The Killing Floor

It's Not Dark Yet: The Roots of Bob Dylan

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

 



6/1/13

Brendan Hogan: I love Bob Dylan's music. He is our Shakespeare. People will write about him just like they write about Shakespeare, and he'll eventually be watered down like we've watered down the rest of our cultural heroes. (Was Shakespeare one person, after all, or a collective of writers?)

There will forever be a "before" and "after" in reference to him, but living now we're lucky enough to experience at least some of his sorcery firsthand. Magic can't be quantified, however, and it's not even worth trying to account for it. It just is. Any cultural impact Dylan has had can't be measured, either, because he has changed our culture. Dylan is like a cultural portal; he exists and so our dimension has shifted. That which could not exist before him, or that which was inaccessible, is now laid out in the open.

Yes, I think this highly of Dylan's art. But to me, his music has always has always been personal. Why? Because Dylan isn't magic. He isn't a figment of our imagination or a hybrid of legends passed down, written into a static, unreachable figure by history. He's a man who has shaped his own story, who has absorbed influences, and who exists in the makeup of our time. That's what I'm interested in talking about today.

Mike Mellor: You bring up a really important point. So often when I get going on Dylan I'm afraid people think I'm hero worshiping when, really, I care very little about who he is as a regular guy, father, grandfather, lover, husband, homeowner, businessman or whatever. I don't collect paraphernalia or gossip about his affairs. I really don't give a shit.

What I care about is his artistic contribution to the world: what he took, what he did with it, how it came out, and how it changed society. He's certainly the most prolific and influential popular artist when it comes to bridging the American folk tradition with "arts and letters". His art made it a regular thing to express Post-structuralist ideas in songs about sailors and homeless people, or to tell Existentialist dirty jokes. It brought Mississippi Fred McDowell up to the Ivory Tower and F. Scott Fitzgerald down to the gutter. He's never settled long on genre, instrumentation or meter, but his work has been a remarkably consistent cry for egalitarianism and compassion. It's music for people who took the Beatitudes of Jesus to heart, who glorify humility and demonize greed.

That is some pretty serious stuff. But where did it all start? Well, the legend goes that his ambition upon graduating high school was "to join Little Richard".

Brendan: That's the thing about Dylan: We're never really sure of who he is. Is he a man of the heart like a blues musician, of the mind like a poet, or does he just want to sing about sex like Little Richard? He's all of those things because he can be. Dylan is the ultimate manifestation of what it means to be an American; to be whatever you say you are. It's something he has deliberately cultivated from his earliest days as a public persona and he's carried on laying down the chaff ever since.

Dylan doesn't use his given name, for starters, and even in his very first radio interview he spun a story about running away with the circus as a young boy. All of that coupled with the mysticism and canny insight of his writing, makes him an incredibly compelling figure. I couldn't care less about his personal life, either, but without a doubt I filter the way I perceive the world, at least in part, through the lens his presence as an artist has shaped.

It's interesting that you suggest Dylan leveled the playing field between "high" and "low" cultures. I've heard people (not you) suggest that Dylan came along and broke all the rules, as if he alone had the power to do so. It's true that he did affect and represent a massive change in the way music was published, marketed, and sold, but that's not art; that's commerce. Bob Dylan is an iconic figure because he has manged to exist in the worlds of art and commerce very successfully while maintaining a high level of integrity. But nobody exists in a vacuum.

Tell me this Bo Diddley song from 1955 doesn't stand up to anything on Bringing it all Back Home.

Mike: I'd never tell you that. In fact I'd go a step further and say Diddley's guitar beats anything Mike Bloomfield put on the Highway 61 album (and I love Bloomfield) and the cartoon mythology of "Who Do You Love" seems like a prototype for "Highway 61" the song. So much of Dylan's "electric period" is right there.

I don't think Dylan leveled the playing field, if by "playing field" you mean society. But if you mean "playing field" to be his own worldview, where he believes there is artistic, intellectual and philosophical merit to be found in every culture and in every station from beggar to king, then absolutely. A large part of his amazing gift is to amalgamate it all into something entirely new, yet wholly referential and reverential. He is essentially a pastiche artist.

Speaking of running away with the circus, I wouldn't doubt it if he stole that little biographical detail from Ramblin' Jack Elliott (née Elliot Adnopoz), a Brooklynite son of a doctor who actually ran away with a traveling rodeo because he was so enamored of cowboy songs. Elliott would go on to become a traveling companion and apprentice-of-sorts to Woody Guthrie, and to many he is thought of as the bridge between Guthrie and Dylan. He was certainly an important figure in Guthrie's life when Dylan went to New York (New Jersey, technically) to find Guthrie laid up in a mental hospital, and was an important figure in Dylan's life when he was finding his folk sound.

Of course, Dylan eclipsed that moon just a few years later but Jack is still around today to tell us the stories, and to perform amazing renditions of Dylan's early material. But before Elliott ever recorded a Dylan song Dylan (under the pseudonym Tedham Porterhouse) played harp on a Ramblin' Jack record.

Brendan: Yes, it's funny how Dylan was copying Ramblin' Jack Elliott copying Woody Guthrie. And he did a good job of it, too. Some of those very early Dylan recordings sound exactly like Ramblin' Jack, down to the way he phrases words and even speaks. It's a wonder Elliott was so forgiving and their friendship endured. Artists imitate, though; genius steals.

Dylan must really be a genius, then, for lifting (or at least borrowing from) the melody and story of "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)" for his song "4th Time Around". A lot is made of his influence on The Beatles, but it actually went both ways.

Mike: Then he must really be a genius 12 times over for his love and theft of Junichi Saga's Confessions of a Yakuza.

I understand why this was a controversy, I suppose, but to me it's just Dylan being Dylan, understanding that the folk tradition knows no such thing as copyright, yet making a completely separate and self-sufficient work. The vast majority of art unconsciously does this sort of stealing and referencing all the time. I mean, really, what is Art History but a catalogue of who riffed off of whom?

My only beef is that Dylan could at least have thrown Saga's name in the liner notes. You know, credit where credit is due, especially when you borrow from a living source so unlikely to be noticed by others.

Brendan: That's basically his argument, too, and I tend to agree with him. An idea has to start somewhere, and more often than not it starts where someone else left off, or in the exact same place. He has the ability to internalize and codify his influences in such a way that his writing expresses a hybrid of wide-ranging ideas. It's personal and universal at the same time, and I don't think you can set out to do that. It just happens.

I suppose problems usually arise when one party makes money and the other doesn't. Dylan happily cashes his checks, I'm sure, but I've never been under the impression that he got into the game for that. In fact, he's made some pretty heavy sacrifices himself.

But stealing is a murky subject. And from Edison to Jobs to Dylan, it's very American, too.

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

It's Not Dark Yet: Summer Songs

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

 



5/18/13

Mike Mellor: Man, I woke up this morning (Thursday) and it's suddenly Summer, like we just skipped past Spring. You know what my favorite thing is about Summer?

