« May 2007 | Main | July 2007 »

June 27, 2007

Torture (revised and extended)

As is doubtless clear by now, I read randomly, rather like an autodidact, chasing whatever rabbits strike my fancy, picking up whatever leaps to hand and seems worth reading when time permits, collecting fragments without a plan.

And so though we get The New Yorker, it mostly ends up in recycling, or passed off to one of the young women to helps to tend to our precocious daughter. I wish, however, to draw your attention to the present edition, dated June 25, 2007. Seymour M. Hersh's continuing investigation of the atrocities at Abu Ghraib continues, and it is his carefully worded suggestion that the present Administration sanctioned torture not only at that prison in Iraq, but at Guantanamo, and elsewhere. Sanctioned and knew, while retaining something like the illusion of plausible deniability.

Torture.

This is no little word, no small thing. It is easy not to know this has gone on, for we are asked not to think about it, to pretend it did not happen or does not matter.

It did happening. It is happening. On our behalf.

This is how we are fighting the war on terrorism. One of the ways.

We are losing.

We have, perhaps, lost. Not -- yet -- the war on terrorism. But our better selves.

Do not turn a blind eye.

Do NOT turn a blind eye.

We must ask about the prices paid, and who pays them.

I have known three men who served in Viet Nam. Only one of them has managed to function more or less properly in the world, after. And one of them killed himself last Friday. He will miss knowing his grandchildren. His youngest brother, my oldest friend, will miss knowing him.

These are the prices paid.

It behooves us to know what we are buying, and what we are paying.

In the cool of the morning, let me add a couple items. The first comes courtesy my father, who ran onto a 2005 U.S. Army Intelligence and Interrogation Handbook while researching the Barbary Pirates (I come by it honest):

"Terrorists are a fact of contemporary life. They are dedicated, intelligent, well financed, resourceful, and astute planners. They are difficult to identify and are not easily captured or interned. The use of terrorist tactics worldwide has increased significantly over the past 25 years, and this trend is not expected to abate in the future."

Surely winning such a war means more than "nothing blew up in the homeland today." (And am I the only one uncomfortable with that word, "homeland" and its resonances of Nazi Germany?) And surely we will not occupy anything like the high moral ground to which this country aspires if we begin the conflict -- this protracted battle with a culture and tradition for which we have little respect and about which we choose to know nothing -- by stooping to the shortcut of torture. And without even asking the question, Does torture produce usable results? Which, apparently, most veteran interrogators would answer in the negative.

And then there is this McClatchy Newspapers report, buried on p. A7 of this morning's Lexington Herald:

"After spending $19 billion to train and equip 346,500 Iraqi security forces, the Pentagon doesn't know how many of them are on the job or whether their weapons have been stolen or turned against American forces, according to a bipartisan congressional report released yesterday."

Is bare, minimal competence too much to ask for?

Or is the real answer to be found in knowing to whom that $19 billion was paid?

Posted by Grant at 9:32 PM | Permalink

June 26, 2007

The First Amendment

In a primitive application of file-sharing, a friend loaned us a copy of the film Not Yet Rated, a documentary about the Motion Picture Association of America's highly secretive yet theoretically voluntary rating system.

I shall not, at this moment, dwell on the gathering absurdity which obliges vast segments of society to find it necessary to legislate against the pleasure of others, to confine descriptions and depictions of love and life to whatever their particular experience of normal happens to be.

Nor shall I dwell on the suggestion that the studios used the HUAC hearings in the late 1940s and early 1950s, and the anti-communist blacklists which followed, as a way to seek to break the power of the Screen Writers' Guild.

It was a short moment, a brief reminder, which struck me again this morning reading the Lexington Herald. Something like 90 percent (I didn't write the number down; it's probably higher) of all media -- TV, film, music, books, newspapers, and magazines: the necessary components of our participatory democracy -- are controlled by six fully integrated multi-national corporations. Or is it fewer, now?

As the co-publisher of an independent magazine, those are terrifying numbers, and they suggest exactly how the deck has been stacked.

Wal-Mart has recently revised its magazine purchases, dropping a number of titles. We hear that you must sell 1.5 copies per store (per issue) to stay in the Wal-Mart system. This isn't a problem for No Depression, as we've never been available at Wal-Mart. But that's two thousand newsstands, located in some of our less affluent and more remote corners, which will now reflect even less diversity of opinion.

The First Amendment, of course, does not protect the business of speech, only the speech itself.

But a summary in the morning paper of recent Supreme Court decisions was chilling. By 5-4 decisions the justices decided that a high school student could be expelled for holding up a banner which read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" at a sporting event that was not on school property. "Schools may take steps to safeguard those entrusted to their care from speech that can reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use," Chief Justice Roberts wrote in the majority decision. Now, I'm going to presume that the kid who held up that sign was various kinds of a pain in the neck, but can that sign reasonably be regarded as encouraging illegal drug use? Please. And even if that were the case...

By another 5-4 decision the Court sliced into campaign finance legislation, ruling that the Federal Election Commission overstepped when it banned pre-election ads prepared by the Wisconsin Right to Life. "We give the benefit of the doubt to speech, not censorship," Roberts wrote. "The First Amendment requires us to err on the side of protecting political speech rather than suppressing it."

Does it, still?

Posted by Grant at 9:12 AM | Permalink

June 24, 2007

The Harry Potter curse

My spare hours these last few weeks have been spent re-reading the Harry Potter series, in anticipation of the July 21 release of its final volume, Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, and the party we will hold at CoffeeTree Books, here in Morehead, leading up to its on-sale moment, one minute past midnight Friday night.

Lots of bookstores, big and small, will celebrate the release of J.K. Rowling's final Harry Potter volume with parties, and with a sigh, for the series has been a boon to young readers and to the book-selling business. (Sort of, but we'll come to that.) For the event I will once again don borrowed robes and a funny hat, wave around a wooden chopstick as if it were a wand, and conduct a trivia contest that will, by some miracle, resolve itself just before midnight.

