Sam Cooke: A Change is Gonna Come / Get Yourself Another Fool

[Part of an ongoing series about protest songs; we'll resume 'regular' rock talk at some point...]

This happened:

In 1993, in high school, I discovered Sam Cooke. I brought my CD boombox into the living room upstairs and lay on the carpeted floor with my head next to it. It was cold – California-winter cold, with a dry crispness even under the gray of morning’s clouds. Later it would be bright sunny and still crisp, quiet with no waves. Maybe later Mom would make a fire in the fireplace.

I had heard his hits, of course, grew up with them in the canon of American popular music that came embedded in radio stations and car rides and movie soundtracks and old records belonging to grownups. On my own, I came to Sam Cooke via a CD re-release in the 1990s of an earlier record (Night Beat) that placed Cooke perfectly between his gospel beginnings and his pop appeal.

And I was sold, entirely. I bought all the greatest hits compilations, searched shops for the original albums on vinyl, tried to sing along and realized there are some voices too good to sing with. I told my friends about the amazing vocal arrangements and the smart lyrics. I read books about 60s soul music and began a deeper discovery of other artists of the era.

It was on that floor, in the boombox, that I first heard “A Change is Gonna Come.” It’s a famous song, I learned later, made perhaps generic by its own fame at this point. This song, released in the early 60s just after Cooke’s death, became a frequent soundtrack to the civil rights movement. But to listen to it for the first time, closely, with your head next to it and the crackle from the carpet and the heater humming beneath its strings, is to feel its power– to understand viscerally how a piece of music can effect in its listener a feeling of change, even without all that context stuff.

The song consists of Sam Cooke’s purest-of-the-pure voice backed by dramatic orchestration. It builds and crests and rides an obvious sense of its importance. And it works. You can’t deny the existence of potential, of change, in the way Cooke revolves this phrase:

It’s been a long,
a long time comin’
but I know
oh-oh-oh
A change gonna come.
Oh yes it will.

But here is what makes this song a protest song: it is personal. It is lyrically ambiguous; it mentions intimate events that could be read either as “small” emotional experiences, or large moments lived in history as they are occurring. This song never once mentions by name things like racism, segregation, economic brutality, violence. It never calls out the context in which it became a major song of the civil rights movement. But it’s in there.

One of the reasons it’s so hard to nail down a way to make art about politics is because we experience injustices as people, not as headlines or as slogans on cardboard signs. Cooke didn’t say, “meet me in Alabama and we’ll do some civil disobedience to fight for our rights!” He said, “I was born by the river in a little tent.” He said, “I go downtown and somebody keep telling me, don’t hang around.” He says it’s been too hard, living like this. So let’s not do it anymore.

 

And this happened:

In 1995, I went to Paris and a boy broke my heart. It was cold in Paris, colder than home but still possessed of that sort of dry precipitation less-extreme winters give us. The sky over pointy rooftops and grand facades was always grey, a few times dusting my nose with snow, but mostly just grey. I walked a lot. In an old woolen military pea coat I walked.

The faithless boy who left me there gave me Paris like I hadn’t imagined I could have it: entirely, mine, alone. And a general strike gave me Paris like I never would have it again, shutting down the subway, all but the fewest of long-distance trains, and even museums. Workers from every sector struck for weeks, delivering to me a city filled with people: people in numbers large on streets, walking, people who would normally be in taxis, walking; people who drove opening their vehicles to even more people, hitchhikers standing on every corner as the new image of rush-hour traffic…

There were no subways, no trains, and museums were either closed or closed early. So I walked around. From the apartment I found with a generous friend of my mother’s, located in the 19^th arrondissement in an immigrant neighborhood on the outskirts of “central” Paris, I walked all the way across town. I crossed the Seine at least twice a day. I walked when it rained and I walked at 2am when it was not very safe and I walked in the morning when I didn’t know where I’d go that day. When it was cold or wet, I stopped and drank coffee or ate a kebab or crepe. When it was lonely, I stepped inside one of the many small repertory movie houses that dot the city, watching my old American friends Humphrey Bogart and Clint Eastwood portray macho black-and-white versions of the romance and the home I sometimes missed.

