Ron Jacobs : 'Another Self Portrait' of Bob Dylan

Another Self Portrait:
Dylan’s take revisited

Dylan's voice here is the voice of an earnest troubadour. There is little of the smoky raspiness present in his mid-sixties material or the world-weary gruffness of Dylan's current persona.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / September 18, 2013

When I lived there in the early 1970s, the main shopping area in Frankfurt am Main revolved around the Hauptwache U-Bahn stop.

Part old-world cobblestone streets and alleyways filled with small shops and part modern multifloor department stores, including the Kaufhof firebombed by the Andreas Baader (the future Rote Armee Fraktion leader) and others in an action against capitalism and war, the area covered several city blocks.

It served as a crossroads for several streetcars, a subway (U-Bahn) station that included a large shopping area, the American Express office, and lots of action. A few blocks away was the Opernplatz, site of the then bombed-out Frankfurt Opera House and the site of most major political rallies in the city.

One of my favorite stores to hang out in was in the underground shopping area at the Hauptwache. It was a fairly large store that sold records, books, and periodicals. The first time I walked around the Hauptwache and found the store, it was the enlarged cover of the Evergreen Review featuring a picture of Che Guevara that attracted me. The date was in early March 1970.

I wandered around the store, looking at the treasures therein. New Left books from around the world, mostly translated into German but some in English, leftist newspapers, a small English language book section, underground newspapers from Britain and the East Coast of the United States, and hundreds of rock, blues, and classical records.

I had no money. I fingered the records in the bins, determined to get some money and buy a couple of them. The next time I visited the store a clerk showed me the turntables in the back where I could listen to albums before purchasing. She sat me down with Jethro Tull's second album and I gave it a listen.

The next time I went to the store, I had 30 Deutsch Marks in my pocket. It was enough to buy a record and a couple undergrounds. The first record I saw in the window, and the reason I'm writing about this store, was Bob Dylan's Self Portrait. I had already read a good deal about the record, most of it negative. I didn't care. I loved Bob Dylan. I bought it without a listen. It cost 30 DM. No underground newspapers for me that time.

After getting on the streetcar home I opened the bag, unwrapped the cellophane from the album and studied the package. The songs were mostly traditional tunes with a couple live recordings of Dylan and the Band from the previous year’s Isle of Wight festival. The front was a primitivist style painting of Dylan by Dylan. A self-portrait obviously.

When I got home, I put it on the turntable. I was immediately taken, even with some of what seemed to be overproduction on some of the tracks. Besides the two tracks from Isle of Wight ("Quinn the Eskimo" and "Like a Rolling Stone"), my favorite tunes were “Days of ‘49” and “Blue Moon.”

Fast forward to 2013. A new Self Portrait disc is in my player. It’s titled Another Self Portrait and includes the tracks from the first album with that name and a few others from the same period, including a demo version of “When I Paint My Masterpiece,” a couple early takes on tunes that were on 1969’s Nashville Skyline, and some songs that appeared on the New Morning disc.

The tracks are almost all completely stripped down. Just Bob and guitar on quite a few of them. It’s even better than the original. The innocence present in this collection makes me wish it was still here. Since it isn't, this helps me pretend otherwise. Dylan's voice here is the voice of an earnest troubadour. There is little of the smoky raspiness present in his mid-sixties material or the world-weary gruffness of Dylan's current persona.

The music is as close to pure as anything ever released by Dylan. The guitar is clear and clean, his picking and strumming reflecting a casual and comfortable relationship with the instrument. The songs that include other players remind one of a very talented and friendly jam session. The songs range from outlaw ballads to songs of love; from pop standards to Dylan compositions. Arrangements are modified and time signatures changed, creating an element of surprise for the listener and lending a different understanding to the lyrics.

Bob Dylan was living in Woodstock, New York, just prior to when these songs were recorded. He was a married man making music and raising kids in the country. Some of his fans were also moving to the country, eager to leave the cops and the dealers of the city behind.

The war in Vietnam continued to rage, while the antiwar movement was taking desperate turns, wondering how in the hell it could stop the killing. Cops in all sorts of uniforms (and many not in uniform) were doing their best to disrupt and destroy the positive changes the counterculture was trying to establish. Music might have been the only salvation.

The guitar playing on these songs is superb and technically superior to anything Dylan recorded before. In addition, the musicians that appear on these songs are topnotch and include David Bromberg, The Band, Al Kooper, Norman Blake, Charlie McCoy, Charlie Daniels, and a myriad of other top players, many then working in Nashville.

The musical interaction between Dylan and his fellows creates a performance ranking among the best Dylan has ever put together. This is somewhat remarkable given the mostly negative response the first Self Portrait album received. In part, that reception can be blamed on the strings that were laid on top of many of the original tracks. To put it simply, the overdubs hid most of the folk instrumentation actually played during the recording sessions.

Another reason for the poor reception had to do with the expectations so many people had for Dylan in 1971. Despite his recent attempts to step back from the role of generational spokesman and all-around revolutionary so many had placed on him (and, to be honest, he encouraged in some ways), all too many of his listeners wanted him to lead the charge. However, it turned out Dylan did not even want to be in the battle.

There is one song in this collection that I first heard on the bootleg (unauthorized release) known as the Great White Wonder. This song has always intrigued me with the simple manner it emotionally stirs the listener to consider the grimy, lost men that sit on sidewalks around the world. Titled “Only a Hobo,” it’s the first Dylan song I ever learned to play on guitar.

That’s not why I like it, though. It’s because of the song’s unadorned musical approach to its subject matter. Bob Dylan sings a tale of a broken man whose heroism goes unnoticed because his heroic act is just that of being alive in spite of the fact that his life has gone “from a drop in the bucket to a hole in the ground.”

The version on this CD has a banjo playing clearly in the background, plucking away the minutes of a dying hobo’s life. That banjo extracts the melancholy present in this story of capitalism’s castoffs. Together with Bob Dylan’s singing, the melancholy of a hobo’s life is forged into the beauty that is the other side of this life.

Another Self Portrait revives a part of Dylan’s catalog that has been unjustly ridiculed. This two-CD set forces a reconsideration of Dylan’s intentions and his artistry during the period these recordings cover. Indeed, critic Greil Marcus does exactly that in his set of liner notes accompanying the CD. (It was Marcus who wrote the infamous Rolling Stone review that asked of the original Self-Portrait, “What is this shit?” -- more in response to the album’s reception than to the music therein.)

Suffice it to say, it is worthy of reconsideration.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, was published in 2013, along with the third novel in the series All the Sinners Saints. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Huw Beynon and Steve Davies : Bruce Springsteen Brings on the Wrecking Ball

Bruce Springsteen performs earlier this year with the E Street Band at the Paramount Theatre in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Photo by Mike Coppola / Getty Images.
Bring on your wrecking ball:
The politics of Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen's patriotism is a central part of his being. He describes it as an 'angry sort of patriotism,' something that he doesn’t want to cede to 'the Right side of the street.'

By Huw Beynon and Steve Davies / Red Pepper / October 12, 2012

LONDON -- On a cold, wet day towards the end of June, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band followed their eight pantechnicons into Manchester. They were there for the 39th leg of their North American and European tour, promoting Springsteen’s latest album Wrecking Ball.

After monsoon conditions all day, the rain stopped as the band took the stage of the Etihad stadium. This was the beginning of the great Bruce Springsteen show, part concert, part revivalist meeting, filled with theatricality and a fair amount of humoUr and pathos. The E Street big band sound provided a powerful backing to the lyrics of the 30 songs that filled the next three and a half hours.

At the start of the European tour, Springsteen explained how his deepest motivation "comes out of the house that I grew up in and the circumstances that were set up there, which is mirrored around the United States with the level of unemployment we have right now."

In that house in Freehold, New Jersey, Springsteen’s father worked intermittently at the Karagheusian Rug Mill (which left him partially deaf), the local bus garage and for a while at the county jail. Unemployment was frequent, however, and it destroyed his confidence and sense of worth, leaving his wife as the organizer of the family home.

This tension between bad work and no work has been a perennial theme in Springsteen’s writing, alongside a search for freedom and self-discovery. It also left him with a strong attachment to places and the memories stored up in them.

When the Giants’ stadium in New Jersey was up for demolition, he sang the first version of "Wrecking Ball" at a farewell concert, developing the physical process of destruction into a brilliant metaphor of class violence and the "flat destruction of some American ideals and values." He sings of how "all our little victories and glories/ Have turned into parking lots." And he repeats the invocation: "Hold tight to your anger, and don’t fall to your fears."

In "Death of My Home Town," he sings of the place where he grew up:

The Marauders raided in the dark
And brought death to my home town
They destroyed our families, factories
And they took our homes
They left our bodies in the plains
The vultures picked our bones.

Roots

Springsteen is firmly rooted in the tradition of America’s great popular singer-songwriters. He writes of love, death and loss, loneliness, growing up, and work, but also of resistance and rebellion, much of it couched in religious metaphor about the search for the promised land within the American Dream. Narrative songs such as ‘"Thunder Road" and "The River" stand comparison with the very best of popular songs but also cast a nod in the direction of Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and John Steinbeck.