That will seem an odd thing, for those who know or have met me. It is quite out of character. I was pressed into service three books back (when The Order Of The Phoenix first appeared, which I'm presently reading) with little warning and no preparation. I transformed in ways my wife and in-laws barely recognized and which I little understand. Apparently I have an extra gear in my personality that becomes outgoing and witty and plays well to crowds, though it is usually well-hidden. Either that or they were all sucking up to the guy giving out the prizes, which seems more likely in the cold light of morning. I do not know where it lives, that gear, and, when it came time to reprise that role for The Half-Blood Prince I was more than a little nervous that I might not be able to summon that persona again. But it emerged, more or less on cue. And so now I trust that it will show up one last time, and not be called upon again.

I wonder if I need spend a paragraph or three defending the reading of Harry Potter by a middle-aged man with better things to do? Perhaps.

Susan was teaching middle school when the first book came out, at a Catholic school in Nashville where there was some talk of banning the book because its emphasis on magic was heretical or whatever. That kind of chatter always frustrates me, and often leads me to read the offending book -- or, as in the case of The Satanic Verses, at least to buy it in sympathy. (I have read a little Rushdie, just not that one, which seemed impenetrable the first time I started it, and I suspect no small number of people bought it to leave on their coffeetable until the season changed. I actually meant to read it. Really.) Regardless, the lessons in Harry Potter are highly moral and resolute, and not condescending in the least.

Anyhow, I remembered fondly reading and re-reading Lloyd Alexander's Taran series, and John Christopher's post-conquest trilogy, and, of course, J.R.R. Tolkien. (It was something of a shock to run onto Tolkien again in college while studying medieval literature, but there he was, impressive as always.) Past which I don't read fantasy, and gave up on science fiction decades back. And so I read Harry Potter, which, for those first couple books is easily done because they're comparatively small and I read quickly; too quickly, sometimes. I have been entertained, and ensnared by Rowling's careful and intricate plotting; the books have stood up to being read each time a new installment arrives, though I suspect this may be my last time through the cycle. Rowling deserves particular credit for the difficult task of writing each book at the rough level of sophistication her lead characters might apprehend.

And so, this morning, rather than reading Seymour Hersh's piece in The New Yorker on Abu Graib, or the Faron Young biography atop my music stack, or Barbara Kingsolver or a political consultant's exit memo I haven't the interest in footnoting here, nor any of the other stacks of books I should be attending to, I will sneak in a couple more chapters of Harry Potter, looking for questions to ask my audience the evening of July 20 and for clues as to what might happen in that final book, and how it might fit together.

I am curious, for example, how the giants and house elves will tie in, and why Harry has been stripped of every strong male role model who might teach him how to survive this final altercation. And perhaps he won't survive, though I fear it's Ron who's marked for death as the hero's best friend.

None of which is precisely why I sat down this morning to write.

I sat down to contemplate price points and the economics of best-sellers. It is possible to buy Harry Potter online or at your local bookstore for 10 percent off, or 20 percent off, or, direct from the publisher for 30 percent off, and, from no small number of booksellers, for 50 percent off (or more), which means they are losing money on every volume they sell.

This is, in theory, the kind of competition which benefits consumers, but I think we put the cart before the horse, and it's time we began counting the real costs of such foolishness.

If I remember my high school economics correctly, the demand for this last Harry Potter book is relatively inelastic. People would buy it no matter the cost, most of them. It is one of the few books every bookseller in America (and abroad) can absolutely count on selling. Looking back at CoffeeTree's sales records we can see a pronounced spike every time a new Potter adventure came on sale, and a smaller spike around each movie debut, I suspect.

This is, as a friend here observed, every bit as idiotic as putting brown-n-serve rolls on sale the week before Thanksgiving.

Now, the sale price matters not to Scholastic Books, nor J.K. Rowling, nor to the various printers whose presses will, under stern security, no doubt, produce this new book. But it matters to booksellers. It doesn't matter to the big boxes -- Wal-Mart and Kroger and whomever else carry it and deeply discount it -- whether they make money selling this book, because they're trying to get you in the store to buy some dozen other things you may or may not need at prices which may or may not be to your advantage. And probably Amazon sells enough that their profit margin (with handling fees, I reckon) will bear up to the stress.

But this is brutal for independent bookstores. And idiotic all around. Publishing is like farming, and like the music industry. The hits pay for the misses; the good seasons mitigate the damage of years in which there is no rain (and Rowan County is in a drought right now, which may mean I spend the afternoon hauling water to our trees and beans). I realize there are anti-trust regulations which preclude price fixing, and in general I think that's a good thing. But there's also an arms race atmosphere to this: We all are obliged to compete with whomever will sell the book cheapest, no matter their motivation (and certainly some of Wal-Mart's motivation is to drive every shred of competition from their markets, including our family bookstore should it come to that).

At some point we as consumers are going to have to unlearn the lessons hammered into us by financial experts everywhere: That it is our right and our duty to seek out the lowest possible price when buying something. (I am hearing, right now, Margo Timmons singing "because cheap is how I feel.") Balderdash.

Where and how we spend our money in this consumer economy is the only real, functioning democratic choice we have left. Now, it behooves local and independent merchants to price things fairly, and to make sure their service is spotless. But where you spend, and on what, determines what is made, what is sold, and by whom. It impacts jobs and local communities and the international trade balance. And so, when buying your new copy of Harry Potter, or of the terrific new Mavis Staples album, or of Exile On Main Street (one of those records I still need to listen to, all these years gone), please consider the less visible costs of where you choose to spend your money. Will you support low wages; will you spend your money in ways which allow it to fly quickly from your community, never to return; will you contribute to the vibrancy and uniquity of the place you live; will you count in the not-so-hidden costs of conformity? Or will you save a buck?

