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September 24, 2007

Lowell George v. Gram Parsons

Little Maggie found the new Best of Little Feat when she came into my office to help me, uh, file CDs a couple weeks back. She liked the chorus line of tomatoes on the cover, and spent the better part of an agreeable hour dancing to the music and handing me discs to alphabetize. She was a little cranky going to school this morning, but got into the little red truck and asked if the Little Feat CD was still around. It was, so we drove the mile to preschool with her dancing and clapping in the booster seat.

Once home I finally sat down and read Bud Scoppa's liner notes, and realized my ignorance of Little Feat was exceeded only by how wrong I was about the band.

One of the Boeing engineers I ran around with in the early 1980s was from Northern Virginia, where George died of a heart attack in 1979. Bruce's father had been a private detective, and died young, and Bruce was the only Southerner I knew. He came with an array of odd albums, and so I associate Little Feat with Bruce and with Barefoot Jerry and some other curiosities that our circle of friends rarely emboldened him to play in public.

Bruce fit the passive-aggressive Northwest pretty well. He wanted a hot tub, so he bought one and set it on bricks in his yard, hooked it up, and enjoyed it. Most folks would have built a deck around it or something, but Bruce just put a stepladder on either side and called it good. At the time he was married to an aspiring painter who seemed not to have benefited from est training. She decided one afternoon that the wall over the fireplace needed fixing, and so she tore it out. Bruce wasn't really prepared to take on that particular project at the time, and, since it didn't bother him, he just left the hole there. Near as I can recall, the hole outlasted the marriage, and then he fixed it.

See, I'd have bet that Little Feat came from Georgia simply because the song I know best on this hits package is "Oh Atlanta." And I'd have bet there was substantial cross-pollination between Little Feat and Skynyrd and the Allmans and Tuckers (and the Band, though the geography there is wrong) and the whole southern rock world, and I'd have been utterly wrong.

Lowell George was a product of Hollywood High, the son of a prominent furrier, and an alum of Frank Zappa's Mothers Of Invention (as were several other Feat). And it is quite possible that his particular stew has more to do with Sly Stone than anything happening in Georgia.

Now, my comparative indifference to Gram Parsons isn't meant to offend. He was a tolerably good songwriter, and a brilliant catalyst. But he had a thin voice and his reputation rests on a handful of songs and the discovery of Emmylou Harris, or that's what it sounds like every time I listen. I mean no disrespect. Honestly.

But the question I have this morning, and I mean this kindly and without prejudice...the question I have is, why do we remember Gram so fondly, so fervently, while we have largely (and I could be wrong about this, too, but I don't think so) forgotten Lowell George? Both worked within the complicated stew of American musical traditions, but George was clearly a more accomplished and ambitious musician (he is credited as one of several players to bring slide guitar into rock, for example; and he played for Zappa). Both were men troubled and led astray by the chemical undergrowth of the 1960s and '70s, and died young. Both wrote a handful of indelible songs.

I'm just asking the question, this morning.

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September 23, 2007

The smell of sawdust and soil

In the end, I finished two classes in economics. The first, in high school, was taught by Mr. Hughes, who threw chalk at balky students with unerring inaccuracy, swore gleefully because he was the department chair and could, believed strongly in Charles Beard's once-influential Economic Interpretation of the Constitution (which I still haven't read), imprinted a strong understanding of the meaning of a sunk cost which has served me well, and promulgated the notion that money, not gravity, made the world go around. The second was a college survey taught by one of my father's friends, who I knew pretty well from having watched football in his basement while he and my dad and another economist, who went on to win part of a Nobel Prize, sampled the domestic product of the good professor's vineyard. (This is how we came finally to have a 12-inch black & white television in our house, but it's a long story.) I attended class, that was about it.

I went to college to double major in economics and journalism on my way to law school, and ended up with enough credits to have double majored in English, even though my wife still says I should give it back because I've studiously avoided the wretched and over-wrought English literature of the nineteenth century.

These are disclaimers because my understanding of economics, as a serial entrepreneur, is hands-on and woefully imperfect.

But I have spent a lot of the last couple weeks with sawdust up my nose and dirt on my boots, and am reminded again that, for reasons which make no socioeconomic or practical sense, I have always felt more kinship with people who work with their hands than with the rising nerd elite.

(And, quite obviously, I'm a nerd. If not part of the rising elite, eh?)

I'm the guy who goes reluctantly to a banquet and watches the way the servers are treated, the logic with which they move almost unseen through the room, the ways in which their interior lives are closed off from view and only vaguely hinted at. One of my oldest friends did that job for a long time, and perhaps that's why I notice.

When I moved to LA more than a decade back, I brought my tools. Not so many tools as I have now, and I wasn't much good with most of them, but they came and marked me as an oddity in the RayGun offices because I owned such things and was unafraid of using them. Or so it felt, so I remember it.

My brother wrote a week or so back to note that the median price of a house in Seattle, home for the first 36 of my years, is now just over a half-million dollars. I do not understand how this is possible, how it can be that anybody affords such things. What crimes must be done to sustain such a lifestyle, and what horrible pressures people must live under, unaware, even, in the grind, that they are being ground. Where, I wonder, do the office workers and plumber's assistants and carpenters live? No wonder traffic is snarled.