He has pursued this lineage as a conscious choice. He has read widely, sung with Pete Seeger, and recorded gospel music and labour and civil rights movement songs. The various themes are deliberately brought together in his latest album to "contextualise historically that this has happened before."

This is most notable in "We Are Alive" with its implicit reference to "The Ballad of Joe Hill." Here the spirits of the strikers killed in the 1877 transport strike in Maryland join with civil rights protesters killed in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963, and Mexican migrants currently dying in the southern desert:

We are alive
And though our bodies lie alone here in the dark
Our souls and spirits rise
To carry the fire and light the spark
To fight shoulder to shoulder and heart to heart
We are alive

Patriotism and class

Springsteen sings from the world of the U.S. manual working class. A world with union cards and union meeting halls; a world that has been taken apart over the past 30 years as industries have closed and many have been economic conscripts into imperial wars.

In giving voice to this, he calls upon elements of post-revolutionary, post-civil war America with a vision of a genuinely democratic working class republic -- something that has been stolen by the marauders, the robber barons and bankers, but which is somehow still lived out in the resilience of its working people.

This patriotism is a central part of his being. He describes it as an "angry sort of patriotism," something that he doesn’t want to cede to "the Right side of the street." This has often led to misunderstanding, as was the case with "Born in the USA." Deeply critical and acerbic about the America that came out of the Vietnam war, it was nevertheless -- with its anthemic chorus -- admired by Ronald Reagan.

Springsteen has become philosophical over such misinterpretations, recognizing that no artist has the "fascist power" to control the meaning of their words. It has led him to talk repeatedly of a dialogue with his audience. It is likely that a song on the current record, "We Take Care of Our Own," will spark such a conversation. Again it is rhetorical, holding the American ideal up to the mirror and suggesting that "the road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone."

In the U.S., where the flag is ever-present and the oath of allegiance spoken daily by children at school, it is easy to see why a fight over what it means to be "American" is a necessary plank of left politics. However, the tensions between the U.S. as revolutionary republic and imperial power are obvious.

If patriotism causes some problems, the class roots of his writings clearly provides him with a universal appeal. In 2010 at Hyde Park he opened with "London Calling," a tribute to Joe Strummer and the Clash, and he has recalled the 1970s and his affinity with punk and how easy it is to "forget that class was only tangentially touched upon in popular music... at the time."

It was noticeable that in the first European date of the tour in Seville, he spoke at length and in Spanish about how the workers were being made to pay for the crisis and saluting the indignados. The next day, the Andalucian UGT, the Spanish union federation, had a video of the speech on its website.


Defiance

Springsteen and the band have amassed a huge songbook, and while there is a range of musical styles and themes, the dark side of American life is never far from the surface. He celebrates the freedom of the streets ("We walk the way we want to walk/We talk the way we want to talk"), but the power of the police and the patrol car is never far away.

After New York City police shot dead an unarmed West African immigrant in 1999 he wrote the song "American Skin (41 Shots)" and in defiance of the NYPD played it at Madison Square Garden. In response they refused the normal courtesy escort for the band, called for a boycott of his shows and organized vociferous anti-Springsteen protests.

With the recession, and the death of his close friend Clarence Clemons, this darker side has taken the foreground. Enraged by the destruction of the material world of the working class, whereby "the banker man grows fatter, the working man grows thin," he goads them to

Bring on your wrecking ball
C’mon and take your best shot
Let me see what you’ve got
Bring on your wrecking ball

Because we will survive, and like the "Jack of all Trades,"
You use what you’ve got
And you learn to make do
You take the old, you make it new
If I had me a gun I’d find the
bastards and shoot ’em on sight

Music and politics

The contradiction involved in Springsteen, now a multi-millionaire, singing with the voice of the poor and oppressed, is obvious. He is not alone here but his resolution of the problem has been unique. His solution was to tour, to play to large stadium audiences, tell the stories and keep the flame alive.

He talks about singing with the band as his "job of work," and of the "hardcore work thing" shared by all the band members. On stage he will talk of the "foolishness of rock and roll." In a master class with young musicians he stressed the need to understand their art as being both intrinsically trivial and "more important than death itself."

While cynics would say that he does all this for the money, and he would agree that the money is important, there is more to it than that. This was made clear when Michael Sandel selected a Springsteen concert as one example of "What Money Can’t Buy" in his new book on the moral limits of markets.

Criticising economists in the U.S., who have argued that the band could net an additional £4 million for every concert with the "correct" pricing policy, Sandel points out that pricing out the people who understand and want to listen to and sing with the songs would change the nature of the concert, making it worthless.

Given his celebrity status, it is difficult to see how Springsteen can keep in touch with life on the streets and retain the voice to sing in the way he does. When asked, he talks of remaining "interested and awake." He is wary of formal politics and though he had clear hopes for the Obama administration -- he played at the inauguration (see below) -- his disappointment is palpable. He has been energized by the Occupy Wall Street movement and has hopes that this can change the "national conversation," focusing it on inequality for the first time for 30 years.

Wrecking Ball is his contribution to this conversation.

Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger, left, sing "This Land is Your Land" at the 2009 inauguration of President Barack Obama. Photo by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images.

Playing for the president

Bruce Springsteen long avoided commenting on White House politics after Ronald Reagan famously misappropriated "Born in the USA" during his reelection campaign. The president ignored the song’s searing critique to claim it contained "a message of hope" that he would make reality if reelected. At the time Springsteen described it as a "manipulation."

George W Bush and the Iraq War caused him to re-think. In 2004 he backed the Democratic candidate, John Kerry, playing 33 concerts as part of the "Vote for Change" tour. He wrote that "for the last 25 years I have always stayed one step away from partisan politics. This year, however, for many of us the stakes have risen too high to sit this election out."

After Bush’s re-election Springsteen became an increasingly outspoken critic. In response to Hurricane Katrina he adapted Blind Alfred Reed’s protest song about the Great Depression, "How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?," transposing the original character of the song’s charlatan doctor onto Bush. He dedicated it to "President Bystander."

Springsteen publicly backed Obama when the future president was still battling Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination. He enthused: "After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project." Springsteen played at several election rallies -- and the president’s inauguration concert.

To coincide with the inauguration he released the upbeat album Working on a Dream. The title track echoed that of Obama’s autobiography Dreams from My Father. But the album itself lacked direction. The new cheery Bruce had lost his distinctive voice.

Wrecking Ball has seen Springsteen reclaim old territory. As he acknowledged at a press conference in Paris, "You can never go wrong with pissed off and rock ’n’ roll," and these songs are angrier than anything he’s penned before. Some of that anger is clearly directed at Obama.

Springsteen was only cautiously critical of the president in Paris: "He kept General Motors alive, he got through healthcare -- though not the public system I would have wanted... But big business still has too much say in government and there have not been as many middle or working class voices in the administration as I expected. I thought Guantanamo would have been closed by now." His music, however, offers a far more damning assessment. The single ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ tackles not only Obama’s America but also Springsteen’s involvement in party politics:

   I been knocking on the door that holds the throne,
   I been stumbling on good hearts turned to stone,
   The road of good intentions has gone dry as a bone

Springsteen has said he’ll be staying on the sidelines during the 2012 election, commenting that ‘the artist is supposed to be the canary in the cage’. That hasn’t stopped the Obama campaign putting ‘We Take Care of Our Own’ on the official ‘campaign soundtrack’. It seems that Obama, like Reagan, recognises the power of Springsteen’s critical patriotism, even if he fails to recognise its critique.

-- Emma Hughes / Red Pepper

[Huw Beynon, Steve Davies, and Emma Hughes write for Red Pepper, a bi-monthly magazine and website of left politics and culture based in London.]

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MUSIC / Harvey Wasserman : A Transcendent CSN

From left, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash, and David Crosby. Photo by Darrel Ellis / Toledo Blade.
Shamans of sound:
A transcendent Crosby, Stills and Nash

Hearing CSN’s standards reminds us boomers of a time and place, an era of history when we were young and open and a whole new genre of music and politics and way of being was in the birthing.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / August 2, 2012

The power of music is one of the great unknowns in the human saga. For reasons we don’t quite understand (yet) its vibrations can lift us to great heights, drop us down into deep depression, liberate us, make us joyous, help us grieve, and so much more.

Thus its practitioners -- the best of them -- can rise to shaman status. They can speak to higher realities, lead us on political issues, arouse our spirits, calm our souls.

Those with the power are rare. There is a huge corporate industry designed to manufacture and sell commercial imitations.

But real ones still walk among us, and if we catch them at the right moment, they can move us as little else in this life.

Monday night, July 30, was such a time. Crosby, Stills and Nash played under a pavilion on the Ohio River outside Cincinnati on a gorgeous warm night before some 4,000 folks who must be described at this point as elders.

(By way of disclosure, I’ve worked with Graham Nash since 1978, when he toured California with Jackson Browne, raising funds and consciousness to fight the Diablo Canyon nukes. With Bonnie Raitt, Jackson and Graham are the core of www.nukefree.org, whose website I edit.)