Brendan Hogan: Public, drunken arguments on the street at night?

Mike: Well, I love those, too...but no. It's Hot Pants!

Brendan: Ha. Yes, I'll take that any day of the week, any season.

I thought you were going to say that your favorite part is the students vacating town.

They can bother mom and dad again with this for a few months.

Mike: Hahaha. Still, decades later, sometimes I find myself singing the verse in my head:

"Your pop caught you smoking, and he said, 'No way!'
That hypocrite smokes two packs a day
Man, living at home is such a drag
Now your mom threw away your best porno mag"

Does that sound as awful to folks our parents' age as this sounds to me?

Brendan: The thing is that the Beastie Boys wrote their song as a total farce. They were making fun of the people who went on to use that song as their personal party-hearty anthem. Of course, the meanings of songs are often taken out out context by those who connect with them, and are thus assigned new context and meaning in the process. It's the same fate assigned to Nirvana's "Polly", which is a song about sexual abuse that people sing along to like it's a lullaby or something, or like Reagan using "Born in the USA" as an anthem of American exceptionalism on the campaign trail in '84. I'm not sure Kesha is being subversive, though. I could be wrong. I'm too old to tell. Always have been, actually.

But speaking of being too old, what's with baby boomers and their monopoly on good-time youth culture? Maybe Kesha really is onto something. Maybe she represents a new Summer of Love, done Millenial-style. Maybe it's just a big middle finger to this:

Mike: It's Ke$ha, Brendan.

But I think you might be on to something. I seriously doubt Ke$ha is being intentionally subversive, but one thing I love about the culture of Millennials is that it owes nothing to the baby boomers.

I don't know what it is about those damn narcissists, but ever since the '60s happened the boomers have been shoving their romanticized, revisionist histories of themselves in our faces. I swear, people between the ages of 30 and 45 know more about their parents' culture than they do their own.

Thankfully, the kids these days don't give a fuck, and they have the DIY internet to shield themselves from the crap the old people put on TV to tell you how cool they were.

God bless them.

Brendan: Ah, it's just rich kids acting like rich kids have always acted. Too much time, money, and comfort are all the ingredients you need to start celebrating a great Summer. Amen.

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

It's Not Dark Yet: Drinking & Drugging

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

Cookie at Tin Pan Alley, NYC
[Nan Goldin (American, 1953 - ) 1983
Cibachrome, 76x102 cm; Matthew Marks Gallery, NYC]



5/11/13

Mike Mellor: Before we get into it I think it's important to remember our friend Shirley Lewis, who passed away this week. You spent more time with her than I did, but that seems almost irrelevant because it didn't take Shirley very long to get close to anybody. She had an endless supply of warmth that she gave to anybody willing to accept it, not only on stage but in just about everything she did for anybody she came across. We're going to miss her around here.

Brendan Hogan: That's the kind of person Shirley was. To me, she's an angel. There are some people who are channels for something beyond the concrete, some kind of energy that we're all tapped into, but only few notice. Some people are more keyed into it than others; they're better tuned to carry its resonance and ring like a bell. That's Shirley.

You could hear it in her music. It was all about energy and feeling: spontaneity and celebration. She vibrated. Shirley was whatever she was feeling, and onstage it might never come out the same way twice. That was pretty thrilling to watch and be a part of, and is the mark of a great artist. It's the most honest way of creating.

But above all, Shirley was just a good human being; kind, intuitive, selfless, and resilient. An angel, really, who touched the lives of many people.

Mike: No doubt. It's been heartwarming for me to see the grieving process for Shirley across social media. People who I thought couldn't agree on anything have been sharing their love for Shirley and their grief at her loss.

One of the best ways to grieve is to reminiscence on the joyful times you spent with that person. Several generations of the Boston blues community have been doing that this week and I doubt any of them have a shortage of memories to work with, as she was usually the person who brought the joy to the room, or else amplified it with her energy. I hear you're dedicating the first half of the 9:00 hour tonight to Shirley's music. I'll be sure to tune in to that.

Another way to grieve, of course, is by drinking, which is part of our theme this week. With a name like Hogan I'm sure you're familiar with the Irish wake tradition, but are you familiar with the song "Finnegan's Wake?"

When Tim Finnegan the boozer " fell off a ladder and broke his skull...they carried him off a corpse to wake...with a gallon of porter by his feet and a noggin' of whiskey by his head." The next day they held the wake, which of course included music, dancing, drinking and eventually fighting. In the fight somebody threw a bottle of whiskey, which broke and spilled all over Finnegan's body. Naturally, the uisce beatha revived him and brought him back from the dead.

Only the Irish, man.

Brendan: I was wondering how you were going to segue into this week's theme. Yes, the Irish definitely know how to hold a wake. But this week we'll look at the flip side of drink and drug and focus on the downside; the non-celebratory side. Why? Just for the hell of it.

So often it's a subject glorified in song and in pop culture, and that's all well and fine, but I want to take a look at reality. Booze and drugs are consuming. I'm all for a good song about good times (so long as it's good), but when getting loaded crosses the line, as it so easily does, into something that you'll do anything to service, then it's a problem. Problems make for interesting stories, though, and that's why we're so compelled to hear them.

Is there anything more desperate than a person who needs their fix, but they just can't get it? Jonathan Byrd tells the story of a man late to meet his dealer because he's stuck behind a jack-knife on the highway. This guy's relationship with dope is a bad love affair; like going insane.

Mike: "I don’t know how I got so low. No, I don’t know how I got so mean.
Diggin’ for change in the backseat clothes. And it’s been a long time since I been clean."

I don't mean to glorify the wake, or other oft-glorified enabling moments like sporting events, weddings, cookouts, bachelor(ette) parties, or whatever. I mean, so many of us are inculcated by these booze-soaked "rites of passage" that get us acclimated to the juice in the first place. Byrd's song is a reminder that, as memorable as the drunken nights of meaning may be, there are far fewer of them for the addict than there are mornings trying to piece last night together, or those endless mid-days where all you think about is the who/what/when/where of getting what you crave...while never examining why. It's a desolate space far removed from the social reverie of group consumption.

What we're talking about is a complicated social construct that fucks up the lives of individuals. And it's not only the junkie on the corner, or the drunk slumped on the bar at 7:00 in the evening. This affects mothers and fathers, grandmas and grandpas, brothers, sisters, cousins and children, plus friends and co-workers and the people we get romantically involved with, all at different stages of their dependency and coping with it differently. There's no easy solution because the population of people who suffer, and the methods by which they cope, is so diverse.

"I Drink" is a good reflection on my personal perspective on it. I'm not saying that my experience is bleak the way Mary Gauthier paints the picture, but I'm tight with people like that, and there is something in the resignation of the song that resonates with me.

"Chicken TV dinner / 6 minutes on defrost, 3 on high
A beer to wash it down with / Then another little whiskey on the side
It's not so bad alone here / It don't bother me that every night's the same
I don't need another lover / Hanging 'round, trying to make me change"

It's amazing how quickly the social habit can turn into a socially isolating prison.

