-à-vis the horrific miscarriage of justice that in 1991 had acquitted the eleven cops who beat Rodney King within an inch of his life, the cinematic pleasure of seeing Ralph Fiennes’s against-casting star turn as an ex-cop street con selling bootlegged “tapes” of other people’s psychological experiences, and the guilty pleasure of seeing a beyond-cut, leather-clad, dread-locked Angela Bassett kicking the living shit out of, first, three LA-punk thugs, and subsequently, two LAPD cops (one played by the great Vincent D'Onofrio), there is the realization that rap music came from somewhere—that is, in its earliest, greatest manifestations, before it was appropriated and turned into a wish-fulfillment adolescent fantasy reminiscent of Brian Wilson’s ‘sun & surf & blondes” fantasies with the Beach Boys.
Whether Afrocentric, apocalyptic, B-Boy, or gangsta: KRS-One, Public Enemy, Run-DMC, or NWA, hip-hop was the voice and the soundtrack of real communities. Passed around on short-run audio cassettes, from the kids who created street art out of spray cans and concrete walls, or sheets of cardboard and their own bodies, or out of busted-out turntables and salvaged LP’s, or out of nothing but their own minds and hearts and voices and rhymes, hip-hop is only a more recent manifestation of the indomitable, indefatigable, and eternal contribution of Africa to the very foundations of American expressive culture. After the horror that was inflicted upon them by Arabic slave traders and Portuguese traders and their own treacherous rulers and Presbyterian ship captains and Cuban auctioneers and
Public Enemy rendered the due bill.
Coming out of Adelphi University's free-form radio programming, they featured the righteous, wrathful roar of Chuck D (born Carlton Ridenhour into Long Island’s black middle class); the hilarious, rubbery Trickster-isms of his brilliant foil/fool Flavor Flav (of whom Chuck said, “I dunno what he adds, but he adds something": “Yeah, boyeeee!”); and the brilliant, orchestral, endlessly rich and layered beats of the genius DJ Hank Shocklee. What too few (white) cultural critics have ever understood, particularly about that first great generation of hip-hoppers, was that they were, as black griots had always done, inhabiting personae—that is, it didn’t matter whether Chuck really did come from the streets, any more than it mattered if Miles Davis had. The black bourgeois have been left out of the story of black music because so many wanted to believe that great black music was a product of instinct or environment, not sweat, effort, thought, and craft.
Chuck didn’t fuck around. Though the dime-store, anti-Semitic combative posturing of bodyguard/dancer Richard “Professor Griff” Griffin and his Security of the First World posse was laughable—though no less obnoxious for its childishness—Chuck’s own militancy was solid as a rock (in Antoine Fuqua’s 2004 Lightning in a Bottle, easily the greatest blues performance video ever, he turned Wolf’s “Killing Floor” into a brutal frontal assault on the Bush administration’s Iraq lies). It Takes a Nation of Millions was a clarion call declaring a new day in black music and identity politics.
And it comes through in the tracks of this compilation too, with Chuck’s great rhymes, Flav’s wild onomatopoeia, and the transcendent beats of Schocklee’s Bomb Squad, which feature the astonishing turntable artistry of Terminator X (who gets a shout-out on the tribute track “Terminator X”; best line from Flav “who gives a fuck about a goddamn Grammy?!?”), and which build layers upon layers of quotes, samples, allusions, and comic collisions: The Shocklee tour-de-force is “Night of the Living Baseheads,” which features no less than thirteen separate samples, from the likes of Sly & The Family Stone, The Temptations, Kool & The Gang, Dennis Coffey, The Bar-Kays, Rufus Thomas, the Average White Band, David Bowie, and Kurtis Blow and a whole network of James Brown and JB spinoff recordings (were it not for James, and his greatest drummer Clyde Stubblefield, whose “Funky Drummer” was sampled literally hundreds of times, it’s very probable that hip-hop as we know it wouldn’t exist). But the Bomb Squad also samples The Escorts, Stevie Wonder, and Isaac Hayes’s “Hyperbolicsyllabicsesquedalymistic” (“Black Steel”, which opens with Flav’s “Base fuh ya face, London!”); “Don’t Believe the Hype” (sampling JB, Rufus Thomas, Melvin Bliss, and which features Flav’s great onomatopoeic retching); “Fear of a Black Planet” (Sly Stone, Syl Johnson, and the Bar-Kays); and the anthemic hit single “Fight the Power” (sampling JB, JB sidekick Bobby Byrd, the Dramatics, Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock,” and even Clapton’s Marley cover of “I Shot the Sheriff”, and opening with a sample of Reverend King proclaiming “Matter of fact, it would be safe to say that they would rather switch than fight!”; Chuck's best line: "Most of my heroes didn't appear on no stamp"); the eponymous “Public Enemy #1” name-checks two other touchstones: Aretha Franklin and the JBs, and “Rebel Without a Pause” is built entirely on samples out of James’s stable, but opens with a sample of Jesse Jackson throwing down at the 1972 Wattstax concerts in LA.