Anyway, I've long had this economic theory that I wish to trot out now because I lack all competence to anything more with it than share it in this setting, and when the second bottle of wine has been uncorked. Part of what drove prosperity in the U.S. after World War II was the rise of unions which, in concert with labor shortages and a rapidly growing economy increased wages. Which mean that, for the first time, people who worked with their hands -- granted, in jobs that often sucked -- could fully participate in the consumer economy: Could buy houses and TVs and cars and college educations for their children.

I don't know that to be true, it just seems right.

And I don't know it to be the case now that people who make their livings with their hands can't do all those things, but anecdotal evidence all around suggests they can't, and that seems wrong.

The deep economic currents which attend our new global economy are as beyond my understanding as oceanography was. I don't know enough to know enough about free trade, but it seems dangerous to me to discover that we simply can't make toys (that having been the latest flare-up in the trade war with China) and such in this country. That we are losing the know-how to build and operate factories here.

I understand there is an underlying theory of comparative advantage at work, and that our economy is somehow better off because these jobs no longer exist here. But I am not certain that the economy being better off means the average person is better off.

Again: I reject the notion that cheap is the highest good.

And all these comparative advantages seem premised on the continued availability of cheap energy. And anybody who believes that will be the case in five or ten or twenty years...may not be planning to live that long. But we have children.

There is a movement afoot, though it cannot be guessed whether it will take root and endure, to preserve the knowing of how things grow without chemicals, and to nurture a wider range of foods than is commonly transported here from greenhouses around the globe. We may need a similar movement, to stimulate a similar impulse, to preserve the knowing of how to make things by hand, instead of from prefabricated parts.

Just a thought.

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September 19, 2007

Rock critic mental gymnastics

At the moment Doubtful Thomas called with his latest query, I was standing in the field preparing for my second lesson in tractor operation and my first pass bushhogging, ever mindful of Merle Watson's fate. This is something teenage boys learn to do before they can drive legally, so I figured, pushing 50, I ought to be able to manage it. More or less.

(This is what I'm doing when I should be listening to your record. Oh, well. Boys just wanna have fun.)

Anyhow, Thomas had a question, which I will reduce some: If the Rolling Stones released Exile On Main Street today, as greybeards, and, say, Voodoo Lounge, back when they were rising lions, would Exile still be judged a great and landmark album. Would they still be judged one of the greatest bands of all time? "Take any '60s or '70s icon who is still making records (Dylan, Young, McCartney)," he asked, "and instead of judging their recent work against the greatest thing they've done (i.e., their most influential LP), just flip them. Take some time and really think about your answer; it's not as easy as you think, that is, if you are totally honest about it."

Thomas knows me well enough to know that I took Herman's Hermits over the Beatles and the Beatles over the Stones. In truth, I've never owned Exile, and I'm not sure I've ever heard it straight through, which is probably enough to get me tossed from the rock crit fraternity, if failing to kowtow to Dylan (and Springsteen, and U2) weren't enough. I don't much believe in such things, but the Stones did always seem too close to evil to me, perhaps because my brother had the 3D cover of Satanic Majesties around the house at an impressionable age, but perhaps also because I sensed something fundamentally immoral or amoral in their music.

Obviously I still do, else I'd not have typed that sentence. I think I begrudge the Stones their decades of cashing in, their appropriation of blues traditions (and Zeppelin did it, too; and dabbled in Aleister Crowley, all of which somehow seemed...better, but I sure don't know why, because I think I'd rather listen to the Stones at this point). Maybe it's Altamont, I dunno. Possibly it's Stanley Booth's still-stunning book, The True Adventures Of The Rolling Stones.

It's Mick's voice, their unrepentance.

Maybe.

None of which is quite what Thomas was after when he called. I think he is asking whether it is possible to make vital rock after 40. I tend to extend the question to ask whether it is possible to make vital art after 40, and to believe (having passed that benchmark some years back) that it is. Wallace Stegner and Johnny Cash and Neil Young (an advance of whose newest, Chrome Dreams II is spinning just now, though I'm not much taken with most of it on first pass) and Lucinda Williams and Billy Joe Shaver and countless others argue that it is, that it must be. (Not sure why Stegner is the only writer I can think of in that mix, nor why I didn't add any visual artists. Ah, well.) Mavis Staples.

Of course it is. That is, in some ways, the point of our little magazine. (And in many ways not: It's about continuing traditions, but it's also about continuing.)

Exile and the rest of the canon all come from a specific time and place, and were recorded with specific kinds of equipment. They can't be uprooted from that context, in part because pop music is always a synthesis, and the great albums, the great songs -- the landmarks, the ones we remember -- catch up a big handful of threads and turn them into new tapestry.

It is also the case that the concerns of a 20-year-old with a guitar and unquenchable appetites for destruction are quite different from a 60-year-old in touch with mortality and a world they once understood. And so, just as I am uncomfortable judging hip hop as a middle-aged white guy living in a small town, I would be uncomfortable hearing a big, muscular, hedonistic album come from a senior citizen.

