Highway 61 Revisited:

The Tangled Roots of

American Jazz, Blues,
Rock, & Country Music

Gene Santoro

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Highway 61 Revisited

Also by Gene Santoro

Dancing in Your Head (1994)
Stir It Up (1997)
Myself When I Am Real (2000)

Highway 61 Revisited
The Tangled Roots of American
Jazz, Blues, Rock, & Country Music

Gene Santoro

2004

1
Oxford New York
Auckland Bangkok Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai
Dar es Salaam Delhi Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kolkata
Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi
So Paulo Shanghai Taipei Tokyo Toronto

Copyright 2004 by Gene Santoro

Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
www.oup.com
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any
means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Santoro, Gene.
Highway 61 revisited : the tangled roots of American jazz, blues,
rock, and country music / by Gene Santoro.
p. cm.
ISBN 0195154811
1. Popular musicUnited StatesHistory and criticism.
2. JazzHistory and criticism. I. Title.
ML3477 .S21 2004
781.64'0973dc22
2003024872
Book design and typesetting: Jack Donner, BookType

135798642
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper

Contents
Introduction

I. Avatars
1
2

Louis Armstrong
Woody Guthrie

7
17

II. The Postwar Jazz Era

3
4
5
6
7
8

Mary Lou Williams

Max Roach
Sonny Rollins
Chet Baker
Miles Davis
Herbie Hancock

33
37
49
64
68
80

III. Rebirth of the Blues

9
10
11
12
13
14

The Gospel Highway

Chess Records
The Folk Revival
Willie Nelson
Lenny Bruce
Sweet Soul Music

93
99
104
119
124
135

IV. In the Garage

15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

Bob Dylan
Electric Blues Revival
Buffalo Springfield
Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris
The Grateful Dead
The Band
The Firesign Theatre
Bruce Springsteen
Tom Waits

153
171
179
185
193
204
216
223
235

V. Possible Futures
24
25
26
27
28
29

Ken Burns, the Academy, and Jazz

The Politics of Music: Don Byron and Dave Douglas
Cassandra Wilson
Marty Ehrlich
New Jazz Fusions
Ani Difranco

243
257
265
278
283
297

Index

302

Highway 61 Revisited

A chronicler who recites events without distinguishing

between major and minor ones acts in accordance with
the following truth: nothing that has ever happened
should be regarded as lost for history.
Walter Benjamin

Music reveals a personal past which, until then, each of

us was unaware of, moving us to lament misfortunes we
never suffered and wrongs we did not commit.
Jorge Luis Borges

Introduction
HIGHWAY 61 REVISITED OFFERS, I hope, alternate ways of seeing the evolution of American pop culture, especially music, over the last century.
It opens with twin chapters on Louis Armstrong and Woody Guthrie.
In the books unfolding narrative, this complex pair of geniuses represent
the headwaters of signicant and twisty currents owing through the last
hundred years of American pop-music history, here separating into
isolated backwaters or bypassed channels, there merging into an unavoidable river with many deltas, but always, whether incrementally or with
white-water force, shaping key portions of the cultural landscape. Both
Armstrong and Guthrie began as folk musicians performing for small
marginal groups. Armstrong became the dapper virtuoso who survived
endless varieties of racism while inventing the musical language that transformed jazz from folk music to art, though he never stopped insisting
(unlike many of his more recent progeny) that entertainment was an indispensable aspect of his art; he enthralled a mass multiracial audience, which
made him forever synonymous with jazz as well as rich, though he insisted
on living relatively simply. Guthrie kept his talents deliberately rude, at
least on the surface, because he wanted to dissolve the stages fourth wall
by not seeming any more professional than his listeners; he smelled bad
and dressed like the hobo hed been, dynamited mass success whenever it
got too near him, and became famous anyway, the catalytic icon energizing the wavelike resurgences of American roots music that have
punctuated every decade since. Armstrong, a black outsider by birth,
wanted in, in his genial waythough thanks to Americas color bar, he
rarely forgot where he stood. Guthrie, a white insider by birth transformed
by family tragedy and Okie alienation and leftist politics, in his brusque
way wanted out. But both challenged many of American societys cherished imperatives and ideals, implicitly as well as explicitly, in their art,
their opinions, their attitudes, and their lives.
Highway 61 Revisited traces how these dynamics and their corollaries
spool through postWorld War II American culture via selected gures
and moments that illustrate the interplay at work in various contexts. In

Introduction

the process, it argues that these interactive tensionsbetween races,

between musical art and pop entertainment, between high art and functional art, between art and commerce, between art and politics, and
between Americas mainstream and marginal subculturesform the fertile
tidepools incubating most interesting modern American popular music,
up to contemporary hip-hop and neofolk.
Since this book isnt encyclopedic, it tries to demonstrate how this
works by telling several overlapping stories in a variety of formats and
styles. One portrays a colorful cast of characters from the American
Parade whose art surfaced marginal subcultures into mainstream US
cultural life, usually with political and social impacts. Another follows
the mingling of jazz (and its attitudes, especially its improvising drive,
the risky business of American existentialist art) with some of the
nations many pop culture streams: folk, rock, country, soul, hip-hop,
poetry, comedy, TV, and movies. Yet another traces the development of
genuine popular or folk cultures within (and often despite) the growth
of corporate mass media, like the ubiquitous homemade garage bands
that sprang up mushroomlike among boomers between the 1960s and
1980s, inadvertently creating a rock canon out of a patchwork of
material while inculcating in millions the endangered pleasure of making
their own music. And yet another suggests that if our politics over the
last two decades has been recycling into a new McCarthy era, our
culture is also doubling back to revive and reexplore modes of alienation and expression from those Cold War days. (This isnt to say history
repeats itself, exactly. Todays hipsters arent 1940s Beats, but they do
share a certain inchoate alienation; poetry slams at little bars and bookstores today arent just reissues of 1950s coffeehouses; the Web isnt
merely a technological update of fan lists, postwar radio, and independent labels; South Park doesnt just reprise Lenny Bruce or the Firesign
Theatre. But they form potentially suggestive parallels.) Connecting
these are thematic leitmotifs like oral culture, racism, authenticity, drugs,
outsider art, white versus black marginal subcultures, and so on.
Theres an autobiographical thread as well, varying in thickness.
Partly thats because the process of discovering the afrmation of human
creativity and possibility that music and art, whether folk or high,
represent in the face of evil, greed, stupidity, and general human frailty
changed my life, as it has so many, and shapes it still. And partly its
because I began this book after September 11, 2001, when the Twin
Towers in my hometown came down and, like so many, I felt the need
to retrace my footsteps, and Americas, trying to understand how I
wound up hereand where we might go next.
Most of these chapters began life in (often radically) different guises,
in the following publications: The Nation, New York Times Book
Review, Chamber Music, Fi magazine, Jazzwise, and Pulse. Others were

Introduction

specically written for this project, to ll out its narrative and thematic
arcs. I want to thank my longtime editor, Sheldon Meyer, whose patient
intelligence is priceless, as well as his assistant, Peter Harper; my production editor, Joellyn Ausanka; and my agent, Denise Shannon. As for my
family and friends, who offered sympathetic ears and shrewd feedback,
no thanks are enough.

This page intentionally left blank

part I

Avatars

This page intentionally left blank

1
Louis Armstrong
FROM 1925 TO 1928, Louis Armstrong made an astonishing series of
recordings, the jazz-creating legacy of his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens, a
succession of studio groups that virtually never performed live. In 1927,
the young cornetist led his band into a meticulously hilarious version of
a classic composition Jelly Roll Morton had made famous, Twelfth
Street Rag.
The track sounds like the opening shot of a revolutionexcept that the
revolution in Armstrongs head and hands had already been in full swing
for years. Unlike most revolutions, from the rst it displayed an ingratiating, inviting sense of humor and charm. Dippermouth, as his early New
Orleans pals dubbed him, used the rag as a trampoline. As his horn fractures the tunes familiar refrains, ragtimes precise, cakewalking rhythmic
values suddenly coil and loop and stutter and dive, the aural equivalent of
a bravura World War I ying ace dogghting tradition. Every time
Armstrong comes precariously near a tailspin, he pulls back the control
stick and condently, jauntily, heads off toward the horizon, if not straight
at another virtuosic loop-de-loop.
The relentless joy brimming in the sound of young Satchemouths horn,
the glorious deep-blue and ery-red tinged Whitmanesque yawp of it, has
an undeniably self-conscious edge. Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray rst
pointed out a half-century ago that it is also the sound of self-assertion, a
musical realization of the double consciousness W. E. B. Du Bois posited
for African Americans. Within this almost Hegelian compound of power
and pain, a racial revisiting of the MasterSlave encounter in Hegels
Phenomenology of Spirit, Du Bois explained that African Americans were
inevitably alienated, stood both inside and outside mainstream American
culture and its norms, prescriptions, hopes, dreams. Such alienation,
Du Bois pointed out, could cripple black Americans by forcing them to
internalize mainstream cultural values that held them to be less than
human, but it could also liberate the brightest of them. The Talented
Tenth, as he called this group, could act on their perceptions of the
contradictions between the high ideals grounding basic American cultural

Avatars

myths (All men are created equal in the Declaration of Independence,

for example) and gritty daily reality, where blacks were not exactly
welcomed into concert halls, schools, restaurants, or buses.
In the bell of Armstrongs barbaric (which means, in the sense Whitman
inherited from Ralph Waldo Emerson, non-European) horn is the sound
of a new, all-American culture being forged from the stuff of the social
sidelines. In 1957, Ellison wrote to Murray, Ive discovered Louis singing
Mack the Knife. Shakespeare invented Caliban or changed himself into
him. Who the hell dreamed up Louis? Some of the bop boys consider him
Caliban, but if he is, he is a mask for a lyric poet who is much greater
than most now writing. Man and mask, sophistication and taste hiding
behind clowning and crude mannersthe American joke, man.
Armstrong himself was no naive artist; he certainly wasnt a fool. From
his earliest days he saw race as a key issue in his life, his art, and his
country, with the wit and understanding evident in his music. As he wrote
of the composer of Twelfth Street Rag, jazzs self-proclaimed inventor,
Jelly Roll [Morton] with lighter skin than the average piano players,
got the job [at Lulu White, New Orleans leading whorehouse] because
they did not want a Black piano player for the job. He claimed he was
from an Indian or Spanish race. No Cullud at all. . . . They had lots of
players in the District that could play lots better than Jelly, but their
dark Color kept them from getting the job. Jelly Roll made so much
money in tips that he had a diamond inserted in one of his teeth. No
matter how much his Diamond Sparkled he still had to eat in the
Kitchen, the same as we Blacks.

IN THE OMNI-AMERICANS, Albert Murray explains how Armstrongs music

limned human talents needed in the frenetic, fast-changing 20th century.
Drawn from the pioneer, Indian, and slave, the key American survival skill
was improvisation, the soloists ability to mesh with his surroundings.
(Historical accident though it may have been, in that context the meeting
of Armstrong and Jimmie Rodgers, Father of Country Music, on tracks
like Blue Yodel No. 9, seems almost a foregone conclusion; it also forecast and encouraged later developments like Bob Wills and his Texas
swing, Bill Monroes bluegrass, Willie Nelsons jazz singing and partnerings with Ray Charles, and Merle Haggards looselimbed improvising
Strangers.) Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man uses Armstrongs version of
Black and Blue, a tune from the Broadway play Chocolate Dandies of
1929, to demonstrate the Du Boisian nature of improvising as epistemological tool.
This was the lesson Armstrong started teaching in the Jazz Age, when
appers reigned and sexual emancipation knocked at the doors of mainstream culture, when the Harlem Renaissance redened African American,

Louis Armstrong

when Prohibition created a nation of outlaws who, thanks to associating

with booze and gangsters and the demimondes soundtrack of jazz, saw
that Negroes, as they were called, were subject to legal and extralegal
restrictions and prejudices just as arbitrary and stupid as the constitutional
amendment forbidding Americans to buy and sell booze.
The elastic rhythms and ery solos on the sides by the Hot Fives and
Hot Sevens spoke to them, and illustrated the joys of the jazz-inected
life. On tune after tune, Armstrong cavorts and leaps and capers over
and around his musical cohorts with the playful self-possession of a
young and cocky top cat. Nothing can hold him down. He traverses keys
and bar lines and rhythms with impunity, remolding them without
missing a step.
Black and Blue made him a star. Originally written as a lament by a
dark-skinned gal for her man, whos attracted to high-yellow types,
Armstrongs brilliant, forceful reading renders it as mini-tragedy, the
musical equivalent of Shylocks speech in Shakespeares Merchant of
Venice. My only sin, he sings in that growl that compounds the earthy
humanity of the blues with an uninching dignitythis is no grovelis
in my skin/What did I do to be so black and blue? The short answer: in
America, nothing. The color line did it all.
Subversive and powerful, Armstrongs music was the fountainhead of
the Jazz Age and the Swing Era, when jazz was Americas popular music,
and the sounds of syncopated surprise lled the nations dancehalls, while
young folks skittered and twirled and ounced and leaped and broke out
of Victorian constraints to looselimbed beats and blaring horns that
emerged from Americas Darktowns in New Orleans and New York and
Chicago.
One of Armstrongs 1936 recordings is called Rhythm Saved the
World. Like many he cut, this banal tune is made something else by his
subversive transformations. Its idea still echoes across Americas teeming
subcultures. Decades later, Parliament Funkadelic insisted, Free your
mind and your ass will follow.
ARMSTRONG ALWAYS CLAIMED HE WAS BORN on July 4, 1900, and who could
blame him? As one of Americas primary declarers of cultural independence (and interdependence), he should have been. But in his rich
biography Satchmo, Gary Giddins both insists that all American music
emanates from Armstrong and proves he was born on August 4, 1901.
Armstrong and his sister were born in The Battleeld, a hard district of
New Orleans; their father left before either could remember him. In his
early years Armstrong was raised by his grandmother, whom he credited
with the Emersonian valueshard work, self-reliance, artistic daring
coupled with personal amiabilitythat guided him. His mother may or
may not have been a prostitute for a while; Louis returned to live with her
when he was ve.

10

Avatars

At seven, he quit school and went to work for a Jewish family, the
Karmofskys, and picked up his rst instrumenta tin horn. Hed been
dancing and singing on the street for pennies with other kids, but, working
coal wagons with the Karmofsky sons, he learned to blow the cheap horn
by putting his ngers together in front of the tube (hed pulled off the
mouthpiece). The boys encouraged him, their clients loved his melodies,
and Little Louis, as he was called, had found his calling.
On January 1, 1913, he was busted for ring his stepfathers pistol and
sentenced to the Colored Waifs Home. Here he joined the band and got
his rst musical training, which he characteristically never forgot.
According to clarinet great Sidney Bechet, who in the 1920s was
Armstrongs only peer as a virtuosic improviser, the cornet-playing 10year-old Louis mastered the chops-busting clarinet solo for High
Societyan astounding feat that only hinted at what was to come.
Little Louis danced in second-line parades, following cornetist Joe
King Oliver in the Onward Band as they wound through the Crescent
City streets. Oliver was a catalytic force for Armstrong, who always
insisted he learned his stuff from Papa Joe. Certainly Oliver mentored him:
when he left for Chicago, following the rst postWorld War I black
migration waves from the South to northern and western cities, he left
Little Louis his slot in the Kid Ory band, which led the young cornetist to
the riverboats plying the Mississippi and to Fate Marable in 192021.
Marable, impressed by the young hornmans dazzling facility and ears,
hired him for his riverboat band, and one of his sidemen trained the
youngster to read and write music. What they played was a mix that, had
they thought much about it, would have confounded the Dixieland
revivalists who decades later took Armstrong as their gurehead: adapted
arias and classical overtures, quadrilles and other dance music, and the
like. (Historian Dan Morgenstern has pointed out the suggestive inuence
of classical music on Armstrongs music.) At Davenport, Iowa, when the
riverboat docked, a young white kid named Bix Beiderbecke rst heard
Armstrong with Marable, and decided to make the jazz cornet his life.
The rst of jazzs white existential heroes, he would perfect his craft by
jamming with Armstrong regularly, an exchange that led to mutual respect
and friendship of the type still rare across Americas color line.
Armstrongs multifaceted legacy, his music, would create a new subculturethe jazz milieuwhere whites and blacks in America could meet
on something like equal grounds, thanks to artistic respect. The institutionalized color line would hardly disappear; for generations, white stars
would routinely get credit for musical advances developed by black musicians. In a historical irony enhanced by American racism, the jazz world
became a site into which disaffected white Americans could exit, in
implicit or explicit rejection of their societys mores and aims; for black
Americans like Armstrong himself, it became one of the few precious
potential entrances into the larger public visibility and acceptance.

