Rhythm Participle

Don’t Worry About the Government

February 2, 2010 · 1 Comment

One of my favorite bands has long been The Talking Heads, the great late 70’s/early 80’s punk-new wave group fronted by the ever erudite David Byrne. I never tire of them, not after all these years of semi-constant rotation. I could blither on about the musical reasons that this is so, and then engage in arguments over “who is better? The Talking Heads, The Clash, The Ramones, or Blondie”? But I never have much steam for these debates. I still obsess over the Talking Heads because of the odd abstractions of the lyrics, the driving rhythm, and the jangling guitar, and something incongruous about all of them put together. (David Byrne solo work doesn’t interest me nearly as much, so it isn’t just that I think the lyrics intellectually…deep.) The Talking Heads are so cheerfully abstract.

I have a long string of favorite Heads songs, but the one that sticks with me in a particularly personal way is Don’t Worry About the Government from their first album, Talking Heads ‘77. (Man, I’ve always wanted to steal that title for something. Maybe someday I will.) You don’t need to have heard this song to follow my story here, but if you haven’t heard it, don’t you think you should? (Sadly, I guess we’re no longer allowed to post music mp3s here, so I can’t help you out with this one. I’m supplied an okay video of the song that’s on youtube instead.)

I see the clouds that move across the sky/I see the wind that moves the clouds away/It moves the clouds over by the building/I pick the building that I want to live in


This is a happy, weirdly and eerily happy, song about working at a bureaucratic desk job. And this is something I know about. It is a song that is not about laughing at the guy who loves his stapler. This is not a song about destroying the boredom from within or without. This is a song about — working —working–. And—living at your desk. And showing off your office to your friends. And being safe.

I smell the pine trees and the peaches in the woods/I see the pinecones that fall by the highway/That’s the highway that goes to the building/I pick the building that I want to live in/It’s over there, it’s over there—

There’s debate out there about whether this is an ironic song or one that is straightforward as can be. To me the song is poignantly real. And sad. And the only people who see it as irony are the ones who have never sat for years behind a desk. Or have not had friends and family who have sat for years behind a desk.

Springfield, Illinois, where I lived for a long time, has the country’s second largest bureaucracy—second only to, you know, the feds. It is an especially corrupt bureaucracy, which honestly just made it sort of fun. The level of evil dealing was really quite exciting and the gossip surrounding it all, nice and juicy, and very often sexual. I, and pretty much everyone else I knew, worked for the government (or people who received direct funding from the gummit). That was what there was to do there. And if you didn’t work there, you kinda figured you should, or that you would eventually, because the State paid better than nearly anyplace else. And if you went to the right fundraisers, and paid the right dues, you’d keep your job for a long time—possibly even through the next change in administration.

My building has every convenience/It’s gonna make life easy for me/It’s gonna be easy to get things done/I will relax along with my loved ones

Loved ones, loved ones visit the building,/take the highway, park and come up and see me/I’ll be working, working but if you come visit/I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important

When this song came out, I had friends, of course, with government jobs, some more ingrained in the bureaucracy than others. In 1978, I was a student and got by through a string of part-time jobs pieced together to help me avoid getting a “real job.” I swore then that I would never work for the State, because, well—I knew I couldn’t do it. I was too ancy, too easily bored and too rude. Growing up around Springfield, it seemed to me like the beginning of the end—a trap. My mom at that time had just started the State job that she would have until the end of her life. She loved her job—at least it wasn’t housework. The people I knew with State jobs all pretty much liked their jobs—or at least they rarely hated them. I came to understand why later.

When the song “Don’t Worry About the Government” first came out in ‘77, I thought it really was a kind of joke. Or, well, I wasn’t sure. Admittedly, a lot of Talking Heads songs were about work, whether it be artistic work or training to be a psychokiller or whatever. I had worked my way through college—I never once just “went to school”—but I hadn’t yet made that distinction between work (done for pay) and Work (done for love). For the Talking Heads, work was about both love and commitment.

As I got older, the lyrics to these Talking Heads work songs kept coming back to me. They’d spring into my head at inopportune moments. When I was working, mostly. The songs had very chimey refrains, which honestly was a bit disturbing when one was trying to type a long dull document, or file, or proofread. You could practically whistle along with those Talking Heads refrains. “I’ll be working, working, but if you come visit I’ll put down what I’m doing….” Yikes. Especially since I did not really want to put my work aside for my loved ones. Along with the lyrics would come things that friends had said to me about these songs.

“I love that song!” said one friend. “I know so many people like this. They really say things like that! Our office is really a kind of…family.”

I found that hard to believe, at first. But then I worked in a couple of these pseudo-family offices. I stayed in one for nearly ten years. We had potlucks and secret Santas, and when women (they were all women) came back from trips, they would bring little presents like pencil erasers that looked like pigs. I once had someone in the office give me a button that said “Almost Famous” (before the movie made that cool), which honestly just pissed me off. We had pens that had little airplanes embedded inside and we had pieces of seashells. We loved each other the way we would love people in our family that we would half-hate. We would perch on the desks and share stories and would sadly shake our fists at injustice. When newcomers came into the office, they were given intense loyalty screenings, and they nearly all failed. Since it was an all woman office and we dealt with the bureaucratic side of social services, we may all have bonded particularly intensely out of sheer fear. We never knew when some crazy guy whose wife was hiding in a domestic violence shelter would come and get us all. And when you read about rape, beating, and killing day in and day out, well—the world looks like a pretty scary place. I mean, it was not an entirely paranoid fear.

Nearly all the places I worked—libraries, universities, hospitals, and, yes, our little office—had an element of this “hating outsiders” fear. When pressed into service (for cash), we bond with our surroundings and we bond, for good or ill, with the people around us. And we bond, too, with our buildings. The buildings themselves represent what we need. And it is safer in an office with all of its many rules (which could not be broken unless the job was to be lost) than it was in that flux outside. But being in the office too much made the outside seem more and more overwhelming, incomprehensible. It became harder and harder to leave.

Don’t you worry ’bout me/I wouldn’t worry about me/Don’t you worry ’bout me/Don’t you worry ’bout me

David Byrne’s voice in this song is so plaintive and so…sweet, in a way. The song honestly has always made me worried about this man in his little office. I imagine him looking, well, just like David Byrne if David Byrne worked in an office. There are a lot of sweet natured people working in their buildings. They usually don’t rise very far because if you are too nice, you’re going to be run over by the competitive ones. But there are always these quiet ones who just sit at their desks and work. I think they are worth worrying over, mainly because no one will notice them enough to worry.

I see the states, across this big nation/I see the laws made in Washington, D.C./I think of the ones I consider my favorites/I think of the people that are working for me

I absolutely love this passage. This is how you know this is a government job. People who work at government jobs really do have their favorite laws. I know I had mine. And my mom, who did precisely this kind of rules-logging, definitely had hers. The legislation, the legal-ese, becomes oddly consoling in its blandness. Even the most morally threatening law is written in this kind of whitewashed language, and the language means, see? you’re safe. see? how innocuous. see? how boring. don’t think about that. We are benevolent. We are good. We have your interests at heart. And we are only words, and can be changed. If you work within our system.

