The Killing Floor

It's Not Dark Yet: Boston's Musicians

Where Mike talks with Brendan Hogan about the 10:00 hour of his radio show Dark Was The Night.

4/27/13

Mike Mellor: This week's topic is pretty obvious.

Both of us are from Eastern Massachusetts. We came of age and were educated in the city of Boston, and we've spent nearly our entire adult lives in it or immediately along its borders. We've been going to the Marathon since we were children. We've both put our time into and collected paychecks from famous Boston institutions whose influence reaches far beyond Massachusetts. We are lifelong products of this city's culture, and very tiny gears in the big machine that makes this very special place run. And we're both proud as hell of our home.

Less than two weeks ago two cowardly assholes killed three innocent people and wounded 282 more in one of the most special places of this city on its most special day of the year, for seemingly no other reason than to adhere to some cockamamie mixture of paleoconservative and pseudo-Islamic bullshit. While it might seem odd for the flawed thinking of Americans who hate outsiders to blend with the flawed thinking of outsiders who hate Western political values, it's important to note that these intellectual traditions are flip-sides of the same coin. They both operate on paranoia, suspicion, ignorance and a romantic view of "righteous" violence. When hatred and destruction from one side want to hate and destroy, they need the desire for hatred and destruction on the other side to make it happen. Both of the wars we have endured over the last decade-plus are based on the fusion of those two, and it seems that Boston is just the latest battleground in a seemingly endless, borderless war of corrupt ideologies.

The problem with their plan in Boston though—in the grand scheme of things—is that the dynamic that fuels this warring is anathema to the culture of Boston. After all, we are the city that at any given time embraces over a quarter-million students from around the world before disgorging them a little bit older and a lot wiser. We are the city with the most top-quality medical facilities in the world; a physical location where people from all over the world save the lives of people from all over the world. We educated Martin Luther King, Jr., the King of Love.

While some gigantic city south of us let their prejudice get the best of them in stopping the "Ground Zero Mosque" eight years after 9/11, we respected the rights of our Muslim citizens and did not interfere with the building of the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center. We were the first to legalize gay marriage, the first to extend equal rights protections to transgendered people, and the first to set up universal healthcare. Quite simply, we are the epicenter of enlightened tolerance in North America. Those two-bit murdering fucks didn't realize what they were up against.

Since our topic is American music I will say this: Boston has for decades been an incubator of local talent, an educator of young artists and a destination for those successful in the craft and in the business. The city's musical history and musical present are part and parcel of our history and culture in general. Just like our academic culture, our musical culture has taken in a broad array of influences, honed it and sent it back out to the rest of the world. This week we will pay homage to that.

Brendan Hogan: I think President Obama, in his address during the interfaith service at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross, expressed what so many of us in Boston have felt about our city all along, especially over the last few days.


“Over successive generations, you’ve welcomed again and again new arrivals to our shores — immigrants who constantly reinvigorated this city and this commonwealth and our nation. Every fall, you welcome students from all across America and all across the globe, and every spring you graduate them back into the world — a BOSTON DIASPORA that excels in every field of human endeavor. Year after year, you welcome the greatest talents in the arts and science, research — you welcome them to your concert halls and your hospitals and your laboratories to exchange ideas and insights that draw this world together….

So whether folks come here to Boston for just a day, or they stay here for years, they leave with a piece of this town tucked firmly into their hearts. So Boston is your hometown, but we claim it a little bit, too…. For millions of us, what happened on Monday is personal. It’s personal.”


What makes living in Boston so unique is the continuous ebb and flow of culture in, out, and through our city like a great tide bringing in the world. There really is no city quite like it: small enough to retain its values and sense of responsibility to itself, while being relevant, open, and forward-thinking enough to absorb into every corner that rush of new ideas and progressive thought without losing its sense of self.

So often I've heard people say, usually in reference to arts and entertainment industries, that Boston is a small town and in order to make it, eventually you've got to leave. That may be true, but statements like that are short-sighted. Boston is a breeding ground. We're a breeding ground because the world comes to us and deposits its culture, its perspective, its knowledge here. But it's not a one-way transaction because we have a cultural backbone, as well, and it shapes those who live among it.

Nowhere is this better represented than in our music. Boston does not support the industry in the way New York, Nashville, or LA traditionally support the commerce of art. Instead, we make art and we make artists. Take Paul Pena, for example, the son of Cape Verdean immigrants born with congenital glaucoma. He went to the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown and then to Clark University in Worcester. He was the product of working class culture, top flight health care, and the most impressive network of educational institutions in the United States. He played guitar in T-Bone Walker's band of the early 1970s, wrote what became one of the most recognizable songs in pop music, and later developed and pursued an interest in Tuvan throat-singing that ultimately led to a cultural award from the Tuvan people.

