Generally Eclectic Review

“Blowing Zen: Finding An Authentic Life” by Ray Brooks (Sentient Publications)

2012-01-19T16:19:00.000-08:00

I first came across the term “blowing zen” when I began teaching the Music of the World course at SUNY Fredonia. The textbook I used that semester referred to “Suizen” (in English, “blowing Zen”) as a Japanese meditation practice, in which a person playing the shakuhachi bamboo flute (now just as often made of harder woods, and even plastic) uses breath control techniques specific to that instrument as a means to attain enlightenment, a profound level of self-realization. This stayed with me, first off because I love the sounds the shakuhachi is capable of making, but also because it represented a function of music-making that I’d never considered before.

I should at this point make clear that, despite some youthful flirtation with the concepts of Zen Buddhism, I have never seriously pursued an interest in Zen, and am thus unqualified to critique the book from that particular perspective. My primary interest in this book, then. is the shakuhachi, a flute with an uncommon range of timbres and pitches, achieved by a skillful manipulation of the notched mouthpiece, the player’s breath and head movements, and partial holing techniques. It is an instrument long associated with the komuso, known as “monks of nothingness and emptiness”, itinerant Japanese monks who survived by playing the shakuhachi both for spiritual sustenance and for begging. as street musicians who wore beehive-shaped headgear that covered their faces, the better to deny the ego.

Ray Brooks is an English-born musician now resident in British Columbia who has achieved considerable mastery of the shakuhachi, well beyond the noodlings one too often encounters from Westerners dabbling in a non-Western musical idiom. “Blowing Zen” (first published in 2000, and now revised and expanded) begins by looking at how Brooks discovered the instrument, virtually by accident, while living and working as an English teacher in Japan. It goes on to trace the fascinating path he took not simply to learn the instrument as a casual means of personal entertainment, but to achieve spiritual goals and self-discipline, while studying on a high level with two of the very finest shakuhachi masters/teachers (sensei) of our modern era, the late Katsuya Yokoyama and the still-active Akikazu Nakamura. Brooks’ musical and spiritual journey also led him to witness and to participate in aspects of Japanese culture and the Japanese worldview closed to most Westerners.

Playing the shakuhacki is a very exacting art, with a great deal of tradition behind the learning process, requiring strict attention, scrupulous adherence to the dictates of the sensei, and considerable self-restraint. It is fascinating to read about the arduous beginners’ process of blowing one note over and over before progressing to the next note, a commitment American music students would be too impatient to put up with for very long. Later, students must learn a composition thoroughly before being given the opportunity to begin work on another piece.

The shakuhachi is in some ways an endangered tradition in modern-day Japan, with its highly Westernized culture - albeit a Westernization that clashes oddly with a worldview that treasures orderliness and subordination to one’s work to degrees rarely encountered in the West - that threatens to turn traditional, classical Japanese culture into museum-piece status. Long hours of practice and relative solitude (even when practicing in public places, as Brooks very often did), required to play the shakuhachi with any sort of true understanding, require a regimen which the fast pace of Japanese life and devotion to one’s employer rendersincreasingly difficult to live by. The description of Brooks’ shugyo, a self-imposed “marathon” in which he headed up a chilly mountainside every day to practice his instrument for hours at a time for sixty consecutive days is a testament to his determination to do whatever was needed to devote himself fully to his chosen musical and spiritual paths. (Fortunately, he had the moral and financial support of his wife during what must have been a trying time for her.)

Brooks’ story is peppered with a number of interesting characters, in many senses of that word. We not only get to meet his sensei, but also his translator (a necessary adjunct, though the flutist managed to learn a fair amount of Japanese; there is a useful glossary in the back of the book which I found myself consulting a number of times), people he met while practicing at temples and riding trains (he often went great distances for lessons and practice sessions), fellow-Westerner street musicians and vendors he befriended, Tibetan Buddhist monks he met in trips to India (there are occasional flashbacks to earlier experiences) and so on. The tales of these encounters are very much a bonus, giving Japan and its people a substantial subsidiary role in his story.

One doesn’t need a great knowledge of Zen to learn quite a lot from this enchanting book. One doesn’t even have to know much about Japanese music theory or performance practices; Brooks supplies whatever basic musical/cultural knowledge you may need to understand his story. Not only will an interest in faraway places and their customs suffice as a starting point, simple intellectual curiosity will be amply rewarded. The book works on many different levels, so that no matter what your particular reason may be for picking it up, it will be a satisfying experience. Very definitely recommended.

www.sentientpublications.com

“Me, The Mob, and the Music” by Tommy James with Martin Fitzpatrick (Scribner) /”High Strung” by Mike Rabon (Aberdeen Bay)

2011-12-28T16:48:00.000-08:00

Two memoirs by 60’s rock’n’roll stars, both of which offer inside glimpses of how a record industry that was rotten to its core cajoled the young performers we loved to sell their souls and forced them to pay an enormous price in exchange for their few years of glory. To be certain, we all knew that the music business was full of shysters, but here are the gory details direct from the pens of two of the survivors. At the risk of sounding cynical - before you start feeling too sorry for record companies who are losing their stranglehold on our entertainment dollars in this era of copyright infringement via illegal downloads, it might pay you to see what really goes on, or at least did in the Golden Era when fortunes were made by everyone except the voices you heard on the records you bought.

Tommy James’ reminiscences are far from the usual dry recitation of names, dates, and facts. No, Tommy has a story to tell and it’s a pretty harrowing one. He opens with an ingratiating recounting of childhood memories, slanted toward those parts of his childhood that are relevant to his later career choice. We see young Tommy Jackson growing up in Niles, Michigan (not Pittsburgh as has been reported from time to time, though Pittsburgh does figure heavily into a significant portion of his story). He works in a record store as a young teenager, where he hears all the latest hits and gets a feel for what the youthful public wants to hear. He starts playing guitars in bar bands while still well below the drinking age. He loves the attention, the girls, the process of putting a cover band and a sound together.

He becomes part of a regional scene where cover bands gleefully steal show-stopping favorite songs from other cover bands (who didn’t write them in the first place). When one of those bands, the Rivieras, hits the bigtime with “California Sun”, Tommy Jackson wants to be next to grab the brass ring. A first attempt, with a band called Tom and the Tornadoes, had (deservedly) gone nowhere, But with a new band, the Shondells, he records a simple, yet irresistible tune called “Hanky Panky”, which had been a B-side for the Raindrops (songwriters extraordinaire Jeff Barry and Ellie Greenwich). It doesn’t do much at first, but suddenly takes off big - but only in Pittsburgh. The rest of the Shondells don’t seem ready to tour on behalf of the record, so young Mr. Jackson (still a teenager) makes a round of personal appearances in PA, with such a degree of success that a local DJ takes him to New York to hunt for a record deal.

If this were a typical rock’n’roll tale of woe, it might well end after this brief burst of regional fame. But ”Hanky Panky”’ catches the ear of Roulette Records boss Morris Levy. (Some of you probably already know where this is going, since Mr. Levy has long-since amassed a, shall we say, “reputation” as a wheeler-dealer virtually devoid of scruples.) Roulette had been a successful record company in the 1950’s, the home of Jimmie “Honeycomb” Rodgers, Buddy Knox, Jimmy Bowen, the Playmates, et. al. Its various subsidiaries were a dominant force in doo-wop. But by the mid-60s, Roulette had become mostly a home to jazz and (also on a subsidiary) Latin music, with no pop-chart stars. But when Morris Levy heard “Hanky Panky”, he heard cash registers ringing. He convinces other record companies that this new young singer, re-named Tommy James for reasons that are unclear, was HIS artist. No one in the record industry dared buck Morris Levy.

What happens from this point on is a story best told by Tommy James himself. It’s a tale of deception on a grand scale, incorporating thievery, bribery, tax evasion, organized crime (Levy was intimately tied in with the Genovese family, THE New York Mob family in its heyday), drugs, violence and threats of violence, murder, whatever other forms of vice you might name, it’s here. One is tempted to add “involuntary servitude” to that list, in that Tommy James had no idea what level of criminal activity Morris Levy was exposing him to when the wide-eyed youth innocently signed his life over to Roulette Records. But no one put a gun to his head to sign on the dotted line (though they may as well have).Even so, for all intents and purposes, Levy virtually treated him almost like a slave. While James was selling millions of records, bringing tens of millions of dollars into Morris Levy’s personal bank account, James saw none of the royalties due him. Yet he continued to work for Levy, partly out of fear, to be sure, but also because all those hit records were allowing him and the Shondells to play ever more lucrative live gigs, from which he could indeed make some very decent money.

This really should have been a very special time for Tommy James. He was on national t.v., touring to places most musicians only dream about seeing, accumulating a stash of gold records (which Morris Levy kept for himself), hob-nobbing with the likes of Ed Sullivan (who, not surprisingly, bungled his name on-air; turns out Ed drank during his show) and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey - it all sounds so ideal. But the reality was constant exploitation, mind-altering pills, and the necessity to always watch one’s back in case a goodfella was behind a partition intending to gun him down. The smiling face on the album covers masked a total mess of a talented young man, caught up in a web of fraud and treachery with seemingly no way out. But those few opportunities which might have presented an opportunity to leave it behind were ignored. Tommy James was not simply addicted to uppers, fame, women, and guns, he was addicted to Morris Levy.

There are times when it seems Tommy James is making Morris Levy the primary focus of the book, not Tommy James. But since this is an eye-witness account which doesn’t simply confirm all the rumors which have circulated around Levy for decades, it expands upon them and then some, this is not necessarily a bad thing. James strikes me as being brutally honest about both himself and Levy, and is not afraid to point fingers and name names, even when significant Mobsters are involved. One can only guess that he waited to tell his story until enough people had died to render it safe. The result is a real page-turner of a true-crime story as well as an expose of record business excess at what I can only hope was its worst. And when Tommy recounts the events of his final confrontation and break-up with Morris Levy, the writing reaches such a feverish pitch that one reads as fast as one can to match the pace of the story, then has to go back and read it over more carefully to savor every detail.

The full title of the book is “Me, The Mob, and the Music: One Helluva Ride With Tommy James and the Shondells.” One helluva ride, indeed, and one helluva book. Perhaps not as many will line up at bookstore counters to read this as they did for the recent books by Keith Richards or Steven Tyler, but this would be the book I would recommend if you’re only going to be reading one rock’n ‘roll memoir.
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There are times when Mike Rabon’s memoir is even more harrowing than Tommy James, though not quite for the same reasons. But Rabon and his compadres in the fondly-remembered 60’s garage band, the Five Americans, also experienced the seamier side of the record business, albeit not on the same scale of a Morris Levy. (I’m sure it seemed just as seamy to Rabon and friends while they were living through their nightmare, of course.) But it’s the brutal honesty with which Rabon describes the horrifying life that he lived for several years following the demise of the band that makes it stand out from the rock-memoir pack.

The Five Americans were an Oklahoma band working out of Dallas when they managed to amass five hit records during 1966-67. Considering that conditions under which they had to work, it’s almost surprising that they had any hits at all, much less a #3 smash in “Western Union” and a bona-fide garage-psych classic with their first hit, “I See The Light”. Rabon takes us through his growing-up years, which were pretty normal, and his brief tenure at Southeastern State College, in Durant, OK, where a band called the Mutineers first got together. The Mutineers decide to drop out of school and head to Dallas, where they assumed they could find more club/bar dates and perhaps even make enough money to eat on a regular basis. They promptly began to starve, surviving by means of shoplifting foodstuffs. So it seemed like quite the break when they attracted the attention of Jon Abnor, Jr., A&R director of a small Dallas label called Abnak. (Abnor later became a one-hit wonder as one-half of the duo Jon and Robin, though Javonne “Robin” Braga was the only one of the pair who could actually sing.)

This was where the Mutineers’ troubles really begin. Abnak head, wealthy insurance executive John Abdnor, Sr. (his ne’er-do-well son slightly changed the spelling of the family name) may not have been a mob-connected gangster on the same level of criminality as Morris Levy, but he was a shyster with a capital “S”. He was just as eager to keep all his talent’s earnings for himself as Levy, but he did so with a sniff of legality. (Abdnor did, however, also serve time for tax evasion.) Abdnor depended on the business naivete of five teenaged musicians who were so excited to “sign here” that they did so without comprehending, or even reading, the contract they foolishly inked their names to, making Abdnor their manager, recording boss, and essentially, mortal-soul owner. No matter how much the newly-christened Five Americans (a name they hated; it was, of course, bestowed on them by Abdnor) earned in royalties and live performances, Abdnor absconded with all of it, even the concert fees. However, he did give the band a place to stay, and left them a small monthly stipend to live on as an advance against future royaltes. Of course, they were never given a reckoning to show how much they actually earned, with the result that Abdnor kept them in perpetual indenture till the day the band broke up, and beyond in Rabon’s case.

The entire Five Americans/Abdnor saga makes for fascinating reading, but the truly traumatic parts of the book relate the story of Rabon’s post-stardom descent into a maelstrom of poverty, mind- and body-destroying drug addiction, brutal maltreatment, injuries from accidents, thoughts of suicide, even a failed attempt at becoming a drug dealer, all recounted with excruciating detail that is both hard to read, yet hard to put down. The book alternates chapters - musical career one chapter, addiction the next, music after that, more about addiction, and so on. This structure may seem less than ideal to a chronologically-minded historian like myself, but I shudder to think if the entire last half of the book had been devoted to his post-music troubles. Fortunately, in the end, Rabon is rescued from certain (and very literal) oblivion, returns to college, and works his way into a settled and satisfying life as a teacher, husband, and father. His medical woes were not yet over, but he has managed to survive once again.

There are some factual difficulties with Rabon’s biographical details. He claims to have been inspired by Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Hound Dog” in 1953, and that they were released on the Sun label. Both of these songs were recorded for RCA Victor, in 1956. Perhaps he was confusing them with “That’s All Right, Mama” or another Sun release, but even these were not yet recorded till 1954. He also refers to “I See The Light” as being the Five Americans’ second release, but Wikipedia (not always the most reliable source, admittedly; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Americans#Singles) lists it as the third. Wikipedia also lists five unsuccessful releases between “Evol - Not Love” and “Western Union”, which Rabon does not acknowledge. Of course, it would have been just like John Abdnor, Sr. to release material without telling his artists, or perhaps Rabon simply didn’t feel they merited attention. There are a number of small typos, which seem to be plaguing small-press books these days, but they do not interfere with one’s understanding of the text.

Both of these books are essential reading if you wish to get a better grasp of what the record business was like in the 60’s, or just like to read fascinating autobiographies by once-major stars. Tommy James still has a healthy career as a touring performer, Mike Rabon is doing equally well in his life, but both have dramatically intense stories to tell. (I hear rumors that Mitch Ryder’s forthcoming book will top them all. Hard to see how, but I’d love to see it!)

“1950’s Radio In Color: The Lost Photographs Of Deejay Tommy Edwards” by Christopher Kennedy (Kent State University Press)

2011-12-23T16:47:00.000-08:00

I should mention right off the bat that the Tommy Edwards whose photographs of rock’n’roll, r&b, adult pop, and jazz artists are presented here is NOT the singer Tommy Edwards whose “It’s All In The Game” was a #1 hit in 1958. The Tommy Edwards under consideration here was a very popular and influential disc jockey in Cleveland during that same period, who later became known nationally for running a record store that advertised in the music magazines of the 60’s.

One of the reasons Cleveland established such a vaunted reputation as an influential music town in the 1950’s (which subsequently made it such a natural location for the Rock’n’Roll Hall of Fame, even long after its musical significance had dwindled) was the power of its disc jockeys to choose the “right” tunes to make into hits, their willingness to take chances on new sounds and small labels, and their ability to create tastes not just among their local listeners but among other members of the deejay fraternity throughout large chunks of the US. Keep in mind that this was a long-ago time when individual deejays were free to pick the music they played on the air, and were not bound to the dictates of Music/Program Directors, out-of-town consultants, tight playlists, prepackaged formats, automation and satellite broadcasting. The local DJ was king, and Cleveland spawned a number of Kings, from the daddy of them all, Allan Freed to local superstars such as Bill Randle and Tommy Edwards.

But Tommy Edwards didn’t simply spin records on-air. As with so many other DJ’s of the era, he played host to a number of young hopefuls who would arrive at radio stations hoping to be interviewed live on the air and get their record played on a major outlet. As with so many other DJ’s, he also hosted record hops, which might feature brief appearances by young hopefuls as well. Beyond that, however, Tommy Edwards had a hobby - photography. Thus, when artists showed up at the studio, he would take color photographs of most of them, then show many of these photos in slide-show format at the record hops he hosted, and mail copies of a few of then out to fans who paid a small fee to receive them. In doing so, he unwittingly documented the Cleveland radio comings and goings of a large number recording artists of the mid-to-late 50’s - big stars, total unknowns, and unknowns who - every so often - would eventually develop into stars.

These photographs disappeared from sight until quite recently, until rediscovered by Christopher Kennedy. Likewise, Kennedy managed to locate copies of Edwards’ hastily assembled newsletter, read mostly by people in the radio industry, in which the energetic DJ shared many of his thoughts, plugged the records he liked, discussed a number of shows and club dates occurring in Cleveland - all in brief, pithy sentences shoved together with little rhyme or reason. What Kennedy has done is reproduce dozens upon dozens of these marvelous pictures, nearly all unseen for decades - rockabillies, ballad singers, aspiring teen idols, actors attempting to exploit their fame by releasing records, and so on - one per page, then supplement it with an extremely readable text that’s every bit as valuable as the pictures.

Kennedy’s text is generally written as if he composing it at the time the pictures were being taken, though there are occasions when he is not averse to allowing himself the wisdom of hindsight, and will let us in on what became of these artists in the ensuing years. He will often insert relevant quotes from Edwards’ newsletter, in a bold typeface, so we don’t confuse it with Kennedy’s own contributions. In yet another typeface, he then shares (whenever possible; sadly, many artists have passed away in the intervening half-century since they were photographed) the thoughts and memories of many of the artists as they look back on their experiences in recent years (mostly 2008-2009).

So what have here is a multi-level pop-music-history package here - the photos, quotes from Edwards, text by Kennedy, modern-day quotes by the artists, all well-organized, beautifully printed, and logically edited. There are more lesser-known artists than major names here (though there ARE many of them also), as there have always, throughout pop music history, been more people who didn’t make it than there have been major names. It is both entertaining and invaluable to see them, learn about their small triumphs and greater failures, and hear what they have to say when looking back on their lives. Their photos are sometimes posed, but more often candid. Much can be learned by studying the subjects’ expressions, demeanor, even their wardrobe and jewelry. It seems clear that most of the artists liked Tommy Edwards as a result of their brief encounter. Perhaps more significantly, it is clear that Mr. Edwards liked and genuinely respected the great majority of the artists as well.

Sadly, Tommy Edwards. who consistently claimed he had nothing at all do with payola and refused to accept it at every opportunity, was nonetheless caught up in the wake of the pay-for-play scandals. The era of the local DJ who could choose his own music came to a close, when it was deemed somehow safer for consultants to choose what people would hear, and the Top 40 format came into existence, with pretty much the same music being played pretty much everywhere. Edwards was unable to find a job in radio, so went into the retail end of the record business. Now, thirty years after his death, we have this visually beautiful and historically invaluable coffee-table book to remember him and his era by. This one’s a gem.

“The Sight Of Silence: John Cage’s Complete Watercolors” by Ray Kass (distrib. by University of Virginia Press)

2011-12-05T16:43:00.000-08:00

John Cage’s contributions to the musical life of the 20th-century were game-changing. What may less known to the public at large are his efforts in such fields as mycology, print-making, poetry/literature, and painting. Truth is, in a couple of these areas, he was essentially a dilettante, but this book/DVD gives us a chance to see and assess his attempts at applying his chance compositional techniques to the art of watercolor painting.

Cage was first invited to participate in painting workshops at Mountain Lake, Virginia in 1983. He was already in his 70’s, and had no need to break new artistic ground. But his enthusiasm for discovering and experiencing new (to him) things led to what was a fascinating new toy for Cage. Needless to say, his paintings were no more representational or carefully calculated than his music was. The I Ching, which served as the basis for assembling musical scores without the interference of artistic intention, once again was used to substitute for pre-conceived creative decisions. At least this was his original concert, though aesthetic decisions occasionally forced their way into the process.

Cage’s subjects were river rocks. No, he did not paint portraits of rocks. Rather, rocks of various sizes and shapes were selected, placed on paper (the specific paper chosen by reference to a randomly-generated number list) in a position dictated by the I Ching, after which Cage selected a brush with reference to his I Ching random-number list, dipped it in a color of paint chosen by reference to the I Ching list, etc. He then painted around the rock, so we are left with outlines of rocks, which were then painted over using a randomly selected wash. In all, 125 paintings were completed in roughly this manner over a period of seven years. Many are aesthetically striking, while others communicate nothing to the viewer (at least to this viewer). But Cage wasn’t concerned with how the viewer would react to these works, pro or con. It was the process that was most significant to him.

The book covers this process in quite a bit of detail, but not so painstakingly that it becomes tedious. Cage’s fascination with this “new toy” is readily communicated by the accompanying DVD, which is essential to any understanding of this intriguing experiment. The films make visual sense of many points that may be a bit difficult to fully comprehend through simply reading the text and viewing the still photos that are generously sprinkled throughout the book. It’s intriguing to see Cage apply the very compositional techniques he brought to his musical scores to an entirely different, fully visual medium, whether one finds them ultimately satisfying or not. Even so, the longer the project carried on the more Cage began to make decisions based on personal preference rather than leaving every single aspect to chance.

Of course, the “main event”, the reason for this book’s existence, is the watercolors themselves. Many of them are reproduced small-scale, several to a page, but in most cases such a view will suffice. The colors tend to be earth-toned rather than brightly colored, but this seems to blend well with the genesis of the project as a collection of rocks culled from a riverbank. The book’s author/assembler, Ray Kass, was the instigator of this art project, and was involved during every step of the operation. Thus, his text may be readily accepted as the definitive retelling of the events described herein.

The accompanying DVD not only illustrates the artistic process, there is a also performance of an early Cage work for prepared piano and percussion, a couple literary readings, and a stimulating question-and-answer session with the artist. In all, a satisfying document, which allows us a glimpse into “another side” of John Cage from the one we’re used to reading about.

“Musical Instruments Of The Southern Appalachian Mountains” by John Rice Irwin (Schiffer)

2011-11-19T16:13:00.000-08:00

This book by folklore historian John Rice Irwin, founder of the Tennessee-based Museum of Appalachia, has been around since 1979, but is new to me. Thankfully, it is still available, as it is a seminal source for understanding the art and craft of non-professional music-making in the Appalachian areas of the United States.

“Musical Instruments Of The Southern Appalachian Mountains” is largely a book of photographs of music-making devices from the Museum’s collection, with explanatory text describing them without organological jargon, and contributing small, but helpful amounts of information regarding their provenance. If you’re thinking, “OK, a book of pictures of fiddles, banjos, and guitars, big deal” - clearly, you haven’t seen this book.

For one thing, there isn’t much here about guitars, because the instrument is a relatively recent (by comparison) arrival to this part of the world, to the point where it is included in a section devoted to “miscellaneous instruments”, along with the mandolin, the jews’ harp, harmonica, flutes, etc. The focus instead is on the long-standing staples of Appalachian music, the fiddle, banjo, and plucked dulcimer (plus two photos of hammered dulcimer, a zither which in the US is more normally found in the further north of the region covered by the book), plus a short chapter on the now-rarely-encountered mouth bow.

But what really entices me to write about this book is the fact that the vast majority of these pictures are of homemade instruments. Keep in mind that the mountain people generally could not afford store-bought, manufactured instruments, most likely couldn’t find them very easily if they wanted to (especially in the pre-Montgomery Ward era), and furthermore, had no intention of playing these instruments professionally. The people who owned these instruments were truly “the folk”, who played music solely for their own entertainment, as well as for friends, family, neighbors. Thus, if the instrument is shaped funny - and many of them are - or made out of non-standard materials - and many of them are - they served the purposes of the people who played them.

Thus, we have pictures of a fiddle made from a wooden cigar box to which a carved neck was attached;, an octagonal banjo, a square one, a cardboard one, pus one made from a ham can; and dulcimers of various shapes, including purely rectangular. Clearly, the assemblers of these oddities made instruments from the objects they had at hand, with no fancy tools to shape or fabricate “proper” instruments. But even those which look like “normal” instruments at first glance often have anomalies of construction which set them apart from more formal patterns. In a few cases, it’s a puzzle how any sound could come out of these rough-hewn products of unskilled hands, belonging to ordinary mountain residents who were simply hoping to make something pleasant with which to pass the time.

This is, then, an absolutely enchanting book, one which appeal greatly to folklorists, acoustic string musicians, folk-art enthusiasts (because in the long run, many of these are closer to folk-art constructions than to “legitimate”, finely-crafted instruments), regional history buffs, students in American Studies courses, and anyone interested in the byways of American music.

The book is 104 glossy pages, longer than they are tall. The photos are in black and white, which somehow seems more appropriate to the subjects at hand than slick, shiny color photography. The publisher’s catalog may be downloaded from http://www.schifferbooks.com/newschiffer/catalog_download.php The catalogs will also guide you to other books on Appalachian culture (not just music) by the same author.

“Preachin’ The Blues: The Life &Times of Son House “ by Daniel Beaumont (Oxford University Press)/“Hidden History of Mississippi Blues” by Roger Stoll

2011-10-24T16:12:00.000-07:00

I have to confess, this is a book I never thought I’d live to see - an actual biography of Eddie James House,Jr. (1902-1988). It’s not that Son House doesn’t deserve a book, because he most certainly does. It’s not that he lived so long ago in the distant past, as his most active years as a professional musician were during my own lifetime. No, it’s a case of my not realizing that the interviewers who wrote articles on House following his mid-1960’s rediscovery had spent as much time as they did discussing his earlier life with him. So, we do know quite a bit about his life and times after all. Indeed, it is the liberal use of these earlier interviews that has made it possible for Daniel Beaumont to even attempt a book-length biography on this complex figure from the early days of recorded blues.