Some civil servants are just like my loved ones/They work so hard and they try to be strong/I’m a lucky guy to live in my building/They all need buildings to help them along—
it’s over there, it’s over there

In a big messy corrupt bureaucracy the work filters down through so many people. Our little office received government funding, but all we could do was to lobby to get more of it so that the good cause would get some of that stinking green slop. As the work sifts through levels, it becomes so bland that one’s little piece means virtually nothing. What is left at this point of powerlessness are the attachments made with the people in the office. You do come to know these people that you don’t really know at all. You do come to really care for the people you work with. Whether you adore them, hate them, disrespect them, admire them, pity them, fear them, you really are forced to care. You hear the most personal things about people, things that I can’t repeat, that are truly scandalous. I heard of these things from people who I barely knew, from people of all ages and all backgrounds. Within a month of a new job, I’d hear confessions of affairs, of abortions and suicidal brothers, of seductions of the young or neglect of the old, and eventually I would usually get invited to toke up on the roof. I thought every time that this person might always be my friend. I even occasionally thought my enemies would be my friends. But I’ve found that once a job is left, the people are nearly always left behind, too. Maybe Christmas cards will be exchanged for awhile, or maybe not, but I’ve found these friendships formed at jobs to be nearly all time-limited. I don’t even remember everyone’s names, though of course I remember the faces of everyone I ever worked with, whether I liked them or not. Once we left the building, there was no point of re-entry. I don’t know what became of most of them. A lot of them are probably even dead by now. Isn’t that spooky?
The man in the song probably knows this. That’s why he’ll never leave his job. He’ll know what happens, and he won’t care about the ones who leave. He likes it, and he’s lucky. Where’s the irony in that?

My building has every convenience/It’s gonna make life easy for me/It’s gonna be easy to get things done/I will relax along with my loved ones

Loved ones, loved ones visit the building/Take the highway, park and come up and see me/I’ll be working, working but if you come visit/I’ll put down what I’m doing, my friends are important

Don’t worry ’bout me/I wouldn’t worry about me/Don’t you worry ’bout me/Don’t you worry ’bout ME……….

p.s. Here is another favorite Talking Heads’ song of mine, “Citiesfrom Fear of Music.

(Lyrics by David Byrne. Index Music, WB Music Corp., publishers.)

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Rocky Mountain High

January 21, 2010 · Leave a Comment

I’m not saying I’m a John Denver fan. Really. I’m not. When I hear that nasal whine, I really want to duck and cover. Sort of. Look, I live in Denver now. He’s our native son, the naive train that smacks into the tree; he crops up in the most peculiar places. A hip coffee shop, a road sign, the park in Aspen. John Denver’s mom died today, I read in the Denver paper—actually, John Deutschendorf’s mother died—and it turned out she’d gone to a nearby Presbyterian church and of course did all the things that nice middle class women do in Denver. The paper said she was “feisty,” right in the headline. She liked to drive 90 miles an hour. She liked pecan rolls and tacos. She lived in Aurora, a Southern suburb gone a bit to seed. I imagine I ran into her at Whole Foods, for instance, or sat with her while entertaining a guest at India’s Pearl. This got me to thinking about what I really felt about John Denver—trying not to care about what others might think of my opinions.

Hard to do. There are always those performers we hear at a certain young age and love a little, only to find later, and with more musical and urban knowledge, that they are sappy schmoes. We all have these people tucked in the dark pockets in our hearts. I know, Post-Modern Professor, that at your deathbed you will utter…”Barry…Barry Manilow….croon Mandy, one more timmmmeeeeee.” Your final words. Scary, isn’t it. I have quite a few of such people in my secret past, and some of them actually are good and some of them are worth artistic justification. I’m not going to do that here. I’m talking here about pure sentimentality, about meaning and identification that comes long before rational judgment. Back before you have that real basis of comparison.

I first heard John Denver back in the 1970’s, when he had a string of big sappy hits. (Actually, I heard his song first, we all did, sung instead by Peter, Paul and Mary: “Leaving on a Jet Plane.” Come on, you’ve heard it: “All my bags are packed I’m ready to go/I’m standing here outside your door”….moving on to that kind of lame chorus: “ I’m leaving on a jet plane/ don’t know when I’ll be back again/oh babe, I hate to go..oh….” Maybe it’s me, but I still hate the way that chorus trails off, like a car with a radiator leak coming to a full stop and at all dramatically.) I really hated some of his hits, even then—they were played to death on the radio, which, guess what, was my only access to music at that time. You heard what you heard. You loved, shrugged, and hated, but as the radio is a stream, there was no ability to cut off that stream of song other than to turn off the machine. There were no one thousand channel options. There were maybe three if the reception was clear, and the other two were a country station and a talk radio channel playing a lot of Paul Harvey and Swap Shop. On a crystal day, we might pick up WGN in Chicago or KXOK in St. Louis, both to be greatly desired, but only found if the radio was just so, cocked to the window like a half deaf dog. So across a few summers, it was John Denver, crossing over on both rock and country. This song he did that finally turned me against him forever: “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” Pure sugar shtick and not good, either—and worse, it was so damned clear that the guy had never lived in the country, him with his “old fiddle” and his farm that was “kinda laid back.” Farms are not laid back, fella. Farms are places where people work their asses off. If he had lived where I lived, he’d be slipping in more negatives, like the real country singers did. But John Denver caught me on this other damned country song. I loved this song then, and when I hear it now, I don’t love it, but this little hinge kind of swings open and I go, “Goddamn it.” This song is “Take Me Home, Country Road.” It’s a paean to West Virginia, and the middle section is really pretty—”I hear her voice in the morning hours she calls me/ the radio reminds me of my home far away/and riding down the road I get a feeling that I should have been home yesterday/yester-day-yay”—and I didn’t have to look up those lyrics. I know them all. I learned to play them on the piano, in fact, and I could probably sit at the piano and play that song even now. The song is a homesick song, and for John Denver, it’s pretty restrained. I think he really did want be taken home by country roads to the place he belonged, West Virginia. Except apparently as a kid John Deutschendorf belonged nowhere. He was a military kid, bouncing from Roswell, New Mexico, to Tucson, to Montgomery Alabama to, sadly, Fort Worth, where he ran away with his Gibson guitar while still in high school. He called himself Denver because, well, he loved Denver best, and look at his real name. He loved the mythical West Virginia best until he got stoned on a mountaintop in the 27th year, on the road to a place he’d never been before—when he got his Rocky Mountain high.