Wal-Mart will sell Harry Potter for less than we pay for it. They have probably cut a deal with Scholastic Books so that they make a penny or two on the transaction, somehow, because that's what Wal-Mart does. It seems wrong to me that we have so tipped the scales of commerce in favor of the biggest of merchants that they have gained such an enormous pricing advantage over their smaller local competitors. If we are to have a fair and better world, I think consumer advocates should begin looking at national legislation which limits the ability of manufacturers to set quantity discounts which are so out of the reach of their smallest dealers. I realize that's socialism, and maybe bad economics, and that it is quite unlikely. But either we begin to realize the danger of the hegemony of the big box, or we risk losing every shred of regional identity, of individuality, and of choice.

Anyway, we're going to have a party, here in Morehead. I'll probably make a fool of myself, and there'll be no drink involved. C'mon down if you're in the neighborhood. And if not, spend a little time shopping in whatever neighborhood you call home, supporting whatever local and independent merchants remain.

Posted by Grant at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

June 21, 2007

The futility of the CD cabinet

Two Sundays back I made loose with a morning hour and cut out the pieces for a new CD rack, which will go in the back room and, finally, house all the compilations which haven't been unboxed, nor filed, since we moved here better than three years ago. It will, I suppose, be the last one I build. With any luck, I'll get it finished before they quit making the things.

And they will, just as they've quit making vinyl, mostly, and cassettes and eight-tracks and 78s and reel-to-reel tapes for consumer consumption. I do not mourn the loss of all those things, but I mourn still, and before it's really happened, the disappearance of the musical object.

We have a CD player stationed in every room of this house (and out in the garage, if I ever had time to make sawdust) where I might wish to listen, and it still pleases me, as it did back in college, to play something loud while I warm my hands in the dishwater. I do not commute. I have no need of an iPod, no place on my desktop for speakers so that this wretched computer can be asked to do one more thing.

I do not adapt to change well, apparently.

Many years ago I was a typesetter. Eventually I might have been a typographer and put on airs, but mostly I typed fast and clean (and rewrote surreptitiously, and corrected spelling, which typesetters were said not to do, but we all did because setting correction lines was a nuisance) and was good enough for newspaper work. Because there was no work for a young writer when I was graduated from the University of Washington in 1982, and because the two typesetting shops where I worked to support my vinyl and Top Ramen habits during college had failed, I bought (with the help of my parents) a typesetting machine and went into business.

I nurtured the delusion, initially, that I would work four hours a day and write fiction. Instead, I worked 12-16 hours a day, weeks without a break, and wrote nothing. Haven't really written fiction since, not counting the odd artist's bio. Sitting at my machine on Westlake Avenue watching the rich people tend to their yachts. Not, in memory, a happy time. There was a moment at one of the yachting bars we went after work when one of my office partners moved her hands at a particularly ill-timed moment and a tray of beer poured over me. The server looked at me for a second and apologized, said, "Generally we offer to pay for dry cleaning, but in your case..." Band T-shirts take beer well, though I feared being pulled over on my way home that night.

In 1986 I sold that business (basically recouping the cost of the machine) because I saw the MacIntosh coming and with it the end of my brief days knowing I had a portable trade and was employable anywhere in the United States, and beyond. I set type through 1992 at The Rocket, but that's largely because computers were expensive and desktop publishing wasn't yet capable of competing with the EditWriter.

I have, in this space, been revisiting my past a lot recently. Part of the reason for that is that I begin to feel very much as I did when the computer put me out of business. I feel dread, and uncertainty.

A while back our Canadian correspondent, Paul Cantin, sent along a paragraph from, I suspect, Billboard, talking about album sales: "Only two albums crossed the 100,000 mark last week, but one of them had a huge debut. Linkin Park's Minutes To Midnight (Warner Bros) debuted with sales of 622,000 (13% digital), giving the album the biggest single sales week of the year. (Norah Jones' Not Too Late was the previous best.) Tank's Sex Love & Pain (Blackground Records) debuted at #2 with sales of 103,000 (1% digital). Wilco's Sky Blue Sky (Nonesuch) had a big first week with sales of 87,000 (23% digital) and a #4 showing. Gretchen Wilson's One of the Boys (Sony) debuted at #5 with 73,000 (5% digital). At #8, Megadeth's United Abominations sold 54,000 (5% digital)."

I am struck by how puny the digital component of those sales figures really is, in the main. And by how modest the numbers are in comparison to what the industry used to sell. Remember when Hootie and the Blowfish shifted 16-million units? Anybody imagine somebody will beat Garth Brooks' total sales record in our lifetime?

One hears that this will be the last Christmas for the compact disc, that they'll quit making the things in four years. The time frame is open to debate, but the inevitability of the thing is apparently not.

My strong sense is that the music industry will end up being a case history for how not to adapt to changing technologies. James Fallows once wrote in The Atlantic, after having briefly consulted for Microsoft in the development of a new Word package, that software is written for major corporations which will buy hundreds and thousands of licenses, and that the concerns of individual users, of single-license purchasers, are not of interest to software developers. It is expected that many individuals will copy the software, and it is such a financially insignificant portion of their profits that they don't care, not even enough to design the product for our particular and unique needs.

The only corporate entities which can and will pay for digital rights are going to end up being radio conglomerates, movie and television studios, and whatever internet and satellite broadcasting enterprises survive the sorting. Individuals are accustomed to, um, borrowing (and I should add that I have purchased all the software on this machine; I think, but it was not always so in the leaner years) software. And that's how they treat, how they're going to treat digital music.

Sales are down. The labels claim it's because various kinds of peer to peer copying are eroding sales. Critics suspect it's because the labels have lost their knack (hah!) for finding and promoting stars, that the music itself is in a fallow state, and/or that there are now so many releases and the market is so diffuse that it will become more difficult for multi-million sellers to emerge.

I think it's because music has often been an impulse buy, a last-minute present, something to listen to fresh on the way home from the mall. I think it's because the destruction of the record store network has eliminated the most powerful marketing tool the music industry has had since radio consolidated and filled every possible moment with commercials and claptrap. I think it's because consumers buy objects, not intangible files.