Paul Pena was a product of his Boston upbringing and he brought it with him literally around the world.

Mike: Yeah, I've heard a lot of smug people over the years talk about Boston like it's a rest stop on the road to somewhere else, rather than a great incubator of culture. Of course, most of those people were dissatisfied with their own lives and projecting their problem on to something else, so whatever.

Pena is a great example of what we're talking about. Most people have no idea who he is, but almost everybody knows "Jet Airliner". Similarly, most people have probably never heard of Cape Verde, but over the last century that little island has played a big part in shaping our regional culture.

I know this because I grew up in the city that has the largest population of Cape Verdean ancestry in the country. In the 19th Century they followed the Portuguese to North America to fish and whale the South Coast, and successive generations moved into the cranberry bogs of the South Shore. In assimilating they have made major contributions to theology, academia, music and athletics. As we speak waves of Cape Verdean immigrants keep coming to our shores and we're lucky to have them.

Another guy people might not associate with Boston is Dick Dale, the pioneering surf rock guitarist. For most people I'm sure his name invokes the beaches of Southern California, but he spent the first 17 years of his life in the ethnic stew that was WWII-era Boston. When people hear his "wet" guitar sound and think of surf and water, what they're also hearing is the influence Lebanese music had on him. He learned that Lebanese music right here.

Brendan: Another misconception that has been cleared up over the last few days is the amount of compassion the people of Boston have for each other. We have a reputation for being a little tough and cold, which we are (although I must say I find being grunted at by miserable Dunkin' Donuts employees or cut off in traffic sort of charming), but it's just a thick skin covering a deep sense of responsibility and caring toward our neighbors. You and I know it's there because we grew up with it, but it's nice to have it revealed to and recognized by the rest of the country.

I also think there's an assumption that Boston has a looser grip on the values that are inherently American; that somehow because we are a bastion of liberal politics and progressive ideas, we don't place an emphasis on the importance of tradition. I think the opposite is true. I think our forward-leaning way of life shapes the values of the rest of the country, allowing it to understand the world and to be fluid and open to change. After all, we are the cradle of the Revolution.

You can hear it in the music of Gram Parsons. When he was studying theology at Harvard he started the International Submarine Band with a few Berklee students and began shaping the sound of what would become described as "cosmic American music", blending psychedelic sounds and lyrical imagery with straight-up traditional, double-clutching country music. The genesis for that shift in country music happened right here in Boston.

Mike: You know, the first Gram Parsons song I heard was the ISB's "Hot Burrito #2" and I was floored. It was "Americana" before "Americana", some weird intellectual working-class American music for mystics. The one question I had in reading up on GP was how the hell did he develop this in the swamps of Florida? Of course, he didn't. He was surrounded by the hippie-meet-folk revival scene in Cambridge when he first heard Merle Haggard, and the lightbulb went off for him. None of this ever would have happened in Jacksonville, FL.

Parsons is an example of somebody from somewhere else who comes here early in their adult life, takes the tools they need from it and sets off to make a mark somewhere else. This is Boston's primary role in society—as evidenced by all the successful people who have shared their personal connections to Boston these last couple weeks—but it's not the only one. In fact, J.B. Hutto did that journey in reverse.

He was one of the many black folks raised in the church that went from rural southern poverty to war and eventually to Chicago, where he turned his musical training to the blues. The only difference with J.B. is that after realizing Chicago was a dead-end he moved to Boston (a great blues town as far as audiences were concerned), formed a new band, got a deal with a Rounder Records subsidiary, won a Grammy and toured the world. Ultimately, he was diagnosed with cancer, went back home to IL and died at 57, but he'd have been just another under-appreciated talent had he not come to play his cards in Boston.

Brendan: Boston is the kind of town where you can come home to roost. Maybe at first it seems odd for this city to be a comfortable home to a veteran blues musician, because, as you mentioned, the more familiar cities of the African American "Great Migration" lie further to the (mid)West, but Boston is actually a great destination for any kid of musician. We share a lot in common with the metropolitan areas of Europe that were beacons of culture for blues and jazz artists during the 1960s, and yet we have the distinction of being an American city. Where else besides New Orleans could you find a blend of Old World quaintness mixed with brash, New World swagger and top flight jazz?

Mike: Nowhere. New York, Chicago and LA were in hyper-modern overdrive, unlike Boston or Europe, and as much as I love New Orleans (my loyal blog readers know) it doesn't have nearly the diversity of Boston when it comes to anything other than music. I mean that with absolutely no disrespect. They are two gorgeous and eccentric American cities with very different identities.