Having said that, however, it needs to be quickly noted that these earlier interviewers left some gaping holes in Son House’s life story. His early years are sketchy at best. The period in between his Alan Lomax sessions of the early 1940’s and his re-emergence in the mid-1960’s are mostly a cipher. Even the extremely few events in House’s life during that period that we do know at least something about are shrouded in impenetrable mystery. Beaumont has done what he can to fill in gaps by studying public documents, tracking down what few relatives he can, and uncovering a handful of musicians in House’s long-time adopted home of Rochester, NY, who remember him from his immediate pre- and post-rediscovery years. But there are still enormous chasms in our knowledge of Son House’s life, which will most likely never be filled in.

Even so, we must celebrate what we do have here, since “Preachin’ The Blues” is most likely as close to a definitive rendering of the life of Son House as we can ever hope to get. True, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t some older Rochesterian who knew Son House during the 50’s and 60’s - even a neighborhood kid who would be in his 50’s or 60’s now - that remains uncovered. But I’m willing to accept that Beaumont has done all he can to uncover whatever facts he could find. Certainly, he has interpreted and arranged these scattered nuggets into a coherent true-life picaresque narrative.

The Son House we meet here is a brilliant musician who lived his life with extreme carelessness. To be sure, beginning one’s life in a small hamlet near Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta is generally not thought of as being conducive to a life of great intellectual accomplishment or urbane sophistication. House took one of the few “ways out” available to a young black man in the plantation world of the early 20th century, and became a preacher. But his penchant for alcohol, women, and a hot temper proved to be far too much of a temptation. But in House’ case, you could remove him from the pulpit, but you couldn’t remove the pulpit from Son House. He continued to preach informally through his career as a blues singer, dispensing advice on how his listeners should get right. Ironically, his religious rants were always abetted by the consumption of massive quantities of intoxicating drinks.

“Preachin’ The Blues” has a fair number of on-tour anecdotes of this type. But Beaumont also has some trenchant observations on the subject of whether re-discovery and a measure of fame were actually good for Son House, aside from increasing his income substantially. The book opens with his rediscovery, as we witness three young white blues fans poking around Mississippi during some of the most tragic days of the Civil Rights struggle, asking questions about an old black man who was not even in the area anymore.The naivete of these insufficiently prepared pseudo-folklorists could well have gotten them killed. They eventually pick up clues that lead to their quarry in inner-city Rochester. What they found was an alcoholic in rather rough physical condition who didn’t play the guitar anymore, didn’t intend to perform anymore, and didn’t even possess a guitar. Their unmitigated chutzpah in hauling him off to face adoring audiences who were ready to worship at the proverbial feet of one of the unsung greats of a bygone era is rather mind-boggling in retrospect. (Canned Heat fans will be interested to learn about the role Al ”Blind Owl” Wilson played in rehabilitating House’s musical skills.)

The story of the circumstances surrounding House’s Wisconsin recording sessions for the fabled Paramount label, and the trip up north in the company of Willie Brown, Charlie Patton, and Louise Johnson, is another highlight of the book. Much has been written about House’s relationship with Alan Lomax, who for all his valuable work as a folk-music preservationist, always seemed more interested in the song than the people who performed the song. Indeed, I’ve heard stories about House’ Library of Congress sessions that are more colorful than what we read here. But Beaumont seems to treat both House and Lomax from an objective viewpoint, which makes his version seem believable. House’ sad final years in Detroit are treated with sensitivity and sympathy.

In sum, there are gaps, and no doubt there will always be gaps. But what we do have here is well worth reading and pondering. The book will appeal more to the hard-core Mississippi blues listener, who already knows a thing or two about the milieu from which Son House’s music arose, rather than to the average person who once saw the name Son House in connection with his influence on Robert Johnson. But if the book brings that Johnson fan closer to the true originator - well, OK, truer, at least - of the style Johnson is erroneously credited with developing, then Beaumont would have done his job doubly well.

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The title “Hidden History of Mississippi Blues” may set you to wondering at first glance. Dozens of dozens of books have been written about the Mississippi blues, so what could be so darn hidden at this point? That would probably be a legitimate reaction, particularly if you believe every word found on academic library shelves is pure gold, or that every word composed on Alan Lomax’s typewriter was the gospel truth.

But our present era is a fascinating period in blues historiography. Seemingly every assertion that generations of early writers on the blues took for granted, every long-cherished opinion-masquerading-as-fact that served as the basis for the next generation’s textbooks is now being questioned, and many are being thrown out. It’s not that earlier writers were lying to us, you understand, it’s more a case of their making unwarranted assumptions based ontoo-scant evidence.

Roger Stolle, a widely-published blues writer/radio DJ/CD and DVD producer, who runs a blues store in the heart of the blues world (Clarksdale, MS), is not the first writer to offer a “corrective” version of blues history (I won’t use the word “revisionist”, as it has too often taken on a negative connotation), and certainly is neither the most thorough nor the most radical. But what he offers in several of the chapters within this slim, yet compact volume is a short historical look at the history of the Mississippi blues for non-specialists, one which incorporates many of the updated concepts and jettisons many of the now-discredited speculations of the past.

Stolle goes beyond psychological/sociological mythologizing by looking at the historical conditions in the Yazoo Delta region which went into the development of the distinctive styles of Mississippi blues music, the lives of cotton-plantation sharecroppers, the realities of the record business in the 1920’s and 30’s, the juke joints where black Mississippians were entertained by this music, the infamous “Crossroads” myth (which my students still believe to be the honest truth about Robert Johnson, no matter how many times I bring up the name Tommy Johnson, and no matter how many times I explode other aspects of this long-standing Tall Tale; a good myth trumps the truth any day), the role of radio in popularizing and disseminating the blues, and more.

For most hard-core blues historians, much of this book will no doubt sound familiar. But even they should find much of interest here. Because Stolle is an active participant on the modern Delta blues scene, he has perspectives to offer which only an insider can develop. In particular, there are almost fifty pages of interview transcripts, reminiscences and commentary from giants such as Honeyboy Edwards and Jelly Roll Kings’ drummer Sam Carr, modern-day Delta-blues survivors such as T-Model Ford and Duck Holmes, and a few less heralded - though not necessarily less interesting - performers whose names are new to me. Most of the interviews have been previously published, to be sure - though some material has been added - yet they are given a new permanence and importance within the covers of this book. (Digression - the day all information appears online rather than in printed books will be the day we have to worry about losing large chunks of our heritage and understanding. Our knowledge may then become dependent on which websites turn enough profit to stay online, and on which formats this information is stored. Books are permanent, or darned close to it; the internet may not be.)

Stolle’s easy-to-read text is complemented by some well-chosen photographs by Lou Bopp, which add to the authenticity and atmosphere of Stolle’s narrative. In all, this is a very welcome addition to the long bookshelves of the blues, and one which you can trust to tell you the truth as it happened.

The Son House book should be relatively easy to find. You might need to search https://www.historypress.net/ to find the “Hidden History” book.

“Dion: The Wanderer Talks Truth” by Dion DiMucci with Mike Aquilina (Servant Books)

2011-10-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

“Dion: The Wanderer Talks Truth” is not so much an autobiography - Dion wrote one of those several years ago - as it a collection of reminiscences and opinion pieces.

For the first hundred or so pages (out of 145), he shares stories from his childhood, his early career, his heyday, his lean years, his turn as a Contemporary Christian artist, etc. The stories are told, however, from a different perspective from the way they might have been told in the past. They reflect his current viewpoint, of what one might call a “born-again” Roman Catholic. This is definitely a man who has looked at life from many sides now, and who now feels the need to set the record straight.

With humor, sensitivity, and total credibility, he tells us about the travails of growing up in a dysfunctional family in the Little Italy section of the Bronx. His a father was a small-time entertainer (a part-time puppeteer) who was more interested in keeping himself physically fit than in getting a job to feed his family. We see little 10-year-old Dion discovering Hank Williams, soon taking his first steps into the music business by singing country songs to a big-city audience. We also find him hanging around bad companions, getting into trouble and, before long, falling prey to heroin. Yet he also talks about his relationship with a caring priest, who never stopped attempting to set Dion on the right path.

Some of the most interesting chapters deal with Dion’s recording career. His first recording was designed to make him just another teen idol, and really had nothing to do with Dion’s own style or musical preferences. We learn how Dion and the Belmonts got together, and how the other members managed to steer the group’s sound away from the sheer streetwise doo-wop of their first hit, “I Wonder Why”, to the more polished-pop sound of such songs as their biggest hit, “Where Or When”. He also tells his version - the true story, he tells us - of the flight which killed Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, and it’s quite different from the many tales that have been recounted in the past.

Dion’s breakthrough days as a solo performer find him becoming a superstar with “Runaround Sue” and “The Wanderer”. He reveals that the former song is NOT about his then-future-wife Susan, despite everything you may have read in the past. We find him learning about the blues from no less a significant behind-the-scenes figure than record producer John Hammond. We see him almost stumbling into the song which once and for all established Dion as a serious artist, “Abraham, Martin and John”. But we also witness the downward spiral of an angry and egotistical young man, who made a lot of money and achieved great fame, but seemed determined to shoot it all up in heroin.

Fortunately, his conversion to evangelical Christianity helped to straighten out his life, his marriage, and his career, at least to an extent. But something was still missing, and he eventually found his personal salvation in the same Roman Catholic faith he ignored as a youth.
It’s at this point that the book becomes somewhat problematical for me. I am not a Roman Catholic. However, my wife is, and I have attended Mass with her on several occasions. The Roman Catholic church I have encountered in this manner would seem to be “Catholicism lite”, at least in comparison to the brand of religion Dion espouses. I’m used to hearing reassuring platitudes and mild instruction, not hard-core Augustinian philosophy. Quite frankly, I had a hard time grasping onto Dion’s personal belief system in the manner in which he expresses it here.

But this is my problem. What Dion tells us in the final third or so of the book is The Truth as he believes it to be, which is exactly what he had been doing in the first two-thirds. He doesn’t soft-pedal his beliefs for public consumption, nor should he. He says what he wants to say in the way he wishes to say it. You have to admire that, you have to accept that, whether or not you choose to agree with it. This is Dion as he was and as he is, and what he has to say is certainly worth reading if you want a fuller understanding of the man.

“The Man Behind The Music: The Legendary Carl Davis” by Carl H. Davis, Sr. (Life To Legacy Books)

2011-09-19T16:27:00.000-07:00

I had set this evening aside to review Carl Davis’ autobiography without realizing today (September 19) would appear to be his birthday, judging by the number of Facebook posts of classic recordings the man produced during the 1960’s and ‘70’s. So I consulted Wikipedia to confirm this birth date, only to find that - so far as I can tell - there is no entry for “our” Carl Davis. There’s an entry for Carl Davis, conductor of the London Ph;lharmonic Orchestra, Carl Raymond Davis, World War II British flying ace, and a boxer from Chicago named Carl Davis. At least with that last one, we’re in the right city, Chicago.

The point is, in the grand scheme of things, Carl Davis, record producer, is, in his own behind-the-scenes way,at least as significant a contributor to the mental well-being of the world as any of the other Carl Davises the contributors to the infamous Internet encyclopedia choose to recognize. Goodness knows many other music-industry figures are listed there, including people who didn’t accomplish a tenth of what Carl Davis has or remain active anywhere near as long as he did.

Which is precisely why we need this book. There are hundreds upon hundreds of books on the shelves chronicling the histories of rock, jazz, blues, country music, classical music of all sorts. But the r&b/soul-music bookshelf is rather skimpy. Yes, there are biographies of the major figures, genre examinations of doo-wop, Motown, and hip-hop (perhaps way too many books). But the Chicago soul-music scene of the 1960’s/70’s has been little documented between book-covers. Even rarer are first-person accounts of that scene in that era. The fact that Carl Davis was not only involved with it, he dominated the behind-the-scenes recording end of it, gives him a perspective on the record business that only a very few previous autobiographers have been willing to share with the public.

The number of artists and hit records with connections to Carl Davis makes for quite an impressive list. He was the man who brought you Gene Chandler, Major Lance, Tyrone Davis,. the Chi-Lites, Young-Holt Unlimited, and the second half of Jackie Wilson’s career. Barbara Acklin, the Artistics, and Walter Jackson were Carl Davis artists. He worked alongside Curtis Mayfield at the birth of the Chicago soul sound. He also touched the careers of many artists who were not normally part of the Chicago scene, but whose careers managed to intersect with his, including Louis Armstrong,. Mary Wells, Erma Franklin, Cassius Clay as he was in the process of becoming Muhammad Ali, even a young songwriter named Elton John. He produced records, groomed artists and songwriters, hired the arrangers, occasionally wrote parts of songs, and ran successful record companies. Dakar and Chi-Sound were his, but he was also responsible for most of whatever magic the historic Brunswick and Okeh labels retained throughout the 1960’s. Now in his mid-70’s, and long retired from the record industry, Carl Davis remembers it all, discusses it all, and supplies a context for it all.

Though Davis seems to have been an above-board fellow in his dealings with recording artists and people throughout the various levels of the industry, he certainly witnessed a few of the seamier sides of the record business, and is not hesitant to write about things he saw, naming a few names in the process. His is one of the most cogent descriptions of how the infamous payola “racket” of the 1950’s operated, and how matter-of-fact the practice of paying to have records played on the radio was considered to be by disc jockeys, record companies, and distributors alike. Davis talks about getting caught up in a later scandal near the end of his career, involving trusted associates/friends at Brunswick, entailing a lengthy and involved trial in which he was eventually exonerated. He also discusses mob infiltration of the booking-agency business. It’s not always a pretty story, but he tells the tale honestly and without fear.

There are many behind-the-scenes stories of how famous records came to be, as well as the foibles of particular artists. We are treated to the unlikely, but true story of how Gene Chandler’s classic “Duke Of Earl” came together. We find a fellow named Tyrone Fettson insisting that his records be released under the artist billing “Tyrone The Wonder Boy”, until Davis finally convinces him not to use that horribly corny moniker. Mr. Fettson then decides to appropriate his producer’s’ last name, thus becoming Tyrone Davis. We hear about talented performers such as Billy Butler and Sydney Joe Qualls, who simply failed to catch on with the public to the degree they should have, due to sounding similar to bigger stars. And that’s just a sample. If you like insider stories about the music business, Carl Davis is full oif them.

There is, of course, room for Davis to talk about his personal life. It’s not always the most pleasant topic for him, but he doesn’t dwell too long on his mistakes. His post-music life has been relatively uneventful, as he traces his uneasy adjustment from the fast-paced and highly lucrative music world to the emptiness of losing it all, necessitating a further change to life as just a “regular guy”. But eventually he found satisfaction in doing everyday work to the point where he felt comfortable enough to write his story down.

There’s a lot of fascinating material here, on a subject which has hardly been done to death in previous books. It’s an interesting enough read that even people with only a passive interest in the workings of the music business will find his story engaging. Nonetheless, it will have special appeal to pop-music historians and people who just want to know the inside scoop on what the record business used to be like.

“The Man Behind The Music” is essentially a self-published book. Life To Legacy helps turn authors’ idea into finished products rather than being a conventional book publisher/distributor. Unlike the usual “vanity press” book, however, Carl Davis’ book may be easily ordered through amazon.com or directly from http://www.carldavisstory.com/

Where The Dark And The Light Folks Meet: Race and The Mythology, Politics, And Business of Jazz” by Randall Sandke (Scarecrow Press)

2011-09-13T15:59:00.000-07:00

Randall Sandke’s book may have a mouthful of a title, but it very succinctly describes what the book is all about. In the space of 275 pages (counting the index), Sandke essentially tells us that everything (well, very many things) we’ve been taught about jazz history is bunk. Of course, he states it more elegantly than that, but the overall effect is that of pure revisionism.

The thing is, unlike so many revisionist histories that try to make their points by distorting the facts, “Where The Dark and The Light Folks Meet:” (the line comes from an early lyric to Spencer Williams’ 1926 song “Basin Street Blues”, generally altered in recorded versions) supplies documented evidence that many significant facets of jazz history have been constructed largely out of unwarranted assumptions, distorted half-truths, and downright, agenda-serving lies. To say this book has made many readers - particularly those with said agendas - uncomfortable would be an understatement. But his research seems to have been quite exhaustive, the only questions seeming to be whether his own subjective interpretations are as biased as the histories he has challenged.

Judging by the evidence presented herein, I would be inclined to state without fear of contradiction that this book is a very valuable corrective. If nothing else, it pokes enormous holes in long-held theories. While it cannot be said that, in the process, Sandke has definitively re-written the history of jazz, his is a very significant step in the right direction. Now that we know what the problems areas are, future historians will have to begin again or be guilty of ignoring some very harsh realities.

Sandke argues that the most significant agendas historians have tried to impress upon the music-loving public involve matters of race. While he does not deny that jazz at its very beginning came out of the African-American experience, he blows the whistle on those historians and popular observers (he is quick to name Wynton Marsalis, among others) for whom jazz is ONLY an African-American phenomenon, for whom white musicians have been treated as a sort of abomination, those awful power-mad white folks who have stolen the black man’s music and thereby profited heavily from its exploitation. Among many other exploded fallacies. Sandke shows how white musicians have been a part of the jazz scene since its earliest days in New Orleans, often in a collaborative setting. In a later chapter, he goes a very provocative step further - perhaps a bit too far for some readers - by arguing that so many contributors to early jazz were Creole (mixed French and black) that they could just easily be called “white” as well as “black” in terms of the percentage of racial heritage (bloodlines) they possessed. But America has never seen mixed-race people in that way

As for the white man profiting from the black man’s creative innovations, Sandke demonstrates through specific facts and figures that the great majority of white jazz musicians have not become rich by playing the music they love. Indeed, many black jazz musicians (again, names are named, figures are quoted) have made considerably more money than their white counterparts. I would like to think that musical contributions and their worth to our artistic well-being are not to be judged purely by who makes the most money and who has had to struggle economically. But the fact is, the accusations against white jazz musicians need to be challenged when they are incorrect. And Sandke is up to said challenge.

Sandke is not only out to correct misinterpretations, misconceptions, and (for that matter) lies regarding early jazz. He takes on the present-day ruling clique (again, read “Wynton Marsalis” and his like-minded followers), who feel it is no longer necessary for jazz to be an innovative, creative art form, that it is enough to pay homage to those artists (and their concepts) who were responsible for the jazz innovations of the past. My question is - and this is me asking, with only a partial paraphrase of what I believe to be Sandke’s intent here - If innovation is not part of the ongoing tradition of jazz, then why do we even bother to honor those innovators of the past by reproducing their music? Why do we not just listen to their records instead of spending large amounts of money to hear jazz repertory companies re-tread older music that has already been done to perfection? And if we should agree that the innovations of Armstrong, Ellington et. al. were once so important that we still pay homage to them, why is it considered somehow wrong to follow in their footsteps by continuing to expand - as they did - beyond the music which preceded them, by being innovative, fresh, exciting, and new? It is precisely because Armstrong and Ellington were innovative in their time that we honor them. Do not current-day musicians also have the right to be equally innovative, if it’s in them to do so? Perhaps I’m misinterpreting Sandke, perhaps he and I are both misinterpreting the intent of the Marsalis Mob, but there are very some skilled musicians who are cheating us of the full measure of their talents by downplaying the role of creativity on the contemporary jazz scene. And in many cases, these are the people who get the grants and the media exposure.

There’s much, much more here, chapter after chapter, sacred cow after sacred cow, butchered, dissected, left lying on the road. What we are left with is the feeling that jazz history as it has been written and as it is taught in History of Jazz courses in colleges and universities across America isn’t history after all. It is, as the subtitle declares, jazz mythology. And most of the discussion has been poisoned in the past by being diverted away from the main topic by biased discussions concerning race, politics, and business.

This is not a quick, easy read. Goodness knows, it took me several months to read it, with long breaks between chapters while I considered carefully what I read. There is much to absorb, much to ponder, much to attempt to rebut if one can. By no means have we heard the last of this debate. There will be anti-Sandke books, I don’t doubt, and books defending his stance as well. Or perhaps the Jazz History Powers That Be will simply sweep Sandke’s concepts under the carpet. But once ideas are out there, they’re difficult to suppress.

If jazz history means anything at all to you, you MUST read this book.

“Mountains Come Out Of The Sky: The Illustrated History of Prog Rock” by Will Romano (Backbeat Books)

2011-08-21T13:27:00.000-07:00

Back in May, I posted a review in my other blog, “GenEc DVD Review”, of a documentary DVD exploring the modern-day progressive-rock (or “prog rock”, if you prefer) scene, “Romantic Warriors”, at http://genecdvd.blogspot.com/2011/05/romantic-warriors-progressive-music.html If I may borrow from myself - in that review, I made mention of the fact that “the perceptions most people seem to have of prog-rock is that it was either a moment of glory that was too good to last, or an aberration in the history of rock that went on much too long, depending on one’s personal tastes and open-mindedness.”

Personally, I prefer to go with the “moment of glory” characterization, but whether it was “too good to last” is open for discussion. The fact of the matter is that it just plain didn’t last, as the great bulk of first-rate prog bands lost their direction after a few groundbreaking albums. That is one of the sub-themes running through Will Romano’s welcome survey of that moment of glory, those heady days which expanded out of the psychedelic 60’s into ever greater artistic realms, then fell apart as bands struggled with personnel instability, ego trips by band members who wanted to showcase their individual skills, and the inevitable clash between the perceived need by some bands to continually top themselves and the desire of other bands to become more accessible to the general record-buying public. Ah, but while the glory days lasted, mountains certainly did come out of the sky. (The title is taken from the lyrics to the Yes song, “Roundabout”).

Romano correctly traces the history of prog back to the Beatles, Syd Barrett’s work with the original Pink Floyd lineup, Frank Zappa, and the Moody Blues’ “Days Of Future Passed”. But we generally think of prog as a phenomenon of the 1970’s, since that is when it reached its greatest heights. There’s an irony to the fact that progressive rock was denigrated by a great many critics during that decade for being too pretentious, too dependent on classical-music influences, too concerned with virtuoso musicianship, too this, too that, when for so many other styles of music and the visual arts, progress/innovation were for many decades looked upon as being desirable elements, needed to advance the artform. Once prog bands seemed to abandon the African-American roots of rock and looked more toward European art-music influences as major sources of inspiration, the critical fraternity tuned out. Of course, the majority of the major prog musicians were English/European by birth, trained musicians by background, so they were only being true to THEIR roots in a way that white rock bands playing the blues generally weren’t. Perhaps Romano could have made this point more forcefully, but his emphasis is, as it should be, more on who the prog bands were and what they accomplished than on what the critics failed to hear.

Romano devotes full chapters to the major bands - Pink Floyd, King Crimson (who get two chapters, due to Robert Fripp’s re-emergence in later years), Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Genesis, Jethro Tull, Gentle Giant, and Camel, discussing how they formed, who their influences were, examining each of their albums in chronological order and in refreshing detail as concerns songwriting processes and instrumentation, keeping track of musicians leaving bands as others come in (and there was a LOT of goings and comings), looking at the producers and the impact they had on each band, incorporating interview excerpts and opinions (both from older press sources and recent conversations), in general tracing the arcs of their careers. One wishes at times he would have spent more time analyzing than describing, but in any case their is a lot of information here.

A number of lesser bands (in terms of international popularity, at least) are also covered - Colosseum, Greenslade, Soft Machine, Hatfield and the North, Gong, Barclay James Harvest, Strawbs, and a much-too-brief look at Mike Oldfield. His definition of “prog” is narrow enough to largely exclude much coverage of Led Zeppelin or Hawkwind, who certainly were “progressive”, albeit within somewhat different (yet, I would argue, related) subgenres of rock. I would have liked to learn more about obscure bands such as Flash or Public Foot The Roman, but any history of any musical field must be selective or be unwieldy.

Although most fans on this side of the Atlantic automatically think “British” when they think of prog rock, Romano thankfully includes chapters on Italy, German, the US (namely Kansas and Styx, who are now largely remembered more for their pop singles than their prog LP’s), but the only non-English band to get their own chapter is, perhaps not surprisingly, Rush. The chapter on Germany strikes me as not inclusive or detailed enough. However, the chapter on Italy will be an eye-opener to Western Hemisphere readers who may possibly remember PFM, but none of the others. There are also chapters devoted to prog bands which emerged after the Golden Era - U.K. Marillion, Dream Theater, plus one that briefly surveys a few of the modern-day, current-century prog bands. There is also a chapter devoted to the sorry state of affairs Yes, Genesis, and the members of ELP found themselves in after the bottom fell out on the halcyon days of the prog era. The author is brave enough to entitle this chapter “Throwing It All Away”.

Romano includes a list of 297 (why 297?) essential prog albums, which should prove to be of some value to newcomers, as well as a checklist for fans. There will be arguments, to be certain. (Magma are on the Top 20. Why is there no coverage of the Kobaian masters otherwise?) The large color photos of bands are nice, but the thumbnails of LP covers are sometimes too small to mean anything (and a few are repeated). The foreword is by Bill Bruford, who pops up often throughout these pages, as you might expect.

In all, this may not the perfect prog history, but it’s certainly the best thing I’ve seen on this under-served topic to date.

“Bob Dylan: New York” by June Skinner Sawyers (Roaring Forties Press”/”Bob Dylan:Like A Complete Unknown” by David Yaffe ( (Yale University Press)

2011-07-26T16:48:00.000-07:00

The celebration of Bob Dylan’s milestone 70th birthday continues unabated in the nation’s bookstores, with a wealth of newly written material, newly reissued material, and of course old favorites sharing space on the shelves. Here are two recent additions which have caught my attention.

“Bob Dylan: New York” is part of Roaring Forties’ “MusicPlace” series which, to quote their own blurb, “unravels the relationships between musicians and the cities they call home.” In other words, the theme of June Skinner Sawyers’ book is to examine Bob Dylan’s early years on the New York folk scene by looking at his life in the City and the work he produced there, exploring the relationship between the two. This could well be the subject for a weighty academic tome, but Sawyers has instead given us a more readable, informal glimpse of the New York neighborhoods in which Dylan spent his first productive, dare I say most innovative years, the clubs and shops he frequented, the people he hung with, and so on.