There’s the epochal, wall-obliterating, heaviest-of-the-heavy 1991 collaborative remake of “Bring the Noise”, sampling Marva Whitney, JB again, and Funkadelic, between PE and the thrash/metal band Anthrax, which echoed the (equally great) 1986 collaboration on “Walk This Way” with Run-DMC and Aerosmith--though I'd argue that "Bring the Noise" rocked even harder and meaner.
My personal favorite is “911 is a Joke,” for its absolutely flawless production and Flav’s astonishing, instinctive, and virtuosic evocation of Uncle Remus, minstrelsy’s interlocutors, and all those nameless, subversive clowns who shucked-and-jived all the way back to the Trickster Rabbit, or Legba, at the crossroads, and before that to Elegibo in Bahia and Elegua and Anansi-the-Spider in West Africa. Flav’s finest hour, the brilliantly infectious, grimly flip irony of “911 is a Joke”—the griots have always understood that the very greatest political power for a musician accrues from making very sure that the critique absolutely rocks the house. Nothing is more revolutionary than music that everyone wants to hear. Only a trickster like Flav would find a way to frame this quintessential “fuck-off” to
The only hip-hop song of this period which was even close to as tough, uncompromising, and just plain dangerous was is N.W.A.'s instantly-banned “Fuck the Police”, with a refrain so infectious and so incendiary ("Fuck tha Po-leece, fuck tha po-leece, FUCK-'em!") that it spread like wildfire throughout black communities even though it probably never appeared on broadcast radio.
In the dystopic, paranoid (“Lenny, the question isn’t whether you’re paranoid; the question is whether you’re paranoid enough”), and sadly prescient Strange Days, just before he is murdered, the prototypical political rapper “Jeriko One” is pulled over on a bogus traffic charge, but refuses to observe the black-white power relations the LAPD expected, spitting out, from his knees, his contempt for a system he knows is loaded against him:
You’ve pulled over the wrong black man, Officer Steckler! I’m the 800 pound gorilla in your mist, fucker! I make more money in a day than you make in a whole year! And my lawyer loves sending sorryass Aryan RoboCop fuckers like you to jail! You’re gonna be in my next song…It’s about a cop who met his worst nightmare: a nigga with enough political juice to squash your ass like a stinkbug! You gonna be famous, fucker!
So they shoot him in the head.
These people changed our world. They changed our nation. They changed global musical culture. And they damned sure changed my life.
And they paid and paid and paid and paid for it.
Looking back to that steaming playground basketball court in
And I’m ashamed.
Saturday, July 14, 2007
Friday, July 13, 2007
"Area's federal representatives stand strong with Bush on Iraq"
Mr Rangel:
While I realize, as reporter, you probably do not choose the headlines for the articles that you write, I urge you to have a talk with the editor who *did* select the above headline for your 7/13/07 report on area representatives' response to President Bush's refusal to examine or adjust his policies in Iraq. It is highly distorting reporting to use the phrase "stand strong", as if to imply editorially that those who disagree with this bullheaded Presidential insistence are somehow "not strong." Such bias should be confined to the A-J's editorial page, where it is well represented.
Albert Einstein defined insanity as "doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." That would be at least as apposite a headline as the one chosen for your story.
Sincerely,
Dr Coyote
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
"100 Greats" #060: David Lindley & Hani Nasser: Playin' Real Good and Playin' Even Better
When I moved to
But that first time, I pulled into the outskirts of Midland, which during the ‘70s oil boom had been a showcase for the particularly unselfconscious materialism of West Texas (Texans aren’t self-conscious about anything: racism, materialism, small-mindedness, generosity, compassion—whatever it is, they’re not self-conscious about displaying it): oilfield cowboys in ten-gallon hats and soup-plate-sized belt buckles, wearing starched jeans and lizard-skin cowboy boots they could barely walk in, oil matrons wearing gold and diamond jewelry and polyester who, when lacking for some way to amuse themselves, would take the corporate jet to Dallas for the afternoon to go to Neiman’s.
Despite the fact that I was heading for a job as “blowout-preventer mechanic”—although I didn’t even know what blowout-preventer was, and my prior alternator experience had convinced me I was no mechanic—I wound up in Midland rather than Odessa, for no better reason than that I thought Cactus Drilling Company would be physically closer to its actual city-of-address (I wasn’t yet acquainted with the West Texas necessity of being willing to drive 50-150 miles to go to a liquor store or movie theater).