So far we've covered folks who are either from here or who have spent a relatively short amount of time here. We haven't even touched the folks who have come here for the long haul and seen it as a city of refuge. Let's pick up with that next week, yeah?

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

To The Wretched Inhuman Being(s) Who Did This

To the wretched inhuman being(s) who did this:

My city is a city of empathy & service. We research problems and search for solutions in our great universities. We save lives in our amazing hospitals. We preserve and protect the sacred knowledge of society—its history, its meaning, its beauty—in our cultural institutions. We lighten the loads of millions of suffering people in our countless non-profit social welfare institutions. People come to my city from all over the world to educate and be educated, to save and be saved, and to further enrich the world through our individual skills and our beliefs in commonwealth and knowledge.

For reasons as of yet unknown, but surely insane and cruel, you brought your hate into our city full of love on its most celebratory day. Like a coward you have murdered at least three completely innocent people (including an eight-year-old boy), maimed over a hundred more and traumatized even hundreds after that, all of whom were simply standing in a crowd. On top of that you have taken the most Boston of Boston days—where half a million people congregate along a 26.2-mile stretch of road to celebrate Spring, charity, physical endurance and global culture—and turned it into carnage, trauma and fear. Whatever you think the problems are in this world, they were surely not represented there on the corner of Boylston and Exeter. Most likely those problems reside only in your demented soul(s).

I hope to God that you are alive and in prison on April 21, 2014, so you can watch us throw the biggest fucking marathon party the world has ever seen. A 117-year tradition in a nearly 400-year-old city cannot and will not be stopped by how ever many monsters were responsible for this. If anything, your grievous actions will be an annual reminder for the rest of our lives that we must not take the love and goodwill in our society for granted, that we must collectivize our strengths in determined measures to snuff out the evil embers from people like you.

I, for one, will start my morning next Patriots' Day on the Boston University campus at the sculpture to our adopted son, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. He said that, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that." And then I will cheer madly for the renewal of Spring, and the runners, and the families, and the charities worked for, and my beloved city. I will think of and probably cry for those dead and maimed this afternoon and then cheer some more, as if to fill the gap of too few cheers from the year before.

We, the hundreds of thousands of strangers will greet each other on the streets with purpose. We will be an army of goodwill to drive out the darkness, an army of love to drive out the hate. I will think about how great it is to live in this city, how great it is to be from this city and how great it is to share this moment again with the rest of the world. I will think about how it now means so much more.

But I probably won't think about you.

Sincerely,

Mike Mellor

Time Capsule: Whisper Against the Current Darkness & the Rest to Come

Time Capsule is a series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

  

Whisper Against the Current Darkness & the Rest to Come

Brailling the keyboard at quarter to four in the morning doing my best to harness the light letter by letter. Wasn’t a bad day the day before, what with the orange tanker, Atlantic Jupiter out of Hong Kong, evidence of sea spray all along it’s hull, sprawled out across the bay. But that light’s pure memory in pitch darkness. Letter by letter, light & memory, all I’ve got in late-night solitude, apart from digital numbers on the clock, offhand reminders of mortality. The dream I woke from had images of black limousine, smoke, & small talk on cell phones. Premonitory, at best. This minor speech act, mere whisper against the current darkness & the rest to come. Fingertips getting the light down. For now, at least, pulse, breath, better.

It's Not Dark Yet: More Lyrical Poetry in Song

Where Mike talks with Brendan Hogan about the 10:00 hour of his radio show Dark Was The Night.

4/13/13

Mike Mellor: We got some really positive feedback on how we tied together such a diverse group of songwriters last week. The oldest and the youngest artists were born 94 years apart and only two of the six were born in the same decade (Lewis 1893, Johnson 1911, Van Zandt '44, Zevon '47, Earle '55, Lamar '87). Two are from Mississippi, two are from Texas and two are from California. Two are alive and four are dead.

I'm going to keep this thread going by throwing in a guy born in 1968. Most people have never heard of Jeremy Wallace, but he is on my shortlist of favorite songwriters. I love his songs so much I wrote an unsolicited pro bono essay about them when I was editor for the Boston Blues Society and the Jeremy Wallace Trio was in the International Blues Competition. To sum it up in a quote: "This is deadbeat music, and you can't fake that shit. It's evocative, honest, earnest, seedy, sad, clever and passionate. Above all, it's real." And Dave Van Ronk agreed with me (or, actually, I agree with DVR).

"Cold October" is my favorite song of his. It's the lyrics like this that are aching, downcast and funny as hell all at the same time.