Louis Armstrong

11

In 1923, Oliver sent for his protg, who kissed his mother goodbye,
packed the sh sandwich she had made for him, and headed north to
Chicago. When he got to the Lincoln Gardens Cafe, where Olivers band
was wailing, he looked like a rube, and was so shy he stayed by the door
to watch and hear. He couldnt believe hed be playing with these masters
of jazz. In a very short time, rst in his recordings with them, then with
his own Hot Fives and Sevens, he would make them all sound like musical
relics.
Rube or notand his mode of dress quickly became Chicago-style
sharpArmstrong got the girl. His second wife, piano-playing Lil Hardin,
married him while they were both playing with Oliver. Hardin was conservatory-trained and middle class, and for the next few years her ambition
would drive the modest genius she married to make his mark in the rapidly
exploding Jazz Age. Oliver kept Louis in his band partly to keep him from
fronting his own, while Lil convinced her husband to grab Fletcher
Hendersons offer to join his New York-based big band. When Armstrong
arrived in 1924, Hendersons band was, as Morgenstern notes, designed
for Roselands white dancing public . . . rhythmically stiff; when he left
14 months later, both arrangements and soloists were extending his sound,
and white America was learning to dance to them.
It was just the start. When Armstrong replaced New Orleans standards
and blues with Tin Pan Alley tunes in the 1930s, he forged the model
followed by the Swing Era, jazzs most successful invasion of American
pop musicand thus of American society. His model was followed literally: key arrangers like Don Redman, who worked for many bandleaders,
including Benny Goodman, adapted Armstrongs runs and rhythmic
moves to section-by-section big band arrangements.
After Armstrong spent time in the Big Apple, working with Henderson
and recording with blues singers, Lil persuaded him to come back to
Chicago, where he joined her band, then Carroll Dickersons, and rocked
the town. The night he returned, he was greeted by a banner shed had
unfurled over the bandstand: Worlds Greatest Trumpet Player.
Armstrong later told Morgenstern the reason he left Hendersons band
was that the dicty bandleader, college-educated and light-skinned and
prone to look down on dark blacks, wouldnt let him sing, except occasionally for black audiences or for novelty and comic effect. Armstrong
sang before he picked up a horn. It was a fundamental part of who he was
and what he had to say. Ultimately, his vocals would make him a worldfamous star. More immediately, they were another virtuosic tool he used
to change jazz and, in the process, American culture.
ARMSTRONG PIONEERED SO MANY FIRSTS IN JAZZ (and America) that a list can
seem unbelievable. Heres a sample. He invented the full-edged jazz
soloist and scatsinging. He introduced Tin Pan Alley and Broadway tunes
as jazzs raw material. And he performed in interracial settings, sometimes

12

Avatars

for multiracial audiences. Once, in New Orleans, when a bigoted

announcer refused to introduce his band, he did it himselfso well that
the radio station asked him to do it for the rest of the bands stint.
He was transforming folk music into an art form without losing his
willingness or ability to communicate his art to a broad audiencethe
vehicle for his penetration of mainstream American culture. And with him
as point man, the submerged African American culturelargely known
beforehand to most whites via caricature or appropriationwas transformed into something undeniable, tangible, concrete. His voice engulfed
America. As Rudy Vallee put it, No one in America sang the same after
him. Among his major disciples was Bing Crosby, but his inuence
rippled across American popular and jazz singing like a submerged tidal
wave. The apparently natural force of his voices cagey dynamics and
loose rhythms as he recongured pop tunes seized talents like Ella
Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday, Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra.
With his last Hot Sevens recordings for Okeh in 1928, where tunes like
I Cant Give You Anything But Love were issued as b-sides, Armstrong
moved closer to the new American cultural mainstream he was inspiring.
When he started recording for Decca in 1935, the impetus accelerated.
In between, Armstrong had been pursued out of Chicago, then New
York, by gangsters. The manager who helped him escape brought him to
Europe, then made off with his passport. (The rst time Armstrong played
London, a deputation of British hornmen trooped backstage to examine
his trumpet for gimmickry. As Morgenstern writes drily, His virtuosity
was still something not quite credible.) A couple of interim managers gave
way, in 1935, to Joe Glaser, a thuggish, mob-connected scion of a well-off
Chicago family. He and Armstrong shook hands on a deal that lasted till
they both died. As Armstrong put it, A black man needs a white man
working for him. Jazz had originated as an ignored marginal subculture,
played in whorehouses and bars by men who were often regarded as renegade heroes, tricksters, folks whose talents could help them get over on
The Man. It was almost inevitable that the white American demimonde
of gangsters and hookers and the like would be among the earliest exposed
to jazz, and among the key white Americans in positions to employ black
jazz musicians. It was no accident that so many of the clubs in jazz centers
like Harlem and Chicago were mob-owned or afliated, that hot jazz
became the soundtrack of speakeasies from coast to coast during the
Roaring Twenties that somehow, in quintessentially American ways, coexisted with Prohibition. Though it was often a marriage of convenience, it
endured because it coupled the marginal and outcast. Among white folk,
who else would choose to hang out with and deal with blacks?
His deal with Glaser marked the beginning of his crossover into mainstream American cultureanother Armstrong rst in undermining de
facto segregation in America. And his years at Decca were his workshop
in change.

Louis Armstrong

13

He fronted a big band, which critics hated and fans enjoyed. The outt
was run by Glaser, since Armstrong, who occasionally hired and red
personnel, didnt want to shoulder a bandleaders nonmusical burdens.
And he agreed with Glaser on a new musical direction: setting his solos off
in sometimes inventive, sometimes indifferent bigband charts; smoothing
his blues-frog vocals into a more sophisticated sound without losing their
rhythmic slynesssomething he was also doing with his trumpet solos,
reshaping his early frenetic chases after strings of high-altitude notes into
smoother, more lyrical solos.
Physical damage to Armstrongs lip and mouth from high and hard
blowing forced the issue. Joe Muranyi, who played with him years later,
says: Part of the change in Louis style could be attributed to the lip
trouble he had in the early 30s. There are tales of blood on his shirt, of
blowing off a piece of his lip while playing. This certainly inuenced the
way he approached the horn; yet what we hear on these tracks has at least
as much to do with musical development as with physical matters. Limitation was, for Satchmos genius, a pathway to a matured artistic
conception. As Giddins argues forcefully in Satchmo, hed never separated
art and entertainment; jazz to him was a popular music that should be
able to bridge that potential gap and allow him to open a beachhead where
black gures could garner popular acceptance and respect. Jazz was his
way into American society. And if his bands irritated critics, there were
plenty of recorded gems amid the dross, and besides, hed broadened his
popularity by appearing in movies, with some inevitably racist parts and
some brighter moments with Crosby, and people loved him.
By World War II, his audiences were more white than black.
THE WAR YEARS BROKE THE BIG BANDS. The culture had changed: singers and
small groups were hip. It was the era of a new sound, what Dizzy Gillespie called modern jazz and journalists dubbed bebop.
Bops frenetic, fragmented rhythms restated the postwar worlds, and it
deliberately presented itself not as entertainment but as art. The musicians
creating it, like Gillespie and Charlie Parker, were fully aware of the stirring civil rights movement. World War II had fostered widespread entry of
blacks into the American military and industry. Not surprisingly, after the
war, they werent willing to return to the old values of accommodation
and deference. Instead, they demanded equality and freedom.
In this context, boppers and their followers saw Armstrongs lifelong
mugging and entertaining as Uncle Tom-style pleasing of white folks rather
than artistic integrity or entertainment. Dizzy Gillespie was rare among
postwar jazz musicians in clowning onstage, his outgoing sense of humor
a continuing counterpoint to the bop conviction that their art was being
shortchanged by the music business, run by white Americans. Most record
company executives didnt like or understand bebop and were sure it could
never be broadly popular; they preferred older, familiar, and commercially

14

Avatars

tested forms. (It was another historical irony that Armstrong and Gillespie
clashed about what the older man saw as bebops pretensions, while Gillespie was, in many ways, Armstrongs truest heir in jazz at that time, with
his beret and glasses and puff-adder cheeks and uptilted horn, his devotion to and adaptation of Afro-Cuban dance rhythms as well as his
implicit claim to artistic status.)
Thus was set the stage for the Dixieland revival. Based in Chicago, the
(mostly white) revivalists needed an artistic gurehead. With a healthy
historical irony they ignored, they chose Armstrongthe very soloist who
blew apart old-style New Orleans polyphony, their idea of pure or
real jazz.
By 1947, Satchmo reluctantly abandoned his 18-piece outt for the All
Stars, a New Orleans-style sextet that included Jack Teagarden and Earl
Hines. Though they often made ne music, the group was seen as a step
backward by boppers. They jabbed at Satchmo, he jabbed back, and the
split between revivalists and modernists escalated to a civil war that, in
different stylistic and racial modes, still divides the jazz world.
Sadly, it was another Armstrong rst. And his audiences began to turn
lily white.
IN SATCHMO, Giddins deftly explains how Armstrongs world-famous
onstage personathe big grin, the bulging eyes, the shaking head, the
brandished trumpet, the ever-present handkerchief, the endless vaudevillian muggingwas an organic conception of the artist as entertainer. Still,
from the 1950s until just before his death in 1971, Armstrong had to deal
with the accusations and slurs.
But if he never forgot who he was, while retaining his characteristically
modest manner and only privately protesting how much hed done to
advance black civil rights, he could still be provoked, as President Eisenhower and the public discovered in 1957. Armstrong was poised to go on
the rst State Departmentsponsored tour of the Soviet Union, a Cold
War beachhead by jazz. He abruptly cancelled it because the southern
states refused to integrate schools, and he publicly excoriated Ike and
America. Surprisingly, even this didnt put a dent in his Uncle Tom image
among the black audiences deserting him.
By all accounts, Armstrong was aware of his gifts and yet somehow
was unassuming. His wealth meant little to him: he traveled on the same
unheated buses as his bands 300 days a year. When his wife and manager
wanted him to buy a Long Island mansion, he insisted on staying in his
working-class bungalow in Corona, Queens, where the kids waited on his
stoop for him when he came back from tours. When his wife persuaded
him to put a brick faade up, he went up and down the block asking if
other homeowners would also like their houses bricked, at his expense.
A prolic writer, Armstrong made his typewriter part of his road equipment. He wrote of everythingscattered impressions, concentrated

Louis Armstrong

15

history and biography, his love of marijuana and Swiss Kriss, a natural
laxative. In his later writings, he contrasts New Orleans blacks and Jews
like the Karmofskys, claiming, with uncharacteristic bitterness, that blacks
didnt help each other to get ahead the way Jews did.
Antonio Gramsci wrote of proletarian intellectuals who could understand class struggle from an integrated perspective lacking to others,
however sympathetic. Though he was writing about himself, he could have
been describing Armstrong. Which is part of why African American intellectuals like Ellison and Murray saw Satchmo as an emblem of Americas
racial politics.
EARLY JAZZ MUSICIANS OFTEN REFUSED TO RECORD because they felt competitors could steal their best licks from their records. This was why the allwhite Original Dixieland Jazz Band made jazzs rst records; black New
Orleans trumpeter Freddie Keppard refused, fearing for his originality.
No one knows for sure how many recordings Louis Armstrong made
during the course of his half-century recording career. All agree, however,
that he helped create both the art and the industry. After all, it was one of
the numberless ironies of American racism that race records, a category
of recordings aimed explicitly at nonwhite and other marginal subcultures
that included Armstrongs hits, were as important as Bing Crosbys in
saving the edging record companies from collapse in the Depression.
But there was more to it than that. Through the phonograph Armstrong
made innite numbers of disciples, dispensing his vision and shaping what
jazz would become. The phonograph transformed evanescent musical
moments of improvisation into captured pieces of time, endlessly duplicable and repeatable, able to be studied and savored as well as experienced
immediately. Also through the phonograph, as Morgenstern points out,
we get a larger sense of what Armstrong himself listened to because of the
records (of arias and the like) that he collected. And nearly three decades
after hes dead, nearly all of us inevitably get our sense of how he played
through the phonographthough Morgenstern has noted that onstage
Armstrong would often solo for half an hour at a time, an experiential
perspective that the records, with their three-minutes-and-under limit,
unfortunately cant and dont give us. What they provide us instead is a
series of windowsimagine peering out an express train passing through
a stationinto Armstrongs world and art.
During the 1950s and 1960s, when he was largely considered a period
piece, Armstrong recorded important documents, like his meetings with
Duke Ellington and Ella Fitzgerald. The best thing about them is their
apparent artlessness, the easy offhanded creativity that was as much
Armstrongs trademark as his trumpets clarion calls. The pleasure is
doubled by the response of his disciples.
Ella ts that description easily, since her trademark scatsinging owes so
much to Armstrongs. Yet she made it her own, purging scat of its overt

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blues roots. Producer Norman Granz supported them with his favorite
Jazz at the Philharmonic starsOscar Peterson, Herb Ellis, and Ray
Brown. The results: both Ella and Louis and Ella and Louis Again are
incandescent yet low-key, full of generous pearls (from Cant We Be
Friends to Cheek to Cheek) that can almost slip by because of their
understated yet consummate ease.
The 1961 session with Duke, Louis Armstrong & Duke Ellington, was
hasty and almost haphazard, a simple melding of Ellington into
Armstrongs All Stars, and yet it produced a wonderful, relaxed, insightful
album. After all, Ellington had shaped his earliest bands around trumpeters and trombonists who could serve up Armstrongs New Orleans
air. And Morgenstern observed just how quickly and efciently
Armstrong soaked up Ellingtons music at sight, shooting down any
notion of Satchmo as a purely intuitive musician.
LIKE MOST POSTWAR BABIES, I grew up knowing Louis Armstrong as the guy
who sang Mack the Knife and, most famously, Hello Dolly. It was
only later Id discover the old blues stuff with singers like Bessie Smith,
the Hot Fives, Ella and Louis, Fletcher Henderson, andone of my
favesArmstrongs accompaniment on early hillbilly star Jimmie
Rodgerss Blue Yodel No. 9. But even as a kid I felt strangely drawn to
the little black guy singing and grimacing on TV, wiping his perspiring
brow with his trademark handkerchief. Although it all seemed corny,
there was something, a hint of a subversionthough that wouldnt have
been what his audiences, black or white, noticed unless they were
oldtimers who knew the ironic physical language or Satchmo fans or, like
me, just a kid.
Why would a white kid in America catch a glimpse of Armstrongs
abundantly joyful and potentially dangerous ironies? Id love to claim
precocious brilliance, but it was a lot simpler. I could tell Armstrong was
real because he lled the little blue TV screen so overwhelmingly that he
made everything around him look, as it should have, fake.

2
Woody Guthrie
ON APRIL 16, 1944, a slight, wiry-haired man with a guitar and harmonica
wandered into Moe Aschs little recording studio on West 46th Street off
New Yorks Times Square. His sidekick, who played guitar and sang
cowboy harmonies, joined him. They were between merchant marine
voyages across the Atlantic, where they dodged U-boats and carried Allied
supplies. With tall, lanky Cisco Houston, Woody Guthrie spent days in
front of Aschs microphones, spilling out hundreds of the thousands of
songs hed collected or written during the preceding decade.
With Ciscos nasal high harmonies, simple almost haphazard lines
running parallel to the melody, and energetic guitar, the duo sounded raw
and homey, as if they spent their time playing saloons or roadhouses or
dockside taverns. And that, along with a dizzying clutch of union and
political rallies, is a lot of what Guthrie had been doing. Bumming around
by himself, with Houston, with young Peter Seeger, he incarnated
Americas mythical wanderlust and noncomformity, lighting out for the
territory in ways that inspired generations of road warriors, hitchhikers,
trainspotters, pop stars, Beatniks, folk heroes, buddy-movie makers, and
con artists.
On and off over the next three years, Guthrie returned to Aschs studio,
performing alone and with various partners, as he unspooled the
Memorex of material in his head. Asch, whose introduction to folk music
was a copy of John A. Lomaxs 1910 compendium Cowboy Songs, adored
Guthrie. He rst recorded Lead Belly in 1941, then watched his circle of
artists expand: Pete Seeger, Josh White, Burl Ives. From this grew Folkways Records, whose treasures are regularly reissued on Smithsonian/
Folkways.
By the time Guthrie surfaced at Aschs place, hed long since been
enshrined as the minstrel of the American left. He found his calling in Los
Angeles, the highly polarized magnet for Okies during the Dust Bowl. Dust
hadnt driven him to LA; family ties and ambition to be an entertainer did.
But Woodrow Wilson Guthrie, born in Okemah, Oklahoma, in 1912 on
Bastille Day (which he was as proud of as Louis Armstrong was of his claim

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to having been born on the Fourth of July), could reach these folks, speak
to them and for them. When he sang in an offhand homespun manner
ecked with sly timing out of Will Rogers, they responded to him: he
reminded them of home, which looked so much better from here in the
California heaven-and-hell of Steinbecks Grapes of Wrath than when last
they saw it, buried by dust. Suddenly this shiftless jack-of-a-lot-of-trades,
this son of a middle-class land speculator and politician who went bust,
this once small quiet boy whose mother was packed off to an asylum and
whose older sister was rumored to have set herself on re, this part Native
American former teen vagabond who after hoboing each summer came
prodigally home each fall to attend high school (where he was the papers
Joke Editor) and devour Kahlil Gibran and Omar Khayyam and Ralph
Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman in the local public library while he drew
portraits of whores and copies of religious scenes and Whistler paintings
(he loved Impressionism) to earn cash, this physically grown-up itinerant
Huck Finn who shucked wives and lovers to go on benders and hit the road
and whom his closest friends described as having barnyard manners, had
discovered himself at age 25. He would be an American troubadour.
Guthrie didnt have a fabulous liquidy voice like his yodeling idol, the
godfather of country music, Jimmie Rodgers. His was thin, often
quavering around a pitch, a rough-hewn semi-amateur instrument. And he
kept it that way. Lack of polish brought him closer to real people; for
Guthrie as for Will Rogers, seeming unexceptional was central to his
artistic presentation, compressed the gap between audience and
performercrucial for functional music sung at union rallies, labor
camps, gatherings of left-wing urban folk enthusiasts. So, although he
adored the Carter Family and spent hours learning Maybelles inuential
guitar technique of picking out riffs on the bass strings while strumming,
he generally kept his guitar serviceable and his mandolin the same. Despite
a family ddling tradition, his violin leaned toward sawing. The
harmonica on his sessions he usually left to Sonny Terry, one of the folk
revivals African American authenticators who blew the blues-and-trainwhistle riffs of a Piedmont street performer, which hed been with his
partner, guitarist Brownie McGhee, who sometimes joined Guthrie too
a deant color blindness in a nation scarred by institutional racism. (One
of Guthries characteristically oddball commercial ventures zzled when
he tried to form an interracial country music group with Terry.) Like the
old bluesmen he ran with, Guthrie regularly dropped and added beats,
stretched verses, ignored bar lines, and seemed, to more sophisticated
listeners like his second wife Marjorie, unable to count time properly.
He always performed better in informal situations. For Guthrie, folk
arts apparent naivete made an artistic statement: it echoed and amplied
its culture and inspired audience reactiona folk version of Brecht. No
wonder Steinbeck loved him: Guthrie stepped out of the American tradition of utopian muckraking antiheroes. His world looked Manichean, and

Woody Guthrie

19

prewar reality conrmed his instincts: the Great Depression ravaged the
land while the rich squeezed the poor, Hitler challenged the rationale of
Western industrial civilization, and there were bad guys aplenty of every
size and shapelocal cops and railroad bulls hassling hobos and turning
starving Okies back at the California border or busting union heads, banks
that slapped liens on everything down to a farmers catch from his creek.
Some heroes turn out bad: Mr. Charlie Lindbergh and his America First
crowd are selling the country down the river to the Nazis. Some bad guys
morph into folk heroes: Pretty Boy Floyd is a Western Robin Hood
handing out Christmas dinners to families on relief. Jesus Christ is a hardworking hard-traveling sort. Communists and union men can do no
wrong, unless they betray the cause. Hobos are going down the road
feeling bad with no home in this world anymore and only the steel rails
humming to go to sleep by, swapping tales from the cauldron that brewed
Paul Bunyan and Babe and the Jumping Frog of Calaveras County laced
with Will Rogerss dry timing. Mothers and home make us misty. Children get indulged, and the grown-ups (like they do now with Sesame
Street) listen in and chuckle to the nonsense and game songs and riddles,
everyone hanging on to nd out where the shaggy dog nally winds up.
If his language wasnt so vital, you could say Guthrie merges Warner
Bros. and MGM movies of the period for a picture of America in ux,
from rural to urban, from agricultural to industrial. The countrys sense
of Manifest Destiny was punctured by the Depression and Pearl Harbor,
but the war quickened its pace of change. By the time Guthrie was
recording for Asch, a lot of what he sung about was history.
Woody Guthrie: The Asch Recordings Vol. 14 gathers 105 tracks in
well-wrought fashion to outline the breadth, heights, depth, and limits of
Guthries genius. Each CD has a loose theme. This Land Is Your Land
includes Woodys greatest hits: most he wrote the lyrics for, setting them
to existing tunes in the way oral minstrels do. The delightfully vitriolic
Lindbergh (They say Americas First/But they mean Americas next)
adapts the melody from a song about the McKinley assassination.
Reuben James, a brilliantly compressed tale of a US destroyer sunk by
a Nazi U-boat, is the Carter Familys Wildwood Flower. And of course
theres the famous title track, a Whitmanesque cascade of vivid lyric snapshots from Everymans America to repudiate Kate Smiths saccharine
God Bless America. Its notorious deleted verse was a blunt attack on
private property.
Guthrie was a too-willing follower of the Stalinist Communist line even
after its widespread sympathizers of the hard-luck 1930s were disillusioned
by the cynical Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1940, and he liked to see social issues
in black-and-white terms, but he wasnt Joe Hill. He was larger and
smaller, more artist and more human. Car Song is hillbilly Spike Jones
rehearsing a parentchild dialogue with Ogden Nashoverlong lines and
mimicked car horns; the nal verse is Why O Why O Why? Because,