I had a cassette walkman and just a couple tapes, and I would sometimes meet up with a group of students to play cards. Whoever won the first round got the walkman as a prize, sitting out the rest of the game in a headphoned state of musical reverie. This often took place in a ‘maid’s quarters’ apartment up eight flights of stairs with a bathroom in the hallway complete with pull-chain toilet. The view from the apartment was amazing, with Dickensian sights onto the peaks and valleys of external-versus-internal city existence: a corner of the Arc de Triomphe, a cat crossing a rain gutter, a woman’s profile steamed in distant bathroom windows, and the anciennes themselves, the Parisian buildings, each one older than the state in which I was born.

I listened to Sam Cooke sing “A Change is Gonna Come” and other songs out that window and other windows, moving, always moving around the city that winter in Paris. But it was “Get Yourself Another Fool” that I felt closest to at that time. As a recently dumped young lover, this was my personal protest song, a masterful breakup song to an oppressive situation. The song’s loving fuck-you lyrics and the ghostly organ beside them ushered away an era, a relationship, and a method of assumption now dead to me.

And this also happened:

It was in Paris on one of those cold grey mornings that I attended my first French demonstration, by accident. Turning down the rue de Belleville, I approached the Place de la Republique and even in the daily crush of urban bodies made thicker by the transit strike, it seemed to me that there were more people than usual. It seemed like they were wearing matching colors, some of them, and then I saw their signs and heard their chants. Hundreds of thousands of people, multiple mornings a week during that month, demonstrating against public sector cuts.

I remember the press of bodies feeling warm and I was feeling cold. I remember not really understanding what people were talking about. I remember being startled to see the everydayness of the protesters– people who looked like my friends’ parents and my friends and middle managers and cab drivers and mechanics and doctors (not nurses—doctors). As I pressed in to the heat of the crowd, the face of Marianne de la Republique poked over the crowd. Someone had tacked a sign on the sculpture’s chest that said “solidarité” and I wondered if that word means something different in French culture, where the concept of “brotherhood” and “equality” are right up there in the national slogan along with the classic “liberty.” Where professionals protest in the streets right alongside those who work for them. Where there is a middle class who feels comfortable shutting down a city to make their power known, who not only isn’t afraid to ask for more, but feels they have a right to. Where solidarity is a cultural quality, not just a term used within the specific context of labor movements.

I walked on, along my daily route, through the iconic daily existence of Paris. Past shady bars near Bastille where one night walking home at 2am, two young men tried to grab my arms and I yelled them away from me before running all the way home. By the plaza outside the Hotel de Ville where that famously misleading iconic photo was taken of that couple kissing, and by Notre Dame, whose minimal statue of Joan of Arc I would visit and sometimes whisper to when I felt sad and cold. I walked near the English-language bookstore of legend, Shakespeare & Co., where I asked a strange man for a light in French and he replied “I don’t speak French” in an New York accent and then later I saw him busking on the street and he sang better than Dylan and we became friends. I walked to the area around the Sorbonne as some kids broke the windows of the Macdonalds where I frequently went to use the toilet. Past the Turkish guys at the café I liked, and the closed-for-strike newsstand owned by the two Algerian dudes who always tried to talk to me about surfing when they found out I was from California. The streets were smokey, people were running, the beep-beep of European sirens blared. Snow formed and failed, and tried again to form. I walked.

And I kept walking. And I felt it, there, in a private moment of my own personal pain and in a public political moment: Something bigger. Something huge, if we can only do this in America – make our personal pains public and make them outraged and make them matter. It’s protest, it’s heartbreak, it’s something big that is also something tiny and inside you. Something like a change, coming.

Keep your eyes wide, the chance won’t come again

"People over Profits," Port of Oakland, 11.2.11

So, I’ve been not blogging and not writing and not even really listening to music for the past month or two, largely because I’ve been busy being totally obsessed with the Occupy movement. (Also I’ve been working a lot. Hire me!) From the bridges of New York to the corners of Oakland to the tiny towns in between, this 99% thing is happening, and sometimes in order to let something happen, you have to push reflection to the side for a bit and participate.