So you know down at Jack's Marylou's unattached and she's working
And something inside of you dies each time that she smiles
She laughs at your jokes and she drinks and she smokes; she's just lovely
But you know all too well that you're just not her style

And though you hardly know her
You'd give all you got if only you could hold her
When it's cold, cold October

>Cold October

Brendan Hogan: Yes, I guess that picks up on the point made at the end of last week's blog that this is music that has reached across generations and up and down the social spectrum.

These days, most songwriters working at their craft aren't household names and never will be. That's not something to fret about, and I don't understand why people base their perception of the value of a piece of art based on how it has been consumed. Ultimately they are talking about commerce, a byproduct of a hyper-capitalistic society, and I'm afraid that may have permeated our culture as much as our great art.

I bring this up because Jeremy Wallace is going to exist many years into the future in the same way he has existed in the past, and exists today. What he does is real, and it can't be made up. It's like an economy: the numbers can be fudged for a while, but eventually what was faked will be lost. The precious stone from the Earth, though, will always have its value. And there will always be deadbeats.

To tell a story you need no more qualification than to be a person with a story, and Peter Case has lived the stories of a hundred lives, it seems. Not only that, but he's able to take them into account and reflect on them in songs that present them almost as a series of vignettes. "Ain't Gonna Worry No More" is a song that captures this perfectly. With each verse he criss-crosses through near and distant memories, tying them together with a chorus that is very much in the present, or at least part of a new presence in his life at the time he is recalling it. It's concrete imagery inserted between verses to bind them together.

Bare feet poppin' on a pinewood floor
A tumble-rush of desert flowers 'side the door
Her music box is pretty with the piebald stripes
Dust mote diamonds in a shaft of light

Everybody's laughing now it won't be long
We've seen a lot of troubles now the ghost is gone
C'mon down; I ain't gonna worry no more

I was waiting at the depot for a London train
Trying to paint a picture in the pouring rain
Hanging out the window running out of blue
Tomcat in the alley dodged a worn out shoe

It's another kind of deadbeat music.

Mike: Case is a genius, plain and simple one of the very best in the deadbeat vein of Americana. He is a songwriter's songwriter if there ever was one.

If the name sounds familiar to anyone reading this and they were listening to the radio in 1992 they might remember "Dream About You," or they might recognize some artists on this 47-track tribute album. Neither of these capture the magic of Peter in his element, but they might prove to be accessible doorways into his imposing catalog.

We have a bit of deadbeat overload in this conversation, stretching back to last week with Warren and Townes, who certainly had their moments, too. I want to cleanse the palate a bit with a little Cole Porter, the writer who first got me obsessed with internal rhyming and primed me for the Wallace style:

Brendan: That song contains one of the most important things you need to know about internal rhyme: Keep it simple and keep it flowing.

When you're near there's such an air of spring about it.

There's not a wasted word in that line and, phonetically, it is so pleasing to hear. It's a short sentence, but each part hooks into the next. "Near" rhymes with "air" as does "about" with "it", which is pretty impressive, but to me the capper comes later. How many internal rhymes can Cole Porter fit in one line?:

There's no love song finer, but how strange the change from major to minor ev'ry time we say goodbye

That line has the same kind of rhythmic rhyme and propulsion we were talking about last week with Kendrick Lamar and hip hop, or the stream of consciousness found in some Townes and mid-60's Dylan songs. It's a rare writer that can construct a line that sounds as good as that one while conveying emotion without being cute about it.

Another person who is really good with that kind of lyrical propulsion is Chuck Berry. He was capable of bringing a level of sophistication to early rock 'n' roll that is worthy of its own songbook, and oftentimes he achieved it through inventive and creative use of language. Chuck liked to make up words—like "motorvating", used to describe moving at a high rate of speed in a car, or "hurry home drops" to describe tears of lonliness—that was rivaled only by the lyrical mysticism of Bo Diddley in "Who Do You Love" or pretty much anything by Percy Mayfield.

My favorite song of Chuck's is "Downbound Train". He spends the entire song comparing a train ride from hell with a terrible bender, but there's nothing trite about it. The best verse of the song calls on the theme of "This Train (Bound for Glory)", but with a hellish bent painted with flourishes of ghoulish imagery.

The engine with blood was sweaty and damp
And brilliantly lit with a brimstone lamp
And imps for fuel was shoveling bones
While the furnace rang with a thousand moans

Where else do you hear that kind of phrasing in rock 'n' roll?

Mike: You've really outdone yourself here, connecting Cole Porter and Kendrick Lamar through Chuck Berry. Now that I think of it, all three of them seem to have known something nobody else around them did. Porter put actual Parisian sophistication into a genre of music that had only Parisian airs (his only peer is actually two people: the Gershwin Brothers) and Lamar is almost singlehandedly bridging the gap between "gangsta" rap and "conscious" rap in the way he shows the streets instead of telling the streets.

