Yuki yanagi ni karasu (Blackbird in snow) [Koson Ikeda, (Japanese, 1802?-1867?), ca. 1880-1890
print : woodcut, color; Library of Congress, Washington, DC]
Two Black Lines
Call it a black line, flight of crow traversing mausoleum of white house across the street with ever-so slight downward trajectory, disappears behind the back, then reappears between mausoleum & tall trees on same track. An undivided line in imagination, nevertheless. Then the young woman walks by real fast in black pants & parka negotiating sidewalk ice & empty blue recycling bins, managing to keep her balance at the same time attempting to reduce the size of her ass, for which there is no need. Exactly opposite of the crow going on about its own midwinter business.
Mike Mellor: I really like the theme you came up with this week, great interpretations of great songs. My head was immediately swimming with selections, but I'm certain I want to start with something off of Wicked Grin, John Hammond's album of Tom Waits covers.
The album was released in 2001, which in hindsight looks like just about the time Waits was cementing his reputation as an American treasure. A generation of young people who primarily knew him as a supporting actor had discovered decades of his music after Mule Variations came out, and he was a year away from releasing Blood Money and Alice, both of which were spinoffs of theatre collaborations with avant garde director Robert Wilson. Hammond, for his part, was stepping way out of his traditionalist comfort zone working with Waits as producer of his own compositions.
The thing I love most about the album is that Waits as producer was able to completely reanimate his own songs by using the skillset of Hammond. I've always felt that though Waits's songs are often based in rhythm & blues, they have always been more theatrical than anything else, primarily because of the way Waits is as a performer. Giving them over to Hammond's authoritative guitar playing, pipes and blues phrasing gives the songs a different body, which lets Waits the producer put different clothes and mannerisms on them.
One of the best examples is "Jockey Full of Bourbon". I love how the chorus grows a melody, from being simply rhythmic in the original version, and the way the punchy accordion sort of duets with Hammond's voice.
Brendan Hogan: I feel like I could play that whole record and just call it a night. I love Wicked Grin. Tom Waits' music cozies up with Hammond's blues, and because he had such a hand in making it I feel like we get the best of both worlds on that album. It's if we get a chance to hear Tom Waits re-spin his own songs, except now we get the kickass playing of Hammond added to the mix. I love everything about that record, and "Jockey Full of Bourbon" is one of Tom Waits' best songs.
My choice is a little closer to home. A couple years ago Mark Erelli and Jeffrey Foucault put out an album of murder ballads called Seven Curses (named after the Dylan song). They do good versions of what I guess you might call more obvious songs, like "Philadelphia Lawyer" and "Johnny 99", but they also do some more obscure stuff like a version of Steve Earle's "Ellis Unit One". Steve Earle is a desert island artist to me, but Erelli can really sing this. I love the way he sings about dreaming of being tied to the electric chair. The "something cold black shot through my lungs" line really brings it to life. The whole album was recorded around one mic, too; no overdubs.
Mike: Wow, I'd never heard that version before, but what immediately sticks out to me is that Erelli understands the material, or at least has the same understanding of it that I do. It's kind of hard to explain, but it really bothers me when I hear a new version of a song and it feels as if the performer(s) fail(s) to understand the spirit of it. And I don't mean just that somebody reinvents the song, changes tempo, manipulates the lyrics, makes it seem entirely different on its surface. That's totally fine and really awesome when somebody can do that and keep the spirit of the original in tact. But the integrity of the song's spirit is most important and there is no getting around that for me. Do you know what I mean?
Erelli doesn't stray too far from Earle's version, but he does put it in his own style and does so beautifully.
Brendan: I agree with you. There are so many interpretations of songs that seem to totally miss the point, or takes the song into a place where it doesn't belong, that it's the exception to the rule to hear a cover that elevates the spirit of the original and adds something. It's often overlooked, but the artist who can internalize a song and inhabit it as their own is as unique as a gifted songwriter.
Mike: Amen to that. It's a lost art.