What it may lack in depth, it gains in capturing the feeling of young Bob finding his way around Greenwich Village, seen from the vantage point of the settings which figured into many of his songs. It is an atmospheric history with enough detail to make you feel at home in Dylan’s world. Indeed, it could well be used a travel guide, since addresses and maps are provided, though most of the places mentioned are long-since out-of-business, serving other uses, or torn down. You can carry it with you on your own Dylan history walk, if you wish, since it does not bog the reader down in analysis or technicalities, which when viewed in relation to so many of the current crop of Dylanological works, is actually downright refreshing.

Sawyers has done the vast majority of her biographical research in other people’s books, so you should not expect amazing new insights, previously uncovered facts, interviews with long-lost Dylan pals, or the like. Sometimes, it’s all in how you arrange the material you’ve learned from other sources, and the first two-thirds of this book is very good in this respect. If you’ve read a lot of Dylan-oriented books, you may well know most, perhaps all, of the actual facts presented here already. Even so, they’re assembled from a fresh perspective, one of time and place, so as to trace Dylan’s growing consciousness of what he wanted to do with his career and how he proceeded in turning those ideas into reality. It is only after Dylan, and subsequently the book, leave New York City proper and move upstate a bit that things become spotty. The details seem more haphazard (two words - “Nashville Skyline”), the observations more obtuse, the settings less easy to grasp. One wishes the author would have clung more assiduously to her original concept of Dylan in New York City, without worrying about his later career.

But up to that point, this is a lively look at young Bob Dylan and the scene that spawned him. I have no qualms about recommending this to anyone looking for a jargon-free and agenda-less introduction to Dylan and his early career.

__________________________________________________________________________

David Yaffe’s “Bob Dylan: Like A Complete Unknown” is likewise relatively jargon-free as University Press books go, but it is jam-packed with agenda. One might say it is ALL agenda. The dust-jacket blurbs are lavish in their praise from authors and academicians. Yet, while I will confess to having had a good read, I am left with the feeling that I haven’t really learned much that is shockingly new, that other folks - whether writers, readers, or just fans - haven’t already considered for themselves. Having said that, I would suggest you might wish to give it strong consideration, if only because Yaffe phrases his interpretations in a fresh, original manner. Sometimes it’s not what you say, but how well you say it that makes a book significant.

Yaffe divides his book into four sections (not counting an Introduction and an Afterword). In the first, he discusses how Dylan’s singing voice has altered so often through the years, and how these changes in vocal quality have mirrored changes in Dylan’s song material and worldview. Haven’t we all made this connection already? Even so, it’s certainly worthwhile to have a thoughtful look at this phenomenon from someone who has obviously put a great deal of concentrated thought into the matter, who expresses his ideas well, bringing a sense of intellectual weight to a topic we may have thought about casually before dismissing it from our minds.

The second essay - I say “essay”, not “chapter”, as there is little to tie them all together; it’s really a collection of four essays - looks at Dylan in the movies. This is not a comprehensive look at all of Dylan’s screen roles; don’t expect tales of “Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid”. Instead, Yaffe looks at the way Dylan is portrayed in specific documentaries (most notably “The Last Waltz”), and dramas (“I’m Not There”, “Masked and Anonymous”), plus “Renaldo and Clara”, which I’ve never seen, but which would seem to be somewhere in between truth and fiction. Yaffe is less concerned with Dylan’s performances as musician or actor - though these aspects do figure into the discussion - as he is with what these films tell us about Bob Dylan the Man, Bob Dylan the Changing Persona, Bob Dylan the Artist. From a strictly personal viewpoint, I feel I learned more from this essay than the others, because this is an area of Dylanology with which I happen to be less familiar. I feel I now have enough of a handle on “Masked and Anonymous”, as to warrant pulling out the DVD for another look. So for me, Yaffe did exactly what he set out to do.

The third essay might be considered controversial to many people, as discussions of racial matters often are, particularly when the subject is the “blackness” of a white person. Not only do we get the expected look at blues influences on Dylan’s music and lyrics, as well as his involvement with the Civil Rights Movement (also covered in the Sawyers book). These we know about. But we also get to know perhaps more than we really want to know about Dylan’s sexual exploits with black women, particularly gospel-style backup singers. Elsewhere, we’ve seen plenty of discussions of Dylan the Christian and Dylan the Jew. Now we get to see the Bob Dylan who thinks he’s black. I can’t say I buy into all of Yaffe’s arguments here, yet it’s the one time in the book I come close to being truly surprised by what I was reading.

The last chapter is the most entertaining and thought-provoking to me, because it deals with Bob Dylan the plagiarist. This is a topic we have all become familiar with in recent years, but it’s good to have all the “gory details” of what Dylan stole from what source, all presented compactly in one place. Of course, in the early days of his career, Dylan was simply following the lead of his role model, Woody Guthrie, plus A. P. Carter, Robert Johnson, and virtually every folk and blues performer who lived previous to and during the early 1960’s, by engaging in the “folk process”. There was no copyrighting of folk songs in the days before music became an Industry, but there was a lot of community sharing of musical and lyrical concepts. New lyrics would be set to older melodies (“Star Spangled Banner”, anyone?), new melodies would be written or adapted to previously-existing sets of lyrics, so-called “floating verses” would appear in song after song, to the point where it’s generally (not necessarily always) impossible to know who wrote what, or who did the “original version”. So, we’ll give Dylan a pass on being a part of the time-honored folk-process tradition, though from a purely legalistic viewpoint, it is, as a matter of fact, plagiarism. But when the mature, copyright-conscious, no-longer-part-of-the-folk-tradition (or is he?) Bob Dylan starts pilfering whole passages from other people’s creative works, both copyrighted and public domain, without giving due credit to the originators, both in his autobiography and his recent songs, is it still forgivable? It would seem the media, after making a major fuss about these thefts when they were initially revealed, has pretty much forgotten about them. But Yaffe gives us the details for us to ponder. He has his opinion, I have mine, which doesn’t necessarily agree with his, and I invite you to read this fourth essay to form your own opinion. You may surprise yourself after you decide not to throw the book at Dylan after all!

In any case, this is a Dylan book well worth reading, even if I feel the blurb-writers were a bit hysterical in over-praising it. Whereas Sawyers’ book may appeal more to the non-specialist in Dylan, those who take their Dylanology seriously will benefit from reading and thinking about the Yaffe work.

“LZ-75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin’s 1975 American Tour” by Stephen Davis (Gotham)

2011-07-21T16:17:00.000-07:00

First off, a few words about the author. Stephen Davis (whom I don’t believe I’ve ever met) and I became music journalists just about the same time, 1970. He’s famous, I’m not.

Partly this was because Davis aspired from the beginning to write for “Rolling Stone”, whereas I was more interested in writing for those rock rags that Davis specifically says he did NOT want to write for - “Creem”, “Crawdaddy”. (I also wrote for such long, long forgotten newsstand zines as “Fusion” and “Zoo World”, which hardly anyone seems to remember, and for a few dozen fanzines, before my music-critic career peaked in general-interest magazines such as “Stereo” and “Audio”.) Partly this was a matter of geography - he spent his time in New York and Boston, I liked living in Small Town USA, and would have been uncomfortable in big cities, even though that’s where the editors and the choice assignments were. Partly it’s because he was aggressive enough to go out and GET those assignments. He also decided to move on to writing books, something I’ve never had any desire to do; haven’t; never will. So here I am in academia and in radio, having a wonderful life, perfectly content to be doing what I’m doing, whether anyone outside my immediate circle has heard of me or not. And Stephen Davis continues to write books.

Most importantly, though. Stephen Davis is more famous than me because he’s a far, far better writer than I could ever hope to be. Whereas I’m the king of the conversational run-on sentence, hyphenated phrase, and only-partially-relevant parenthetical digression, Davis is concise, controlled, imaginative, witty, self-effacing when it serves his purpose - darn it, he’s entertaining! When he does bend the writing rules, there is a context in place for it. A Stephen Davis book would be interesting to read even if the topic were of little interest, because he’s fun to read. But since he generally writes about reggae and famous rock stars, his topics are interesting as well. (Personally, I prefer to write about obscure topics and unknown people, which may be another reason hardly anyone bothers to read my stuff.)

Case in point - “LZ-75”, a book so breezy, so absorbing, so downright agreeable that you will want to read it all in one sitting, and at 215 pages, that’s entirely possible. Davis has already given us the definitive Led Zeppelin bio, “Hammer Of The Gods”, so there’s no need for him to revisit the subject in a comprehensive manner. What this book is, then, is a supplement to the Big Work, a look at the band’s American tour during the first half of 1975, a crucial part of the story not fully covered in the first Zep book, for the simple reason that Davis misplaced his notebook about the tour. Not long ago, he finally relocated the notes, marked “LZ-75”, which serves as the title for this book. True, it may have been better had he had all the information and reminiscences available when he wrote “Hammer”, but now he can look back and evaluate the tour from a totally mature, less harried vantage point, fully aware of what has transpired over the course of 3-1/2 decades..

The book opens with some important background on Led Zeppelin, parts of the band’s history which may not be familiar to younger readers. (I am always amazed by the fact that so many of my students consider Led Zep to be their favorite band, even though most were born in the late 1980’s/early 1990’s. But they rarely have any grounding on WHY the band was crucial to subsequent developments in rock. I’m convinced some of them think Led Zeppelin invented rock’n’roll.) He traces their rise from the ashes of the Yardbirds through their early LP’s, reminding us old-timers how fiercely this band was hated by the critical fraternity. (Another reason, perhaps, why I didn’t fit in with the mainstream of rock criticism during the 1970’s - I absolutely ADORED Led Zeppelin from the first moment I heard them in 1969. I didn’t start writing till the next year, though, not that I would have made much difference.) We watch them sell trillions of albums, perform in front of ever-huger audiences, and begin to indulge in extravagant lifestyles that have served as models for rock-star excess ever since.

Indeed, that extravagance is one of the major themes of the book. Davis witnessed some of it firsthand, having found his way onto their rented rock-star private-jet to cover several stops on the aforementioned 1975 tour on an ill-fated assignment from a famous magazine not known for covering rock stars, extravagant or otherwise. (The story of how he got the assignment is a hoot in itself.) We get to meet a variety of characters, including the band’s relentlessly conniving manager, Peter Grant; the band’s persevering label manager, Danny Goldberg - actually, I HAVE met him, and found him to be as agreeable a record-industry executive as you could hope to find; William Burroughs (whom Davis treated less than honorably, and he realizes it), and a would-be groupie schoolteacher, just to pick out a few of the most memorable people in these pages.

And we get to meet the members of Led Zeppelin as they actually were, seen through the eyes of someone who had a degree of access to them, albeit with definite limits. Well, we get to meet three of them. John Paul Jones tended to disappear once he got offstage, and seemingly no one got to know him during this stage of his life. Despite his fondness for certain substances, Robert Plant comes off as the most average-guy-sort in the bunch, which may be whyl all these years later he remains close to the spotlight. Alas, a cold and subsequent throat problems during the tour dragged down Plant’s performance level for an extended period. (Jones is still active, too, of course, but not as prominently as Plant. Jimmy Page still pops up on occasion as well.) Davis found John Bonham to be downright scary, and preferred NOT to get particularly close to him. Bonham’s over-indulgences were many and rabid, and it’s no surprise he died at age 32. Jimmy Page, however, comes across as the real tragic figure of the band. A guitarist so skilled that he could create wonders in public night after night despite being strung out on heroin, we find him sitting in his hotel room virtually unresponsive, seemingly incapable of getting any true pleasure from his status as one of the music world’s biggest superstars.

Later in 1975, Robert Plant would be in a car accident that set into motion the band’s eventual downward slide. But to most fans of so-called “classic rock”, they’ve never really gone away. Perhaps those fans may find this book a bit disillusioning, though I think most people have a pretty good inkling of what the band’s lifestyle was like in their heyday. But fan or not, this book is a great read, particularly if you’re looking for light summer reading on a rock’n’roll topic, by someone who truly knows how to write. Don’t miss it.

“Johann Sebastian Bach” by Rick Marschall (Thomas Nelson “Christian Encounters” Series)

2011-06-25T16:23:00.000-07:00

This slim volume comes from a series of short biographies entitled “Christian Encounters”, issued by Thomas Nelson, a major publisher of religious books. The series examines the Christian lives of famous people, some obvious (such as Saints Patrick, Francis, and Nicholas), some less so (Jane Austen, Galileo, for example). Johann Sebastian Bach probably falls somewhere in the middle, because while he was not a clergyman as such, a considerable percentage of his musical output - and his life as a whole - was devoted to the church.

As one might expect, this book is deliberately slanted toward a Christian readership rather than the academic musicology audience. Author Rick Marschall, who has a definite gift for reducing complex issues to easily understandable basics without downplaying their true complexity, intends to show that not only did Bach write much music for the specific purpose of worship, even Bach’s secular music was composed with the thought of praising God, and was written under the guidance of divine inspiration.

He makes his case, and he does it very well, if sometimes a bit repetitiously. But in the process, he has come up with an interesting book that may have a difficult time reaching out beyond its target market. While he effectively encapsulates the major events in the composer’s life (adding a few less crucial, but entertaining anecdotes to add color and humanity to his subject), there simply isn’t space in a book this size for the kind of detail and original research an academically-oriented reader would demand from a biography of a major intellectual figure. Moreover, while there is some light analysis and streamlined explanation of concepts from music theory and music history with which a general readership might not be familiar, he makes no attempt to really dig into the sort of intricate technical examination that a college music professor would like to see.

But this is not really a criticism, since the book was not written for scholars, but for the intelligent layman, particularly Christian readers who love Bach’s music and want to know more about the man and the impetus behind his music. Marschall carefully guides these readers through sacred and secular compositions, relating them to events in Bach’s life, exploding a few common myths along the way. For instance, he makes it clear that Bach was not a failure in his time, though his greatest renown outside his home territory was as an organist. He also makes it clear that the reason Bach fell out of fashion almost immediately after his death in 1750 is that the dominant styles in music changed drastically right around that time, not necessarily because he was considered a less-than-worthy composer. We also see how highly regarded Bach was by the major musical figures of the Romantic Era, so that his 20th-century “revival” was more an expansion to a mass-media level, rather than a re-discovery of a totally forgotten figure, as has often been portrayed. The scholars know all this already, but the casual fan may have been misled by less fastidious comments in the popular press. (I know I was deceived on these points during Bach’s burst of popularity in the late 1960’s.) It’s good to have a popularly-written book settle these matters for the general reader.

For the right audience - which need not be limited to the “solid-core” evangelical Christian book reader - this will be a most welcome examination of an often misinterpreted major figure, one who self-identified as a Christian and wrote his music - not as an artistic expression for his own glory - but for what he saw as the glory of God. This thought colored Bach’s work, therefore it colors this book, and author Rick Marschall is perfectly justified in steering this delightful little book in this direction.

“Stepson of the Blues: A Chicago Song of Survival”” by Larry Hill Taylor with Bonni McKeown (Peaceful Patriot Press)

2011-06-16T15:46:00.000-07:00

Larry Hill Taylor is the stepson of the late Eddie Taylor, who served as second guitarist for John Lee Hooker, but made an even more significant impact as the architect of the “Jimmy Reed Sound”, one of the most influential and commercially successful blues styles of the 1950’s/60’s and beyond. Eddie Taylor later recorded under his own name, but never achieved a level of stardom commensurate with his musical importance. The Taylor family is a multi-talented one, as Taylor’s wife, Vera (Larry’s mother), was a well-regarded singer, Larry himself is a drummer/singer/bandleader of some repute, while his brother Eddie Jr. and sister Demetria are also known on the Chicago blues scene.

On the surface, none of this would appear to make Larry Taylor’s life story so momentous that it would justify the publication of his autobiography. The history of Eddie Taylor and Jimmy Reed would be more likely to attract casual readers than that of Eddie’s stepson. But Larry Taylor has a compelling story to tell - several of them, as a matter of fact. This book, co-authored by Larry’s former manager, Bonnie McKeown, herself a blues pianist who has logged time in the Chicago clubs, is - when all is said and done - part autobiography, part diatribe. Larry Taylor feels misused by the blues establishment, he feels his fellow black Chicago blues musicians have been misused, indeed he feels that black blues musicians in general have been dealt a dirty deal. And he’s angry enough to try to do something about it, by laying his own career and reputation on the line to shout out to the world that something extremely unfair has going on in the world of blues for a long time, and the situation is not getting any better.

The first section of the book is more about his Mississippi family origins, his upbringing in Chicago, his various adventures and misadventures, his musical education, etc. In one sense, his childhood reads rather like you might expect a fairly typical Mississippi-rooted, urban ghetto childhood in the world of the blues to read. But of course, no one’s life is ever really as typical as anyone else’s. Taylor’s youth was enlivened by the presence of some of the all-time greats of the blues, who regularly visited his parents in their home, thanks to Eddie Sr.’s vaunted position among the blues royalty of his day. Young Larry picked up tips and lessons from the greats, and kept their words of wisdom to heart, while also getting to see them in their less public moments.

Larry’s life begins to take a less stereotypical turn toward his future career as a bluesman, when he joins a neighborhood street gang. This may well be a part of many modern-day blues musicians’ background, but it’s one which has become so associated with hip-hop in the outsider’s eye - of course, there was no hip-hop when Taylor joined up in the 1960’s - that it takes the reader by surprise. Soon Taylor finds himself involved with martyred Black Panther activist Fred Hampton, and with the Nation of Islam, again not a “typical” blues background, but one which helped instill a particular sense of right vs. wrong into the young Larry Taylor.

Then his life falls apart, when he is falsely accused of being a child molester, which leads to a horrifying round of legal injustices, incarceration in a veritable hell-hole of a prison, and intrusive psychological evaluations which led to some pretty harrowing treatment. The fact that the Taylor family was complicit in Larry’s imprisonment - perhaps feeling he could simply be scared straight, without any thought of how damaging his experiences would be - is a blotch on Eddie and Vera Taylor’s reputations.

Larry’s story doesn’t get any prettier once he gets out of a prison. As he tries to find steady work in the low-paying, jealousy-ridden, dishonestly-run Chicago blues clubs, he suffers through problems with women and develops a serious hard-drug addiction which he has a great deal of trouble shaking to this day. He also finds himself hounded by what he assumes to be FBI spies, seemingly lurking around every corner. Quite honestly, there are times when this comes across as a paranoid obsession, but it’s his life, and I can’t say he’s mistaken or lying.

But while the second half of the book covers these and other personal subjects, what really sticks with the reader in the latter stages of the book is Taylor’s full-throttle expose of the current blues scene. We learn that even in Chicago blues clubs which, judging by the city’s reputation, one would expect to be dominated by hard-core African-American blues musicians, white musicians - make that white rock musicians posing as blues musicians - often get the best-paying jobs, except of course for a handful of long-established superstars such as Buddy Guy and B.B. King. Taylor points out in various contexts that what black fans listen to and call blues is a very different thing from what white fans call blues. Black blues fans include what was known in the 1960’s as “soul music” as part of their steady diet, whereas white blues fans eschew “soul-blues” and prefer rock-oriented music which may or may not have solid roots in the blues. Even a cursory observation of the Southern Chitlin’ Circuit soul-blues sales charts vis-a-vis the playlists of the typical white DJ posting to Yahoo’s blues-dj list will support this contention. This dichotomy severely impacts black blues musicians who try to make a living in areas where the better-paying clubs cater to white fans, and has essentially left us with two competing musical scenes, both known as “blues”, one white, one black.

Taylor goes on to castigate the blues establishment as a whole, as represented by the Blues Foundation (which tellingly took W. C. Handy’s name off their long-established annual awards) and by many of the people who post on the Internet’s often-controversial BLUES-L listserv (where Rory Gallagher and Gary Moore are thought by many to have been the Kings of The Blues). Some blues fans may consider Taylor’s screed to be sour grapes, the rantings of an artist who has failed to crack the upper reaches of blues stardom and has become embittered as a result. However, I know from my own experiences (as a white college professor in his 60’s, so race, age, and position are not necessarily factors; by comparison, Larry Taylor is 55 years old) that the blues scene can be very difficult for anyone to crack. As someone who has lectured on blues, written about blues for some 40 years, and taught university-level courses on blues, I am still totally lacking in credibility among Western New York blues fans. The latter tend to gravitate toward what I call “biker bar” blues, the hard-core audience for which can be extremely narrow-minded about what they will accept or reject as blues, and who often show themselves to be quite intolerant of opinions on this subject that differ from their own.. My perspective on the matter comes, of course, from a very different angle than Larry Taylor’s, and unlike him I don’t need to depend on blues as my source of income, but I can easily understand where he’s coming from. I don’t blame him at all for being frustrated, and I applaud his boldness for taking a strong, if unpopular stance on this subject.

Of course, the people who most need to read this book and think seriously about what he has to say will probably ignore it. ‘Twas ever thus. So many negative things have happened in Larry Taylor’s life that the book simply cannot be a pleasant read, something light to skim over without giving it a second thought. But in the end, his faith in Islam (which he discusses in an Appendix) serves to see him through. This is, after all, a tale of survival. I hope he gets the right people to listen.

More information on the book, including ordering information, as well as a sample of Larry Taylor’s music,may be found at http://www.stepsonoftheblues.com/

“The Song Is Not The Same: Jews And American Popular Music”, edited by Bruce Zuckerman and Josh Kun (Purdue University Press)

2011-06-01T16:15:00.000-07:00

This collection of essays is Volume 8 of an “Annual Review” (what might be thought of as an academic journal in book form) called “The Jewish Role In American Life”, published under the guidance of the USC Casden Institiute for the Study of the Jewish Role in American Life.

I have to confess it is not the sort of book I was expecting when I took it off the pile of books to be reviewed. The title would seem (to me at least) to promise some sort of comprehensive survey of the roles played by Jewish artists in the popular music of the United States, rather than a collection of unrelated essays. Beyond that, I was hoping it would be something more along the lines of the Jewish composers of Tin Pan Alley, with perhaps a glimpse of klezmer music thrown in as well. But while there is a famous mainstream American songwriter profiled here, it is not Jerome Kern or George Gershwin, but Bob Dylan. And while klezmer music is likewise covered here, it’s by the very contemporary Naftule’s Dream, not the very traditional Naftule Brandwein.

But books deserve to be read, studied, and reviewed for what they are, rather than for what they are not. After a rather shaky first essay, this is a collection of thoughtful, well-written and often fascinating essays on topics not encountered as often as they might be. That first essay, which strikes me as more a preliminary sketch for an essay which needs to be far more comprehensively researched than this brief memoir, is a reminiscence by Gayle Wald, about being Jewish and listening to Michael Jackson as a young girl during the 1970’s. I should state right offhand that I am not Jewish, but even so I cannot fathom that Jewish-Americans listen to commercial pop music any differently from the way Gentiles do, or - taking the opposite point of view - that all young people, whatever their backgrounds, listen to all music in the same way. Essentially, all Wald tells us is that her ethnic background and, as a consequence, her family background were very different from that of a typical Michael Jackson fan, and thus she reacted to him in her own special way. Indeed, despite the essay’s title, “Dreaming Of Michael Jackson: Notes On Jewish Listening”, the essay is as much about Wald’s reaction to Michael Jackson, the stage presence, and Michael Jackson, the pop-culture phenomenon, as it is about actually listening to his music. But there may be a kernel of an idea here which is worth pursuing - do people of different ethnic and cultural backgrounds living in the United States listen to the same music as their fellow Americans in a way that is different from their neighbors? I think most people would say that African-Americans listen differently - or for different things - than white Americans, but the evidence is strictly anecdotal. But do Jewish-Americans listen differently from Italian-Americans, for example? Take a step in another direction - do Republicans listen differently from Democrats? The possibilities would be limitless, and potentially lucrative to certain industry types. My gut feeling tells me this is a concept which might be worth looking into, but a more serious study is needed.

The second essay is also somewhat more of a preliminary sketch than a full-blown examination. But in this case, pictures tell the story as well as words can, so the result is more successful. Jody Rosen discusses and illustrates early 20th-century sheet-music covers, primarily of Tin Pan Alley comic songs with Jewish themes (some of them written by Jewish Tin Pan Alley songwriters, including Irving Berlin). The subject is not so much the stereotypes in the lyrics, but the stereotypical portrayal of Jews in the front-cover pictures, whether drawn or photographed. The images on these sheets may not be as consistently damaging as those on “coon song” sheet-music covers, but they tend to be insultingly racist, nonetheless. One of the worst offenders is reproduced right on the cover of this book - “When Mose With His Nose Leads The Band”, featuring a cartoon-style drawing of a musical quintet being conducted by a director whose nose is said to be so prominent that he can conduct with his nose instead of a baton. Amazing what trash our ancestors could come up with, isn’t it?

The third essay, by Peter LaChapelle, is an examination of the much more insidious racism of the then-powerful industrialist Henry Ford, as typified by his attempts to establish country-dance music among right-thinking (i.e., Caucasian Gentile) Americans of the 1920’s, to overthrow the invasion of Jazz and jazz-rooted popular music and popular dancing, a scourge promulgated by blacks and Jews. I don’t think there’s a great deal of disagreement anymore over the extent of Ford’s racism, but I do question the author’s lumping together of Ford’s country-dance movement with the growing popularity of Southern country music in the 1920’s. The Appalachian string bands of that period were not playing the older dance forms favored by Ford, but breakdowns and long-regionally-established fiddle tunes, slanted toward a very different audience than the urban, Northern listeners Ford seemed to be aiming for. Ford’s favorite fiddlers were Northerners such as Mellie Dunham and Jep Bisbee, whose popularity on records paled beside that of Gid Tanner’s Skillet Lickers or the North Carolina Ramblers. Other than that, this is an interesting glimpse of a once beloved, now more often reviled American icon and the near-Hitlerian society he envisioned for America.