None of which, I suspect, wrestles with Doubtful Thomas's question. So it's your turn, now.

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September 16, 2007

An overture to okra

I learned two things in sophomore biology. First, because Mr. Matchett was an amateur magician and my bathroom had a wall-length mirror, I perfected the French drop, which means I can occasionally delight small children by making quarters disappear. I never learned to make them reappear properly, but did master making larger chunks of money vanish later in life. Second, I discovered that the pretty girl on whom I had my initial crush of the year wasn't the slightest interested in me, but that her best friend would be delighted to break my heart (and many more, as the years wore on).

This is one thing more than I managed out of seventh grade art, where I reigned as paper football champion and learned to wiggle my ears -- another favorite with the pre-K set -- while, um, modeling for the class. Which, I think now, was a kindness, since I could no more draw than I could play real football, especially with that cast on my foot from having fallen up two stairs while visiting Aunt Maggie in Merced. Hell of an entrance to junior high.

(Oh, and I took care of that other, more urgent biology lesson by reading my older brother's copy of Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask. Thanks, bro.)

Okra, of course, is a phallic symbol. That, at least, is what one gets with a college literature degree.

With me so far?

A decade or so ago, while exploring the front and back catalog of the always engaging (and now defunct, as such things go) Ass Ponys, I became briefly acquainted with a record label called "Okra," for whom they initially recorded. I had no idea what okra was. Somebody eventually muttered that it was some kind of southern vegetable, and, probably when my wife fixed gumbo for me the first time and we bought some on the frozen food aisle, I figured out what it looked like chopped and frozen.

Later, I tentatively tasted it as it is most commonly prepared where I now live, chopped in quarter-inch circles, dredged in cornmeal and salt, and fried in oil. (I have, as previously noted, added cayenne to that preparation for my present summer's enjoyment.) It is also possible that I ate it as a side dish at Rosco's Chicken & Waffles in LA (the one restaurant I miss from my 16 months there), though I suspect I stuck with greens.

Okra is not my favorite vegetable, but I'm fond of it.

I probably don't have a favorite vegetable. I didn't really eat the darn things until I began dating and had a job and could buy dinner somewhere other than...hmmm...maybe all those high school relationships went bad because we never had dinner? (OK, that actually covers three girls, and I hope that the excuse of my callow youth will do for a public apology.) And because in the 1970s (and still today) becoming vegetarian seemed like a good thing, even if I've never been able to spend that much energy learning about nutrition, and refuse to give up barbeque.

But I like vegetables as an abstract construct. I want to like vegetables. I know they're good for me, and I try, at last, to do things which are good for me.

I suppose spinach is my favorite, sautéed in olive oil and garlic (a whole head of garlic, chopped), with salt and fresh-ground pepper and fresh lemon juice. There was an Italian place in Seattle which offered that as a side dish, and a friend and I went back for about a year until we'd figured out how to replicate it. More or less.

But this year learning in my father-in-law's garden has taught me fresh respect for okra. I am somewhat fascinated by this peculiar and durable plant, for it is clearly a succulent, is occasionally prickly, and seems distantly related to cacti. I have no evidence for any of that sentence, it just seems that way. Okra is the kind of plant I can imagine dinosaurs dining on, in the old days. (I have a four-year-old. Dinosaurs are on our minds these days.)

It is a tricky plant which hides its progeny as best it can, but regenerates well past every other vegetable's harvest. And if it succeeds in hiding its pods they become hard and tough and inedible, thereby inviting you to eat the young and leave the old to feed the soil. I throw them to the compost at the edge of the garden.

The garden, alas, is waist-deep in weeds (we'll put down cardboard next year, and try harder, but there do seem to have benefits in this drought year to letting weeds shield some of the plants), and mostly done. Even our marauding turtle, who has impeccable taste in tomatoes, seems to have left the field of battle to the garden's full-time residents: songbirds and the two-inch yellow grasshoppers which attract them.

Soon it will be time to disc the garden down, turn it, and plant a cover crop. Which I won't do, because I'm not competent to operate the tractor, though I am to be trained to bushhog where I can do no harm. Which is to say, far, far from our emerging orchard, and nowhere near where we planted blueberries and blackberries, or anything else we care about.

I have been thinking about what all this means all summer, because it's what I do: Think too much. And today because I've been re-reading a blog on ethicurean.com written by Signature Sounds radio promoter and farmer Rebecca Lay (http://www.ethicurean.com/2007/09/14/growing-into-a-farmer) in which she talks eloquently about discovering herself to be a farmer this season.

Now, I'm going to waste some time on ethicurean.com this week simply because I like the ethos reflected in its clever, punning name.

But I am a long, long way from being a farmer. (Not to mention the number of departed relatives who would rotate underground at the mere thought of such a thing.) That involves knowledge and competencies and patience and time I simply do not have. I aspire to knowing enough to help to grow things that are good to eat. And even that seems unbelievably ambitious.