Brendan: Yeah, I didn't think you were glorifying anything, I was just speaking to the culture at large, which as we know, is pervasive. All one has to do is turn on the TV, go to a social or sporting event, even just meet new people, to understand the reach of drinking culture in particular. But addiction is addiction, and Byrd's song, to me, spotlights the kind of desperation, and all-consuming drive, to feed one's addiction.

That singular motivation in the addict's life is what ultimately messes them up, because nobody can live that lifestyle forever. It can't stand. And as you point out, and Mary Gauthier so brilliantly depicts in her song, it's problematic not only to the addict, but to everyone in their life.

"Fish swim / Birds fly / Daddies yell / Mamas cry / Old men sit and think / I drink".

That relates a kind of stubbornness in an addict's attitude that is destructive in its own right.

What should be noted about our culture, though, is that we haven't shied away from these things, at least in popular song over the past century, especially among blues singers. It comes up with Victoria Spivey in her 1927 song (that features a killer low-tuned guitar sound from Lonnie Johnson, by the way) in "Dope Head Blues". There's that same denial, the same stubbornness to face reality.

"I feel like a fighting rooster / Feel better than I've ever felt / I got the double pneumonia / And I still think I've got the best health".

Mike: Yet reality always wins against the stubbornness to face it.

That particular song is about a Vietnam vet who got hooked on heroin, which isn't so different from the Iraq/Afghanistan vets who got hooked on oxycontin. Heroin and oxycontin are both opiates and that returning veteran could just as easily be you or me or nearly anybody else in this country. On one of Prine's live albums he introduced the song by saying:

"We went over to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. I'd never been there before. I'd seen pictures of it. So I looked, both Al and me looked up guys in the telephone book there. That's what it looks like. They've got these little phone books and you look up the person's name you want to see. It tells you which part of the wall to go to.

So we looked up our friends in there and went and found their names on the wall. And when you stand there looking at their names, it's black marble. You can see your reflection in the wall.

So if you ever get the chance to go there I suggest you go to the place. It's a pretty fitting memorial."

You can see your reflection in the wall. I hope people can also see their reflection in these songs, whether or not they are or ever were addicts. Not only can it happen to the best of us, it has happened to the best of us.

Brendan: John Prine is our Mark Twain. There's an incredible amount of weight to the simplest of lines in his songs. "Jesus Christ died for nothing" is not a throw away sentiment to Sam Stone; it means he's given up, and Prine lets us see that to the end.

Then there's "Dead Flowers", a song that has come to epitomize drug chic. Keith Richards' iconic status owes as much to his intake as his output, but it's important to remember he has lead the life of a millionaire since his 20's, and has benefited from the luxuries that come along with that. Townes Van Zandt, and so many countless others aren't so fortunate.

Mike: Neither are you.

Brendan: Well, I am fortunate. The thing about stubbornness is that it can be used against itself. It's called willpower. Ultimately, though, it comes down to a choice between life or death, and everyone has to choose every day. Except maybe Keith Richards.

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

It's Not Dark Yet: Boston's Musicians Part II

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

 



5/4/13

Mike Mellor: Last week you mentioned how the seeds of Gram Parsons' groundbreaking mix of country, rock and poetry were planted in his mind while he was a student at Harvard. More or less, he heard Merle Haggard plant one foot in the history of country music and the other in the the emerging camp of anti-establishment popular songwriters. Parsons was duly impressed, but wanted to take it even a step further.

It was like a chain reaction. Haggard was inspired by folks like Jimmie Rogers, Bob Wills, Lefty Frizzell, Johnny Cash and Buck Owens, and his influence did two things; it legitimized the alternative leanings of fellow country acts like Willie, Waylon, Kris and Johnny, and it passed all those folks on to people like Dylan, The Band, The Byrd, and Parsons. Haggard probably represented the far right of the movement and Parsons the far left, and in between those two poles was a big space in which to make American roots music.

Boston formed a pretty decent country scene from all of this, led by acts like Joe Val and the New England Bluegrass Boys, Chuck McDermott & Wheatstraw, The Estes Boys, Tina Welch and my favorite, John Lincoln Wright and the Sour Mash Boys. They played places in Harvard Square like Passim and Jonathan Swift's Pub, and there was even a place in Park Sq. (where the Legal Sea Foods and the parking garage are now) called the Hillbilly Ranch that looked like this:

John Lincoln Wright wrote a song about it:

The thing I love about Wright's music is that he imbues country music with a New England sensibility. In the clip below he talks about his involvement as a young man with the "Bosstown Sound" and how he developed into a country singer, then plays a song about his mixed Yankee and Irish heritage.

Is there anything more Cantabrigian than, "Never call another man a fool. Fools always speak for themselves?"

Brendan Hogan: I feel the same way about Bill Morrissey's music. Although he's not a Bostonian per se, his songs often represent that New England sensibility that Boston is so much a part of. We're just a large fishing and mill town, after all. Or at least the roots of that still stretch through the region.

Personally, I've sometimes struggled with the idea of whether or not Boston can be a legitimate home to or incubator for Southern culture, be it country or blues music, BBQ, whatever. On the artistic sde of things, I've wondered if it's possible to have a healthy scene in a town like Boston that contributes to the culture without fetishizing it. But then I listen to Bill Morrissey, John Lincoln Wright, or Peter Rowan and I realize that we live in an era that blends regionalism and influences. Musically, it goes back to some of the first recording stars of the 1930s, people like Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, or Bob Wills: When you distribute a lot of something over a wide area (in this case recorded music), a cultural feedback loop is created that doubles back on itself and winds up blurring the lines of regionalism and opening channels of influence.

Bill Morrissey clearly listened to Mississippi John Hurt and Robert Johnson records. He was also from a New England mill town and sang about Boston girls. It all makes total sense in our post-modern world.

Boston Eyes

Mike: That broadcasting and feedback loop is what made Dylan, sitting in his room as a teenager with a transistor radio taking in the music from radio signals that travelled up the Mississippi River. It's also what made you and me to be the people we are, immersed in cultures foreign to the people who raised us. This question of authenticity you raise is really important, for understanding history and understanding the present, but I think the rules have changed. Presently it's more about knowledge and feeling than it is geographical and familial proximity to the "source".

That being said, we are still emotionally tied here in New England to our fishing and early industrial heritage, not to mention our small family farming heritage. I think this is the major tension between people like us who are multi-generational New England and people who arrived here from other places. They see Boston for what it presently is (academia, health care, biotech, finance) and we see it through the lens of our family's history. The magical thing to understand is that both perspectives have value, and both have a legitimate stake to claim in our cultural present and our cultural future. Sometimes I wish the newcomers would value our side a little bit more, but I'm sure they could say the same thing about our side.