Odessa, the city just down the road, was the blue-collar town, where the down-on-their-luck Anglo bikers and the immigrant Mexican guys who actually worked the rigs lived (for a fantastic portrait of Midland-Odessa when I was there, see H.C. Bissinger’s fantastic detailed and accurate—yet sympathetic—book Friday Night Lights), but Midland was where management, office workers, and shareholders lived. By 1979, though, the oil boom was failing, with the visible indicators of a tanking local economy all around: shuttered businesses, half-built “economy” apartment blocks, and local people whose lives were falling apart.
I slept in my car that night. I was 19, and so poor, and so ill-prepared for this journey, that I didn’t even have enough ready cash, or a credit card. The banks were closed and there was no place to cash a check. Everything I owned was packed into that little green Fiat—and it seemed to me that night in the fall of 1979 that I had lost pretty much everything else in the world that wasn’t within a 5-foot radius. In addition to clothes, and a guitar, and a few records (Albert King, Springsteen, the Allman Brothers, Lou Reed, Stravinsky, Beethoven 6), and a portable record-player, I had a copy of the November ’79 issue of Guitar Player, the cover of which was a shot of Frank Zappa holding a rebuilt Strat that Hendrix had burned at Miami.
It’s funny how things work out. That night, in the parking lot behind a shipping yard in
In the article, Lindley described playing as a sideman to a whole community of LA-based ‘70s pop types I cared less than nothing about (Jackson Brown, Crosby/Nash, Linda Ronstadt…who?!?), but his take on music, his hilarious perspectives on polyester wardrobes, and, more than anything, the passionate enthusiasm with which he talked about obscure musics and dimestore guitars, made him sound like an alien visitor—from some musical planet much cooler, much more diverse, and just much bigger than any planet I knew. I had no idea what his music sounded like, but the article persuaded me that there was stuff there to know.
The next morning, I washed up in a gas-station bathroom and reported to the oil-company’s field offices, before locating a boarding situation with a woman whose white-collar husband had just abandoned her for a trophy wife, leaving her with a split-level house in
But it was almost 20 years before I ever heard Mr Dave in person, when Dharmonia and I were visiting my sister on the West Coast, and read that Lindley (having long since shed both his major-label shackles and his “pop” affiliations) would be playing solo at San Fran’s Great American Music Hall, surely one of the great music rooms in North America. We drove down to the Tenderloin to O’Farrell, and found Lindley’s peeps out in force. It was a typical guitar-geek crowd: mostly guys, mostly Anglo, mostly middle-aged, a good percentage of them already well into the throes of legacy recreational substances. They were obviously beyond-pumped to see him play live, and ready to sing along on the weird cover tunes (Bob Frizzell’s “She Took Off My Romeos” and “Tiki Torches at Twilight,” and Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Meatman” being exemplary) he was prone to.
Lindley had come out of the same 1960s Topanga Canyon folk revival scene that had birthed the careers of the great Taj Mahal and Ry Cooder, and in the music of those three, and their fantastic and various collaborations over the decades, you’ve got the best and most productive results of that folk revival: flexible, visceral, sympathetic, monstrously heavy-grooving music; for some reason, the
Dharmonia and I had good seats at one of the Hall’s miniature tables, not too far from the stage, and when he came out on stage, clad in a tasteful 4-color-coordinated houndstooth polyester combo (for a real “too much information” experience, visit his website and read his explanations about how to stretch additional days’ wear out of polyester clothes while on lengthy tours), complete with matching plastic shoes, I could see how free he was—how much the Dave off-stage and the “Mr Dave” onstage were, as a result of years of work, of hewing to playing only the kind of music he wanted to play and turning down gigs that prevented him from doing that, were the same person. And my GOD! was that an interesting—if eccentric—person.
One of the lessons it took me entirely too long to learn is that a really great musician, one who is serving the music and has learned to detach his ego from the music—to hear the music and to see himself as two separate entities—will never play “beyond what he can hear.” If the ceiling of the skill-set is at a particular place, a great musician will play at 80% of that level, because s/he has no investment in “proving” anything. She or he will just, in the words of the great blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, “wait ‘til I hear something to play, and then play that.”
Lindley could play anything he could hear, on any of the arsenal of instruments around him, and it seemed that he could hear everything. His freedom, chops, and confidence were so great, as he moved between instruments, that his personality and casually commanding musical vision came through as clear as a bell on all of them. That night at the GAMH, it was all brilliant, whether it was Sufi music on bouzouki, or his great version of “Mercury Blues” (which Nashville-hat artist Alan Jackson stole, sold to Ford, and made millions on) on Weissenborn, or his fantastic saz version of Warren Zevon’s “Play It All Night Long” (for whatever reasons—maybe comparably weird personalities—Lindly was the greatest, most simpatico interpreter of Zevon ever, and played the best solos that ever appeared on any Warren record, including the elegiac, deeply Buddhist last testamentary The Wind, recorded when Zevon was dying of cancer).
