Tuesday November 1st, 2005 @ 9:01 PM
Winking At the World
My stepson, Levi, is sixteen and fascinated with zombies, insistent that I watch one of his zombie movies. I was bored into stupefaction. Each of my eyes looked like a bowl of tapioca pudding with a cherry in the center.
Zombies, as far as I can tell, are human beings who are driven by some weird survival instinct while being otherwise devoid of all personality. In some cases they have been inadequately resurrected from the dead. They seem to do things as a mindless, conformist gang. I know this much: I don’t want to be one and neither do you.
As a society, that is why we love our musicians. As a nation that is why we treasure New Orleans. The American root music culture of New Orleans, so flamboyantly and grandly displayed, gives personality to a great task and toil population.
Everyday societal functions can become tedious as we labor at dispassionate jobs to put bread on the table. I’ve certainly been there. I once had a job breaking up concrete curbs with a ninety-pound jackhammer. After three straight weeks of this, I had become a zombie. To get through a day I had to take on the mind set of a dog chained to a post, otherwise I’d have just sat down on the curb in the hot sun and cried like a baby.
The great American mythologist, Joseph Campbell, explains why we common human beings will jeopardize our lives, our well being, even the well being of our families, to rescue a total stranger in dire straits. “It is because at the core of our being, we recognize that we are one.” We share a common life source, inhabit the same tiny planet in a gargantuan, mysterious universe, and we feel each other’s fears, loves, and sufferings. We are intimately identified and inextricably bonded. Disaster forces us to think about this and express it.
After 9/11 we applauded and worshipped our fireman and policeman, because they showed the world that human beings have within themselves prodigious courage. They made us proud to be human especially as a counterpoint to the terrorists who made us ashamed of our nature. The twin towers rescuers declared by example to mankind and to each of us individually: we humans can be beautiful, and profoundly noble.
In a different kind of disaster, Hurricane Katrina bludgeoned the smile off the face of society and ripped the twinkle from its eye. It assaulted that part of us that is fun, playful, and delightfully creative, in short, our collective personality. There is no city in America that can wink at the world with the panache of New Orleans, and in so doing unveil our roots, soul, and poetic charm.
The very mention of the name, New Orleans, tells the world that America is friendly as a wiggling pup, richer than Midas in music, and more fun than a tickling uncle. It can evoke the same response the chief bandit had in the movie Three Amigos when he grinned broadly and said, “I like these guys.” Are there any among us who aren’t proud of the contribution to America’s sum and substance that New Orleans music adds?
That’s why radio broadcasts, television reports, and newspaper articles asked about the state of musicians and music clubs. “Where is Dr. John, Fats Domino, Allen Toussaint, Harry Connick, Jr., Henry Butler?” The list went on and on. Many inquired about Professor Longhair who is long dead, but immortalized. The New Orleans music scene is of precious value to Americans and we don’t want to lose it, because in so doing we diminish such an integral and identifiable part of our collective character and we face the drudgery of our vicissitudes, like the zombies we don’t want to be. Among its many attributes, New Orleans is the twinkle in our eye.
Posted by Carl
Wednesday September 28th, 2005 @ 8:55 PM
Jason opened the package and read the cheap photocopy inside, “you’ve got to read this, Carl,” he said.
I looked at the handwriting, all caps slanting unevenly across the page. It was a promotional flyer from a new band in Cheyenne, Wyoming. It began “Sun Raze take Cheyenne by storm…” We owned a popular nightclub in those days and received several such promo kits every day.
Let’s examine what we can learn from just this much information. What professional band would send a hand written photocopy to be taken seriously? But these guys had an important message: they were conquering geographical territory. So far they had taken Cheyenne. Not lightly either, but “by storm.” Were we to assume that this meant all 50,000 residents of Cheyenne? If not, then how many? Since one could assume that little children and old people were not in this equation, that removes about twenty grand right there. Since this was not a country band, another twenty grand wouldn’t be included. Since they just started up and since they only played in one of two bars that held a capacity of a hundred people or so, we have to assume that out of Cheyenne’s fifty thousand populace, they’d played to maybe two hundred. However, since a new band usually seeds the audience with friends and relatives for about the first six gigs, these two audiences were most likely the same people. So a final tally of maybe one hundred is what we can conclude “taking Cheyenne…” actually meant.