The show was a mix of old and new, but stayed within the terrain of melodies and harmonies the trio essentially invented.

Wooden ships on the water
Very free
And easy
The way it’s supposed to be.

Hearing CSN’s standards reminds us boomers of a time and place, an era of history when we were young and open and a whole new genre of music and politics and way of being was in the birthing. There was a war on and we wanted peace, and injustices and bigotries we wanted done away with, and with all that came a mindset and culture that changed the world -- but not yet enough.

With a superb supporting cast (including David Crosby’s son, James Raymond), the band reminds us of why these songs became standards in the first place. It’s not enough that music is of a time -- it also has to be good on its own. The deep resonance of the chord changes, the perfect harmonies, master guitar riffs, intriguing lyrics... there are reasons these songs are still with us. "Carry On," "Helpless," Suite: Judy Blue Eyes," "Our House" will always carry the touch of greatness that inspired them.

Thankfully, the group has also kept its political focus. Graham dedicated "Teach Your Childre" to the underpaid, overworked professionals who do just that.

He also sang "Almost Gone," a searing accusation written with James Raymond about the ghastly torture of Bradley Manning, the whistleblowing young soldier being pilloried by our imperial army for the “crime” of telling the truth.

Graham’s epic "Winchester Cathedral" asked “how many people have died in the name of Christ?” The question was underscored with "Military Madness," reminding us that our species continues to poison and bleed itself with an unfathomable addiction to violence and war that could someday soon kill us all.

To do this kind of politics in a concert for which people have paid good money is a delicate dance. But these guys are good enough -- and then some -- to make it work. It is, after all, who they are, and have been, and we would expect no less.

The riverfront night was clear and clean, but global-warmed, and at one point Graham complained of the heat.

“Take off your shirt,” someone yelled.

“Are you kidding,” said Graham. “I’m 70 years old.”

Well, yeah, but he and his brothers haven’t lost a beat, and their core audience has the aura of being as fit and bright and full of life as we were way back when.

In those days, we never doubted we would live forever. In the parallel universe CSN still has the power to create, it seems we actually have.

[Harvey Wasserman’s History of the United States is at www.solartopia.org, along with A Glimpse of the Big Light: Losing Parents, Finding Spirit. He edits www.nukefree.org. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog

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MUSIC / Gregg Barrios : Patti Smith's 'Banga'

The wait is over:
Patti Smith's 'Banga'

The title cut is a meditation on Pontius Pilate's dog Banga in Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical novel, The Master and Margarita.

By Gregg Barrios / The Rag Blog / June 13, 2012

Patti Smith fans' eight-year wait is over -- Banga is a bold return to the musical style and lyricism that made earlier Smith efforts praiseworthy.

Banga opens with the cinematic voyage of "Amerigo" (Vespucci, from whom America gets its name) to an Edenic new world. On this cut, the richness and delivery of Smith's incantatory voice shines brightly. The pop charm of "April Fools" will have you humming to Patti's vocals and tapping to Tom Verlaine's guitar work. "Come, be my April fool, we'll break all the rules." Eat your heart out, Jimmy Iovine.

The title cut is a meditation on Pontius Pilate's dog Banga in Mikhail Bulgakov's satirical novel, The Master and Margarita. It speaks of canine loyalty. "Night is a mongrel -- believe or explode," Smith howls, as son Jackson provides the barking. However, "This is the Girl," written for Amy Winehouse, scores with its girl group doo-wop a la the Shangri-Las. Perfect.

The 10-minute epic "Constantine's Dream," perhaps the best art-rock composition by an American artist this year, evokes the narratives of Horses and Easter. In its dream within a dream, Smith, like a howling St. Joan of Arc on a steed, calls out, "All is art -- all is future!"

The world doesn't end with a bang on Banga but with a haunting and unfettered version of Neil Young's elegiac "After the Gold Rush." A perfect touch to the most satisfying comeback album of the year.

[Gregg Barrios is a journalist, playwright, and poet living in San Antonio. Gregg, who wrote for The Rag in Sixties Austin, is on the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle. His play I-DJ premieres in July at Overtime's Gregg Barrios Theater in San Antonio. This review was first published at the San Antonio Current. Contact Gregg at gregg.barrios@gmail.com. Read more articles by Gregg Barrios on The Rag Blog.]

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MUSIC / Greg Moses : 'Grifter's Hymnal' is Ray Wylie Hubbard on the Cosmic Sly

Tricked out tunes on the cosmic sly:
Ray Wylie Hubbard's 'Grifter's Hymnal'

From the beats of the opening bar of the opening track you can tell that Ray Wylie is in a mood to groove right through this millennial year of long reputed doom.

By Greg Moses / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2012

So there I was hearing nothing but this wicked whirring Bandit Model Whole Tree Chipper rammed up against a load of Bibles, books, old newspapers, and brown-paper-covered magazines piled high as the Davis Mountains being scooped up and fed to the chipper by a Cat Ultra High Demolition Hydraulic Excavator.

And with the backup alarm blaring from a 469 horsepower Segmented Ejector Truck moving relentlessly into loading position I was finally able to focus my attention on the dusted vinyl lettering that marked every piece of equipment as the property of Ray Wylie Hubbard, Unlimited.

Because when you tune into the opening tracks of Hubbard's freshly released Grifter's Hymnal (2012: Bordello Records) you can't help but thrill to the sound of re-shredding everything you thought you knew.

From the beats of the opening bar of the opening track you can tell that Ray Wylie is in a mood to groove right through this millennial year of long reputed doom. After all, there's nothing at risk if your gods are archaic enough to come from places that can't be undone. And all powers of such antiquity have something to say about eternal slyness and the essence of trickery that goes by the name of existence.

Go ahead, I dare you, roll tape, then see if you don't start smiling right away, finding yourself snakebit before you hear the first warning rattle.

Mirothane is one word you might study up on in preparation for track number one. As defined by its inventors at Mirotone.com, Mirothane PU (TM) is a "flexible sealer with good clarity, superior chemical resistance and resistant to white marking under sharp impact." Might be a sign of Hubbard's acquired taste for custom interiority. Might not.

By the time we get to track two, we're tuned up, warmed over, and rockin', but not at one of those smokeless, sober, early venues like the kind they put Hubbard through at SXSW. No, no. Here we are full tilt throttled for that wide open midnight threshold where everybody grabs everybody else and jumps into the future unknown, crossing over into some other life that may or may not catch you just in time. Yes, yes.

Then, long after the midnight hour, some random mirror catches you reflecting on life and death. And if you've been reading Gloria Anzaldua lately, you'll have some additional enrichment to draw upon as Wylie Hubbard sings in track number four about life up against the memory of Lazarus, who only died twice, not five times like Gloria did.

Track four finds us lighting up and looking around on "New Year's Eve at the Gates of Hell," somewhat like Dante, finding all these familiar faces and refusing to be all that repentant about it. So another year comes and goes and we're still looking at all the souls who haven't yet been sorted where they're supposed to be. As our judgment turns on its own temper, lookout Ma, ain't nothin all right now.

Nahuatl poetry is what you might be thinking about while you're listening to track number five. Indigenous juxtapositions of beauty and death. The song is called "Moss and Flowers" so you have to know that if eternity is what you're after then it's not the kind of eternity that can be measured with an infinity of clocks. You get a very nice experience of duet here, with the harmonies on the guitar parts split between the buds of your Skullcandy (TM).

While speaking of death, "Red Badge of Courage" takes us into war zones of the mind where we have sent our kids these past decades. Somehow, you know the song already. It's just a matter of hearing it played for the first time. Track six is an excursion into protest music, with the weariness of our war habits sounding deep down.

"It's unbelievable" is how I want to sing the opening stanza of track seven's "Train Yard," and we are indeed treated to an unbelievable metaphorical trip involving a red hot penny. Even the great Yeats would nod to the greatness of this hot penny poem, looped in the loops of its steam-powered grip.

"Coochy Coochy" is a plain song of desire with a profoundly felt absence of the one thing that makes everything else sweat. It's a fun song, simple, and I reckon it may begin to replace "Snake Farm" as a crowd sing-along favorite the next place Ray Wylie Hubbard plays. One more sing-along song is not surprising from Mr. Hubbard who, as we say in Texas, writes sing-along songs, "so well, so well, so well." Thing is, this sing-along song was written by Ringo.

If we find ourselves lost in a mood for another Hubbard Mother song, track nine is called "Mother Blues." It's the longest track on the album and may be properly styled epic. The thing about Hubbard's Mother songs is you can't help but find yourself laughing from the gut. You may want to get yourself checked for hernia after this track, and if a professional is unhandy, perhaps a lay practitioner will have to do.

The genre that Hubbard works in is listed on my iTunes spreadsheet as "Country," so you'll not find it out of place for Mr. Hubbard to sing a little song about a rooster, some chickens, foxes, a blackbird, and the way truth stains our memories like wood. The song is called "Henhouse," but the whole family is here, including a grandpa with Dixie roots.