I know what that Muppet-looking mop-head meant. (An aside: John Denver looks like a stuffed toy with a wide mouth and big 70s glasses. I recommend the movie he did with George Burns, “Oh, God,” to get the full impression is how almost cute and downright ugly John Denver nee Dusseldorf actually could be. Or watch The Muppet Show. There was a reason he was regular.) I was homesick for country roads even when I lived on them (hell, I wanted John Denver’s, not mine; his had more trees and less Illinois corn). And when I moved to Colorado I caught the high, even though I don’t walk down to the neighborhood medical marijuana shops and purchase the wares. The mountains trump all. Coloradans love John Denver’s tribute to the mountains; “Rocky Mountain High” is officially our state song, and we like to think he is high on life as well as the ever-present weed because when you’re up there, you can see nearly everything. John Denver is not faking his love in this song and when you hear it slipping into some song mix in some mountain town, you know it. Even if you don’t really like the song, like me, you can’t help but feel in that sub-logic part of your mind that he nailed it. “He was born in the summer of his 27th year/ on the road to a place he’d never been before/ he left yesterday behind him, you might say he was born again, you might say he’d found a key to every door” (okay, say what you will, but that last long line is really cool, even sung in Denver’s piercing tenor—because he nailed the conversational rhythm, he’s getting ready to tell us a story over, say, a sub sandwich in that dive)….And then there’s the chorus, heard ad nauseum all over Colorado: “And the Colorado Rocky Mountain high/ I’ve seen it rain and fire in the sky/ Friends around the campfire and everybody’s high-yi-yi” (dogs wail at this final note)…Rocky Mountain High, Coloradohhhhhhh.” Enough? Okay. The thing is, it does rain and fire in the sky. When you’re in the mountains you are close to the sky. You can kiss the sky, of course, although it’s likely that the sky will smack you in the mouth then and knock you down the mountain. The sky in the mountains is so close that you are subject to electrocution during a sudden storm, knocked over by wind, burned by a sun that is shockingly close to you (I never get used to that). It is not benevolent but something odd happens to humans there. In packs, we get kinda mellow. We feel really good. We are kind and we walk big dogs, and even mountain bikers say hello on the way down. Strangers tell you what’s around the next turn. We are really high.

Poor John Denver was killed flying a small plane. I always respected that. Of course, it’s the fall that gets you, but that’s not the point. It’s how high you got. Everyone in Colorado, even the conservative ones, know that John Dusseldorf went into the clouds. We don’t really care if he was any good or not. That’s not the point.

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on the mall at the Democratic National Convention: “come on out and buy some product!”IHa

September 3, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Having no special tickets to get me into the “special musical events” for the “special” people at the Democratic Convention (the conventioneers and those who are connected to them and those who donated lots of money or those who are just paying close attention to the parties), I didn’t see Sheryl Crow or Stevie Wonder or the Drive-By Truckers playing for the Montana party or any of the other people who performed in the exclusive events.  But I didn’t really want to…much.  I was even too tired to try for the Rage Against the Machine tickets, in part because I think the band is imitative and strident and NOT FUNNY (the best of the older punkers had a sense of humor, remember?).  But I kind of wish I had, since there was a big protest afterwards, and it would have been fun to see that.  But by then I had already spent hours walking around the 16th Street Mall, a ten block downtown area that was packed with people throughout the convention. (Oh, it seems so empty and lonely now.)  I went to hang out, to watch, to just sit and listen.  I heard some music in the protester’s park and I heard some musical snippets of conversation.  I’ll try to give you a sense of what it was really like at the convention, from someone who was not Important:

On the way to the mall, walking through Denver’s strip of parking lots and office buildings–one lot attendant to another: “The guy got a replacement eyeball and he said he never wanted to  see the person it was  coming from.  He said it just kept lookin at him.”

This set the tone.

The mall is crammed with people.  Not the kinds you’d necessarily imagine.  Some were delegates, easy enough to spot in their suits and conspicuous nametags and their happy grins.  Some were tourists, all ages (especially teenagers) from all over the city, all ethnic types, all shapes, all weaving through and seeming to have a good time.  It is very carnivalesque; a lot of people are drinking from cups, people drinking liquor in the sidewalk cafes, people laughing.  While there is an armed brigade of police in riot gear on every corner, in the middle of every street, literally everywhere, it doesn’t diminish the generally gleeful mood.  People are really happy about the Obama thing.  (Sure the press is full of accounts of disgruntled Hillary people, but they weren’t very obvious about it.  I saw very few Hillary signs, saw very few people looking angry.  Maybe the press assumes that all middle aged women are Hillary supporters?–because there were many middle aged women around, particularly among the delegates, all of them exceedingly well groomed.)  There was a guy on stilts and an Uncle Sam outfit carrying his signs, and a random T-shirt booth trying to pass off the Hillary gear, but other than that….It felt all about unity, man.  Progression, all that good stuff.  The glee was apparent at night when people would stumble out of the clubs, trying to figure out how to find a taxi in North Denver.  It actually did have a feeling of hope.  

Though hope was not particularly apparent in the music that I heard that day.  The street musicians were singing folky songs, but nothing that would offend–nothing that you wouldn’t hear from any standard street musician in any given city.  Like the pan flute–oh, yes, we had one.  And a guy with a clown nose playing Dylan on a harmonica.  You couldn’t really hear the 5 piece doo wop group who sat against a downtown wall that entire day, collecting money for independent musicians (according to their sign).  They were mostly drowned out by the anti-abortion protesters not far from them, who were rather vocal in their disapproval of the Democratic party.  They were the most obnoxious and obtrusive of all the protesters I saw on the street during the convention.  They positioned themselves at an intersection and proceeded to block the sidewalk so that it was nearly impossible to get around them, and thus were forced to actually listen to them.   Another vocal protester was the nutjub who walked down the street chanting “Democrats are Crybabies!!”  He was engaged in vociferous debate with a tidy young man until a police officer strode over to add his views on the matter.  Also drowned out were the clipclops of the horses ridden by some of the officers, who mostly hang out in groups and talked about their horses.  The token German Shepherd was also led around by riot police looking for drugs? bombs?  Once the dog started fiercely barking, sounding like he was tearing off someone’s leg; when I walked past, the officer told another, “I love this dog’s bark, it sounds so ferocious.”  And the dog was just hanging out, not looking particularly threatening, but looking rather German nevertheless.  Occasonally, too, you’d hear the rev of a group of cops racing their motorcycles down the center of the mall (causing consternation among the crowd, who scrambled to grab their children).  Also bullhorns blasting out views of various varieties, most of them conservative, actually.  

“This place has a bad vibe, man,” I heard one teenager say.  

But I did spent quite a lot of time at the center of radical activity, the Civic Center park.  This was where the hippies, the protesters, the rowdy professorial types, the media, the curious set up shop.  Ther e were booths promoting the legalization of pot, booths against the war (of course), booths for animal rights (veganism, anyone), booths selling tshirts and buttons and such of course–maybe 12, 20 booths in all, scattered around the periphery of the park.  There was a bus for Rock the Vote (which never garnered a bit of attention the whole time I was there).  It all felt very sixties and early seventies, as in the days when I went to college at the hippie school (Sangamon State in Illinois) and there would be protests emanating from some of the residents of the nearly communes and from radical faculty and such.  People even dressed the same, had the same beards, but they were young, and so that was strange, that was quite timewarpish.  You’d think that they’d have some new styles, something other than the long hair and braids and peasant skirts, but maybe it’s just that “back to the earth” thing.  I liked the face paint.  Anyway, they were all very quiet, these people, sitting in their little roped off areas playing guitars and singing folk songs and (maybe?) getting high (though with the police presence, maybe not).  They looked a little bored, a little disappointed, because really,  not a lot of protesting was happening, and there weren’t that many of them.  It felt a little lonely somehow.