This leads me to Patty Griffin, who is a Mainer but came down here to start her performing career. Unlike many Massholes I think of most of Maine as sharing the same heritage we do, even if we diverged in the end of the 19th Century. In that way I feel that Maine is a close cousin, whereas New Hampshire is that fucked up cousin from that part of the family you only tolerate seeing at weddings and funerals. But, I digress; this is about Patty.

I think of her as the impressionist songwriter of the New England experience. She doesn't deal in narrative or linear, but the way she paints portraits of regular folks and their observations is heartbreakingly yankee. Her song "Making Pies", about an aging spinster who works at the Table Talk Pie factory in Worcester, is devastating in how it lays out a mindset of New England resigned loneliness. Before the song's crescendo the narrator tells us stories about her job at the factory and how close it is to her home, her nephew, and the friendly priest she spends time with. After this we learn about her favorite and least favorite memories:


Did I show you this picture of my sweetheart
Taken of us before the war
Of the Greek and his Italian girl
One Sunday at the shore

We tied our ribbons to the fire escape
They were taken by the birds
Who flew home to the country
As the bombs rained on the world

Never a plea for sympathy. Just a statement of reality. The problems of the socio-economic class that goes to war. The back and forth between the factory in the center of the state and the eastern shore. The tremendous loss of something...love, life, freedom, happiness. Yet never a plea for sympathy. That is tremendous writing of the New Englander psyche.

Brendan: Yes, "heartbreakingly yankee" is a great way to describe that song. Is there anything more New England than a Table Talk apple pie? Patty does a great job of telling a story that is particular to a certain person, or kind of person, in a way that is universal, accessible, and understandable. That's the mark of a good storyteller, and that's why she is an internationally-recognized artist and star who has created great work with Robert Plant, Buddy Miller and others, in addition to her own.

I was just looking into the life of Mark Sandman. (It was so strange to me to see all the news coverage a couple weeks ago down the street from where Sandman set up Hi-n-Dry studios in Cambridge, near Inman Square.) I learned that, among other things, Sandman had been a cab driver before Morphine really started to take off. Is there any better way to become intimately acquainted with your home town than by knowing its streets and neighborhoods, and by ferrying its people around? If so, maybe its by learning to play music in front of and among the same people.

In an interview with French TV he did in the early 90's, Sandman was prodded to talk about what made Boston a unique music city. The interviewer suggests that Boston is an incubator for alternative culture because it is a college town with many universities. This may be true, but Sandman's answer speaks more to the homegrown nature of the city. Boston is small, consisting of many close knit neighborhoods. Each neighborhood has a handful of places where people gather, whether they be bars or whatever, where musicians are welcome to play, so long as they don't piss off the locals or regulars. So long as you don't piss them off, you're free to make music any way you please, without pressure. That is an amazing gift. It allows creativity to happen. As I said before, Boston is a breeding ground. Art is made here for the sake of art. We're not New York, LA, or Nashville, but every now and then a band from Boston breaks through nationally or even internationally. When they do, they are often unique and unto themselves because they were allowed to just be in their formative stages. Creativity comes first because there are no big breaks to catch in Boston; as a musician you're just trying not to piss off the locals.

Mike: Funny you should say that. One of my uncles was a cab driver in Boston in the '70s and '80s. Another was a house and commercial painter. So much of what I've said in our Boston conversations I've learned from them, denizens of the Hillbilly Ranch, Jonathan Swift's, Club 47, Paul's Mall, the Speakeasy, the Blue Sands. You've just made it clear that what we've been doing this whole time is documenting oral/aural history, a people history of our home. Thanks for that persepctive.

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

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:
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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

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:
91.9 FM Boston, Worcester, Falmouth
91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
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It's Not Dark Yet: Blues Songs of Social Consciousness

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

 



3/30/13

Mike Mellor: One thing I love about this series is that not only do we get to jump back and forth across a century of recorded music, but we also get to put contemporaneous things together that were/are artificially segregated.

Last week we talked about songs from the American Folk Revival which, from my perspective, is a direct product of Post-War American class and race politics. The genre represented the unionized American Left in the lead-up to World War II and rather quickly aligned itself with the African American Civil Rights Movement (AACRM), which only makes sense since the community was based on song hounds and ethnomusicologists who had been doing their field research in the Black communities of the South for decades. Of course such allegiances made them natural targets for the henchmen of McCarthyism and ruined many of their lives, but it turns out to have worked wonders for their legacies because once the Second Red Scare died down these musicians became icons for left-leaning Baby Boomers. This is all fantastic but what always gnaws at me is that almost all of the household names that sprung from the movement were white. Woody Guthrie? Burl Ives? Pete Seeger? Peter, Paul and Mary? All white. It's true that Harry Belafonte also became a household name, but it was for fucking "Day-O (The Banana Boat Song)".

The theme this week is blues songs of social consciousness, a genre that to me seems inextricably tied to the Folk Revival even if you aren't going to see a PBS special or a Time Life Collection infomercial about it. A lot of the names you see bandied about in talk of the Folk Revival made songs like this, pointing out the injustices in their lives and communities:

Brendan Hogan: That's an interesting point, and one that I think is still a thorn in the side of folks who like things organized in terms of black and white, or in this case blues and folk. The notion that blues music is folk music, in that it can share the same interest in social consciousness and substance, is foreign to some music fans. Many times I have heard people say, "Oh, blues music is fine so long as it's kept in bars," as opposed to listening rooms and other folk venues. That's horseshit. It's ignorant, insulting, and frankly, representative of the type of racism that still exists in this country, swept-under-the-rug and ignored. That kind of attitude in the music world leaves musicians in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't straightjacket, artistically. And it's not unique to today.

Big Bill Broonzy's "Black, Brown, and White" is a great example of a true folk song of substance sung by a man who was a blues star of the "race records" era. What he was saying in that song managed to piss off everybody, which is a daring feat. Polite, bourgeois, white audiences just discovering Broonzy didn't appreciate their usually good-humored songster in overalls highlighting their complicity in societal racial inequity, and black audiences didn't like being spoken to in the terms Broonzy uses in the song ("If you're black, hey brother; get back, get back, get back").

Of course, what they all missed, and what their universal dislike of the song highlighted, is Broonzy's ability to tell the truth in song. If that's not the mark of a good folk song I don't know what is. And if you're upsetting everyone, as opposed to only one group, it means you're saying the right things.

I feel like blues musicians today encounter the same problems. That's why so many of them are still in bars.

Mike: Did anyone else catch that kind of flack?

Brendan: I can't think of any other blues musicians who caught the kind of flack Broonzy caught. Maybe it's because, in the case of "Black, Brown, and White", his message was so direct and unapologetic, but I also think it's at least in part due to the fact that he was successful in crossing over. White audiences wanted him to be a genuine country boy, while the black audiences who were more familiar with his R&B music probably didn't appreciate his catering to whites.

It's a different scenario with someone like Josh White. He became prominent with the Café Society crowd pretty early on, so he was preaching to the choir, so to speak, when singing this:

Mike: Of course. Café Society is where the "Harlem Renaissance" and the "Folk Revival" met. I put them in scare quotes because they are thought of as entirely separate movements, even though they happened in the same city, one immediately after the other with certain young folks of the former being elders of the latter.