Speaking of Mark Erelli and Jeffrey Foucault, and seeming to have that same understanding of a song as I do, Foucault has a version of John Prine's "Storm Windows" that gives me goosebumps. "Storm Windows" is one of those songs that I've sung in my head so often for so long that my internal/imaginary version has different lyrical phrasing than Prine's versions do (not that I could ever execute it).
When I heard this version a few years ago, via Facebook of all places, I was astounded. The flat way Foucault extends the word "slow" in "play it so slow" for a second and a half longer than Prine, how he pauses at "window" instead of "raven" on the line "for so long the raven at my window was only a crow", and how he loses his cool a little earlier in the line "silence is golden 'til it screams right through your bones" are all ways I imagined the song sounding. It's like he knows something about my innermost thoughts, like he was not only staying faithful to the song itself but also to my very personal attachment to it.
Obviously I don't believe that, but that's how it feels. A great cover is capable of doing that.
Brendan: I guess that's the thing about cover songs: They have to be believable, otherwise what's the point? I think as music fans, when a song connects with us, it goes deep. We internalize it, so when we hear another person play a favorite song of ours, it damn well better do it justice.
Laura Marling is a person whose songwriting I really admire. She's damn good, and only 23. I don't think age means much unless it shows, and in Laura's case it doesn't show. So when a friend told me that she recorded a version of Jackson C. Franke's "Blues Run the Game" I had to hear it. It's one thing to write well, but to inhabit a song like Franke's...that is something else altogether. I listened probably a dozen times. Laura has that intangible thing; a totally believable understanding of what she's saying.
Mike: Now you're opening up a whole new topic! To understand a song and make it your own is one thing. To be in possession of wisdom and composure beyond your experience, and then to express it in a mature fashion, is another thing. She is the latter doing the former, which is a pretty rare thing. Can you give us a Laura Marling original to go out on?
Brendan: Laura is a rare artist. Check out "Sophia". Genius stuff.
Dark Was the Night airs on WUMB Saturdays from
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Listen online or at:
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This is republished from September 25, 2012. I just hate this god damned movie so goddamn much that I had to post it again. And hey, it's Oscar season!
How do I even begin expressing how tremendously I dislike this movie? By describing it thusly: emotionally simplistic and overwrought "noble savage" hipster condescension.
Yeah, that's a start.
Beasts of the Southern Wild is a neo-primitive hero narrative set in an allegorical Greater New Orleans. Our hero is a six-year-old girl named Hushpuppy (yes, really) who lives in a cyclically apocalyptic land called The Bathtub, a bowl-shaped locale which lies on the other side of the levee from the rest of society. Among her many heroic virtues is an uncanny ability to be eloquent and metaphysical well beyond her years, something of which Lucy Alibar--the debutante-hipster who wrote the screenplay--seemingly could not get enough. "When it all goes quiet behind my eyes, I see everything that made me flying around in invisible pieces," she says. I never knew a six-year-old could be so portentous.
The members of her community--which includes her father but not her runaway mother--have built a self-reliant, proud and unabashedly hedonistic lifestyle on their patch of muddy segregated land. Like in any Apocalyptica, USA, their daily life rituals are primitive even as they use tools from--and are surrounded by--the detritus of the modern world. Among the heaps and hardships they find plenty of time for drinking, eating, dancing, drinking, carrying on and drinking. That's right, they are just like the real-to-life rednecks and coloreds in the beautifully romantic despair you see all across the American South. Ain't it quaint?
Challenging this sizzling din, though, is a persistent rhythm of impending doom, one that Hushpuppy can feel through the earth salt in her flesh and hear with her wise ear so low to the ground. "The whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the smallest piece, the whole universe will get busted," she tells us. Tell that to Darwin. Or God.
The Bathtub has a legend about primitive proto-cattle that once ruled their land but got frozen in the polar ice caps in the last Ice Age. Due to global warming, presumably, these aurochs will thaw out, herd into The Bathtub and once again stake their claim to supremacy. When that melting happens, of course, sea levels will rise and The Bathtub will also be incredibly vulnerable to storms. After all, the levee that segregates them is designed to keep excess water in The Bathtub and out of the rest of society.