That said, I wonder if the sustainable agriculture movement -- this subculture of people interested in growing without chemicals and preserving heirloom seeds and breeds -- needs to come up with a different word. I don't know that farming is what they do. What we try to do here. Nor is it gardening. Farming, it seems here, has been co-opted by Monsanto and combine salesmen. We're after something different, older, more honorable.

I don't know what that is, I'm just tossing it out there before I head out to cut the last few pieces of okra and buy an eggplant because we didn't plant any this year.

And while I play the second album from Ass Pony instigator Chuck Cleaver's new band, Wussy. And wiggle my ears, reflectively.

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September 13, 2007

A more temperate contemplation of morality and art

It is true that a spate of bad music emboldened me to lose my temper in public. Or at least here, and I have to assume this is public. I hadn't thought I was preaching about morality, but perhaps I was.

So, for the record: I drink. Moderately, these days. Immoderately on occasion. On rare occasion in these middle years, for the price gets higher and, anyway, our daughter and my wife -- and my life -- deserve my full attention. I am also keenly aware -- personally and professionally -- of the high price of substance abuse. Leaving immediate family out of it, I would note that I lived and wrote in Seattle during the grunge years.

And I reject the myth of the self-destructive artist. Absolutely reject it. Kids came to Seattle to acquire a heroin jones so they could write as well as Kurt Cobain, missing absolutely the lesson of every addicted artist's output: Their gift was so powerful they created despite their addictions, not because of them. There is no substitute for talent, there is no short-cut to mastering craft.

Again, from the gloriously wise fraud, Carlos Castaneda: That is -- the chemicals of real and imagined pleasure are -- a path without heart.

So.

All kinds of music, not just the boys from Texas, play to the lowest common denominator. That, in part, is how I came utterly to lose contact with rap.

There is a fundamental difference between writing to and for the working class and pandering.

And then I came back two phone calls later and looked at that line. Utterly condescending, isn't it? And inaccurate, to boot, since the fratboy audience celebrating their stupor in Texas comes from the privileged crust, not the dust of old trailer parks.

What am I after, then?

There is the matter of artistic responsibility. You can't control the text people bring to your words, whether they're written or sung, and we who write in one form or another struggle with that, or should.

Nor should the government find itself in the business of censoring expression.

But we should be in the business of telling the truth.

Most of the classic country songs about drinking ("The Bottle Let Me Down," "There Stands The Glass," even Shelly West's "Jose Cuervo") that come to mind are a blues, a mourning, a cautionary tale. A morality play, I suppose.

We make choices, and artists are not responsible for actions taken by others that might be inspired by their words. Which is less clear in the age of terrorism than it was during Ice-T's "Cop Killer" (and he must surely enjoy the irony of playing a cop on TV), say, but which is still an uneasy truth.

There was a moment when an old friend wondered aloud how he was going to explain the Grateful Dead's "Casey Jones" to his son the next time it came on the radio. His son, of course, now plays bass in a band and seems to have survived nicely, but it's a harder question now that I have a daughter.

We should be in the business of telling the truth, with grace and art and in such a way as to give pleasure to the listener/reader/viewer.

We should also be in the business of making things better, not worse.

And we should not celebrate stupidity. I ran onto a blog this morning (at www.the9513.com, and before I noticed they'd linked to my Texas diatribe) discussing a paper which argues country radio elected George Bush president. It's an academic argument, which means it's provable and internally consistent but not necessarily real in the real world. But it's interesting.

We are faced with enormous and complex issues. Iraq. Global warming. Health care. And the Bush Administration sees particularly bent toward discrediting experts when their answers are politically inconvenient. Stop. I don't mean to go off on Bush here. I'm quite certain both sides of the aisle do this. My point is that a significant portion of our culture has embraced a kind of know-nothingism, is reacting against the rise of the nerd class to economic and cultural prominence by rejecting knowledge. By repudiating experts.

I have long suspected that one reason public schools struggle with financing is because most taxpayers didn't enjoy their education.

But we used to look up to experts. Now we just presume they've been bought and sold and don't trust any of them.

Or something.

I wander in circles. You tell me. I'm here all week.

But at the end of the day I want to listen to the smartest person in the room.

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September 11, 2007

That's right, I'm not from Texas

Apparently there are now three kinds of music: Good, bad, and Texas. Now, I like Austin plenty, and defer to nobody in my admiration for the bodies of work created by Alejandro Escovedo, Lyle Lovett, Jon Dee Graham, Lucinda Williams, Ray Wylie Hubbard, Guy Clark, Townes Van Zandt, Willie Nelson, Ray Price, Joe Ely, Doug Sahm all that. All them.

Not many women on that list, are there?

Mostly that's not what's meant when one talks about Texas music. Mostly what's meant is the progeny of Robert Earl Keen, whose carefully clever ability to write redneck anthems masks a shrewd businessman with a keen eye for detail. Which leads to Pat Green and Kevin Fowler and Max Stalling and a bunch of others whose CDs aren't near the player just now, and won't be.

No, still two kinds of music. Just another brand to avoid.