Jonathan Z. S. Pollack offers an entertaining look at the use of Yiddish words and phrases in scat-singing, the influence of cantorial singing on Cab Calloway’s style - and now that he mentions it, I can tell it’s there, I simply never thought about it - and in the oddball jazz songs of singer-songwriter Slim Gaillard, who was known to occasionally write lyrics consisting entirely of names of Jewish foodstuffs. He also takes a very brief side trip into minstrelsy, looking at the role it played in the development of artists such as Al Jolson.

Much more arcane is Josh Kun’s look into the world of Jewish comediennes who appeared in nightclubs and on LP’s doing “blue” (that is, naughty) material for the middle-aged, middle-class “party records” crowd. Though they were primarily comics, they spiced their act with songs as well. As Kun points out, performers such as Belle Barth and Pearl Williams (the two he specifically concentrates on) have pretty much been excised from the histories of both comedy and music. So while I must confess that I have always considered this to be a low form of comedy and a mediocre variety of music, it’s worthy of documentation like any other entertainment phenomenon.

David Kaufman examines the Jewishness of Bob Dylan, who changed his name from Zimmerman, wrote songs that did not overtly address Jewish concerns. professed to be a born-again Christian at one point in his career, and in general could be interpreted as ignoring, if not necessarily outright denying his Jewishness. Having read this essay a day or two before seeing the clip of Dylan on a Hassidic telethon in the “Bob Dylan: Revealed” DVD, I’m inclined to say that to Dylan, his Jewishness was to him largely a non-issue rather than a denial. But while this is a topic that has been broached in the past, Kaufman’s essay is an interesting read.

The final essay, by Jeff Janeczko, looks at a handful of albums on John Zorn’s Tzadik Records, from the “Radical Jewish Culture” series, specifically from the viewpoint of musical hybridity, I have to confess I have heard none of the records being discussed, which as the author points out, is essential to a full understanding of his discussion. But while he claims samples of these recordings may be found on the web, I was unable to find them. (Other performances by the artists can be found on Youtube, which helps considerably.) Even so, his discussions about and excerpts of interviews with four diverse artists - Ben Perowsky, Wolf Krakowski, Koby Israelite, and Naftule’s Dream - are quite interesting. What’s more, the discussion of the various types of hybridity is most enlightening. So even without hearing the specific records Janeczko talks about, I feel I gleaned more from this essay than any of the others.

In sum, this is, like so many collections of essays by various authors on a diversity of topics, inconsistent. Of course, you may find those segments I’ve downplayed to be much more to your liking, which is likewise pretty much the nature of books of this sort. If the subject matter looks promising to you, I would suggest that you seek it out to find out more.

“Ukulele” by Daniel Dixon with Dixie Dixon and Jayne McKay (Gibbs Smith)

2011-05-01T16:03:00.000-07:00

About two months ago, I posted a review on my music-DVD review blog of an entertaining documentary about the ukulele called “Mighty Uke” - http://genecdvd.blogspot.com/2011/03/mighty-uke-amazing-comeback-of-musical.html
The film was a lighthearted but quite substantial look at the ukulele, encompassing the instrument’s history, its construction, visuals of unusual-looking ukes, examinations of well-known exponents of the instrument, and paeans to the uke’s ability to make people smile.

Now, along comes a profusely illustrated little book on “The World’s Friendliest Instrument”. It is a lighthearted but quite substantial look at the ukulele, encompassing the instrument’s history, its construction, visuals of interesting-looking ukes, examinations of well-known exponents of the instrument, and paeans to the uke’s ability to make people smile. Yet it does not simply cover the same material as the film did, but approaches the topic in its own, distinctive way. Clearly, there is quite a lot to say about this not-so-humble little music-maker.

As with the film, the emphasis is on how the ukulele is a user-friendly little instrument which has a long and illustrious history, sullied somewhat by a fallow period which in recent years has begun to give way to new glories. Author Daniel Dixon provides a look at the instrument’s origins in Portugal, and its journey to its adopted homeland of Hawaii. He also briefly acknowledges its influence in Brazil, where he calls it the cavaco, though it is more commonly referred to by the diminutive name, cavaquinho. (This is a very minor detail in Dixon’s book, but I seem to have missed it altogether in the DVD.) He raises doubts as to the veracity of the long-held tale of Joao Fernandes, who has most often been credited with introducing the Portuguese braguinho (Dixon prefers the term “machete”) to Hawaii. Alas, there were no musicologists documenting these events as they occurred, so Dixon’s guess is as good as anyone else’s. We then see how the instrument was adopted by Hawaiians after a somewhat sluggish start. By the beginning of the 20th century, it had very definitely taken a foothold on the islands.

From the 1910’s on, we see the instrument being spread far and wide, with Hawaiians bringing the uke to the mainland U.S., mainlanders discovering the uke on trips to Hawaii, Tin Pan Alley songwriters writing ukulele-themed songs which most often had little connection to what “real” Hawaiian music (even the Westernized varieties) sounded like, and a variety of American entertainers popularizing the uke as accompaniment to mainstream mainland music. We are introduced to such once-famous performers as Cliff Edwards (a/k/a “Ukulele Ike” and the voice of Jiminy Cricket), multi-instrumentalist Roy Smeck (who sometimes let his virtuosity play havoc with his musical taste, but was a most impressive ukist nonetheless), 1920’s singing stars Johnny Marvin and Wendell Hall, the hugely-popular (in England) singer/actor and proponent of the banjo-uke, George Formby, and the virtually forgotten May Singhi Breen. We meet them through short biographical sketches, photos, sheet music, and pics of their ukuleles, celebrating a decade-plus when the ukulele was a significant element in the world of show-business on both sides of the Atlantic, as well as the Pacific.

This was followed by that unfortunate period when the ukulele fell into a long period of disuse. Radio and t.v. host Arthur Godfrey, strumming and plugging a cheap, plastic uke on his programs, kept the instrument in the public consciousness, after which Tiny Tim brought it to “Laugh-In” and the world beyond. While Godfrey’s reputation has dimmed, and Tiny Tim is generally thought of with derision, Dixon is objective enough to soberly discuss their roles in the instrument’s history, giving them credit where due. In the meantime, Hawaiian virtuosi such as Eddie Kamae and Herb Ohta (a/k/a “Ohta-San”), along with jazz ukist Lyle Ritz, proved much more could be done on the instrument than simply strumming chords. This in turn led to the present-day emphasis on intricate melodies played on an instrument once thought to be too limited to achieve any degree of true complexity. This brings us to modern times, as we meet the ukulele’s 21st-century golden-boy Jake Shimabukuro, as well as such strumming self-accompanists as the late Iz and all-around man-about-music Ian Whitcomb, plus innovators such as James Hill and John King.

But the book is not just about people, it’s about the instrument itself. There are pictures of ukuleles made by Martin and Gibson, unusual variations such as the pineapple-shaped ukulele, the balalaika-shaped Ukalyka, the tiny fluke, and a variety of ukes with exotic designs imprinted on them. We learn how the instrument is manufactured, tour an important Hawaiian uke factory, and visit with a skilled craftsman who makes high-end instruments. We visit one of the many ukulele clubs which have sprung up in all sorts of places. There is much, much more, even chord charts and an introductory ukulele lesson!

“Ukulele” is a fairly slim, hard-bound volume which packs a lot of pictures, information, and opinion into its 144 pages. It’s an entertaining read as well as a painessly educational one. If you have any interest in the ukulele, or are just curious to find out what all the buzz is about, I suggest you might wish to pick up both this book AND the “Mighty Uke” DVD. Each one by itself is a treat. The two together are not only complementary, they can give you a pretty comprehensive view of this growing musical phenomenon.

“Jazz Matters: Sound, Place, And Time Since Bebop” by David Ake (University of California Press)

2011-04-10T16:10:00.000-07:00

Sometimes it seems as if there must be no need to write yet another jazz book. One might think every aspect of the music’s glorious past, somewhat shaky present, and unforeseeable future must have covered in dozens of tomes by now. But then, along comes a fresh, thoughtful, carefully reasoned book discussing topics that have not been done to death, and one realizes that there may be more left to say on this heavily analyzed musical genre. “Jazz Matters” is one such book.

The first thing that needs to be pointed out is that author David Ake is a musician, critic, and University of Nevada, Reno professor. Having worn all these hats (though not at the same institution), I know all too well how often people performing any one of these roles feel they must grind axes in public. I don’t get that feeling when reading Ake’s collection of essays. He has points to make, certainly, but he’s willing to entertain other people’s ideas, to consider alternate perspectives, even to enter controversial subject areas with an air of objectivity. What’s more, he doesn’t write in the dry, academic, jargon-filled manner which mars many critical books published by University Presses (an area of the publishing industry I am only too happy to support, mind you). You can not only read these essays and understand them, you can actually enjoy the process. Refreshing, to say the least.

But what impresses me the most is that he has actually found new things to write about. To be sure, basing a 17-page essay on the creak of a piano bench (that’s what it sounds like to me; Ake is more careful about speculating on the source of the sound) for one brief moment during a half-century-old Miles Davis LP would be considered by many to be epitome of esoteric criticism. But it leads him to cogitate over such things as the way we listen to the sounds of jazz; what constitutes acceptable sounds and what might be interpreted as “mistakes” in an artform built around spontaneity; whether recordings should represent themselves as artifacts that capture the sounds a musician would produce during a live performance. And it all makes sense as you read it, whether you necessarily come to the same conclusions as David Ake or not.

The opening essay (not counting a well-considered introduction, which sets the tone for what’s to come) promises to be much more arcane that it actually is. His thought is that John Coltrane assumed three subjective personas during the course of his career - a “being” subjectivity, a ”becoming” subjectivity, and a “transcendent” one. Due to time constraints - and because I don’t feel the need to reproduce Ake’s ideas in this space - I will let you find out on your own what this all means. But once again, it makes a great deal of sense when you read it, and it dovetails with my own thinking about how Trane’s music evolved over the the years. The author’s conclusions are readily audible in the music, though I’ve never seen anyone express these ideas with such clarity as Professor Ake does.

The third essay is about what Ake terms the “carnivalesque” elements that are too rarely encountered in contemporary jazz, elements that he feels can be found in the music of the New York ensemble Sex Mob. Essentially, Ake feels there is too much of a premium placed on jazz musicians being dead-serious all the time, that the sense of boisterous fun that could frequently be found in jazz of earlier eras has been lost in the rush to glorify jazz as a ”serious artform”, glorified as “America’s classical music” in the words of the late and beloved Billy Taylor. I have to confess that the music of Sex Mob has never particularly excited me. Still, the grim visages and austere approach of so many self-important modern jazz artists does seem to leave their music with less emotional content and perhaps less audience appeal than need be the case. Laugh all you wish at the Original Dixieland Jazz Band (my example, not one from the book), but their loud, informal, high-spirited music was entertaining fun, easily enjoyable by anyone attuned to the popular styles of the era surrounding the First World War. To be sure, there is considerable artistic validity in serious, straight-faced jazz, but why can’t there occasionally be a sense of “play” in the “playing” of jazz as well? I can almost hear the grumbles of certain self-appointed taste-makers who might read this essay.

Another concept that never crossed my mind - though as someone who is noted as much for his love of folk and traditional country music as jazz, I have certainly noticed the rural influence in certain post-bop artists - is posited in an essay focusing on Keith Jarrett and Pat Metheny. Ake points out how jazz has always been associated with The City, whether that city be New Orleans, Chicago, New York, Los Angeles - the list goes on. It has come to be regarded as a sophisticated response to certain conditions and facets of urban living. But what Jarrett and Metheny (and others of their ECM label-mates) have done, in somewhat related, but essentially independent ways, was to bring a sense of the pastoral to jazz, taking their music out of the strict city environment by utilizing certain elements of folk-rooted musical approaches, in a manner which might be tabbed as “Americana”-related. This essay relies somewhat on musicological analysis, tempered with aesthetic effects, but once again may be read without a Music Theory text at one’s side. It might have been interesting had Ake considered the subject of Western Swing - the first fusion of urban jazz with country sensibilities - in this essay, but since his major concern is, as the book’s subtitle clearly indicates, jazz “since bebop”, and Western Swing’s most creative period (I feel) was before World War II, it was probably considered less-than-relevant.

Ake’s essay “Rethinking Jazz Education” is on a subject close to his heart, and certainly one I can identify with myself. As a Music History professor, many of whose students are involved with the SUNY Fredonia jazz program - indeed my office is directly across from that of the head of the jazz program - I get to witness Jazz Education close-up on a near-daily basis. (I have also served as Faculty Co-Advisor of the Fredonia Jazz Ensemble and have written liner notes for a couple of their albums.) Among the arguments discussed by Ake is the often-heard grumble that in former times, musicians learned from other, more experienced veteran musicians in clubs, on the scene, face-to-face, often on the job itself. There was less of the current-day majoring in classical music, being trained to play art-music scores, and receiving training in jazz primarily in reading-oriented big bands in an academic setting, the accepted method (or at least AN accepted way) of teaching jazz in many institutions. The learn-by-doing method is thought by many non-academic musicians to result in a jazz performer who is potentially freer to express oneself through improvisation, a tendency which some feel to be stifled by academic training. And I can understand that argument when I hear some students struggling through attempts at improvised solos. But I also hear other students who are well on their way to becoming fine jazz artists, not simply technically, but in terms of creative improvisation as well. As with everything else on campus, the key is the individual student, the effort they put into it, the background they bring into the program, the degree of self-motivation they have to break free of their training and their schooled technique. (And I would argue that schooled technique is very important to future employment in music; not everyone will get to play small-combo gigs as their main source of income). There are many options and many opinions pro and con to learning to play jazz in an academic setting, and few of them lead to instant, one-size-fits-all answers. I would recommend anyone involved in the field to read and carefully consider what Ake has to say on this topic, which goes well beyond the few generalities I offer here.

I personally find the final essay to be the weakest in the collection. In it, Ake discusses the question of the “American-ness” of jazz, by looking at several factors - origins, the spread of jazz to Europe beginning in 1919, the levels of skill and understanding of European jazz artists of earlier eras vis-a-vis more recent European musicians, the status of expatriate Americans in Europe in the bop and free-jazz eras (where they were often treated as Conquering Heroes), and interviews with American-born musicians currently residing and working in Paris. Jazz is a music of African-American origin, and many people still believe African-American jazz musicians to have a special sense of the music. Nevertheless, Europe has developed its own styles of jazz, less dependent on African-American roots, often betraying the influences of developments in European classical/art music. Has jazz ceased to be a solely American artform? If so, how does this effect the status of Americans working in Europe? These are all fascinating questions. Yet somehow, I don’t feel Ake has devoted enough space to come to definitive conclusions, if any such conclusions can indeed be made. I would like to see him take on this subject in a longer format, preferably a book-length treatment which would delve more fully into each of the topics addressed in this essay.

But even in his one near-failure, David Ake provides much food for thought and fresh perspectives. I think that’s what I enjoy most about this book. It does not merely rehash long-exhausted ideas, but opens up the possibility that there is much more to be said about jazz, even in the 21st century. And if jazz criticism can remain healthy, jazz itself should be able to remain healthy, too. And that’s good news in our increasingly commodified musical world.

“Blind But Now I See: The Biography of Music Legend Doc Watson” by Kent Gustavson, PhD (Blooming Twig)

2011-03-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

Arthel “Doc” Watson turned 88 years old on March 3, 2011, and is still touring and performing at a pace which might tire musicians a third of his age. On one hand, he has been a major contributor to our modern-day understanding of Appalachian folk-music traditions. On the other, he has been lauded as one of the great innovators of contemporary acoustic music, who opened the doors for so many of the innovations that have taken place in this field since the 1970’s. Yet no one has apparently ever seen fit to write a biography of this American Treasure, until now.

The Doc Watson story should be one of great triumph, overcoming enormous obstacles which would have discouraged most people from exploring their human potential right from the very outset. And for much of this book, that’s exactly what we get. We meet young Arthel as he emerges into this world sightless, in dire poverty, in an isolated region of North Carolina, in an era (1920’s) when blind and/or disabled people were not given many of the opportunities available to them now. But Doc Watson did not let his lack of eyesight hold him back, as he played and worked like any other member of his family. The self-reliance he learned early on would do much to make him as independent as possible in the future. His first triumph, in other words, is that he didn’t treat himself as if he had a disability, and instead developed the many abilities he did have.

Thus, the opening chapters of Kent Gustavson’s well-researched biography read like an idyllic portrait of a young man comfortable in his world. But the educational system throws a monkey wrench in the lad’s way, in the form of the Raleigh School For The Blind. I’m sure the people in charge thought they had the best interests of their young charges at heart, and were hoping to shelter them from the inevitable disappontments life would throw their way.. But even though Watson greatly benefited from the exposure to classical music and Western music theory that he was exposed to as part of the School’s curriculum, the primary educational object of the institution seems to have been to instill into their pupils the realization that they were not, and never could be, normal people. They were led to believe they would never be able to earn a living by doing useful, productive work, but would need to subsist on government handouts, supplemented by selling pencils on the street.

This, too would prove to be unsatisfactory to young Arthel. He had a musical gift, being able to play the banjo, the harmonica, the guitar and sing, and he would use that gift to perform as a backup musician in local bands in the area around his home town of Deep Gap, NC. He had already heard his family and neighbors sing the classic Anglo-Appalachian ballads, he learned the repertoires of local fiddlers and banjoists, and he absorbed many sounds of many musical stripes from listening to the radio. He was conversant with swing, honky-tonk country music, blues, rockabilly. Indeed, he absorbed musical lessons whenever and wherever he could. There would be no begging or selling pencils for this blind man, though the opportunity to make enough money to rise out of poverty would elude a young man with an equally young wife and children.

But doors had a way of opening for Doc Watson, often slowly and tentatively, yet he took advantage of these openings nonetheless. When the folk-music boom of the late 50’s/early 60’s began to give the performers who recorded the classic country recordings of the 1920’s and ‘30’s an opportunity to be “rediscovered”, Doc Watson came to the New York in the company of the garrulous medicine-show singer/banjoist/entertainer Clarence Ashley and his band. Somehow, Watson seemed always to be treated as the fourth most important member in any group of four, but he made what would in the future prove to be important contacts, while impressing important people, including folklorist and entrepreneur Ralph Rinzler and classic ballad singer and dulcimer legend Jean Ritchie. Eventually, Doc was given a chance to prove that he was not simply the equal, but the superior of most of the musicians he was associated with, and he began to attract attention from record companies and the New York press.

If Gustavson ended the story at this juncture, we would already be cheering a tale of triumph over adversity. But Doc Watson’s career takes on even greater dimensions when he begins touring with his young son Merle. Fore one thing, the two of them not only worked together like few pairings before or since. What’s more, Merle’s more modern musical interests encouraged Doc to break free of the strictures of maintaining strict Appalachian stylistic purity, to further develop innovative picking techniques that he had already demonstrated in his flat-picking arrangements of fiddle tunes, and to extend his reach into newer, more flexible musical structures and song choices. Together, the Watsons would influence the growth of newgrass, Dawg music, and other innovations growing out of Appalachian roots. Doc and Merle Watson became the lightning rod which would attract and encourage dozens of musicians on a variety of instruments. And Merle was always there by his side, as the great confidant, consultant, source of comfort, enabler, his father’s guide through the world. This truly does read like a story of triumph. But then . . .

Like so many young men of his generation (which I should add is also my generation, but thankfully I never fell into this trap, though the opportunities were certainly there), Merle Watson enjoyed partying too much - the booze, the drugs, the long nights without sleep, the questionable relationships. After a while, he chose to retreat back into the mountains. He made sure his father was left in the hands of a capable replacement, Jack Lawrence, but an assistant is not a beloved son. Then, under circumstances which may never fully be understood, but which Gustavson takes great pains to examine as closely as he can, Merle dies in a curious accident on his tractor. And, as Gustavson details with great care, when Merle died, a large chunk of Doc Watson’s soul seems to have died as well. Merle has been gone a quarter-century, while Doc Watson continues to push onward, but somehow it’s not the same, and Watson himself has never been the same.

Up to the point of Merle’s death, this book often reads like a hagiography, the great accomplishments of a giant towering over mere mortals. But this impression is shattered by the final portions of the book, as it becomes a look at a sorrowful man who came so far and accomplished so much over such a long period, only to have his world fall apart. It is to Doc Watson’s credit that he did not merely fold his tent and go home, but one can only wonder if his continual touring way beyond retirement age is the only way he knows to deal with the permanent absence of the son he loved. My respect for Gustavson’s interpretation of his subject’s life and motives certainly increased through this sad shift in scenario.

Gustavson based his writing on a large number of interviews (including emails, certainly a valid method of interviewing in the 21st century) with a great many people, including those who knew Doc for long periods of time and at many stages of his life, as well as some whose experience with the man was fairly brief yet impactful. I find myself wondering why there is so little mention of David Holt, with whom Doc Watson has done considerable touring and recording in his later years. It strikes me as a missing chunk of the puzzle. But this is one of the few substantive criticisms I have, and certainly there are many people to tell the various sides of the Doc Watson story. It’s not always a light, happy read, but it is a significant one.

The publisher’s website is http://bloomingtwig.com/

“Traveling the Spaceways: Sun Ra, The Astro Black and Other Solar Myths” edited by John Corbett, Anthony Elms, and Terri Kapsalis (Whitewalls)

2011-02-21T11:57:00.000-08:00

Few musicians have attracted as much rabid adoration by what is essentially a small cult audience as did the late Sun Ra. Few musicians have also attracted as many naysayers, among music lovers who have yet to come to grips with Ra’s music, his flamboyant stage presentation, and/or his seemingly impenetrable philosophy combining ancient Egyptian and futuristic outer-space elements. This marvelous little book - 91 pages, crammed with tiny print and illustrative materials, most likely possessing as much content as many books three times its length - goes far in explicating much of the background which factored into the development of Sun Ra, the man and the myth. After reading it, I have reached the conclusion that, whatever else one might have to say about the man and his art, crazy he wasn’t.

This collection of essays, poems, and photos/posters/label-art/oddities has its origins in presentations made during a symposium in Chicago engendered by an art exhibit devoted to Sun Ra. The Windy City figures prominently in Sun Ra lore. Although he was born in Birmingham, Alabama (nickname, “The Magic City”, which later became the title of one of his most fabled LP’s), and spent his most successful years in New York and Philadelphia, it was Chicago which provided a home for his early apprenticeship and the subsequent beginnings of his “Arkestra”. Although a few of the writings included here strike me as self-indulgent and obscurant, the bulk of the essays give the Sun Ra fan a great deal to chew on.

Robert L. Campbell’s “The Early Arkestra: In The Clubs And On Film”, looks at the transformation of jazz pianist and arranger Herman Poole “Sonny” Blount into Le Sonyr Ra, scuffling in the small jazz and r&b nightclubs of Chicago, working on a sound and hoping to establish a reputation as an in-demand entertainer. Ra’s early, more easily accessible recordings have often puzzled fans of his later, more avant-garde work, but he did not begin as a fully-formed experimentalist. Nevertheless (as the next essay makes more clear), his arrangements often pushed the harmonic and sonic envelopes, using electronics and percussion in ways that were quite unorthodox for the 1950’s. It becomes clear that seeds were being sown. These were years of distinct non-success, with gigs being low-paying and short-term, often accompanying touring blues/r&b/jazz singers. He was lucky to keep a small combo (not yet a big band) going as long as he did. Campbell talks about Ra’s early recording sessions (though her has little to say about the Saturn r&b 45’s), as well as a film in which the band appeared. This half-dozen-year period witnessed the first Sun Ra LP’s and the first inklings of a Legend in the Making, but clearly Chicago was not opening up for Sun Ra, and he left hoping to find greener pastures in 1961.

While Campbell details the professional comings and goings of Sun Ra in Chicago, it is left up to Kevin Whitehead’s “Sun Ra’s Chicago Music: El Is A Sound Of Joy” to examine his actual musical development during this early period in more depth. He finds many of the later, by-now familiar elements of Sun Ra’s art already appearing in embryonic form in Chicago. Some of his discoveries struck me as surprising. For instance, I had always taken the title “El Is A Sound of Joy” to derive from an inexplicable corner of Sun Ra’s mysticism. But it turns out that the “El” in question is, very simply - and perhaps so obviously that I looked for the arcane where it did not exist! - the elevated railway, commonly called the “El”, which is such a distinctive feature of the Chicago skyline. We also find Ra arranging jazz and pop songs for nightclub performances, learning how to voice his instrumentation in intriguing ways. And we find him trying to conjure up the essence of world-music traditions during an era when authentic world-music was little known in America.

Graham Lock’s “Right Time, Right Place, Wrong Planet” is the real eye-opener among the essays, as he tackles the question of whether Sun Ra was indeed crazy, as seems to be the general consensus, even among his fans. What Lock tells us is rather that Ra was highly self-educated (being a voracious reader) in aspects of African-American history that most Americans simply do not know about. He also had a sense of humor, a sense of theatricality, and a fondness for creative metaphors. Lock talks about sermons by black preachers from early in the 20th century, in which the concept of Heaven is used in a metaphorical sense. He then points out how, as a black man living in the Space Age who had an antipathy to the Black Church, Sun Ra would employ many of the same metaphors, but replacing Heaven with space-travel references. Likewise, Lock suggests that the song “Let’s Go Fly A Kite”” may connect to the 19th-century slave codes, in which slaves were forbidden to fly kites. Seen in the light of hidden historical context, Lock opens the door for many of Sun Ra’s seeming eccentricities to be be looked at in an entirely new light. This would appear to be an area of Sun Ra studies which demands considerable further research.

