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March 21, 2006

On meeting Billy Faier and SXSW

I was a few months from a difficult birth the last time I saw Billy Faier, which makes it 47 years ago, in Berkeley, California. His is not exactly a well-known name, though the two albums he cut for Riverside in 1957 and '58 -- The Art of the Five String Banjo and Travelin' Man -- have as much to do with how I turned out as Ferdinand the Bull and Thoreau. Mother spun records while doing the weekly ironing (and she ironed everything) when I was little, and as much as I liked Mozart's "Figaro" aria I was fascinated by Travelin' Man, and, especially, its final song, a cowboy morality tale called "The Hellbound Train."

Everybody has a white whale they chase, an excuse (in this case) to walk into every used record store stumbled upon in 30 years of seeking and ask the clerk if ever they've heard of Billy Faier.

Nobody ever has, save for close listeners to Ramblin' Jack Elliott, who has a long song about running around Bourbon Street with Faier and other free spirits.

"Hellbound Train" kept me off drink (and such) until I was 18. Scared me to death and entranced me every time I played it. Still does. Just his voice and one mean-ass banjo. He found it (as, I believe, others have) as lyrics preserved in one of those 19th century folklorist collections; I know only one other version, a Love & Rockets b-side Courtney Miller once was kind enough to tape for me, though it's long lost in the box of cassettes in the back closet.

In the very early days of ND we used to run a little "has anybody seen?" box on the letters page. In ND #7 -- the one with my faux constructivist Waco Brothers cover -- I took the desperate step of asking if anybody'd heard of Billy Faier. A few days after publication the phone rang and a writer I don't know well gave me his phone number in upstate New York. I asked how they could possibly be acquainted, and she explained calmly that she'd been having an affair with the husband while he'd been enjoying a dalliance with the wife.

It took a couple days to work up the nerve to dial that phone number, but he answered right off, probably warned of my coming and properly gruff when I asked what he'd been doing all those years: "Well, living!" he said. He'd transferred those two Riverside LPs to cassette, and had another title available, cut with John Sebastian, so I sent him $20, passed the address on to my big brother, and told him that, in our house, he was bigger than Earl Scruggs. He laughed, and I like to think I added a little delight to his day.

That was it until about six months ago, when Billy found me online and sent word that he'd moved to Marathon, Texas, and was working on his autobiography. We've talked and corresponded some since (which is how he came to write a book review in #62), mostly me trying to figure out how to get my hands on that drafted autobiography, for not simply am I fascinated by his music, my hunch is he had a fascinating life that drifted through the folk revival into the 1960s and all kinds of mess. A drive across country with Woody Guthrie and Ramblin' Jack. That kind of stuff. I want to know what he did, what he saw, what he remembers, what he makes of it all. I hope it's a good book, and I hope it finds a publisher. I suppose I wish that having my name in some fashion attached to the thing might help it see the light of day, but my name doesn't exactly sell books, so...

So Billy has a new record label, an enterprise called Tompkins Square, and they had a showcase on the Friday of SXSW. It happened to conflict with ND's evening showcase. I'd semi-seriously asked my partners to let me book Billy Faier onto our stage, but even I knew it was an unreasonable request. And, anyway, he already had a gig. (Tompkins Square, incidentally, has just signed Charlie Louvin, who is apparently about to make a record with Mark Nevers.)

I left a hamburger unfinished and dashed up 5th Street to the Hideout on Congress in time to join a half-dozen other people in a small theater space (the last person I'd seen there was Bob Forrest from Thelonious Monster). To see Billy Faier.

To see him play.

He is now 75 with long white hair and glasses, not precisely the vigorous (and, mother said, somewhat truculent) young man of his album covers, but still quite a force. After, he explained that one eye had been rendered blind by botched lens surgery, which ended his juggling career a few years back, and that he's spent much of the last 25 years learning to play classical piano. And that he's finished a book on juggling which promotes his tablature for the art, and, he says, a pornographic novel with well-rendered characters.