The only thing I am certain of at this point is, I’m a part of this.

When I was small enough, I climbed inside the cool orange velvet of my mother’s acoustic guitar case and sat inside it. From this textured shell I listened to roughly strummed versions of Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan, and I thought that’s what protest was.

In the protest songs of my remembering, the narrative is simpler and more direct than I’ve seen it be in my adulthood. The oppressed rise up promptly upon being put down. Small acts always have historical effect. Hope is clear and so is the opponent. Change is a pinpointable effect we achieve together, unified, from the first chords to the last strains with maybe just a bridge or two of confusion thrown in for mood, most likely in the shape of E-minor/G plucked loosely on guitar strings.

What I’ve seen and experienced in the past month or two has not been so neatly proscribed. Often it’s also raw and scary and exhausting, and at this point it would make a terrible song. But what I understand the more I see is that it’s probably going to stick around for a while. Its songs have time to be composed. As my friend Kevin said of his 4-year-old daughter after the Children’s Brigade march in Oakland on November 2: “Ingrid is a member of the 99% generation!”

My parents sang protest songs. First in protest, then as lullabies. They were students in the 60s, they protested the Vietnam war, and they raised kids in the California redwoods in the 70s, so the legend of that era’s social movements was deeply embedded in my upbringing.

I was a child of the Reagan generation, and by the time the 80s came around, I viewed the movements and their songs as  historical: romantic, but ultimately dragged down by difference and economy. It was nice to be a hippie, I thought, but ultimately you have to get a job. Buy stuff. Send me to ballet class. Slap a “no nukes” sticker on the station wagon and pick me up after school. I never expected, in my lifetime, to feel the urgency people must have felt when they thought they were changing the world, for real. I never really listened to the words:

They say: We are unstoppable. Another world is possible.

So for now, until I can at least rein in my to-do list a bit, I’m going to let the protest inhabit the music and vice versa. I’ll share a couple of my favorite protest songs with you.

And yes, I’m taking requests.

The Band

Capitol Records, 1969

A few things I know about The Band:

1. They’re Canadian, mostly. Just like fellow great rocker Neil Young.

2. It was this band the vaulted and honorable Bob Dylan chose to help him become electric, to turn folk into rock, to play Judas to the quiet strumming of the 60s and step right out towards the 70s, 80s, future, end.

4. These boys on this album cover look like any boys on Valencia Street now, when I hit the corner from my apartment and trip on them standing by the fancy sandwich deli/corner store – always in groups of threes and fives, walking in tight clusters or standing next to piles of bicycles, wearing beards like fathers and rough plaid coats that summon the spirits of working class men most likely last embodied by their fathers’ fathers’ generations, before boys all left for the city and realized that new urban poverty was easier, in a way, less work and more girls, and before tiny drugged out angry boys in Seattle ever existed and wore these shirts, too. I can see the boys on this album cover playing to the Monday night crowd at Amnesia, except of course nowadays there would be less instruments and more electronics, and the music would somehow still be rock and roll despite its country acoutrements. And I would really like it but feel like it’s academic in a way: studied. Feel like it lacks some sort of genuine.

5. But the musicianship is impeccable and the songs are still catchy as heck. I like these early contained years, 1969 or so, best. Honest, I wasn’t ever a Last Waltz girl, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

6. I have been having sing-a-longs with my friends lately. Two, sometimes three guitars, strummed with bar chords and the simplest of rhythms, favorites of the rock and pop and blues genres across decades sung to chords we looked up on the Internet. We are usually full from some awesome dinner, smiles and lyrics and melodies projected and sung into each other’s sated and shadowed faces in dim living room light or dark garage hang-outs. Sometimes I have mixed feelings about sing-a-longs, am a bit reluctant, and I’m not sure why. Is it because we’re not very “good”? Is it my youthful stage fright rising again, a fear that magically only visits me when music is involved? Is it because I miss earlier sing-a-longs, with punker guitar players in smaller apartments in harder cities when I was younger and hungrier?