The blackbird from "Henhouse" reprises its appearance in track 11. "Count My Blessings" is a song that weaves a grifter's autobiography with reflections on the death of Sam Cooke. The grifter assures us that three card monty is a lucrative occupation if you keep the game moving fast enough. And the grifter somehow can't forget how the jury acquitted Sam Cooke's killer in 15 minutes flat. In such a fast-paced world, an ironic sense of gratitude can some days help a living body try to get by.

Pretty much everything I know about country music is what I've learned from Willie Nelson shows, so when country music concerts end with gospel tunes I think of young Willie playing honky tonks all night Saturday and then staying up to play church Sunday morning. Somewhere the line between Saturday night and Sunday morning gets crossed, you might say.

So when Ray Wylie Hubbard ends this Dionysian romp with a song about God's light, it's like we've all stayed up through sunrise. To our day-people's routines we have been re-delivered. Nor have we forgotten to tip the night people for the things they come to do.

[Greg Moses is editor of the Texas Civil Rights Review and author of Revolution of Conscience: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Philosophy of Nonviolence. His entries on King and Racism appear in the Encyclopedia of Global Justice. He can be reached at gmosesx@gmail.com. Read more articles by Greg Moses on The Rag Blog.]

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MUSIC / Ron Jacobs : A 'New Kind of Lonely'

Bohemian hoedown:
A New Kind of Lonely

I See Hawks In LA create music that might best be described as a twenty-first century manifestation of that high lonesome sound first introduced to the world by Bill Monroe.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / April 11, 2012

Imagine yourself in a small cabin in the mountains north of Santa Cruz, California. There's a small fire burning in the stone fireplace just warm enough to burn away the Pacific fog creeping through the space underneath the door. People are gathered in the main room. Some are tuning their instruments, others are twisting up a reefer or two, and still others are pouring pints of home brew. Everybody gets settled and the picking begins.

That cabin, that scene, is where the latest disc from the California band I See Hawks In LA takes me. This CD, titled New Kind of Lonely, is their fifth release (sixth if you include their “hits” collection) and, in a departure from their other work, is performed solely with acoustic instruments. Foregoing their electric guitars and pedal steel, I See Hawks In LA have turned in a solid piece of work that simultaneously enhances and expands their singularly exquisite sound.

Not quite country, not quite rock, I See Hawks In LA create music that might best be described as a twenty-first century manifestation of that high lonesome sound first introduced to the world by Bill Monroe and other bluegrass pioneers.

This CD, given the fact of its entirely acoustic performances, emphasizes that link to the lonely hollers of Southern Appalachia that one hears in songs like “Blue Moon of Kentucky,” “Uncle Pen,” or “I’ll Fly Away.”

The difference lies in the song’s topics. Instead of Kentucky, Jesus, or moonshine, New Kind of Lonely includes songs about painter Mary Sky Austin, the Grateful Dead, and weed. Unlike previous releases, the songs here tend toward more personal situations; personal situations that represent a life outside the mainstream.

The opening song is titled “Bohemian Highway,” and the listener then travels this highway while being entertained with tales from the outlands of California’s bohemia. It is a bohemia birthed in the hippie/freak culture of the 1960s and 1970s and still celebrated in song, literature and some folks’ daily lives.

Like the best fiction emerging from this metaphysical realm (Vineland by Pynchon, Already Dead: A California Gothic by Denis Johnson), there are also warnings of the dangers one might find in a culture that accepts drug use and drifting as aspects of its essence.

Certain vocalists are instantly recognizable. One of those singers is the aforementioned Bill Monroe. Others include Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Mahalia Jackson, Bonnie Raitt, and Leonard Cohen, to name just a few. The vocals of I See Hawks In LA’s Rob Waller fall into this category. The smoothness of his delivery (unlike Dylan or Young, whose singing is anything but smooth) does not muffle its sweetness or singularity. There are songs of joy and songs of warning. Songs about wandering and songs about getting hitched.

The key to I See Hawks’ is their playing. This acoustic masterpiece features plenty of incredibly adept, pleasing, even achingly beautiful guitar playing. There are not enough superlatives to describe it. Indeed, it could stand on its own if the vocals did not exist. When one adds the fiddle playing of Gabe Witcher (Punch Brothers), the sound becomes sublime.

In the past, I have tried to summon musicians that I See Hawks In LA reminds me of. While not an easy task because of their genuinely unique sound, Gram Parsons, New Riders of the Purple Sage, and The Byrds have come into mind.

This release has reminded me of another. Back in the 1970s there was a group that hailed from Kentucky and Arizona called Goose Creek Symphony (they returned in the 1990s and still perform). Their sound was a combination of rock music, clogging, horns, fiddle music, and just plain awesome picking. Every once in a while their music became something as celebratory as a group of old timers celebrating their latest batch of likker.

You feel so good; you just have to kick up something.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His latest novel, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, is published by Fomite. His first novel, Short Order Frame Up, is published by Mainstay Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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MUSIC / Jan Reid : The 'Old Mad Joy' of the Gourds

Image of The Gourds from thegourds.com.
Old Mad Joy:
No Last Waltz for the Gourds

'Most bands grow out of rock and roll when they get to be our age,' Russell told me with a laugh. 'We've done everything kind of backward.'

By Jan Reid / The Rag Blog / January 14, 2011

In the 40-odd years since Austin became more than a backwater of American music, none of its talents have been more rousing and enduring than the band called the Gourds.

The Gourds came out this fall with a highly praised and historically resonant Vanguard release, Old Mad Joy. They have four fine singers and songwriters and an astonishing facility with an array of instruments that include acoustic and bass and electric guitar, mandolin, accordion, violin, piano and organ, and drums. They blend strains and echoes of gospel, rock, blues, country, bluegrass, Cajun, even barbershop harmony -- sometimes all of that blended in one song.

I first encountered them about 10 years ago, and I thought, good lord, it was like seeing and hearing The Band. That first exposure led me to an album called Shinebox, which was recorded in the Netherlands, and that started with a pitch- and humor-perfect country-western take on Snoop Doggy Dogg's hip-hop classic, "Gin and Juice." The band's leader -- to the extent they have one -- is a large good-natured man named Kevin Russell. The cover was an Internet sensation, and reached the notice of Mr. Dogg, as the late Molly Ivins tagged him. An associate on his radio program reached Russell and asked the Gourds to roll on over and rap.

Russell hesitated and said they would have to make some travel arrangements. “The guy said, ‘You’re where?’ Like everybody in the world lives in Los Angeles. I guess if you live out there it seems like they do.” Shinebox also contained eclectic covers of David Bowie's "Ziggy Stardust," Townes Van Zandt's "Two Girls," and Billy Joe Shaver's "Omaha." But now the Gourds seldom play any covers, because their own writing is so prolific and so good.

Jimmy Smith, the Gourds’ bass player and another star singer, has curly black hair and sideburns that are going a little gray now. In style and voice Smith reminded me of the late singer and piano player Richard Manuel, of The Band. David Langford, a rancher and nature photographer whose son Keith is the Gourds’ drummer, told me that I had it wrong. “Listen to him again,” he said. “He is Rick Danko” -- the late singer and bass player of The Band, which in the sixties and seventies, especially with the parting Martin Scorcese movie The Last Waltz, far transcended its origins as Bob Dylan’s backup group.

Smith nodded politely as I mentioned the similarities and perceived influences. “We’d never heard of them until people like you started telling us that we sound like them,” he said with a smile, perhaps putting me on. It was a gentle way of saying I was old enough to be his father.

Russell asked me one time, “You want to know why we became an acoustic band?” He laughed and said, “We didn’t want to haul around amps.

“Why the Gourds?” I asked about the name.

“When we came to Austin we were the Picket Line Coyotes,” he replied. “There was some history associated with that, and we just decided it was time to change. Jimmy wanted us to be the Sun-Dried Diegos. I guess he wanted us to play happy hours at Central Market.

He had this little house we called the Steamy Bowl. A shack, really, but he lived there 10 years. Off the road, 200 bucks a month, nobody we could bother much. It was the classic band house. We played, we crashed, we slept on the floor. And he had this little sculpture in the front yard. Broken guitar, various junk. Between its legs was a butternut squash.” Russell shrugged.

“That seemed to be us. The Gourds.”

Russell’s dad worked for an oil company. They lived first in Beaumont, where an uncle used to play Willis Alan Ramsey’s legendary only record and long for the old days at Armadillo World Headquarters, and then his dad’s work moved them to suburban Houston, and then Shreveport.

“I was into Southern rock,” Russell said. “Anything Southern. Lynnyrd Skynnyrd was my favorite.” Then punk bands from Minneapolis and the West Coast caught his ear, and punk was somewhat the tenor of the Picket Line Coyotes. “We sort of got run out of Shreveport,” Russell said. “We were just playing music, and drawing crowds, but fraternity guys were getting drunk and tearing up joints. The owners blamed us. We were blackballed.”

The evolving band moved to Dallas, and then Austin. Smith was from the Dallas suburb Plano. Max Johnston, the third lead singer, had come down from Kentucky and played banjo and acoustic guitar and the violin, which he plays like a violin, not a fiddle. He has a fine song on the new album called TK.