But, man, can he still play that banjo. His voice isn't what it once was, but those fingers remain incredibly agile, delicate, almost inexplicable as they calmly attack anc caress those five strings. Gatemouth Brown was the only other player I've seen whose hands were so magical. Faier is a unique stylist, so far as I can tell, fusing guitar technique with the Scruggs roll and the occasional clawhammer attack, all of that at once and entirely natural. And no wonder the banjo never sounded like that when I tried, all those years back when "Deliverance" was big.

He's a New York guy, one of a generation of musicians who took seriously the ethical and aesthetic conflicts implicit in the study of folk music, and one of many generations of musicians who were transformed by the Beatles.

When my parents were in college, Billy Faier had a radio show on KPFA in the Bay Area and WBAI in New York. He still has tapes of those shows (archived, now, happily), which air nightly at 7:30 pm CST on Basin Radio, 101.1 FM (basinradio.net), and maybe some day I'll figure out how to listen on this contraption.

Much of this year's SXSW amounted to that kind of ancestor worship, though that hadn't been my plan. An awful lot of the shows I saw featured musicians of my vintage, or older, and an audience to match. It is argued that only the young are an important audience, a commercially viable audience, an audience worth attracting, but I'm not sure I buy it. Actually, I'm sure that I don't buy it.

Saturday afternoon, when we meant to see Imaad Wasif (oops, that party was Friday) we ended up at the Ponderosa Stomp party, which featured Barbara Lynn and an amazing guitar player whose name I'm about to misspell because I haven't a clue where to find him (and couldn't guess which of his five self-released CDs to pick up, and so returned empty-handed): Classie Ballou. Thurday night I saw a lot of Jon Dee Graham (which has become an annual pilgrimage for me) and Marty Stuart, who (with Kenny Vaughan) put on an understated guitar clinic at Antone's. Tom Gillam, standing with me, just threw up his hands and threatened to make his band rehearse.

But maybe the best thing I saw, in the dim exhaustion of Saturday night, was Sam (of Sam and Dave) Moore. It helped that it was in a park and I was able to see little kids dancing everywhere, and, thus, to miss my daughter even more. It really helped that he had a sparkling band that included Bekka Bramlett and another woman whose name I lost on backup vocals, and an exquisitely tight horn section. Moore is still a surprisingly powerful shouter, and there's a new album (a duets tribute I suspect) coming through Rhino.

But the treat of the whole thing -- and I type this knowing that even my collaborators here at ND will be shocked by how terminally unhip I've become -- was Travis Tritt, who proved an exceptional southern soul belter for two brilliant songs.

I have a soft spot for Tritt. Not long after I moved to Nashville, Ernest Tubb's celebrated their 50th anniversary with an outdoor concert. It was cold and bleak and not a lot of people came down to Broadway, which had been blocked off for the evening. Bill Anderson presided, and, as the headliner, Tritt came out and sang. I remember "Where Corn Don't Grow" being his hit of the moment, though that could be wrong and it doesn't matter. Travis Tritt didn't have to do that, especially not at a time when country music was actively seeking to distance itself from its roots. But he did. And he did it graciously.

I came home to find that he'd signed to a new label, Category 5, which, I guess, means that the money making machine in Nashville doesn't think he can feed that beast anymore. Maybe he can't. But he's still got some great music in him. And that's the part I care about. That's what I go to Austin each year to hear.

I'm sure there are blogs and newspaper columns and such all over the web extolling the virtues of dozens of young bands I didn't make time to see. Maybe next year I'll see them, and maybe I won't. I turn 47 in a few weeks, and I find it increasingly important to be reminded by those of my generation (and beyond) that one's best work isn't necessarily done in the first flush of youth.

A post-script. Wednesday night I slipped into the Austin Music Hall to see Kris Kristofferson sing with Jessi Colter. I hadn't counted on there being chairs on the floor, and so ended up talking to Jagmo about posters while they sang. But in the interim I caught what must have been a short version of Kinky Friedman's stump speech. He is, of course, a gadfly candidate for governor of Texas. Or is he? Granted, he was addressing an audience receptive to every punchline. But he's good out there. If he has any real populist policies to go with his cigar and black hat, if he's actually serious about doing this and winning...he might. He just might.