In other essays, John Corbett looks at Sun Ra’s Chicago recordings from a critical perspective, revealing that many of Ra’s later-released LP”s were actually products of the Chicago era, but were not issued until after the artist settled in New York. He also examines the question of who was responsible for Saturn Records’ early cover art, which is a more interesting discussion than one might expect. Kerry James Marshall looks at some of the formative influences from the 1920’s and 30’s which may have affected Sun Ra’s worldview and contributed to the “strangeness” we often see in his philosophy, flamboyance, and actions. Calvin Forbes looks at Sun Ra from a Black Nationalist viewpoint, and connects Ra’s Egyptian-isms to the belief that ancient Egypt was a black African civilization. We’ve become so used to seeing portrayals of ancient Egyptians as swarthy white people in Hollywood films, and thinking of the current Arab-dominated population of Egypt as descendants of the original Egyptians (albeit without sufficient proof) that most of us have not given much thought to the possibility that ancient Egyptians may have been black. Terri Kapsalis offers a fascinating look at Sun Ra’s wordplay, and finds much meaning in it.

There are more, though to my way of thinking some of the shorter pieces tell us more about the authors of these essays than they do about Sun Ra or his art. But other readers may well disagree. I must confess I have never seen John Szwed’s bio of Sun Ra, so I am willing to consider that some of the personal discoveries I’ve made reading this book may have been covered there. But there are so many fresh perspectives in this collection that I have no qualms about giving a very high recommendation to anyone, fan or foe, who would like to better understand that self-styled man of mystery, Herman Poole Blount, Le Sonyr Ra.

“A New Mountain To Climb” by Neal McCoy (Tate Publishing)

2011-02-06T13:09:00.000-08:00

Neal McCoy enjoyed tremendous success in the country-music field during the 1990’s, but the intervening years have not been quite so kind to him on the record charts. Nevertheless, he has managed to maintain high levels of success and name recognition as a live performer, due in particular to the uncanny loyalty of his fan base. No doubt his supporters recognize and appreciate the fact that McCoy is one of those special musical artists who supports his fans as much as they support him. McCoy is as much a humanitarian as he is a show-business personality, someone who has tried to do as much as he can for those who, through no fault of their own, have been less fortunate than him.

His first book is not a memoir (which, quite frankly, is what I was expecting) but a collection of short essays about real people he has met who have encountered and overcome tremendous obstacles in their lives. As such, it is not a “music book”, which is the stated theme of this blog, but belongs instead under the heading ”inspirational”. Since this is not the sort of thing I generally read or review, I have no real basis for a critical judgment, except to say that I did indeed find these stories to be inspiring, as we meet people with incurable physical conditions, poverty, or accidental injuries striving and generally succeeding to overcome the mountains life has put in their path. Rather than approaching these tales with a weepy, pitying bathos, McCoy describes the low points, then shifts his focus to the positive aspects of these people’s lives, such as their family relationships and their small accomplishments (and sometimes big ones). Yes, you may cry at times, but more often you will cheer, or at least come to appreciate what these people have done. You will also cheer and appreciate Neal McCoy as well.

Most of the real people McCoy profiles are “little people”, neither rich nor famous, just common folks. But he also discusses Mickey Gilley’s paralysis following his accidental fall off a porch while moving furniture. We likewise meet basketball star Karl Malone’s mother and, perhaps most memorable of all, General Tommy Franks, as well as a few of the soldiers who served under him in the Middle East. The aspect which ties all of these individual stories together is McCoy’s musical career, which made it possible for him to meet and interact with these varied individuals, separated as they are by geography, age, and physical condition. Indeed, the most harrowing chapter of all may be McCoy’s recounting of the small, secret USO tour he made in the company of Wayne Newton and Drew Carey to war-torn Afghanistan. The small troupe literally put their lives on their line to bring a bit of joy and diversion to the soldiers. You can’t help but admire them for these selfless actions.

Neal McCoy proves to be an ingratiating writer, with a good sense of narrative and thematic organization, carrying the “mountain” motif throughout the book without it ever becoming stretched or cloying. I hope he considers writing his own life story next. I have a feeling it could prove to be as motivational - and entertaining - as this book.

“Kids of the Black Hole: Punk Rock in Postsuburban California” by Dewar MacLeod (University of Oklahoma Press)

2011-01-24T13:56:00.000-08:00

For those of you who get a bit edgy when you see a word such as “Postsuburban” in the subtitle of a book on a subject such as punk-rock, rest assured that this is not some dry, dull, academic textbook. Yes, it is academically sound, and certainly is worthy of being published by a University Press. Nevertheless, author Dewar MacLeod generally, and refreshingly, keeps jargon to a minimum. What it is, then, is a lively, readable, and at times quite personal account of the rise and spread of punk rock in the L.A. area in the late 1970’s, and the subsequent development of hardcore in the outlying areas as the world greeted the 1980’s.

MacLeod is quick to point out that the punk phenomenon is far from native to Southern California. Despite the pioneering punk-in-formation styles of L.A. bands such as the Runaways and the Droogs - the latter are curiously absent from the book, perhaps because they would not attain their full impact until several years later, and then in Europe - punk-rock proper was a product of New York City and London, and essentially had to be imported into L.A. It caught the ears of young Angelenos who found themselves bored with the soft-focused country-folk-rock which dominated the Southern Cal scene during the 70’s. A lot of young kids were looking for something more visceral, more exciting, more relevant to their interests, and found it in New York’s Ramones and London’s Sex Pistols.

MacLeod tells how one of the key players in the formation of a punk-rock aesthetic on the L.A. scene, writer/publisher/record producer/store-owner Greg Shaw (1949-2004), attempted to establish an audience for roots-oriented rock’n’roll in new, up-to-date guises, and indeed is thought to have coined the very term “punk-rock” in the early 70’s. (I might dispute that, because I recall hearing the term “punk” during the 1960’s, applied to some of the garage-rock bands also favored by Greg Shaw. But at that time, the term conveyed an attitude more than than a specific musical genre.) But Shaw was already approaching 30 by the late 1970’s, and his school of energetic, yet “respectable”-sounding power-pop seemed too tame for many of those club-goers who needed to hear something louder, faster, nastier, and less polished. So while Shaw supplied much-needed early exposure, a chance for some bands to get on vinyl, and a place for them to sell their discs, in the end his musical preferences failed to win the day.

(At this point, I should parenthetically point out that the reason I have taken such an interest in those sections of the book where Greg Shaw is discussed is quite simple. Through our correspondence in the early 1970’s, centered around his fanzine “Who Put the Bomp”, he was my original mentor, my role model, the man who helped me crystallize my ideas on music - though I eventually went off on many different tangents, aesthetically and professionally - and thus is more responsible than any other non-family individual for the path my life has taken. A lot of us who became music journalists in the 1970’s, many of whom are still working, or as in my case dabbling, in the field owe a great debt to Greg Shaw. I am pleased to be able to take this opportunity to thank him, posthumously, for all he did for me.)

The disputes between Greg Shaw and the newer breed of punk musicians, writers, and promoters are significant, of course, but MacLeod also discusses many other facets of the L.A. punk underground. We get to see, for example, a young fellow named Jan Beahm transmute into Bobby Pyn, then further into Darby Crash of the much-revered (by some) and reviled (by others) band The Germs, and witness his rise and tragic fall. MacLeod takes us inside the clubs/halls/lodges to vicariously witness through his own memories and solid research the sights, sounds, and personalities which made this once-imitative scene increasingly unique. We see the turf wars, as different factions vie for supremacy, and we watch what had been a relatively benign scene (in the sense that any destruction caused by the first wave of L.A. punks was generally self-destruction) deteriorate into violence, much of it (but not necessarily all of it) provoked by the LAPD, who would raid clubs and smash heads with little or no provocation. Through all of this, the music continues to be loud, fast, and even, on occasion, distinctive.

Unfortunately, the hardcore scene which developed in Huntington Beach and other outlying areas, turned increasingly violent. The reasons for this violence were no longer connected to turf wars or even the police, but simply violence for the sheer sake of that rush of excitement that accompanies violence.. The violence sometimes extended beyond the audience to the band members themselves, and the music reflected this turn of events. One wishes MacLeod would have devoted even more space to objectively examining what specific cause-and-effect relationship there may have been between hardcore-punk music and hardcore-punk violence. Perhaps he takes for granted that it’s readily audible in the very sound of Black Flag or the Circle Jerks.

As a whole, I find this to be a well-balanced look at a phenomenon that is too often treated superficially, subjectively, and with such flagrant prejudice that it quickly becomes clear that most writers (on both sides of the discussion) are more interested in stirring up emotions through a screaming diatribe than offering an impartial examination of events as they occurred. Does Dewar MacLeod have his prejudices? I’m sure he does. But he manages to keep things on an even keel by interviewing many people who were there, and letting the story unfold as it happened. This is the way the writing of the more controversial aspects of popular music history should be approached, but too often is not.

"Pocket Cash" by Jim Marshall (Chronicle Books)

2011-01-09T15:49:00.000-08:00

Has there ever been a significant musical figure whose entire life could be so easily read in photographs as Johnny Cash? From the famous picture of the young Arkansas sharecropper boy to the handsome young Sun Records star, to the gaunt, seemingly anorexic pill-popper of the early 60’s, to the defiant face on the “Folsom Prison” LP cover, to the infamous “middle finger” shot, to the man so obviously in love with June Carter, to the hulking figure dressed all in black, to the creased, weary face of the old man who did the American Recordings series, our immediate reaction upon hearing the name “Johnny Cash” is as much a visual one as a musical one.

Not all of the iconic photographs of Johnny Cash mentioned in the above paragraph were taken by photographer Jim Marshall, but many of them were. Those that were snapped by Marshall, however, can be found here in this new book. Marshall was essentially the “official Johnny Cash photographer” during the period was at his peak of popularity and influence. “Pocket Cash” is a small, yet memorable collection of many of Marshall’s pictures of Johnny Cash, along with a few photos (with and without Cash) of his friends and members of his real and musical families. Marshall had a gift for being in the right place at the right time, but it wasn’t simply a matter of luck. He had a talent for knowing exactly when Cash’s face and physical stance were supremely photo-ready. Moreover, he had the skill to choose the correct angles, the best backdrops, the right settings to snap his pictures.

There are many photos of the Folsom Prison concert here, as well as behind-the-scenes shots from the set of Cash’s t.v. variety show, candid pictures of home life, live performance shots, and glimpses into the recording studio. Most are in black-and-white, which to me seems the most appropriate medium with which to capture Cash’s worn visage and monochromatic wardrobe, though there is a small color section as well. There are also three brief texts. The intro, by son John Carter Cash, helps place Marshall and his pictures in a context. The one-page reminiscences by Kris Kristofferson and Billy Bob Thornton are not really necessary, yet they’re interesting to read nonetheless.

Johnny Cash is such a seminal figure in American music history, and Jim Marshall such an important chronicler of the Cash saga, that it’s easy to recommend this slim volume to anyone who wants to know as much about the life and real-life legend of Johnny Cash as possible, even without the presence of words.

“Forever Doo-Wop: Race, Nostalgia, and Vocal Harmony” by John Michael Runowicz (University of Massachusetts Press)

2010-12-29T16:27:00.000-08:00

The amount of verbiage which has built up around the 1950’s/early-‘60’s style of rhythm-and-blues vocal-group singing known as “doo-wop” has been quite extensive, not only in book form, but also in specialist magazines and on the Internet as well. Most of the writing on this musical genre has been factual/biographical/historical/discographical, concerned primarily with who did what when, who sang on which record by which group, how/when/where individual groups formed and who their influences were, whatever happened to the singers in these groups, and so on. This material is generally carefully researched, and has great value for fans and future researchers alike, to be sure.

But as the subtitle of John Michael Runowicz’ book and the fact that it published by a University Press both indicate, “Forever Doo-Wop” is hardly your typical work on the subject. It is indeed, one of the few academically-oriented books in the field, and the first to my knowledge that approaches the subject through the lens of ethnomusicology. Rest assured, though, that despite the copious footnotes and the seriousness with which Mr. Runowicz approaches his subject, the book is written in a reader-friendly style, without the over-reliance on academic jargon which mars so many otherwise insightful academic books on popular culture.

John Michael Runowicz is perhaps uniquely qualified to write an ethnomusicological examination which retains an authentic feel for and love of the music. On one hand, he is an “independent scholar” with a PhD in ethnomusicology; on the other, he has worked extensively as guitarist and Musical Director for both the classic 50’s vocal group Earl Carroll and the Cadillacs (known for “Speedoo” and the version of the song “Gloria” which served as a template for dozens of cover versions) and Shirley Alston Reeves (former lead singer of the Shirelles, and a busy solo artist in her own right).

Don’t let that seven-syllable word, “ethnomusicology”, scare you away. It simply refers to the serious study of music within a culture or community. ”Community” in this sense does not necessarily refer to a geographical location, but may be extended to a group of people with a shared interest. Bluegrass fans, to cite but one well-known example, tend to comprise a tight-knit “community”. And, as Runowicz is careful to point out, the entire field of doo-wop - including singers, backup musicians, what he calls “mediators” (record producers, promoters), and fans - can be considered to constitute one large and, to a considerable extent, tightly-knit community as well, albeit one in which the various subgroups often have varying interests. One common misconception is that ethnomusicology always studies what the music industry refers to as “world music”, which some people translate as “foreign music” (as if the United States were not a part of the world). But in recent years, ethnomusicologists have studied a variety of musical genres which are far from being specific to a single country or ethnic grouping (such as the “riot grrrl” phenomenon).

When I first became interested in ethnomusicology in the 1960’s, the major emphasis tended to be on technical musical analysis, breaking the music of a particular group of people into its component pieces, seeing how these pieces fit together, thus seeing not only how these types of music “work”, but also to uncover what makes these musical expressions differ from other musical expressions. Yes, Runowicz does offer some musical analysis in terms of what sorts of chord progressions are common to much doo-wop, how the vocal harmonies are arranged, what time signatures are often heard, and so on. But these analyses are kept to a bare minimum of technicality. Even when he describes how singers and backup bands learn their parts, his descriptions are easy to follow and highly instructive. There is enough meat here to please the scholars (though I suspect that the definitive technical analysis of doo-wop has yet to be written), but it is approached in ways that should be accessible to the average reader.

The emphasis, then, is on the people of doo-wop and the way the music impacts their lives. Most notably, he offers an extended look into the career of Earl Carroll and the Cadillacs, the vocal group with which the author has spent the bulk of his performing career, a group which has been around for over a half-century, more than long enough to witness and to form opinions about the many changes and trends in doo-wop through the years. Runowicz is quick to point out that, while the audience may listen to this music in order to satisfy a craving for a nostalgic experience, the performers themselves are not trapped inside a museum, but are living, breathing professional entertainers who are serious about their art and its craft, who work hard even into old age to maintain a high level of quality in their music and stage show.

The author also includes a short overview of doo-wop history, pointing out its roots in the German/Austrian style of close harmony, but in an Americanized style which began to develop in the 19th-century in black barbershops. (There has been quite a bit of scholarly detective work in recent years which has demonstrated beyond a doubt that barbershop-quartet singing as we know it began as an African-American phenomenon). He looks at harmony singing in an African-American religious context, at its entrance into mainstream musical circles thanks to such groups as the Mills Brothers and the Ink Spots, and at the immediate precursors of doo-wop, such as the Delta Rhythm Boys and Ravens.

He extends his historical view into the later period of doo-wop, when Italian- and Jewish-American harmony vocal groups became prominent. He looks at the dark days of the British Invasion, when doo-wop seemed to disappear off the face of the earth, when groups had to adjust or die, and most of them died. He also studies the revival of doo-wop in the 1970’s, a somewhat limited revival which found aging groups singing to mostly aging audiences, consisting primarily of the same people who listened to their records in the “old days”, who wanted to hear groups sing their hits, and only their hits, and rejected anything new. And while it was a welcome revival of interest, it was limited in that it did not cause the music to come rushing back to the mainstream popularity it had from the mid-1950’s to the early 1960’s. And he does this all very effectively, in a very short space - the book consists of less than 150 pages of text, a page count which does not include the detailed notes and a thoughtfully-complete index.

One aspect of the book which might cause some controversy within the doo-wop community, but which Runowicz approaches delicately yet openly (meaning, he names names) is the subject of racism. As a white man who performs with black singers and musicians in a genre originated by African-Americans, but which in many ways became co-opted by white audiences, white managers, white-owned record companies, and white concert promoters, Runowicz reveals the often seedy manipulations to which this particular group of African-Americans and their music have been subjected, with largely negative impact to their financial and social well-being. Sadly, the stories he relates are common to many African-American musical genres, yet it’s an area too many authors writing for the mass market do not feel comfortable discussing. Once again, this is a University Press book, which one hopes allows for a greater degree of openness when discussing sensitive matters.

In all, I find this to be the most fascinating and unique book on the subject of doo-wop I’ve ever come across, and I recommend it highly to anyone interested in American popular music history, whether a doo-wop fan or not. I’m sure Mr. Runowicz has more to tell us on the subject, and I hope there will be more books to come.

“1989: Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About” by Joshua Clover (University of California Press)

2010-12-12T12:14:00.000-08:00

I need to mention this right off the bat - “1989” is NOT a book about Bob Dylan, despite the subtitle of the work. In fact, he is a very minor player here, used more as a symbol of an earlier generation than anything else. The subtitle “Bob Dylan Didn’t Have This To Sing About” is a line from the song “Right Here Right Now” by Jesus Jones, which IS a major player in the book.

It is Joshua Clover’s contention that the world-shaking events of 1989, most notably the Fall of the Berlin Wall, the overthrow of Communism throughout Europe, and the bloody protests in Tiananmen Square, are in some way connected to the changes in popular music which took place in and around 1989. He makes sure one understands that “1989” in the musico-historical sense refers not only to the literal year 1989, but also to musical events in the immediate period leading up to the year 1989, plus subsequent developments in the very early ‘90’s, which grew out of the musical revolutions of ‘89. Thus, the Jesus Jones song - the lyrics and video of which make reference to the politics of 1989 - is taken as a symbol of the year’s events, even though it was released in 1990 and hit the charts in 1991.

I have to confess that in 1989 and the years surrounding, I was in my early 40’s and had wearied of pop music. I was instead spending most of my time listening to folk-based and world-music styles. Thus, I had never really considered 1989 to be a particularly epochal year musically. Clover’s book has convinced me otherwise. It has even convinced me to go back and listen to much of this music again. Since I am by vocation a popular music historian (specializing in pre-1970 genres, to be sure), I am always pleased to come across intelligent analytical/critical thinking which allows me to re-examine music history from new vantage points.

I have far less to say about the political historical aspects of the book, largely because I am not familiar with the specialized, post-modernist, historiographical literature which Clover makes considerable reference to. He is very much concerned with the concept espoused around the time that the events of 1989 represented “the end of history”.Clover very carefully debunks this argument in rigorous academic terms. His writing in these sections is very dense and exacting, though a slow, committed reading generally makes his points clear.

The musical analysis is much easier to digest. In what I find to be the book’s most compelling and convincing chapter, Clover details how 1989 signalled the switchover from politically-based “Black Power” rap (typified by Public Enemy) to gangsta rap (typified at this time by N.W.A.), from New York to LA, from the influence of the Nation of Islam to a “Boyz N the Hood” mentality, in which black anger was turned into black-on-black violence. These changes were reflected in the music itself, as the rhythmic complexities of 80’s rap turned into a cooler, sample-based backdrop which led to massive legal problems for artists and record producers. Clover’s ability to dig below the surface and connect dots in a manner I personally had never contemplated is most impressive here.

1989 also was the year when grunge began to supplant punk by combining musical elements from both punk and metal, then turning the whole thing inward. Clover’s descriptions of this occurrence may hold fewer surprises than the hip-hop chapter, but they do make for interesting reading and re-listening. Most convincing are his arguments for why grunge was doomed to be a short-lived phenomenon in its pure state.

A less obvious change in the period called “1989”, at least as far as American readers will be concerned, is the story of how the “rave” became such a momentous event in England, where acid-house not only developed into a chart-topping musical genre, but raves became a way of life for a while, as no-holds-barred dance parties began attracting hundreds of thousands of people to large, open spaces all at one time. Musically, this craze had roots in Detroit and Chicago, yet the rave on a Grand Scale never caught on in the US to anywhere near the extent that it did in the UK and throughout much of Europe.

Perhaps least convincing to me is Clover’s chapter on how 1989 was a golden age for the single, just as the 45 was giving way to the CD single. I really wish he would have explained why he thinks 1962 was also such a golden era for the single, when most critics (not necessarily including myself) decry the music of the early 60’s as a particularly fallow period. Then again, Joshua Clover is not “most critics”, but a man who thinks for himself, thank goodness. I simply feel this segment of the book needed more conviction, more detail, more explanation.

As I’ve hinted, this slim volume (145 pages, not counting the Acknowledgments to Greil Marcus and others, 18 pages of notes, and a useful index) may be slow-going for many people. But the ideas are well worth mulling over. It may not be to everyone’s taste, but it is a worthwhile addition to the academically-minded pop music fan's library.

“If Trouble Don't Kill Me: A Family's Story of Brotherhood, War, and Bluegrass” by Ralph Berrier, Jr. (Crown)

2010-11-24T16:34:00.000-08:00

The Hall Twins, Clayton and Saford, were never famous country musicians. Successful sidemen, yes. Regionally popular radio performers, yes. They even made a few records. But you won't find much, if any, information about the Hall brothers in standard country-music histories. But this by no means implies they did not have interesting stories to tell, stories which would no doubt have been lost to posterity had Clayton Hall's grandson, Ralph Berrier, Jr., not become a journalist in Roanoke, VA, with an interest in his state's musical heritage.

The historical role played by the Halls was by no means an insignificant one. They were present at the end of the old-time string-band tradition, they contributed to the transition period between the country music of the 1930's and that of the '40's, and they helped usher in the beginnings of bluegrass. Their greatest success came in the years immediately preceding World War II, as members of Roy Hall (no relation to the Twins) and his Blue Ridge Entertainers, the top radio and live-performance country-music ensemble in the Roanoke area, a band perhaps best remembered as an early outlet for the fiddling talents of Tommy Magness, known for his work with Bill Monroe and Reno and Smiley. But this is the middle of the story, a very important segment of the Hall Twins' story, to be sure, but not necessarily the most interesting part. But that may be because life was actually going well for the Twins, for once.

But the Halls' story is grandson Ralph's to tell. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the stories of grandfather Clayton and great uncle Saford are Berrier’s to retell. And retell them he does, superbly, with a journalist's fine eye for detail, a reporter's skill for getting to the heart of matters, and a storyteller's art for building any given section of his tale to its conclusion. This is nonfiction, but it reads as swiftly and in as engrossing a manner as a novel.

The story actually begins with a look at the Halls' grandmother and mother, two fascinating Appalachian women from an area in the Blue Ridge Mountain county of Patrick, located in Virginia, close to North Carolina, but, as Berrier points out, not especially highly regarded by either state. Their existence, as well as that of Clayton and Saford Hall and their many siblings, might best be described as “marginal”. It was a life filled with hard poverty, easy violence, illicit sex, and strong religion (in the Halls’ case, the Moravian church). The only way out was to head to the nearby city of Bassett and work long, grueling hours for little pay in a furniture factory.

But the Halls had a way out of the furniture plant - music. They learned to play every stringed instrument used in the country music of the day (Saford in particular became a much-admired fiddler), their vocal harmonies were twin-close, and their repertoire expanded beyond Appalachia to incorporate the Western songs they heard in singing-cowboy movies. Berrier chronicles their adventures, onstage and off, as local stars, making it sound like a pretty darn good life for a couple rascally 20-year-old guys coming out of a difficult childhood.

Then came World War II, and life would never be the same for either Hall twin again. Saford entered the fray first first, and was sent to fight Nazis and Fascists, in Africa and Europe. Clayton eventually wound up in the Pacific Theater, most notably the Philippines, where he fought in some of the bloodiest battles of the war. The recounting of their varied and often harrowing experiences is the centerpiece of the book, as two country boys from The Hollow - who had gotten into their share of minor scrapes and fights, but who had rarely stooped to harsh brutality - now found themselves in a position where violence, bloodshed, turbulence, and sudden death were constant companions. While this hardly puts the Halls into unique positions during wartime, their tales of extreme duress, of common, ordinary men in uncommon, extraordinary situations, of killing and being killed, are told by their grandson with a fervor and a power missing from the dry descriptions of official military history. To be sure, there is the possibility that the Halls may have embellished their reminiscences a bit, but their tales resonate as emotionally true. Berrier has insured that his narrative is fleshed out believably by interviewing other people who were there.

After the war, the Hall Twins attempted to pick up their musical careers where they left off. But Roy Hall was dead and Tommy Magness had turned into a hopeless alcoholic. The twins went their separate ways, the qualities that had made them a special pair slipping away until they became ordinary, everyday working people. Nevertheless, in their last years, they found themselves becoming popular local entertainers again, adding a dash of color to what one might have expected to be the drab final years of two aging ex-soldiers.

Clayton and Saford Hall may never have become as famous as their talents and ambitions might have taken them, if only World War II had not intervened. Even so, they emerge as two very memorable characters. Their grandson has done them proud by telling their stories with flair, understanding, and a great deal of fine writing. What’s more, this is a book which may be profitably and enjoyably read by anyone, regardless of whether they have any interest in old-time country music or not. This is one fascinating book, and I recommend it unreservedly.

“The Fabulous George Lewis Band: The Inside Story” by Barry Martyn with Nick Gagliano (Burgundy Street Press)

2010-11-18T16:31:00.000-08:00

Clarinetist/bandleader George Lewis (1900-1968) has long been considered one of the great iconic figures of traditional New Orleans jazz. As such, the telling of any portion of his story by someone who knew and worked with him represents a significant contribution to the storehouse of jazz knowledge.

It helps to keep in mind that this characterization, “traditional” New Orleans jazz, has a number of levels of meaning. To many people, for example, the Dukes of Dixieland played “traditional” N.O. jazz in the 1950’s, even though they were a few generations removed from the origins of the music, and were influenced by swing and other post-N.O. developments. One might easily argue that even King Oliver in 1923 represented a stylistic modernization over the “original” New Orleans style. Truth be told, we don’t really know what the earliest New Orleans jazz styles sounded like, since no one bothered to document them while they were happening. What we can say, however, is that the music of George Lewis and his band of the 1940’s and 50’s exemplifies what we believe to be one of the oldest, most purely “authentic” early New Orleans jazz styles to be documented, despite the fact that he was most likely born after the music’s ultimate origins, and was not recorded until the 1940’s. This alone would make the George Lewis Band worthy of study.