20

Avatars

because, because, because, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. Philadelphia

Lawyer sleeps with a cowboys girl and gets his rightful comeuppance.
And when you get to California with hungry kids instead of a banjo on
your knee, the gallows humor of if you aint got the do-re-mi, boys helps
ease your gritted teeth and troubled mind when the cops turn you back.
In the 1930s, the Communist Party was one of the few organized voices
consistently raised against racism in Americaone reason Paul Robeson,
for example, signed on. The Party showed Guthrie that poor whites and
blacks were both marginalized in their own country. And so he wrote: a
stirring ballad about Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad, his
own Strange Fruit, called Slipknot, a potent series of questions about
lynching set to relatively ashy guitar work.
Inevitably many of his political screeds have dated badly: Sacco and
Vanzetti is insipid, and Ladies Auxiliary is camp (O the ladies auxiliary is the best auxiliary). But what endures about Guthries best work is
its ambition and scope. He reminds us how music existed before Walkmen
or MP3 players or Internet radio, how people made music for themselves
to accompany daily life, remember events and deeds and characters, speak
back to power and carry the news.
A man with a guitar has been an American symbol for a century. The
guitar was made for folk music: it was easy to learn to play a little, was
portable, and could be polyphonic or monophonic. On his Guthrie had a
sign: This Machine Kills Fascists.
But as this box set shows, he was many-sided: the Victorian sentiment of
parlor songs like Lifes Other Side and Put My Little Shoes Away; the
drug songs like Cocaine Blues and Take a Whiff on Me; the hobo tunes
like Ramblin Round and Hobos Lullaby; occasional pieces that celebrate the Bonneville Dam and rural electrication; Farmer-Labor Train
(Wabash Cannonball) and When the Yanks Go Marchin In (When
the Saints Go Marchin In); square-dance calls on Ida Red; historical
ballads like 1913 Massacre about IWW miners. His textured naturalistic imagery and conversational delivery relay stories of good people
misled, abused, looking for love and hope and a meal, in a magnicent
land of abundance that manifests natures inherent goodnessor would,
if it and its people werent raped and ruined, bullied and misled by evil
men. This is Americana submerged or omitted from our history textbooks.
Listening now to Woody Guthries foxy, plainspoken wordplay lets us
glimpse the patchwork of oral traditions, of local cultures that were fading
at the moment Guthrie emerged at the vanguard of the gathering folk
revival.
IN 1935, FRANK BURKE, the liberal owner of Los Angeles radio station
KFVD, offered Guthries cousin Jack a 15-minute slot for a singingcowboy show. But once Woody hooked up with Maxine Crissman, aka
Lefty Lou, and formed a duo, mountain ballads and hymns took over. The

Woody Guthrie

21

audience surged, Burke expanded the show to half an hour, with a section
devoted to Cornpone Philosophy, and the letters from transplanted
Okies poured it at a thousand a month and more. When Guthrie put
together a mimeographed collection of old-time tunes he and Lefty Lou
sang over the air, it sold briskly50 to 70 copies per day; they plugged it
over the clear-channel airwaves that wafted as far east as Texas, where his
rst wife and kids lived up with family until he sent for them, able to
support them for the rst time.
More offers rolled in, one from across the border. Mexican clearchannel radio was allowed more powerful transmitters than American
stations. Their signals aimed north, covering the American Southwest and
bouncing around the ionosphere on clear nights to as far north as Chicago.
The allure of a huge audience brought the Carter Family to one station.
Another, XELO, wanted Woody and Lefty Lou, and offered them $75 a
week to assemble a hillbilly troupe for a nightly three-hour show. It ended
after a few weeks, when no one got paid. And so back they went to
tolerant Burke, who cut Guthries pay to a dollar a dayne with Woody,
since he could then skip out and sing at skid-row bars and labor rallies
and mingle easily with workers while left-leaning Hollywood types
marveled uncomfortably.
Guthrie was congenitally restless. Neither his wife nor partner could
gure out why he didnt care about opportunities, career possibilities,
stability and money. He could spend a day carelessly rolling down hills
with kids in LA parks, squatting with bums in tenderloin districts, scribbling in his notebooks, sketching on his pad, watching clouds form. But
he wasnt motivated to succeed. When Burke urged him to report on
conditions at Okie camps for his new liberal newspaper, Guthrie started
writing the sort of tunes collected in 1940 on his rst commercial album,
Dust Bowl Ballads. He inverted a traditional Baptist hymn popularized
by the Carter Family, The World Is Not My Home, into tight-lipped
anger about the rich forcing the poor onto the road, ending with I aint
got no home in this world any more. The Communist newspaper Peoples
World noted his native class consciousness and signed him to draw
cartoons and author a daily column, replete with misspellings and grammatical errors he adopted in the comic Western dialect fashion of Twain
and Harte.
When the Popular Front collapsed after the HitlerStalin Pact, Guthrie
persisted in defending the Soviet Union as he toured camps and sites of
labor struggles and strikes with actor Will Geer and a makeshift troupe.
(One early Peoples World booster dubbed him Prince Myshkin.) Others
saw in him an effortless folk purity. The far-from-nave Guthrie hit back
at their condescension with burgeoning arrogance, armed by his authenticity. Of Burl Ives, he said tartly, Burl sings like he was born in lace
drawers. But when he made fun of Burkes anti-Soviet radio editorials,
the station owner nally dropped him. Guthrie stashed his family back in

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Avatars

Texas and headed to New York, where Geer was starring in Tobacco
Road. He sold his old Plymouth, put $35 in his pocket, and hitched and
rode across the land, his dirty ears burning with God Bless America, a
huge hit, all the way.
IN A WAY, WHAT MOSES ASCH recorded with Woody Guthrie was a change
in attitude toward American popular culture. Under the New Deal, the
government sent out squadrons of researchers, writers, artists, and collators to document and disseminate local American folkways and history.
This was part of the broader push to put to work the armies of unemployed, but it also reected a country awakening from the social elites
Eurocentric cultural dominance, partly thanks to emerging mass media,
and recognizing its e pluribus unum selves in the mirror of its artifacts.
Jazz, the music of the urban sophisticate, was a prime example: a stew of
African rhythms and chants, American marching band instruments, eld
hollers, and the blues that melded into something no one had heard
before, the modern sound of the industrialized present, the big bands were
the sonic equivalent of a 12-cylinder Jaguar. Bebop distilled the frenetic
rhythms and jangled complexity of postwar American urban life. In
contrast, the eld trips of the Lomaxes and others like them were journeys into the past to gather scattered memories rendered into folk art. At
Carnegie Hall in 1938, John Hammond aligned the elements of the
musical continuum at From Spirituals to Swing, an all-star concert.
They would meet again in the civil rights and antiwar movements.
Dizzy Gillespie has said that he and the other young cats from Harlem
clubs like Mintons had bebops building blocks, but that Charlie Parker
brought charisma and virtuosity that catalyzed their musical and extramusical visions. In 1940, when Guthrie hit New York for the rst time
and met Alan Lomax and young Peter Seeger, he completed a circuit that
switched on the urban folk revival. He found disciples who could take
care of his needs, deal with his outsized weirdness. They found someone
whod lived the life theyd been savoring via cultural artifacts. The tall
tales Guthrie wove about his genuinely hardscrabble life added what leftists called authenticity to his critiques of The System. He was the Peoples
Singer, their barbaric poet.
Alan Lomax was 23 when he rst heard Guthrie in March 1940 at a
Grapes of Wrath benet for farm workers that Will Geer had organized.
His world shook. Alan worked with his ex-banker father, John A. Lomax,
from age 17, crisscrossing the South making irreplaceable eld recordings
of black inmates, adding oral histories and interviews that nest among the
jewels of the Library of Congress. What he heard politically radicalized
him; all he and his father agreed on was that the music was a singular
American art form. For Alan, as Joe Klein observes in his thorough and
well-written Woody Guthrie: A Life, It was, potentially, a weapon in the
class struggle. Throughout his career, hed see himself as a promoter as

Woody Guthrie

23

well as a collector, someone who found ways to bring the music and the
message to the widest possible audience.
The biggest prize the Lomaxes snared on their 1933 Library of
Congress trip to Louisianas Angola State Penitentiary was Huddie Lead
Belly Ledbetter. Lead Belly spent most of his life in prison for crimes like
shootings and attempted murder. He learned to work The System: he
entertained guards for special perks, even won a pardon in 1925 from a
30-year sentence by singing for Texas governor Pat Neff. Though he
dubbed himself King of the 12-Stringed Guitar, Ledbetters fretwork
was solid but hardly ashy; you might not guess hed rambled with Blind
Lemon Jefferson, the great Texas bluesman and early race records star,
as a youth. But his high keening voice, a powerful cri de coeur with a hardto-decipher drawl, evoked Jeffersons, and he carried in his head a
fathomless bag of Americana. The Lomaxes were enthralled. With their
help and his own (this time he wrote a song for Governor O.K. Allen of
Louisiana) he was released and retained as John Lomaxs chauffeur and
traveling companion; he joined the Lomaxes on their southern travels. For
brief bursts his music supported him, but mostly he scufed. Although he
built an audience via weekly New York radio shots, his commercial
recordings sold poorly, mostly because the big labels couldnt resolve how
he t their race catalogs. He did prison songs, ballads, cowboy songs,
childrens songs, lullabies, contemporary pop, accordion two-steps, and
even the blues. They gave up, and left him to Moe Asch.
Asch is one of those independent label heads who played vital roles in
postwar American music. At Folkways, Asch recorded culture that was
vanishing beneath urbanization and the growing mass media. He ran his
several labels on love and a shoestring. That means he doled out $20 here,
$40 dollars there, to any artist who asked for it; he didnt keep books, and
they didnt get royalties. It also means that many of his master discs no
longer exist, and so the younger folk revivalists Aschs artists inspired later
hunted his recordings with almost the same avidity they brought to their
search for living songsters.
Lead Belly was the rst folk artist Asch recorded, and his songs fed a
powerful underground stream into folk and rock music of the 1950s and
1960s: songs he claimed to write (in an oral tradition, authorship is hazy,
since change and adaptation are constant) include Goodnight Irene and
Cottonelds, which were covered by everyone from Seeger to Creedence
Clearwater Revival, and dened others like House of the Rising Sun.
Bourgeois Blues is his scathing portrayal of racism in the nations capital
(They call a colored man a nigger just to see him bow).
Asch saw Lead Belly as a victim of the expectations of even wellintentioned white leftists like the Lomaxesa victim of authenticity. The
two became friends. In his letters, Ledbetter complained that the elder
Lomax was paternalisticwhich included putting him in convict stripes
for concerts. He didnt like being reduced to a symbol of oppression.

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Avatars

According to Asch: He was one of the most formal human beings that
ever existed. His clothing was always the best pressed, the best. His shoes
were $60 shoesin 1947! Where he might not have had much money to
come home with, he had to have a cane. Lead Belly treated himself as a
noble person.
Nevertheless, he always addressed the white folks as Mister in a low
deferential voice. (Guthrie was Mr. Woody.) He had recesses they could
only guess at, depths they ascribed to him unclearly but in some awe.
From 1940 on, he would be a sort of black doppelganger to Guthrie, who
borrowed the older black mans adaptations of songs like Jesse James,
and used the melody of Goodnight Irene numerous times. On the other
hand, when Nicholas Ray, then a radio director, wanted to replace
Ledbetter with Josh White, whose diction was clearer to whites, Guthrie
threatened to walk off the show; Lead Belly went on.
TO MOST ACADEMICS SPECIALIZING IN FOLK MUSICwhich to them meant the
tracing transmission of Elizabethan ballads in AmericaAlan Lomax
seemed like a Communist. He wasnt, but one of his chief allies was.
Charles Seeger was a classically trained musicologist who championed
American folk music as the authentic voice of the people, and thus inherently socially progressive. For Seeger, the ne arts belonged to the ruling
elite, and commercial popular music was a pablumized travesty of the ne
arts intended to lull the masses. With George Gershwin and Aaron
Copland, who mined elements of jazz and country music, Seeger played
a part in the broad intellectual trend fueled by the New Deal and the
Popular Front into an outpouring of articles and books, documentaries
and recordings: the desire to wrestle with the Emersonian question of
American culture. As it went on, culture was redened: rather than the
ne arts, it embraced what people did and made, how they talked and
loved and hated, what they ate and rodethe circumstances of human
social life. For the elder Seeger, commerce and folk art were antithetical.
At the same time, Seeger and his wife Ruth, in partnership with the
Lomaxes, struggled to nd ways to transcribe the elusive musical qualities
of rhythm and phrasing that, in all forms of American folk music from blues
to jazz and beyond, evade European notation. The Seegers had a shy son
named Peter who had gone to Harvard, tried his hand at political puppet
theater, was an unpaid assistant to Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress,
and studied the lute. Encouraged by his father and Lomax, he switched to
ve-string banjo. Like Lomax, he rst saw Guthrie perform at the Grapes
of Wrath benet concert, and from that point was Guthries chief acolyte,
student, and explicator. They hoboed and sailed in the merchant marine
together, and at different points pooled their creative talents.
The Almanac Singers marked an apex of their rather asymmetrical
relationship. In early 1941, Seeger and Lee Hayes, the Almanacs core, and
a few others lived communally in a seedy loft off New York Citys Union

Woody Guthrie

25

Square. They started holding Sunday afternoon rent-party concerts, and

Lead Belly, Sonny Terry, Josh White, and Burl Ives showed up; nonmusicians paid 35 a head and a dime a beer. In the maelstrom of activity the
Almanacs improvised lyrics of protest to old tunes and were shocked and
thrilled when their audience of leftist urban sophisticates seeking Americas
folk-culture roots exploded like they were in a Baptist church. (The name
hootenanny came a bit later.) They had watched Guthrie improvise
lyrics, tinkering and rewriting constantly, the ux and ow of his heady
language charged with risk and playfulness. They did it collectively to
afrm solidarity; all their compositions were credited to the group. They
called the creative improvising process passing the song around.
In one of American historys odd symmetries, at around the same time,
in Harlem, beboppers were taking old standards and drastically revamping
the melodies and harmonies and rhythms in jam sessions.
A recording for a small leftist label got the Almanacs wide notice,
including an ambivalent review in Time. They were now big sh in folk
musics small pond. And if they tall-taled their lives to the media to authenticate their popular roots, it was to dramatize and credential their bona
des as outsiders. Isnt that what Woody did?
Guthrie had ed New York full-tilt in 1940 after deliberately detonating
success. Following the Grapes of Wrath benet, Alan Lomax and
director Nicholas Ray arranged a deal with the CBS radio network. Back
Where I Come From was a half-hour folk-music show Guthrie had a big
hand in scripting and shaping; one episode featured the Golden Gate
Gospel Quartet. Big-money offers followed when it was a smash: sing on
Sankas We the People, toss off a song about Wild Bill Hickok for Cavalcade of America, host Pipe Smoking Time for a tobacco company on
network radio, with So Long, Its Been Good To Know You in a bigband version as the theme. The tightly controlled show reduced Guthrie to
a propno spontaneity, no commentary, no politics, just shopworn hickin-the-big-city stuff. I cant take being told what to say, what to play, and
what to wear, he said later. He hit a parade of bars, then he hit the studios
of both programs in rapid succession and quit, and then he hit the road to
California, where he languished, broke, saddled again with the family hed
dragged to New York and now dragged back out. Finally he caught a
break: a month in Oregon, working for the Bonneville Power Authority on
a movie that never materialized but inspired a couple of dozen of his nest
lyrics, like Grand Coulee Dam (set to Wabash Cannonball) and Roll
On, Columbia (set to Irene). Then he got the transcontinental call: the
Almanac Singers planned a summer tour and wanted him on it. So he
dumped his wife and kids and hopped a cattle car for New York.
Soon after he arrived in 1941 the Almanacs cut two discreetly nonpolitical records for a small jazz label, and the headed out in an old Buick on
a national tour to support striking CIO unionists. The group was giddy:
they were riding with an original Road Warrior, and a frenzy of collabo-

26

Avatars

rative composition ensued that entered the legends and DNA of the folk
revival. Guthrie insisted that protest songs should show rather than tell,
but, beyond craft, there was only so much he could teach; they had to nd
it for themselves, like the jazz soloists who would soon follow Charlie
Parker around. As he said, Music is some kind of electricity that makes
a man a radio. Only some people dial in to more static than others.
After a couple of months, Guthrie split and left Seeger holding the bag.
Irresponsible? Or childish enough, free enough, to shrug off career, getting
ahead, even changing the world, so he could ramble and create? He
whined and complained when hard times cramped him, and he treated
his women with both love and scorn, and he never really knew his kids,
but he couldnt sit still, couldnt take the harness. His evasions of The
System were so casual and complete neither Lomax nor Seeger could
match them. Was this what the Communists meant by his native class
consciousness? Seeger paid his bills promptly. Guthrie never paid attention. It was remarkably like the complicated relationship between Dizzy
Gillespie and Charlie Parker.
When he met Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger saw his fathers vision of an
American Brechtian troubadour incarnate. And he translated his fathers
ideas into action. The folk movement bloomed from roots Seeger tended
devotedly for decades, and then, during the 1960s, the vision infused rock.
BEFORE THE NEW DEAL, record companies dug into rural American roots
music for their own reasons: survival. During the Roaring Twenties, radio
nearly killed off recording sales: why buy music when it wafted over the
airwaves for free, interrupted only by commercials? (Does this sound a
little like the 21st century battle between entertainment conglomerates
and digital piracy? Why did Americans accept ads so quickly on mass
media, as if commercial interruptions were acts of nature?) The desperate
labels turned to the marginal poor white and black sounds that urban
markets didnt initially want.
Ralph Peer was the initially unwitting instigator of new rural and
regional markets. He worked the South selling records and sheet music to
appliance stores and similar outlets when one customer suggested he could
use a few country discs to spruce up sales. Peer didnt know much about
it, but he signed up a few Atlanta artists. The discs sold decently, so he
scanned for more talent. In 1927 he hit the jackpot with Jimmie Rodgers
and the Carter Family, whose hits not only spread hillbilly music far and
wide but, Midaslike, recast them into commercial gold.
Enter the major labels and the development of race and hillbilly
records. The strategy was lovingly parodied in the lm O Brother Where
Art Thou: nd local musicians, pay them a small at fee if anything,
record them cheaply, usually at a local radio station, press a limited quantity of discs, and advertise locally. In this way dozens of regional American
subcultures, from the black and white Appalachian communities to hot-