Red-bearded Claude Bernard joined the band blowing on a hooter and bought his first accordion for 35 bucks at a flea market; he’s also the keyboard player. The original drummer was the immigrant Welshman Charlie Llewellin, now Texas Monthly’s new media director and the band’s favorite photographer. Keith Langford, the drummer they settled on, is Russell’s brother-in-law. He’d been playing heavy metal in San Antonio.

Russell had a day job in Austin’s popular independent Book People. He thought an appearance by the band might lighten up employees who wanted to air their grievances at work. The Gourds were initially an in-crowd discovery of people who frequented the bookstore. “Lots of women dancing together,” said Bernard. “Wild dancers. They whipped up the crowd in a way we couldn’t possibly manage.”

They played for crowds of 20 at the Chicago House, then moved up to the Hole in the Wall, across the street from the University of Texas campus and KLRU studios but still far removed from Austin City Limits. “Alt-country” was a rubric of the nineties that began as a fanzine of Uncle Tupelo. The Gourds were uncomfortable about being branded alternative anything and lumped into a yuppie stampede to bib overalls and old swimming holes, but they were Austin’s foremost beneficiary of alt-country.

The Gourds in Austin, Texas, February 12, 2007. Photo by Steve Hopson / Wikimedia Commons.
The North Carolina independent Sugar Hill picked up the Gourds, but they paid their bills from their income on the road. The South by Southwest festival swirled around the Gourds in Austin, but Russell told me that if I’d come to Jovita’s I wouldn’t encounter anybody with plastic cards hanging around their necks. Smoke billowed back then, beers were handed back from a long line at the bar, and now and then a waitress would maneuver through the mass of bodies, holding a tray of enchiladas aloft.

The players were handing back and forth instruments that seemed to never need tuning, though the venue had problems; a clogged air conditioning duct poured a stream of water at their feet. “I think it’s gone beyond towels,” said Russell, blinking and thrown off stride. Smith walked over, spread his arms, and raised his face to the shower. The album they were pushing then was Cow Fish Fowl or Pig.

The title of the record was drawn from Smith's fanciful song about a vendor calling on William S. Burroughs, Henry Ford, Lee Harvey Oswald, and Muhammad Ali. Performing it, Langford was bearing down on his harmonica, Bernard hugging and swaying with his accordion, a chorus of voices singing genial nonsense, bop bop, bah dooh dah, bop bop. “My name is Jorge and I twist and I juke/ I roll into town on a wagon of fruit.”

The Gourds crowd presented a stunning array of young women. A blond whose face would fill up a movie screen looked at her boyfriend, raised her elbow with a grin of delight, and I watched them go swirling and stomping their heels in the ageless bacchanal.

The Gourds have come a long way since then. The banjo and harmonica have mostly receded from the mix, and they're plugged in now -- more often than his mandolin, Russell plays lead electric guitar in a style that echoes Lynnyrd Skynnyrd, the Allman Brothers, and other Southern rock bands that influenced him as a kid. "Most bands grow out of rock and roll when they get to be our age," Russell told me with a laugh. "We've done everything kind of backward."

One of the most impressive things about the Gourds is their longevity. They have persevered for 16 years, getting better all the time, and they’ve done it in a once laid-back city where the cost of living has skyrocketed. Smith’s Steam Bowl shack and the $200 rent is a fading memory. They have mortgages now, and Smith told me, "Between us we have five daughters and seven sons.”

They rehearse now in an un-airconditioned former nursing home in South Austin; the room they utilize, once the kitchen, has no windows, much musicians' equipment, and a homey pleasant clutter -- one wall sports a bumper sticker that reads, "My honors student has a career in the service industry." They get started by 11 a.m. and work no later than 1:30, and then they scatter to pick up their kids after school.

They’ve got devoted followings all over the country now, and they've escaped the European touring routine that sustains but also traps so many Texas bands. They've got no roadies -- for roadies expect a living wage and tend to be temperamental wannabe musicians. The Gourds don't have the star routine down in which all the instruments are in tune, the sound system is thoroughly checked, and they walk out and hit the chords of the first big hit. Their music is too intricate for that, and they dress like what they are -- onetime hippies who are in their forties now.

Gourds image from Facebook
They've been at this together since 1995 because they love and respect what they have going. And now they're no longer scuffling. After years of deserving it, the Gourds have hit the big time.

David Langford, the drummer's father, told me, "Keith grew up listening to our records of The Band, and that's how he plays the drums." Jimmy Smith flaps his elbows like The Band’s Rick Danko when he performs, but he's a better bass player. Danko played bass with a pick, as does Paul McCarthy.

Smith has the thick muscular hands of a blues guitarist, fingers up on the frets, working the thick strings with a callused thumb below, and with Keith Langford's drumming that's one of the reasons their sound is so tight. Smith's voice is an untethered tenor, and he does sound a lot like Danko. The legacy of The Band and the Gourds’ inheritance is now inescapable.

Through the efforts of their manager Joe Priesnitz, who once represented Stevie Ray Vaughn, they signed a Vanguard contract overseen by executive Bill Bentley, an Austin expat who saw Willie Nelson first captivate an Austin crowd of hippies and anti-war militants assembled for the campaign of George McGovern in 1972, and for a while worked as a publicist for the multicultural rocker Doug Sahm.

Bentley engaged as the Gourds’ producer Larry Campbell, a gifted studio musician who has recorded with Willie, Sheryl Crow, Little Feat, K.D. Lang, Cyndi Lauper, and Levon Helm; he was a member of Bob Dylan's road band from 1997 to 2004. Early last spring, when there was still snow and ice on the ground in upstate New York, the Gourds arrived for a dose of Campbell's breathless style in Helm's storied Barn Studio in Woodstock.

"It really is a barn, but a real nice barn," Russell told me. "Levon lives in an upper story of it." Did the legendary drummer and singer of The Band take part in the sessions? "No, he wandered through every so often in his house shoes. He was very friendly, and wanted to take particular care of Keith. 'Do you need anything? Some water, a soda pop?' Seems to be some kind of voodoo with drummers.'"

Of course that's reasonable. In the late summer rehearsal I observed in Austin, Langford was the one who came out of that fire in the kitchen soaked in sweat.

As in past records, the smooth baritone Max Johnston contributes one of the best cuts on Old Mad Joy, the melodic rocker “Haunted.” But Jimmy Smith and Russell again claim most of the lead singing and writing credits. Smith slurs his lines more than Russell, and as a result his singing is not as accessible as his longtime partner's. And that’s a shame; in wordplay and jitterbug of thought that’s as offbeat as Kerouac, his writing is remarkable.

His great song on this record is “Marginalized.” It’s a paean to a painful subject in our culture, fully in view amid Austin’s stream of BMW convertibles and Escalade SUVs. The hero of this song is the one standing out in the heat beside a stoplight with a message of his life’s misfortune scrawled on a cardboard sign, counting his fortune by the bills and coins dropped in a tin can, pushing all he owns in a cart heisted from a grocery store.

But elevated by Russell’s mandolin and the backup harmonies, the sorrowful song manages to soar. “Well, I’m taking it home on my tectonic plate/ crashed in a pyramid and claimed squatters’ rights/ shared a coop with a fellow wouldn’t shut up about a girl named Isis/ had to blend with the tourists when they came in the a.m…”

Earlier this year, Russell released an album called Shinyribs that was an instant favorite in Austin, singing only his songs and bringing just Keith Langford from the Gourds in a studio band that included one of the cosmic cowboy survivors, Ray Wylie Hubbard (the writer of Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.”)

Russell said it didn’t mean he was splitting off from the Gourds. “With a band like this you have to make a lot of compromises. Everybody’s got material they’d like to get out there. I’ve got boxes full of songs that I’ve never done anything with. Shinyribs is a break that allows it to be just me, with a terrific other band besides.”

Russell’s rock and roll high point on Old Mad Joy concerns that dreaded gig of road musicians, a dive in nowhere with a vile crowd that brings out the complaint: “My heart is black but in my sack/ I got a sammich and half a pack/ of vitriol and self-abuse/ who can I call to accuse and abuse/ for bringing me to … Peppermint City!” He said there is no such place, but then they’ve played them by the dozens. He laughed when I told him I’d never before heard a rock song with the word “vitriol.”

He also offers “Two Sparrows,” a song about Jesus that he wrote years ago. “His innocence held such clarity, Gethsemane still on his breath/ barefoot and burdened unjustly but love never leaving his breast/ from this began my wandering, my punishment for the crime/ of standing still among an angry mob, all of them friends of mine.”

Vanguard is pushing a rocker called “I Want It So Bad” as the single, but the best of it is Russell’s “Eyes of a Child.” “It’s true I am wicked, it’s true I am mean/ I must have lost my way chasing a dream/ It’s true I’ve done things that I’m ashamed of/ But I still need tenderness and the warmth of love/ I’ve come clean and I’m redeemed/ since I have seen through the eyes of a child.”

All of this may not sound entirely joyous. But turn it up. It’s some of the best music since "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."

A few refrains in this piece previously appeared in the 30th anniversary edition of Jan Reid’s The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock.