And of course, Berry, well, if American music were an hourglass Chuck might very well be the neck; the whole history of this country's musical sound seemed to come out of him and Lord knows everything after has his fingerprint on it somewhere. He's not the only important rock 'n' roller, but he's the only one who had every talent an ideal rock 'n' roller had. For the sake of this conversation, he is undoubtedly the greatest lyricist of that time and everybody knew it. Especially himself.

Brendan: Ha. Yes, but the best line of poetry in rock 'n' roll belongs to Big Joe Turner in "Shake, Rattle & Roll": "I'm a one-eyed cat peeping in a seafood store, I could look at you 'til you ain't a child no more." That whole song, including the term rock 'n' roll itself, is a poetic euphemism for sex.

Mike: I think David Lynch might agree with 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

Culture & History Cannot Be Mutually Exclusive (Unless You're White!)

Sure seems like the whole USA's gone country these last few days, huh? OK, maybe it's just LL Cool J. 

We have seen, though, quite a bit more attention paid in "elitist" circles to country music in the aftermath of Brad Paisley and LL's epic fail. Most of it has revolved around whether or not Paisley is actually racist (he put it in the title of the song, didn't he?) and whether or not America has actually reformed itself, but some people have bothered to peak around this elephant in the corner of the South to see what else is going on in Nashville.

Noah Berlatsky published an absolutely scathing review of The Band Perry on The Atlantic site yesterday. Ouch! While I'm pretty sure he only meant to tackle TBP—and perhaps by extension their "country" sub-genre that sounds more like post-grunge modern rock than anything else—I think his thesis has some light to shine on the whole "Accidental Racist" controversy.

The meat of his argument is that historically country (or hillbilly) music was, "not so much a single style (like jazz or to some extent blues) as it was a marketing category," designed to appeal to a swath of people who were either rural themselves or were from rural families recently transplanted to the city in a rapidly urbanizing society. Naturally, people want music that reflects their values and strengthens bonds within their community, especially as that community is being stretched beyond recognition, and the marketers in New York and Nashville knew how to exploit it. "This meant," Berlatsky explains, "that country became the music of hillbillies. But it also meant that whatever music hillbillies played—whether folk, blues, jazz, or, eventually, rock—became country."

The problem over time is obvious: "rapidly urbanizing" in the '40s and '50s means "urbanized for generations" in 2013. This is true in the urban jungle of Chicago or the post-industrial sprawl of Canton, OH, but it's also true in new New South bastions like Charlotte and Atlanta. Grandpappy isn't whittling sticks on the front porch anymore, and his beat-up old '52 Chevy Pickup is just something he joyrides while on vacation from his office job. The physical connection to the pastoral homeland of yore has been severed, the once-tight relationship between urban now and rural then has been FUBARed.

This leads Berlatsky to the question: "What is the music of hillbillies when there are no hillbillies left?" His answer is the vast empty space of The Band Perry and those of their ilk. I think there's still plenty of room on that giant fantastical plane for songs like "Accidental Racist".

You see, one of the great things about being white in the United States of Amnesia these days is that you get to choose your historical allegiances and cultural identifiers just like you'd fill your plate at the Old Country Buffet. Also just like at OCB, you can consume a wide variety of tasteless garbage and shit it out soon after. After all, this is the land that encourages Masshole townie teenagers to get blotto in the New England Patriots stadium parking lot before Country Music Fest, sponsored by Dunkin' Donuts, Texas Roadhouse and the Samsung Galaxy Note. This is the land where for every Teena Marie there are innumerable Three Times One Minus Ones. This is the land where emo kids become grown-ass adults that fetishize spell-casting children and vampires. This is the land of the "Honky Tonk Badonkadonk".

This is our contemporary culture and us white people are like shapeshifters in that we have this ability to be what we want at any given moment, until it becomes inconvenient, at which point we can become something else. We can change back and forth without repercussions. Tonight with our friends we can be just like KeSha, T. Mills, Lil' Wayne, Taylor Swift, Dierks Bentley, Charlie Sheen, Kim Kardashian, Seth McFarlane, Tony Montana, Jay-Z or whoever the fuck else and Sunday afternoon we'll still be who we were raised to be for dinner at Grandma's house. Meanwhile, someone like Jordan Davis does the same play acting in a gas station parking lot and ends up dead at the hands of an angry racist. Yet nobody seems to grasp the difference.

This magical cocktail of ignorance, entitlement and opportunity is what's behind "Accidental Racist". The story starts, after all, with our "Skynyrd fan" wearing a symbol of "Southern Pride" on his chest, but when a black guy sees it our protagnist gets to thinking that maybe this guy is assessing "Southern blame". Instantly our "white man" becomes a victim of the antebellum South, too, "caught between" the dueling forces of pride and blame.