This is my age showing. Kids today, they're different.

Sure. They're more computer savvy than I'll ever be. But it's not the tool, it's what one does with it. And whatever kids today are doing, they're not buying music, at least not in numbers which compare to what kids of my generation did.

Artists increasingly send links to soundfiles, hoping I'll listen. Every once in a while I do, but mostly I just delete the e-mail. There are still far too many CDs stacked around me wanting to be heard. Some day, I suppose, I'll have to buy speakers for this poor, over-worked machine.

Or I'll have to find something else to do.

I am not anxious to do that. If you have read more than a line or two from my fingers you will know that publishing No Depression -- getting to write about what I wish, discovering so much great music, and designing the whole package -- is the best gig I've ever had (save being Maggie's dad). The best gig I will ever have.

But I really, truly, do not know what I will do that cold morning whenever it arrives when music is available only as an MP3 file, or whatever comes to supplant that format. I think I'll dig out Robbie Fulks' song, "She Took A Lot Of Pills (And Died)" and play it at high volume, just as I did when I was first discovering the music we write about in these pages.

And then, perhaps, I'll go out to the garage and build a shelf for all the books on the floor in here.

Posted by Grant at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 18, 2007

Five stray thoughts

(1) If Barry Bonds were a man -- and that's not a phrase I commonly use, but it's what is needed here -- he would hit home run #754 and retire, one short of Hank Aaron's record. It would be a brilliant and redemptive gesture, honoring his senior, his better, and quietly acknowledging the taint his inevitable record will otherwise have. He won't do it, of course.

(2) If Barack Obama wanted my vote for president he would oppose the present drive within the coal industry for state and federal subsidies of the liquid coal boondoggle. I understand that as a senator from a coal-producing state he is more or less obliged to co-sponsor this legislation. But if he wishes to prove himself more than simply a first-term Senator, if he wishes to prove himself a leader, not simply of these United States but, yes, of the free world, he will need actually to lead and to leave behind the blandishments of local and regional power.

(3) I listened to two local businesspeople chatting yesterday, both bright and able and successful entrepreneurs, both people for whom I have enormous personal and professional respect. One of them said, "If we were starting out today, we couldn't do it." Meaning that the present landscape is so modified to meet the needs and appetites of enormous businesses — of the big boxes — that there is no longer room in the marketplace for local, creative, and ethical businesses.

(4) Some months back I read a book surveying George Washington's views of slavery. Because I loaned it to a friend I am unable to cite it here, but no matter. Washington was the only one of the founders to free his slaves, albeit in his will, and then only his slaves and not those which were owned by his wealthy wife...including her half-sister. Washington was apparently a pragmatic man whose objection to slavery was not so much moral as practical: Slaves did slipshod work, were poorly motivated, and finding managers who could extract good work from them was difficult at best. A number of the agricultural improvements credited to Washington are his attempts to create systems that not even slaves could mess up. At roughly that same time I read the E-Myth, one of those business books which make the rounds regularly and then fade, for most of them contain one good idea extended to 60,000 unnecessary words. (Not unlike my blogs, though at least I'm shorter winded here.) The chief lesson of the E-Myth is that Ray Kroc's adaptation of the assembly line to the production of regularized fast food is a model every business should adopt. Which means that everything your business does can be done by employees who require minimal training and can be plugged into a system so fool-proof that no employee is irreplaceable (nor commands a high salary, in consequence). This is, I suppose, means as a tonic to the many entrepreneuers who hold their business so closely they cannot let go. But it says precious little for the dignity of work.

(5) My father sent me a clipping from the Seattle Times noting that King County, which includes Seattle and the suburbs in which I grew up, is the tenth wealthiest county in the United States and is now home to 68,000 millionaires (counting net worth, but not their homes). There are 9.3-million millionaires in the United States now, Jerry Large's column also notes. He also cites a University of California study of IRS data from 2005 which "found that the wealthiest 10 percent of Americans earned the largest share of the nation's income since before the Depression." Mamaw, in her mid-80s and a life-long Republican looked up from lunch yesterday and said quietly, "There is no middle class."

A change is going to come.

It may not be for the better.

One of the wisest things my father ever said: "Them as has gets."

Posted by Grant at 9:20 AM | Permalink

June 17, 2007

Greatest Misses

All this looking backward needs to stop soon, but by way of completing both an offline conversation and some sleepless listmaking, following is a random handful of shows I wished I had attended.

These, by the way, are shows that I could have seen, and so this leaves out artists who expired before I was born (Robert Johnson, Glenn Miller, Blind Willie Johnson, Milton Brown, Hank Williams…) or shows I'd have been far too young to attend (Cream comes to mind, as do the Spencer Davis Group, Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, James Brown, Marvin Gaye, on and on). This, then, is a brief admission of errors of omission. In no particular order.

(1) Townes Van Zandt at the Backstage in Seattle, Washington. When I finally tracked down the banjo player Billy Faier he told me that he'd spent a couple weeks touring with Townes, having met him in a poker game. If I remember right, he said he left the tour after their Seattle date because there was too much drinking going on, which I know y'all find shocking. I never saw Townes, barely knew who he was before he died. And maybe it wouldn't have been much of a show, but I sure wish I'd been there, nevertheless.

(2) George Thorogood & The Delaware Destroyers at the Fabulous Rainbow Tavern, April 16, 1979. I may be slightly off on the date, but no matter. Thorogood, as I have observed before, was a kind of roots music Rosetta Stone for me; 1978's Move It On Over led me back to Hank Williams, Elmore James, and Johnny Cash. He played the Rainbow on my twentieth birthday, and I couldn't get in. Or maybe it was Parker's Ballroom, now that I type it. It doesn't matter. I was underage and I couldn't go. I saw him much later in a gold lame suit (reminiscent of Phil Ochs' Gunfight album cover) on a big stage at Bumbershoot, and, by then, realized what a ham-fisted guitarist he really is. I suspect he'd have been more compelling years earlier in a small room. And I'd have noticed fewer flaws.