Woody Guthrie

27

jazz urbanites to Hawaiian cowboys, were captured on shellac for Victor

and Okeh and others who turned a handsome prot from the spare change
that the marginalized subcultures provided within the industrializing
society.
When the Depression ballooned, radio rapidly replaced expensive live
broadcasts with DJs, many airing regional and race records. Two of the
countrys most popular programs were the Grand Ole Opry on Nashvilles
WSM and the Barn Dance on Chicagos WSM. Soon Hollywood signed
singing cowboys like Gene Autry, whose yodel and style were a relaxed
impression of Jimmie Rodgerss.
American folk music and commerce had galloped out of the gate
together and left a cloud of questions and nostalgic notions of authenticity
in their wake. Was Jimmie Rodgers, the tubercular Singing Brakeman
whose hard-lived music embraced country, blues (he learned to play guitar
from black railroad hands, though his rhythms mostly stayed whitebread
stiff), Hawaiian, and even jazz (with Louis Armstrong), inauthentic
because he recorded for a big label and sold stacks of commercial records
and built a mansion in Texas? Was he authentic because he played benets for local ood victims with Will Rogers?
The young Woody Guthrie studied and mimicked the records of
Rodgers and the Carter Family with an energy he devoted to nothing else.
He imagined himself as a performer early, and the performer in him saved
him time and again: when he bought off boyhood gangs by entertaining
them, when he rode the rails with hard cases who relaxed after a tall story
or tune, when he opped in eabags where everyone was prey, when he
played for Okie camps and labor rallies armed only with his guitar and its
motto. Like Louis Armstrong, he learned very young that dancing in the
street paid better than working or begging. He devoted his free time, when
he wasnt bitching or bragging about his Okieness or chasing women or
drinking, to pursuing his creative desires in a dozen directions, usually at
once. He never quite told anyone what he really thought. He slept in his
boots on other peoples clean sheets and always smelled bad and snuck
off before anyone else got up and Tom Sawyered his way out of any kind
of work. But he sketched and painted reams, read Rabelais and Darwin
and Lao-Tzu, wrote brilliant letters of staggering wordplay and emotional
directness as well as novels and stories and hundreds of songs that are now
part of the foundations of modern American popular culture.
What, in this context, does authenticity mean?
EVER WONDER HOW BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN got an Okie drawl? The next Woody
Guthrie is always in the wings. Ask John Mellencamp or Steve Earle.
Lee Hayes remembers when Guthrie adulators rst lined up to head for
Coney Island, where Woody was living at the time with then-wife Marjorie
and their kids Arlo and Nora. Guthrie had early symptoms of Huntingtons choreathough no one, except him, knew it. Hed been creatively

28

Avatars

dry for months, years. The sketch pads were blank, the novels abandoned,
the songs reduced to squibs and notes, the whole huge clattering Rube
Goldberg creative apparatus spinning its wheels ever more crazily as he
tried to dodge or ignore the fate that had haunted him since childhood.
A waiter at an Adirondack resort where Hayes was talent coordinator
told him: Most kids reach a point where they really want their freedom.
You hate school, your parentsanything that stands in the way. All you
can think about is getting OUT. You want to hitch a ride, hop a freight, go
wherever you want. Woody, I guess, represents that kind of freedom for
me.
By then Washington Square Park and Cambridge were magnets for
scruffy-looking kids with acoustic guitars and a college education and a
need to get OUT.
Ramblin Jack Elliot showed up at Coney Island Hospital, where
Guthrie was recovering from a nearly fatal ruptured appendix, in 1951,
carrying a guitar and decked out like a cowpoke and calling himself Buck
Elliot. His name was Elliot Adnopaz, and he was the son of a Brooklyn
doctor who heard Guthrie on a radio show and saw him at a regular
downtown hootenanny. He could mimic Woodys every inection, physical movement, attitude. For years Ive had a postcard of them on
ophouse cots, their thick mops of tangled hair and long thin features not
so vaguely twinlike. But as Guthrie fell under the diseases power, he
resented Elliots uncanny accuracy at aping his slurs and stumbles and
bouts of aphasia.
When Bob Dylan showed up, serious folkies said he was stealing Jacks
scene. But Dylans relationship with Woody was different: Guthrie was
deathly ill by then. Dylan was less ever-present doppelganger than entertainment and reliefas Guthrie wound in and out of hospitals over the
years, even his old friends, many worn out by years of demands and
erratic behavior and self-righteous arrogance, stopped coming. Dylan
played and wrote songs for Woody, as if he were seeking a kind of benediction from the songster, the poetic gift, the human touch. After his 1966
motorcycle accident, Dylans rst public appearance was at the benettribute for Guthrie.
Springsteen, inspired by Bound for Glory and the movie Grapes of
Wrath, became the blue-collar voice of the Rust Belt Age. But those jobs
and plants and folkways are eroded and lost now, two decades later, and
his audiences links to him are loaded with loyalty and nostalgia as much
as solidarity. Can The Boss be as free as Guthrie, tethered as he is by
commercial demands and a mass audiences expectations?
What, in these contexts, does authenticity mean?
O Brother Where Art Thou sent acoustic music wide once more, but
the format never left, just ebbed and crested. White singersongwriters
have abounded since Guthrie, but young black musicians with acoustic
guitars playing backporch music dropped off drastically after Muddy

Woody Guthrie

29

Waterss generation until Keb Mo and Chris Thomas King, who not only
win Grammys but take contemporary riskslike mixing in hip-hop. What
does this mean? Where will it lead?
As for hip-hopwell, Guthrie didnt invent the talking blues, the white
mans rap, though the form is so identied with him he should have. Think
about freestylin, where rappers improvise and pass the song around.
Isnt hip-hop folk music a recycling of old cultural parts into something
dramatically new that nally surfaced into commercial media? And what
do hip-hoppers in full blingbling driving Humvees to swank club parties
mean when they insist, Im keepin it real?
I FIRST HEARD A WHOLE ALBUM by Woody Guthrie because of the 1966 New
York City subway strike. I couldnt get to school from where I lived, so I
stayed over at a schoolmates house. He was a serious guy, deep, smoked
a lot of Camels, and had a sly and wicked dry sense of humor. We sat up
for a couple of nights going through his stacks of folk records. I heard
Lead Belly for the rst time; I couldnt understand half of what he sang,
but I liked its rough immediacy. Folkies like Joan Baez, Simon and
Garfunkel, the Kingston Trio, the Weavers all bored methey sounded
so bleached and passionless and sincere and safe, even when I liked the
lyrics. I had heard lots of people sing Guthrie tunes, but until that night I
hadnt heard the man himself sing more than a couple. It didnt t my halfbaked notion of blues. Its the white mans blues, my friend said. Within
a year, the antiwar movement ratcheted up, and This Land Is Your Land
was one of its anthems.

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part II

The Postwar
Jazz Era

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3
Mary Lou Williams
MARY LOU WILLIAMS was the rst girl who really made it into the boys club
that was (and mostly still is) jazz. Sure, girl singers by the dozen fronted
the big bands. And there were always women who played jazz, though
most of them worked in all-female outts, like novelty acts. Think of Some
Like It Hot, with Marilyn Monroe as the ukulele-strumming vocalist.
Like Monroe, Williams was drop-dead gorgeous, though she was tiny
and in her prime weighed barely 100 pounds. Also like Monroe, she had
a creative personality crosshatched with neurotic paradoxes, which she
managed to transmute into art that was distinctive, eccentricall hers.
She had a rollicking boogie-and-stride piano touch that would have done
her early idol, Fats Waller, proud; she liked to brag that she played heavy
like a man.
Born in 1910, when Louis Armstrong was a preteen and jazz was
unrecorded, Williams, at the age of four, could hear a piece of music and
play it back. At seven, she began her long working life in Pittsburgh and
earned a chunk of her near-destitute familys keep. At 12, she had mastered
parlor-piano favorites, light opera, ragtime, stride, boogie-woogie, waltzes,
marches, and Irish-tenor hits. She played at private parties and silentmovie houses and whorehousesnancial mainstays for jazz musicians
like Waller and Count Basie. At 13, she hit the road with Boise De Legg
and His Hottentots. But she did not learn to read or write music until she
was 20, when she became arranger for the Swing Era band, the Clouds of
Joy, led by Andy Kirk. A territory band, focused on the area around
Kansas City, it rode Williamss distinctive arrangements to fame.
Williamss arranging style was witty and deft. She wafted oating
chord voicings via unusual instrumentation, and stacked punchy riffs and
owing melodies over a light, looselimbed beat. Later she did charts for
bandleaders like Duke Ellington and Benny Goodmanand was often
underpaid or not paid at all. This was typical of the way she was underappreciated and overlooked even by men who perceived her talent. Still,
she managed to keep growing and writing, despite a husband who lived
off her and beat her. In the 1930s, she wrote self-assured tunes like

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The Postwar Jazz Era

Froggy Bottom, Cloudy, and Roll Em, which became a hit for
Goodman. In 1939, she mentioned to John Hammond that shed heard a
young guitar player from Oklahoma City who was translating Lester
Youngs quick-witted rhythms and melodic sense onto his instrument.
Hammond, the Vanderbilt-descended leftist who was Goodmans brotherin-law, arranged for Charlie Christian to take a train for Los Angeles,
where the clarinetists quintet was performing at a restaurant. One night,
Goodman showed up to nd a guitar amplier onstage; Christian, wearing
a purple shirt and yellow shoes, waited backstage. When Goodman called
Rose Room to stump the newcomer, Christian instead played so brilliantly he inspired the group in a round-robin of solos that lasted nearly
an hour, and was hired by Goodman on the spot.
Two years after Williams nally divorced her husband in 1940, she
started a sextet with the young Art Blakey and trumpeter Shorty Baker,
who became her next husbanda marriage that lasted only two years.
Leaving Ellingtons employ, Williams decided to settle in New York, where
Barney Josephson hired her to hold piano-queen court at his club, Caf
Society, the famed Greenwich Village nightspot that catered to the rich
and intellectual left and was one of the rst to break the color bar. It
featured jazz, blues, folk music, and comedy, usually with a liberal/leftist
slant to match its integrationist policy. Here in 1938, Billie Holiday would
sing Strange Fruit, encouraged by Josephson and the omnipresent and
extraordinarily inuential (if often disliked and feared) Hammond.
In 1945, Williams unveiled the ambitious, stylistically wide-ranging
Zodiac Suite. She had read a book about astrology, she told historian Dan
Morgenstern, and decided to do the suite as based on musicians I knew
born under the various signs. She had been at a creative impasse compositionally; the thematic approach freed her muse. Aries was for tenor
saxophonist Ben Webster, whom shed known since her Kansas City days
in the 1930s; its stride feel owed its logic to his love of the form and its
practitioners; and also for Holiday. Taurus was dedicated to Ellington
and herself, and has willful whole-tone scales and tempo changes to match
the signs character. Gemini was meant for Goodman, Baker, and Miles
Davis, with its contrasting themes and piano-bass divergences. Virgo is
a boppish blues dedicated to critic/historian Leonard Feather, a great
friend of and advocate for beboppers. Libra, with its gorgeous Impressionistic ambience, she wrote for Dizzy Gillespie, Bud Powell, Thelonious
Monk, and Art Tatum. Aquarius she wrote for FDR and Josh White,
the black folk-blues singer who was also a regular performer at Caf
Society. Pisces, a Chopinesque waltz, was for Josephson. She recorded
the entire suite as piano solos, duos, and trios for Moses Asch, the key
gure in the folk revival. who also recorded the likes of White, Woody
Guthrie, and Pete Seeger. In an early example of jazz being adapted to the
concert hall, the New York Philharmonic performed three of the movements from Zodiac Suite at Carnegie Hall in 1946.

Mary Lou Williams

35

Meanwhile, like the young guitar player shed recommended to

Hammond, Williams had become a central character behind the scenes in
bebop. She mentored bop outlaws like Thelonious Monk (who wrote
Rhythm-a-ning from one of her riffs), Bud Powell (who fell in love with
her), and Dizzy Gillespie, whose big band she wrote scores for. She worked
briey in Benny Goodmans Sextet, taking Teddy Wilsons chair, and in
the early 1950s led a trio with bassist Oscar Pettiford and drummer Kenny
Clarke, the nonpareil bebop rhythm section; besides their own performances, they played with a range of bop instrumentalists and vocalist Billy
Ekstine. Its evident that Williamss capacity to absorb new sounds and
idioms into her own voice and her restless quest to forge new forms of
jazz composition had few equals.
As a Taurusthe sign she shared with Ellington and Charles Mingus
Williams offstage was, perhaps not surprisingly, a complex, fascinating
maze of crossed motives and ideals: seless and haughty, paranoid and
primly determined, ercely stubborn in artistic matters and always craving
a business handler, self-abasing and overbearing, articulate and mystical,
tempestuous and controlling, the highly private possessor of a steel will
and cavernous insecurities who also just happened to be a superior allaround creative musician.
Mary Lou Williams was by turns a wild woman living the freewheeling
jazz life and a passive, self-agellating soul scarred by an insidious array
of guilts. In 1954, she suddenly left her gig at a Paris nightclub, stopped
performing, and opened the Bel Canto Foundation, which she funded by
means of a thrift shop, for which she badgered musicians from Armstrong
to Ellington to donate clothes and whatnots. She lived a hand-to-mouth
existence once again. In 1957, at the age of 47, following at least one probable abortion and several tormented years of visions of saints and demons,
she converted to Roman Catholicism. Even then she had her own angle:
she went to St. Ignatius Loyola, the Jesuits magnicient Park Avenue
Baroque church. Her favorite Jesuit told her she could be more effective
if she dropped her Christlike good deeds (she gave away most of her
possessions and money and refused to play in nightclubs) and returned to
her art to revamp it as a vehicle for her new beliefs. From then on, priests
guided her career and spiritual life, and she tried heroically to become a
saint. She prayed several hours a day, wrote a series of jazz masses (one a
masterwork for the black South American saint Martin de Porres), tried
in vain to solicit a papal commission, and acted as spiritual counselor for
just about everyone she knew or met.
An intuitive personality riddled with nooks and crannies can make a
stunning character in search of an author, but Williams has found her
writing soulmate in Linda Dahl, and the engrossing result is Morning
Glory, the detailed and revealing biography titled after one of Williamss
hits. A tireless researcher, Dahl sounds Williamss resonant depths, tapping
her diaries, unpublished autobiography, and previously unseen papers as

36

The Postwar Jazz Era

well as interviewing dozens of her colleagues and friends. The book has
some aws: pedestrian prose, overlong quotes, and occasionally zigzagging chronology. But the nal product overcomes its relatively minor
drawbacks to present a serious and engaging historical portrait of one of
jazzs greatest underappreciated gures. In the process, it throws down
the challenge of reevaluating and reviving her work.
As Dahl sees it, Williams learned early to live in her head. The darkskinned ve-year-old discovered both intra-black and black-white racism
when her family moved from Atlanta to Pittsburgh. Her mother was a
party-girl drunk, with a slew of children who raised themselves; the family
would often teeter on the brink of starvation. When a friend of her stepfather was teaching the 12-year-old Mary Lou to drive, he tried to rape
her. She fought him off, warning that her stepfather would come after him.
But she needed to learn to drive: Being stubborn, I kept going with him
. . . yelling stepfather! as a threat until I learned to shift gears and start
in rst. It is a parable of her dealings in the world of men.
At its best, Morning Glory pulses with that sort of vignette. Dahl, who
previously wrote Stormy Weather: The Music and Lives of a Century of
Jazzwomen, does not put Williams in a straitjacket of psychopathology
or feminism. Instead, she keeps her sense of historical context sharp, and
probes rather than labels her subjects teeming contradictions.
Dahl explores Williamss endless jousts with business moguls and
family, her nancial and musical and emotional ups and downs, the relentless commercial pressures and repeated episodes of racism. She keeps her
judgments oblique but usually telling; after she documents how Williams
had to overcome sexual discrimination time after time, she drily observes
that Williams may not have been as accepted in the boys club as she
thought. And always there is her well-laid foundation of research: watch
how she locates Williamss compositional stream of masses and neverending push for a papal commission within Vatican IIera American
Catholic political agitation, reminding us that Williams worked with
Dorothy Day, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement. Obviously,
though her eyes were directed toward heaven, she still felt the need to alleviate earthly suffering.
Williams died of bladder cancer in 1981, following four years as artistin-residence at Duke University. The one-time boogie-woogie queen, who
hated rock and roll as commercial evil but saw jazz as spiritual because of
its roots in the redemptive suffering of the blues, was eulogized by jazz
critics but otherwise soon forgotten. This clear-eyed biography, along with
the reissue of Williamss long-out-of-print recordings and recent versions
of her work from artists as diverse as pianist Geri Allen and trumpeter
Dave Douglas, should help x that.

4
Max Roach
For drum legend Max Roach at age 72, which he was when this interview took place, life was good. He could look back with satisfaction on a
lifetime of innovationand controversy, something Roach, an outspoken,
even combative fellow who has never lost the street elements of his
complex character, is as adept as ever at stirring up. That same restlessness
marked his persistent musical explorations of the last 50 years, which have
helped map the postwar era in jazz. From the work he did as a teen with
bebop innovators Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Bud Powell to his
offbeat classical-meets-jazz forays, from his denitive hard bop quintet,
featuring Sonny Rollins and Clifford Brown, to his championing of hiphop artists as the newest wave of African American cultural renewal and
change, Roach has been on the cutting edgeand unafraid to speak his
mind.
Twenty years ago, when I rst interviewed him, he straddled the fence on
Wynton Marsalis, then a hot, divisive topic of discussion: he thought the
trumpeters classical chops outpaced his jazz abilities (which I agreed with)
but added that it was about time jazz musicians themselves and American
institutions like Lincoln Center recognized the value of what Roach, like
many in the jazz world, sees as Americas greatest contribution to the arts.
Then, when Marsalis unveiled his rather Mingusy but jumbled extended
work, All Rise, in the late 1990s, Roach was furious: Those churchy
sections, he sputtered at me during the intermission, are shit! Hes never
even been in a Baptist or Holy Roller church, and it shows. In my review,
I attributed the cleaned-up quote to a jazz legend in the audience; Roach
told me the day the piece ran that he got a sharp phone call from Lincoln
Center ofcialstheyd guessed it was him and wanted to know why hed
talked such trash to me. Because its what I think, he shot back.
As countless people, including his old cohort and erstwhile business and
musical partner Charles Mingus, have discovered over the years, its not
really worth arguing with Roach. Especially now that hes garnering the
sorts of accolades that his achievements should bringand, all too rarely
in the arts, while hes still alive to enjoy them.