Read: The character is so accustomed to thinking he can have his cake and eat it, too, that he thinks he can walk into a Starbucks wearing a CONFEDERATE FLAG T-SHIRT(!)* and expect that NOBODY should dare think he might be racist. Brad Paisley thinks he can write that character as a victim of life's circumstances. For real.

Then our protagonist says that, you know, we didn't start the fire and I'm doing everything I can within reason to appease your anger, but it's not my fault. "THEY called it Reconstruction" and "WE'RE still siftin' through the rubble after a hundred-fifty years." Can't you see that we're brothers in the fight, brother? For real.

Finally Paisley brings in a real-to-life black guy (a celebrity rapper, even!) to validate his worldview and offer a truce ("If you don't judge my do-rag / I won't judge your red flag / If you don't judge my gold chains / I'll forget the iron chains"). For real. Talk about false equivalence.

This would be a hilarious farce except for the facts of what we are talking about. What we are talking about is the wholesale capture, shipment, commodifcation, enslavement and brutalization of human beings, followed immediately by equal or worse treatment of their descendents, followed immediately by a war in which they were pawns, followed immediately by a decades-long state-run terrorism campaign against them—sometimes sanctioned by the federal government—followed by a brutal public struggle for human rights, followed by another four or five rocky decades of realization until now, when we may have a President with brownish skin but we also have more than a million black people in prison. I'm sorry, Mr. Paisley, if you're comforting "white man from the southland" bullshit enrages those of us who care about history, society and real amity. You don't know shit, so please shut the fuck up.

But, really, what else can we expect from a culture that separates its history from its heritage but hubristic & vacant pride for the stuff we come from that we like and callous attempts at disassociation from the stuff we come from that we don't like? The dufuses of the new New South have been afforded the luxury of distancing themselves from Jefferson Davis while still embracing Rand Paul, and they are acting accordingly.

In all of their ignorance, can you blame them?



* By the way, who the fuck calls the Confederate Flag the "red flag"? I've heard "Rebel Flag", "Dixie Flag", "Stars & Bars" and "Southern Cross", but never "red flag". If it is such an inoffensive symbol of Southern Pride or Skynnyrd fandom, Mr. Paisley, why did you have to use a euphemism to describe it?

Time Capsule: The Sound of Weather Breaking

Time Capsule is a series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


An Oak Tree in Winter
[William Henry Fox Talbot (British, 1800-1877), ca. 1843
Salt print, 7 5/8 x 6 9/16 in.; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles]

The Sound of Weather Breaking

Three oak leaves visible from the front porch hung on all winter. Across the way, another mammoth tree, seemingly bare, details the blank white sky behind it. Weather here has finally broken, allowing me to sit outside on the Adirondack rocker, instead of at my post at the backroom library table Jean Fields gave me when moving to a smaller apartment. Originally from an old building in New Haven, it invites writing. In the distance now I hear the freight train crossing the main drag heading north. Closer, birds singing praises of the day. I’m in love with shadows almost as much as the light. Wind chime shadow swinging silently against white clapboards.

It's Not Dark Yet: Lyrical Poetry in Song

Where Mike talks with Brendan Hogan about the 10:00 hour of his radio show Dark Was The Night.

4/6/13

Brendan Hogan: Last week we talked about how blues musicians are oftentimes overlooked in the discussion about songs of social consciousness, especially during the era of the folk revival. It got me thinking that the same kind of dismissive attitude also applies to their contributions to poetic songwriting. April is National Poetry Month so I thought this weekend's feature would be a good time to look at that.

Blues songs are particularly interesting because they are strict in some ways. Harmonically and melodically they adhere to pretty formulaic structures. The lyrics often had to be cryptic because what some singers expressed was not acceptable to large segments of society, or perhaps they are cryptic to us as a function of past regional dialects. Either way, these limitations lead to increased creativity for many blues artists of the early 20th century.

Robert Johnson's music offers great examples. He couldn't sing about Beatrice breaking his heart and leaving him sexually frustrated in "Phonograph Blues", but he could say how much he loves her phonograph if only she didn't break his winding chain. The double meanings weren't restricted to sex, either. They could also apply to love, especially the unrequited kind, as in Johnson's "Love in Vain":

"When the train left the station there were two lights on behind / The red light was my baby and the blue light was my mind."

Sometimes not saying something is more potent than saying it.