So I saw a band there.  I’d tell you their name, but I don’t know it, because I didn’t get there at the beginning of the set and they weren’t exactly handing out programs.  These were the free concerts, “for the people,” and they performed in this well area where the acoustics aren’t too bad.  The band was, I believe, a Puerto Rican-American hip hop band from Chicago.  Five or so people who played instruments and sang along with their rapping. And they were pretty good.  They added some flavor, and while I thought I was just observing, I actually got into them.  The listening crowd was pretty sparse–maybe 50 people up front paying close attention and a lot of scattered observers–and so their chants about liberation and the murdering pigs kind of fell flat.  The murdering pigs, by the way, were there, but they stayed far back from the action, hanging out on their bicycles and talking about their lives.  They seemed to be pretty amused by the whole thing, and didn’t rise to the bait.  ”You have to be willing to DIE for your beliefs!”  Right.  And it’s true.  Unfortunately, they were being ignored by the authorities at the time, even though I never shook that sense that we were all being watched.  Because we were, and having our pictures taken, too.  I walked around the park area while they were playing, taking in the scene, and I’m posting a few pictures of what I observed there.  Despite my own cynicism, I was taken in by the feel of the thing; it felt important that it be there and people be allowed to say what they felt.  Maybe it was that old sixties laid back feel of optimism and community that I was trying to find.  They were lucky to find it so simple.

The media did outnumber everyone else there.  And I have to say, I found that exciting.  The documentary crews (announced by their shirts, which said Documentary Crew).  The CNN, MsNBC, Associated Press, the unidentified, it was interesting to watch the interplay between them and the people being observed.  It added to the sense of it all being staged, right down to the peace & love (although I know that the kids were sincere).  It felt like something I was watching from a distance.

I left when a performance poet, a really bad one, came on–preceeded by an announcer who said:

“Come to the liberation source!”  (And just where was that again?)

“Art is not free!”  Which was a lead in to:  ”Come on out and buy some product!”

Hmm.  You mean over at that Free Trade Booth?

It’s hot as hell and my feet hurt.  It’s starting to get dark and the police are looking ancy; they start challenging some of the people working in a booth; someone, I hear, gets robbed.  Everyone is drooping.  On the way back, a man carrying a Hillary sign is laughed at uproariously by a man in shades sitting in a sidewalk cafe–Hillary guy starts yelling “Chill out!  Chill out, man!”  And the guy laughs louder and louder as the crowd looks at the Hillary guy runs away.  

Even so, it is mostly quiet.  ”Freedom ain’t no joke, ya’ll” were the last words I heard from the performance poet.  Mexican workers begin carrying in chairs from the middle of the mall.  The shops begin to close.  The mall empties as people head to the speeches, to the parties, to the food.  I think I even saw Angelina Jolie throwing out her lemonade.

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come on, I know white people have rhythm!: music at the Democratic National Convention

August 26, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Denver, where I live, is swarming with people here for the Democratic Convention.  Fifty thousand or so, say the papers.  It’s like a big party out there, even the protesters and cops smiling until they got into the pepper spray.  Booths selling Obama dolls (made to look suspiciously nappy-headed) and Arbonne Cosmetics and sno-cones and of course lots of T-shirts, buttons, stickers, banners. It’s like going to the State Fair without the cows and where everyone is pretty much like you.  White is mostly the color of the day here (from skin to t-shirts), and the attire ranges anywhere from suits and pantsuits (for Hillary supporters) to the kind of casual almost boho attire that relatively hip older people like me like to don.  Once in awhile I passed someone dressed as a donkey.  Once I passed a girl in a pink Playboy Club type outfit riding a bicycle.  Secret Service people are everywhere, although they try to come up with disguises sometimes (you can see it in their eyes–steely, just like in the movies–and they usually don’t move from position).  I saw one skinny guy in full jogger attire, carrying a huge jar of protein mix, and could never decide if he was real or undercover.  With the crowd, though, there was not much jogging to be had.  The real attention grabbers were  the riot police driving down our usually quiet Denver streets in tanks.  They are everywhere: huddling in the shade, when they can find some, or perched on the tanks, or just leaning against buildings.  A lot of them smile at you, like they’re in the spirit of the whole thing themselves.  Hey, it’s my job, don’t worry.  But they have weapons.  They have riot helmets.  As a kid, I was obsessed with Kent State.  Obsessed with, curious about the Sixties, would stare at the photos of the hippies and the soldiers for hours, the kids coming up the hill, the kids laying face down on the ground.  I’m not trying to be melodramatic here, but I couldn’t shake it out of my mind.  Even though the bystanders,

Susan, Lawrence, self & Paige touristing at the DNC

Susan, Lawrence, self & Paige touristing at the DNC

the tourists, the media, far outnumbered the 100 or so protesters who we soon glimpsed, I was paranoid.  Things just happen–as they did last night, when a group surrounded by officers and pepper sprayed.  They’re saying it’s going to be worse as the convention goes on.  But you know, I’m going to go watch it all this afternoon anyway.  There’s an excitement to that kind of fear.  Everyone is enjoying it, this party, just as people in Denver always seem to enjoy themselves.  Anyway, it’s Obama, everyone is happy.

 

Surreal.  I know this has nothing to do with music yet.  So let’s throw some in.  Most of the music events are by special invitation.  No surprise.  Not being any kind of official press, I didn’t even try to get a pass.  Anyway, there’s nobody here I’d really want to see, to tell you truth.  But I do walk down the packed streets and I did go to a concert last night at Red Rocks.  Let me tell you quickly about the Red Rocks affair, which, in the terminology of the young, COMPLETELY SUCKED.

It was sadly disorganized.  Or, well, it was organized, as in it was done in proper order and timing.  But the music selections didn’t work for the crowd and the thing wasn’t well advertised.  Being at Red Rocks, an enormous outdoor mountain ampitheatre, when no one is there is just depressing.  The sound bounces around the rocks and makes for some kind of sucking void of guitar distortion.  In brief, a sad spare  crowd, average age about 50, exceedingly white, are greeted with a folk singer (Jill Sobule, who was sweet and entertaining), a boring DJ doing dance mixes of 60s and 70s song, a young rap singer named Murs (who tried so hard to no response that I felt sorry for him)…by the time Apples in Stereo came out, the crowd was in a state of depression, no doubt thinking that if they were actually important Democrats they’d be at the convention itself watching Michelle Obama’s speech.  Poor Apples in Stereo were predictably poppy and sunny and silly to the point of being oppressively whimsical, but good, you know, and fun, and would have been fun to see in a bar.  ”We LOVE Obama!” they’d occasionally trot out, to crowd cheers, but they made their love sound a little like mushy love, like they wanted to ask him out on a chaste date, complete with roses and a meaningful hand touch at the door.  Sigh.

The best song of the evening: Jill Sobule and her mother singing Nelly’s “It’s Getting Hot in Here.”  Seriously.  And Mom could sing.  Most painful note by rapper Murs-the-Seventh-Wonder:  ”Sing along with me, people–when I say Hustle, you say Hustle!” Cringifying.  Although hilarious to see about 200 middle aged white folks imagining drive bys in West LA while yelling  Hustle in unison.

Okkervil River, who were billed, apparently didn’t show–or at least hadn’t by the time we left, after 3 hours of boredom.

