Life’s Rich Pageant

I.R.S., 1986

So, R.E.M. broke up.

I have to be honest: I didn’t exactly know they were together. I’m an R.E.M. fan, but I still tend to think of 1994’s Monster as their “new” album, because I’m pretty sure that’s the last of their albums I bought. However, lately, in part because I’ve been around a lot of mandolins recently, I’ve been revisiting their earlier albums and remembering how much I loved this band, and why.

They’re good. Really good. They make me raise my head up and sing along and sometimes even jump up and down. They clearly know way more about music — structure, harmony, all that academic stuff — than many of their contemporaries. They send me back to times and places far from here. They last.

In fact, they often get better over time: Automatic for the People and Monster were almost dirty secrets for me at the time of their releases, because R.E.M. was by that time firmly a popular band and grunge was happening and they weren’t “hard” or “loud”; I joined in with other alternative posers in whispering that R.E.M. were “sellouts” while at night I still listened to Drive over and over until I could fall asleep. Now, without such a time-based pop culture context (and partially because compared to a lot of popular rock bands now, R.E.M. is so obviously cool and dark and different), those “mainstream” albums of theirs play even better.

R.E.M.’s songs consisted of rock structures, harmonic vocals, and fine-tuned songwriting — with countryish suggestions via fingerpicking and a bit of twang in Michael Stipe’s voice. They were not a country band, but they were a rock band from Georgia. They wrote about some of the same things punk and grunge bands wrote about, but they felt… quieter. And they were good. Bill Berry, Peter Buck, Mike Mills, Michael Stipe: all in their own rights deft and skilled musicians who were so self-possessed they didn’t showboat with their sound, but instead were a group. This was a band, not a lead singer and some backing musicians (I’m speaking about their music and sound here, not about their cultural/celebrity image, which was decidedly and increasingly Stipe-centric). They even all sang harmony.

At the time, people thought this band was political, in the way that at the time a sixth grade me wearing a “save the rainforests” sweatshirt on the first day of school was considered political. In other words: not exactly activism, but earnest and concerned, especially in the face of most pop music of the 80s.

Party to their political earnestness and their emergence from an independent record label, was R.E.M.’s status as the poster band for “college radio”: alternative, indie, whatever you want to call it. I had heard about this when my friends got me into them in high school, but I was a decade too late to understand what college radio in the 80s meant to people who were actually in college in the 80s. I was a child in the 80s; by the time I got into R.E.M., I didn’t know about radio and the way it could build alternative cultures in the face of pop destruction and Reagan-era conformity. I didn’t know about the unique sounds this band was creating or that they were truly unique sounds– or how big their influence was on most of the other bands I loved in the 90s.

Here’s a fun exercise: put on “Old Man Kensey,” from Fables of the Reconstruction. The slow bass intro, the strength of single, dark plucked guitar notes. A droning repetition to the rhythm and the voice. Speed this up a tiny bit, put a little more angst and raw pain in the voice, make it louder and switch out the chorus pedal for a fuzzy distortion and let the song explode at the chorus … and it’s a Nirvana song. Something in the way. Repeat.

For me and my friends, who worshipped Nirvana and Pearl Jam and Madonna and Pavement equally, R.E.M. was about mix tapes and poetic phrasings, long sessions spent driving and singing along in bad harmony, a romanticized image of southern America, and hints at the political wrapped in the eternal emotions of rock and roll. But mostly, despite their cohesiveness as a group, R.E.M. was about the words.

Stipe is a poet. Let’s just be honest here. In the video for “fall on me”, one of my possibly favorite songs of all time, we see only the lyrics, in all caps, sans punctuation, running over upside-down images of humanity’s earthly follies:

Did you notice the lyrics?

A melody and a counter melody. The sky and the sky. There’s a problem feathers iron. Lifting and falling and there was a moment somewhere – my dad’s backyard, a bootleg live R.E.M. mix tape copied over and over via friend and friend, in the hammock, discovering the most immediate way for me to feel grounded: to lie on my back and look at the sky, through overhead leaves if possible, and pray — and ask — that it not fall on me.

Also something about the way humans think we can own things we can’t own.

This was poetry. This was a musical era in rock in which a lyricist could ramble free-associatively in semi-linked metaphors and imagistic expressions of emotion, and still mean something. The best lyricists of a certain kind still do this – Cobain, Malkmus, Jeff Tweedy? Thom Yorke almost gets there but doesn’t let go enough — but it is becoming increasingly rare in rock music, as hooks and guest-spots and statements take over our sonic media like so many status updates.