Unfortunately, this book is not the definitive telling of George Lewis’ story, as it covers only one period of his life and, for that matter, only one portion - albeit a very crucial one - of the George Lewis Band’s existence. This is the period when Lewis - who had returned to New Orleans and what appeared to be a resumption of his long obscurity, after enjoying a brief glimpse of fame playing with trumpeter Bunk Johnson in the early/mid 1940’s - was trying to establish a new dance band in the traditional N.O. style. He had gathered together such equally unknown, yet eventually renowned musicians as Big Jim Robinson, Lawrence Marrero, Slow Drag Pavageau, among others, with hopes of finding more work as a performer at local dances and clubs. He approached a young, articulate, recent college graduate, Nick Gagliano, about helping the band find work. Gagliano did just that, sending Lewis on his way to relative stardom on the traditional jazz scene of the 1950’s. This book is as much about Gagliano and his relationship to the musicians as it is about the band itself.

There is much to chew on here. English-born drummer/bandleader/historian Barry Martyn employs an interview format to elicit thoughts from Gagliano (who is now in his 80’s) on the nature of jazz tradition, the crucial influence of New Orleans’ unusual racial atmosphere on both the musical life and everyday life of New Orleans, the role of the manager in establishing an artist’s reputation, and many other topics germane to the career of George Lewis, but also to the history of New Orleans music as a whole. Martyn asks trenchant questions, Gagliano answers them, and the results are presented unedited.

And therein lies the book’s biggest problem. The fact that the transcripts are unedited eliminate the question of whether Gagliano’s thoughts have been subjected to editorial interpretation. That’s good. But - and this is a big but - every hesitation, every partial sentence, every tangent and diversion, every bit of personal conversation that should have been kept personal, every repeated question, are all here, slowing down the narrative, making it read rather more awkwardly than it needed to. A bit of judicious editing, retaining the integrity of the interview, but rendering it more readable, would have been welcome. What’s more, there are details Gagliano simply doesn’t recall. The “I don’t knows” and “I can’t remembers” begin to pile up once he nears the part of the story where the careers of Lewis and his band are taken over by another manager. (Gagliano went back to school to get his law degree, and could no longer devote time to his musical hobby.) The overall effect is that a book with the potential to attract more widespread attention will now appeal primarily to scholars of the music and other people with a vested interest in learning more about the New Orleans scene of the pre-Civil Rights” period.

Adding interest to the book, in any event, are an interview with a white man named John Chaffe, who took banjo lessons from Lawrence Marrero, further illuminating the stultifying role of race in New Orleans in the 1950’s, and a wonderful reminiscence by musician-turned-historian Samuel Charters. The book comes packaged with a CD of previously unissued live recordings by the George Lewis Band, recorded in Ohio in 1952-53, along with taped interviews from 1953, which add considerably to the book’s significance.

The book is distributed by LSU Press, another fine example of a University Press making available a book slanted toward a specialist market that is grossly under-served by commercial publishers.

“Banjo on the Mountain: Wade Mainer’s First Hundred Years” by Dick Spottswood (University Press of Mississippi)

2010-11-07T12:35:00.000-08:00

Wade Mainer was born April 21, 1907 and, at the time of this book’s publication, was still alive and occasionally active. Making music in front of an audience while over the age of 100 is rare, but not totally unheard-of. (Ukulele legend Bill Tapia comes to mind.) But Mainer’s accomplishment in outliving virtually all of his contemporaries is so unusual, it is sometimes forgotten that he was an important, influential figure in his heyday, who prefigured many of the innovations which have taken place in bluegrass and country music to the present day.

Indeed, when Wade Mainer first impacted the country-music scene in the mid-1930’s, bluegrass had yet to be invented. It was his fresh, new approach to the banjo that served as a bridge between the traditional, African-rooted clawhammer technique and the three-singer style popularized by Earl Scruggs in the mid-1940’s. This new book by veteran bluegrass historian Dick Spottswood is not so much a completely detailed biography (though it does offer quite a bit of significant biographical information), as it is a tribute, perhaps “celebration” might be a better word, of Wade Mainer’s long, if somewhat sporadic career.

Mainer was born in rural western North Carolina, in an area and an era in which it would be expected that a youngster would grow up to spend his entire life as a millworker. But Wade and his fiddle-playing brother Joseph Emmett “J. E.” Mainer chose another option, forming a string band which played on numerous radio stations throughout the area. Spottswood traces their career on radio and records, through numerous personnel shifts, and changes in leadership (J.E. had to leave his own band due to his drinking problems). The Mainers’ recordings not only became regionally popular, they attracted the attention of famed folklorist Alan Lomax, who invited them to Washington to perform “folk music” for President and Mrs. Roosevelt. In one of the most revealing segments of the book, Alan Lomax instructs Mainer as to which “authentic folk songs” he wants Wade and the band to perform, not all of which were part of the band’s recorded repertoire. It’s as if Lomax thought he knew more about what was folk music than the “folk” themselves, or at least felt the need to control their performance.

Spottswood traces Mainer’s subsequent career through its various ups and downs, a religious conversion which caused to leave music, his years as an autoworker in Michigan, his long and successful marriage to Julia Brown Mainer, who would become his duet partner in later years, and his subsequent comeback in the 1970s, when he began recording a long string of LP’s for the Old Homestead label. It’s a fascinating story of a man who really had very little concept of what an important historical figure he was, and was therefore almost entirely free of pretense.

In addition to Spottswood’s biographical essay, there is a more technical essay on Wade Mainer’s banjo style, which explains what it was that set him apart from other banjo players who preceded him. The second half of the slim, but highly informative volume is devoted largely to a collection of photographs, documents, and reminiscences by Wade and Julia, as well as a discography (with dates and personnel) of Mainer’s 78-RPM recordings of the 78 RPM and LP eras. I would, however, have preferred a more complete breakdown of song listings for the Old Homestead collections.

The book is only 134 pages long, but there’s a lot packed into these oversized pages. I would assume that the primary markets for a book such as this would be music historians, collectors, and libraries rather than casual bluegrass/oldtime-country fans. But I found Mr. Mainer’s story a fascinating one, and I’m sure casual readers would likewise find it so.

“Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage” by Kenneth Silverman

2010-10-21T17:02:00.000-07:00

I don’t think it would be too far off the mark to consider John Cage as the single most influential figure in non-popular music during the second half of the 20th century. Love him or hate him, he changed the way “art music” is written, is heard, is notated, is presented, is danced to; well, you get the idea. He set into motion several balls which haven’t stopped rolling yet. Even so, to the public at large - at least that portion to which his name has any meaning whatsoever - he is known almost solely because he composed a “silent” piece of music.

John Cage lived 79 years, 79 intense years filled right to the very end with almost feverish activity, creativity, an unstinting lack of compromise and, in the end, after decades of struggle, world-wide fame and all the others perks which come with long-fought-for acceptance. He lived a complicated, controversy-filled life, one which would be impossible for the average biographer to make sense of. But Kenneth Silverman is not just any biographer. His previous accomplishments include highly regarded books on Houdini, Edgar Allan Poe, Samuel F.B. Morse, Cotton Mather - all easy subjects to write about superficially, but difficult subjects to put into their proper perspective. John Cage, a complex man who never seemed to comfortably settle into one mode of expression or one personal philosophy for very long before he was off on another artistic quest, might very well have been Silverman’s most difficult task yet.

But Silverman tackled the job with a diligence that less thorough authors might spurn. He searched through hundreds of print sources, interviewed people who knew and/or encountered Cage, pored over correspondence, checked facts, compared opinions. The result is a fresh, comprehensive, uncensored, meticulously detailed, carefully explicated examination of a man whose life was filled with contradictions, stubbornly held convictions, and difficult to fathom twists and turns.

We learn that “our” John Cage was the son of a previous generation’s equally enigmatic John Cage, a scientist/inventor quite well-known in his day, but also a bit of a crackpot. Cage, Jr. decided early on to study with Arnold Schoenberg, thinking he would be his entree into musical modernism, only to discover that Schoenberg wanted his students to have a thorough grounding in classical music theory and harmony, the very things Cage was hoping to liberate himself from. His need to shake free of harmony led him to begin composing percussion music. It is almost humorous in retrospect watching him naively and over-optimistically trying to convince people to listen to new music as well as his lectures on the subject.

But Cage was not easily dissuaded. Silverman carefully follows him as he quickly moves from innovative style to innovative style, prepared pianos, electronics and tape manipulation, the beginnings of what would come to be called “Happenings”, graphic notation, indeterminate music composed with the crucial aid of the I Ching (Silverman’s explanations and illustrations of this process is invaluable) and later with the aid of computers, the concept of “time brackets”, and on and on. The author traces the development of Cage’s decades-long collaboration with his gay lover, choreographer Merce Cunningham, as the two try - in vain for quite a long time - to build enough of an audience for modern dance and modern music composed in inseparable conjunction with each other to pay the rent and put food in their stomachs. We see Cage taking on a variety of students, including a Japanese composer who was married to Yoko Ono at the time, which helps to explain what I had previously considered to be the unlikely connection between Cage and John Lennon.

As he aged, John Cage never mellowed, never played it safe. He had long since discovered that his compositional concepts could be expressed textually rather than being set out on staff paper, to be repeated the same way each time a piece was performed. So it should not be surprising to find him turning to the writing of texts for their own sake - as one might expect, texts of a rigorously unconventional nature. His interest in the writings of kindred spirit James Joyce are examined, as is the Irish author’s influence on Cage. We also follow the development of the Cage-originated poetic form, the mesostic, which made him as much an innovator in the literary field as he was in music.

Silverman looks at Cage’s consuming interest in mushrooms, his artistic experiments with stone lithography, his friendships with many world figures in music and art, friendships which often turned prickly after awhile. Indeed, there is a tremendous amount of twentieth-century avant-garde culture discussed within the 400-plus pages of this densely-written, but eminently readable book. It is difficult to imagine there will be any need to write further books about John Cage in the future.

The review copy was an advance copy (due to a variety of circumstances, this review is appearing after the publication date), so it had no index. It should be obvious that the index, which will be in the finished product, will be exceedingly helpful in keeping the characters straight. (Silverman does the reader the favor of summarizing every so often, to remind the reader of people and events which were had not been mentioned for a while). There is also a reference to a CD on the Mode label. I’m afraid I simply do not know if the CD is included with the regular copies of the book, or if it is available as a separate entity. But looking at the CD track list at the back of the book, it seems clear that the CD will be an invaluable adjunct to the text.

I can’t imagine anyone with a interest in John Cage or with a more generalized interest in twentieth-century composition not wanting to read this book. Curiosity seekers should also find much to chew on here.

“Saxophone Colossus: A Portrait of Sonny Rollins” by John Abbott and Bob Blumenthal (Abrams)

2010-10-12T16:54:00.000-07:00

There have been a great many tributes in celebration of Theodore Walter Rollins’ 80th birthday this year, but few may prove to hold as much permanent value as this absolutely gorgeous book.

There are relatively few jazz musicians whose importance to the world at large is so great as to justify the publication of a photographic coffee-table art book. What’s more, there are very few photographers who have devoted as much time and skill to documenting an individual jazz musician as John Abbott has with Sonny Rollins. When you couple dozens of beautifully composed, shot, and printed photographs with Bob Blumenthal’s eminently readable, consistently insightful, and thoughtfully conceived series of essays on Rollins, the result is a book to peruse and to treasure.

Sonny Rollins is indeed a colossus of the tenor saxophone, but jazz-astute readers will have already made the connection to Rollins’ classic 1956 quartet LP, “Saxophone Colossus.” Blumenthal has structured his text after the album, with each chapter/essay being thematically inspired by one of the five tracks on the LP.

Thus, chapter 1 of the book is entitled “St. Thomas”, a tune which at one time was credited to Rollins, but which he readily acknowledged many years ago was an adaptation from a Caribbean tune, meant to represent his family ties to the Virgin Islands and Haiti. Blumenthal uses the tune as an example of Rollins’ “assertive” approach to rhythm. Though he first recorded with singer Babs Gonzalez in 1949 while still a teenager, It was Rollins’ assertiveness which attracted attention while playing with Miles Davis in 1951. In an era in which the initial fire of bebop was mellowing down to the cool approach introduced by Davis in 1948, it was Rollins who, along with such musicians as Horace Silver and Art Blakey, opened the door for the more aggressive “hard bop” sound which eventually established itself as the jazz mainstream for many years to come.

Though Rollins’ surprisingly names Fats Waller as his earliest influence, Chapter 2, “You Don’t Know What Love Is”, delves into the far greater impact Coleman Hawkins had on Rollins’ big tone and improvisational choices. (Secondary influences included Ben Webster, Don Byas, and Lester Young.) Blumenthal notes also that Hawkins was the first jazz musician to achieve and maintain a high level of popularity without having to resort to the trappings of show-biz, thus acting as the role model for all subsequent jazzmen who saw themselves as dignified, serious artists, rather then entertainers. By recording the pop ballad “You Don’t Know What Love Is”, Rollins was in a sense showing the effect of Hawkins, jazz balladeer extraordinaire, on musicians whose primary concern was their music, rather than catering to the whims of a fickle audience.

Chapter 3, “Strode Rose”, leads Blumenthal to consider “Saxophone Colossus” as a “well-made jazz recording.” Due to the relative lack of sales potential, many of the jazz LP’s of the 1950’s were ill-rehearsed blowing sessions. Musicians who did not play together regularly were thrown into a studio for three hours, often without prior rehearsal. A series of tunes and/or chord sequences (often “borrowed” from other tunes) was agreed upon, and the tape started rolling. Recording sessions were a chance to pick up some quick money by blowing extended improvisations without a great deal of forethought. It’s a small miracle that so many of these blowing sessions are still entertaining, and indeed strike many people (such as myself) as far more listenable than over-produced, carefully arranged, yet bloodless modern recordings. Certainly, Rollins played on his share of blowing sessions. Still, “Strode Rode” stands apart from the average tune on this sort of album in that it IS, like so many of Rollins’ originals, actually “original”, i.e., a fully-realized, carefully considered composition. Blumenthal’s analysis of the tune is as fascinating as it is effective.

In chapter 4, “Moritat” (the original U.S. title, shortened from the German, for the Kurt Weill song better known as “Mack the Knife”), Blumenthal tells us that Rollins chose to record the piece out of personal preference, rather than as a nod to the commercial market. Indeed, he points out that Rollins has often chosen to record tunes that many other musicians of his caliber would consider trivial, simply because he likes them. He also credits Rollins’ frequent quotations of well-known melodies within his improvisations to his sense of humor, as well as to their “suggestive and melodic shapes.”

Chapter 5, “Blue 7”, is built around a tune that was instantly composed (improvised) on the spot by a combo that existed solely for a three-hour recording session. However, it has transcended its blowing session origins to become a cohesive, fully unified jazz classic. Blumenthal connects “Blue 7” to the subsequent “Freedom Suite”, which thus allows him to get into a discussion of Rollins’ political views, as expressed in his music. He also talks about Rollins’ infamous unannounced sabbaticals, during which he spent his time practicing and reflecting on both his music and his life.

There is much to ruminate on in Blumenthal’s text. But despite my emphasis on the musical aspects of the book, I must once again commend John Abbott for his photos, which dominate the book as a whole. He has an exceptional eye for color coordination (a sense I am sorely lacking, which is why I am so impressed when I see the work of someone who has mastered color). He also has a finely developed sense of line, posing the saxophone as carefully as he poses Rollins himself in the studio portraits. He also is skilled at capturing facial expressions (even at a sideways glance) in the live-performance shots.

The photographs, the text, and of course the man and the music under consideration all combine to make this an exceptional book of its kind. Highly recommended.

"Eleven Unsung Heroes of Early Rock & Roll” by Dick Stewart (Lance Monthly Press)

2010-10-09T14:01:00.000-07:00

Publishers, and for that matter, authors, can be a fairly conservative lot when it comes to choosing which rock-oriented books find their way onto the market. It’s not surprising that the 40th anniversary of Jimi Hendrix is considered a milestone, leading to a plethora of books on The Man. Likewise, there are a number of books appearing about John Lennon, the Beatles, and yes, Paul McCartney, timed at least in part to coincide with what would have been Lennon’s 70th birthday. Do we really need new books about Bob Dylan or Elvis Presley? - well, the list goes on.

This is why I am so pleased whenever I see lesser-known artists representing various levels of commercial achievement making rare appearances on the nation’s book shelves. Currently awaiting review are books about the under-rated 60’s psychedelic band Arthur Lee and Love, traditional New Orleans jazz clarinetist George Lewis, pioneer folk singer John Jacob Niles, among others. To be sure, we have their records to remember them by, we have magazine articles and websites devoted to their accomplishments, but there is a permanence associated with having one’s life story enshrined within the covers of a book that goes beyond more ephemeral forms of documentation.. (Don’t get me started about the so-called ‘death of the printed word”! As anyone with a collection of files on floppy disks can tell you, there may be very little permanence associated with cyberspace.)

And this is why I am so pleased to see a book devoted to some of the less widely-known names associated with rock’n’roll in the pre-Beatles era. (To be sure, a few of the people covered in Dick Stewart’s book had careers which extended beyond the British invasion.) The book’s subtitle is “Historic Contributions by Artists You Never Heard Of”. There are actually only two artists here whom I’ve never heard of, - Robert Kelly and Clyde Hankins; see below. Indeed, a few of the eleven men (there are no women included, but for that you should blame history more than the author) had major hits. Even so, I dare say that the average, non-specialist reader would likely find most, possibly all, of the names in this book to be unknown quantities, even when familiar with a few of the records they appeared on.

Stewart, a former surf guitarist who hails from New Mexico, is especially fond of the rock’n’roll scene of West Texas and his home state, which accounts in part for a preponderance of artists who recorded for (and were in some way or another victimized by) the great Clovis, NM-based producer Norman Petty, who often treated his young artists more as servants than budding professionals.. Buddy Holly and, to a far lesser extent, Buddy Knox have dominated the discussions of the Petty studio to such an extent that it is sometimes forgotten that Petty also was a major purveyor of the guitar-instrumental variety of rock’n’roll. The book devotes a chapter each to lead guitarist George Tomsco of the Fireballs, and Jimmy Torres and Keith McCormack of the String-a-Longs.

The Fireballs first attracted national attention in 1959 with their pre-Ventures guitar instrumental “Torquay”, followed closely by “Bulldog”. It’s worth noting that it was Petty who encouraged the group to stick to recording instrumentals in their early days, and likewise encouraged them to focus on vocals later in their career. Though the band had a #1 hit with ”Sugar Shack” in 1963, many people don’t realize that this record and their last hit, “Bottle of Wine”, in 1968, was the same Fireballs band that did the instrumental hits, since Petty put singer Jimmy Gilmer’s name front and center on the label of the “Sugar Shack” 45. (By the way, “Bottle of Wine” is not an “old Irish pub” song, but was written in the 1960’s by Tom Paxton.) As a result, Tomsco became something of a forgotten man among rock historians.

The String-a-Longs’ career was more short-lived, but they also had a gigantic hit in 1961’s “Wheels”, with its distinctive four-guitar texture (lead, rhythm, bass, and an “extra” guitar which played a mixture of rhythm, harmony, and counterpoint) and a drummer who played on a cardboard box (again, Petty’s idea). Stewart’s interview with lead guitarist Torres is especially insightful, as he discusses the problems of being a Hispanic kid in West Texas, as well as his atypical background in classical and band music. It turns out that McCormack was involved with both bands, as the String-a-Longs’ rhythm guitarist and as the co-writer of “Sugar Shack”.

The Norman Petty connection is featured in three other chapters. Sonny Curtis, who was born without a first name, had played with the original Crickets, and later re-joined them in their post-Holly career. He is best known, however, as a songwriter, who wrote the Everly Brothers’”Walk Right Back”; “I Fought the Law”, which became a hit in the cover version by the Bobby Fuller Four”; and the theme for television’s “Mary Tyler Moore Show”. Sonny West wrote “Oh Boy” and “Rave On”, hoping to use them to establish his own recording career, but Petty assigned them to Buddy Holly instead. (To be sure, there is no guarantee West’s own versions would have had anywhere near the impact of Holly’s versions.) Drummer Carl Bunch was the drummer on Buddy Holly’s fateful last tour, and supplies a great deal of perspective on how and why Holly split with the Crickets (once again, Petty’s interference seems to have been crucial), and the unfortunate circumstances of that last tour, leading up to the fatal plane ride.

The first chapter of the book is devoted to Jack Ely, whose voice (though rarely his name) is familiar to untold millions, as the singer on the Kingsmen’s perennial “Louie Louie”. I doubt anyone at this late date still believes the old fib about the song having dirty lyrics, which Ely slurred so people would have difficulty understanding them. (That story never made sense to me from the outset. What would be the purpose of singing naughty lyrics if no one can understand them?). Instead Ely tells of a microphone placed up so high that he had to extend his neck and shout to be heard over the rest of the band, in this pre-multi-track recording session. Ironically, the Kingsmen had been known as a clean, Christian band prior to this controversy.

Fans of the late-period (mid-to-late 60’s) guitar instrumental band, Davie Allan and the Arrows (whose “Apache ‘65” and “Blues Theme” are both high on my personal playlist), will be frustrated when they read what Allan considers to be the reasons why the band was so poorly promoted. There is also a fascinating portrait of the late keyboardist/bass player Larry Knechtel, best known for his work as a session musician (he’s the pianist on “Bridge Over Troubled Water”) and as a member of both Duane Eddy’s Rebels and Bread. In one sense, Knechtel probably doesn’t deserve a spot in this book, considering the disdain he seems to have held for most rock’n’roll and surf music. However, his insights into the life and requirements of a top-level studio player are well worth reading.

The two artists I had not encountered before reading this book both have interesting stories to tell. Robert Kelly is a perfect example of a hard-luck musician who eventually caught a break. In his early career, he was pretty much a struggling small-timer whose fight for survival led him into contact with no less a historical figure than sleazeball-nightclub-owner turned assassin Jack Ruby. Kelly eventually found success - though not necessarily fame - as leader of a Vegas showband called the Expressions. The other unfamiliar figure, Clyde Hankins, was a guitarist during the big band era, whose claim to rock’n’roll status comes not from his own playing, but from his role as teacher/mentor to a number of the Petty-associated West Texas guitarists, including Buddy Holly and Sonny Curtis. One could quibble over whether Kelly and Hankins deserve to be considered rock’n’roll heroes, but they’re worth reading about, in any event.

Author Stewart hints that a second volume of unsung heroes may be forthcoming. I for one look forward to it, and hope this book sells well enough to make that possibility a reality. For more information, head to http://www.lancerecords.com/unsung%20heroes.htm

“Summertime Blues: A True Rock’n’Roll Adventure with Eddie Cochran” by Sharon Sheeley (Ravenhawk Books)

2010-09-11T16:55:00.000-07:00

(NOTE: This review is based on an uncorrected advance review copy. The book itself will be issued on November 1, 2010)

Sharon Sheeley (1940-2002; sometimes known as “Shari” Sheeley) peaked young. When she was 18, she was at the top of the pop-songwriting world, having written Ricky Nelson’s first #1 hit, “Poor Little Fool.” About two weeks after her 20th birthday, she was plunged into deep despair after barely surviving an auto accident, which killed her fiancé, rockabilly legend Eddie Cochran. Although she managed to piece her career back together in the years following the accident, forming a successful songwriting duo with Jackie DeShannon, these two milestones came to define Sharon Sheeley’s life for all time.

This autobiography, which would appear to be appearing in print for the first time, tells of Ms. Sheeley’s life up to and including the aftermath of the accident. In the process, we meet some of the biggest and most colorful rock’n’roll and pop stars of the late 1950’s, and get more than a few glimpses into their off-stage personalities. It may or may not be a “tell-all” – unless, of course, rockabilly singers were as innocent in their flirtations as they are portrayed to be here; it was, after all, a very different, more respectful era – but neither does she gloss over some of the negative aspects of your favorite artists.

For instance, we are introduced to Don Everly of the Everly Brothers, dating Ms. Sheeley without deigning to tell her he was already married. Indeed, Don comes off as a rather cantankerous young fellow with a huge chip on his shoulder. (His brother, Phil Everly, on the other hand, comes across as kind, helpful, a real sweetheart of a young fellow, who would do anything to aid a friend in need.) There have been tales of Paul Anka’s obnoxiously massive ego circulating around the music world for decades, and we see the beginnings of this right from the outset of his teen-idol career, when he was still a teenager himself, coping with so-called overnight success. (We are, however, informed of Anka’s kinder side as well.) But the real “villain” of this book is Gene Vincent, a paranoid schizophrenic, manic-depressive megalomaniac of the first order. (Keep in mind I am not a trained psychologist; but even so.)

Before you get the idea that all 50’s rock’n’rollers were abnormally troubled young men, let me quickly point out that most of the young heroes Sharon Sheeley encountered seem like normal, average everyday 1950’s American youth. To be sure, she meets Elvis Presley just as he is discovering that he no longer has a private life. Sheeley’s sympathetic portrait of a polite, friendly, yet increasingly trapped young Southern boy who is becoming afraid to look out hotel windows at mobs of screaming girls is one of the most touching parts of the book. Ricky Nelson as she encounters him off-screen is the exact same Ricky Nelson we watched every week on t.v. (The same goes for Ozzie as well.) Buddy Holly is insecure, Ritchie Valens unprepared for stardom, and so on. Perhaps there are not many surprises in regard to most of the performers we read about here, but it’s nice to have our pre-conceptions supported by eyewitness reports.
Needless to say, Sheeley devotes the largest chunk of space to Eddie Cochran, whom she actively pursued even when he seemed disinterested. He comes across as a complex man, in many ways quite mature for his age. On the other hand, we see him practical jokes on unsuspecting friends, pranks often bordering on cruelty. On the whole, though, Cochran is portrayed as a virtuoso electric guitarist who is all for business, who would rather have spent his time working in the studio or jamming with friends than becoming a star performer, or engaging in a normal private life for that matter. He jealously guarded his relationship with Sheeley, and forbade her to tour with him – until the fateful final tour of England. Much has been written about the accident that caused Cochran’s death, including many downright apocryphal tales. Sheeley covers the incident with the keen eye of a journalist, until the final moments, in which she was so severely injured herself that she had no real memory of it. One of the most affecting chapters of the book details her long, painful recovery amidst her loss of the man she was supposed to marry once they arrived home in California.