My husband, sitting beside me, was just pissed.  ”Fucking Democrats can’t organize themselves out of their own asses,” he said, or something to that effect.  He made a list of what they needed to do to arrange the event and get the trains to run on time.  He began the list by insisting that the event NOT be a Red Rocks, a giant wall of rock that is miles outside of Denver.  Even though the musicians loved being there (as in “I LOVE being at Red Rocks!” and “I finally get to play at Red Rocks!”), nobody else did.  

Once when I escaped to  the bathroom, I saw melancholy women wearily washing their hands: “Well, at least we couldn’t have asked for a better sky!”

After all this, they were to show 10 short winning films on democracy.  But by the time they got around to it, everyone had left.

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from San Miguel to home

August 20, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Back in my last post I said some stuff about Mexican music.  About how in San Miguel in Mexico I hadn’t heard any rap and rowdy music on the streets because the town was so small & quaint, etc. etc.  Most of those ideas had to be changed the next night when the neighbors next door had a crazy pool party.  Or maybe it was the neighbors.  Actually, we think it was probably some of teenagers who were doing construction on the house, which to that point consisted primarily of a concrete shell and a hot tub and a swimming pool.  So with the tarps flapping over the window spaces the guys switched on the lights, brought in the stereo, and got the water ready.  By midnight the pool was filled with girls and the wheelbarrows with beer.  And the music went on all night.  Loud. Right by my room.  Thus I got a good overview of what a party full of Mexican teenagers listen to all night. 

            Really bad pop, really bad rock, a little rap, and (by 2 a.m.) mariachi.  A few American songs mixed in, but nearly all Mexican.  The only thing that got the sing-along chorus going outside was the mariachi–and the wails and the yee-haws went on for quite some time, until I finally fell asleep.  Until then most of the music was pretty wretched….It’s funny how bad cliched tunes transcend all languages, especially in the early morning when nobody wants to hear them.  I’d be moved by this idea if it hadn’t been so painful.  The kids seemed to be in disagreement about the song selection, with the volume turned up then down, a love song replaced by a rap song, etc. In the morning, the detritus of the night (empty bottles, clothes, who knows what) lay scattered across the cement until finally someone woke up and cleaned it all up again.  Since most of the large walled houses on our street were owned by rarely present whites, it’s unlikely that the owner would ever have known.  (Unless, of course, the house is owned by Mexicans–but Mexican owned mansions didn’t seem to be the norm in our part of San Miguel.  The full time residents seemed to live in the small adobe houses abutting the little fruit stands.  The trend seemed to involve razing these houses to construct walled complexes for the gringos, like us.)  At any rate, the drunken house party gave me a chance to hear some watered-down  mainstream Mexican rap.  The next night I heard it again, playing quietly on our street as a pack of six kids loitered around a low-slung Chevy.  Just like in our neighborhood at home.        

            Once back in the States, I found that the carniceria a few blocks from us no longer looked so forbidding, even if I didn’t speak Spanish.  Mexicans, even Mexican Americans, seem to just take us stupid gringos in stride while they work and collect our cash.  I guess when we leave town, they have a celebration.  I vow yet again to learn Spanish and to go engage our neighbors in conversation.  I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to it.

 


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wandering San Miguel

July 26, 2008 · Leave a Comment

 

I find myself in San Miguel Allende, a Mexican town in the center of the country.  I’m lucky to be here, putting in my pesos to stay with my friend Sharon Solwitz.  She is renting for the month; Paige (my daughter) and I for only ten days.  I understand now the desire for a month of writing time in this place.  Although there are internet cafes and even (if you really really want one) a Domino’s pizza, the place is relatively separate from the kinds of traffic and noise and strip mall clutter that you get anyplace in America.  There is no stream of WalMarts along the highway because there is no highway.  The road to San Miguel, a paved 2-lane, winds through a string of towns selling tamales and Cokes in bright shacks along the roadside.  The only thing in the states I can really compare that drive to was a trip once made through the South.  It is the rural, but not American rural—instead of tractors, nearly all of the farmers used plows and donkeys.  It was lush, mountainous, beautiful—green, after the monsoon season—the cacti and the trees all enormous, not failure like the shrunken Colorado cacti I’m used to seeing.  For some reason I thought I was expecting scrubbrush, a place so horrible that people would fight border guards to leave it.  The only thing I see plaguing this particular spot is poverty, and even that seems to be kept to a relative minimum by the number of gringos and Mexican tourists who flock to San Miguel to patronize its many shops and restaurants.  

This place is not exotic or rustic or cute or any of those labels that you might expect to apply to a non-coastal Mexican city.  If there’s a label of that sort to be had, it might be quaint—. It feels in some ways old and untouched and still a town.  You know that everyone here knows one another.  You know that they watch to see who you are and what your name is and where you are staying and if you plan to stay and if you have dogs and children.  There are many dogs and children here.

And there is music.  And this is a music blog, so I swear to keep mentioning it.  There is music every night here somewhere, and I won’t have time to see much of it live.  I hear it on the streets, though, everywhere I go.  From shop to shop to shop a radio is playing.  From private windows comes music, and to seduce us inside the restaurants, a guitar player or mariachi band.  The dogs bark and roosters crow in rhythm.  (And they bark and crow a lot.)  From the cars comes some Mexican rock.  So far I haven’t heard any rap or anything that is cursing too loud.  I’ve heard a lot of Mexican rap in my neighborhood in Denver, but none here; I don’t know if that’s by choice or whether the teenagers are kept under lock and key because the town caters to tourists. There’s plenty of Mexican pop on the radios, pretty much interchangeable with Britney Spears-type stuff, and there’s some Mexican rock, not too rowdy but with a lot of rhythm and some spicy inflections, but I don’t know my music well enough to identify who is playing.  Much of the music, though, is traditional.  I’ve come to think that it’s the Mexican version of country and country/folk—I guess here they call it regional.  Some of it seems to be more authentic than others—and I get this impression in part by flipping through the many Mexican language channels on our cable TV here.  Lots and lots of music channels.  Mexican MTV (like ours, same audience, more music), VH1 (the same), plenty of other channels, and then the Mexican version of CMT (Country Music Television) which has rougher production values, more crusty men (or young soulful men) in matching outfits and cowboy hats.  What am I saying here….Mexico is not very different in what it likes commercially than us in the States—their music breaks out urban and country, likes ours—their music TV seems to be either directly patterned after ours or run by the same US companies—.  But walking the streets here you just hear one melody after another and nothing is too loud or too obnoxious—it’s tuneful, melodic, light on the bass.  It fits the town, it doesn’t grate against it.  Perhaps the kids here never rebel against their families in that way.  They’re trying to figure out how they’re going to help support them, and to take care of brothers and sisters.  I’m only guessing.

Our cab driver from Leon to San Miguel told us he had crossed the river ten times to take jobs in Texas and North Carolina.  He would work and then bring the money back to the family in San Miguel.  He said that on his last trip he had been jailed for six months and told if he returned he’d be in for 3 years.  Several of men I’ve talked to here speak decent English, come from spending time, they said, in Texas.  