I am tired of stupid songs. I am tired of music which revels in being drunk and stupid and surviving it. I am flat worn out by the songs which inspire and are inspired by that delusional lifestyle, and the singers who substitute a faux cowboy yee-haw attitude for a distinctive singing style. For having a voice. For having a clue.

Kevin Fowler has a song on his new one, Bring It On, called "Ain't Dead Yet" that's a prefect exemplar of the form. He lists a bunch of unhealthy behaviors, from drinking all night to eating fried foods, and then offers the fist-waving choral affirmation that "we ain't dead yet." "Tell all the rule makers/and all the rule breakers/why don't you just leave us alone," he sings, copping as he goes. No, you're not dead yet, but is that really how you want to spend your middle and elder years? Crippled, pickled, and obese?

Honest to god, my accidental last name completely aside, I'm not a puritan. Really. I have not sworn off the pleasure of John Barleycorn, and I can eat me some biscuits and gravy. And a fair bit of barbecue.

But the sentiment and the music is so damn stupid and knuckleheaded and so completely like the fractured anti-intellectual wisdom of our current president that it's making me crazy.

And stop pissing and moaning about Nashville, y'all. First thing is, you'll take the contract if it's offered. (Fowler's album is coming out on Nashville's Equity label, produced by Blake Chancey.) Second thing is, this Texas music thing is every bit as hackneyed and formulaic as anything Music Row churns out, only the craft isn't as refined and there seems no possibility of being surprised by any of it. Third thing...oh, never mind.

There. I feel better. Slightly.

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September 9, 2007

The unfairness of things (9): Dao Strom

It is tempting to submit to temptation and concede that, from this chair, the real unfairness (and not an unfairness at all) is that Dao Strom is far more talented than I, for she has published two volumes of fiction, reaped a good handful of luminous awards for her efforts, and recorded one album of songs from the American folk tradition -- Send Me Home, in 2004 -- that were sufficiently striking to merit a small piece in ND's March-April 2005 edition.

(Well, there was never any danger that music-making might prove to be among my gifts. And I have not attempted to write fiction for years, at least not on purpose. No regrets, though the impulse remains and may yet resurface. Or so it promises most nights on the cusp of sleep.)

Presumably because we had corresponded briefly as I sought to acquire a photo to adorn the short profile John T. Davis wrote, Ms. Strom was kind enough to have a copy of her second book, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys, sent my way. It came out a year or more ago, and languished among all the other books on the floor awaiting shelving or assignment or recycling, or reading. But when I did finally make time to do those things, I was, unexpectedly, in the mood to read fiction. And still curious. So I am, this morning, mostly through reading the four linked short stories which make up her second volume.

I will use the excuse of that word volume to transition awkwardly to the one evening we did not meet, during SXSW '06, best I recall. She had an 8 p.m. showcase at one of those nameless clubs on 6th in Austin. The venue next door had a metal band playing, whatever walls separated us from them hadn't an ounce of insulation in them, and an equipment manufacturer had parked its specially appointed bus outside this club's open window. Strom and, I think, a trio of acoustic musicians were playing quietly in the front of the club, but could not be heard. I had mentioned to several friends that she might be worth checking out, for I could not tell from her album what kind of live presence she might have.

One or two of them came, since there are rarely conflicts during the 8 p.m. slot, and the club was more or less conveniently located. I walked in a few minutes late, and found a chair next to Rounder co-founder Ken Irwin. Not the first time I have seen Mr. Irwin where I did not expect him to be, but this time I asked and found that someone in the shipping department (or so memory argues), had told him she might be worth seeing, and so he came. That he would listen speaks well for him. Irwin is, in a quiet way, a much more assertive man than I am, and seemed deeply offended by the way Strom's music was being treated. He, at least, caused the windows to be closed, which helped, and may have said something to the people running the bus. And perhaps to the fellow at the sound board.

A couple other people in the room could have done much for Strom's musical career, including Jim Olsen of Signature Sounds, who is proving to have first-rate ears (see: Mary Gauthier, Lori McKenna, Josh Ritter, etc.). But she could not be heard. Other performers might have surmounted the obstacles through some force of will, but she did not, did not try to. It is quite possible that music is a therapeutic sideline for Strom, an adventure and not a vocation. But she was diffident, took her punishment quietly and without incident. She bent with the winds, and left quietly. (As did I, a few songs into Jeffrey Foucault's set, Bo Ramsey having wisely turned his amp up.)

Dao Strom is, in any event, a writer, a product of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, the daughter of writers. A writer first, one suspects. And she writes careful, nuanced stories that work hard to reveal small things and seem effortlessly to dodge the obvious. I am too blunt a writer and reader to enjoy or apprehend the symbolism she has so carefully polished, but not quite so dense as to miss the rootlessness of her protagonists, all Vietnamese women in various phases of their lives, all somehow disconnected even from the intimacies of those lives. It is not clear that they would be more connected were they still in Vietnam.

No wonder she is drawn to the comparatively deep roots of the Anglo-American folk tradition.