(3) The Police at Astor Park, 1979. My second car was a 1972 Mercury Capri with mag wheels. Like my first car, a 1967 Camaro convertible (my stepbrother still has it, the bum), it ran only half the time. It was my first experience with a manual transmission, and I still remember coming up one of those downtown Seattle hills -- I worked as a door-to-door typewriter salesman that summer, or maybe I've fused memories here because that won't add right according to the calendar -- hearing one of the AM radio stations play "Roxanne" in their drive-time cash or trash feature. It was trashed, and the DJ was gleeful about it. I had never heard anything like it, and couldn't decide if it was good or not, but I was pretty sure the DJ was wrong. Soon enough I was pretty sure they were real good, though it was the Police's aggressive creation of marketable collectible items which got me to quit buying such things. Anyhow. They played Astor Park, which ended up being a dump across the street from The Rocket offices, and had once been a very nice supper club where people like Ray Charles held court. And I couldn't go, because I wasn't 21.

(4) Ted Hawkins at the Backstage, Seattle. Or at Goochi's in Wenatchee, Washington, July 8, 1994. That last one is a date I'm sure of because there's a track from that show on Hawkins' posthumous The Final Tour. I completely missed Hawkins when he was alive because I simply didn't believe his bio; now I think his is one of the great and complicated stories wanting to be a movie, but I don't make such things. One of the labels had sent out a metal band whose lead singer was supposed to be a homeless schizophrenic, and the whole thing was wrong in so many ways that I didn't trust Ted Hawkins to be who he said he was when the Geffen album (I guess it was The Next Hundred Years) crossed my desk. Not seeing Hawkins may be my biggest regret on this list. Yeah, it is. His reading of "There Stands The Glass" is everything. Everything.

(5) Mother Love Bone at the OK Hotel, Seattle. Green River had split before I knew what I was missing. Bass player Jeff Ament is also a designer, and would sometimes come into The Rocket office to have a few words typeset. Because he's a genuinely nice guy and we both loved basketball ( I am still more jealous that he walked away from a college scholarship to play music than I am that he became a rock star), we got to talking. He was excited and nervous about his new band's first show, and was kind enough to invite me. I was dead dog broke and spent a lot of time under the Viaduct trying to find a free parking space. By the time I got to the door of the OK Hotel, a place I don't think I'd been in before, the show was way over capacity. I half-heartedly tried to talk myself in because I was, after all, from The Rocket, but the doorman assured me somebody else from The Rocket had gotten in, and I wasn't dressed like anybody I saw in the crowd, so I went home. I was never a big proponent of MLB, nor of glam, but it would've been a show to see, far better than the desultory afternoon performance I saw at Bumbershoot a couple years after. And then Andrew Woods was gone.

(6) Nirvana at Motorsports in Seattle. Motorsports was this brick garage on Stewart Street that I drove by every day, and then it became a venue for maybe a month. This was the only show Mudhoney drummer Dan Peters played with the band after Chad Channing was tossed out. Dan is the Ringo Starr of grunge (Matt Cameron is the Ginger Baker, minus the ego and the drugs, and I don't know who Barrett Martin reminds me of because I can't name more than a handful of drummers to this day…which leaves out Jason Finn and Mark Pickerel, all of whom were essential to Seattle). Anyway, I don't know why I didn't go, no more than I don't know why I didn't see the Nirvana show at the Hub Ballroom (I think I was actually in the building that night, at KCMU with Jeff Gilbert). But I didn't. And I still think Kurt Cobain was the single best singer I will ever see, even though I never saw him on one of his legendary nights. Ah, well.

(7) The Talking Heads. Anywhere. Ever. David Byrne is the John Hammond of our age. Discuss.

That'll do. I'll get back to the present one day soon.

Posted by Grant at 10:18 AM | Permalink

June 14, 2007

A meditation on Elvin Bishop

P.K. Dwyer was the first musician I ever interviewed, because he made a record with his band the Jitters that I liked, because we had a mutual friend, and because Charley Cross let me write the piece for the entertainment section in the University of Washington Daily he edited and called Pure Pop For Now People.

I had been along for one other interview with musicians, back in high school. My friend down the street stumbled upon a band called Uncle Cookie who were briefly famous for covering the Ramones and letting people in free to their shows if they brought plastic baseball bats. I went along for the interview at this big old house they lived in in the University District. It was a warm and friendly place and there were records neatly filed everywhere. The leader of Uncle Cookie (I still have their sole 45) was Conrad Uno, who had played on the Shorecrest High School golf team years before and who would go on to found PopLlama Records (where my co-editor would one day briefly intern) and Egg Studios, to be associated with the Young Fresh Fellows and to retire (I suspect) on the strength of producing the Presidents Of The United States Of America's best-seller.

As I remember the premise of Uncle Cookie piece in the Highland Piper was that they'd sure like the easy money to be made playing our high school assemblies, and wouldn't they be more fun than the cover band we'd been seeing since junior high school. And as a show of solidarity we went to see them at the Richmond Rec Center, which makes that, I believe, my fourth concert. My first punk rock show, if that's really what it was (and it wasn't, not by today's standards...one song on the single was a dance number called "Hamburger").

P.K., in any event, was a Seattle street singer who had adapted to the new wave with the Jitters. I had just bought my first Sonics album a few days before he came by my apartment to be interviewed (his girlfriend, it turned out, lived across the street; they later left Seattle to go to clown school in Paris, and then he moved to Venice Beach, and now back to Seattle, which probably leaves out some stops along the way, but no matter). Pawing through my crate of recent purchases he stumbled on the Sonics and was emboldened to cover "The Witch" the next time I saw him play, losing his voice in a final song that at last won over the crowd at the Showbox to see Pearl Harbour & The Explosions.