One cannot help but notice that she has very little to say about her life post-Cochran. She talks about her writing partnership with DeShannon, but only briefly. We learn that she later married (and divorced) L.A. disc jockey Jimmy O’Neill, best known nationally as host of the mid-60’s pop-music TV show “Shindig”, but that’s about all we learn. Sheeley retreated from the music business in the late 60’s, but we never really find out why, or what she did with her life beyond that point. She shared what she wanted to share, and then stopped. I mean no disrespect, because I am quite pleased with what she did give us, but I would have liked more.

Because this was reviewed from an advance copy, there is no index. Because the announced page count is greater than what I received, I would assume an index would appear in the final volume, and it will be helpful to future researchers, I’m sure. There are typos sprinkled here AND there, but these will no doubt be caught before final publication as well. There is also a lengthy section, nearly a hundred pages, of photographs, posters, and other “memorabilia” of people who figure into the narrative (again focused primarily on Eddie Cochran), most of which I had not seen before.

Overall, this will be an entertaining and informative addition to anyone's 50’s rock’n’roll bookshelf.

“Talking To Girls About Duran Duran” by Rob Sheffield (Dutton Books)

2010-08-31T12:58:00.000-07:00

Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield’s latest set of remembrances has attracted much more attention in the mainstream press than most music-oriented books. This may well be because, despite its outward appearance, “Talking To Girls About Duran Duran” isn’t really a music book. It is, rather, a series of short essays about growing up in Boston during the 1980’s to a constant backdrop of the music being played on the radio during this much-loved (by some), much-reviled (by others) era.

Each of these 25 essays is named after a specific new wave, hip-hop, or pop record of the period. In some cases, the song plays a defining role in the essay. In others, it is barely mentioned. In a few cases, songs other than the one that supplied the essay’s title perform a more significant role in the telling of Sheffield’s story. The titles and artists serve as themes, as reference points, which situate his reminiscences in time and mood, as guides to where Sheffield’s head was at any given time.

Thus, we learn about Sheffield’s relationship with his sisters (who recur throughout the book) as he tells us about his musical encounters with Duran Duran (who bookend this collection by being the focus of both the introduction and the final essay). He tells of his sexually frustrating experiences dancing with girls as an exchange student in Spain, represented by Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark’s “Enola Gay”. In two of my favorite chapters, we discover him working on a garbage truck in an essay entitled after Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” (for reasons which would take too long to explain here), and spending an idyllic summer driving an ice cream truck, which very tangentially connects to “Purple Rain”. Indeed, the connection is definitely tangential in a few other cases as well. These, however, are balanced by essays that directly connect to the artist or song under discussion. Perhaps the most entertaining of the latter is Sheffield’s look at the virtually forgotten one-hit wonders Haysi Fantayzee.

I might surmise that the reason I so thoroughly enjoyed reading this book is that I can easily relate to the concept of phonograph records as the essential soundtrack to my own life, albeit two decades earlier. While I would never get around to writing my own Sheffield-inspired memoirs of my own defining era, the 1960’s, I can imagine which songs and vital performances would figure into it – “Runaway”, “Running Scared”, “Pipeline”, “California Sun”, “96 Tears”, “Pushin’ Too Hard”, and so on through the psychedelic era. While reading this book, I felt a kinship to Rob Sheffield, a man I’ve never met, almost as if he and I were brothers, born eighteen years and a world apart.

Or perhaps I simply enjoyed the book because Rob Sheffield is a lively and engaging writer, a fellow who has overcome much of his teenage angst, yet who can still relate to it and can express his fears and small triumphs with both humor and poignancy. Anyone who enjoys true-life coming-of-age tales, whether the reader is able to relate to ‘80’s pop music or not – I hereby confess it’s not really one of my favorite decades – will have a good time with this book.

“Neil Young: Long May You Run by Durchholz and Graff // “When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening To Van Morrison" - Greil Marcus

2010-08-17T16:57:00.000-07:00

Neil Percival Young and George Ivan Morrison will both turn 65 this year, Young on November 12, Morrison on August 31. In an earlier era, 65 was synonymous with “retirement age”. Of course, many people retire at a younger age nowadays, but neither Young nor Morrison shows signs of calling it quits. True, Neil Young has been devoting much of his time and energy to looking back, documenting his many decades in the business. Morrison has slowed down somewhat, though he headlined a folk festival in Canada just this month (August). Still, both seemed poised to carry on for some time to come.

Nevertheless, 65 remains a landmark age, a time appropriate for critics and historians alike to start the process of summarizing and saluting the careers of artists who have made a major impact on the musical world, as both Young and Morrison have done since the 1960’s. These two books illustrate two very different approaches to the art of the hallowed-figure-of-rock career retrospective, though neither is exactly the hagiography one has come to expect from such tomes. The truth is, neither Neil Young nor Van Morrison has made it easy through the years for writers to follow the development of their artistic timelines in a logical manner. Both have reputations for being cantankerous, unpredictable, and eccentric in their own ways. They do what they wish to do, expectations be damned.

Of the two, Neil Young has had by far the greater commercial success and the greater influence on subsequent artists. Thus, it’s not surprising that he’s the one who has been given the oversized-coffee-table-book treatment. I must confess that I have not read any of the previous full-length treatments of Young’s life and career (there would appear to be at least eight earlier books), but authors Durchholz and Graff tend to rely mostly on two of them - Neil’s father Scott Young’s “Neil and Me” and Jimmy McDonough’s “Shakey”. There are also quotes from papers and magazines strewn throughout the text. No doubt these two books could be considered the definitive sources to date. Scott Young was not “just” Neil’s father, but a prominent Canadian author and television/newspaper journalist, while McDonough interviewed Neil Young extensively before the artist decided not to authorize the book after all.

It is often the case that biographies relying heavily on previously published works are regarded as slipshod hackwork. Of course, this attitude assumes that the reader is familiar with all of this previously published work, and that the authors of the later books have nothing new to offer. I personally found much here that was new to me. But beyond that, Durchholz and Graff get high marks for their arrangement and interpretation of the facts, and for their well-reasoned critical commentary on the artist and his art. Since Neil Young’s recording career has been littered with false starts and abandoned projects, indicating that he himself has not always been happy with his work, it is only fitting that Durchholz and Graff are also unafraid to occasionally find artistic fault with the music under consideration. Thus, we may consider this a “critical biography” as well a history.
However you wish to look at it, the book tells the story of Neil Young in compact, readable form, covering everything from childhood to his first recorded work as lead guitarist for a Winnipeg band called the Squires, through his days in Toronto with the Mynah Birds (which also featured Ricky James Matthews, later to find stardom as funk icon Rick James), Buffalo Springfield, the various comings and going with Crazy Horse, the equally frequent comings and goings with David Crosby, Steven Stills, and Graham Nash (a series of collaboration almost doomed to failure considering the nature of Young and Stills’ relationship in Buffalo Springfield), various genre explorations (from electronics to swing) with a range of collaborators, recordings with top Nashville players such as the late Ben Keith, his political songs and statements, his benefit causes (often related to the illnesses of Young‘s sons), all the efforts to represent Young’s musical history through a series of reissue repackagings, all culminating in Young’s role in the development of the fuel-efficient Linc/Volt automobile. Virtually every recording session is described in loving detail. If it was a significant aspect of Neil Young’s life, it’s covered here, even when it sheds a less than favorable light on the man himself.

The narrative is supplemented by sidebars detailing various people and events in the Neil Young saga. This results in a few instances of repetition, as topics mentioned in the text occasionally reappear in the sidebars. In addition to the text, there is a fascinating array of high-quality illustrations spread throughout the book, virtually on every page – performance photos, artwork, album covers, 45 RPM picture sleeves, posters, concert programs, ticket stubs. Even if one already knows everything there is to know about Neil Young, the book will impress your friends as it rests on your coffee table. There is also an illustrated discography, which could have been improved by personnel listings.

If “Neil Young: Long May You Run” is a tribute in the form of a Big Statement, “When That Rough God Goes Riding” is a much smaller, more narrowly focused statement. Greil Marcus has long been recognized at one of the Greats of contemporary music journalism, as witnessed by the number of other writers who have referenced such classic Marcus books as “Mystery Train” and “Lipstick Traces”. (Incidentally, 2010 also marks Greil Marcus’ 65th birthday.) “Rough God” (the title comes from a Van Morrison song which paraphrases William Butler Yeats’ poem “The Second Coming”) is not on this level of accomplishment (and I doubt it was intended to be), but it’s a fascinating, beautifully written little nugget in its own right.

On the upper-left corner of the dust jacket, the publisher has classified the book as “Music/Biography”. A biography it is not. The details of Morrison’s first couple dozen years are briefly sketched in the book’s first few pages, concentrating on his early influences and his days with the Northern Irish band, Them. Beyond this point, there are just enough biographical details sprinkled here and there to provide a context for Marcus’ musico-philosophical musings. The book lacks enough technical matter to classify it as a musicological analysis. If pressed for a term to classify the book, I would need to call it “an appreciation”, and a rather impressionistic one at that.

Marcus’ writing style is, as always, filled with quotable lines and delicious phrases, so many that it would be a disservice to single out one or two. (This no doubt reads like a cop-out, but it would be better for the reader to come upon them in their intended contexts.) His opinions on Morrison’s songs and performances often break with conventional wisdom. He very much dislikes “Brown Eyed Girl”, which he considers to be Morrison’s “least convincing” record; he dismisses the song “Moondance” as “TV-commercial jazz”; actually, I find that one a valid observation. But his discussions of most of the performances he chooses to discuss at length are very well thought-out, sometimes rather quirky, but by and large far from capricious.

One of the aspects of Morrison’s performance style Marcus spends considerable time with is what he refers to as the “yarragh”. Once again, this is a Yeatsian concept, thought of as a haunting, sorrowful cry which can be detected in much Irish balladry, whether sung or written as poetry. It is Marcus’ contention that when Morrison indulges in repetition of words and lines or wordless moans/interjections, it is part of his quest for the yarragh. It is what makes Morrison’s art distinctively Irish. This is Marcus at his best. At his worst, he devotes one 10-page chapter to 16 albums recorded between 1980 and 1996, considering every one of them as not worth devoting time and energy to take seriously. On the other hand, several chapters are devoted to performances hardly anyone has ever heard, available only on bootlegs or in the memory banks of concert attendees. Marcus is such a fine writer, one eagerly reads his commentary on these as well.

The Neil Young book will doubtless appeal to fans, but is just as likely to win converts to his music. The Marcus book will appeal almost exclusively to hard-core Van Morrison fans. But if you want to encounter a great popular-music historian writing near the peak of his powers - music writing as literature - "When That Rough God Goes Riding" is for you as well.

“Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues” by Alan Govenar (Chicago Review Press)

2010-08-04T14:16:00.000-07:00

Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins (1912-1982) has been dead for 28 years, but remains an iconic figure among blues fans, including many who were not yet alive during his lifetime. To many people, Hopkins represents post-WW2 down-home blues at its purest level of authenticity, even when played on his instrument of choice, the electric guitar.

But how much do blues fans really know about Lightnin’ Hopkins, and exactly how far removed was he from the “taint” of show business, or the modernization of urban influences? Part of the reason we think of Hopkins as a bastion of rural Texas blues values is the mythology which has grown up around him. As Alan Govenar, a greatly respected chronicler of the Texas roots-music scene, makes clear in this first-ever full-length biography of the man from Centerville, Lightnin’ Hopkins in large measure created and disseminated his own myth.

To be sure, this hardly makes Sam Hopkins unique among bluesmen of any period. Not many blues artists from earlier eras have left us autobiographies in which they explain themselves and their art, though many have been interviewed and documented by collectors and historians. But even autobiographies cannot be relied upon; Big Bill Broonzy comes to mind in this regard. Many interviewees have been known to answer straightforward, fact-seeking questions with colorful tall tales, relating “experiences” which they think people would like to hear, or which they feel would fit the interviewers’ preconceived notions. Not enough documentation was done during the early, pre-war era of the blues, making it difficult for authors to check for accuracy or multiple views of the same events.

Lightnin’ Hopkins may have come from a slightly later era, when one would have hoped hard documentation would have replaced the gushing admiration of colorful stories. But even so, he first came to the fore when white blues collectors still had not yet done crucial research, and were all too ready to make suppositions based on insufficient knowledge mixed with stereotypes. Thus, Hopkins was able to get away with painting ever-changing word portraits of his life. Couple this with the fact that little documentation was done of African-American music (and life in general) during Hopkins’ younger years in rural Texas, and you have mythmaking opportunities galore. Alan Govenar makes a valiant effort to separate fact from fiction, to make sense of the contradictions, to follow the complex arc of Lightnin’ Hopkins’ life and career, to fill in as many gaps in the record as he can. Holes remain, and most likely always will. Nevertheless, this book strikes me as a fair, unbiased, and believable, providing unprecedented insight into the life and music of an enigmatic, self-made mystery man.

Not surprisingly, the weakest part of the book is the section dealing with Hopkins’ younger, rural years. Govenar has interviewed a few relatives and childhood friends, but by and large the trail has gone cold, particularly since Lightnin’ claimed to have left home to become a traveling musician at age 8. (He subsequently had very little schooling and remained functionally illiterate his entire life.) We find him receiving encouragement from Blind Lemon Jefferson, followed by a stint accompanying singer Texas Alexander in the years after the latter’s period of relative recording stardom. But Hopkins really emerges musically in the big city, Houston, where he spent most of his adult life. He originally performed for strictly segregated black audiences, and indeed had several Top 10 hits on the r&b charts in the late 1940’s and early 50’s. He continued thereafter to present himself differently to black ghetto audiences, with whom he felt comfortable and could identify, than with the white audiences who came to dominate the last 20-plus years of life. Govenar suggests that experiences with record companies, folklorists (including the influential Mack McCormick, who is portrayed in a most unflattering light), bookers, etc. led Hopkins to mistrust most of the white people he came into contact with. (Arhoolie Records’ Chris Strachwitz was a refreshing exception.) The combination of lack of education and mistrust led him to demand payment-in-full for every song he recorded as soon as he finished recording it, either refusing to sign contracts which could potentially have brought in considerable, much-needed royalties, or to ignore without a second thought those contracts he did sign.

Hopkins was a bristly fellow, one who enjoyed his alcohol rather too much, who gambled away what little money he earned from his music, who had a very violent streak, and a very highly developed ego. He spent (by his own reckoning) a dozen or more stretches in jail for assault and related charges. But with the right people, he could be a bosom friend and companion, in particular with the woman he called his “wife”, who actually had a legal husband and children with whom she continued to live at night while spending her days with Hopkins. His dislike of travel early in his career, followed by a virtually disabling fear of flying once he realized that he could make far more money on the road than in the bars of Houston’s Third Ward, held back his career. But his distinctive recording style and highly mannered give-the-audience-what-they-want live performances eventually made him prosperous well beyond his expectations. Govenar follows these developments in an easy-to-read, yet highly detailed manner. In particular, there is much detailed information about most of Hopkins’ recording sessions, beginning in 1946 as half of the recording duo of Thunder and Lightnin’ (with pianist Wilson Smith; it was this nom-de-disque, supplied by a record company, which resulted in Sam Hopkins becoming known as “Lightnin’).

Govenar’s portrayal is eventually a sympathetic one. Despite Hopkins’ difficulties as a person, his music and artistry far transcend his personality and defy easy analysis. I rather wish Govenar had spent more time discussing which portions of Hopkins’ improvised lyrics were indeed spontaneously generated and which were built from traditional, floating-verse sources. But this is a biography, after all, neither a musicological tome nor a study in poetics.

Because he recorded for so many labels and was subject to so many reissues and repackagings, Hopkins’ discography provides special challenges for researchers. However, Govenar includes a list of Lightnin’s sessions, complied by Andrew Brown and Alan Balfour, that is probably as complete as one can get. A full discog, listing all reissues, remains for another day.

In all, this is a very successful and satisfying book, which will appeal greatly to blues fans, and could reach a wider audience a

“A Deeper Blue: The Life and Music of Townes Van Zandt”, by Robert Earl Hardy (University of North Texas Press)

2010-07-19T13:26:00.000-07:00

Buried deep within my memory banks is an unfortunately vague recollection of a Songwriters’ Special episode of “Austin City Limits”, which featured a number of writers, gathered around swapping songs and stories. (I don’t believe this was the heralded Townes Van Zandt tribute, but it was back in the 1990’s, so I can’t be positive at this late date.) Someone – I want to say Guy Clark, but perhaps it wasn’t – made a statement to the effect that Townes Van Zandt had such an enormous impact on his fellow Texas songwriters that it was almost impossible for a Texan NOT to write like Townes.

The exact statement – and certainly there’s a bit of hyperbole involved here - the person who said it, and the televised circumstances may have lost itself in my over-crowded brain, but the underlying truth behind the assertion remains. The distinctive features that distinguish Texas country/folk singer-songwriters from those who hail from other backgrounds were first set into motion in the late 1960’s by Townes Van Zandt. Certainly, there have been developments, refinements, and personal innovations by a number of artists through the intervening years. But Townes is inarguably the origin point.

Even so, there are many people for whom the name Townes Van Zandt does not resonate, just as there is a smaller group of people for whom Townes has become a touchstone, a standard against whom others are judged, an icon. Townes Van Zandt virtually defines the term “cult figure”, someone who has taken on a near-god-like character among many of his followers, but who remains virtually unknown to the public-at-large. The sad fact of the matter is that there was virtually nothing god-like about Townes Van Zandt the person, regardless of how high in the pantheon of great songwriters his body of work places him.

For an idea of how non-god-like Townes Van Zandt the person was, one need only turn to Robert Earl Hardy’s biography of Townes, “A Deeper Blue”. Certainly, the basic thrust of Townes’ sorrowful tale of degradation and dissipated potential will come as no surprise to his followers, regardless of their opinion of his songs. It has never been a secret that he suffered from extreme depression exacerbated by severe alcoholism and rampant drug abuse (including, but hardly limited to, heroin addiction). Hardy meticulously traces the fall from grace of this intelligent, seemingly well-raised scion of a family whose involvement in Texas business and politics dates back to the days when Texas was an independent republic. Indeed, Hardy may be a bit too meticulous. As the book progresses, the reader begins to weary of reading about yet another alcoholic episode, yet another forced attempt at rehab, yet another ghastly drug incident, yet another example of Townes letting down the people who loved him and continued to forgive him (and thus continued to enable him) no matter how low he continued to sink, until the inevitable tragic ending.

But Hardy is a conscientious biographer, who will not ignore important parts of the Van Zandt saga, however redundant their accumulation may seem to the reader, since these continuing self-inflicted wounds play an important role in the development and roller-coaster instability of Townes’ career, with its long gaps in between fertile periods of transcendent activity. His addictions and the turbulence of his personal life are reflected in the poetic brilliance of his best song lyrics, and help to account for the early burn-out of his muse and its subsequent occasional reappearances. To know what makes Townes Van Zandt’s finest songs so special, it is necessary to understand the up-and-down curves of his life.

Townes poses particular problems for a biographer. For one thing, the shock treatments he received at a mental health facility during his late teenaged years wiped out his memories of what was, by all accounts, a mostly-happy childhood. Any knowledge of his youth that he may have shared with interviewers over the years came second-hand, through what his family and friends told him. Even more confusing is the simple truth that Van Zandt altered many of the “recollections” of his subsequent years from interview to interview. For example, he told multiple stories of how he came to write his most famous songs, “Pancho and Lefty” and “If I Needed You”, in fabrications which would often bear little resemblance to the memories of people who were around him when the songs came into being. Hardy is careful to quote as many sources as possible to try to construct truthful accounts of the incidents he writes about, rather than falling into the all-too-common journalistic trap of believing whatever an interviewee wants you to believe.

Hardy also offers brief analyses of several of Townes’ best songs, mostly early ones, along with brief discussions of the circumstances of their writing, and occasional interpretations of some of the more obscure lyrics. One wishes there would have been more of this sort of thing, but the door is left open for future critical examination of Van Zandt’s total body of work. Another area with potential for future biographers is additional research into Townes’ first forays into Europe and the international scene. His performances in Texas, Nashville, and on tour in the US and Canada are dealt with at some length, but it would be interesting to know how this quintessentially Texan performer was regarded overseas, and how he behaved on these early jaunts. (The response was obviously quite positive, as he was asked back several times, and even recorded an album in Ireland.) Certainly there must be many people who were involved with these first foreign tours who have interesting stories to share.

The book is filled with fascinating anecdotes, not just about Townes, his family and friends, but also many of the musicians in his circle, such as Guy Clark, the ill-fated Blaze Foley, Mickey White, among others. There are also amazing tales of woe courtesy of his three wives and a few girlfriends, plus his three official children. Hardy successfully captures the ethos of the Houston, Austin and alternative-Nashville scenes during the periods relevant to his story.

There is much here to recommend to anyone who loves Townes Van Zandt, the singer, the finger-picking guitar master, the awesomely gifted songwriter, the spellbinding performer. As much as I find myself shaking my head aghast at the travails of Townes the man, I still admire Townes the artist. But one can only wonder if Hardy, by being honest and open in recounting these harrowing details of wretched excess, might scare away people who have yet to make the acquaintance of Townes’ music.

This may well be the saddest book I have ever read, but so far as I am aware, it tells the truth.

“Cold Pizza For Breakfast: A Mem-Wha?” by Christine Lavin (Tell Me Press)

2010-07-06T12:42:00.000-07:00

Singer-songwriter Christine Lavin celebrates 25 years as a full-time professional contemporary-folk singer-songwriter with the publication of this book of reminiscences.

For those of you may not follow the current folk scene, Christine Lavin is a songwriter with a sly sense of humor, more than a few clever turns of phrase, a penchant for writing songs on topics few other performers dare to consider, and a generous heart for promoting the music of other performers she believes in. If her songs are often atypical of her genre, her book is hardly your average garden-variety autobiography, either.

This is not the usual dry recitation of names, dates, facts, and lists of accomplishments. Indeed, the historian in me wishes there were a few MORE names and dates. Being a kind-hearted person, Lavin will sometimes avoid last names, even first names on occasion, of people she would prefer not to identify in full. (For example, at one point, she lets slip that she was once engaged to another performer. I suppose people in the know realize whom she’s talking about; I don’t.) Likewise, there are times when it is a bit difficult to determine exactly when some of the events she recounts occurred.

But these are really minor quibbles in the long run. This is a very entertaining book, chock full of humorous (and true) stories, often of the laugh-out-loud variety, though even these were not always funny while Lavin was living them. Right off the bat, she tells us of her Gig From Hell, when she opened for Joan Rivers before an audience of senior citizens who had never heard of her and didn’t want to hear her. In my past life as an Irish folksinger, I had a couple gigs like that, so I can empathize with the author right from the outset. Then there was the night at a regular Birdland event called “Cast Party” where she not only battled a peripatetic microphone; she also miscalculated audience reaction to the song she was attempting to perform. I should quickly add that the book is not simply a collection of Christine Lavin’s Greatest Disasters; she shares her triumphs as well.

I don’t wish to give the impression that it’s all humor. There are moments of sadness and tears, plenty of sound advice from her mentors (including her guitar teacher, the great Dave Van Ronk, as well as from veteran club owners), tales of growing up (in the Hudson River town of Peekskill, NY, and in Geneva, in New York’s Finger Lakes region) and finding her way in the world, stories on how she encountered many of her musical associates (including the other members of her old group, the Four Bitchin’ Babes), and anecdotes concerning her various obsessions (Dame Edna, knitting, individual Broadway musicals which she attends over and over again).

One of the things I like best about “Cold Pizza For Breakfast” (named after one of her best-known songs, which supplied the title for an ESPN2 show, which wound up NOT using the song on the program itself – well, you can read about that) is that you have this feeling that you’re in a cozy chair having a conversation with an old friend. It’s a most pleasant diversion, an easy read, yet a substantial one. You’ll feel as if you’ve learned a few things about Christine Lavin, about the contemporary folk-music world, and a few important things about life as well.

“Cold Pizza for Breakfast” may be found through tellmepress.com as well as some of the usual online sources such as Amazon. It includes a complete discography of Lavin’s many CD’s and the various-artists releases she has helped compile. There is also a fascinating list of a thousand recordings she has played on her radio show.

Get this one. You can’t help but enjoy it.

“Fela: Kalakuta Notes” by John Collins (KIT Publishers)

2010-06-18T15:21:00.000-07:00

I first encountered Fela in the early 1970’s when he was still using his birth surname, Fela Ransome-Kuti, on an album in which he was “presented” to Western audiences by former Cream drummer Ginger Baker. My previous exposure to modern African music at that time had been Olatunji’s “Drums of Passion” and South African hits by Miriam Makeba and Hugh Masakela, and the rock-flavored fusion of Osibisa. To me, Fela sounded like an interesting variation on James Brown, but that’s as far as I was willing to commit.

About five or so years later, I was surprised to again encounter Fela, this time as Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, on a white-label promo LP called “Upside Down”. This time, I was ready to be bowled over. There were two pieces on the album, one on each side, yet on the title track (the B-side was an instrumental) Fela took advantage of this expanded song format in creative ways that James Brown’s loosely-jointed Polydor jams never did.