So I’ll throw on this record and be in the backyard, still years too late to know anything about context, and I’ll be only in poems, in finger-picked poems, under the sky, beginning to fall all over again.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

Reprise, 1969

There are some albums I’ve been afraid to write about. Entire records that sit, shelved, in infamy and, now, silence. They are famous. They are often my favorites. They are by artists about whom miles and miles of prose have been written. What can I possibly have to add to the world’s thoughts on Neil Young? Bob Dylan? Radiohead’s OK Computer and Nirvana’s Nevermind?

Experience is it, at that point. We all know something about Neil Young. He is a classic rock god who also remains pleasingly lo-fi. He’s Canadian. He had a house somewhere off Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz Mountains. He gives to charity. He wears that hair, those flannels. He writes rock music that should be opera in its storytelling grandness but also is intimate and, just, inside himself. His voice is surprisingly nasal and high when you hear it, and his simple, rough guitar riffs live somewhere between blues and riot girl. He rocks. But the knowledge we don’t share about this artist and this particular album is our ever-individualized experiences of the music.

Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere was the first album I owned by Young, though certainly not the first I’d heard or liked, but probably the first I’d listened to deeply, on my own, not just in passing or at the behest of a male friend or as a familiar low-level Rock background. This was Young’s first album with the band Crazy Horse and was recorded in 1968 while he was also still in Crosby Stills Nash & Young, post-Buffalo Springfield, pre-solo fame that arrived with the release of Harvest.

There is a long guitar solo in “Down By The River” that told me everything I needed to know about Neil Young when I first heard it. His playing holds a transparency not often seen in “guitar guys” – a slow pace that allows itself to find the notes, the progressions, the scales, and a tenderness to the picking that belies the roughshod skill behind it. Just a simple concept, iterated: an exploration of a melody. Little ego on the tape– except of course the ego that allows a guitar solo to own most of a 9-minute song. A willingness to leave the sound as it is sounded, and circle back again, and try a new place, and let things sound the way they sound again. This solo sounds… overheard.

When I listen to this music, I have a feeling of being catapulted into a past both my own and born only of myth. It’s like a drive in a hot car through forests, windows down and the sun fearless on top of you, and you hit the dark curved shade-spots around uneven turns in the mountain road and are blinded for moments by the coolness, the deep green flash before you open back up into light of the day. You have been in this town before, you have known these people.

There is a sense of place I have often talked about with certain friends who are from mid-sized towns with strong personalities — towns in California like Santa Cruz, where I’m from, Grass Valley, and San Luis Obispo. We call this sense of place “hometown, not smalltown.”

The designation “hometown” carries with it a certainty of uniqueness, a strong sense of the place and the intimacy the word implies, but also the experience of growing up with the resources and cultural access to know that this home exists inside a particular bubble, and one day you might leave it, but it will always exist. A hometown is a good place to be from, but maybe not to stay. And when, if, you do go back, whether for a visit or because you sometimes get stuck there between stations, your daily path becomes a strong mix of sense memory actions and smells that can alternately drive you up a wall and shore up, support, the very essence of your “self.”

Everyone who leaves the place they are from knows this experience to varying degrees:

This place is what made me; I gotta get outta this place.

And that is the experience I have to add to the discussion of this incredibly famous record. The experience of hometown. For me this album will always be my hometown, and all the times I listened to this music there or all the times this music made me want to go back there, or want to leave. The “Nowhere” of the title track is both “back home” and the place you yearn to escape, the day-to-day running around of plain old hometown life: Santa Cruz and me in it as a grownup in all the ways that has happened, in short and long bursts, since I left at 16.

These songs solos, words, and silences contain the narrative sense of visiting a smallish place where you know everyone, and their parents. Of summers. Of telephone calls you don’t want overheard, hours spent sitting in cars outside driveways just to have some silence, not knowing the names of streets you know better than your own veins, and of the constricting contradictions of family and how they are near us yet far. The sight of Pacific Avenue on a Saturday night when it looks nothing like it looked in my childhood but it smells like home. Seeing old friends thrive, and escape, and not escape, and not be close friends but still be known.

Certain smells, like the wet of redwood lanes when its hot above them. Knowing what time the fog will come in. Now we are older, but we share a past with others in which some drowned and some thrived and some changed shape to suit a new present. And some of us regret some of it, or romanticize all of it, or recognize only hints of it–but we are all equally here and there at the same time. Nowhere.