Yet I’ve seen no more beggars here than I would in any US city.  I don’t know if they keep them off the streets or if everyone gets by okay.  There are many people with small shops in the neighborhoods.  Many sell cokes, fruit, laundry detergent, and such.  The shops have names like “Victoria” and “Laura.”  Many of these places have children, girls, as vendors; they know very little English but are willing to work with my very little Spanish.  Closer to the tourist center the shops focus on crafts and clothing, the tamale stands turn into Japanese restaurants and Irish pubs.  There are street vendors, too, roasting corn and meats over open flames.  The streets are cobblestone and the traffic (many cabs and buses) wind through them slowly, all one way.  Everywhere, buildings are being constructed and rehabbed; there is always the sound of hammering and sawing.

The ultimate destination in San Miguel, the center of life, is the medieval church on the plaza.  Pilgrims come to this church and spend time in its courtyard.  The church is old, a bit battered, almost frightening in its serious saints and Mary.  It does not have the feel of a welcoming church—but then, I’m not Catholic.  It is all arches and points.  

There are many churches in San Miguel.  We hear the bells tolling all the time.  I suppose that is a kind of music, too, although it also seems to be a kind of alarm.  The birds are plentiful and here on my balcony that’s the music I hear.  LIttle bird chirps, abrasive sqwawks and wings flapping.  (At least when the people next door aren’t drilling on the new stone mansion that probably replaced someone’s little home.)   It all moves very slowly; it is a flowing rhythm, no pounding or jarring.  

I imagine that the young people must be bored.  But it moves at about my speed.

I hope to add some photos later (perhaps even of local musicians).  Right now I don’t have the cord to attack my camera to my computer.  I am, though, able to hang out at a local coffeehouse and use their wireless service.  And so here I am.

–Becky Bradway

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the occasional random world song

April 27, 2008 · 1 Comment

 Cheb Mami’s Rim Lachoua

I’m going to pop up some thoughts about individual world songs once in awhile, thereby placing my blog into that category known on the web as the “mp3 blog.”  Rather than pick new things, I thought I’d pull from songs that I have that, for some reason or another, stick with me & serve as an example of what a particular interesting artist is up to.

I’m beginning by talking about the song “Rim Lachoua” by Cheb Mami, the Algerian raï-pop-African punk singer.  He’s one of my favorite Middle Eastern singers because his voice is exceptionally sweet and riffs up and down and all over the place.  Mami, whose real name is Ahmed Mohamed, (“Cheb” means “young,” and is a common appellation given to Arabic popular singers),  grew up singing raï on the streets of Algeria.  (Rai, for those who don’t know, is a kind of reggae-ish singing that is a mixture of Arabic, Spanish, French, & African folk forms.  Apparently its origins came from bedouin men & then was popularized by women in the early 20th century.  Raï translates as “opinion” formally & as “oh yeah!” casually–making it kind of like rock music was supposed to be, right? –Yeah.  It was political, sensual street music.  Originally, raï was the music of the poor, sung in protest and celebration.  Now it’s gotten more mainstream, recorded (of course), and popularized globally as its sound and beats mix in with other pop forms.  Cheb Mami is one of the figures who’s had much to do with the music’s spreading popularity, as he’s happy to record with American soul and pop artists like Sting.  The album from which our selection “Rim Lachoua” comes is Dellali, produced by the soul/disco wizard Nile Rodgers.  While this might seem to dilute the sound, Mami’s approach doesn’t seem to cause objections among other raï performers, and he certainly wasn’t the first to add Westernized approaches.  And, to his credit, Mami hasn’t (for the most part) begun singing in English. 

Mami began his career by singing on the streets, making his own cassettes, in Algeria.  He didn’t get successful until he moved to France in the late 1980’s; over time, he’s become one of the most popular artists in Algeria.  (Apparently, he’s the “Prince of Raï” to Cheb Khaled’s “King of Raï,” causing all of those Mami fans a lot of distress.)  Rai singers have often had to live in France, since the political and religious conservatives in Algeria find the music to be the  corruptor of youth; as time goes on, and camera’s flash, Mami’s music comes to sound more mainstream French pop.  And, like fans everywhere, people in Algeria prefer their stars to be hot, meaning that there are lots of beefcakey photos of Mami floating around the cybersphere.

The song “Rim Lachoua” is a good example of a Cheb Mami song on the poppy end.  It’s from one of Mami’s earlier albums, Dellali, from 2001.   I  have a soft spot for a genuinely sweet (but not saccharine) pop song that is just, well, cheerful.  I grew up with The Cowsills’ “The Rain, The Park, and Other Things” stuck in my head, and I still get all mushy whenever I play Brian Wilson’s Pet Sounds (as any  person with a hint of life in them would).   For some reason, when Cheb Mami’s lovely tenor and this particular upbeat riff comes up my shuffle, I feel better.

I made an attempt to find the English translation for these lyrics (or to find these lyrics at all).  No luck.  I’m a bit shocked that, with all of the information out there on the internet, these translations aren’t there.  I’ve had this experience with other quote-unquote world music songs, especially those in Arabic and African languages.  When I found some Cheb Mami songs in the original language and tried to run it through my Google language translator, the software got completely flummoxed.  The closest I could get was a French to English (the Arabic to English got me nowhere), but even then, many of the lines were bungled.  The particular lyrics from another song from Dellali seemed to have some political undertones, but who can tell?  (One of the few sites I found that has Arabic to English song translations is a blog, Arabic Song Lyrics and Translations.)

With world music, I’ve just learned to listen without understanding the words.  I get frustrated at times when the intensity of the voice clearly demonstrates that the words matter, but it hasn’t stopped me from loving, say, the sweeps and sails of Mami’s voice.

Cheb Mami’s most recent CD, Layali, seems to be mostly sell-out dance music, some really bad disco of the late 80’s variety.  Repetitive electronic beats, chick backup singers, a multitude of American soloists, etc.  It’s clearly a bid to get over internationally.  It loses that distinctive flavor of a particular place; it loses all atmosphere.  If I want Mariah Carey, and I do not, I would buy it.  When I hear it, I see French discos in my head.   I also noticed that he relies on the backup singers far more, making me wonder if his voice just isn’t as strong & he’s trying to cover it up.  (One popular song of this record has the chorus “Come on, baby, let’s go dance.”  You don’t even need a translator for that message.)  It’s kind of sad to see someone who is so talented and distinctive go the way of all sap & mush.

Cheb Mami’s album Dellali & his other work can be purchased just about anyplace; here’s the link on Amazon.

So: I leave you with another catchy, pretty song from Dellali:Viens Habibi.

e c

 

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record love, part 1: hamburger lady

April 19, 2008 · Leave a Comment

There’s a subculture out there.  You know there must be, there are so many others.  I knew them even before the days of the internet, back when suggestions were swapped at Appletree counters, trades made in the dusty, dark upstairs of the parents’ used furniture store.  Then, the collectors kept them in pristine in sleeves, lined in rows like shiny machines, perfectly alphabetized.  They filled basement shelves, praying for the absence of rain.  Quality maintained by dehumidifiers.  By the care you’d give to rare plants.  Who else would guard them?