Another master of poetic lyrical imagery in blues is Furry Lewis. Take his song "Falling Down Blues". With essentially the backing of one chord he tells a woman how much he loves her, wants her, and needs her without ever saying it plainly. He ultimately winds up frustrated, leading to the best and most cryptic lines in the song:

"She caught the rumbling; I caught the falling down / I didn't see her; I didn't turn around"

In other words, she caught the train; I drank until I couldn't stand. I didn't see her leave; I didn't even say goodbye.

Mike Mellor: Oh, now we're getting into some shit.

I was worried that this topic was going to go "Dylan, Prine, Waits, oh my!" Of course, the work of those guys is so important to me that it infiltrates my dreams, but everybody knows their value. I really appreciate the footing you've placed down for this conversation.

The "folk blues"—to me—has always been resonant the same way Walt Whitman is resonant, or Emily Dickinson or Mark Twain, for that matter. None of those three have much in common with each other besides the fact that they were American when America was deciding how to be American, and they shaped it. The same can be said about the sharecropping grandchildren of slaves in the agrarian South. The same way American literature was created out of an education in the past but also a steadfast insistence on an entirely different modern aesthetic, so went American music. Robert Johnson and Furry Lewis were both pioneers of THE American music aesthetic, the same way Whitman, Dickinson and Twain were pioneers of the American literary aesthetic.

And the tradition continues, of course, even if we keep mis-identifying every aesthetic shift as SOMETHING ENTIRELY NEW. Virtually nothing in the age of broadcasting + archives can be entirely new, but we persist as humans in the timeless tradition of making new language to make new sense of slightly new variations of old situations.

If this sounds hyperbolic, it's because I've been obsessed with Kendrick Lamar for the last four months, and I feel like his poetry has changed my life, or at least validates things I have experienced. The way I feel about Whitman, Twain, Johnson and Prine is how I feel about Lamar. With his latest album he has distilled his personal experience as an American into a gorgeous elegy for the forsaken children of Los Angeles. By doing that so successfully, so artistically by tying songs with different moods together with imagery and meter, he has created a space in ghetto life to start discussing the BIG picture of internal + external bullshit that plagues us.

We've had rap acts for a long time damn the man and castigate black folks for being unenlightened, but through poetry Lamar has given us the humanism, context, understanding, compassion and empathy to properly assess the situation and adjust. I'm not saying it is going to bring about a change, but it should, and that enlightened potential is artistic gold.

There are a number of songs on Good Kid, m.A.A.d City that are worthy of this ostentatious introduction, but only "Good Kid" is radio-friendly without edits. It's a song about looking for a way out (of the ghetto) when all you see are inter-locking traps that keep you in (gang violence, police brutality, drugs). The kid suffers a string of indignities but always comes back to the motif of future respect through perseverance.

Brendan: See, this is why I disagree with Wynton Marsalis when he rails against hip hop or anything with a "four to the floor" beat as being of little artistic or musical value. Hip hop and the blues share more in common than they have differences (and perhaps that's a topic for another discussion), but where blues music and its lyrical content is duty-bound to harmonic structure, hip hop is not. That allows for a free form kind of word play that, if nothing else, relies on internal rhyme to act as an anchor or pivot point tying each line to the next. When a writer can spin off like that it creates a tension that is very musical, constantly leading the ear forward (like a diminished chord in a Ray Charles song, for the music geeks).

That Kendrick Lamar song, and the way he delivers the lyrics, reminds me of the Townes Van Zandt song "She Came and She Touched Me". They both share an intensity brought on by the delivery of the lyrics as much as the lyrical content itself, and yet neither relies on delivery alone. Both are extremely well-written songs.

Mike: You're on to something with "leading the ear forward", literally. Next time you're on the T look for one of the kids listening to rap on headphones. Their necks jut out as if the music is dragging them by the ear. And if you look closely their shoulders rock with the rhythm, but the head movements are synchronized to the anchors and pivots of the rapper.

Many Townes songs have that same propulsion, but this is the best example ("For the Sake of the Song" comes to mind, too). It's the juxtaposition of the looping rhythm and the fast stream of imagery, sentences and thoughts spilled across and abruptly chopped between lines. The difference I suppose is that Townes is writing figuratively (the song is about heroin, I think) and Kendrick is writing Compton realism, albeit laced with figures of speech.

Speaking of Los Angeles and junk, I have another song that leads me by the ear but in an entirely different way. The lyrics of Warren Zevon's "Carmelita" are minimalist as far as narratives go. The scant details of the protagonist trying to score some dope open up a plethora of inferences and assumptions as you try to fill in the blank spaces in your imagination. Each verse is set up almost like a joke, with the first three lines building the tension for the release of the punch line.

Brendan: While "Carmelita" is a great song, I ask you to defend its lyrical content as an example of poetic verse, as opposed to a straight narrative, sir.

Mike: Does Carmelita not qualify as free verse?