Conveniently, a storm's a-comin' right at that point in a film where character development meets the accelerating plot. The wise thing to do, softies might say, is to leave The Bathtub before the impending storm, but most folks are having none of that. "They think we're all gonna drown down here. But we ain't going nowhere," Hushpuppy says, parroting the hubris of the obstinate adults around her.
The wise thing to do, a writer might say, is to continue character development while the plot progresses, but Alibar is having none of that. Hushpuppy's character is the only one that gets fleshed out at all, and even hers is mired in girl-power tropes.
The post-Katrina New Orleans fetish in this movie is more garish and hackneyed than Dr. John with a purple top hat and a talisman. Survival in poverty? Check. Pride in an anachronistic lifestyle? Ebullient hedonism? Check check. Mystical folklore? "Authentic" wisdom from ostensibly ignorant people? Victims of a cruel, uncaring, bureaucratic mainstream society? Check check check. They could have at least been a little more clever about it and placed the allegory somewhere other than a bowl-shaped geography in the Gulf of Mexico.
All this fetish does is rewarm shallow understandings of New Orleans and flawed simplifications of Black culture. They address the "laissez les bons temps rouler" tradition, but through a lens that doesn't explain the unique history of bad luck, tragedy, violence and oppression. You see the drinking and dancing in the face of annihilation, but you're left to assume it's because of present circumstances rather than a centuries-old history steeped in both Catholicism and mystical beliefs inherited from a wide swath of Africa. It also kept touching on the "tough love" aspect in Black culture. It is a very real thing--oversimplified beautifully in Boyz n the Hood and explained marvelously in the recent book The Warmth of Other Suns--but again the movie tried to display it without any real explanation, sensitivity, context or depth.
This is like the Vice Magazine approach to showcasing what is not in the American mainstream-- an arrogant liberal perspective in which "authentic culture" is prized by those without an understanding of what they claim to admire. This is particularly evident in the chaotic scenes after the storm. The Bathtub folks are evacuated to the big bad mainstream society and a mean old doctor in a white-bright room tells Hushpuppy's Daddy that he'll die if he doesn't have a heart operation. In response the whole cast escapes society, flees back home and Daddy takes a medicinal herb and worm concoction. The message is clear: the authenticity of voodoo worm medicine is way cooler than modern medicine and all its impersonal sterility and stuff.
I kept trying to like this soul-destroying movie, partly because I've always been fascinated with New Orleans's place in the imagination of America and partly because Quvenzhané Wallis's acting was quite good. The problem is that one girl's charming portrayal of bravery in isolation can't resolve hours of stylized racist hokum.
I also kept waiting for the disenfranchised but self-reliant people of The Bathtub to reclaim the civilization their culture created but from which they were unceremoniously kicked out, especially when they bombed the levee and when they found the floating nightclub seductively named Elysian Fields. Then I remembered that, just like vaudeville characters, these aren't ones in possession of their own spirits or destiny. Those are manipulated by their makers, even if those makers don't possess the knowledge to understand the depths of the culture they reference.
I guess to them it's all crawfish, Jax beer and sparklers.
The question I asked myself
From behind a locked security door:
What would Jesus do? If like me
He’d never seen this guy before
Give alms to the poor
But the neighborhood watch captain said
You give something to one,
You’ll have them all at your door
Mike Mellor: OK, let's try this again. Last weekend's blizzard knocked my interent out from Friday evening until Sunday morning and didn't let me publish last week's post about love songs. This was one of them:
Looks like we're in the clear with just little snow squalls today. What's the topic tonight?
Brendan Hogan: Tonight's theme will be songs about presidents. I don't know about you, but the first song that pops into my head is J.B. Lenoir's "Eisenhower Blues". I love it because it's a socially conscious and critical song from a black man in 1954; a time when having an alternate world view was not acceptable by even the whitest of white folks.