This goes back to what you said about structural racism. The very notion of segregation is to appeal to the perceived advantages of living in a vacuum—as if it lends a sense of righteous purity—when biology, society and art have forever been thriving in intercommunication and dying in isolation. Art is communicable Darwinism; a great expression from one is adopted by another and adapted to other circumstances, then adopted by another and adapted to different circumstances, ad infinitum. If the same concept applies to both our genetic structures and our social structures it must be at the core of who we are. Art, in its openness and communicative abilities, must express not a nostalgia for what was good from the past, but recreate that timeless good for the immediate moment over and over again.

Dr. King knew that, and that is what makes him the transcendent figure of the AACRM, which of course is the thread holding all of this conversation together. He understood that the socio-historic fight in which he was engaged was one of conservatism v. timelessness, and that timelessness always wins in the end. And it wasn't only the white establishment that was conservative; the Nation of Islam was pretty conservative, too. After all, a theology of black supremacy is just as racist as a society of white supremacy.

There's a Mavis Staples song about Martin and the larger movement that I think captures this sense of timelessness:

Brendan: That's well said. Art, and particularly music, is in a position to affect change in the world in a way that other forms of human communication aren't. Maybe it's because of the broad appeal of music, or the way it can literally move you, but there is something about a message couched in the form of a song that is going to have a deeper impact than just words alone. Which is why it's interesting that folks like Staples, J.B. Lenoir, John Lee Hooker, and countless others from the most segregated corners of society have used their influence as musicians to affect positive change. In the face of systemic oppression, forced poverty and unspeakable violence, how easy it would be to say we're coming after you instead of We'll never turn back?

Champion Jack Dupree is another one. He grew up an orphan at the New Orleans Home for Colored Waifs. As a young man he was a successful prizefighter, then a cook in the Navy and a POW during World War II. After the war, he recorded quite a bit in the US, but wound up moving to Europe for the reasons so many jazz and blues musicians did during the '60s, where he lived out the rest of his life. This was one of the last songs he recorded:

Mike: The simplicity of both of those songs is tremendous. It's amazing, when given eyes to bear witness and a voice to speak the truth, how plain things can be so powerful.

That's an excellent point, by the way, about how protest songs never resorted to violence or revenge. Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote about the lack of revenge fantasies in African American history. His basic argument is that the We're coming after you impulse was not nearly as strong as the Leave us the fuck alone impulse. Since he's probably more knowledgeable about this than both of us combined, let's let him have the final word on this one.

Ta-Nehisi Coates from The Myth of Harriet Tubman, 1/3/2013:

I recently finished Kate Larsen's excellent biography of Harriet Tubman--Bound For The Promised Land. Tubman, like any mythical figure has had her exploits elevated beyond actual events. But even in Larsen's historical telling she emerges as a super-heroic figure. It's true she didn't shepherd 200 slaves out of Maryland. The number was more like 70--which is to say, given the logistics, a lot.

At any rate, I've done a lot of thinking on the place of myth in African-American history. Django aside, we don't really have many avenging angels. Reviewing the primary documents of the time, I don't even detect much taste for mass vengeance. There's often a taste for particular vengeance on particular people, but more than anything there's a strong desire to be left the fuck alone. Actions, like absconding with oneself, are usually set in motion by the threat of sale and the disruption of family ties. At first I was surprised by the lack of race hatred. But when I thought about it, it makes sense.

Race hatred among whites was not irrational devolution. On the contrary it served an actual political purpose--defining the borders of citizenship, manhood and the broadest aristocracy ever created. Race hatred among blacks is just vengeance. It doesn't really go anywhere. It doesn't offer access to anything you didn't have before. Even if you look at the actual ideology of black nationalists what you will find more than "Kill Whitey" is "Leave us the fuck alone." Whereas integrationists wanted to be left alone here as Americans, separatists wanted to be left alone elsewhere. But both wanted to left alone.

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

It's Not Dark Yet: Songs from the Folk Revival

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

3/23/13

Brendan Hogan: Last week's 10:00 feature on new music was a lot of fun. The more and more we get into these themes the more I'm realizing that we are only scratching the surface on these things. That's a good thing, though. Despite how deeply or passionately we may delve into something in our personal lives, there's always something else to learn. I know I learn a lot from you, and I hope people who read these find them a good jumping off point for their own listening, too.

This week's theme will be the Folk Revival of the 1950s and '60s, an era that served as an important bridge between the two halves of the last hundred years.

Mike Mellor: Yeah, books have been written about most of the themes we discuss and we reduce the discussion to a handful of paragraphs. We need to be thankful to the researchers and authors who have provided so much insight into what we love; you can never get that depth of knowledge from a wikipedia article. Me being a librarian & blogger and you being a musician & DJ, we know that the knowledge we pass off in snippets is stuff we obtained in larger, more authoritative hunks from historians, scholars and other musicians. What they do makes it possible for me, at least, to be a good dilettante.

I can't resist making a proto-Folk Revival choice to start. If there were a Mt. Rushmore for American culture Woody Guthrie would be on it. His life was immense and instructive and I would argue that his cult of personality is the aesthetic base of the American Folk Revival movement. Obviously, lots of other people contributed to it and Woody stole bits, lyrics and licks from most of them, hut his posture, politics and prose styles form the feeling of the scene.

As you mention the bridge between halves of the century, the most enduring contribution Woody made was as the living, breathing, thinking Dust Bowl refugee. By singing the Dust Bowl songs he was speaking for all victims of the Great Depression, their lost pasts, compromised futures and difficult present. That's pretty much the template for a Bruce Springsteen song, isn't it?

Brendan: I think there's no denying Woody's impact on American culture and his influence on some of the most successful musicians of our day. To me, Springsteen's  Nebraska and The Ghost of Tom Joad are direct descendants of Guthrie's storytelling style. It's a style that seems to stretch back to Greek mythology, doesn't it? Tell the story plainly, cast your characters in myth, have clear heroes and villains. The difference with Guthrie is that he was singing of the people, for the people, casting them in the role of hero, and telling their stories in three minute chunks tailored for radio and record.

What I especially love about The Asch Recordings is the clarity of Guthrie's playing on them. His whole thing was to just bust out a song, as is. I don't think he gave much thought to the presentation of what he was playing or singing; in fact perfection was probably antithetical to his point. The sound of the recordings themselves are of quality, so there is nothing to get in the way of the loose simplicity of his delivery. That quality makes a recorded song more accessible than one that sounds slapdash or hastily recorded. You can really hear why they were so influential on the next generation of "folk revivalists".

Odetta borrowed Guthrie's simple style of guitar playing, but her overall delivery was far more intense to suit the material she was singing. Listen to her version of "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho". It's pure Odetta, straight from the black church and presented very directly. She was very good at using the guitar strumming to create a dynamic range that served her vocal, and therefore the story or message of the song.