The first disc atop my listening stack today is an advance of a live Elvin Bishop album called Booty Bumpin' that Blind Pig is putting out (street date: June 26), and Elvin Bishop's name always reminds me of P.K. Dwyer. I asked P.K., back in 1980, what kind of career he wanted in music. And he said something like, "I'd like to be Elvin Bishop. I'd like to be able to travel around the country and play to enough people who knew my name that I could make a decent living and keep doing it."

I don't think P.K. was particularly a fan of Elvin Bishop's, it was just the name which came to mind, and he probably had been (or was about to be) through town recently. And "Fooled Around And Fell In Love" which went to #3 on the pop charts in 1976, four years before Mr. Dwyer and I were chatting.

But I have always liked his formulation. Yeah, Bishop probably made enough money on that one hit (and he had a handful of albums in the top-100 in the '70s) that he can afford the luxury of a musician's life. The point is that very few of us get to do the thing we're meant to do, even if we're clever enough to figure out what that might be. And my particular point is that anybody who can figure out a way to make a living that doesn't involve working in a cubicle or a big box, I'm good with that. I applaud that. Encourage it. If that means selling the odd song to a TV commercial, y'know...that's OK. Occasionally there are songs which seem like they belong more to the audience than to the artist associated with them, but...it's a tough world out there, and it's not getting any easier.

And, in a way, I've always sought musicians like Bishop — or, rather, the work of musicians like Bishop — who do it for the love, for the pleasure of playing, for the need, the compulsion, the certainty that it's what they're meant to do. Not for the stardom, not for the money. For the art, or the craft, it makes little difference in the end which. Because it's a kind of work, a hard kind of work, the best kind of work. The only kind of work worth doing.

I've never met nor interviewed Mr. Bishop, nor have I seen him play. Nor do I particularly need to. But it pleases me to find him still making music, to know that Blind Pig has even had some modest success releasing his albums. That a man in his early 60s is still out on the road pleasing the people, playing music because it's what he's meant to do, and he does it well enough to make the night tolerable.

Posted by Grant at 9:52 AM | Permalink

June 13, 2007

An appreciation of the farm egg

Barbara Kingsolver's new book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year Of Food Life hasn't yet worked its way through the family to my stack of unread books, but, because she's a Kentucky-born writer and widely read, I've read an excerpt in a magazine along the way, and read a bit about her book in the Lexington paper.

If I understand correctly, Kingsolver and her family sought to do a simple and difficult thing for a year: To eat food grown locally. It is a habit I hope they have sustained past publication of her book, and a habit we seek to acquire, as best we can.

Susan is reading it just now. She looked up at one point and nodded toward our kitchen counter. "Those bananas, and that pineapple?" she said. "Those are the Humvees of food."

I am not anxious to think so hard about food, nor do I think it wise to take our present comforts as an entitlement.

A variety of reasons make buying local produce particularly important today. It means we support local farmers, whose work and knowledge we will increasingly need if the coming petroleum shortage arrives before our politicians find their spines. It means we support heirloom species of plants (and animals, I suppose) that are commercially insignificant or have not yet been genetically modified so as to fit comfortably into supermarket bins. It means we eat fresher food that has been grown for its taste, not for its ability to survive global transportation in a modular container.

This is not yet easily done where we live. Susan came back from the supermarket one day and said she'd been obliged to choose strawberries grown in California over organic strawberries grown in South America.

Now...I recognize that our ability to choose carefully what we eat is, in part, a reflection of our middle income status. That, too, seems grossly unfair.

But I sat down to write simply about the egg.

For portions of the last year we have been the beneficiary of the fecundity of local chickens, and the kindness of their owners. Our refrigerator has regularly been filled with a dozen or three eggs from several sources, shared out around town because they cannot, evidently, be sold, and they won't keep forever.

Now, I'm a kid from the suburbs. My mother's family raised chickens during the Depression, back in Merced, and she doesn't eat eggs, nor cook chicken to this day. We had already fashioned the habit of buying the expensive organic free-range chicken eggs at Kroger's (they're about three times the price of regular eggs, and rarely go on sale) when these local eggs began arriving. We tend to eat eggs most mornings, one way or another, because it's an important meal and a good way to begin the day and all that.

The first dozen local eggs were more than a little intimidating. One of them came from a duck. One was particularly small and it wasn't clear to me where it came from, exactly. Their yolk is a different, darker color than we are accustomed to, and their flavor is much, much stronger. Some of the eggs have feathers attached. And other stuff, a reminder of which end of the chicken they emerge from.

Let's face it: Store eggs are a polite form of tofu. They're a protein source that takes on the flavor of whatever you add, be it salt and pepper or hot sauce or cheese or whatever. They have little flavor on their own. Farm fresh eggs took some getting used to, and the shells don't have a uniform thickness, and they're not all the same size and color.

But they taste like eggs.

It took me a while to get used to it, but we ran out this week and are back to the Kroger top shelf brown eggs, and it ain't the same.

One of the kids at the Fuzzy Duck said last week that only the day before had she learned there was more than one kind of chicken.

This is why it's important to eat local produce, best we can.

It's better for us. It tastes better. It consumes less petrol. It supports a local farmer, and it's one less thing we need to drive across town to pick up from one of the big boxes.

We also have bought a share in a Community Supported Agriculture venture, which is to say, we are sharing in the harvest from a local organic farm. We did this back in Nashville, and have finally found a farmer near Morehead who is interested in trying this relationship. Once a week she delivers a basket of produce; whatever's in season, whatever came in. It makes meal planning a bit more of a challenge, and we may need to plan to do more canning before it's all over.

But fresh fruit and vegetables, grown in the next county...we are fortunate, in many ways.

Posted by Grant at 3:57 PM | Permalink

June 9, 2007

A random list of influential live shows

Unlike my very methodical co-editor, I do not keep a log of the concerts I've attended. In any event, I'm quite certain that he's seen more music than I have, though I'm his senior by half a generation. But I've seen a lot, regardless. I do not now miss going to shows three or four nights a week in part because I've seen a lot, and in part because I have too often been disappointed by what I did see.