One needs to look no further than Pete Seeger or the Hollywood blacklist to see what a polemical stance against the 'American way' could do to one's ability to earn a living as an artist. But because little attention was paid to a person with J.B.'s background—a poor, black, illiterate sharecropper from Mississippi—in a weird way I think it worked to his advantage. Parrot Records was asked to rename the song as "Tax Paying Blues" and that was the extent of the scrutiny on J.B. But that's what I love about him. He was saying things when nobody else was. And it's a great song.
Mike: No doubt. The song comes in the aftermath of both the Recession of 1953 (that hit black people worse than white people) and McCarthyism dropping into overdrive. I'm not sure Eisenhower had a whole lot to do with either of those things, but like a quarterback in football the President takes the credit and blame for pretty much everything that happens in the country.
J.B. also had a habit of overtly political songs; he also wrote and recorded songs like "Korea Blues" and "Alabama Blues". Maybe this is what kept him relatively obscure until the 2000s?
Brendan: I think that's definitely part of it. While he had commercial success in the US with songs like "Mama, Talk to Your Daughter" and was considered important enough to tour Europe with the American Folk Blues Festival in 1965, black blues fans were leaving the music for the more defiant and outspoken nature of soul music by 1965. But there was J.B. even then, recording blues for a German record label in the last years of his life, singing things like "Why was I born in Mississippi when it's so hard to get ahead? Every black child born in Mississippi; you know that poor child is born dead."
Mike: Singing like that in 1965, in a sense, made him more of a contemporary of Nina Simone than, say, Muddy Waters.
I'm going to change directions with my pick and go with Johnny Cash's rendition of the folk song "Mr. Garfield", a narrative about Charles Guiteau's assassination of President James Garfield from the point of view of regular citizens hearing rumors:
The non sequitur introduction about Tombstone, AZ and Jesse James is there because the track is from Cash's concept album Sings the Ballads of the True West. The assassination happened in Washington, DC, so I don't know how it's relevant to the album concept, but it's a great song nonetheless. I especially like how Cash humanizes Garfield and his wife Lucretia in the way he narrates their conversation.
Brendan: Yes, I love the line about Garfield telling his wife to remarry. "Don't pull a single harness all your life." It humanizes the story, for sure.
I always understood the song's introduction as a way of putting the story of the President's assassination into historical context. I mean, it's a bizarre song to write, isn't it? President Garfield had the second shortest term in office, just a few months, and isn't remembered for much more than his assassination. I wonder why Ramblin' Jack Elliott was compelled to write about him.
Brendan: Yeah, definitely sounds like it comes from that version. I wonder if Ramblin' Jack gets credit if only because he wrote it down.
Mike: Interesting. We should ask him the next time he comes through town.
Brendan: Nah, it seems to me that he wrote the sheet music for posterity's sake, and has since gotten credit by default. Besides he doesn't need a couple whippersnappers calling bullshit on him. He's Ramblin' Jack and it is folk music, after all. Everything is borrowed from the same pot.
Dark Was the Night airs on WUMB Saturdays from
8pm-midnight.