Max has an American folk song he’s learning on the mandolin called “Cripple Creek,” and before my friends and I play the traditional version of the song in Kevin’s garage in Oakland while we drink away the week with homebrewed beer on old couches, Pete and I are bound to go off for a bar or two of The Band’s “Up On Cripple Creek” and I’m bound to wonder internally how these pretty kids from Canada ever got into American traditional music and decided it spoke for them. Or how we did, for that matter. Kevin tells us there was an influential miner’s strike at Cripple Creek, Colorado (there’s also a Cripple Creek in Virginia), and I tell Pete that next time we’re just figure out the chords and play The Band’s version.

The traditional song Cripple Creek is dirty, the lyrics filled with ribald metaphors and dudes gettin’ some from loose ladies and a songsongy chorus that echoes out of Kevin’s garage and down the MacArthur Boulevard hill in the early night and bounces over Lake Merritt like a memory long after our group attempts at playing it. Once a visiting friend-of-a-friend played this song along with us, a real solo from an actual trained and practicing musician, using the mandolin like a violin and plucking out the melody below her fair chin. That’s how I hear it now, always, and also I hear myself singin’ The Band’s version with a fake musical Southern accent and I hear how far away we are from wherever Cripple Creek really is, wherever it was in 1969 and 1869 and I wonder how close The Band thought they were really getting to it. They weren’t stupid, no doubt. They saw it and waded in it and also knew it wasn’t theirs. But somehow in doing so it became theirs, too. Perhaps that’s how those boys on Valencia feel about their plaid jackets, or how us amateurs in the garage feel about our ripped guitar tabs. We’re doing this. And so, it’s ours.

Monk’s Blues

Columbia Records, 1968

Thelonious Monk’s blues. Are … not very sad. They’re boppin’ a bit, in fact. When I pulled this record out of the stack, I was searching for quiet, yet reaching jazz piano music, to tell the truth. I wanted a grey chilly thoughtful start to what will be a long, long day full of questions and demands and tasks and such. This is not that album. In fact, I can’t recall this album. It seems so un-Monk, so brassy and loud and externally large, as opposed to the internal, pause-ridden largess that I usually with Monk’s jazz piano.

There are questions here, but not the kind that offer counterbalance to the approaching daily onslaught of tasks and supervisions, and not the kind that help me check off from my list the item indicating that I’m doing the right thing. I think this guy always did the right thing, at least on the keys. Although this album would maybe argue that point, in that it feels so not like this player’s personality.

So I’m disappointed I couldn’t remember that this album is not in fact quiet piano introspection but a full-on horns-and-all band, making the day come on with a one-and-a-two-and-a like the rush of peoples ascending the stairs after trains arrive on both tracks, like the the trucks dangling above us on the overpass, the slam-rhythm on neighbor commuter cars setting off for the expedition at hand: the sounds of going out there, of extrospection. Extra out there, extra open to the dips and flows and peaks of the moment.

I guess that’s what some jazz is, right? Extra. This kind opens with an assault and smooths into a quiet one only two tracks later, arranger and conductor Mr. Oliver Nelson making his presence in the room known at all times via his big, big!, arrangements, horns and horns and horns that leave Benny G. behind by a decade or so, yet still stick together tight enough to pay him his proper dues.

I can list the ways in which I will go outside today, and to this soundtrack I will do it with relish, I will write it pretty and I will keep, keep listing. List the sounds outside like the neighbor kid lists his toys from the backseat of the van, list the tidal back-and-forth swoop of distant vehicles passing, the internalized squeak of the bus stop and the bus wires overhead, list the phone calls I will make soon and the tasks we all will accomplish this day, list the troubles of others and the doubts of yourself, like all the different pangs of guilt I will feel in two minutes when I have to stop working on this to work on other things, list the numbers and numbers of days I have stopped working on this thing in front of me, in order to work.

It’s okay; in the arms of Nelson and Monk it just it what it is. A day. Maybe not the kind you want or expect, but here and present and all accounted for. So whattya gonna do? So, go outside, don’t be too blue, remember the horn section backing you up, and let yourself be.

Octaves are yours: check ‘em off one by one.

[This is not from the album, but is what I was aiming for when I chose Monk today:]

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.