Now what does it mean, “by storm?” I’m guessing we were to assume that the converts were won quickly and powerfully. Since mom and dad, cousins and siblings, neighbors and school friends were already won over before the band even formed, I will give them that the conversion was rather quick.
Now the rest of the promo letter was filled with equally embarrassing self-proclamations: “If you liked Stevie Ray, you’ll love Little Ray Stevenson…his guitar sears like a cutting torch…this band will kick your ass…opened for Jose Flores and the Hot Tamales at the VFW prosthetics fundraiser.”
Here’s one thing you can count on, every band in the country thinks they are better than they are. It forms a weird pattern. When a band starts out they think they are about 1000 times better than they are. They hear their mom and buddies and girlfriends cheering and they thrill to the deafening blast of the amplifiers and they are lofted into psychodelia. In their minds they are Metallica prancing and stomping about the great stage. The longer a band is together, the less blown up this exaggerated view of themselves. First their moms don’t come any more, then their friends, then they go on their first road trip and play to twelve strangers who stand around booing, laughing at them, giving them the finger, and pelting them with ice cubes. At some point they are taken down to the lowest point a musician can get which is thinking they are twice as good as they are. Here they give up, or start getting success. Either way the scale starts back the other way.
If they quit, the more years go by, the better they think they were until they are telling old-timers at the local watering hole that they once took Cheyenne by storm. In their memory, thousands of people were screaming for them at the VFW prosthetics fundraiser, only it has become the opening for BB King when he played the Pavilion.
If, on the other hand, they become successful, their self-view can take them back to 1000 times as good as they are. I think of the sixties British Rock groups who got a hit record, like Herman’s Hermits singing, “I’m Hen-er-ee the eighth I am, Enereeee the eighth, I am I am…”
Their music aside, if the Hermits had even looked one thousand times as good as they did onstage, they still wouldn’t be as cool as James Brown.
Now you fans can do the music world a lot of good by being able to distinguish between a truly good band and a pretender and then cheering or booing accordingly. The main source for musicians’ self-image warp is accolade. It is hard not to think you’re pretty cool when an audience is screaming and clapping and whistling and girls are flashing their breasts. The worst thing you can do when a band sucks is to give them accolade. This means we have to listen to them again. Girls, if you must show your appreciation with breasts, not saying this isn’t a great idea, then save them for those who really deserve the honor. You’ll have those musical cretins out buying bigger amps, smoke machines, and leather pants if you keep that up. Do us all a favor and don’t encourage these yo yo’s with boobage.
I personally think that the kindest thing you can do when you hear a lousy band is to boo, laugh, pelt them with ice cubes, and give them the finger. This way they’ll go get a job at Seven Eleven, find a nice little wife, have a couple of kids, pay their taxes and say their prayers. Society is much stronger this way. They can tell their grandkids about how they opened for Jose Flores and the Hot Tamales and they’ll believe it was fabulous and so will their grandkids and everybody will be happy. If you applaud these guys and show them breasts, they’ll end up in their forties still hauling out their leather pants on weekends playing the VFW and winking at your daughters. Be merciful, kill them when you have the chance.
So how can you tell if a band is bad? Some things are obvious, like horrid tone and bad timing, but I’m going to give you the subtler clues-don’t let them fool you:
1) Their equipment is too nice. If you see amps with no rips, scuffs, or dirt, and drums that gleam and have a bunch of ancillary hardware, and an elaborate lighting system and a P.A. that takes half a day to set up, the band sucks. The two nicest drum kits I ever saw belonged to a lawyer and a teen-ager with rich parents. Both drummers sucked.
Good bands have hauled their equipment around so long that it looks war orphan poor. And they leave most of it at home.
