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
Wednesday June 1st, 2005 @ 8:59 PM
Generation Blues
My father’s eyes twinkled as he staggered into the living room under the weight of our first television set. He was giving his four children a literal window to the world and never again would we be confined to the mundane monotony of Laramie, Wyoming. The busts of Mozart and Beethoven, which sat atop the piano, stared stoically at our new contraption as my father adjusted the rabbit ears.
We children sat cross-legged before this fantastic device, excitedly praying that our dad could perform some wizardry with the antenna and knobs. When the picture finally came clear my father could not have looked more shocked if a Giant Iguana had crawled out of the screen and started humping his leg. It was Little Richard, precariously pompadoured, prancing about in frilly, open-chested, sartorial outrage, and absolutely violating my father’s beloved eighty-eight keys with rock ‘n roll triplets. He shrieked blasphemous values about taking Long Tall Sally back into the alley while undulating in front of screaming white girls.
It was more than my father could take, let alone Mozart and Beethoven. His face was freeze-framed in electric-chair horror. While impaled by culture shock, his four children bounced on their haunches aglow in jack-o-lantern grins. None of us would ever again be satisfied by what we found in John Thompson’s piano book lessons.
My father thereafter banned us from anything Little Richard-a fight he couldn’t win because the opposing army had too many weapons. Elvis brought his pelvis, Jerry Lee stomped on the keyboard with his boots, James Brown could moonwalk an entire stage in seconds, and the Beatles and Rolling Stones were waiting in the wings to introduce long hair to a crew-cut culture.
But doesn’t every generation fight a losing battle with its children? For it is the tacit task of young people to challenge the tastes and values of their fathers, lest the status quo petrifies the growth and creativity of the human race. My father’s generation horrified their elders by jitterbugging in Zuit suits. My grandfather’s crowd danced the Charleston in Speakeasies. It goes way back because the pilgrim’s brought over Victorian virtues so severe that piano legs were wrapped in gaiters to avoid the possibility of arousal.
Today we’ve reached a strange chapter in America’s perpetual rebellion of youth. It is getting hard to find ways to alarm the last generation. The baby boomers blossomed into hippies who fornicated at festivals, ate LSD for breakfast, set fire to guitars, draft cards, flags, and bras, and used body odor as their cologne of choice. A musical hero might chase drugs with Southern Comfort and a dash of Tabasco sauce.
Music serves as the bellwether for rebellion. The lyricists of my generation had it easy because late fifties folk were listening to the Chipmunks singing ooh eee ooh aah aah, tang tang, walla walla bing bang, and Sheb Wooly had a number one hit with these famous words: it was a one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater…
But today’s youth has to really work at troubling the hippies and then the eighties rockers. Recently I heard this line in syncopated rhythm: beat the bitch with a rat… I wonder how that would sound in Chipmunk?
The gym is an amusing musical matrix. Young males get to play the music and they like it loud. One day after an hour of listening to the unintelligible screaming of a band called Dumpster Juice, I announced that it was only fair if someone representing us older folk could play some music, and to my surprise they agreed without me having to confront some musclehead with his pants hanging down beneath his underwear and his hair spiked stiff enough to aerate my lawn.
My music was on trial. I got out The Best of James Brown. After a couple of songs the boys were nodding approval. “Nice Screaming,” they said. Until then I had never realized just how much screaming James did. I guess old or young we aren’t that far apart, about two octaves I’d guess.
Posted by Carl
Wednesday August 2nd, 2000 @ 8:58 PM
Jazz vs. Blues
I’m always being asked innocently by acquaintances and relatives what kind of music my band plays. When I say blues they almost always smile in delight as though we’ve made an unanticipated connection. “I love blues,” a friend declares with sincere enthusiasm. “My uncle played in a jazz band when I was a kid. We went to hear him in the City Park one time.”
What?
How am I supposed to respond without sarcasm? Let’s see: “Gee, we must be soul brothers, let’s go over to your house and listen to your Thelonious Monk collection, now there’s a blues man if I ever heard one.”
Here’s some other choice connections: “Five years ago we went to the Bluegrass festival in Telluride…I love blues, my favorite band is Moody Blues…or Blues Traveler…I like the old blues like Janis Joplin and Led Zeppelin…”
If you asked Americans to name one blues singer, almost all of them would say, B.B. King. If you asked them to name two, they’d probably throw in either Dan Ackroyd or one of the Belushi brothers. If you asked for a third, you might get any damned suggestion from Bo Bice to Tiny Tim, or they might just give up and defer to their uncle who plays jazz at the city park.
I’m going to be incredibly kind and forgive the ignorance of those who mistake Bluegrass for Blues, or those who think Moody Blues is a Blues band. Why? Because, after all, the word blue is a commonality. Not everybody is Sherlock Holmes.
But why do we lump Jazz and Blues together as one genre? Most jazz guys I know view blues as simple and primitive and way too easy for their sophisticated skills. Most blues men I know think jazz is musical chatter or clutter and devoid of emotion. Not all. Some jazz musicians join blues jams in an attempt to have soul. Some blues musicians play jazz in an attempt to prove they have brains. Occasionally I even find someone who is skilled at and loves both, but rarely. The old adage that jazz is the music of the head and blues is the music of the heart, if true, would explain the bifurcation.
If you don’t think the aficienados know the difference, consider that I once tried to audition my band in a jazz club in Denver. The owner was old and cranky. “Blues!” He exclaimed indignantly, as though I’d handed him a stinky diaper. “This is a goddamned jazz club. Haven’t had a blues band in the entire history of the place.” He said it defiantly, as though he had successfully defended against the barbaric hordes from the Russian Steppes. “Whaduyuh want my customers to hang me back in the alley?
I trudged out of the place wondering why I felt like I did when they wouldn’t let me into advanced Algebra. Of course the reason I wanted in was that the girl from whose paper I always cheated was headed there. But I have a point to make. What makes music good or bad is the craftsmanship, not the genre. Somewhere inside it should be melody, phrasing, originality, soul, dynamics, and technique. And we, as the American public, should seek and reward those qualities.
If instead we are content to applaud wildly in a Karaoke bar for some poor pilgrim singing Patsy Cline’s “Crazy,” and define that as quality entertainment, then we deserve what we get. Not being able to distinguish blues from bluegrass or jazz is akin to thinking all wines are just “booze.” Not being able to distinguish the quality music of any genre from the cheap and dismal is like pouring a glass of Ripple into a vintage Cabernet Sauvignon, and declaring with a burp, “It ain’t that bad!”
Posted by Carl