 

And when played, the sound was crisp, clean, real, as if you were there– better than live, this wall of sound.  Mulvee had ‘em in the basement. The ones who would never come to our town, the ones from Britian and L.A., NYC, even France, accented Japan, they announced themselves through Mulvee’s singularly placed speakers and if you closed your eyes and breathed in everyone else’s smoke you might think that yes, even someone as concrete as you would understand the frightening strains of Throbbing Gristle or the angular architectural triumphs of Pere Ubu as they built a whole new City.  What a relief  when Elvis Costello came on, Get Happy!, how familiar and warm that voice, someone you could really argue with in the middle of the night, that he would enter the room of plastic and plants.  And then Mulvee got that beer brewing thing and a new era was launched.  It was just us in there, you know–no one was running in and out, this was the world of the quiet, this was a place where musicians rarely visited in the flesh (except, well, Charlie Daniels over and over again & occasionally Buddy Guy on the route between St. Louis and Chicago), this was a place where the information was known only to the select and the not necessarily “hip,” and we weren’t even posing because nobody knew.  We didn’t even have a freaking college that you would call a real college, there was no gathering spot no Clark Street or Belmont, sometimes the local new wavers or that rare party when Adrien Belew the guitarist who played with Bowie would come in and there’s be flashing lights and the whole thing–Adrian Belew is the nicest guy ever, practically a doofus so nice–I can’t remember why he was in our city, he lived around there, he was as close as we’d ever get to a celebrity–.  Look, there was nobody to know.  There was no internet, right, so it wasn’t even up on Facebook, that we were so underground, there was just this obsession.  And it wasn’t even shared by all of us.  We all were in love with different sounds.  I thought Throbbing Gristle  too droney, and Kraftwerk, while appreciated, did not move me.  (Throbbing Gristle: “Hamburger Lady” played with its incessant hamburger lady repetition, electronically altered, like entering an empty vat with slick metal and no way out, played when our friend burned over 70% of her body popped over and the ex and Mulvee laughing their asses off until she said: “You know, that happened to me.”  We didn’t know.  “A kerosene lamp exploded.  I spent months in the hospital.  I spent a year with my mother.  I hate my mother.  My husband left me.  He didn’t even visit me.  See?”  And she pulled up her long skirt to reveal an intricate web of pink and white tissue.)

 

How abstract it all seemed in the day, how taken for granted now.

 

We all of us loved Mulvee’s collection. 

 

We were in awe of the plastic sleeves (even while we ridiculed the anal-retentiveness, snicker snicker what a nerdball, amazed by the way the record was carefully cleaned before going onto the turntable, the way it was handled always on the edges, not a fingerprint to distort the clarity.  We were afraid to touch anything too much, especially since Mulvee would huddle around like a worried parent, but we did it anyway.  A deliberate smack in the groove when he wasn’t looking but not enough to cause permanent damage just enough to fuck with the plan a little because that level of order is terrifying….  Fifteen, twenty minutes passed looking at the artwork on Devo’s, reading the liner notes that came with the Robert Johnson.  Voice like David Byrne’s chanting not him though way way out there thumpathump beatbeatbeat wwwwwwooooooooooguitar………………… . . . . . . . . . . . Struuuummmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmeeeee……… . . .. . . .. . . … . . . . . . . . . . . . . Call me a drunk be a final solution……..(is that what he said?  Mulvee, do you have the liner notes?)…thumpa…nuclear destruction……natural selection……no, not a drunk…..need a final solution…….bassssswoooooooo

 

Money from the government job went into the sound system.  The subwoofer, the eternally crisp speaker, the needle–a needle alone could cost hundreds, for it was this that touched the groove so lightly, took black plastic and turned it into light and night–.  So much for that tiny room.  Too much for the neighbors, windows closed.  Nearly rattling the frame, but not quite.  This would create distortion.  No on distortion.  Unless intentional.  It was not.  Thirty seconds over Tokyo.  Solution?  Finance.  Columns.  Checking the data against the log?  Call up the captain.  It’s a government town.  A government town.  Don’t you worry about me….

 

Discipline.  Berlin.  That’s what it takes, right.  Industrial.  Mulvee’s open heart surgery.  You could die.  They thought he’d die.  He wasn’t supposed to make it to 21.  Twenty one’s the number.  He liked to sleep in a coffin.  Or so they said.  I doubt it, seriously.  Mumbles beneath the throbbing drone, the spirits, demons, muttering the way they did.  Gothic, it is….medical advances…..a fan…..the saw…..the light, the way they talk around you on the table before and after….and the nightmares, the nightmares…..it’s okay….burn unit burn unit….(Hell, you always know it’s German.  Sorry, British.  Stupid.)

 

Pere Ubu: Cleveland, Ohio.  Devo: Akron.  Is there hope? 

 

The lights kept the plants alive.  They curled and strained beneath the fluorescents.

 

It’s boring if you don’t smoke.

And then there was the flood.  Was that before or after we began to drift away?  The sleeves saved some.  Not all.  The insurance payment was substantial.  Photographs documented their existence, documented the loss.  Creeping mold.  The mold inhabited, never went away, no matter the fluids you never shake the smell really.  It took something out of it.  You get tired, when you acquire and protect, create an archive as it were, and then.  No matter what precautions.  Somewhere in it all, Mulvee took up photography. 

 

That flood.  And the new wave band broke up, they all went here and there.  Mostly they stayed in town.  People got married, had babies, broke up, people kept jobs.  Scandals, regrets, the bars closing up replaced by those government worker pickup places, the hippies going out of business left no performance space, even we knew it would not improve.  The record store closed.  It happens that way, there’s no holding on once it goes.

Mulvee got married.  Everyone was so surprised.  He’d never had a girlfriend.  Our friend left her husband and son to marry Mulvee.  By then we never saw him much.  It was strange.  I don’t know if they listen, what they listen to, if they are still together, even if Mulvee is still alive.  Pere Ubu–mostly a guy with a synthesizer, David Thomas–Pere Ubu still makes electronic symphonies.  Throbbing Gristle…who cares.  And hamburger lady?–she got on her bike and rode off, never ashamed to show the scar flowers, the real tattoos on her bare legs.

 

 

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I want to like bluegrass. I have failed.

April 3, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I want to like folkie bluegrass music.  I really do.  I love the artistry, love the sound of the mandolin.  I’m impressed by virtuoso playing.  I like the melancholia.  I love Bill Monroe, Doc Watson, the old farts.  I like old country, The Carter Family, even Kitty Wells, Loretta Lynn.  I want to like what’s coming out now.  I keep trying, I do.  But I keep getting bored.

I feel like I’m betraying my roots to say so.  But I can rarely get past a second listen of most bluegrass albums.  They’re so damned repetitious.  They emphasize the playing over the songwriting, over the words, and I ultimately can’t stand the way the same riffs come up over and over again.  And they bring to mind the folk clubs where I’ve seen these musicians.   They are staid, respectful places, full of intense listening, ponytails, very few whoops and hollers, and no dancing.  This isn’t what it was supposed to be about.