38

The Postwar Jazz Era

In spring 1996, Roach made one of his periodic leaps into new turf: an
album featuring him in an extended composition with the New Orchestra
of Boston as well as a shorter piece with the So What Brass Quintet. That
is why Im up on Central Park West to see him. While he and his ofce
assistant are dealing with phone calls and inventoryone of the assistants
tasks is to go over the unorganized but extensive tape and wire-recording
library of live shows Roach has stashed over the decades, some of them
riveting performances with the BrownRoach Quintet featuring Rollins
Roach hands me a video, which I pop into the machine. The tape, a live
performance of Festival Journey, as the orchestral piece is called, starts,
and I daydream in front of the TV, waiting for Max to nish with the
phone. There in his spacious 14th-oor apartment overlooking the park,
Im surrounded by the memorabilia of a lifetimeAfrican and Asian
percussion instruments, an upright bass, a guitar, books that cover African
American history, world mythology, all manner of art and musical catalogs and essays. It is only a sampling of the breadth of mind the most
interesting jazz musicians display, an aspect of the music that informs it
deeply but that too few listeners know or appreciate, and as my eyes
wander the rooms I let myself play back some peaks of Max Roachs illustrious career.
Born in 1924 in the South, he moved to Brooklyn with his family when
he was fourpart of the migration of southern blacks leaving sharecropping for work in northern factories. Daycare for him and his older brother,
as for many black kids of the time, came from the church, with its rich
musical traditions that have left their indelible ngerprints on Roachs
music. FDRs New Deal had its impact as well, an impact Roach has never
forgotten as hes complained bitterly about the disappearance of arts, and
in particular music, education from elementary and high schools across
America. It was free, Gene, thats how poor kids could learn to play an
instrument, he says to me whenever the topic comes up. As a boy, he took
maximum advantage, studying trumpet, piano, and then drums under the
WPA program, which, seeking to make the arts an integral part of
American daily life, sponsored artists teaching in the schools. His early
experiences, and the lifelong benets hes reaped from them, instilled in
Roach a lifelong commitment to arts education (he was on the faculty at
the University of Massachusetts at Amherst for more than 20 years) as
well as strong social views.
But Roachs formal schooling combined with what he calls the university of the streets. Growing up black in prewar Depression-era Brooklyn
was in somemaybe too manyways something like life as depicted in
a Spike Lee movie. (Roach admires Lees work and attitudes.) Besides his
studies and rehearsals with the jazz band and symphony at Brooklyns
Boys High (now Boys and Girls High), Roach scufed for paying gigs
at after-hours joints, backing chorus girls and re-eaters and the carnival
like, honing his chops, pocketing the cash, biding his time. So when he

Max Roach

39

was 16, he was ready to replace Duke Ellingtons stalwart drummer Sonny
Greer for a couple of dayswhich he did so well it opened new doors for
him, as the right gig in those days could for a young musician. Soon jazz
stars like tenor sax pioneer Coleman Hawkins were hiring him, and the
teen became a xture at Harlem clubs like Mintons and Monroes, where
Dizzy Gillepsie, Thelonious Monk, Kenny Clarke, and Charlie Christian
were putting aside the big band charts that earned them their daily bread
in order to toss their evolving ideas about harmonic extensions and
rhythmic twists into the communal pot. Christians upbeat, Lester
Youngavored guitar solos red the imagination; Gillespie and Monk
were, in their different ways, expanding jazzs language beyond the blues
and pop, internalizing, as it were, the language of Gershwin and Debussy
and rewriting it to new beats, which were Clarkes insights, developed out
of the need to redene the drummers role in small groups. Once a Kansas
City alto saxist named Charlie Parker landed in the Apple in 1943, he
brought the apparently volcanic ow of ideas, motifs, and convoluted
melodies into the mix, and the chemistry that would yield bebop was
catalyzed.
What Roach, following Clarkes lead, did with the drums changed the
shape of postwar jazz. His attack is compositional, melodic, in a way few
drummers before him, aside from Count Basies Papa Jo Jones, had
mastered. (Roach has for years done a solo drum tribute to Papa Jo, a
stunning example of how the drums can indeed speak the language of
tonality and inferencea 20-minute lesson in why Roachs attack has
deeply inuenced latter-day drummers from Tony Williams to Joey
Baron.) Brandishing offbeats to match the hornmens slippery lines, ourishing a quick press roll or a rimshot or cymbal smash to reply, Roach
abandoned simple timekeeping to enter into complex conversations with
the front line, sculpting the improvised arrangements as he proceeded.
This sort of playing required a compleat musician. So Roach hit the books
at the Manhattan School of Music; his classmates included the Modern
Jazz Quartets John Lewis and historian Gunther Schuller. Following with
the drum solo compositions he began showcasing in the late 1940s, and
the adventurous drum-and-bass outings he mustered with Mingus in the
early 1950s, he formed MBoom in the mid-1970s, an all-percussion
ensemble intended to highlight the rounded possibilities hes nurtured for
the drums.
Bop was cool, the ultimate cool to younger musicians like Roach and
Sonny Rollins and Jackie McLean. But it didnt pay anyones rent; the
industry, reeling from the postwar collapse of the big bands, the midwar
musicians strike led by mob-connected union czar James Petrillo, and a
variety of luxury taxes, had moved to highlighting singers backed by small,
often anonymous combos, and was hardly interested in a clearly esoteric,
even exotic new musical idiom. And so, like virtually every avant-garde
music in America before or since, bop found other outletssmall entre-

40

The Postwar Jazz Era

preneurial record labels often loosely (or tightly) allied with gangsters,
mob-owned or mob-connected booking agents and venues. Prestige and
respect the movements leaders gathered aplenty from their acolytes, but
in the mainstream press they were jeered at and pilloried, depicted as
goofy European aesthete wannabes wearing funny clothes and talking
crazy lingothe same kind of treatment the Beats faced shortly afterward.
Even the name bebop was a condescending media creation.
And so Roach like his vanguard confreres, hustled for paying gigs. He
found himself on club-lined West 52nd Street, now renamed Swing Street,
going from venue to venue, backing Charlie Parker, New Orleans revivalists, vocalists like Louis Jordan, who walked the line (which had not yet
been drawn) between rhythm and blues and jazz. He learned from it all.
That same versatility and curiosity made him essential to Miles Daviss
Birth of the Cool, the groundbreaking sessions that united Lewis, Schuller,
Gerry Mulligan, and a few others under the direction of Gil Evans, a
former arranger for the Claude Thornhill band whose apartment became
this ersatz groups crash pad, headquarters, and unofcial nerve center.
Riding the swing of historys pendulum, this nonet eschewed bops smallgroup freneticism, its dependence on the head-string-of-solos-head format,
and instead ventured into a more understated, orchestrally arranged
palettea harbinger of what Evans and Davis would later bring to classic
recordings like Sketches of Spain.
Roach had been studying Baby Dodds, an early New Orleans drummer
with, among others, Louis Armstrong, who maximized the use of his
entire drum set in ways that had never been signicantly picked up on.
On Birth of the Cool, you hear Roach expanding Dodds approach, the
subtleties of his colorations, the nuanced responses to the other instrumentalists and their interactionsquite a different road from Swing Era
pathnders like Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa, whose showboating,
indebted to black drummers like the diminutive Chick Webb, could all
too easily overshadow their artistic gifts.
By the mid-1950s, the jazz pendulum had swung yet again, back
toward bebop without simply reiterating it. As the jazz spectrum devolved
into Third Stream chamber jazz, junked-up bop, and West Coast cool,
groups like Art Blakeys Jazz Messengers with Horace Silver began to
delve into what became known as hard bop, a harmonically strippedback, gospel-avored stepchild of bebop. Charles Mingus adapted this
style to his own Jazz Workshop idea, mingling the notion of improvisation
as spontaneous composition with the idea of working compositions out on
stage in performance, often confounding his musicians (and audiences) in
the process. Roach was one of the powers of this movement, with a fearsome lineup that included saxist Sonny Rollins and trumpeter Clifford
Brown. This group was one of postwar jazzs nest and most kinetic; their
deft tempo shifts and odd-sectioned tunes, framing ery solos, upped the

Max Roach

41

performance ante and lifted audiences out of their seats. People could
dance to jazz once again.
Like and often with Mingus, Roach participated in political demonstrations and movements from the McCarthy era onwardmarching in
Alabama with Dr. Martin Luther King, Harry Belafonte, and Pete Seeger.
And he used his music as a platform for his views. We InsistThe
Freedom Now Suite was commissioned in 1960 by the NAACP to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation; the
piece is an outpouring of rage and frustration at American racism that,
not surprisingly, makes for hair-raising, provocative music. I once asked
Abbey Lincoln, Roachs wife of the period who sings on that album, how
she felt doing all the painful, at times blood-curdling, screams and vocalizing. Lincoln is a regal woman with a soft storytellers voice often rightly
likened to Billie Holidays, and in the last decade shes nally come in for
much of her due, as both composer and interpreter. At the time, she gazed
back at me in her resolutely queenly way and said, It was what the music
and its mood required, but Im not sure I think of it as singing. Maybe
for the sake of comparison I should ask Cathy Berberian how she thinks
of her role in Luciano Berios music.
Roach refuses to let age make stale his apparently endless variety. He
has continued to multiply his musical languages and their creative outlets:
MBoom, his Double Octet (with strings), his symphonic material, his
series of one-on-one jousts with musicians as resolutely unalike as Cecil
Taylor, Dizzy Gillespie, Anthony Braxton, and so on. It should have been
no surprise in 1988 that he became the rst jazz musician to win a
MacArthur genius award.
I have no idea how many times Ive seen Max Roach play, and how
many times Ive listened to his recordings: The Quintet at Massey Hall;
Birth of the Cool; A Study in Brown, with Clifford Brown and Rollins;
We Insist: Freedom Now! Suite; Survivors, with his long-running quartet
of trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater, saxist Odean Pope, and bassist Tyrone
Davis; Historic Concerts, with Cecil Taylor; Max and Dizzy; Easy
Winners, with his Double Quartet, his own plus daughter Maxines
Uptown String Quartet; MBoom Live at S.O.B.s. Among the last few
times Ive seen Roach onstage, two stand out in my memory. The rst was
in Harlem, where he played solo for a benet audience of glitterati that
included ex-mayor David Dinkins and congressman Charlie Rangel.
Roachs legs were clearly showing their age: he needed some help climbing
the drum riser, and there was a scary moment when he slipped and the
crowd audibly drew its breath. The second was at Tompkins Square Park
in the East Village, where Roach headlined the annual Charlie Parker Jazz
Festival. He played his tribute to Papa Jo Jones, and the crowd of 10,000
went wild, bursting into a prolonged standing ovation at the nale.
Here, then, is Max Roach.

42

The Postwar Jazz Era

Gene Santoro: Youve always been adventurous. Its something you

shared with Dizzy and Milesthe people who changed music in the
1940s, say. They didnt stop; they kept changing, evolving, developing.
Max Roach: Right, right. I think thats the essence of what we do. It really
comes out of writing. You have to keep renewing yourself. Its like the
university: publish or perish. With us, its the record companies. No
matter what you do, year after year record company presidents, A&R
executives say, Man, youve made all these records. But what have you
got thats new? So youre constantly searching so you can record.
The people you just mentioned, and people like Abbey, thats what
theyve done. Its one of the earmarks of what American music is about.
The kinds of things that are coming together now, for instance, are
amazing, unpredictable. Take Willie Nelson: jazz singing, country
music, nylon-stringed classical guitar. Hes like Ray Charles; he wants
to do it all.
gs: The impetus, the urge to change, seems tied to something very
Americanthe need to disregard categories, whether social categories
or other sorts.
mr: Absolutely. Thats not what this country was supposed to be about.
This country was supposed to eliminate that, and its gone a long way,
though its obviously far from done. And the same thing should happen
artistically. Its like you said: theres no hierarchy of the arts hereor
at least there shouldnt be. Its supposed to be a uid situation, not like
in more traditional societies, where art tends to stay more xed and
immutable, or even in Europe, where there are different kinds of standards. Here its like theres this town square in the middle of everything
where anybody should be able to work, where everybody should be
able to meet with other artists and have a conversation.
In a couple of weeks, were going into the studio to record with
MBoom, along with Tony Williams and Ginger Baker. [Williams, who
had broken into the big time with Miles Daviss so-called second great
quintet with Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, and Ron Carter and
reshaped the use of cymbals and polyrhythms in jazz, subsequently
died; Baker, one of the founders of Cream, the blues-rock improvising
trio that helped launch jazz-rock fusion, soon after this formed an
offbeat power trio with guitarist Bill Frisell.] What were doing is something weve already had a trial run on; we did it in Verona last year. We
had 15,000 people in the arena. I must tell you, Im looking forward to
it, but Im also thinking Tony can really dance.
gs: Ive seen the old man dance pretty well.
mr: Yeah, well, Tony and Ginger will keep me at it, I tell you. And
MBoom, of course, has been together over 20 years now and made the
point that the drums can do a lot more than just keep time. But when
Tony and Ginger and I get together, its three different styles, a few years
apart, anyway, but the way they mix becomes something completely

Max Roach

43

different. Thats why over the years Ive played in duos with so many
different kinds of peopleto check that chemistry out.
gs: Cecil Taylor is somebody youve played with in a duo, somebody
whose approach is totally distinctive, who some people consider to be
on the extreme edge even after 40 years of being on the scene and
recording and getting artistic, if not commercial, accolades. But you
take your thing and you get with it, wherever you want, and make it
work.
mr: Thats exactly what this music we call jazz is about, Geneexploration. Cecil is something; hes always pushing when youre playing
with him, hes always got another ood of ideas ready to go. Hes a very
strong musical personality; its like getting into the ring with Mike
Tyson. So usually you have to struggle to get a foothold in there. But
once you do you set up a give-and-take. With Cecil, you have to keep
doing that during a concert. But thats the funand the artistic challenge, the meeting of the minds. And that makes him a joy to work
with, especially for a percussionist. The interaction is so uid, and hes
so aware of rhythm, what he does with it is so subtle. And at the same
time hes so . . . insistent.
I remember one time I did a duo with Dizzy. He was touring around
Europe with his band. Now, Dizzy worked every day if possible; he
always did that, claimed it kept his chops up. He could never understand how Mingus, for instance, could go for days without touching
the bass. Anyway, I met Dizzy in Paris, but I got there ahead of him.
When he came in, it was late, so we didnt have a chance to talk about
what we were gonna do. In fact, we didnt get a chance until the next
morningin the car, on the way to the sound check. Dizzy turns to me
and says, Whos the bass player? No bass player, I say. Whos the
pianist? No pianist. He turned and looked out the window for a
second, then turned back with a little smile on his face, and said softly,
So Im free, huh? Harmonically and rhythmically, he could stretch
the bar lines any way he wanted to, stretch the progressions any way
he wanted to. He wasnt restricted to hearing any particular way somebody else on stage wanted him to. So he just kinda smiled and shook
his head from side to side. Of course, when we got onstage he proved
one more time that he still had more tricks than anybody else up his
sleeve.
gs: The way you roam around stylistically reminds me how jazz musicians
have traditionally resisted denition, having themselves or the music
pigeonholed. Denitions could hem in what they were trying to do.
mr: Well, I think some things have changed. I think younger musicians
like Wynton Marsalis and those guys began to realize that they could
study Roy Eldridge and Dizzy Gillespie, and Louis Armstrong for that
matter, and learn big lessons from them. Thats good. But the important
thing in jazz is still that you develop who you are. You have to have a

44

The Postwar Jazz Era

personal signature. Miles went to the conservatory, but before he went

there hed developed his personal signature. So had Monk. The way he
dealt with space and so forth, for instance, was like nobody elsehe
was Monk, he was saying something about himself, the way he related
to the world. The way he sounds is the way he was, and he was like
nobody else.
gs: Theres a story you once told me about playing with Lester Young.
You stopped by his room, guring it had been a good night on the
bandstand. And he said, You cant join the throng till you write your
own song.
mr: Oh, yeah, he had that way of talking. See, playing with him, I
thought Id be doing the right thing by playing like Papa Jo Jones. That
night, we nished, and I thought, Boy, Papa Jo would be proud of
me. But Prez was saying, Look, kid, get your own signature. Youve
got to nd your version. Its like Bird said: If you dont live it, it cant
come out of your horn. Youve got to live it, then believe it. Doing
what somebody else did isnt the point. In this music, you have to nd
out who you are, what you feel, what you want to say. Thats one of the
ways that its so American. You have to be yourself.
Thats also one way jazz is different from classical music. In classical
music, you learn to study and come up with the nest interpretation of
a work that you can. Thats a different way of expressing your personality. You have to learn to use whats written already to express
yourself. In jazz, you have to learn to be who you are, and create the
music from that.
gs: One analogy Ive used is a library. In classical music, people are
trained to read uently, and naturally each person reads differently,
adding shades and nuances to the work. In jazz, its like the books are
missing pages that the musicians have to ll in, connecting the dots in
their own ways without destroying continuity.
mr: Thats exactly it. Youve got to come up with something thats individual to you and true to the music. Thats why youre playing, thats
why youre on the gig.
gs: Thats kinda what you and Kenny Clarke did for bebop, no?
Rearranged the rhythms?
mr: Right, right. Well, youve gotta remember what was happening at
the time. The demise of the big bands had put all the weight on small
groups and small clubs. First, there was the war, drafting most of the
musicians, then there were special taxeson dancing, for instance. And
there was the rationingtires, gasolinethat made it hard if not impossible to tour like in the Swing Era. All that made it pretty close to
impossible to keep a big band going. Duke Ellington was one of the
only bandleaders who could, and thats because he had the royalties
coming in from his music, which he used to support the band. So the
big bands basically died out and gave way to the small groups. That

Max Roach

45

meant that the role of the drums had to change too. The small groups
needed something different, not somebody keeping time. It had to be
more active.
For me, Dizzy was actually the catalyst of that whole bebop period.
He was on top of everything about it before everybody else, all the guys
of our generation. He was working for and writing for Cab Calloway,
writing for Claude Thornhillhe started very young. So hed make the
round of nightspots and sit in with you, with anybody. When I rst
heard talk of Charlie Parker and Oscar Pettiford it was because Dizzy
had heard them in Kansas City and would come back to New York and
talk to us about them. So by the time Bird got to New York I was
already playing at the places he started to hit.
I rst heard about Charlie Parker in 1943, at a joint called Georgie
Js 78th Street Tavern, on East 78th Street. We played down there from
say nine until three, then wed pack our gear and go uptown and play
from four until about eight A.M. Thats a lot of playing time, but we
were all young, and so there was a lot of energy. Charlie Parker heard
us playing around the clock and looking for jam sessions after we got
off high school, and he was amazed. If the music happened, if bebop
took off artistically, it was because of that: the enthusiasm, the commitment, people wanting to do something new. It was fresh.
What Kenny Clarke brought to it, especially from my perspective,
was his overall musicianship. He was a good pianist, a good composer,
played mallets. I saw that and said, Ah, so youve got to do all that to
think like he thinks. That whetted my appetite to get more involved
with theory and harmony and all those other things necessary to full
musical training, cause up until then usually drummers just played the
drumsthey didnt know or need to know anything about the musical
architecture, say. But when I saw how Kenny dealt with everything, it
was an education. For me, it was like Dizzy bringing Miles over to the
piano and saying, Youve gotta know how this works if you wanna
be a real musician.
I remember recording Un Poco Loco with Bud Powell. I was doing
the standard Latin rhythm thing Id learned on it, and he just stops the
tune and looks at me funny and says, Youre Max Roach. Cant you
do better than that? So I fooled around and came up with something
different. A few weeks later, when the record comes out, I see him on
the street. Hey, Bud. He just glares at me: You fucked up my
record! You know, we never did play that piece live after that, whenever I worked with him. But on the other hand, we were playing in so
many odd meters that jazz hadnt much used before5 or 7 or 9and
feels, that it all became almost intuitive. We internalized them. They
became second nature.
Of course, at the same time I was doing that stuff I was going out on
the road with rhythm and blues folks like Louis Jordan and Red Allen.