Reverend Gary Davis, 1935-1949

Yazoo, 1970

How does one talk about the blues? First, be honest:

How do I — as a white person, a music person, a 21^st-century person, and a city person — talk about the blues?

There’s an intense amount of exoticizing and identifying that happens when white rock kids talk about and play the blues. Often we talk about how “real” the blues are, how “universal,” how “anyone can have the blues” without recognizing that we really don’t know what it’s like to experience the world–and more specifically, the music world–in the way that black American musicians did, and do. We live in a racist culture, and white artists often benefit from putting forth blues music in ways that the black artists who invented it never did or have.

The argument usually goes like this: On the one hand, music is universal; the feelings, emotions, and unspeakably musical connective threads sewn into this music can and often do transcend the music’s troubled history and the listener’s particular demographics. And the revolutionary power of music itself, its profound and mobilizing effect on us as creatures who respond to song, may in the end be more effective at addressing issues of race than talking about it. On the other other hand, is it really okay for white folks to keep benefiting from this stuff, paying “homage” to it, romanticizing it, and pretending we know where the heck these guys were really coming from?

Jack White, I’m looking at you. Led Zeppelin, every song you ever did was a Willie Dixon song and he didn’t get nearly as rich or famous for writing them as you did for playing them. People instantly respond to examples like these saying, but they’re the best! They are pure talent and that’s why they are so successful! So mistake me not: I’m not diminishing the contributions of these white musicians; I think both of them are pretty remarkably good bands. But I think, to different degrees, both those artists have profited from the work of less famous, black artists in disproportionate ways, ways that don’t always make me feel okay.

This is dissertation, flame war, lifelong discussion stuff: the history of white folks and the blues. Particularly since the “folk revival” of the 1960s and all the “field recordings” made by white middle-class college students of black poor blues musicians that were pressed on wax. I can’t do this issue justice in this space, but I want to bring it up, because I feel that often white folks go wrong by simply failing to talk about it– failing to recognize that American music comes from and continues to exist within a complicated racialized context and history of appropriation. Hence it is received in that context, too.

So. How do white artists and critics and fans acknowledge the long history of white artists appropriating and emulating black artworks while still appreciating the music of those artists? How do you talk about musical influence and acknowledge privilege, too?

I don’t know. But I think it’s important to bring it up here. Really important. The history of American popular music hinges on this relationship between black and white artists, and how they interact. Call it stealing or homage, evolution or study, anthropology or family. Call it all those things, because it is all those things.

And also remember to call it music.

And try to call out problematic shit when you see it. So I’m going to call out the guy who wrote the Yazoo liner notes for this record.

Here is a sample:

Davis has the uncanny ability of being able to play proficiently in any key. His most unusual arrangement conceptions are found in those songs placed in the key of F.

It’s hard for me to tell when Reverend Davis’ style matured. The 1935 recordings have a rough vocal quality about them but a very competent guitar sound.

While clearly coming from a place of reverence and music-nerd dissection of technique, there is a something about the perspective here that creeps me out. It’s downright anthropological. Which is fine, I mean, that’s a legitimate (if boring) way to talk about music: musicians as cultural anthropological subjects. But to me this smacks of the musicology equivalent of describing a black man as “so articulate!” as though that’s something remarkable for a black man to be: “Davis is competent at guitar, isn’t that great?! How mature (for a backwoods, blind, poor, country-livin’ black man).”  Yes, how mature for a person who is an expert at it, how amazing that a masterful and influential composer and performer of this type of music we all so adore is good at playing this type of music. “And he’s blind! and he can play in keys!” How cute!

[And I'm not a music theorist -- I play bar chords on the guitar, and about 8 of them. But it's news to me that playing in more than one key is something to be singled out for surprised praise. Please correct me if I'm wrong, music geeks.]

I just don’t think the Yazoo guys would have written this way, so academic and condescending, about a white artist. Can you picture a dissection of the unique fingerpicking technologies employed so maturely by Pete Seeger or Woody Guthrie? Or take John Fahey, who was making folk music at the time this record was pressed and was listened to by similar audiences. No one talks about John Fahey like they’re surprised he’s sophisticated and complex and can play in more than one key. (In fact, the opposite often goes for white artists: they are talked about as being “down home” or just “down and dirty” as positive things if they play music like Davis’.) Fahey got to write his own liner notes, because he got to be in charge of his own stuff. Not because he was more competent than Davis, but because he had the access and resources and respect to be a power player at an independent record label, thanks in part to the privilege of being a white guy.