[Jan Reid is an author and music historian and a writer-at-large for Texas Monthly, and his writing has also appeared in Esquire, GQ, Slate, and The New York Times. His books include Texas Tornado: The Life and Times of Doug Sahm, The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (considered the definitive tale of Austin music in the 1970's), the novel Comanche Sundown, and books about Tom DeLay and Karl Rove. His, memoir The Bullet Meant for Me, was the story of his mental, psychological, and emotional recovery from a brutal 1998 robbery and shooting in Mexico City -- and his sustaining friendship with the two-time world champion boxer Jesus Chavez. Reid is now writing a biography of former Texas Gov. Ann Richards.]

• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's October 12, 2010, Rag Radio interview with Jan Reid.

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James Retherford : Austin Street Band Festival: Marching for the Cause

The Honk!TX parade heads east down 2nd Street. Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Marching for the cause:
Austin's first community street band festival

By James Retherford / The Rag Blog / March 16, 2011

The streets belong to the people.
-- Diggers, San Francisco, 1967

See more photos, Below.

AUSTIN -- The first annual Honk!TX Fest, billed a "festival of community street hands," marched on Austin Friday through Sunday, March 11-13.

Continuing a Honk! tradition started in 2006 in Somerville, Massachusetts -- while also KEEPING AUSTIN WEIRD -- some two dozen U.S. and Canadian street bands in gala attire created mobile "liberated zones" in East Austin and the North Campus area with color, costume, cacophony, and collective spirit, carrying "messages of hope, unity, and social change." The weekend culminated on Sunday with a march from City Hall to East Austin's Pan American Park, followed by an all-day jam.

(Though not formally associated with Austin's massive South by Southwest [SXSW] festival, this event is part of hundreds of related music activities happening over the next week here in the "live music capital of the world.")

The festival was organized by Austin's Minor Mishap Marching Band, a 30-plus-member "renegade brass band" that describes itself as "Bourbon Street meets Budapest." MMMP is a truly absurdist spectacle featuring a washboard-playing Roller Derby queen, an (almost) seven-foot-tall Elvis impersonator playing bass drum, a klezmer-shredding clarinet player, dancing tubas, and assorted other freaks of musical nature. Founded two years ago by multi-instrumentalist Datri Bean, this band really kicks it!

The Minor Mishap Marching Band hosted the weekend festival and set a high bar for musicality and theatre. Photo by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
Also representing Austin (by way of Brazil, sorta) was the samba-sashaying Acadêmicos da Ópera, a huge contingent of drummers and dancers bringing the sensuous rhythms of the Carnaval parade.

The out-of-town guests brought their own hit-and-run street parties also. The red-and-white-themed Extraordinary Rendition Band from Providence, Rhode Island, the green-clad March Madness Marching Band (with hula-hoop twirlers) from Lexington, Kentucky, the Hubbub Club from Graton, California, Environmental Encroachment from Chicago, and Atlanta's Seed & Feed Marching Abominable (founded in 1974) combined slapstick guerrilla street theatrics with high-energy funk, heavy metal, Eastern European, and Dixieland marching tunes.

Of special note: Seattle's ultra-tight Titanium Sporkestra, named after the ubiquitous mutant fast food eating utensil. Their logo features a red spork and sickle.

The medium was unhinged fun, but the message from all of those hard-working, fun-loving musical groups was freedom and justice, starting from each public space liberated through the act of playing and then spiraling outward, with insistent drum beat, to the rest of the world. Ya gotta love it.

Minor Mishap Marching Band will open for White Ghost Shivers at Threadgill's World Headquarters in Austin on March 26.

[Austin activist-journalist James Retherford was a founder and editor of The Spectator in Bloomington, Indiana, in 1966. A graphic designer, writer, and editor, Retherford is a director of the New Journalism Project, the nonprofit organization that publishes The Rag Blog.]

Atlanta's Seed & Feed Marching Abominable's "drum majorette" (left) leads the ensemble through some intricate dance steps. Right, The Titanium Sporkestra's horn section feels the funk.
Austin's Acadêmicos da Ópera sets a Carnaval mood with a spirited street samba.
The March Madness Marching Band from basketball-crazy Lexington, KY, is all about hoops.
Providence's activist Extraordinary Rendition Band marches to the beat of a different drummer.
Big Elvis and Lil Miss Hap bring it to the street with that weird Austin beat. Photos by James Retherford / The Rag Blog.
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Mr. Fish : A Conversation with Graham Nash

Above, Crosby, Stills and Nash at Atlantic City in 2009. Photo from Vicarious Music. Below, Graham Nash. Photo from last.fm.
A Conversation With Graham Nash:
Vietnam, Diane Arbus, and Green Day

By Mr. Fish / April 6, 2010

“They got guns, we got guns, all God’s chillun got guns!”

So sang the Marx Brothers during the frenzied buildup to the ridiculous war that finally erupted at the end of the 1933 anarchic comedy, “Duck Soup.” What has always struck me about that film, beyond its satirical strengths and punchy one-liners, was the fact that it was released during the worst year of the Great Depression, after the GNP had fallen a record 13.4 percent and unemployment had risen to 23.6 percent.

It was as if Hollywood were attempting to provide the public with a much needed escape from the agony of the massive financial crisis by allowing them the chance to remember, with some fondness, how preferable war, even a farcical one, was to staring the economic calamity clear in the face. If only a plunging dollar could be bayoneted and ballooning interest rates could be strafed out of existence; to have a mortal enemy to kill is always preferable to having a wound, stabbed into the back and out of reach, that bleeds the strength out of one’s optimism.

I’d gone to Atlantic City in August of 2009 to see Crosby, Stills and Nash to be reminded of the exquisite outrage that they, along with Neil Young, had so famously hurled into the hellish maelstrom that was the Vietnam War and to reapply its relevance to my own opposition to the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, desperate to forget how poor I was becoming, how many bills I’d be unable to pay at the end of the month, and how the current financial crisis, like the one almost 80 years earlier, was slowly dimming the lights on every other calamity in the world and making American self-pity the only agony worth woeing over.

Atlantic City in August, while indeed funky -- and no stranger to brown acid or vast amounts of illicit sex between strangers -- is no Yasgur’s Farm. Sure it is thrilling to approach by air-conditioned car, this metropolis of magnificent lights, skyscraper hotels, insomnia made jubilant by a gazillion flashing light bulbs, all of it pressed right up against the black ocean, but outside of the car it is abscessed New Jersey, the air damp and over-inhaled and brackish, smelling like a drunk octopus riding a horse through stale popcorn.

And then you enter any one of the casinos and immediately find yourself surrounded by the repulsive yin to the outside yang. Thusly, walking into the Borgata Hotel Casino for the CSN show, I found the air to be overly polite, like it had been blown through an Easter basket. And then there was the geometrically cacophonous carpeting as convincing of elegance and luxury as a 300,000-square-foot toupee; Tourette’s woven into a nauseating aesthetic.

And then there were the cheap sonsabitches walking around in loud shirts and crisp white sneakers trying to buy a million dollars with pocket change, their telepathy horse-trading so hard with Jesus Christ that their lips were moving.

With incontinent classical muzak dribbled through the PA system and making me feel more like I was waiting for a teeth cleaning than a mind blowing, I sat down in my assigned seat and, looking at the empty stage before me and the great hive of drums hanging amid a ridiculous contraption of chrome scaffolding and the fake candles wicked with four-volt bulbs placed here and there and the Flying V resting on a guitar stand, I began to worry that the men who I’d come to see might no longer exist; at best, like the candles, they might be poor parodies of themselves, having become so waterlogged by their own celebrity over time that the only thing left linking them to the glory of their past was the names on their drivers licenses.

I had to wonder if I’d made a huge mistake believing that, given the adoration of enough fans, an alligator bag might learn how to swim gracefully again; or that Muhammad Ali might be able to stop shaking just long enough to snatch a fly out of the air and be beautiful again; or that it could be 1969 again.

Then the lights went down. Then the trio of legendary sexagenarians took the stage, Stills in pleated black dress pants, Nash in bare feet and Crosby in an outfit one might throw on to clean out the garage. (Uh-oh.) Then the familiar harmonies were blended. Then, almost immediately, a mood as perfect as a pearl was fashioned right in the middle of all that superfluous and muculent funk surrounding us all.

It was breathtaking.

Five months later I found myself sitting down with Graham Nash at the Waldorf Astoria in New York to talk about both his recent induction, as a Hollie, into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the publication of his new book of photography, Taking Aim, a collection of candid photographs of musicians, past and present, some taken by Nash himself, all of them chosen by him, his commentary captioned on nearly every page.

Predictably, when you have a conversation with somebody as dynamic as Nash it’s easy to ping-pong wildly off topic, which we did. Despite being almost 70, up close his eyes appeared to be brand new and curious about everything. Typically closed when he sings, and he’s been singing for a long time, it made sense to assume that his eyes have probably seen less, though contemplated more, than the average person and, like coins with limited exposure to the outside elements, are now bright and shiny enough to practically emanate their own light.