46

The Postwar Jazz Era

See, a drummers like a chameleonyou deal with all kinds of musical

situations or else you dont work. That may be one reason there arent
that many drummers who nd their own voice to the extent that they
have something so different they become bandleaders: Chick Webb,
Buddy Rich, Gene Krupa, Cozy Cole, Art Blakey, Elvin Jones. Its not
as easy to nd something that makes you stick out on a tympani instrument as it is on a melodic instrument.
gs: Bebop bred its reaction, the cool.
mr: The Birth of the Cool sessions were amazing. Miles and I had been
working with Bird for years already, so we knew each other well. And
Gil Evans had been there during that whole period on 52nd Street. In
fact, during intermissions and after we got our dough, as often as not
wed go to Gils place. Gil was arranging for Claude Thornhill, as was
Dizzy, and thats how the whole thing hooked up. Wed been going to
Gils tinkering with ideas for that music for weeks, an incredible mix of
people: Miles, John Lewis, Lee Konitz, Gerry Mulligan. There was
really some kind of chemistry.
Speaking of small groups, I remember when Mr. Ellington played
with me and Charles Mingus. Listen to that record. He really kicks our
butts, hes all over the place. And we were supposed to be the hot young
guys, but we were scrambling. He had that left-hand stride thing going,
his real sharp sense of time. Mingus got so unsettled he just decided to
pick up the bass and leave. So we all went into the lobby, and Mingus
was just beside himself. Everybody from all over the jazz world had
come to see this particular session, to see Duke on his trio date with the
younger guys, so the pressure was onreally on, if you were as sensitive as Mingus. So we had to calm him back down to nish off the rest
of the session. Duke had to coax him back into the studio, telling him
how beautifully he was playing, and then he calmed down and we could
get back to work.
gs: In 1952, you and Mingus started your own label, Debut, and
recorded the fabulous Quintet at Massey Hall with Dizzy, Bird, Bud,
and yourselves in 1953.
mr: Yeah, we started Debut because nobody was banging down our doors
to record us. He was a bass player, Im a drummer, and record companies look for lead players. So we had to start our own record company
to record our music. But we also recorded Charlie Parker, Miles Davis,
and everybody else we could, because we were all struggling during that
period. There was no work. The clubs were closing down. The record
companies were cutting back. It was hard to make a living.
So I remember when we did Massey Hall. It was Minguss idea to
record that, the so-called dream band. At that time the only one of us
who was signed to any label was Charlie Parker. Since he was signed
with Norman Granz for Verve records, we said, Bird, you negotiate
for all of us. So he went to see Norman and asked him for $100,000.

Max Roach

47

Norman said, Well, uh, Ill call you back. Of course, we never heard
from him. So we put it out on our own label, but we couldnt use Birds
nameNorman threatened us about thatso he became Charlie Chan.
gs: MBoom and your solo pieces, like Drum Conversation, have long
been vehicles for you to foreground what the drums can do besides just
accompany.
mr: You know, Gene, you just hear so much in New York. When I heard
Segovia do a concert and saw him deal with that instrument alone
onstage, I felt that this could be done with a drum set. When Ravi
Shankar rst came to the United States he had a wonderful tabla player
who had spread in a semicircle maybe eight tablas that he did some
wonderful solos on. And I was always fascinated by Art Tatum, what
people like that could do with solo instruments. So in the back of my
mind I felt that the technique and knowledge of how to create form
in other words, how to take music and look at it architecturallyis the
key to the drums. You build. Of course, youre not dealing with melody
and harmony, but certainly you can relate to poetry and sentences, you
can ask yourself questions and answer them, and you can do the same
kind of things writers do to make what theyre doing make sense.
MBoom came about because I needed some people who felt about
percussion the way I did. The front line has always been the horns, the
second line was the rhythm section. So I got some people who felt like,
Okay, were gonna be the front line, the second line and every other
thing too. The percussion family, after all, runs the complete spectrum
of sound, of determined pitches, from bass marimbas and tympani all
the way up to bells and chimes at the top. Harmonically, we can cover
everything with mallet instruments. As far as instruments of undetermined pitch, its limitless: tire irons, shakers, everything. This was the
basic idea: we wanted percussion to do the whole damn thing. That
isnt original, of course, because you have people like Stockhausen in
Europe, youve got the Japanese kodo drummers, and of course the
Africans. But I think the unique thing I was after was that this percussion ensemble would reect that music thats created in the United
Statesjazz or whatever you want to call it.
See, the drum set is an innovation that comes out of the United
States. Nowhere else that I know of do percussionists play with all four
limbs. So a new language is being developed here. As each generation
starts dealing with the music, the drums take on a more prominent role,
as in bebop, as in rhythm and blues, and in rock, as in rap now.
gs: A few years ago, you created some controversy by championing hiphop and working with Fab Five Freddy.
mr: One of the things that fascinated me when I rst heard rap was that
there were no melodies or harmonies, just rhythm and poetry, rhyming.
It was exciting to me. I think it was the most revolutionary sound out
here as far as people of the inner cities are concerned, the ones left out

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The Postwar Jazz Era

of society. Okay. So rst what the rappers have done is rejected what
everybody else says is the proper way to deal with soundthat you
must have a perfect balance between melody, harmony, and rhythm.
They took rhythm and made it into something else; they obliterated
melody and destroyed harmony. They spoke to their neighborhoods, to
the life led there. And they came up with something that people are
relating to all over the world.

5
Sonny Rollins
Theodore Walter Sonny Rollins has been called jazzs greatest
living improviser so many times its become his virtual Homeric epithet.
In 1959, musicologist Gunther Schuller wrote an essay using Blue 7
from Rollinss Saxophone Colossus to explicate the saxophonists thematic
way of worrying at melodies to unfold variations, often so subtly that they
recall the attack shared by his idols Lester Young and Billie Holiday. Ask
any signicant contemporary saxist, from Joshua Redman to Joe Lovano
to Branford Marsalis, about inuences; expect Rollinss name to be at or
near the top of the list.
In concertthe only way to experience Rollins at his besthe stalks
the stage wielding his tenor like its a toy, twisting and turning down the
corridors of his restless imagination with such uency that he seems less
a purely musical, and more a natural, phenomenon. His burred, uid tone
shifts as he ransacks his bottomless memory banks for quotes, fragments
of tunes he can warp into the crucibles that are his solos. His love of pop
culture, from cowboy movies to dancing, led him to annex to jazz styles
like calypso, in his St. Thomas, and rework Tin Pan Alley schmaltz like
Toot Toot Tootsie. At the time, few jazz artists aside from Miles
DavisRollinss most frequent bandmate in the early 1950scould touch
that sort of vehicle without going soft. But thats Sonny Rollinsand so
thats what you get. The integration of his personality, the focus on the
ow of his jazz voice as it articulates the pools of his psyche, is what
makes him so formidable, as a player and as a person. He is a nonpareil
jazz existentialist.
The quick prcis of his life and career runs like this: his mother was
born in the Virgin Islands, but Sonny Rollins grew up in Harlem, alongside other jazz-musicians-to-be like Jackie McLean. His older brother and
sister studied music and became classical professionals, but Sonny was
drawn to jazz and the jazzy pop of the Swing Era. He met his bebop idols
hanging out on the Harlem scene: Charlie Parker, Max Roach, Thelonious
Monk, Bud Powell. And like the teenage McLean he worked with them,
rehearsing with Monk: He used to sneak me into bars after school. In

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The Postwar Jazz Era

1955, he was recruited for one of hard bops powerhouses, the Max
RoachClifford Brown Quintet. Two years later, he went out on his own.
Rollins has gone his own way ever since. His two retirementsone
in 1959 to study himself and his music, when his practicing on the
Williamsburg Bridge prompted a now-famed short story; the other in the
late 1960s to travel to the Orient and delve into Eastern philosophiesare
the best-known manifestations of his singularity. He doesnt quite t the
standard categories of jazz history or life. Hes played almost everything
there is to play, and it has all, for better or worse, come out him.
When you interview him, its like playing in his band. He expects room
to rove and develop his ideasand they are ideas, not prefab riffs that fall
easily under the ngersbut he also gets bored or impatient if you dont
have the chops to feed him variations on the changes.
And so I lead off by asking why he hates recording.
He dives in: Im reading a book called War of the Worldsnot the H.
G. Wells book. Its about the world of cyberspace, a sort of doomsday
prophesy of whats happening in that world, how people are getting so far
away from contact with each otherwhat the author calls f-to-f, which
means to face-to-face contact. This is getting to be a thing of the past, just
like playing a musical instrument is getting to be old-fashioned. Some
people can sit down in front of a screen and punch in an atmosphere of
some kind and then experience those things via the Internet. I think thats
a dangerous trend, but I dont like technology anyway, so I was converted
before I read the book.
I think that, whereas recordings are good, and Im very happy to have
made successful ones that helped people nd out about me, the actual
playing experience is nothing like being with real people, and creating
music for real people, and getting the feedback from real people. That
hasnt been replaced. In cyberspace, its gotten to the point of cybersex.
To me, thats a type of insanity. Now, playing music and recording isnt as
extreme an example, of course, but playing live is like having sex live, as
opposed to recording, which is like having cybersex. So I always like to
have that contact with the audience. For quite a while, a lot of my records
that I like were live. When I started out, everything was done in the studio,
but that basically meant recording live anywayno overdubbing, no
going back and forth. In effect, it was live, but no audience except for the
engineer and producer. Now, of course, I employ overdubbing and other
modern techniques myself for my recordings, but I prefer f-to-f. I think
theres something that happens in actual live performance. It cant really
be captured; even a live recording is not like being there live. Does that
sound crazy?
I shake my head no. Ive been at lots of shows that have been recorded,
and the record, no matter how good, never feels the same. The vibe is
gone, or at least diminished; you have audience noises, not the electricity,
the looks on bandmembers faces, the movements and colors of the crowd.

Sonny Rollins

51

He nods. All right. So theres no way to capture whats happening

right at the moment, which is what jazz is all about anywaythat creative
spontaneous thing. Thats why I hate recording. I believe in this spontaneity, so I like to play in front of people.
Spontaneous communication, I suggest.
Music is just a language, he observes, and you speak to people in
ways they and you can understand. You want to communicate without
condescending. Every great musician Ive ever known, all very serious
guys, wanted to reach people; not all of them succeed in the same ways.
Music has a spiritual aspect that needs to be communicated to people.
Spiritual, mystical, whatever you want to call it, theres something mysterious that you cant get by punching a button. Thats what makes life not
humdrum.
This air conditioningI hate it, but its necessary, Rollins apologizes as he stops answering a question to clear his throat. He uses the time
to step back from what Ive asked him, scrutinizes it like its a tune to blow
on, and says, Arent these questions kinda technical for a general audience? Our conversationfor this interview has turned into a conversation
over the course of its three-plus hoursunfolds in Rollinss small 39thoor Manhattan pied--terre (his real home is a 120-acre farm in upstate
New York), a few blocks north of the World Trade Center, which hasnt
yet fallen; its windows glare with the rising heat of this early summer day,
and the Hudson River below glints its way to the sea. Rollins is sitting up
in bed, his head swaddled in a blue turban, his eyes hooded by dark glasses,
his muscular torso draped with sweatclothes and a sheet. I shrug, and
explain the technical stuff sets up and lls in around more general stuff.
He answers, Well, as Ive said a lot of times I consider the saxophone
to be a very unique, mystical instrument. The conical shape goes all the
way back into antiquity. I remember when I rst saw a saxophone I got
hooked because it was so prettythe keys and the gold, you know. I was
just always attracted to it, and I still think its the greatest instrumentyou
can do so many things with it, its open-ended. The instrument is there to
bring out the sounds of the individual artists, their personal sounds. The
rst sax players I learned to appreciate, like Coleman Hawkins and Benny
Carter and Lester Young and Louis Jordan, represented an incredible
range of possibilities on the instrument.
That is a fascinating list.
Ever since the mid-1920s, when Coleman Hawkins, after sitting near
Louis Armstrong in the Fletcher Henderson orchestra, began to consciously replace his old-style vaudevillian slap-tonguing antics with the
looselimbed emotional and creative rapture he absorbed from Armstrongs
surging triplets, dotted and tied notes, and melodic leaps, the saxophone,
especially the tenor sax, has been considered jazzs primary instrumental
voice, elbowing aside the cornet and trumpetan ironic inversion of how

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The Postwar Jazz Era

Armstrong himself had elevated his cornet above all the other instruments
in the old New Orleans jazz bands. Hawkins, trained on classical piano as
a child, had little of Armstrongs instinctive and intensied blues feel, nor
had he yet made the underlying connection Armstrong did between arias,
say, and instrumental solos. But as Armstrongs power swept over
Hawkins, as it did all of hot jazz, it liberated his thinking: his lines grew
more legato, his rhythms percolated, and he drew on the harmonic understanding his childhood lessons had instilled. The tenor saxophone had left
vaudevilles barnyard mimickry to become a jazz voice.
By the late 1920s, Hawkinss solos connected arpeggios across chord
changes, replacing the largely horizontal (melody-derived theme and
variations) soloing that Armstrong and early jazz featured with vertical
(harmony-derived lines linking notes from chords) soloingand thereby
opened the conceptual door for most jazz improvisers since. In his early
days, Hawkins at times sacriced Armstrongs dancing subtlety and
exuberance; like John Coltrane during his later free-jazz period, Hawkins
tended to alternate heavy and light beats, in ways that rhythm and blues
and rock and roll musicians could adapt. On his famed 1939 version of
Body and Soul, Hawkins lled a 78 rpm disc with an improvised saxophone solo of gorgeous construction and rich masculine tone that
suggested dim lights, dreamy eyes, and a discreet fade-out.
Benny Carters alto sax also mined legato smoothness, an economy of
effort that climbed and descended across the songs harmonic motion via
seamless arpeggios, though his silken tone, like that of Duke Ellingtons
Johnny Hodges, unwound with yearning, in contrast to the sexy insistence
growling in Hawkinss (and in disciples like Ben Websters) tenors. And of
course, with his charts for big bands like Hendersons and his own, Carter
joined innovating arrangers like Don Redman (the longtime sonic sorcerer
behind Hendersons band) in formally restructuring big bands along the
rhythmic and melodic lines suggested by Armstrongs trumpet solos.
Lester Young, a professional carnival and show musician from childhood, ended up in Kansas City in the early 1930s, where he met and left
Count Basie for an abortive stint with Hendersons band. He was hired to
replace Hawkins, but Hendersons personnel derided his playing; he had
a light, airy, almost alto tone, and his long-lined solos, departing from the
arpeggiated guidelines Hawkins had staked, seemed to oat almost arbitrarily from one chord to the next on passing tones and exible rhythms
that helped inspire bebop. One reason Prez, as he was called, was often
accused of homosexuality, a nasty putdown in the macho jazz world, was
his distinctly un-Hawkinsy, unassertive yet brainy solos. And Young
always insisted that his major models were Jimmy Dorsey and Frankie
Trumbauer, two white saxophonists with classical training who played in
sweet bands with dry, almost withdrawn tones; Charlie Parker, who
always cited Young as the central inuence on him, called the same pair.
This was not politically correct.

Sonny Rollins

53

Finally, there is Louis Jordan, a shaper of postwar rhythm and blues,

once it had hived off from jazz evolution into bebop, cool, and the like.
Jordans father led the Rabbit Foots Minstrels around the TOBA vaudeville circuit, and as a high school kid he played sax and sang with the
troupe on tour. When bebop demanded attention as high art, Jordans
jumping jive, like Illinois Jacquets honking and screaming solo on the
1939 smash hit Flyin Home, was art as entertainment.
Rollinss list restores integrity to the fallen Humpty Dumpty of postArmstrong jazz. Art and entertainment are assimilated. Rollins can touch
the thrilling intellectual heights of modernist jazz while reviving its audience-grabbing panache. Even in 2002, he was one of the few jazz
instrumentalists who could sell out Carnegie Hall, where thousands of
fans endure the horrible PA, which reduces Rollinss edgy, often trebly
tenor to an electronic kazoo, to catch a glimpse of the process of his jazz
thinking.
His improvising approach reminds me of holding a melody up to light
and rotating it. How does he know when its done?
Like a jeweler, almost, he says. Thats what I try to do. I never really
think that its done, and its difcult to get the people Im playing with to
realize that its not done. Its never done. The problem for me is that musicians will often feel its done. For instance, Ive got a new rhythm section.
I always tell guys when they start with me: say youre playing a song,
Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Now, this is jazz, I know, so were not
just gonna play the melody. But after we state the melody, I dont want
you to stop and go into that jazz 4/4, extemporize on the chord changes.
Dont make that clear demarcation from one into the other. Go slowly
into it. We may play the melody ten times. Each time its gonna be a little
different. So keep going on; as we keep playing, well get into the place
where its more jazzlike. But it has to come in a more natural, owing way.
Looking at it that way, things can go on forever. Theres no limit to
what you can do, as long as everybodys thinking that way. It should go
on and on and on, until it gets to the point where its not happening. Ill
leave that up to me, though, and then Ill make the endingmuch later
than most guys would think it should be.
Newk is what they called him in the early days, because he resembled Brooklyn Dodgers hurler Don Newcombe, one of baseballs early
black color-bar breakers. His saxophone contemporariesJohn Coltrane,
Ornette Coleman, Albert Ayler, Eric Dolphyfomented angry, shearing
revolutions that blew off what they heard as a calcifying Tradition. Rollins
in many ways stood aside from the postwar rush of developments around
him, anchored only in the moment, his voice and material an existential
response to change. Think of the Buddhist concept of immanent reality,
potential elicited into motion by human activity, or of Heisenberg and
particle physics.