2) They play Mustang Sally without being threatened or cajoled. All good musicians have come to hate that song, most of them at least a dozen years ago. This extends to Sharp Dressed Man and anything by Bob Seger. If you hear them playing these songs and you know they are a good band, look closely and you’ll see that they are in extreme pain.
3) You see a middle-aged lady in the audience with a video camera who looks suspiciously like a mother. Mother’s only come out when their kid’s band is starting out, or they are famous. If the band you are watching isn’t famous, well, there you go.
4) The frontman winks at women while doing overt pelvic undulations. If he
does this while sporting a gut, hairy chest, and gold chains or dog tags, oblivious to the giggling girls who are sticking their fingers down their throats, the band not only sucks, they are disgracing mankind.
5) The guitarist is wearing a Stevie Ray Vaughn outfit. Even one item is bad, but if it is the entire regalia then you’re in for a long night. Here’s the clues: a flat brimmed hat with silver spangles around it; the whiskers growing in a V just below the lower lip, not the chin; a silver spangled belt; puffy sleeved shirt with a scarf around the neck; pants tucked into moccasin style boots. Now if the guy actually adds the Mexican serape to this outfit you need to sic your dog pack on him have them drag him around the parking lot for a couple of hours.
6) The time between songs is longer than the songs. When a band has to use this time to light up cigarettes, drink beer, confer on what song to play next, ask who starts the piece, and argue with their wife or girlfriend, the band is more amateurish than a sixth grade play about Pilgrims. If they lean into the microphone and start demanding drinks from the bar over the P.A., you know they are a step away from calling Bingo at an Elk’s club in Nebraska.
7) They tape words to songs on the mic stands. Bands that do this couldn’t be more embarrassing if they puked on themselves. Hell, why not just get a karoke machine and a screen?
8) Their sound check takes longer than their gig. Bad bands feel very important walking around sound checking and fussing over things about which they know very little. They take great pride in conferring and discussing with serious looks on their faces. I’ve seen amateur bands sound check the entire day previous to their gig. A good band sound checks the way an old cowpoke rolls his own cigarette with one hand-no fuss, no muss.
9) One or more of the members has his back turned to the audience all night. This is made worse if they fiddle with equipment while they are playing, still worse if they smoke a pipe. This seeming indifference is really insecurity to the point of wetting his pants. It is the opposite of panache and charisma. These bands would be much better off replacing these guys with cardboard cutouts fronting a tape recorder.
10) The band is huddled together like sheep. This is especially bad on a big stage. They do this for security purposes, same as sheep. It is exacerbated if they all wear dark glasses for Ostrich purposes, thinking you can’t see them because they can’t see you. These guys need to take an injection of hormones and have their wives bitch slap them a few times before going on stage. When a guy takes up guitar and starts practicing, perhaps he should practice audience rapport in the mirror at the same time, like Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver: “Are you talking to me? Are you talking to me?” If you were the guy in junior high who waited for everyone to leave the locker room so you could get undressed, being a stage personality is probably not the job for you.
The last clue I’m going to cover today so you can tell which bands are bad, is going into the club and seeing only twelve people there, booing, laughing, pelting the band with ice, and giving them the finger. This would be number eleven, but who ever heard of eleven points to anything? If you see this kind of rude behavior going on, there is only one appropriate action to take-join them. Remember they are actually doing the band and the world a favor. These are humanitarians in action and you probably need to do something good for a change as well. So give it everything you’ve got: jeering would be nice; heckling and mooning are good; sticking your tongue out and wiggling your fingers in your ears is always a nice touch; you can’t beat a good raspberry. I would recommend calling their mothers nasty names, but remember the lady with the video camera is probably a band mother. So try insulting their dads, even the mom would appreciate that.
Get rid of these guys before they do something injurious, like putting on a concert at the local grade school. One of them is probably the school principal anyway. You owe it to our youth. And if you are a female, please don’t show them breasts. I have a theory that one sincere flashing of breasts negates ten bad things you do to the band. One woman can wipe out a lot of hard work by the fellows.