Listen online or at:
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Value emails as one would tactile multidimensional nature of teletype glued to telegram! Its ragged edges. ALL IN CAPS STOP Henry Miller alludes to his employment at Western Union in NYC in Moloch, Sexus, Tropic of Capricorn, + Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch, vowing afterward never to work again. Get word from Mr. Simmons at his coin, stamp, & pawn, that Webster’s New International Dictionary Second Edition Unabridged, 1957, is in from auction house up north. Told him I recalled the price as $75, he says, no, $60, so with extra cash purchase antique postcards of Hopi Pueblo, Place Vendome, Tour Eiffel, & because a friend is enamored of news new bells will ring for the first time on March 23rd at the cathedral in Paris, Notre Dame. Bent sends two Moleskine Postal Notebooks from Aalborg, saying they struck him as “perfect items” for me. In fact, when standing in the long line at the post office yesterday, fellow correspondence LOVERS, day before Valentine’s, I couldn’t wait that long staring at boring drudgery going on, hightailing it out to the car for Li Po & Tu Fu: Broken the Moon of March, / April approaches: / How many Springs / Am I to welcome? [TF] Telegram style foreshadowed text messaging. DEAR K SNOW MELTS OFF ROOF STOP HEART SUN BLOOD LOVE R
Hey, remember that time in the Winter of 2010 when I called Scott Brown a narcissistic, self-serving & vacuous douche nozzle and stated just nine weeks after his improbable special election victory that "it's very unlikely that he'll get re-elected"? Turns out I was right about all of that, huh? And this here pretty much guarantees that he'll never win an election in Massachusetts again:
Good riddance to bad rubbish, Scott Brown. Fuck you and the horsetruck you rode in on. Good luck following the Glenn Beck / Sarah Palin trail, spouting gibberish for money until Roger Ailes finds you to be a liability. We already know you're a pro at the xenophobic bullshit Fox News spouts. Maybe they'll keep you on payroll for a few years.
Mike Mellor: So, let's
try something here and see how well it works. You have a radio show,
Brendan, Saturday nights on WUMB called
Dark Was the Night featuring blues, roots and songwriters. It
airs from eight to midnight and each ten o'clock hour has a theme, like superstitious songs, migration songs or blues songs of social consciousness. We're going to take time here every
Saturday morning to swap a couple of songs from the upcoming ten
o'clock hour.
Tonight's theme is a continuation of last week's live music hour.
You're really making it tough on me right away because last week you
played from three of my go-to live albums: James Brown Live at the Appollo, Johnny Cash At
Folsom Prison, and Dylan's "Royal Albert Hall" Concert. I was fretting
about it earlier, but I woke up with this one yesterday morning.
For me the song itself is the quintessential example of Prine's
late '80s/early '90s writing style: minimalistic lyrics relying heavily
on loaded images, playing with baby boomer iconography to bring humor
to situations that aren't necessarily funny. The introduction story
uses the same style and, in Prine's classic way, the punchline isn't
really a punchline but an aww shucks shrug of the
shoulders.
It almost makes you want to break up with somebody, doesn't
it?
Brendan Hogan: Ha. I've had my heart broken enough
that I don't wish that on anyone, but you did hit the nail on the
head. The humor in Prine's writing is key to understanding what
he's saying. You can get away with a lot when you make someone
laugh. So, especially with his divorce songs like "All the Best",
Prine's pain, vulnerability, and bitterness is made more accessible
and understandable through his humor. It has a way of opening
things up and can also be a pretty effective bludgeon for putting a
person in their place, depending on how you use it.
Take Dylan for example. "Ballad of a Thin Man" is one of the greatest
dressings down of all time. Sure, the context of the song alone is
cutting, but Dylan has us laughing at, not just feeling contempt
for, the person and the circumstance he's addressing. Great stuff.
Mike: Ugh, The hectoring in this song is so
good! Even in the studio version, where he laughs on the "But you don't
understand" line, it's clear that this Mr. Jones guy is a useless
dweeb. You kinda sorta feel bad for the hapless little reporter, the
way you would any victim of a bully, but you don't really because Dylan
does such a good job of cutting him down.
This particular version is my favorite, too, because the song fits
perfectly with the animosity in the room.
Brendan: In that performance Dylan is singing as much to the audience as he
is to his original target, an incompetent TIME magazine reporter
(pardon the redundancy). As a listener I don't sympathize with any
of them: John Prine's wife, Dylan's audience, or the magazine
reporter. That's the point.
Dylan and Prine could easily come off as assholes; as bitter and
even weakened by their circumstance. But humor is endearing. And
it's a great vehicle for the ultimate "fuck you".
Dark Was the Night airs on WUMB Saturdays from
8pm-midnight.
Listen online or at:
91.9 FM Boston, Worcester, Falmouth
91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
1170 AM Orleans