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The Postwar Jazz Era

He says: A lot of musicians approach their instruments through sound,

by trying to develop a particular sound that will be theirs. As far as a
sound goes, I have an individual sound, because each individual plays in
a particular sort of way. But if I listen to my sound over the years there
have been some changes over time. Therefore I dont identify myself with
a sound, dont think of a Sonny Rollins sound. Miles has a sound;
Coltrane at a certain time at least had a denite sound. I dont think I have
that kind of a sound. Im sure to people listening thats theres something
they hear that tells them its me, but I think of things in terms of ideas.
My tone changes more than a lot of other peoples; I use it to make statements with, to color different phrases different ways when Im repeating
them or working them. So I dont think of a Sonny Rollins sound because
Im always changing my sound to get out something I want at a certain
time. Its completely ad hoc, and has to do with a lot of things like different
instruments and the different environments as well as how Im feeling. Im
trying to portray an idea.
Portraying ideas is an abstract pursuit that, in music if not always
philosophy, demands a rm grasp of the concrete, if you are to communicate effectively. For Rollins, as for Armstrong and Davis, jazz is a mode
of being as well as a musical genre, a method for querying and revising
popular culture and ideally society. Foraging across the rolling plains of
American pop music, Rollins, like Armstrong and Davis, has subjected the
sounds of American daily life to jazzs Socratic interrogation, wringing dry
Tin Pan Alley of sentimentality via the ironies of the marginalized.
This is not abstract. The calypso for St. Thomas is rooted in Rollinss
family background, utterly transformed. Theres No Business Like Show
Business and Toot Toot Tootsie were radio hits during his young
manhood. Way Out West nods to the cowboy movies he loved as a
black kid. (Aaron Nevilles lilting falsetto blends Sam Cooke with Gene
Autry, his Saturday afternoon hero. Charlie Parker loved the stories of
country music.) You could say Rollinss polyglot music represents America
reimagined.
There was a period, he says, when I think that by playing a so-called
popular tune it enabled a lot of people to relate to jazz. So a lot of musicians played these tunes partly as a way of communication, from jazzs
very early days. I like a lot of pop songs, and of course I heard a lot of
them when I was growing up: Im Gonna Sit Right Down and Write
Myself a Letter, Ill Get By, Fats Waller playing popular tunes, things
like that. So I like to play them a lot, and intersperse them into things that
Im doing, because theyre in my mind already and they come out when
Im playing.
Fitting melodies from other songs onto other changes is a whole other
area. You cant take an old song like Sunbonnet Sue that youd hear in
an old cowboy movie and put it into any thing anywhere. The chords have
to match, and not only the chords but the feeling has to match. I like the

Sonny Rollins

55

way Ella Fitzgerald does that; shes got it down. But its one of the tools
of jazz improvisation, and it has to be done the right way to work. The
beautiful thing about jazz is that it can absorb everything else and still be
jazz. So its not incongruous for me to use these materials I heard in the
movies or on the radio when I was a kid growing up. His 1951 recording
with Miles Davis, Dig, is instructive: the swinging, somewhat sardonic
reading of Its Only a Paper Moon takes an astringent tack, stripping
sentimentality out for more complex emotions than even Nat King Coles
version, a proto-rhythm-and-blues hit in the late 1930s. You can hear the
love Davis and Rollins share for melody, the hook the audience can follow
through the gyres and tumbles of improvisation.
What, I ask Sonny, was it like playing with Miles Davis?
He smiles. Playing with Miles was great because I love Miless playing
in the same way I love Lester Youngs playing. I put them together because
of that whole lyrical approach, the focus on melody and feeling. Miles and
I both liked to take pop tunes that no jazz musician at the time would have
thought of as the basis for improvisation and use them; Miles did it with
Bye Bye Blackbird and Surrey with the Fringe on Top. And in facta
lot of people forget thisColtrane did the same thing. What was that song
that people rst began picking up on him with? My Favorite Things.
People had been hearing Coltrane for a long time, but when they heard
that song they said, Wow. So using pop tunes like that serves a purpose:
communicating with the audience. People would say, Oh yeah, thats a
song I know. I dont think anybody wants to be so abstract that theyre
beyond comprehensionespecially in those days, when most jazz musicians were starving. There wasnt that much work around. And besides
communicating, using these songs shows off the depths of the possibilities of jazz.
In retrospect Im sure thats had an effect on whats been called my
thematic improvisingthough I wouldnt have realized that at the time I
was starting out. Part of the way I play is that Im creating melodies. Thats
different from what most beboppers were trying to doto run the chords
as fast as they could. Im not putting that down at all; it takes a great deal
of skill to play that way. Theres just different ways to do it. And I had to
do some of that kind of playing too, on the way to getting closer to my
own musical soul. The jam sessions alone would have pushed you into
that; you had to compete, you had to learn certain kinds of lessons. But
my natural inclination is more of the melodic style.
The shadows are lengthening as the sun ows into the west-facing
windows of Rollinss apartment. I ask him what it was like when he came
of age and into jazz.
He shrugs. Black people had fought and died in the war, and were
tired of waiting to get on the front of the bus. Same old crap. We know
the history from the time of the slaves; no different. And there was bebop,

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The Postwar Jazz Era

a new music that kinda linked up with that. This was one reason a lot of
people liked Charlie Parker, because he had a certain dignity about the
way he played: hed always be very erect, talk in a very erudite manner. So
as young people coming up, we saw this as the next wave, you know. We
werent going to be buffoons or clowns anymore. This is great music, and
you must accept it like this, and we are people, and you must accept us as
people. It all ran together. That was one of the great things about Charlie
Parker that people havent talked too much about. That attitude was one
big reason we looked up to him.
On the recordings Rollins made with Bird in 1953 under Daviss leadership, Parker, redubbed Charlie Chan with characteristic whimsy because
of contractual snarls, plays tenor saxonly the second time hed recorded
on it. His bluesy cries, unagging lyricism, pungent rhythms that glide
over bar lines and time signatures sound far closer to Lester Young and
Sonny Rollins than they do to the frenetic imitations of bebops myriad
Little Birds who thought the secret to Birds brilliance was his needle, not
his soul. As for herointhere was the complex sociology of the postwar
era, when black soldiers and workers were expected to return quietly to
the status quo ante, which charged a powerful current of rebellionand
repression. Was it coincidence that the McCarthy era and the early civil
rights movement coincided with the ooding of heroin through Darktowns from New York to Los Angeles? Not according to musicians like
Rollins, canaries in Americas cultural coalmines.
So I ask him about the politics and drugs of bebop.
He explains, A lot of it was imitation of Bird, a lot of guys like myself
who played saxophone and looked up to Charlie Parker just wanted to
imitate whatever he did to be able to play more like himand that
included shooting up. That was the bane of Birds existence. He tried to
stop the guys, but he couldnt stop himself; that was his downfall. But see,
it wasnt so much the drugs themselves as much as the fact that black
musicians couldnt use drugs and get away with it. I mean, Billie Holiday
was a big drug addict, but even though other white artists like Judy
Garland were big drug addicts, they as a rule could get away with it. So
black musicians felt that this was a way to penalize them more.
So in the larger sense, for a lot of people it was a sort of social protest
to use drugs. This was the rst generation that wouldnt go quietly to the
separate hotel, the back of the bus, the separate food counter; they got
into ghts and lots of hassles about it. Thats what I mean by the social
aspect about the drug abuse.
Billie Holiday was one of my all-time favorite people; she may have
been on drugs, but she also sang that powerful protest song Strange Fruit.
I remember Eddie Davis telling me that when he and Bud Powell were in
Cootie Williamss band, Bud got beat up really badly, which turned him
to drink and drugs. The same thing happened to Miles at Birdland, when
a cop beat him up for standing outside the club between sets. That was a

Sonny Rollins

57

bad night, because everybody came downtown when they heard about it
on the radio, and it nearly became a riot. Then there used to be a place
called Cafe Society in the Village, which was one of the rst places to have
integrated audiences and integrated bands. But there were a lot of incidents in the Village about it: I remember hearing that Sarah Vaughan got
beat up there. So it was a very volatile era. In a way, all that rage about
racism ended up making people hurt themselves with drugsthats the
saddest part about it. They were so alienated, they had so much difculty
dealing with the double standards, they felt they had to turn to drugs.
Now, drugs were a form of rebellion, thats true, but they were something more. I know when I was using drugs, back in those days we felt
that gave us a sense of community, among ourselves, against a hostile
world, okay? Nobody really liked the music, it was always played in small,
smoke-lled nightclubsyou know. So it gave us a sense of having something against the larger society. So there was that element in there. So
we got into it, and then later you realize you shouldnt; you have to nd
other ways to exist. But its a very complicated subject, because a lot of
artists use some kind of legal or illegal drugs. Drinking we considered oldfashioned, for instance. But it was something artists have often used to
put their minds in a different place. Its so old, and so valid in many ways,
that the two, drugs and art, have gotten mixed up. You know how many
great writers have been juiceheads. We knew that then.
Even by the elastic standards of the jazz demimonde, Thelonious
Monk was a highly eccentric man who carried a satchel full of random
loose pills and bottles that he would periodically dip a hand into, and
come out with a mouthful of whatever. He was also a founder of modern
jazz, the anchorman at the sessions at Mintons and Monroes.
Monks piano attack was as laced with idiosyncrasies as his famously
unpredictable personality, captured painfully and painstakingly by the
movie Straight No Chaser. He was radical in his jagged melodies and
rhythms and percussive piano attack with its unbelievable bent notes and
crushed chord intervals, conservative with his solid foundations in church
music, pop, blues, and stride.
Most young beboppers and critics considered Monk a clumsy primitive,
interesting but a byway, a footnote, an inconvenience in the rush of
modern jazz; for Rollins, he was an existential artistic guide. In 1953,
Rollins joined Monk, Max Roach, and Oscar Pettiford to record Brilliant
Corners, a collection of Monks original, gnarled tunes. On the title cut,
wrote David Rosenthal in Hard Bop, both saxophonists and Roach, challenged by the tunes eccentricity (they never did get the head right, and the
take nally released was spliced together from various attempts) and by
Monks suggestive comping, turned in inspired performances. Certainly
Rollinss solo, elbowing its phrasing into odd shapes and looming, leaping
intervals, and Roachs, all percussive melody, are exceptional.

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The Postwar Jazz Era

Rollins says: Monk had a very different style from anybody; something like Duke Ellington but more extreme. I heard Monk play a lot of
regular standard songs, not just his own stuff. His rhythmic and harmonic
conceptions were so unique. He was a catalyst, a denite hero. He energized both Coltrane and myself to go out and do our own things after we
played with him. Part of it was that he was so dedicated to the music, its
all he cared about. I picked up on that right away.
Rollinss next stop on his quest for self-development came in late 1955,
the Clifford BrownMax Roach Quintet. He had recovered from his
heroin addiction; now came a period of peak creativity. Roachs kinetic
drums underlined and partnered Browns slashing trumpet solos, those
rich, fat sound and ultralong lines and doubletime tempos that seemed the
polar opposite of Miles Daviss cool, clipped, introspective horn, until you
listened to his ballad work. Tracks like Parisian Thoroughfare suggest
a Mingusy marriage of musique concrete and jazz. On Brownie Lives, a
live recording shortly before Browns tragic death in an auto accident,
Roach reroutes the band by recalibrating rhythms or suggestingon the
drums!changes in melodic direction. Rollins isnt as polished as Brown,
but he bubbles with ideas: his opening on Gertrudes Bounce is startling, ery, a clarion call. Here we hear Rollins coming into his promise;
the man and the instrument, like the archer and the arrow, meld into one.
And so I ask him about his beating heroin and joining Roach. He
doesnt inch: Gene, that group came at a very interesting time in my
life. I had just made the break away from narcotics myself. You know the
story: I wanted to show Charlie Parker that I was straight, so I went away
to Chicago and got straight, and then he died before I could show him.
Anyway, I came back on the scene determined to be straight, because I
realized this was a negative way, that you cant really destroy yourself and
play music. Sure it might give you a certain sense of being together against
the world, but that wasnt enough. If were all gonna die, whats the point?
I realized that, and determined to stay away.
Anyway, I joined that band when Harold Land left, and the music was
very successful. It was a beautiful experience. I knew Max from New
York: he was an idol to me, like Bird. And Id met Brownie: hed recorded
a couple of tunes Id written with Elmo Hope, and I went to the sessions.
So I was out in Chicago, getting clean, working a lot of menial jobs and
getting ready to come back to New York. Id been around nightclubs,
stood the test of guys coming up to me and offering me drugs. So I was
ready. Then, when I joined the band in Chicago, I found that Brownie was
the type of personality who exemplied everything that I felt jazz musicians should be, who wasnt destroying himself. He was playing great, he
looked great, he was a plain-living guy, very humble, beautiful individual.
That was a revelation to me. I was on the right track, but that band helped
me stay there. Brownie was an anomaly: to be hip then, you had to shoot

Sonny Rollins

59

up. For a guy to be playing a horn that great and be clean was really something. He was an angel.
Rollins and Coltrane, who struggled with his own drug problem, met
in the studio for Tenor Madness, where the contrasts are suggestive.
Rollins digs deep and patient into his bluesy roots, while Trane arcs aching
note fusillades, sheets of sound; but when they trade fours at the tunes
close theres been a meeting of the minds.
In 1957, Rollins made his debut as a leader with Saxophone Colossus.
Here he is becoming himself. He synthesizes what hed learned from Monk
on You Dont Know What Love Is, scrambling time, warping tonality,
leaping odd intervals. And theres St. Thomas, of course, with its undulating rhythms and complex personal penumbra: Rollinss friend Harry
Belafonte, who popularized Caribbean folk music in America, marched in
Alabama with Roach, Pete Seeger, and Dr. Martin Luther King.
A year later Rollins cut Freedom Suite, nearly twenty minutes with
a pianoless triothe format Ornette Coleman had just begun to explore.
And Rollinss reliance on melody as his improvising road map grew
stronger with A Night at the Village Vanguard, the remarkable Way Out
West, and Sonny Rollins in Stockholm 1959.
Martin Williams wrote of Way Out West, Some reviewers heard
anger or aggression in his saxophone sound. There is much humor to
be sure; there is parody and even sardonic comedy. . . . There is more than
a hint that he was taking a cue from the airy, open phrasing of Lester
Youngs later work. . . . Rollins shows he had absorbed ideas from Monk
about how to get inside a theme, abstract it, distill its essence, perceive its
implications, and use it as a basis for variations-without merely embellishing it or abandoning it for improvisation based only on its chords. . . .
By 1957 Rollins had moved so far along as a kind of one-man orchestra
that on the title piece of Way Out West he returns for his second solo with
a spontaneous imitation of Shelly Mannes drum patterns.
By the summer of 1959, Sonny Rollins was widely regarded as the
hottest saxist in jazz. But as anyone whos witnessed a Rollins cadenza can
testify, the man runs by his own clock. So at his acme, he created a legend
by taking himself out of the musical rat race: no nightclubs, concerts,
recording dates. Until November 1961, he kept pretty much to himself
except, of course, for those marathons on the Williamsburg Bridge. When
he came back on the scene, Martin Williams shrewdly noted, The Rollins
who returned to public performance in the fall of 1961 was the same
Rollins, only more so. Ones memory of that Rollins is a memory of
performances which nostalgia might exaggerate but which exact memory
could obscure.
Its impossible to imagine a contemporary jazz musician of Rollinss
stature doing anything like this. Back then, young audiences, lured by the

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The Postwar Jazz Era

tang of rebellion and cheap tickets, came back and back again to watch
the improvised music unfold, the process at jazzs heart, its existentialist
soul, over extended gigs that could run weeks, even months. Now, club
rents are sky-high, and so are ticket prices. A week-long run is a gift; onenighters are the norm. The more leisurely and personalized oral tradition
Rollins trained in has given way to academic classes and relentless industry
pressures. As a label executive put it: Jazz and sports these days have a
lot in common. Art used to be the thing you strove for, your goal. Sonny
Rollins wanted to be the best he could on his horn. Now the goal is career
management. That doesnt preclude art completely; it just makes it part of
the equation, instead of the whole. And there are so many ancillary possibilities now: videos, movies, multimedia. These guys have a much broader
horizon to scope out and choose from. For them, music may only be the
means to a number of ends.
I probe Rollins about the idea of career. He eyes me a minute, and
responds: I wanted to do some more studying, right. And woodshed for
a while. But I think its difcult to get away from music. Even now, I have
made a point of managing my career so I dont work as much as I can, so
I can keep myself energized and have some kind of stable life away from
the business, and Im able to work in better venues when I do work
raising the level of jazz, in a small way. I usually take off the end of the
year, a couple of months. But sometimes its harder to come back; what
you missed. Duke Ellington used to work every day, and every moment
there is to create something youre doing it. Even practicing at home,
writing, its not the same as being on the stage. Thats where it really
comes; thats where you have the intuition; thats where you have the
ideas; thats where you learn what you should be doing. So the stage is
still it.
When I went away in 59, I really had a focus: I knew what I wanted
to do, and I knew I had to do it. It had to do with my music. I felt I wasnt
playing as much as I should be playing. I had a lot of peoplethe press,
fanswho built me up to the point where I couldnt deal with that
without really feeling that I could deliver. So I knew that I was gonna go
back and get myself together; I had a strong motivation. I wanted to break
some bad habits I had, like smoking. Im a person who appreciates solitude anyway, so its easy for me to be alone.
Gene, the music were involved in is very serious. And the people Ive
been fortunate enough to be around . . . well, its something you dont
want to dele. I never set out to have a careerno, no. We wanted to
communicate, sure. And when I started playing I wanted to be like my
idol, Louis Jordan, have those 8 x 10s and one of those nice tuxedoes and
that kind of stuff. But what it meant, I had no idea. The thing was the
music. There are ne lines. You want to get across, but you dont want to
condescend. In the late 40s, early 50s, there was so much happening in
the music we were too busy to think about it. Ill tell you this: I dont think

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61

jazz is or will ever be something one can have a career in. Maybe its
changing; if it is, I hope its a good thing.
But I always considered jazz to be outside the mainstream, because
thats the way its been in my experience. The guys that played, the great
artists that created this music, always scufed. It got a little better as the
years went onColtrane began getting a little success right before he blew
himself out and died. Milesyou could say he had a successful career. But
for Miles to get to that pointif you accept that he viewed it as a career,
which is not completely truethe music was the key part of his life, of all
our lives. That was it. Anything that interfered, we tried to get to the
concert each night, and get the music right. This is what it was. I still think
that jazz is like that.
Career is a funny word, Gene. I dont have a career. People know me
because Ive been around a long time, okay? And fortunately, Im a
survivor. But Im not rich, and Im not trying to get rich. Trying to get rich
playing music is an oxymoron; theres something wrong with that. The
societys different now, though, so maybe that will change too.
When Rollins ended his exile, his rst LP added guitarist Jim Hall to his
trio for a mix of standards like Billie Holidays God Bless the Child and
Without a Song and sawtoothed originals. The Bridge was an instant
classic. The empathetic interaction between the guitarist, whose chords
shimmer with the Impressionistic beauties pianists like Ellington and Bill
Evans brought to jazz, and the saxophonist, whose lyricism winds through
the densest harmonic thickets without losing ebullience, produces some
of jazzs most luminous moments.
There have been pinnacles in Rollinss work since, especially on stage,
and stretches of lackluster recordings. On the Outside documents his
interest in the 1960s avant-garde with mixed if provocative results.
Equally uneven is All the Things You Are, where Rollins faces off with
Coleman Hawkins, using free-jazz overblowing and chordless soloing,
while Hawk remains magisterially aloof. In 1966, he scored Ale, orchestrated by Oliver Nelson for a 10-piece band. In the 1970s and 1980s his
albums suffered from a kind of multiple-personality disorder. Trying on
funky fusion, Rollins lost his mercurial edge within formulaic jazz-rock
backing. (The exception is Stevie Wonders Isnt She Lovely, an extended
romp equal to anything hes ever cut.) He soloed on Waiting on a Friend
for the Rolling Stones Tattoo You because Mick Jagger heard him at the
Bottom Line and called him up. Rollins rst heard the nished track at a
market near his upstate home: I thought, Gee, theres something strange
about that guy playing saxophone, and nally I realized, Wait, thats me!
I wasnt credited on the record, and didnt want to be: I was doing it as a
lark, as a challenge to see if I could relate to it.
Live, Rollins remains a cauldron of creativity, a saxophone Bach able
to overcome mediocre concepts and agging bands with his fugues. But he

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The Postwar Jazz Era

has his off-nights, when entropy closes in. In 1985, his concert in the
outdoor garden of New Yorks Museum of Modern Art was recorded as
The Solo Album, a major disappointment. It sounded as if jazzs greatest
improviser had forgotten to prepare and relied too much on intuition; he
stumbled uncharacteristically into solipsismfragmentary quotes, scales
and nger exercises untouched by his usual alchemy.
So in the 1990s he performed a series of concerts with younger musicians like Branford Marsalis and Terence Blanchard that the press billed
as duels. He doesnt like the word, laughs and shakes his head: Duels?!
Aieee! Do they ever refer to Pavorotti and Placido Domingo singing
together as a duel? I wonder. . . . No. They give those people more respect.
Duel is sort of derogative. The whole attitude is demeaning to jazz,
because jazz shouldnt be looked at like a boxing match. That puts it into
a different area. Jazz is entertaining music, its serious music, but its both
at the same time. So you dont have to say that jazz should be a museum
pieceno. But it shouldnt be looked at as a duel; with Branford especially there was a lot of that type of thing. No, jazz is more like a
conversation between people who maybe havent had a chance to discuss
certain ideas before. We push each other in different directions, but the
music is what benets. And it should be entertaining at the same time,
because people are seeing something real happening.
You know, Gene, thats how the music was always transmitted. 52nd
Street wasnt just Bird and Dizzy. All kinds of people were playing the
Street thenBillie Holiday, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Don Byas. It
was like a Golden Age. That kind of scene doesnt exist anymore. And of
course there were jam sessions on the Street, but there were jam sessions
all over; they were just the way things were done in those days. I played
in the jam sessions on the StreetI was just coming of age, you know. But
there was also a place called the Paradise in Harlem on 110th Street where
everybody would come and play: Hot Lips Page, Charlie Parker, everybody. It was a different time: in those days, you had to compete with
another guy on trumpet, another guy on sax. Nowadays, its a different
thing. Young musicians can listen to recordstheyve got all these records,
theyve got all this audio equipment, theyve got video equipment where
they can see guys playing. But thats not the same thing as getting up on
the bandstand with Monk or Clifford Brown and playing with them.
On the session dates, for instance, if you made a lot of mistakes youd
have to go, because there were always a lot of other guys waiting to get
up on stage and blow. So you didnt have too many chances. If you
sounded fairly good you could come back and maybe theyd let you play,
but you had to show what you could do pretty quick and hope that you
could make it, hope that it sounded okay. I guess guys still get together, but
its not like before where there were denite places to do it and everybody
would come in after working, especially in big bands, where they had to
read a lot of music, and just jam.