Context is a lot. The conversation was different then. Music geek conversation was different then, too. I’m maybe getting all offensive on this guy’s liner notes just because it makes me feel uncomfortable as a white person who’s trying not to be an asshole and I don’t quite know how not to be. No one can say that the folk revival movement didn’t mean well. While giving us some amazing recordings of terrific previously unheard-in-mainstream-white-American-music artists, many of these folks were in fact trying to give credit to the black roots of popular folk and rock. Which I appreciate. But they might want to have taken a little bit less of a condescending tone when they talk about black artists who basically invented what we now know as rock ‘n’ roll. Just saying.

And here’s a question more immediately for me, for this blog: How can I talk about race and not let it be the whole conversation? I just spend 500 words I could have spent talking about Reverend Gary Davis — his life, his talent, his skills, his sound — talking instead about the white guy who wrote his liner notes. I apologize. I’ll let Reverend (and he actually was a reverend) Davis speak for himself now. And there are more of these 60s/70s blues/folk revival records in my collection. So let’s talk about it more, while we figure out how to talk about it, okay?

America

But at night, nothing had actually changed.

 

 

“The Voice of the Turtle”

We still worry.

The sweep of the moon over breasts, the butcher block kitchen, dune buggy drivers and the trans-pipeline sand ramp.

Oceans below and things marked.

To-do.

 

 

“The Waltz That Carried Us Away & Then A Mosquito Came And Ate Up My Sweetheart”

Swimming in you out the window:

The biosphere of what always was there

grass ponies, manifestation,

your artistic instinct.

We each wrap in towels after a tragic twist in the gangster narrative.

 

 

“Mark”

Then there a sign

You made me

We all do it:

beach and throw away yourself

spectate

 

 

“Knoxville Blues”

Tension fades with the blue of this feeling and strings made of steel:
high, art, night, skin, cruel

the ways we are.

 

 

 

[The italicized titles are the song titles; "sand-pipe ramps" and the images are from the giant comic book/tarot adventure laid into the gatefold of the record sleeve. ]

 

 

Red Headed Stranger

Columbia, 1975

When I was ten years old, my father bought me a ¾-sized acoustic guitar and accompanying after-school lessons at a music shop downtown. At the first lesson, my teacher asked me what kinds of songs I wanted to learn. I barely remember the conversation, but I certainly remember what I answered: Willie Nelson. That’s what I, at ten years old, wanted to learn to play. And not just any Willie Nelson song—the first song I ever learned on guitar was “Bloody Mary Morning.” At the time I had no idea what a Bloody Mary was, but I knew that song from both my mom and my dad. My mom had at one point had to explain to me what “something stronger to start off the day” might be (hint: it’s liquor). But mostly I just liked the way it sounded: Pure. Guitar and a voice and a harmonica and a fingering and rhythm that was going to be really difficult to learn. Simple but smart, and simply good.

Soon after I started learning the fingerpicking pattern for Bloody Mary Morning, the guitar got pushed aside because I didn’t have time to do that and attend my intensive ballet lessons after school. [A quarter of a century later, and I am still playing guitar and wishing I had not stopped learning it formally. Ballet? Yeah, um, it’s been a while.] But my love of Willie persisted. I felt like with Willie, whether the cheesier songs or the more minimal ballads, you were getting more than a song. You were getting a story, a character, and an almost movie-like flood of images with every quiet strum of his guitar. My most-loved Willie albums are 1998’s Teatro and Red Headed Stranger, which both offer up a spare, lonesome sound infused with Western-influence guitar technique to haunting, cinematic effect.

Red Headed Stranger is a record that, like the song “Bloody Mary Morning,” I can’t recall ever encountering for the first time. It snuck in, somewhere back there: one of those works of art—like certain songs or fictional characters or cinematographic points of view—that have been in me since I became aware of knowing songs, or knowing the lyrics to those songs, or having taste in cultural things. Since forever. It’s also one of those records that I think is perfectly itself, beautifully realized and infinitely memorable—so much so that when I pick it to be the soundtrack to another suddenly sunny San Francisco morning, I’m a bit concerned I won’t have much to say about it.

Red Headed Stranger is a “concept” album that, at the time it was released (1975), revolutionized the country music world. It is minimal, spooky, and dark—yet still contains terrific country-style songs. In the 70s, Willie Nelson and his cohorts were earning the label “outlaw country” because they were making music that contradicted the more pop, produced sound that was coming out of Nashville. Willie became a superstar with this mega-selling record and even won a Grammy. So, you know. “Outlaw” is sort of relative here.