The literary world is as cruel as the music business, and subject to most of the same pressures. Her first book, Grass Roof, Tin Roof, was published by Houghton Mifflin and won the Chicago Tribune's Nelson Algren award (which I did not know existed, but it pleases me to know that the author of The Man With The Golden Arm is remembered, at least occasionally) and a James Michener fellowship and an NEA grant. The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys was published by Counterpoint, a division of the Perseus Group. Which suggests (not to read too much into machinations which are fundamentally none of my business) that, like so many artists whose work I am drawn to, her sales did not match the quality of her work.

Regardless, I hope she makes another record one of these days. That she becomes more comfortable with and within her creative powers, though I type that knowing it to be a presumptuous assessment. But as a reader and a listener I want her to let go, a little. To trust us more, to reveal more, to reach further. To find or acknowledge her center.

The unfairness, then, may be that we think we know somebody through their work. Through their art, in this case.

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September 5, 2007

Needle In The Hay: Elliott Smith

Last spring, the kind folks at Kill Rock Stars asked if I would do a bit of freelance work and write a one-sheet to set the context for the two-disc retrospective, of Elliott Smith roughs and demos, New Moon. As sometimes happens, it didn't end up being used. It wasn't what was wanted, by somebody, or they were too kind to tell me it wasn't very good. (This is why I don't have much of a freelance career, and so it goes.)

Quite possibly KRS expected me to have less distance and more intimacy with the subject, but I was trained not to become close to artists, and still think that to be a good and sensible rule. And, this morning, I wonder how much damage we do by knowing too much about the singer's private demons, anyhow. Art refracts through the experiences of its recipients, and I think it's meant to be an active process in which we (listeners, readers, viewers) add layers of meaning, and not a passive ingestion of the artist's pure intent, as impurely contextualized by experts.

Which is not to disavow the art of criticism -- not at all -- but which is to suggest that the biography of celebrity is a peculiar and suspect lens through which to view an artist's work. I cannot listen to Nirvana because I know, even not having read the several biographies, how much it cost Kurdt Cobain to write and sing those songs. I think I was richer not knowing and being able to hear, to imprint my own personal text on that experience.

Back when Peter and I were both driving $1,000 cars (his had been set on fire, but ran fine anyhow) and starting to talk about publishing a magazine together, we went to see Elliott Smith and Mary Lou Lord at RKCNDY, the short-lived post-industrial playground where Eddie Vedder revealed his penchant for climbing the rigging to a batch of suits from Epic. It was not a well-attended show, even though Mary Lou Lord had not yet chosen to extinguish the buzz surrounding her career. Smith, who I remember seeing only that once, was a diffident, closed performer, hunched over his guitar and soft at the microphone. I believe there was a bottle of cheap wine at work, or perhaps Robitussen.

He did not seem easy in the spotlight, nor like someone who would ever seek the big stages his songs would soon make available to him.

For no good reason I was reminded of the following bundle of words in the haze of today's awakening, and thought to dig it out, to revise and extend my remarks. Which is cheating, eh? Well. I'll strip out some of the glad-handing that goes with trying to write promotional material (for the record: I'm terrible at that kind of writing, but every once in a while need to remind myself of that fact, apparently).

The temptation, I wrote and still believe, given the lurid and unresolved details of his passing on October 21, 2003, is to force our impressions of Elliott Smith’s entire life and creative output through the hazy lens of his disintegration. New Moon offers a different story, a happier story, a much fuller and more realized story. Not from the beginning — he’d been writing songs on a four-track since he was 14 — but from the beginning of Smith’s emergence as a formidable songwriter in Portland, Oregon.

Portland (even more than Seattle) had a reputation as a hard, blue-collar town those days. One didn't fear the police in Seattle. Portland, we were warned, wasn't like that. And its music community was legendary for its creativity and its eccentricity, and its almost willful embrace of obscurity. Local and international cult legends included Greg Sage and the Wipers (art punk with a flying saucer bent), Poison Idea (anarcho punk featuring a brilliantly nihilist 400-pound guitarist, the late Pig Champion), and Dead Moon (the legendary garage rock trio, recently retired, I believe).

Smith had been born in Omaha, Nebraska, and raised by his mother and an abusive stepfather in the suburbs of Dallas until his father brought him to Portland to attend high school. Right on schedule he finished studies in philosophy and political science at Hampshire College in Amherst, MA, and returned to Portland in 1991 to do…what?

To work in a bakery and write more songs, as it turned out. The band he ended up forming, Heatmiser, were part of a small punk-pop community (which more or less included Pond, Hazel, and the Spinanes) that stood in oddly sunny contrast to the ironic, iconic fury of grunge breaking three hours to the north.

He wrote a lot of songs. From 1993-96 Smith contributed significantly to Heatmiser’s three albums, released three solo efforts of his own, and left piles of material unreleased or on very obscure b-sides and compilations. It is a striking body of work.