In between there were his amusingly bizarre stage presence and anecdotes, borrowing the Rastafarian musical dialect he learned from Ras Baboo in El Rayo-X or the old Cajuns and Scots from whom he learned his tunes, or telling stories of hair-raising Aeroflot flights to obscure Central Asian folk festivals, or the wild culture-clashing interactions he experienced when he brought back to the US the Malagasay musicians with whom he and Henry Kaiser had collaborated on the great World Out of Time collaborative CDs, or the meteorological adventure of recording with Sami musicians above the Arctic Circle for Sweet Sunny North, or relating a dream in which Jimmy Stewart came to him to explain what a disaster George HW Bush was (imagine Stewart’s “Harvey” voice saying “Ya people have just fucked things UP!”).
Lindley has always understood that music—all music, in its infinite, magnificent diversity, and particularly in performance—is about communicating. Communicating all kinds of things: one's own bent take on the world; a sense of music as a universal language across cultures; a sense of freedom; even just the miraculous reality that a shared sense of what constitutes beautiful sound can reach across all kinds of boundaries. It’s that One Big Note that has sounded in Lindley’s music ever since the Sixties; that sense that all music is sacred—that it can transform and enrich our lives.
That sense of the (comic, eccentric, magnificently human) sacred capacity of music moves throughout these records. No one--or two--disc s can really capture the breadth of Lindley’s musical mind, but these live performances, in duo with the Persian zarb player Hani Nasser, come close. Like Cooder’s duo with Hindi chitravina player Vishwa Mohan Bhatt, it’s a collaboration that came more or less serendipitously: a backstage jam at a folk fest, where Lindley realized Nasser’s percussion could drive and support his string grooves, without constraining him to specific chord changes or formal structures: freedom, within collaboration, in other words.
The wonderful roots tunes are here: the Cajun standard “Bon Ton Roulet”, played on the majestically deep-voiced Weissenborn (a lap-style slide guitar which can support baritone as well as tenor tunings, in turn obviating the necessity for any bass-player) and the reggae two-beat of “Ain’t No Way Baby”; so are the weirdo covers that the GAMH guitar-geeks had come for (the Weissenborn rockabilly of “Her Mind is Gone”; the rock-steady of “She Took Off My Romeos”; the faux-lounge groove, luau chord-changes, and Esquimel-esque falsetto of “More than Eva Braun” and “Tiki Torches at Twilight”—best line “All the girls with their boyfriends/Are throwing up in their cars”).
There’s a nakedly-beautiful tribute to the fallen Zevon in “Play It All Night Long,” which opens with a magnificent taksim (free improvisation) on Weissenborn, erecting cathedrals of open-tuned chords and overtone resonances, before Hani’s zarb comes in on the stark pulse of the backbeat. There are the lovely cross-cultural instrument-leapfrogging traditional tunes, notably another beautiful extended taksim (a term from Middle Eastern music) on saz that segues into the old Appalachian tune called “Cottonmill Blues”; and the beautiful banjo-esque modal groove, also played on saz, of “Way Out West in Kansas” (perhaps from Cooder, Lindley has inherited a great sensitivity old songs: his “Poor Old Dirt Farmer," like Cooder’s “Taxes on the Farmer Feeds Us All”, is one of the great folk-revival versions, and their duo take on Lead Belly’s Bourgeois Blues, though raggedy, was ferocious enough to have made George Bush wet his pants if Bubble Boy ever actually heard any real music), which culminates with a superlative extended jam and trading-fours on the chord changes.
Predictably, the show, and this disc, concludes with a fanboy’s yelled request for “Mercury Blues,” which Lindley and Nasser present in a storming version on slide and percussion. There are great extended solos here, to the fanboys’ delight, and it’s a fitting conclusion to the disc.
But my favorite moment might come earlier, on the swirling slide reverie that opens “Rag Bag”. It’s presented as another free-rhythm taksim, an improvisation without meter—though it would probably more appropriate to describe it as alap, the analogous mood- and mode-setting improvisation that opens a performance of Hindi classical music—over the organ-like drone of the Weissenborn’s baritone low C. It’s very open music—no specific rhythm, no particular sense of urgency or anticipated revival. We’re just listening to Lindley’s Big Music, to his reverie and recollection and receptivity to the very big world that his sense of musical freedom has opened to him. And to us.
That night in 1978, in my tiny, decrepit Italian car, with almost all my worldly possessions around me, not knowing what the next day would bring, reading David Lindley’s words before I ever heard his music, sleeping under what I now realize were the virtually infinite stars of the October West Texas sky, I could not have known the journey that would leave me writing this appreciation, almost thirty years, yet less than 100 miles, away.
But I’m awfully grateful I’ve had David Lindley’s Big Music along for that ride.