Mike: Would you say that the directness of writing, playing, singing and recording are characteristics that define the genre? Are there examples in the genre that are not like that? Or did the instances where the artists didn't do that mark an evolution into another genre?

Brendan: Joan Baez is good example of someone whose technical proficiency on guitar and vocal is very much a part of her sound, but I don't think anyone would dispute her relevance as a folk revivalist. She's never really strayed from that, either.

And that's not to say that Odetta, or any other artist of the era, isn't proficient in their own way, but generally-speaking the folk revivalists were more about getting the point across than about technical proficiency. There's a genuineness about that approach which is appealing.

Mike: Oh, you're talking about virtuosity. Now I get it.

Plenty of them were virtuosos on their instrument, none moreso than Dave Van Ronk. Just listen to his "Sunday Street".

Brendan: First, I'm thrilled that you included a live version of that song from Dave Van Ronk. I had never seen film of him performing before! His playing is so idiosyncratic, which is evident just by hearing him on record, but seeing him play is really cool because his finger-picking style is so "wrong". He uses the thumb and two fingers in his right hand, where "proper" technique would have you use three fingers. So, I guess that keeps him far from the virtuoso category, but show me another picker with that style.

Other people play using the two-finger method, but none of them sound like the next. They're all unique. People who play by the book all sound very similar; very tamed. I guess that goes back to my point about the singularity of the style of many of the folk revivalists. They were trying to get to the message with the least amount of resistance. No indoctrination on account of little proper musical education. What's more "folk" than that?

But your mentioning "Sunday Street" also brings up another subject: Dave Van Ronk was maybe best known for interpreting older traditional music from sea shanties to dixieland jazz, but he wrote "Sunday Street". At what point do the folk revivalists cross over into singer/songwriter territory? Is Bob Dylan part of the folk revival? How about Joni Mitchell or Fred Neil? Neil wrote "Everybody's Talkin'", a massive hit for Harry Nilsson in the late 60's, but he also did this:

Mike: I told you I was a dilettante.

You could answer those questions with musical beginnings. Dylan's first important work came directly out of that Greenwich Village scene, after having hunted down Guthrie in a mental hospital and meeting Ramblin' Jack Elliott there at his bedside. He also knew Van Ronk very well. I think he certainly belongs in the group, even though he famously turned his back on it.

Joni—in my mind anyway—is in the lineage after Dylan's evolution of and then out of the folk revival, writing idiosyncratic poems as songs. And Neil, he worked in the Brill Building for Christ's sake, and wrote some pretty awesome hits for the rockabilly guys. This is all actually a very good example of how cultural scenes weave in and out of each other across the mainstream.

Brendan: Exactly, and that's why labels for artists are at best placeholders. But the movement on a broader scope was real. The folk revivalists acted as a conveyor, pushing American spirituals, cowboy songs, folk ballads and blues into the second half of the 20th Century. And they did it by putting their own mark on the music, and in some cases creating entirely new styles in the process.

That's the whole point right? It was a revival, after all, and when you revive something you give it new life.

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

It's Not Dark Yet: New Songs

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

3/16/13

Mike Mellor: So, it's fundraising time again. I know you won't bring it up here, so I'll do it:

WUMB relies on membership donations for a disproportionate amount of its operating revenue. Quite literally it is the only station in Boston that plays the kind of music we talk about in this series, and the same goes for a lot of the music I write about elsewhere on this blog. It's also where you hear (the amazing) American Routes, Mountain Stage and Albert O's Highway 61 Revisited. It's something worth supporting, so do it.

This week's theme is new music. Some of my lifelong favorites have put out records in the last few months and for the most part I've been really pleased with them, especially Richard Thompson's Electric. Thompson puts out a lot of product and the results have been inconsistent since 1999's absolutely perfect Mock Tudor, but this is the best record he's put out in 13 years.

Recording at Buddy Miller's house and having him produce the record probably has a lot to do with it. Thompson is remarkably steady with his songwriting and guitar-playing styles, and I think that has been his downfall for the last decade. He needed a collaborator to send him in new directions and challenge his creative process.

Miller lives in Nashville, and there is one song in particular that sounds born to be an Americana "hit" for somebody like Delbert McClinton or T. Graham Brown, or even Robert Plant:

Brendan Hogan: Thanks for the plug. It's the people's radio, so it has to be supported by the people.

There's already been a lot of good new music this year, so I think it's worthwhile to take a look at some of it. The new Richard Thompson album is definitely one of the best. He's a guy who can go deep, and I agree that if the production stays out of the way his songwriting and playing shines through.

It feels weird to say about RT, but everyone can suffer from a heavy hand. It's not everyone who can take advantage of being pushed in the way that I'm sure Buddy Miller is capable, though. That man can get sounds, and to a musician as prolific as Thompson, it must be like being served a pitch right in the wheelhouse. The record has been stripped of anything unnecessary and left only the essence of what makes Thompson great. My understanding is that the whole album was recorded in four days, which goes to show the high octane of creative energy both guys are running on.

The new Kris Kristofferson record stays out of its own way, too. I've heard people say he sounds like a tired old man, which is a complaint I don't understand. What else should he be? The album is called Feeling Mortal, and that's exactly what it sounds like.

It also helps to remember that Johnny Cash was sounding every bit his age on his last recordings, and while I'm not comparing the two, it's testament to Rick Rubin and Don Was as producers to just get out of the way of that, not to try to force a voice or a playing style into places it can't go. You'll get a far more genuine record that way.

Mike: Kris is another one...I've literally been listening to him my entire life. He won me over as a kid with the song "If You Don't Like Hank Williams (You Can Kiss My Ass)". It was the only time I could say ass in front of my parents without getting in trouble.

If somebody complains that he sounds like a tired old man, they clearly don't know Kris's catalog. Every new composition on this album has a thematic/stylistic counterpart from the classic era of his career (1966-1974). He's been writing like this since his 20s and singing like this since his late 30s. The only differences are he sounds a little happier now and the tired sound comes from old age instead of from burning the candle at both ends.

I think we've talked about this in person, but I feel like Johnny Cash ushered in a new era in popular music where performing songwriters can work their craft for an appreciative audience all the way to the grave. This has been true in the fine arts for centuries, and we seem to always have performers living off their past glory in old age, but it's a pretty new phenomenon in such a young person's game as recorded popular music to let the old dogs have resources and creative control to do things their way. We're starting to see it with Dylan, Willie, Prine and Waits, too.

Brendan: It's definitely a new phenomenon. The idea that an artist can cultivate his or her craft over a lifetime is nothing new; in fact I think it was expected. It's the idea of the artist as pop culture icon that is new. Dylan, Prine, Cash, Willie, Waits and Kristofferson have each managed to sustain their craft as artists while also maintaining their relevance in the marketplace. And they've done it with their own finesse, which is a difficult balancing act. So to be turned off by sincerity; well, I guess I just don't get that.