I was curious about what some women bluegrass players were up to, and I received in the mail some CDs to review.  Man, I wanted to like them, I really did try.  And I did, first listen.  Sometimes, I was blown away at the sheer energy and technique.  But as I played them again, I was just left sort of empty and even vaguely depressed by the fact that I wanted just…more. 

images.jpeg 

Corinne West is a bluegrass player whose CD Second Sight left me neutral. Her musicianship–her picking–impressed me; her lyrics and the repetitious nature of the songs kind of…bored me on later listens. She seems sweet and sincere, likely kind, and this abundance of honey ultimately disinterested me.  Maybe I have too much punk in my background, but if I’m going to listen to bluegrassy folk, I want the smart, mean edge of Richard Thompson or the sheer transcendent voice of Sandy Denny.  I’ll want something truly melancholic, angry like Lila Downs.  (The contrast was apparent on West’s Spanish language song “La Macorina,” which seemed to be nearly recited, without feeling.  I kept thinking what that song would be with Lila’s sad silk tones).  A bluegrass purist would say, “Well, clearly you’ve just cited musicians that are hardly real bluegrass.”  That’s the problem, folks.  Bluegrass isn’t pure, ought not to be pure–it’s always been a big hodgepodge of the down and out backwoods rural culture.  It ought not to be held into artificial boundaries.  Corinne West is beautifully accurate, controlled, positive, and I wanted something to slip.

All that said, if you like extremely energetic banjo picking, she’s got it in a song like “Gandy Dancer,” where the notes scatter all over up and down; I just blocked out her voice and paid attention to the pickin’.  That’s the best way to approach music like this.  If you like pretty, check out “Second Sight,” with its “needle and its eye—yi–yi–“ refrain.  Each individual song demonstrates intricate prettiness, and is best played in a mix of more adventurous tones by other people.  As a whole, her CD becomes monotonous.Second Sight

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Shifting into a more country vein, let’s talk Rhonda Vincent.  Wow.  Now here’s a chick that scares me.  She is an “All American Bluegrass Girl,” with all that this may mean–she’s the real thing.  She’s patriotic as hell, she’s “proud of where she’s been,” which is Missouri.  She’s immersed in the Grand Ol’ Opry tradition, which is kind of cool, given the way country music seems to have let go of its bluegrass/true twang roots.  There’s a lot of Southern kick-ass defensiveness, and, as I said, people like this scare the hell out of me.  I have the same background, and they always seem to be pissed off at me.  I think that Rhonda would be, too–somehow I don’t think this is a lady who’d move to Denver and drink espresso in the chrome coffeehouses the way I like to do.  So….I respect Rhonda Vincent.  She’s a true believer–she’s not saying this All American crap to get over–she really, and I mean really, supports the servicemen while picking like a madwoman.  There’s also the occasional gospel, as on “Jesus Built a Bridge to Heaven,” a pleasant, rocking song that is nice but unexceptional.  But she never loses her  energy–a song like “Ashes of St. Augustine” on All American Bluegrass Girl skips along all of the hard-driving spectrum.  In fact, many of her songs on this CD hit this breakneck pace–so much so that it’s exhausting.  Rhonda, calm down once in awhile, hon, we know you can play.   So I was thinking.

            Rhonda takes a more melancholic tone in Good Thing Going, her new CD on the trad folkie label Rounder Records.  Her voice and its slippery twang take off on “I’m Leaving,” even getting into a little yodel.  The song “I Give All My Love to You” is a country ballad, but pretty boring (“it’s you and me together/but today I’ll make you mine”–yuck!).  “Just One of Kind” starts out with the line “within the prison of my soul/locked within my troubled mind” and goes on to talk about the “plain old fashioned boy.”  Okay, I’m thinking that this is a bid for big Nashville success, and as good as all that vocal work and fingerwork I have to say, er, please no.  Give me that old style mania.

I’ve found myself wanting to hear a simpler kind of country music.  And as much as I like Gillian Welch, I don’t mean her.  She’s too sophisticated, urban.  I’m meaning the gritty, pissy stuff.  Gretchen Wilson, sometimes Shelby Lynne when she’s not getting all slick on us.  Sure, the technique might not be crazy good and in your face.  But at least the girls got some balls. 

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New wave roots punkers The Fleshtones–hey, a book!

March 12, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Anybody remember The Fleshtones?  Anybody heard of The Fleshtones? 

This roots garage band from the late 70’s/80’s/today gets an interesting and extended profile in Joe Bonomo’s book Sweat: The Story of the Fleshtones, out on Continuum Books.  The story might be best expressed in this way: the band’s best two albums, Hexbreaker! and Roman Gods, is still not out on CD, not available to download as mp3’s, and here’s a book about the band itself, out by a major publisher.  Why isn’t anybody awake?fleshtones.jpg

 

You can download some of the band’s later CDs off of emusic.com, but that’s not quite the feel we want here.  The point is that the band’s music was never promoted properly, not by the band (who, according to the book, was always wrecked), but especially not by the labels.  It’s not that the opportunities weren’t there: they were initially under contract with I.R.S., which was working with some of the most popular indie bands of the era (like the Go-Gos and the Police).  The band, which apparently was HOT onstage, fleshtones83-10-20.jpgspent all of its time on the road on the States and in Europe.  Its fleshtonesamericanbeat.jpgbase, though, was nearly always NYC and the Peppermint Lounge and various crash apartments.  They were so good live that they got the attention of the New York press & critics & this was what they were trying desperately to ride when recording.  The energy just didn’t make the transfer to vinyl—at least not usually—and the cool production of the time didn’t work with the bluesy Standells-type, Stax/Volt, alt-country sound.  They’d probably do way better today, when they could get some buddy with computer skills to sell their music directly. 

fleshtones_sweat_sept_07.jpg The story as told in Sweat is strangely not sad.  It probably should be sad, but the book has a distant feel.  It’s a recounting of deals gone bad, of screw ups, of narcotics.  The thing was, the book never let me get to know any of these guys, so while I was intrigued by the machinations, I didn’t really care about them at all.  I didn’t pity the musicians, didn’t feel like they got what they deserved, nada.  I felt like I understood the frustrated producers more than I did the guys, whose personalities I overall could barely separate.  (Except for Gordon, the horn player, who did all kinds of crazy self-destructive things.)  I was told that Peter was an intellectual genius and condescending, but honestly, I didn’t see it.  Once in awhile I’d hear that a guy broke up with a girlfriend, like Judy.  Who is Judy? Randomly, I’d hear a reference to someone being married, but I had no idea who he married or why or how that all worked with being on the road all the time.   I didn’t know who their friends and enemies were.  It’s like…the guys didn’t exist as individuals in the book.  They were more representatives of the Roots Punk Sound (or something).  And since they apparently helped to bring about their own lack of success, I would’ve liked a little more personal understanding of just how that happened.  The closest I can get is that they were truly just too honestly garage band, too performance oriented, too drunk, too working class, too cranky to really work the business end. 

I read the book because I remember the Fleshtones.  I had their two best records, Roman Gods and Hexbreakers!  They were gloriously fun records, great for parties and to dance around to when nobody was looking.  They were more ballsy, less intellectual, more Americana than most of the other bands of the era.  I don’t have the albums anymore (that’s what happens in breakups), but I remember the moment.  When I saw the book, my first response was, “The Fleshtones?  They’re still around?  Someone wrote a book about them?  Why?”  They were one of the most fun bands of the crazy period that ended up getting called New Wave/Punk.  Just can’t shake off the horn joy of the time, and so here’s a book.  Young bands, it’s a cautionary tale.  I.R.S., who put out the best of the Fleshtones records, was absorbed by MCA.  Old punkers, it’s all too familiar.  Fleshtones and whoever owns the I.R.S. music catalog: why the hell isn’t The Fleshtones’ old music available for download RIGHT NOW.

 

 

 

 

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