Back to the “concept” part of concept album. This can mean many things to many people; to me it means an album that is written and recorded and designed as a whole. It means it centers on one theme, or one story. One concept to connect it all. For me, the “concept” album’s dangers are that it can become bloated, overwrought, overstated. When it works, it works entirely. And Red Headed Stranger works.

Piano and guitar and Willie’s tenuous tremor of a voice are the overriding elements here. Close your eyes and you’re in a country opera… or more like a Western film.

Indeed, what Willie Nelson and his outlaw band did with this album was make a Western record while everyone else was busy concentrating on “Country.” And it is Western, with all the associations that term carries with it, whether of the “wild” or Hollywood variety or both: the open skies of Montana, the bizarre justice mores of the American West at the dawn of the twentieth century, hard and cruel white men riding around on horses unable to express their emotions except through acts of violence.

He found them that night in a tavern in town
in a quiet little out-of-the-way place.
And they smiled at each other as he walked through the door
And they died with their smiles on their faces.

The plot is pretty simple: preacher loves woman. She cheats on him. He kills her and the guy she’s now in love with, who was a past love she’d left behind when she came out West. (Which is sad for obvious reasons of killing people, but also because the new couple seems to be so happily in love.) So, that’s two relationships ruined and two people dead. Then the preacher is sad, too, and rides horses around the great West, sometimes killing people and ruining countless other lives and relationships in the process.

The central character is classic Western material: a formerly believing, ordered man who becomes, through a romantic betrayal and his violent reaction to it, a “stranger” to all, riding the “untamed” land on his beautiful horse with a new, trigger-happy persona masking his deep loneliness and grief. This is the type of frustrating but legendary macho/vulnerable murderer/hero that the Western genre is so good at giving us.

Is this a glamorizing ode to violence, including violence of the domestic variety and the violence brought to the land by the westward expansion of white folks? Totally. It is certainly that. Just like most Westerns.

Despite, or perhaps because of these issues, the Western has always felt sad to me—the myth of it being a sad facet of our culture, as well as the reality of it being sad for many regular, struggling people at the time who must have made the journey West, contributed to the genocide of another culture and the failure to realize the rewards upon which the whole mess was predicated. There were a lot of dreams placed on us out West here, and most of those dreams were false and/or broken for the large majority of the people involved.

And, just like Western films, this story of a violent and lonely man and his journey is only palatable to the audience because it is a tale of vulnerability as well as hardness. This is Montana, in “the year of ’01.” This is the typical hard-knocks mythical West, in which a man is allowed to kill a women who tries to steal his horse, but not really supposed to cry when his girlfriend breaks his heart. So why do we like this red headed murdering stranger so much?

Because he does cry:

He cried like a baby
He screamed like a panther in the middle of the night.
And he saddled his pony
and he went for a ride

And it’s because of the preacher’s sadness that Red Headed Stranger becomes not just a classic country album, but a classic Western album. This is thanks to Willie Nelson’s songwriting abilities. The songs, many of them ballads, are sad, and often flash the listener back to other, better times in the lives of the characters, times of unending love and courtship and unlimited possibilities. They do lyrically contribute to the cool myth of the lonesome cowboy, but mostly they are about loss.

Red Headed Stranger is also an ideal example of an album that is an album. Taken one at a time, the songs yield a couple hits – “Blue Eyes Cryin in the Rain,” for one, which Nelson didn’t write but was forever identified with because of his performance of it here —but they lose their narrative impact when split up. Many of them are only refrains, fragments of songs lined up in a cohesive order. As a record, from start to finish, there is a story being told here, a sound being developed from the minimal building of haunting chord fragments through to the final reprise. Take it and mix it up and throw it on an iPod, and it’s not the same. Also, without the particular medium of vinyl, you don’t get this (click to embiggen):

The entire back cover of the record jacket is a storyboard, an illustrated short-hand for the entire narrative of the album, drawn in cartoon style with excerpts from the lyrics. How cool is that?! An album complete with characters, scenes, dialogue, and a freakin’ storyboard. Willie Nelson made a Western movie for us, and he put it on wax.

Also:

I think most people know by now that Willie Nelson wrote the song Crazy, which was made iconic by Patsy Cline. If you didn’t know that… well, now you do. While we’re on the topic of super famous songs that were written by country songwriter icons, Dolly Parton wrote “I Will Always Love You,” the song with which Whitney Houston sold a gazillion records. So, “country” is also a bit of a myth. Mostly, good songwriting is good songwriting. Doesn’t matter which chart it tops.