Carl
Posted by Carl
Monday August 1st, 2005 @ 9:00 PM
Emotional Intelligence
“Sonny Boy Williamson was just another big, dumb, N_____,” he sneered between sips of Vodka. “He was a no good drunk, lived in a dump, and was the biggest liar in town. Hell, even his damned name was a lie. He killed a man too. And we make the sonovabitch into a hero.
I looked at the two bricks lying on the bar. They had just torn down the “dump” where Sonny Boy had lived, and I snagged the bricks with the intention of putting them on my big roll-top desk at home.
The man continued his tirade, “You Yankee bastards idolize Sonny Boy enough to take the bricks from his shanty.” He paused to consider the irony, and chuckled. “Hell, the big ape didn’t even have a car, walked everywhere he went. Harmonicas only cost a quarter back then and Sonny Boy still couldn’t afford ‘em. Ask old man Gist down at the music store, he’ll tell you the club owners used to keep harps back ‘o the bar for Sonny Boy and loan them to him when he came to play. If they let him have them he’d blow them out playing for somebody else and wouldn’t have one next time he came around.
We paused and took in the bust of Sonny Boy sitting on the bar next to us that had started our conversation. I was saddened as the man finished his assessment of one of the most famous Blues men to have ever lived, “His last day on earth he was playing at a high school graduation party, May of “65″ and a bunch of us kids got to watch him puke blood. Ornery old bastard drank himself to death.”
The man who told me these things died a couple of years later of alcohol poisoning. It was a more sophisticated death than Sonny Boy got because it was in a hospital and cost him lots of money, thereby making it respectable. I guess that’s where smart people go to die.
Unfortunately, most of what this bigoted man told me was true, and he therefore equated Sonny Boy’s miserable existence with being “dumb,” as in stupid. Sonny Boy, a.k.a., Rice Miller, among several other aliases, was a lot of bad things, but he wasn’t stupid.
Innate intelligence tries to find a way to surface in a personality, even when it is stifled in ignorance, poverty, poor habits and negative values. If it is not given the avenue of formal education it finds a route in feelings. For lack of a better term, I call it emotional intelligence, and I see evidence of it in ignoble blues musicians like Sonny Boy.
He was a journalistic Christmas Tree festooned in vivid metaphors: His chest, a blacksmith bellows rushing wind through a broken picket fence of bad teeth…hands like condor wings flapping a great rush of wah, wahs, onto notes bent like palm trees in a hurricane…a clown goat in derby-topped harlequin suit who could play the harp Popsicle fashion with no hands…
He couldn’t afford a giant brace of harmonica’s which he blew out faster than less powerful players, so he learned to get the most out of what he had. He learned to play in different keys with one diatonic harp. Now without launching into a detailed harp lesson, suffice it to say that I play harp just well enough to know how incredibly hard that is. He had to know every harp position well enough to know which notes to play in every different key, and/or he had to overblow, or blow-bend the draw notes, which maybe one in ten thousand harp players, can do worth a tinker’s damn. My money says that we could take every Rhodes scholar and Rocket Scientist in America and give them unlimited time to practice and they’d come up for air scratching their collective great brains.
While Sonny Boy is probably the most quoted harp player in history, which says all that is needed about his original vocabulary of licks, comps, and runs, this column isn’t about just him. I am using him as a window through and beyond the prejudice and ignorance that keep the geniuses of our root music in ignominy. It’s a scene where “poor dumb blacks” would unravel the wire around a broom and stretch and nail it to a board from the porch to make a slide guitar with the aid of a coke bottle. It’s a testimony to the those living in blistering poverty who took the harmonica, invented in Europe to play simple melodies, and figured out how to bend the notes and coax a haunting beauty and a whole new genre of music from unintended depths of the simple reeds. It’s a tribute to the emotionally intelligent who were given nothing else by God and country, and who returned to us an entirely new dimension of understanding music.
Posted by Carl