Crosby, Stills and Nash at the Big Sur Folk Festival, September 15, 1969. Photo © Robert Altman / altmanphoto.com

Mr. Fish: Let me start things off with a quote by photographer Robert Frank: “When people look at my pictures I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of poetry twice.” I mention that quote because I think it expresses what is uniquely special about how you seem to approach both your photography and your music, which is with a great respect for the vulnerability of a particular moment.

Graham Nash: It’s all about communication. It has to communicate -- that’s all I want to do. I don’t want everybody to agree with me -- if they don’t agree with me, that’s fine. I’m just trying to communicate, it’s that simple. And I don’t want to waste your time, because that’s all we’ve got. When you boil it all fucking down, it’s your family and time, that’s what you have and you deal with it however you want. If I’m fine and my wife is fine and my kids are fine, the rest is a fucking joke.

And I can play this game -- life -- I know how to do it. I’m old. I’m 68 years old, right, and I know how to do this and I don’t want to waste your time. Same thing happens with a song -- I do not want to waste your time with a song. Why waste three minutes of a person’s life that they can’t get back by singing them a song that sucks and doesn’t say anything? Why show somebody a photograph that’s a picture of nothing?

M.F.: Right, and that’s precisely what I mean about your focus and the moments you capture -- you do have this reverence for time as an incremental measure of a meaningful life. Your best work, like “Our House” and “Simple Man,” “Lady of the Island” and others, reminds us how precious, how sacred, simple experiences can be when they’re unguarded and stripped of pretense.

G.N.: Yes—that is what I try to do, and I can only try.

M.F.: And your photography reflects the same reverence.

G.N.: I think a still photograph has an amazing ability to move. Of course it doesn’t physically move, but it moves you. If I put an image in front of you I want you to be thinking, I want you to be getting angry, I want you to be getting sad, I want you to fucking react -- I want you to wake up!

And if I’m writing a song like “Chicago,” I want you to be angry because when you bound and chain and fucking gag a man and call it a fair trial you’re fucked! This is America, for God’s sake. We have a Constitution. We have respect for humanity. I don’t give a shit what Bobby Seale was doing in that courtroom -- you cannot bound him and chain him and gag him and call it a fair trial.

And when those kids got killed at Kent State, fucking Neil was furious and the way he dealt with his anger -- same as you deal with your cartoons, you fucking pour it onto the page -- we pour it onto the page of tape. And, again, we don’t want to waste your time.

M.F.: Which I think is what differentiates an artist from, say, a mainstream journalist or an anchor on the 7 o’clock news [who] want to waste our time and to pacify our anger and to keep us from dissenting against power. An artist’s main responsibility is to be honest and to not bullshit, which is contrary to the job of a politician or somebody whose objective is to preserve the status quo.

G.N.: Absolutely true.

"Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City." Photo by Diane Arbus.

M.F.: Now, just to illustrate what you said about the power of a good photograph, I read somewhere that your song, “Teach Your Children,” was inspired by your reaction to the Diane Arbus photograph, “Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park.”

G.N.: I’d actually written the song right before seeing the Diane Arbus, but when I saw that image... what had happened was I’d been collecting photography from 1969 onwards and in a particular show at the de Saisset Gallery in Santa Clara, which was the first show of images I’d collected, I put the “Hand Grenade” photograph next to a picture [by Arnold Newman] of [Arnold] Krupp, who was the German arms magnate whose company was probably responsible for millions of deaths.

It was an eerie photograph, a portrait, and the lighting is weird and his eyes are dark -- a great image. And looking at them together I began to realize that what I’d just written ["Teach Your Children"] was actually true, that if we don’t start teaching our children a better way of dealing with each other we’re fucked and humanity itself is in great danger. I mean, look at what’s going on in the world today -- look at the Obama administration. What a pile of shit we gave him to deal with, now he’s trying to deal with it all on many fronts and he’s getting shit for not concentrating on one thing.

M.F.: Well, frankly, I don’t think it’s the job of the president to solve many of the problems most threatening to us. I think it’s a mistake to think that the Office of the Presidency of the United States is a humanitarian position. Rather, [the presidency] is a job for somebody with a business mind -- somebody who honors the traditional power structures and upholds the absolute authority of multinational corporations and who can manipulate information in such a way as to prevent regular people from noticing how little control they really have.

G.N.: And the dance between them all is insane.

M.F.: But let’s compare what’s going on in the world right now versus what was going on in the 1960s. There are some depressing similarities: We have an unjust and illegal war that we’re fighting -- in fact, we have two, some would say more. All unnecessary and brutal and ...

G.N.: Silly -- yep.

M.F.: And, when you consider the economic crisis, you think of Dr. King and his commitment to helping the poor and lower working class.

G.N.: Sure, and the division between the rich and the poor is getting wider and wider and wider.

M.F.: And there’s the social unrest exploding all over the world in places like Greece and the Occupied Territories, Iran, and there’s the environmental movement still straining its efforts to save the species and now you have Obama talking about building new nuclear power plants, even after people like you fought so hard through the ’70s to stop construction, which was a remarkable victory.

G.N.: Right -- when we did the No Nuke concerts at Madison Square Garden, there hasn’t been another nuclear power plant built in this country since.

M.F.: I know -- it was such an incredible accomplishment.

G.N.: Well, when I met with Obama’s people, before I decided to support him, that was my first question: What is his stance on nuclear power? I knew about his relationship with Exelon in Chicago and I knew he got money from them, so I wanted to know what the hell his stance was. And they said, well, it’s a very interesting stance because he knows we might need it, but he knows we’ll never get it.

So he can afford to say that we need to do this, but he knows damn well that until we can figure out how to store the waste and until we figure out how to keep it out of the hands of terrorists, it’ll never get done. So I think he’s walking this brilliant line between appearing to support what is an unbelievable industry that has never made a penny and has taken billions from the American taxpayer and knowing that we’ll never get [new operational plants].

M.F.: But the message [Obama] is sending to the anti-nuclear activists, then, is that big business trumps their concerns. The pronouncement that we need to build more nuclear power plants can only be seen as the President turning his back on the left.

G.N.: I think they need to look a little deeper.

M.F.: I’m not so sure. I think the left would prefer a public victory to a private investigation into what may or may not be true about what a politician says.

G.N.: I think that’s right.

M.F.: I think that progressives would rather have an administration that honors their past victories and that doesn’t try to marginalize their deep concerns and send the message that the dominant culture is going to continue pushing liberal values aside.

Your point about Obama’s decision being a political move is not lost on me. However, I feel that I must point out my belief that perhaps the greatest contribution made by your generation was the idea that there should be no compromise on certain issues, particularly when it comes to things like war and pacifism and anything that threatens [to compromise] our humanitarianism or the public health.

In fact, I think that there is a lot of rage and disappointment coming from people who saw some of the liberal principles they believed [Obama] had but was forced to compromise to get elected as never having been part of his core belief system at all. I think that in the back of some people’s heads they thought he was going to be like Gandhi.

G.N.: Where is the disappointment coming from, though? What is he actually doing that is pissing the left off?

M.F.: Maybe it’s what he’s not doing that’s pissing them off.

G.N.: Like what?

M.F.: His amping up of the war in Afghanistan. His secret renditions program. The bank bailout. His position on gay marriage and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell. The nuclear issue we’ve been talking about. Support of Israel has been a sticking point, although some of the recent news on the illegality of the new settlements is pretty remarkable. The fact that you can all of a sudden criticize the Israeli government and not be called an anti-Semite is amazing.

G.N.: To have even put Israel in the middle of all that stuff is insane. Sometimes I wonder if we didn’t do it all deliberately.

M.F.: Right, like our supplying weapons to both Iran and Iraq during their war in the 1980s in order to help keep the region unstable and reliant upon our intervention for survival.

G.N.: Yeah, that’s right -- Eisenhower was right, wasn’t he? But you have to add something else to what he said. It’s not only the military-industrial complex, but the military-industrial-commercial complex, because trying to make sure everybody is in line to buy a new pair of sneakers and a soda is insane.

M.F.: And that brings up another interesting comparison with the past. Back in the 1960s and 1970s, in order to be involved with the anti-war movement and in order to be an effective feminist and in order to fight for civil rights, you needed to do all those things in public. There was no Internet; there was no safety net that allowed you to privately involve yourself in a mass movement.

G.N.: Yeah, you had to do it publicly and there were risks.

M.F.: And that was even part of the appeal. I remember back to when I was seven years old in the early ’70s and how I wanted to grow up to be Angela Davis.

G.N.: Wow! How fantastic!

M.F.: And I really believed it was possible -- I mean, why not?

G.N.: Yeah!

M.F.: And now I feel ripped off that I’m not Angela Davis.

G.N.: Well, when we had the opportunity to speak out, we did, even to the detriment to ourselves. But where is that movement now?

M.F.: I think the movement is being controlled.

G.N.: By whom?

M.F.: By the military-industrial-commercial complex. They don’t want us waking up. They just want sheep -- go buy your sneakers, man!

G.N.: Exactly -- and Old Navy can sell you a T-shirt with a peace sign on it and you can put it on and suddenly think you’re involved in the peace movement.