John Collins’ “Fela: Kalakuta Notes” accomplishes many tasks, but one of them is to supply a well-reasoned analysis of how Fela’s music developed from roots in Ghanaian highlife music – much of Fela’s career was split between his native Nigeria and Ghana; what’s more, Nigerian highlife music has its ultimate origin in the music of highlife’s first home, Ghana - through the influences of jazz and James Brown, to an anti-colonial, re-Africanized, innovative force of uncommon power and vitality. Collins suggests that Fela added a crucial element of Nigerian-ness by building his arrangements around bass lines that replicate facets of melody played by Nigerian talking-drums. The fact that Fela’s backing vocals were sung by dancers, rather than trained studio vocalists, also added an essential element of tribal call-and-response to the mix. Collins also convincingly discusses Fela’s unique music theory in the most cerebral chapter of the otherwise easily readable book. (Fela would have been cognizant of music theory, as he was trained in Western classical music in England, a fact which I had not been aware of before.)

But musical analysis is only one, fairly small, aspect of this book, and not necessarily the most significant. John Collins is a trained ethnomusicologist, yes, but he is also a music historian and musician. In this latter role, he has spent many years in Ghanaian highlife bands (though he is a white Englishman by birth), played for a time in the 1970’s in Fela’s band, and even acted in Fela’s unfinished “Black President” movie. Subsequently, he had a level of access to the man, the musician, the controversial political figure, the egotist that could never be approached by any straightforward Fela biographer.

Rest assured that this is a no-holds-barred, warts-and-all look into the lifestyle of Fela the man and the incredibly curious environment in which he allowed himself to live, rather than a hagiographic treatment of a friend and mentor. Fela’s warts are quite gargantuan, extending to many different aspects of his life, to the point where one is tempted to put down the book in disgust in numerous places. Even by the levels of rock-star excess, Fela’s lifestyle was grotesque and (to me, at least) highly unappealing. As much as I admire Fela the musician and Fela the spokesman for the disadvantaged, exploited Nigerian populace, I find it difficult to whip up much enthusiasm for Fela the human being, after reading Collins’ diary entries from the period in which “Black President” was being filmed.

In addition to Collins’ researches and memories, he also gives us interviews with many people on the scene, some of them no longer with us. The book was originally completed in 2002, around the time the German label Wrasse was engaging in an extensive program of Fela reissues. However, the book went unpublished at the time. Collins has updated it to 2009, including a section on Afrobeat bands influenced by Fela’s music. This section should have been expanded with more detail, but I suppose in a sense it could be considered somewhat tangential to what Collins what was hoping to accomplish here. The primary focus of the book is Fela and his life, not what happened after his death in 1997.

So, in the end, we are left with a book that is part biography, part anecdotal history of aspects of the contemporary West African music scene, part memoir of Collins’ time with Fela, part expose, part musical analysis. Considering that it consists of only 159 oversize pages, many of which are partly or wholly devoted to a fascinating array of photographs, Collins has managed to pack quite a lot into a fairly small space. Now that American interest in Fela has increased exponentially, thanks to the hit Broadway musical, the time is right for a look at the “real” Fela, not just the force of nature represented on the theater stage.

Adam Gussow - Journeyman's Road

2010-05-16T12:21:00.000-07:00

I actually began to read this when it was sent for review three years ago. But, unfortunately, considering the nature of the book – a compilation of separate articles, many from “Blues Access”, as well as a variety of other sources – it was all too easy to put aside and not pick up for the longest time. Thus, the long delay, which has nothing to do with the quality of the book.

Adam Gussow is now an academic with impeccable credentials, teaching literature at the University of Mississippi. However, he formerly played regularly on the streets of Harlem as harmonica sidekick to blues singer/guitarist Sterling “Mr. Satan” McGee, under the curiously Biblical name of “Satan and Adam”. Professor Gussow sees himself during this street-musician phase as being a white apprentice to a black master of a black musical idiom, thus the use of the word “journeyman” in the title of the book.

New York City is not a location generally associated with blues music. To be sure, many of the vaudeville blues divas of the 1920’s spent much of their performing time in the theaters and recording studios of New York, as a sort of undervalued adjunct to the Harlem Renaissance. Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Josh White, Rev. Gary Davis, and a host of lesser-known Carolina bluesmen found their way to New York during the 1930’s and 40’s. The Greenwich Village folk scene of the 1950’s/60’s shared (with Cambridge, MA) in the development of the first generation of blues-influenced white singer-guitarists (such as Dave Van Ronk and John Hammond).

There are still blues performers on the New York club scene, but it has rarely been thought of as a “blues town” in the past several decades. One of the most valuable aspects of Gussow’s book is that it documents not only the work of Satan and Adam, but also that of a number of other New York-based performers, many of them quite obscure. The book also contains many insights on what it is like to be a late-20th-century bluesman on the road and in Europe, as well as on the streets and small blues bars of New York. There is also a heartbreaking look at the dissolution of Mister Satan’s musical career (but with a note of hope at the end; since the book was published, the duo has resumed performing on an occasional basis).

The first part of the book gathers together most - why not all? - of a series of columns Gussow wrote for “Blues Access” magazine, mostly in the 1990’s. These are more journalistic than academic in tone. Even so, he is a very literate writer, and will use academic jargon (talk of dialectics, Postmodernism, etc.) to make his well-considered points. Among his assertions - which I wholeheartedly endorse - is that there are no easy answers, no one-size-fits-all explanations for either the historical development or “meaning” of the blues. He is also very conversant with the social history behind the blues idiom. For example, one very affecting segment discusses the role lynching played in the development of the blues.

The English professor in Gussow emerges in the second half of the book. There is a substantial look of what might be termed blues-as-literature and literature influenced by blues. The majority of the works he discusses are works of fiction, a genre rarely encountered in lists of essential blues reading. Included is a fascinating paper on blues influences on the writings of William Faulkner, which non-academic readers may find much easier to digest than most serious literary criticism.

This is a somewhat slim volume (188 pages), but there is a lot to chew on here, a great deal of variety, fact, opinion, and views of many subjects not already done to death on the ever-growing blues bookshelf. It would not be my recommendation as a beginner’s intro to blues, but the faithful will much of interest here.

“Journeyman’s Road: Modern Blues Lives From Faulkner’s Mississippi to Post-9/11 New York” was published by the University of Tennessee

Garth Cartwright - Princes Amongst Men: Journeys with Gypsy Musicians

2006-07-07T08:09:00.000-07:00

Garth Cartwright is a New Zealand-born, British-based writer whose deep-seated love of Balkan Gypsy music shines through every page of this fascinating new book.
To most Americans, the term "Gypsy Music" - if it has any meaning at all - conjures up images of flamenco guitars and dancers, or perhaps Hungarian cafe violinists, or Django Reinhardt and his present-day "gypsy jazz" counterparts. Every semester I find the students in my Musics of the World course totally unaware of the existence of Taraf de Haidouks, the Kocani Orkestar, or any other Balkan Gypsy artists for that matter. And every semester, most of them take to this music immediately. This comes as no great shock, as it is music of tremendous power, both viscerally and emotionally. Until now, I've been unable to recommend an easy-to-comprehend, non-technical source of further information. I will, however, be guiding students to this book from now on.
Princes Amongst Men works on a number of levels. Since, as the subtitle indicates, it deals with Cartwright's own journeys within Serbia, Macedonia, Romania, and Bulgaria, it is in some ways a travel book in the classic manner. Cartwright has the eye and the interpretive sense of a travel writer, telling us not only about the scenic beauties of the mountains and the squalor of the mahalas (the "Gypsy part of town"; an inexact parallel would be "ghetto" in the older, Jewish sense of the term), but tying in the history of the land, its various peoples, and their interactions.
We also learn a lot about Garth Cartwright as well, perhaps a bit more than we need to. But at least he gives us a good sense of where he's coming from, and of how his Balkan experiences have transformed him.
There is also quite a bit of socio-political commentary throughout the book. His subjects, the Roma a/k/a Tzigane a/k/a Gypsies (different terms are preferred in different places), have been marginalized out of public awareness (indeed, almost out of existence). What little we think we know about Gypsies (nomads living in caravans, never settling down, marrying at age 12, always stealing or cheating) are really slanderously vicious stereotypes. A few people have been incorrectly taken to represent the whole. The poverty, discrimination, and denial of identity are all too real, however. Sad to say, too many young Roma with no future in sight and nowhere to turn have taken to sniffing glue as an escape.
But this is primarily a book about musicians. Yes, there is musical description, though very little in the way of technical analysis (which is not Cartwright's intention, in any event). He travels from major cities to small towns to tiny villages that do not even appear on maps, interviewing and photographing the cream of the Balkan Gypsy music scene. (The photographs are sometimes smaller and less clear than one might prefer.) Many of the musicians he had already gotten to know from previous trips to the region, which gives him a level of access reserved for trusted friends. He also finds it easy to earn the trust of many new acquaintances. He even manages to get an interview with Bulgarian chalga superstar, Azis, famed for his Mephistophelian look, bisexual-S&M stage act, and overtly homoerotic music videos. I quickly add that Azis is totally unrepresentative - musically and personally - of the musicians profiled in the book, which in itself makes him one of Balkan music's most memorable characters.
Most of the musicians Cartwright discusses are more down-to-earth, regular people. We see them in their homes, with their families, friends and neighbors, in taverns and at weddings (which are often their primary source of performing income). Cartwright not only looks at the professional history of Taraf de Haidouks, he talks to several members of the loosely-structured ensemble and gives us a feel for what their life is like at home in their now-fabled Romanian village of Clejani. We are charmed by Esma Redzepova. We shake our heads at the injustice to which the Kocani Orkestar's Naat Veliov has been subjected. We learn why Fanfare Ciocarlia seem so atypical of Romanian Gypsy music (it has to do with location and ethnicity). We attend the brass orkestar festival at Guca, Serbia, and are ready to book a flight immediately. We get to know Ferus Mustafov, Jony Iliev, Saban Bajramovic, but not singers Dzansever (whom Cartwright failed to locate) and Sofi Marinova (who refused to be interviewed unless she were paid).
The "villain" of the book is filmscore composer Goran Bregovic, who is cited several times for appropriating songs composed by known artists. Bregovic then claims the material to be "traditional", copyrights his "arrangements", and receives lavish praise and healthy royalty checks as a result. The Gypsy musicians whose material is thus adapted receives nothing.
There are useful lists of further source material, including books, journal articles, websites, recommended recordings and films. The book's usefulness as a reference is, unfortunately, lessened by its lack of an index.
But it is Cartwright's skillful portrayals of the land, the society, the musicians, and their music that make this a memorable and valuable book. Highly recommended.
Princes Amongst Men was published in London in 2005 by Serpent's Tail, and has a U.S. list price of $20. The publisher's website is www. serpentstail.com

Richard V. Duffy - "The Abyss of Jazz"

2006-06-16T08:36:00.000-07:00

Richard Duffy is a tenor saxophonist and part-time bigband leader who has recently begun to make a name as a jazz journalist. In this e-book - available through http://www.authorhouse.com - Duffy professes his love for jazz and offers his insights into what he believes the essence of the music to be.
I confess I found this work to be somewhat difficult to get into at first, for reasons which may tell you as much about me as about the book itself. Duffy's approach is often very "cosmic", and I'm simply not a cosmic kind of fellow. It was only after I belatedly realized that his cosmic musings could be interpreted metaphorically, as a poetic commentary on a poetic music, rather than as a completely objective view, that I stopped fighting the book and began to look forward to reading and enjoying it.
Part of the problem is Duffy's sometimes unorthodox use of language (at least unorthodox to me). The very title of the book, The Abyss of Jazz, strikes me as negative, whereas Duffy is actually using the word "abyss" in a positive sense. I suppose I'm a victim of my religious upbringing, but to me, the word conjures up images of Satan being thrown into the bottomless pit. Duffy does indeed use the word to mean bottomless, but in the sense of never-ending, knowing no bounds. (For the record, my Webster's New Collegiate lists multiple meanings for the word "abyss" - "the bottomless gulf . . . or chaos," but also "intellectual or spiritual profundity"; the latter is what Duffy intends.) Another favorite word is "abode". To me, an "abode" (noun) is a dwelling, a place of residence. For Duffy, "abode" is a verb. I at first took it to mean "abound," though he also uses that word. Rather, by "abode", he seems to mean "abide", past or present tense, in the usual sense of "stay" or "continue", but also "to live within", which relates to the dictionary definition of "abode". It is one of Duffy's talents that after he uses it as a verb a few times, it seems like the natural, proper word.
There are, however, words that are just plain wrong. (Is there such a word as "infectiside" and, if so, is it indeed a verb?) Some of them are clearly typos which should have been fixed by an alert proofreader.(Billie Holiday's audience bulged "at the seems", for example.) He falleth into Biblical language at times, and uses capital letters and exclamation points to drive a point home. The academic in me would prefer the prose to be less purple, but there is a poetic resonance to much of it that eventually won me over. After all, the main topics of his discourse are inspiration and artistic genius. Can one effectively account for such nebulous concepts in conventional, earthbound phraseology? In this light, all this talk about "cosmic dust" can be accepted as a subjective way to explain the inexplicable.
Duffy's purpose, then, is to celebrate jazz as the most creative form of musical expression, and to revel in the genius of its most praiseworthy architects and executants (to use his words). One of the highlights of his life, a chance to jam with a number of musicians in pre-Katrina New Orleans, is told in loving detail. The book was written before the Hurricane; it's sad to think that experiences such as this may never happen quite this way again. There are occasional historical inaccuracies which pop up in reading the book. For instance, what possible connection could the ODJB (who recorded in 1917) have to reggae (which developed in the late 1960's)? (Unless "reggae" is a typo for "raggy".)
He offers what he considers to be a "universal definition" of jazz. However, as I read it, it could just as easily fit the Grateful Dead, Ali Akbar Khan, and anyone else who uses improvisation as a means to reach a transcendantal state. Perhaps jazz fits his definition, but it is by no means the only musical idiom to do so. In my opinion, so many varied styles of music have come to be accepted as "jazz" that at this late date it has become impossible to define it. I do not consider this to be a bad thing. Nevertheless, his effort to define the indefinable is a valiant one.
He devotes much of the book to the examination in capsule form (about a half-dozen pages per) of the lives and accomplishments of a number of jazz greats, beginning with Louis Armstrong, though most of the book is devoted to his beloved bebop. Indeed, it is in the bop portraits, and in the chapters devoted to the big bands, that he shares his most cogent insights. The chapter devoted to his personal hero, Dexter Gordon, is a joy to read. And since his experiences as a big band leader have obviously brought him a great deal of personal satisfaction, he is able to communicate the joys not only of playing with and leading his own bands, but the joys of listening to his role models (Basie, Herman, Kenton) as well.
The artists chosen for coverage are all highly significant contributors, but there is no one here who emerged in the last 50 years. The most recent artists are Miles and Mulligan. Coltrane is very briefly mentioned, while Ornette Coleman is absent. This is, of course, entirely Duffy's prerogative. But it would seem to me that there have been a great many musicians who have emerged in the past fifty years who could illustrate his concepts of universality, intensity, and improvisational integrity.
I might also have preferred less biographical sketching in favor of a more detailed application of his opening thesis. How exactly do the artists he profiles illustrate his concepts? He comes close to telling us on a number of occasions, but it only whets the appetite for more analysis. Perhaps in his next book, he might dispense with individual artist profiles and sustain a book-length examination of his thesis as an extended think-piece. As if to tempt us in that direction, he includes a chapter entitled "Philosophy of Being a Musician", which explores the concepts of cosmic energy and intellect, and their connection to the creative impulses within a musician and to the "truth" of music. One is free to agree or disagree with his interpretations, but they are worth pondering nonetheless.
Despite its problems, there is a great deal here that is worth reading. At the price of printed and bound books these days, this 159-page e-book is certainly worth $4.95, as well as your time and effort.

Chuck McCabe "Uncle Rhythm's Cosmic Riff and Gig Guide"

2006-05-19T08:54:00.000-07:00

Chuck McCabe is a veteran singer/songwriter/guitarist/banjoist who has worked in a variety of musical settings over a forty-year career. His experiences range from rock to bluegrass to folk, not to mention a brief moment of glory in a polka band (see Chapter 22, "Best Banjo in Dubrovnik"). He has, it would appear, seen it all and done it all. In this 1993 memoir (still in-print), he shares a few of his misadventures with unsuspecting readers who merely thought they had heard it all.
McCabe is a fine slice-of-life songwriter with a talent for delineating character. This talent carries over to his prose as well. Although he refers to "Uncle Rhythm's Cosmic Riff and Gig Guide" as a "How-Not-To Book For a Career in Music", his musical career is more of a setting, a backdrop, an explanation for how he chanced across the strange cross-section of humanity who figure in his stories.
I use the word "stories", although the incidents described herein are ostensibly true. In an era when one lying author unwisely endorsed by Oprah has cast doubt in the public mind on the credibility of all non-fiction, it's easy to read a book of this nature and think, "This stuff couldn't possibly be true." On the other hand, truth being - as they say - stranger than fiction, could anyone possibly make up the story of the hijacked bakery truck? I guess if McCabe tells us this stuff is true, we'll simply have to take his word for it!
This is essentially a collection of vignettes, rather than a coherent, chronological memoir. McCabe credits Tom Wolfe, Hunter Thompson, and Garrison Keillor amomg his most prominent inspirations, and the influences show. But McCabe is a skillful writer in his own right, whether tongue-in-cheek (as in the opening chapters, with their dead-on glimpses of the music industry and its habitues) or dead-serious (as in Trickle Down," which traces the author's growing disillusionment during the 1960's and '70's; or "One for the Kid," a touching tale which juxtaposes McCabe's penning of a song for "Sesame Street" with a child caught in the middle of a domestic tug-of-war.
I happen to be from roughly the same generation as McCabe and spent enough years as an Irish folksinger/musician to be able to identify with some of the happenings and people represented here. I fully sympathize with the owner of an Orange Country nightspot who destroyed the tape recorder he was using for background music, rather than pay ASCAP the licensing fee they demanded. (McCabe doesn't specify ASCAP, but I recognize their tactics. I had a similar run-in with a rep from that organization, who caused a little-old-lady bar-owner to tearfully shut down the only traditiional-Irish seisiun for miles around, because she couldn't afford to pay for the license ASCAP demanded so that a few of us could gather together once a month to play 100% uncopyrighted traditional material.)
Yet even though we come from the same background, I was never one for alcohol and drugs. These substances play a major role in several of these tales, which may explain why my reminiscences aren't nearly as, er, colorful as McCabe's. Not all the stories are about music, by the way, as illustrated by "Marine Corps Birthday," about a particularly rowdy time in Tijuana. (True, a banjo DOES play a small, but key role in this story.) The low point of McCabe's wretched excess is retold in a hilarious encounter with Hoyt Axton and his band.
By the way, I scored a 90 on the Quiz, even though I am fanatical about music. I did, however, become a critic. (See Chapter 13 if this paragraph makes no sense.)
Occasionally, the humor falls flat. "Yes On No" is a satirical plea for more negativity in the world. Unfortunately, it bounces from topic to topic so often that the concepts don't have a chance to develop.
OK, so Chuck McCabe isn't Jonathan Swift. No matter, he does just fine being Chuck McCabe. It's an easy read and an entertaining one, with finely-tuned prose and a strong sense of you-are-there. In the end, one is left with the impression that despite consuming way too many drugs (fortunately living to tell the tale), Chuck McCabe is a pretty nice guy after all, even if he did spend a little too much time with bad companions along the way. I'd love to see him write a follow-up to bring us up-to-date on his exploits.
The book was self-published, and is available from Amazon or directly for $12.95 (including s+h) from Woodshed Productions, 15466 Los Gatos Blvd. Suite 109-161, Los Gatos, CA 95032. An excerpt appears at http://chuck-mccabe.com/book_unclerhythms.html

Debra DeSalvo "The Language of the Blues"

2006-04-05T13:58:00.000-07:00

One of the many fascinating aspects of the music we call "the blues" is that the lyrics of the songs are often as attention-grabbing as the music itself. Whether one considers the blues to be an artistic self-expression, a means of catharsis, or merely a form of entertainment (and all three viewpoints can be convincingly argued), the songs tell us quite a bit about the worldview and the lives of the performers and/or their audiences.
Unfortunately, many of these lyrics have been subject to misinterpretations by listeners mystified by the language used in these songs. Goodness knows, for example, how many people have said to me that "mojo" is a euphemism for the male organ, an explanation which seems to satisfy them more than the actual meaning does.
It is for such listeners that Debra DeSalvo's new book, The Language of the Blues, should prove especially valuable. Many long-time blues fans will know much of this material already. Many of us will carp about inaccuracies or speculations which clash with our own concepts of particular terms. (Indeed, I intend to do just that below.) But this book-length glossary (a slim 173 pages, but with very small print) will open a whole new world for newer fans while teaching us wizened old blues veterans a few things as well.
DeSalvo has arranged the entries alphabetically in dictionary fashion, rather than in a cohesive narrative. Thus, if you want to know what "stones in my passway" means, you can simply look up this particular phrase. But the book is written in such a lively, anecdotal style that a person can profitably read it cover-to-cover. The only problem with the latter approach is that there is, of necessity, some duplication, so that you will read much of the same information under "foot track magic," "goofer dust", and "stones in my passway."
These particular terms are associated (as is the aforementioned "mojo") with a sizeable body of African-American folk superstitition known as "hoodoo." This subject has been extensively covered in Cat Yronwode's must-see website, http://www.luckymojo.com (which DeSalvo is quick to acknowledge). It is good, however, to have it in easily accessible form alongside the non-hoodoo terms. Thankfully, DeSalvo is careful to document her sources throughout. Many of the entries are dependent on scholarly works on African and African-American language and folklore, books which the average blues fan is not likely to be aware of. DeSalvo has also done considerable original research, interviewing a number of primary sources, i.e., blues performers who themselves use these terms in their songs.
Some of the most fascinating material gleaned from scholarly sources concerns the West African (Wolof, Bantu, Manding, etc.) linguistic origins of terms common to blues and popular parlance ('dig", "hepcat", "juke", even "fuzz" for "police", among many others). Many Southern black customs are likewise revealed to be survivals of centuries-old African folkways, brought to these shores by slaves and adapted to their new environment. She also includes an entry (not quite a definition, but grounds for a potential definition) for the concept of "blues" itself. She suggests rather convincingly that the use of the word may be related to an old term for "drunk".
There are, I hasten to point out, a number of entries which disagree with my personal conceptions of particular terms. In most all these cases, I've held on to my definitions/conceptions for so long, I can no longer document my source of information. For example, I was told many, many years ago that the "C.C." of "C. C. Rider" stood for a Country Circuit preacher who went from one isolated area to another on horseback, ministering to small groups of people who didn't have access to a preacher on a regular basis. Some of these preachers were known to be, shall we say, less than holy. DeSalvo suggests that the "C.C." might stand for "Cavalry Corporal (actually, a typo makes this "Calvary"). I understood "monkey man" to refer to someone who will do whatever his lover asks him to do, no matter how degrading he personally finds it. (Similarly for "monkey woman"). I am familiar with Robert Lockwood's explanation of "dust my broom" meaning "leaving," but years ago I heard it explained as "making a clean sweep of things". Certainly, the two meanings are hardly incompatible. Way back in the 1960's, I heard John Hurt's "lovin' spoonful" explained as oral sex. It's entirely possible my long-forgotten source was incorrect.
Sex is a common root for many of the terms discussed here. I find it somewhat difficult to reconcile "hambone" as "penis" with the thigh-slapping style of body percussion also known as "hambone" - two uses of the same word, no doubt. I find DeSalvo's discussion of "motherf***er" (my self-censorship; DeSalvo spells out words such as this, something one must do in a book of this sort) interesting in that it makes no reference whatsoever to sex with a female parent. She doesn't bother to include some of the more blatant double entendres of the Bo Carter variety (such as "Banana In Your Fruit Basket" or "My Pencil Won't Write No More"), no doubt assuming them to be so obvious they don't require explanation.
There are a few errors of fact. Joel Sweeney was not the leader of the Virginia Minstrels, though he was a direct influence on that ensemble's banjo player, Billy Whitlock. I also question the assertion that Duke Ellington's was the first swing band to trade in a banjo for a rhythm guitar. I suppose it may depend on how one defines "swing," but certainly Eddie Lang appeared on the scene while Ellington was still using banjo. She has W. C. Handy in Tutwiler, MS in 1895. True, the date has long been is in dispute, but 1903 has been more commonly given. Memory tells me JoAnn Kelly preceded Bonnie Raitt and Ellen McIlwaine as a notable woman bottleneck guitarist, but I won't state that Kelly was the first. (Define "notable", right?) In one of the few internal contradictions, DeSalvo quotes H. C. Speirs as saying a sharecropper might earn a quarter a day, then repeats that assertion once or twice more. However, in her discussion of sharecropping, she correctly points out that sharecroppers did not indeed earn any wage per se, and more often than not wound up in debt at the end of a season. (To illustrate why, she includes a Sharecrop Contract from 1882.) Another glaring mistake, probably the result of a typo, concerns Henry Stuckey - was he in World War I or II?
There are a number of terms which cry out for explanation, but are not included here. With any luck, this book will sell enough to merit a second edition. Then, perhaps, we will get explanations for "mamlish" (a once-common word which seems to have eluded researchers for years), "fore day creep" (perhaps self-explanatory?), "shave 'em dry" (I've seen it defined as having one's throat slit, but that doesn't seem right to me somehow), "pigmeat" (or does it simply refer to the meat of a pig?), "stovepipe" (that one has indeed been settled, but it belongs here anyway), "candy man" (referenced in relation to "salty dog", but not defined; too obvious?), and "windin' boy" (or "winin' boy", referenced in relation to "stavin' chain"). But for every omission, there are any number of interesting inclusions, such as a look at how the policy game (numbers racket) operated. DeSalvo also selects sample songs for most of her entries, so that you may hear them used in context. Now, if only someone would issue a companion CD!
Despite its imperfections, this is a very worthwhile and useful addition to the blues bookshelf, not just as an "anecdotal dictionary" (DeSalvo's term), but as an intriguing look at the world from which the blues was created.