Heatmiser were better than good, though in the end they managed only those three albums and an EP. Smith’s first solo release, 1994’s Roman Candle, was little more than a quiet set of demos, a private experiment somewhat reluctantly released. His eponymous 1995 album, which began his relationship with Kill Rock Stars (then, I think, the emerging Riot Grrrl label, among other good things), was another matter entirely, opening with the startling beautiful pop confession, “Needle In The Hay.” By 1996’s either/or (originally to have been another self-titled album, but Smith relented -- relented! -- and settled for a nod to the Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard), Smith’s career had eclipsed that of Heatmiser, or Heatmiser had gone the way of all bands. Regardless, after a final and obligatory two-week tour, he was on his own.

The songs on New Moon come roughly from 1994-96, and were recorded for his second, self-titled album, or for what became either/or. Or they were taped just for the hell of it, as a kind of audio diary. (They were, to varying and comparatively minor degrees, cleaned up for this release.)

In the end I did meet Elliott Smith one afternoon, in an old man's bar somewhere in Hollywood, where we both lived. He had two minders who drifted to the background while we chatted into a tape recorder, and was scruffy enough and reticent enough to have no little difficulty ordering a beer, and my burnt coffee. He was a bigger man, and more substantial, than one might have thought from his photos, from his persona, from his voice. Not as raw-boned as Mark Lanegan, but sturdy. And smart. Very smart, and not pretending a bit.

“I was just recording a bunch of songs,” Smith said that November 1996 afternoon, just before the fuss and the Oscar nomination and all the rest began. “I wasn’t trying to make a record. I recorded some of it at my girlfriend’s house, on a four-track. I recorded some of it at one place I lived, and then another place I lived, and then another place where someone had a warehouse space, and I recorded some of it a real studio.”

Mostly alone and playing all the instruments, in the end Smith had 30 songs in various stages of completion for either/or, which left 18 unaccounted for. “A lot of them,” he said dryly, “had problems that, to me, were fatal.” (It is always endearing to find somebody else who speaks in dependent clauses.)

One of the problems was that people unexpectedly cared what his next record might sound like. “When I was a little kid I wanted to be in the Beatles,” he said, “but I’m totally not susceptible to the weird pressure of, well, you have to impress everybody all the time, and everything you do has to better than the last stuff. But I totally got derailed by it. I recorded a bunch of stuff that I was really happy with, if it had just been me, but then when it was time to put together a record, suddenly I didn’t want to put a lot of it out anymore.”

It is one thing to sing these songs alone in a studio of your own making, or to a room of 15 familiar faces. But to several hundred or more strangers, to hear them on the radio?

Yes, he was a confessional songwriter, but most of his released material arrived with shields of some sort, from the sweet delicacy of his voice to the deceptively simple pop sounds of the music which carried his vocals. Many of these songs are raw, and not because of their comparatively modest production: entreaties to girlfriends, friends, demons; celebrations of a simple, vibrant, artistic life far beneath the glare.

Would he have wanted to hear “Riot Coming” on the radio, with the couplet “a punch in the stomach/makes sons into daughters”? What if he had finished “Whatever (Folk Song In C)” with the elegantly simple admissions “If you’ll be straight with me/I’ll be straighter with you” and “If you’re all done/like you said you’d be/what are you doing/hanging out with me?”

He did, of course, finish the early version of “Miss Misery” here, for which he received an Academy Award nomination. That was a curious season in which both Smith and Allison Moorer appeared in full dress, singing on Hollywood's biggest stage. I cannot guess what that cost Smith to do, but perhaps it didn't. Perhaps his diffidence, his shyness, his uncertainty masked more drive than was polite to reveal. Perhaps he grew into his role, though it is not clear to me what his role was, nor what it has become after his passing. Certainly he is easier to understand dead than he ever was alive, but I suspect that could be said of all of us.

Other songs are experiments, moods of the moment, sketches. “High Times” ends up with atypically shouted vocals and no hidden fury, and “New Monkey” and “Fear City” rock more aggressively than most of his solo material did. “Thirteen” manages somehow to combine the guitar sounds of Mississippi John Hurt and a story that echoes both “Stagolee” and “Leader Of the Pack.” And “Big Decision” contains an unmistakable nod to the Violent Femmes’ “Blister In The Sun,” and, yes, no small amount of foreshadowing: “It’s a big decision/You can’t kick when you’re down.”

The big decisions, of course, were down the road. But the decision here was to plunge forward, to get it all down, to try to get it right; to play, to dabble. To do the work.

And he did the work. Despite whatever demons best him, and much like Steven Jesse Bernstein, the poet laureate of Seattle punk, Elliott Smith did the work. Both men died on the edge of a blade, nearly on the same day a dozen years apart. Which means nothing, of course.

But it does make the music harder to listen to, knowing.

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September 2, 2007

An instrumental interlude

It took half a day, but all the books which have arrived here these last two years are almost entirely off the floor and on shelves where they belong, or in the mail to new homes. It won't last, and I need to busy myself building another set of shelves so as to get the vintage magazines safely off the floor (one of the cat thinks Life a good place to sleep, the one with the Gordon Parks photo essay on Harlem in it). But in the midst of a stack where I'd carefully placed it a year ago, so as not to lose it, I found once again the slim, bound volume Maxine Cushing Gray published on the tenth anniversary of her newsletter, Northwest Arts: Twenty Articles on the Art of Criticism.