A lot of writing about music is about one's proximity to celebrity. Too many live shows -- particularly arena concerts -- are about that, as well. I am not interested in celebrity, and this isn't meant as a list of brags.

But I got trading e-mails with my friend Tom, up Jersey way, about how we came up and what we saw that really mattered. Mine seems an odd mix of memories, but perhaps it'll explain something. Or not.

In something like chronological order, then (and leaving out my first three concerts: Jethro Tull at the Seattle Center Coliseum the summer of 1975 and the summer of 1976, and Gary Wright opening for Rick Wakeman at the Paramount in Seattle, the fall of 1976; we all have to start somewhere)...

(1) Pearl Harbour & the Explosions with The Jitters at the Showbox in Seattle, probably 1979. The Jitters were a Seattle cow-punk band, of sorts. Really it was PK Dwyer and Donna Beck, converting from street singing hippies to new wave punks, but it came out cow punk. (They were also, I believe, the first musicians I interviewed.) Anyway, I still love their one and only album, if only as a memory piece. But Pearl Harbour...I'd never heard of her, nor of them, and I can't figure out why the rest of the band seems to have fallen from sight. She was spectacular. She could sing, she could put on a show (I have a hunch she'd been an exotic dancer in San Francisco, but that could have been hype), and the three-piece behind her were tight and inventive.

(2) John Cale at CBGBs in New York, late December 1979. My dad bought me a plane ticket to New York as a Christmas present. I spent a night at Eddie Condon's jazz club because they didn't care that I was underage as long as I drank, which I didn't really do back then. And then I looked in the Village Voice to see what was happening in Manhattan. I thought John Cale was JJ Cale, whose albums I'd been buying on cutout at Peaches. Instead, I was treated to a really dreadful set from an opening act called The The, and a stunningly furious set from Cale. He'd recorded a live album at CBGBs, Live Sabotage, which barely figures in his discography, and this was the release party stand. It was a fairly bleak and political album, angry with bombs dropping. The Russians had just invaded Afghanistan, Ronald Reagan was about to take power, and Cale was charged with energy. Snarling but hardly moving. I had never seen anything like it. I bought every one of his records I could find and went to see him another handful of times before I came to understand that what I'd seen that night would never happen again.

(3) Tina Turner at the HUB Ballroom, University of Washington, probably 1980. I had become friends with Annie Rose & The Thrillers, who were opening. Tina was between hits, and a couple years from Private Dancer. The Ballroom was maybe half-full, and it should have been a desultory performance. But Turner was an exacting professional of the old school, I now know. And her piano player, a young man whose name I wish I knew, was such a strong, knowing, joyful force on stage that he kept pushing her deeper into the songs. It was the first time I really understood how powerful the interplay between musicians onstage could be.

(4) Pere Ubu at the Paramount Theater, Seattle, WA, 1981? The show that probably broke Modern Productions, who had sold out two nights with Devo at the Showbox just before, and were handing out free tickets in line. It was a four-band bill that included Magazine and, I think, the Dead Boys, and maybe the Members? Or the Undertones? I don't remember. What I know is there were about 200 people there and I ended up running into most of them later on. And Pere Ubu's blend of jazz and punk and new wave and sheer exuberant dissonance was transcendent. "I'm a big pink ball under the ocean."

(5) John Prine at Parker's Ballroom, Seattle, Washington, probably about 1984. I had almost entirely given up on music, had quit going, quit buying albums. Today I say that hardcore punk drove me out, but mostly I'd started a typesetting business after college and was trying manfully to grow up. And failing. Anyhow, my roommate wanted to go, it was an $18 ticket (why I remember that I don't know, except that our third friend still owes me for his), and though I couldn't afford it, we went. It's the only time I've seen Prine, the only time I need to. Just John Prine, those songs, a spotlight, a microphone, a beer or two. Those songs. That voice.

(6) The Ganelin Trio, the Fabulous Rainbow Tavern, Seattle, WA, probably July 1986, and Charles Gayle, the Alligator in Santa Monica, CA, probably 1996. The Ganelin Trio were Russian jazz players. Piano, sax, drums. The pianist emigrated to Israel; the sax player I saw in a Russian art film later. Not too many came. Nobody knew who they were, not really. They wouldn't spend their meal money because hard currency was more valuable than food, and one of them was a collector of modern art. I don't know from jazz -- it's never been a language I had time to learn, nor a way into -- but it was a special and spectacular show that ended with the drummer continuing his solo around the club on every single object he could find. Years later Paul Semel turned me on to Charles Gayle. And if I don't know from jazz, I really don't know from free jazz, except that it seems odd to me that this music which began in New Orleans whorehouses has moved so far from the groin. Gayle plays with almost pure emotion, with and against his band. Sometimes it was magical, sometimes it was a struggle. He paused for a long soliloquy against abortion that was remarkable for its emotional force and eloquence. He didn't change my mind, but he opened it.

(7) Lyle Lovett at Parker's Ballroom, Seattle, Washington, probably 1986. Mary Schuh, who is ND's office manager, was part of the new crew I joined at The Rocket that year. As I remember, the fellow who lived in the apartment she and her husband rented behind their house, the fellow before Peter Blackstock, backed out at the last minute, and they had this extra front row seat. I had no idea who Lyle Lovett was, but Mary's taste has always been pretty good (she also introduced me to the Paladins and the Tailgators). It was just Lyle with a cello and a percussionist. And those songs, the ones he's still known for. I've seen him a bunch, since, but he never has been better.

(8) Seattle takes New York: Screaming Trees at CBGBs, Soundgarden at NYU, and Mudhoney at some converted church on St. Mark's Place opening for GWAR. This all happened in and around CMJ in the years before grunge broke. I saw all those bands a lot in those years. These shows are memorable because it was in New York we came to realize that the music which so powerfully moved us back home had a national audience. Screaming Trees mopped up Galaxy 500; Chris Cornell got in a trance and took his microphone stand to the ceiling over the stage; hundreds of white t-shirt kids in the front half of the venue knew every word to every song Mudhoney sang, which was perhaps more than the band did some nights. Kurt Cobain was one of the two or three best singers I've ever seen or heard, but I never saw him at his best, never made it through the doors to his most famous Seattle shows.