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March 8, 2006

Old wounds and the new right

Last night Peter forwarded a particularly pointed commentary on Bruce Springsteen's forthcoming album of Pete Seeger covers, written by Paul Mulshine of the Star-Ledger, the largest paper in New Jersey. It is headlined (and do I wish I'd written this head), "If I had a hammer, I'd take it to Springsteen's new record."

Now, I don't know Mr. Mulshine at all, but sure as I type that he'll be across the table from me at dinner next week during SXSW. Nor am I all that much a fan of Springsteen's work. I think I've finally worked my way up to neutral. Perhaps that's a consequence of the seven years I spent working in the same office which produced Backstreets magazine, typesetting that book, and doing one or two other chores for that part of Charles Cross's former business. When I started work Charlie sorta chuckled when I told him I didn't own any Bruce (I'd typeset the headliines for the first issue, even) and handed me a Dutch pressing of Nebraska, which is still as close as I come to really understanding Bruce's attraction. I count Backstreets alum Erik Flannigan as a good friend, and think highly of the current Backstreets publisher, Chris Phillips (and, by extension, of his brother, who publishes a fine magazine about books,called Bookmarks).

Once Charlie had extra tickets, and so I was 20-odd rows back at the Tacoma Dome during the Tunnel of Love tour. That's my Bruce credential. I felt the same way that night I did some years later at Al Green's church.

I am not, shall we say, a true believer.

And, like Mr. Mulshine, I have some difficulty with the populist pose of one of rock's biggest stars. I've always thought it a shallow, comfortable role that his audience now demands he play, and maybe he's not capable of more, and maybe I'm just not capable of hearing it. It always felt, to me, as if he (or his people) let "Born in the USA" be co-opted by the right because it helped sell records during the Reagan jugernaut, confident that his core audience understood he was being misunderstood. And so I was gratified when Springsteen stepped out and spoke out during the last election cycle. That, at least, involved some risk, particularly these days, and when artists fear to risk they are no longer capable of making art.

"Sing," John Cale sang, "fear is a man's best friend."

In any event, I'm pleased to see such blunt commentary in print, for most of the younger generation of rock critics (and, again, I've no idea of Mr. Mulshine's age) seem uncomfortable clearly voicing strong opinions.

"Springsteen may be a hell of a rocker but he is an awful folk singer," Mulshine writes. I'd mumble that maybe Nebraska, and perhaps Tom Joad, argue otherwise, but...OK.

A few lines down as Mulshine talks about the downloadable version of "We Shall Overcome" that I've not heard: "The first thing you will notice about it is that Springsteen is singing in a sort of generic middle-American drawl. The second thing you will notice is that he is singing out of tune. The effect is to create a false air of authenticity."

Now, one of the things I've been meaning to write about here is the whole dragon chase for authenticity. My current hunch is that it's one of those things one becomes concerned with at certain phases of investigating roots music, but that, ultimately (to borrow, again, from Castaneda), it is a path without heart. Either the music draws you in, or it doesn't, and there is artifice involved as soon as a second person steps into the room where the sound is being made.

It does, however, seem a little curious to charge a veteran rock star with inauthenticity. He puts on a show. He pours water on his head to look like he's sweating more. He paces his presentation so it looks and feels like he's playing for hours without limit, but, in fact, he is husbanding his strength for the next night and creating the illusion, as best he can, that we're still in the unfettered days of his youthful explosion on the scene. Or that's my theory, anyhow. And the fact that he has mastered stagecraft neither adds to nor subtracts from my respect from his work; that's PART of his work, after all.

None of which, alas, is what emboldened me to start typing about Mr. Mulshine's critique. It was, instead, the next paragraph:

"[Pete] Seeger was just as bad in this regard. While posing as a humble hick, Seeger was in fact a Harvard dropout who adopted a folksy air as a means of inflicting his Marxist views on audiences."

And there we have it: The old, old wounds, recalibrated for this generation.

I grew up believing Communism to be one of many 19th century utopian philosophies, and aware that Karl Marx had felt Russia to be the state least suited to its application. I read Trotsky in the 8th or 9th grade. I don't think I had any illusions about Stalin, nor any real understanding of Mao (who stares, in poster form, at my back as I type; just because I like the artwork of the cultural revolution, not because I endorse its precepts; and because I like the fact that Mao and Johnny Cash are across the room from each other).