Maxine died October 25, 1987, only a few days after publishing Vol. 13, #13 of Northwest Arts, and I have written here before of her importance as a kind and subtle mentor (and not just to me, for I am the least of her spiritual heirs). It is unlikely that I would have sustained a writing career without her support in the 1980s, nor that I would have had anything worth saying -- even today, if I do -- absent her careful guidance. It seems to me, without digging through old banker's boxes of magazines, that her series on criticism continued after this volume, for it was a subject in which she was deeply interested, and invested. And I am quite certain that typesetting this booklet, and her newsletter, and occasionally sharing a tea bag in her kitchen, has much to do with the standards I seek constantly to employ and evaluate and reevaluate as a critic.

So I greeted this slim, 64-page salmon-covered volume tenderly, as an old friend, and I mean to read it again. To see how I have been shaped, how I turned out. The first entry comes from John Ardoin, who was then music editor of The Dallas Morning News and a frequent contributor to The New York Times. (Ardoin died in 2001, and wrote four books about Maria Callas.) Maxine reprinted the piece from a spring 1976 edition of Catalyst, about which I know nothing.

(I realize much of this discussion marks me, too, as an antique, for we live, it is said, in the era of unmediated media, surfing a democratic internet in which everybody's opinion is of equal merit. They are not. Criticism is meant to be careful and knowing work, and does not involve thumbs. This is not a Luddite's attack on technology -- not today, anyhow -- but I am absolutely opposed to society's growing disregard for accumulated knowledge, for expertise.)

Ardoin writes, toward the end, "Every instrumentalist I have admired has turned out to be passionately fond of singing and did everything in his power to imitate the way a human voice at its best molds a phrase and imparts emotion and inflection to a line. This is as it should be, for the voice is the most natural way of making music."

In some way this is helpful. Atop the turntable, in a stack of like-minded things I sometimes mean to write about, and other times hope simply to contemplate, are a handful of instrumental albums. They trouble me, these albums. They suggest new limitations. Strongly prejudiced toward the song, we do not much cover instrumental music in our pages, and so when the kind folks at Drag City suggest attention should be paid to Sir Richard Bishop's Polytheistic Fragments I am quite certain it is not because anybody remembers whatever kind words I may have written about his first major presence, as a member of the Sun City Girls. No, they think it belongs here somehow, and perhaps they're right.

But I have nothing much to say about the music, nor do I quite understand its purpose. It plays peacefully in the background, but would I not better be served by opening the windows to the tree frogs and crickets and subwoofers of awakening college students?

Perhaps because it draws more explicitly from folk traditions, I have an easier time with Chris Murphy's Luminous (on Kufala: The leader in authorized bootlegs, which whimsy one must stop to applaud). It, too, is experimental music -- not quite new acoustic, certainly not jazz as we now think of jazz (though, to be fair, I think of jazz as I think of red wine: something to enjoy, but to study no more than I would study chess) and not even contemporary classical music. It is chamber music, of a kind, with support from an array of familiar names, including Victoria Williams, DJ Bonebrake, and Victoria Williams, and, in my sheer ignorance, I imagine something of the gypsy in Murphy's electric violin.

The curious banjo fusion of From Mali To America (5-String Productions), an album of duets between the American clawhammer player Bob Carlin and Cheick Hamala Diabate, a Malian master of the ngoni, the banjo's precursor, makes better sense. It has a didactic purpose, drawing parallels, tying traditions together.

Somewhere, now gone to ground in the swirling chaos of my random stacks of things, is a new Bill Frisell album on Blue Note (with drummer Matt Chamberlain and guests Viktor Krauss, Ron Miles, and Eyvind Kang; they're calling it Floratone) which seems to signal that, at least for the moment, his foray into American roots forms has run its course. A pity.

And yet...

Jazz was born playing in New Orleans whorehouses, or at least that's the one-sentence caricature. Born in a hard place I would never have visited, and a long time ago. This is not about authenticity, though jazz as conservatory music is about as interesting as watching neutered cats fight. I simply cannot imagine a context, save at some future and entirely imaginary job as a film music supervisor (neither a goal nor a possibility), in which I would play this music. And I was raised on Mozart and Beethoven and all that, in addition to my dad's late-night adoration of Tiny Freeman's bluegrass program on KRAB.

I think Ardoin has hit on it, though I am recontextualizing him for my own needs. It is the voice I miss in this new instrumental music. It does not sing from the heart, it thinks. It is more about technique than passion. It does not blush.

In the crush of the crowd hearing Pere Ubu or Mudhoney or the Undertones or the Cowboy Junkies or Lucinda Williams or...one wishes to lose, only for a second, one's sense of separateness. To be joined in involuntary communion. One wishes to be touched by the power of the human voice, by the passion of an idea. By the human experience. Even here, alone, listening to stacks of music, I wait for that touch. And rejoice when I feel it, when I hear it, for it is still a rare thing. And treasured.

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