M.F.: And you don’t even have to do anything—just wear the T-shirt.

G.N.: Yeah, it’s insane. They learned with the Vietnam War, man, you know -- when Walter was telling you every fucking night while you were eating your steak dinner how many fucking Americans had just been slaughtered. The public can only take that for a certain amount of time, then they start to write to their congressman, they start to get pissed and they start to rise up and then all of a sudden the Vietnam War stops. Right? Did you ever see any footage of Grenada? Did you see any footage of Panama? Did you see any footage of Iraq?


Graham Nash. Photo from last.fm.

M.F.: No.

G.N.: They learned -- they learned how to control it. And the media, as you well know -- you can count on one hand who owns the media that covers the entire planet. They have no interest in people standing up and saying that the president doesn’t have any fucking clothes on.

M.F.: And what do you think can be done about that? Can the movement be revitalized? Is there a different strategy that people should be using...

G.N.: Sure, and here’s a perfect example. When Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt, and I found out that Congress was trying to slip an odd sentence into an energy bill that would make the public responsible for $50 billion to restart the nuclear industry again we did a video of Stephen’s song, “For What it’s Worth,” with Ben Harper, with me and Bonnie and Jackson and we went to the Hill and met with all those people and showed them 126,000 signatures that we’d gotten in three days and we managed to get the sentence taken out.

I mean, we didn’t learn anything from Chernobyl? You know how many people are still fucked up from Three Mile Island? And you know it’s going to happen again. You can’t have 104 plants here and 72 in Japan and 15 in France and expect nothing to go wrong. In the ’50s they used to say that nuclear power would be so cheap that they wouldn’t even have to charge for it -- bullshit! Do you know how much energy it takes to build a nuclear plant, to keep all that shit cool and safe so they can store it for thousands of years, the waste I mean?

We’re only 200 years old and we can’t control anything! How the fuck are we going to control this shit for thousands of years? It’s madness! It’s a industry that has no future -- they’re only trying to make money on construction. They’re even trying to say it’s green!

M.F.: I guess radioactivity is green because you can’t see it -- like it’s only theoretical pollution.

G.N.: Well, water is really the next big thing -- there’s going to be wars over water. I knew this 33 years ago. That’s why I moved to the wettest spot on earth, I swear to God. I was in San Francisco and we were being told on billboards to shower with a friend because the drought was coming and stuff like that and I knew what we were doing to the Colorado River, how we were damning it and fucking it up, and all the San Francisco people were saying, “Why are we sending all our water down to that fucking desert?”

And I’m thinking, water, I’ve got to find a place where water will never be an issue. So 33 years ago I moved to Hawaii. Now I’m lucky enough to be able to do that, but that’s how serious I think the water problem is going to be.

M.F.: I think you’re right, and what scares me most is how we don’t currently have any kind of organized mass humanitarian movement that might help us survive such a catastrophe and prevent us from descending into real tribal savagery. I mean, one of the things that your generation had -- that my generation doesn’t have -- were young people who were able to articulate the politics of dissent and humanitarianism well and who were able to, for want of a better word, make progressiveness and radicalism sexy. That’s what drew people to the counter-culturalism of the time, the music, the fashions, the grooviness of it all ...

G.N.: And we knew that, sure.

M.F.: You made it hip to thumb your nose at the Johnson and Nixon White House, but you also grounded [your dissent] in a certain logic -- there was a great deal of sanity in wanting to stop the war and to argue against materialism and to live a more spiritual existence. It was more than just an opinion that you were pushing -- it was a lifestyle.

G.N.: You’re absolutely right.

M.F.: And I just don’t see that happening nowadays. In fact, most unsettling to me about the recent death of Howard Zinn...

G.N.: What a brilliant man.

M.F.: Right, but what I found so odd about him dying was how unfair his passing seemed. I found myself wondering, “Wow, all the real radicals are disappearing.” It was like he was gunned down in his prime, but he was, what, almost 90? I suddenly realized that most of the people who make me want to be a bigmouth are all over 60, at least.

G.N.: [Progressive humanitarianism] moves forward in small increments. Did you see Pearl Jam on “Saturday Night Live” this past weekend?

M.F.: I didn’t.

G.N.: Right -- Eddie Vedder, playing his guitar, and what’s written on his guitar? ZINN! And people can twist their heads up and say, “What’s that written on his guitar? Zinn? What the fuck is that?” And then they go to Google and they type in Zinn and all of a sudden they’re off!

M.F.: Right.

G.N.: I’m not saying that that’s the only way to do it -- I’m just saying that that process is still going on. When you give a person too much to think about, they become inactive a lot. They get paralyzed. I mean, look at what kids are faced with today. I heard a thing on NPR the other day while driving around about how some of these medical students owe $300,000 in student loans. Think about that. How the fuck are they supposed to pay that back?

And the woman who they were interviewing said that she wanted to be a family doctor, but she couldn’t afford to be a family doctor. She has to subset and subset and subset and become the only doctor who does operations on ears and then she makes all the money, but it isn’t what she wants to do.

I want to be a pediatrician, I want to be a family doctor for people -- you can’t! You can’t afford it! Lawyers are the same way. Accrue massive debt in law school and forget about going into something like civil law. You’re forced to becoming a lawyer for some corporation somewhere.

M.F.: It’s all very carefully designed. Keep the sheep occupied and we’ll rob them blind and they won’t even know. In fact, we’ll even smile at them and tell them they’re doing great -- like you said, we’ll sell them a T-shirt and let them think they’re in the peace movement.

G.N.: Right.

M.F.: Keep everybody crazy.

G.N.: Another important lesson that came from the 1960s was the fact that it isn’t necessary to go to every march and to every demonstration and every sit-in and to be an expert on every bit of legislation that might be moving through Congress to be political. I think the notion that you require a vast understanding of every issue in public circulation can become a deterrent to people getting involved in dissent, like they’re not smart enough.

Again, that was the genius of [that] generation: it was enough for a person to remain committed to a lifestyle based on humanitarian ideals, to claim real ownership over his or her values and a lifetime dedicated to peace, love and understanding ...

M.F.: Good ol’ Elvis!

G.N.: Right -- and that was enough to be effective politically, because it was a way to exist off the grid and not rely so heavily on needing to be subservient to the dominant culture. In other words, so long as you don’t need laws to know that racism is wrong, or that sexism is wrong...

Or that homophobia is wrong ...

M.F.: Or murder or stealing, yeah. As long as your ideas and beliefs are not determined by whatever rewards or punishments you feel you might receive from the state, you’re politicized and fighting power. You’re saying that your morality is self-generating and not imposed by an artificial hierarchy.

G.N.: Right, I’ll give you another example: We had my song, “Teach Your Children,” in the middle of 1970, bolting up the charts. ...And then Kent State happened. We went down to Los Angeles and we recorded [Ohio], mixed it, recorded “Find the Cost of Freedom” for the B-side and we said we want it out right now. “Well, you can’t do that—you’ve got a hit moving up.”

We want it out right fucking now! We put that out in 12 days and the fucking cover for the 45 was a picture of the Constitution with four bullet holes in it. We killed our own single. You don’t do that -- you’re not supposed to do that. We didn’t give a shit. We thought the slaughter of these four kids, which the government still hasn’t apologized for, was more important.

M.F.: And that’s what I’m saying, that that simple understanding doesn’t seem to be part of contemporary culture anymore, particularly when it comes to the arts community and the musicians who have historically been so effective in communicating that message.

G.N.: But they are there.

M.F.: Are they?

G.N.: What about the Beastie Boys? What about their Tibetan campaign? How about Green Day?

M.F.: Well, all right—Green Day is a good example.

G.N.: Let me tell you something—I have never met them, right? And as I was leaving the after party [for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony] at the Bull and Bear, in this hotel, I see Billy Joe [Armstrong] as I’m headed up the stairs and I don’t stop, you know, I just wave respectfully, and he parts the people around him and comes up and he hugs me for two minutes, babbling about what a great songwriter I am and how he wanted to be like me and write melodies that are in people’s hearts all the time and I said, “Wait a second—you have to understand, I am really proud of you.” Wait a minute, why’s that? “Because you’re doing what we did -- you’re standing up there and fucking telling it like it is! “American Idiot” was brilliant!”

It kind of shocked him a little bit. But there is this chain of musicians who really do give a shit. They are there, maybe few and far between, but they are there. Tom Morello from Rage Against the Machine is a fucking brilliant man. And we’re trying to influence those people -- me, people like James Taylor, we’re all trying to influence those musicians who are coming up and following us because we’re dropping off the other end of this diving board, we can’t help it. It’s called old age and eventually death. But we want to encourage people to stand up and to give a shit and to have courage.

[Dwayne Booth (Mr. Fish) is a renowned cartoonist and freelance writer whose work can most regularly be seen on Harpers.org and Truthdig.com. His website is Clowncrack.com. Dwayne Booth lives in Philadelphia, PA, with his wife and twin daughters.

Source / Truthdig

Thanks to Larry Piltz / The Rag Blog

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