I grew up believing that some form of socialism would prove the natural evolution of our democratic experiment, that it was our obligation as thinking, caring individuals in the richest nation on earth to provide a floor beneath which we did not permit our fellow citizens to fall. I still believe that, incidentally. I don't believe in utopian philosophies anymore; they are always engineered as if the human race were as bright and well-meaning as the philosophers who seek to perfect them. Er... us. But I believe in getting as close as we can. In the striving.

The role of the post-Depression American socialists/communists/liberals seems increasingly complex, the better I come to understand it. It is difficult, even today, for me to reconcile the evidence that the Rosenbergs really were spies. It makes perfect sense, in the aftermath of the Depression, that working people would look toward some system that more evenly divided wealth. It makes perfect sense that Civil Rights acativists would take help from wherever it was offered, that the American Communist Party would seek both to support (because it was the right thing) and to co-opt (because it was an opportunity) that movement.

The folksinging left put itself on the line for union workers and civil rights. So did a lot of other people. Some of them were in the thrall of various political ideologies, and many worked through several such groups trying to find something that worked, that made sense. Plus or minus their guiding ideologies, I continue to believe that the difficult work they did was worth doing, and that we are a much better country for their efforts.

Lots of people were or thought they were Marxists in the 1930s and 1940s. Many of them paid dearly for that freedom of thought in the 1950s, including Pete Seeger. One of my favorite obscure musicians, the late composer Conlon Nancarrow (from Arkansas; for most of his working life he lived in Mexico City and wrote music for player piano rolls), fought in the Lincoln Brigade in Spain, as I recall, and was banned from returning to the United States as a Premature Anti-Fascist.

Are we, then, to deny the music, the work, the effort of Pete Seeger (or Nancarrow) because he once believed in something which proved inconvenient later on?

Are we not allowed to learn, to change our mind?

Rather more to the point: We on the left have sought to create a better world for everybody. Maybe the ideas haven't worked, but the impulse seems, in general, honorable. (It is something of a shock to hear how reviled Vista volunteers were here in Eastern Kentucky.) The evidence at hand argues, convincingly to me, that those in power -- and it's hard these days to credit them with an ideological position, so venal has the impact of their rule proven -- have sought simply to enrich their backers and, as a byproduct, those who have supported them.

The debate we are meant, I hope, still to have in this democratic republic remains centered on how best to do the job of governing. For that debate to work, strong and eloquent voices on ALL sides must be heard. They must respect each other. The process can not be simply about winning the game of electoral politics; the obligation which comes with seeking to rule, at any level, is an obligation to attend to the wants and needs of one's fellow citizens. Not just those who might reasonably be expected to vote for you next time out. The tension between us should be about doing what's best for the country, not about who will benefit financially from the insertion of specific language in an appropriations bill.

We cannot have that debate if one side seeks never to listen to the opinions of the other -- if either side ceases to listen. We cannot have that debate if the debate itself is only about winning, not about testing ideas. We cannot have a democracy if we do not debate in a meaningful way. We cannot give up on that hope, on the hope of democracy.

I don't yet know if Bruce's new record is any good. I'm not sure I could tell, to be honest, but I'd like it to be good. Pete Seeger wrote and popularized some pretty good songs, and, yes, I know the publishing history of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" is troubling. But the idea that Pete Seeger's entire career is to be ignored because of political beliefs he held (or holds) is absurd.

"A complete retrospective of Seeger's work would remind Americans of just how thoroughly misguided the so-called Old Left was in the 20th century," Mulshine writes.

Not perfect, no, far from it. But somebody had to champion the rights of minorities and women, somebody had to argue that the poor deserved food and health care, somebody had to erect protections for workers against the immutable and, when unchecked, exploitative power of big business. There has to be some balance in this thing. And anybody pretending that Joe McCarthy's heirs would have embraced any of those causes is disingenuous at best.

I guess I'm still fighting the old battles, too. Ah, well.

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