Mike: Me neither.

Another guy who's a little younger but shows every sign of being on that path is Nick Cave. He's been doing whatever he damn well pleases since he formed The Birthday Party in the late '70s. Since then he's consistently been juxtaposing ideas: Christian imagery of savageness and grace; an overwhelming appetite for the romantic and insatiable lust (and occasionally a middle school locker room sense of humor); life-affirming beauty amidst gruesome violence. The main difference I see between young Nick and old Nick is that now he favors third person where he used to favor first. It's as if his characters are on paths he's already been down, and he likes to send them heaps of trouble.

His pet topic of late seems to be young people finding their way—with all their confusion and optimism and hormones—through a contemporary world that appears near collapse on many levels (economic, environmental, moral). "Water's Edge (Will of Love)" is the song off his new Bad Seeds album that really gets to me:

Brendan: Hearing that makes me think of Tom Waits' "Downtown Train" and the carnival he refers to where all the Brooklyn girls stay and never win. Both songs are describing a chaotic charade that no one can succeed in, but one which still carries on. Both Cave and Waits are on the outside looking in, with the distinction being that Waits' character is in his moment and in love, whereas Caves' character has seen his best days gone by. It's a brilliant song and I love the way he sings it.

It's no secret how much I like Laura Marling's music, so you can imagine I was pretty excited this week when I got to hear a track off her forthcoming record. Laura is so young and has come so far artistically already, that I really look forward to seeing how far she'll develop her craft.

The arrangement on the new song is more sparse than on her previous records, and while I can't make assumptions about the production of the record as a whole, the thinner treatment really leaves the song wide open. The less there is to prop up a song, the more it can stand on its own. Laura's songs have always been little masterpieces, so it's cool to possibly expect a record that approaches them in a simpler, more direct way.

Mike: That's an interesting observation. I guess a Brighton, England beach and a New York City subway car aren't so different after all.

I really like how this song builds with just the four of them. Marling on guitar lets in the B3 sounding like a pea whistle, which lets in the bass, which eventually lets in the drummer, whose just playing cymbals, I think. She moves from picking to chords, the drummer picks up a bass drum beat, and then what sounds like a tambourine, the B3 picks up momentum...and she's so solid a singer she sounds the same even as she has to be heard over the increasing noise.

And that verse: "Truth about desire, they say / Is the need to breathe for another day / Truth I hear about regret / It's the hardest truth I've come to yet." She is in the zone.

I know you've been on the Marling train for a while, but I've been waiting for the next stop in her artistic development. If this song is indicative of the album I'm on the train.

Brendan: Glad to hear you're on the train. It's strange: In the past I might never have been exposed to the amount of new music I find myself exposed to now, if not for the radio gig I'm working now. I've never been one to have my finger on the pulse, so-to-speak, nor do I care about buzz. But it is cool to keep up on things, because there is good music being made.

I think it's easy, especially in this post-Woodstock Baby Boomer legend-making world, to fall under the romantic assumption that anything worth being said has already been said, or that the iconic figures who made their statements a generation ago can never be equaled. That's bull. Great new things are still being made today, some by old masters, some by people much younger than you and me. To believe there's nothing left worth being said, well, you might as well pack it in.

Mike: Great new things are being made by this guy and this gal our age, too, and this young dude. And we could play this game for hours. People talk a lot about how the contemporary economy is real tough on musicians, but that doesn't mean the music they make is lesser, or that economic forces can make the creative well run dry. Capitalism is less than 500 years old; making art is primeval.

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

 

It's Not Dark Yet: Femme Fatales

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

3/9/13

Brendan Hogan: I had a lot of fun with the song interpretations over the last couple weeks. There's just so much out there. This week we'll shift gears again, though. You and I have discussed this before: There's so much bravado and machismo in American music. It's part of the character. But bluster hides an insecurity, and it leaves open the possibility for table-turing, so-to-speak. So this week we'll hear from femme fatales in song; the deadly antihero of American folk music.

Mike Mellor: Yeah, the "black widow", or the "bad bitch" in hip-hop parlance. She's a staple of folklore at least back to the Tanakh, when Delilah seduced Samson into willful powerlessness. There's a song about that, as you know, popularized by Grateful Dead and brought by way of the Rev. Gary Davis, by way of Blind Willie Johnson, by way of God knows who. I've always had a deep fondness for the way Black culture used Old Testament stories for strength in their very specific tragic circumstances and this one has a levity under it that most of them don't.

Brendan: Yeah, Delilah's one of the baddest going. The prototypical femme fatale. What do you think is the correlation between this story and Black culture?

Mike: I'm not a theologian or an ancient historian but from my understanding Samson appears in the Book of Judges, which is a cyclical series of stories. The Israelites piss off God, God punishes them by putting them in the hands of their enemies, they repent, God sends a "judge" to lead them out, rinse and repeat. Samson was the judge who was supposed to deliver them from the Philistines.

Long story short, God's plan for him is to go to Philistine and wipe those motherfuckers out. On the way he falls in love with a Philistine girl, shit hits the fan, he loses his girl, loses family members and has more encounters with loose women while intermittently killing thousands of Philistines. Then he falls in love with Delilah, who is also Philistine. Delilah is fine as a motherfucker, but she's in cahoots with those motherfuckers, and she keeps probing Samson about what makes him so strong.

The common misconception is that his hair made him strong. God made him strong, and one of God's orders was that he never cut his hair. What happened is he kept teasing Delilah by saying this thing or that thing would make him lose his strength, but each time she tried it didn't actually work, until one day he said it came from his hair. She called a dude to cut his hair while he slept, his oath with God was broken, God jetted, Samson was weak and he was suddenly mortal...and outnumbered.

He strayed from the righteous path because messing around with some evil gal seemed better at the time. He and therefore all Israelites paid the price.

Now consider the lives of the first few generations of African (American) slaves. You're separated from your family, community, language, landscape, everything...captured, brutalized, and shipped as the human beasts of burden for a commercial enterprise on another continent. The only thing your cruel overlord motherfuckers give you is a propaganda education in Christianity, which ironically starts with stories of a star-crossed people suffering absurd persecution to win the love of a monotheistic God.

By the religion's very own metaphors, your class of people is in a struggle to prove to God that you are worthy of ultimate love, while God punishes your mistakes by throwing awful monstrous people in your way to fuck you up. You are an Israelite, the white people are Philistines and someday God will send you somebody to deliver you from bondage. But you have to watch out for those Delilahs, the agents of ruin masking as agents of pleasure.

Brendan: Brilliant. It is a story of oppression and searching for ways to climb out of misery.

I think the femme fatale can play a role that is a means out of suffering as well. That's why I love Nina Simone's version of "Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera. Pirate Jenny isn't waiting to be delivered from misery and oppression. I interpret it as a story of coming to her wit's end and doing the "rising up" herself against her aggressors....with a little help from her fellow "pirates" in the black freighter. She's saying, "You people can gawk while I'm scrubbing these floors; while I'm taking constant shit from you. But the ship is coming in and we'll have your heads." And I love that it's Pirate Jenny, too. Not Pirate John. Am I wrong to think a femme fatale can play the role of empowerer, too?