If it were strictly a narrative it would go something like, "The radio station playing mariachi music isn't coming in clearly on my radio. I'm sitting here in a dark room in Echo Park dreaming of a woman in Ensenada. The glowing tubes in the radio are visible in the dark room. I'm playing with my gun because I need a fix and I'm broke. I pawned my typewriter to buy a fix from my dealer. I'm going to meet him on Alvarado Street by the chicken restaurant." Instead the song has:

* Metaphor ("playing solitaire / with my pearl-handled deck"),
* Connotation (double-negative in "The county won't give me no more methadone"),
* Shrewd word-play ("sinking down" in line with "strung out"), and
* Tones throughout that reinforce the protagonist's sense of isolation.

But I'm not the creative writing major or the songwriter in this conversation. Am I missing something?

Brendan: I hear what you're saying. In fact, in putting the show together I found that there is a sliding scale that separates a song like "She Came and She Touched Me" from "Carmelita" and that there are many songs that fit somewhere in the middle. I guess the test that I run in my head is whether a song lyric would stand on its own without the support of music, but that's not a very fair test. A song lyric has certain guidelines to adhere to that poetry doesn't, including harmonic and melodic structure, and it also has to live with the implication that it will tell a story in somewhat short order. To measure what makes a song verse poetic is probably an impossible task, and you make a good argument about "Carmelita".

In that vein, the title track to the new Steve Earle record, "The Low Highway" is a song that I think combines great story telling with poetic verse. It's nothing new, but Steve Earle has mastered the tradition of telling a story using plain, accessible language augmented by abstract image to punctuate his point.

Mike: Oh, that reverb. I know we're supposed to be talking about lyrics, but that echo on his voice, the way it rings when his voice opens up...it's great.

Anyway, I first heard this song on WUMB a few weeks ago. It struck me as an update to but the antithesis of Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land". There is no doubt the masses of this country are better off in 2013 than they were in 1940 (and if you disagree with this you're either a poor WASP or a goddamned idiot), but their American trajectory was upward and our American trajectory is downward. The two songs reflect it.

The part that gets me most:

"Traveling out on the low highway / By the yellow moon and the light of day / From the snow white crown of the mountain tall / To the valley down where the shadows fall

Met a man with a rifle in his hand / Been away to battle in a distant land / Taught him to hate, taught him to kill / Now he's out on the road with a hole to fill"

We just marked the 10-year anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. Few people are writing songs like this now, and yet Earle was writing them about folks in Afghanistan (on all sides of the conflict) before we even got tangled up in the Iraq mess again. And he does it so eloquently, somewhere between the eloquence of Whitman and the gutter of Bukowski, with just as much humanism as either of them, for the hyper-political time of the 21st Century. He's a gift.

Brendan: That's exactly what I was thinking; it's an updated or reconfigured "This Land is Your Land". He even uses the juxtaposition of concrete and abstract imagery in the same way Guthrie did.

"Wheels turn around on the asphalt singing / 'Every sin is a prophecy'.

I heard an old man grumble, a young girl cry / Saw a brick wall crumble and the white dove fly / A cry for justice and a call for peace / The voice of reason and the roar of the beast.

And every mile is a prayer I prayed / As I rolled down the low highway."

The same gift Steve Earle has can also be found in, and traced through, all forms of American music, from Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl songs, to Jack Kerouac's "Blues and Haikus", to Bo Diddley's "tombstone hand and graveyard mind", to Kendrick Lamar's m.A.A.d city. I don't know if it's distinctly American, but it's in everything that is distinctly American. So when people say Americans have no culture, or no music of substance, it frustrates me. Not only do we have culture and substance, but it continues to permeate every crack and corner of our popular song and folk music as it has for over a century.

Mike: And if we have no culture, why is the rest of the world obsessed with our nothing?

Dark Was the Night airs on WUMB Saturdays from 8pm-midnight.

Listen online or at:
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91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
1170 AM Orleans

Time Capsule: Collaborative Palimpsest

Time Capsule is a series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

 

Collaborative Palimpsest


Wrote this down from a dream in the pitch dark on a small card I thought was blank, but turned out by morning to have been a postcard from a friend kept on the nightstand, so that it became, unwittingly, a collaborative palimpsest. I would like a machine to show how the two merged, one below the other, but doubt such a one has been invented, yet?:

His:  & butterflies since he was 8 years old.
    Even Nabokov wld. have been
    impressed… Be well, you &
    your wife.
            [signed]

Mine:  Long after one touches
    the other with lips or
    fingertips, one touches
    the other with
    words
          [unsigned]

FURTHER STUDY:

Palimpsest
X-rays reveal Van Gogh's hidden portrait