(9) Jimmie Dale Gilmore at the Backstage in Seattle, ca. 1992. With Mudhoney in the audience, before their split-EP. The closest I will ever get to hearing Hank Williams sing.

(10) Whiskeytown, wherever they played during SXSW 1996. We had just started this damn'd alt.country magazine, and they were everything we dreamed them to be. I'm still waiting for Ryan Adams to be as good and focused as he was on that first album. And he never will be. It'll never matter that much and that little again.

(11) Steve Earle with the Del McCoury Band, The Station Inn, Nashville, TN, 1999. They played, I believe, four nights in a row. I saw three of them. I've seen a lot of Steve, and I've written about him a lot. He ain't perfect, and I don't care. He's one hell of a songwriter, a phenomenal performer, and he thinks hard all the time. The Del McCoury Band were at the top of their game. The last night some guys came to the door asking them to shut the concert down because they had a house to move down the street. They'd never heard of Steve Earle, which was a pity. The show went on. It was almost over, anyhow. More than I knew.

(12) Down From The Mountain at the Ryman Auditorium. What was that, 2000? Susan and I were given tickets at the last minute, and almost didn't go. Nobody knew it would be a phenomenon, but...the Fairfield Four in full voice. And that magnificent trio: Alison Krauss, Gillian Welch, and Emmylou Harris. I still wish they'd make a record together, but I suppose they won't.

That all leaves some stuff out. It leaves out the Seldom Scene at the Backstage, when I got to show my dad what the perks of being a music critic were. It leaves out seeing Lucinda Williams do "Car Weels" during SXSW years before the album came out. It leaves out the time I saw Tom House at the Sutler after too many glasses of whiskey and told him exactly how good I thought he was. It leaves out the break-up show when Caitlin and Ryan and two bananas played the Exit-In. It leaves out every time Emmylou Harris casually walked onstage when we lived in Nashville. It leaves out how great Blood Circus were the night Nirvana opened for them at the Central Tavern. It leaves out Buddy and Julie Miller and Jon Dee Graham. And the Bad Livers. And Love Battery. And some more I'll probably come back and add in an hour. Like the time we played bridge waiting in line for the Grateful Dead. Or the first NIne Inch Nails show at a stupid teen disco in Seattle.

It's a big sweet world some nights.

This list even leaves out the night I went to the Sutler to see Steve Young and Bob Neuwirth and met my wife. But I remember nothing about the music.

It's a big sweet world, and I'm grateful.

Posted by Grant at 9:58 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

June 5, 2007

Why albums matter: Chris Thile

Our two weeks of magazine production usually telescope into one week of exhaustion, but a lot of music gets listened to along the way. Mostly I work through stacks of incoming discs, and usually get to the bottom of one or two. But in the late hours, needing strength, I tend to revisit old favorites (Peter may still be reeling from the long-ago shock of early Gary Numan at high volume; at one point I was tempted to write here an argument that the Talking Heads' Little Creatures is their finest moment because it's the one time they weren't trying so hard).

And, occasionally, I visit the shelf filled with albums that I should know but have never had occasion to play and ingest. Having reached the bottom of another toppling tower of tepid music, I succumbed to that temptation, and quite randomly put Chris Thile's How To Grow A Woman From The Ground on.

Not quite randomly. I been drawn to the cover artwork (designed by Loren Witcher), and particularly to its gutsy rehabilitation of the typeface Bookman Swash (probably by Kate Mrozowski, credited with "typography assistance"). Bookman Swash is a kitsch face now, hard to use without irony; hard to use at all. It works nicely with the cover collage to create the sense of early 1960s romantic innocence, which plays -- consciously or not (and I hope consciously) -- against the album's title and theme, which more than suggests Mr. Thile's loss of innocence and the dissolution of his marriage.

Thile is still young and good looking and ungodly talented, and so it's hard to feel too bad for him. But he also seems an impossibly nice guy, despite his success, or at least that's how he carries himself. Sometimes his work with Nickel Creek reminds me too much of Journey, and some of How To Grow A Woman seems headed toward the energy, at least, of prog-jazz stars Weather Report; I even wondered if Jon-Luc Ponty might lurk in the wings, and that's not meant as anything more than a sense of where Thile's need to be challenged by equally strong players may yet take him. Where I would follow willingly, but only for one very focused album.

But I came here to argue for the importance of the album as a form, and to draw particular attention to Thile's song "I'm Yours If You Want Me," carefully placed in the next-to-the-last position odd or failed songs are typically lodged. It is an unusual song, and perhaps the single best thing I've heard Thile do. It is sparse and vulnerable and strikingly open, and I'd bet there was an open bottle of very good Scotch in the studio when he recorded it. Here he conceals nothing behind a thicket of notes, for he plays simply, single strings plucked firmly in vague, dissonant meditation. And not even the occasional vocal and violin support of Gabe Witcher disturbs the solitude, the anguish, the tentativeness, and then the certainty of the song.

It is a bold, brave piece of work. I should think it unlikely that Thile's career will take him regularly in this direction, but I will watch and listen to him far more carefully now, for he has revealed a capacity for depth and emotion which his prodigious instrumental skills do not necessarily leave room for most of the time.

And this is why albums matter to me. That song cements the whole work, from its Strokes cover to its Jimmie Rodgers nods to everything else. That song makes the album, for me. It is the centerpiece, the closer (in sales parlance) to Thile's 14-song and quite ambitious musical essay. I'm sure you can go download it somewhere, and it'll stand nicely on its own. But it belongs in context, right where it is at track 13.

Posted by Grant at 11:24 AM | Permalink