Mike: I don't think so, especially in the 20th-21st Century. If anything it represents an evolution of the femme fatale as class struggle and feminism became major issues in the Modern West.

The traditional femme fatale leads you into danger by her manipulation of her desirability, mainly because that is one of the few powers women had in society. But as that changed with women voting, earning wages, engaging in economic and political struggles, etc., the nature of the archetype must change. Instead of bringing ruin to people by way of her desirability, Jenny is ruining people because people don't desire her, or value her humanity. But the fact remains that she is the agent of ruin.

Brendan: That's a great point. Focusing that kind of power onto a love interest is a familiar theme in folk music, whereas as using that power as a source of empowerment confuses the issue in a really interesting way, which helps make "Pirate Jenny" a great song. Evil is a kind of power, after all.

But as far as the kind of evil found in/with love, there are few who capture it better than the Delta musicians of the '20s and '30s. Take Robert Johnson's "Kind Hearted Woman". I still don't know if he's singing about one woman or two. If it's two different women, then the kind-hearted woman can't hold his interest like the evil-hearted one can. And if she's one in the same, what a complicated character she is: So evil that she'd kill him just to have it on her mind, just to know she did it, but yet he can't leave her alone. Now that's power.

Mike: That's a great question. If it is the same woman, is he being sarcastic by calling her kind-hearted? Is he saying she's the kind of person who'll turn on you? Acts nice but is plotting your demise? Or is she just a sociopath?

Brendan: Good point. I wonder if "kind hearted" is an odd regional term, or another part of the dialect that has since fallen out of use, like nation sack has. Either way, evil is the trumping call in Robert's relationship with that woman.

Mike: And that's not the only relationship he had with evil...

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

 

It's Not Dark Yet: More Interpretations

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

3/2/13

Mike Mellor: Hey, what's the topic this week?

Brendan Hogan: Want to continue the covers? I was actually thinking that yesterday because there are a lot more good songs.

Mike: If that means I get to pick Richard Thompson's cover of Britney Spears' "Oops!...I Did it Again", then yes!

Brendan: Wait. They have to be covers of good songs, not novelty songs.

Mike: Funny you should say that. I swear to God the first time I heard the original version I thought to myself, "Hey, wait a minute...I kinda like this song. If you take out the awful production and the awful performer, it's actually a good pop song." I even stole a copy off of Napster, burned it onto a CD and stuck the disc in my desk drawer. I wanted to listen to it, but I didn't want anybody to know.

It took Richard Thompson to help me overcome my shame..

Brendan: I don't believe in feeling ashamed of what you like, but I also don't think that song fits the context of the theme. If the theme was Polished Turds, then I'd be on board. It's not that I don't like the song simply because Britney Spears sang it. (And by the way let's point out that she "sang" it. She didn't write it; two of the FOURTEEN producers who manufactured that album wrote the song). I just argue it's not a great song, and therefore doesn't fit the criteria of the theme hour for this week's radio show.

Mike: Does this mean I can't pick Taco's rendition of "Puttin' on the Ritz" either?

Brendan: No versions of "Puttin' on the Ritz" either. The argument for including Shawn Colvin's version of "Crazy" can be made, though.

Mike: I just googled that expecting Willie Nelson, not Gnarls Barkley! Please make that argument, sir.

Brendan: To me, it's an example of a good pop song written from a seemingly genuine place. The original was recorded using samples, drum machines, and other modern pop music production techniques, and Shawn Colvin just applied a more stripped-down treatment using finger-picked acoustic guitar, vocal, and rhythm section.

That kind of re-working usually shows whether a song can stand up. I guess the difference I see in "Oops!...I Did it Again" is not so much whether it's revealed to be a good song in the hands of Richard Thompson, but that it is a totally fabricated thing to begin with. I've never been a fan of the let's get together and write a hit approach to songwriting. Something about it isn't genuine unless it's done well.

Mike: I see what your saying; at its base the song itself has to meet certain criteria of artistry. I've been a fan of Cee-Lo Green since the days of Goodie Mob. I know that André 3000 has received a lot of accolades in his career for sophisticating hip hop, but I think in the entire Dungeon Family Green is the only one who has made a mark as a lyricist.

Another great pop song that got a lot of renditions in its hey-day was The Band's "The Weight". My favorite version is by The Staples Singers. In a lot of ways I think of it in the same light as how we were talking about John Hammond's Wicked Grin last week. The Band wrote amazing songs, many of which were heavily influenced by gospel and rhythm & blues, but as charming a singer as Levon Helm was, a song structure like that is built to be sung by someone like Mavis Staples.

Brendan Hogan: I agree. A lot of people have covered that song nearly to death. But The Staple Singers' version is a great example of music circling back around on itself. It's North American rhythm & blues backwoods gospel folk rock. I like the re-arrangement of the hook of the song, too. It's a nice twist; throws your ear off a little bit. And, you're right, Mavis' voice is so big and authoritative that it fills a space and takes on a different persona than Levon's did, but without doing his original vocal take a disservice.

I think it's important, when covering a song, that it be inhabited by yourself without ignoring or cancelling out where the song came from. Steve Earle is a master at that, especially when covering songs of his mentors and heroes. He does a great version Guy Clark's "The Last Gunfighter Ballad". It has all the intensity you expect from Steve Earle without overpowering the finesse and detail of Clark's writing. A perfect tribute song.

Mike: Yeah, I know this song from Johnny Cash's uninspired version from the '70s. Earle treats it with the seriousness it deserves, without necessarily losing the black humor. Come to think of it, that's his style in general; mostly deathly serious but with an ability to laugh every once in a while...

...as opposed to Randy Newman, whose primary lyrical tool is humor. I can't always enjoy Newman's arrangements or performances of his own songs (he's a little too drawn out and asymmetrical with his piano playing), but when they're in the right hands they sure can be great. I Love Levon Helm's version of "King Fish", a song about one of my favorite figures in American history, Huey P. Long.

Brendan: Levon with his daughter Amy and Larry Campbell. What's not to like? His drumming style is like B.B. King's guitar playing: I know it from one note (or snare hit). But... that's a topic for another discussion.

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

It's Not Dark Yet: Interpretations

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

2/23/13

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 8pm-midnight.

Listen online or at:
91.9 FM Boston, Worcester, Falmouth
91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
1170 AM Orleans

It's Not Dark Yet: Songs About Presidents

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

2/16/13

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.

Mike: Ramblin' Jack gets credit for writing it? I thought Cash's version came from this rendition on a 1952 Library of Congress album named Songs and Ballads of American History and of the Assassination of Presidents:

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:
91.9 FM Boston, Worcester, Falmouth
91.7 FM Newburyport, Stow, Marshfield
1170 AM Orleans

It's Not Dark Yet: 2/2/13

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

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