Sonny Rollins

63

Jazz at its best is the perfect picture of democracy. Were all playing on
this different level; were not down here on this material plane, physicality.
So of course you transcend race and all that stuff. It really is American
music, it really isit ts so much of what the country is all about. And this
is the place its most ignored. Here its treated like a second-class citizen
like blacks. The ofcial culture cant recognize it for what it is. That makes
life hard for a lot of great musicians. Now everybody talks about jazz
being Americas classical music, but its mostly an empty phrase. Even the
way the big jazz festivals are put on here shows that: theyre usually sponsored by big corporations who want to use the music as an ad for
themselves. In a way, that diminishes the music. Its a tricky subject.
Im very proud of the fact that jazz musicians can survive without
having to be funded by the state; I think in a way thats good. Look at the
way symphony orchestras are always looking for money from benefactors; a lot of jazz musicians are able to make it without having to ask
anyone for money, which in a way shows the power of jazz, and Im proud
of that. Im proud of the fact that jazz teaching is burgeoning in the
schools. The only thing I would want is the ofcial recognition from
people in high places that jazz is Americas musicthere should be more
of it on TV, more on the radio, just more generally, so that it permeates
everything. But it cant be divorced from the whole racial hangup in this
country. In a way, jazz is still going in and out the back door.

6
Chet Baker
Its easy to rephrase Tolstoys opening to Anna Karenina so it
describes junkies, who all share an essential plotline: who and how to
hustle in order to score. But in the world of postwar jazz, Charlie Parker
gave junk an unprecedented clout and artistic aura. Bebop, the convoluted
frenetic modern jazz he and Dizzy Gillespie, among others, formulated,
demanded intense powers of concentration. Bird played so far out of
nearly everyone elses league that his heroin habit seemed to explain his
godlike prowess. So heroin became an existentialist response to racism, to
artistic rejection, a self-destructive way of saying Fuck You to mainstream
Americas 1950s mythologies. Parker warned everyone from young Miles
Davis to young Chet Baker away from smack, but few heeded him. In
1954, Davis weaned himself from a four-year addiction; in 1988, Baker
died after decades of living in Europe as a junkie, found in the street (Did
he jump? Was he pushed?) below his Amsterdam hotel window.
Oklahoma-born and California-bred, Baker had one amazing artistic
gift: he could apparently hear nearly any piece of music once and then
play it. He intuitively spun melodies on his trumpet with a tone critics
compared to Bix Beiderbeckes, and spent his long and uneven career
relying on that gift and coasting on his remarkable early breaks. In 1952,
Charlie Parker played with him in Los Angeles, giving him instant cachet.
When Gerry Mulligan hired him for the famed pianoless quartet that is
the quintessential white West Coast Cool band, it made him a jazz star.
After a drug bust broke the group up, Baker began singing; his wispy
balladeering and Middle America good looks gave him entre to a broader
public. During his early 1950s stint with Mulligan, he unbelievably beat
Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie to win critics and fans polls; his rst
album as a vocalist, which featured My Funny Valentine, got him lionized on the Today and Tonight shows and in Time. From there on, his life
took on a downward bias within a junkies relentless cycles.
Deep in a Dream: The Long Night of Chet Baker aims to synthesize all
the information about the trumpeter and tries to interpret him within the
broader contexts of popular culture. Author James Gavin had access to

Chet Baker

65

unpublished autobiographical notes and interviews with Bakers erstwhile

memoir collaborator Lisa Galt Bond, and also draws extensively on books
like Jeroen de Valks Chet Baker: His Life and Music and Chet Baker in
Italy; he apparently scoured archives for interviews, proles, pictures and
video and audio materials as well, stirring in dollops from Bruce Webers
1988 overripe movie about Baker, Lets Get Lost. Gavin has tracked Baker
across Europe and America, has distilled the divergent attitudes toward
him and his work, and attempts to make a case for what endures while not
inching from calling clunkers. He confronts black jazzers resentment of
Bakers playing: most heard him, with excellent reason, as a paler, milder
Miles Davis, yet he won polls and looked like he was making big money.
As Gavin points out, Bakers lilting lyricism and even his demeanor owed
almost everything to Daviss, but Baker wasnt raking in sales like college
favorite Dave Brubeck, though he was churning out streams of highly variable product. In fact, Gavin explains the popularity of the sappy Chet
Baker with Strings album, the trumpeters best-selling 1954 disc (which
sold an uncharacteristic 35,00040,000 copies the rst year), by comparing
it to popular contemporary mood musican apt and telling linkage.
Gavins discussion of that record strikes one of his leitmotifs, Bakers
charismatic visual appeal: William Claxtons cover photo was so dreamy
that record shops all over the country put the LP on display. Claxton
showed Baker at his peak of beauty, staring out wistfully at the session,
cheek resting against his horns mouthpiece. Many of the buyers were
young women with little interest in jazz, who bought the LP for its cover.
They were surprised to hear music as pretty as Baker was. It was his looks,
more than his music, that the Hollywood crowd cared about.
Hes shrewd about Bakers singing: Record producer Dick Bock
listened in alarm as [Baker] struggled to sing on key, pushing the session
into overtime. Bakers dogged persistence didnt impress the musicians,
who were reduced to near-invisible accompanists, tiptoeing behind his
fragile efforts. But as people stared at the cover and listened to Bakers
blank slate of a voice, they projected all kinds of fantasies onto him. He
became the rst jazz musician to attract a strong homosexual following.
Gavin is quite good at debunking longstanding myths about Baker,
many of which Baker started himself. He didnt beat out loads of trumpeters to play with Bird in LA; a studio pianist, not Parker, hired him. Its
highly unlikely Bird told East Coasters like Davis and Dizzy Gillespie that
theres a little white cat on the coast whos gonna eat you up. For Gavin,
this self-mythologizing is a key to Bakers recessive, almost invisible character: Just as he discovered how to seduce the camera lens into depicting
him in make-believe terms, he learned to glamorize the truth into a fairy
tale of romantic intrigue.
Naturally, the biographer seeks the man behind the layered tales. Here
Gavin circles a black hole, because Baker was, as one witness after another
testies, nearly completely unrevealing. He didnt read, or speak, or other-

66

The Postwar Jazz Era

wise express: he was cool. Longtime junkiedom only hardened this character trait into manipulative blankness. So Gavin looks at Bakers doting,
pushy mother and his violent failure of a father, checks out Bakers highschool beatings for being a pretty boy, intimates that Bakers brief and
harsh version of heterosexual sex may have covered for repressed homosexuality, and links him to the waves of rejection, from the Beats as well
as Hollywood types like Marlon Brando and James Dean, rippling the
1950s. Its suggestive, though not necessarily convincing, since, unlike
other jazzersDavis and Charles Mingus, for instanceBaker had no real
contact with or interest in other artistic subcultures.
Bakers critical reputation kept crashing after the Mulligan quartet
disbanded in 1954, and his drug use continued to escalate from around
that time, when his heroin addiction began. By 1966, he hit bottom: he
was badly beaten, probably because he ripped off a San Francisco drug
dealer, and his upper teeth had to be pulled. His embouchure wrecked, his
career, already smoldering, looked like it was nally in ruins. He worked
in a Redondo Beach gas station and applied for welfare. Against the odds,
record-label head Dick Bock bought him dentures, and for more than a
year he workedprobably harder than he ever did before or afterto
rebuild something of the limpid trumpet sound that once made girls
shudder.
In 1959, he had relocated to Europe, where he stayed for the rest of his
life (except for a couple of brief homecomings) to avoid prosecution for
drug busts. (Inevitably, he got busted in Europe instead.) Gavin rightly
notes that the Europeans, especially the Italians, adopted Baker as a
familiar bohemian archetype: the damaged genius, an artist in need of
understanding and patronage. It didnt help. His trajectory careened
mostly down; upward bursts of musical lucidity ashed against a churn of
mediocrities and an ever-more snarled life. His talent languished: he never
expanded his musical knowledge, nor did he really learn to arrange
or compose or even lead a band. He relied on producers and agents to
direct his musical life; he didnt bother conceptualizing his own creative
frameworks. He always demanded cash paymentsno contracts, no
royaltieson his endless scramble to score. And as women revolved
through his life or fought over him and were beaten by him, he tried a
few bouts at detox but compressed even further into a junkies twodimensionality. By the time he died, most American jazz fans thought he
was already dead.
For this last half of his book, Gavin, even buoyed by research, swims
upstream against the cascading ow of a junkies essential plotline. For
decades, Baker is mostly chasing drugs, screwing anyone within reach,
tumbling downward creatively and personally, and alternating manipulatively between victim and abuser. Except as a voyeur, its hard to care,
especially since, with exceptions I think even rarer than Gavin does,
Bakers music was generally worthless. Junk didnt make him a musical

Chet Baker

67

superman; it simply drove him to make fast, sloppy recordings with underrehearsed bands, playing horn that was so unpredictable in quality it could
sound like an abysmal self-parody. Sympathetically balanced as he desperately tries to be, even Gavin can only cite a handful of ex-sidemen as
Bakers musical legacy of inuence. Instead, he depicts Baker as a kind of
cultural icon rather than a cultural force.
It was one of historys ironies that Baker was resurrected after his death
by a lm made shortly before it. Bruce Weber, a fashion photographer
famed for his homoerotic Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren ads, has a sharp
eye for the scandalous, and decided to make Lets Get Lost when he saw
Baker at the trumpeters brief ing at an American comeback in 1986. He
fell for what an associate described as beauty that looked kind of
destroyed. Weber bought him a French beatnik wardrobe from a Paris
designer, and paid him $12,500 for a performance that Gavin describes:
eyelids sagging, slurring his words, all but drooling. Unless he got what
he needed, [Webers assistant] said, he wouldnt have sat still for us a
minute. The documentary rered interest in Baker among boomers and
Gen Xers, who responded to the bathetic junkie glamor of his apparent
frailty, personal and artistic, just as their 1950s avatars had. Reissues of
Bakers albums on CD have gathered mass and sales since.
That leaves us with Bakers mysterious death, long haloed by a host of
theories. Gavin rejects accident, reporting, the window [of the hotel
room] slid up only about fteen inches, making it difcult, if not impossible, for a grown man to fall through accidentally. Dismissing
speculation that Baker might have lost his room key and tried to climb the
hotels faade, Gavin feels its unlikely he could have gone unnoticed on
such a busy thoroughfare. He dismisses homicide, as did Bakers remaining
friends and the Dutch police, and concludes that Baker was shooting his
favorite speedballs and committed a sort of passive-aggressive suicide by
opening a window and letting death come to him. . . . [He] had died willfully of a broken heart.
Thats a pretty sentimental nal fade for a hardcore character like
Baker, who for all Gavins determined nuance ultimately seems far less
rebel than junkie. Maybe Gavin should have pondered Naked Lunch.
Then he might have ended his book with, say, Steve Allens take, since
Allen was one of the many Baker burned: When Chet started out, he had
everything. He was handsome, had a likable personality, a tremendous
musical gift. He threw it all away for drugs. To me, the man started out
as James Dean and ended up as Charles Manson.

7
Miles Davis
Its drizzling on an unseasonably warm spring day in New York in
1988; even the huge bay windows in this suite in the upper reaches of the
swank Essex House, which sits on Central Parks southern edge, reveal
only the muted greens of the reviving foliage below and the dull gray sky
above. The plush suites hallway is crammed with huge cardboard boxes;
the living room has a Yamaha DX7 keyboard and a four-track recording
machine set up within reach of an armchair where, across a coffee table
littered with magazines (Details, Interview, Vogue) topped by a score pad
and a couple of trumpets, sits Miles Dewey Davis III.
The disarray is partly because Miless apartment is being renovated and
partly because he just signed himself out of the hospital the day before.
Once again, his body, which over the last 40 years has been ravaged by
heroin, alcohol, cocaine, Benzedrine, barbiturates, sickle cell anemia, and
car accidents and their after effects, is ghting off another onslaught, this
time by the diabetes that has plagued him for years. I got these sores all
over my right leg from taking the insulin, he rasps in the world-famous
cough of a voice that somehow, like his muted trumpet, projects crystalclear. He pulls up his pants leg to reveal a swaddle of bandages and tape
beneath a metal brace; his shirt hangs open to show a cotton pad taped to
his chest. From time to time he shifts uncomfortably in his seat, his leg
semi-stretched out beneath the table. When he gets up to open a window,
hes stooped and achingly slow: the pain hes repressing becomes unavoidably, horrifyingly manifest. I was in the hospital for three weeks, he says
offhandedly, playing off his reading of the reactions on my face. Ive got
an infection right here from taking insulin. They say it was a oor germ
that comes from the rug, yknow.
I dont say anything. I dont know what to say. Rumors are milling
around the entertainment world about what is ailing Davis, and the speculation runs right up to AIDS, hemophilia, canceryou name it; if its
deadly enough, Miles Davis is supposed to be stricken with it. This is a
typically double-edged mark of his stature: those who admire him and
those who disparage him are abuzz with the same stories. He wants to

Miles Davis

69

dismiss the talk, but he clearly also doesnt want to dwell on it, give it
credence or heft by answering it. And so, held in proud check by the same
remorseless combination of focus and discipline and self-awareness that
has driven his art and persona for half a century, he gets up and shufes
haltingly but with apparent purpose around his suite briey, as if to prove
by willed movement that he will endure, come back, live to upset his
detractors and cheer his fans, and cheat his own demons one more time.
And so once he settles back down, for 90 minutes he talks into my tape
recorder, taking questions and working them the same way hell take a
melody into his trumpet and, in giving it back, tease the unexpected angles
out of it, stamp it his. Most of the time his sketch pad sits on the table
before him, and while he talks he chooses a pen to color and ll in his
current work-in-progress; hes sketching and painting a lot these days.
When he grabs my arm to underline this or that point, his grip is strong
surprisingly so, for such a frail-looking little guy, as if all those years of
boxing have left their sturdy residue despite years of ailingbut friendly.
He pulls his sunglasses on and off, peers over them at me and then around
the room, nally casts them aside; when he does his eyes burn, the
gleaming windows of an inner intensity multitudes have witnessed and
been drawn into by his art, but few have fathomed.
Im nervous but trying to stay focused. Ill as he looks, Miles Davis in
person is quick and sharp. Id interviewed him before briey over the
phone a couple of times, but this is different. There are umpteen stories
about Davis ash-frying interviewers in person when they stumble or
screw up or just trigger some invisible tripwire inside his psyche. Add that
hes been one of the sounds in my head since I rst saw him at the Fillmore East in its heyday, one of those mix-and-match three- or four-act
shows that Bill Graham mounted so memorably, shaping the tastes of a
generation. So Im not real interested in getting crisped without getting at
least some of the goods Ive come for.
I lead by asking a couple of musical questions, general ones, feeling
my way. He watches me, characteristic hooded eyes, not quite indifferent,
not quite engaged, a predator, it seems to me as I try to concentrate on
my notes and his answers and the window in my tape recorder, where I
can see the cassette hubs turning reasssuringly around like theyre
supposed to. Hes waiting. I ask a third musical question. He ignores it,
leans forward, grunts assertively in that trademark slurred rasp, You a
musician? Pause. I feel like maybe Ive done it, whatever it is. Too late.
So I say, Yeah, I play. Whatchu play? Guitar, mostly. Not
trumpet? Nope. Never? Nope. You sure? Uh, yeah. Pause
for two very long beats. Too bad. You got great lips for a white guy.
One beat. I bust out laughing, his eyes lose their cowling, open briey
into a dancing light. From then on, he talks. When hes done improvising
on a particular topic, he pauses for a moment and then asks, What else
you wanna know?

70

The Postwar Jazz Era

Opinionated, outspoken, and usually outrageous, Miles Davis has been

at the center of some of the most important musical and cultural upheavals
of the last half-century. Even a casual ip through his catalog of albums
uncovers more precious touchstones than most artists dream of mining in
a lifetime. From the glory days of bebop to the birth of its cool reaction,
from the hard bop swing of the pendulum to the introduction of modal
structures, from jazz-rock fusion to getting back to the funk, Davis has
stood in the eye of the hurricane, riding its twists and turns through the
tumultuous postwar renaissance of American popular culture with a
remarkable agility. The success Daviss art has brought, however, is hardly
mirrored by his disastrous personal life, where he repeatedly paid the price
of moving on via multiple wrecked marriages and relationships, alienated
families and friends, and the extensive physical damage he is, here at Essex
House, trying to overcome one more time so he can play, perform, become
himself in the one place where he incontestably is: making the music that
has consumed his being.
Listing the cast of characters Davis has played with can be like
taking a name-droppers tour through the history of jazz since World War
II. How he entered the scene, however, is more revealingly characteristic.
Son of a dentist, a well-off African American who owned a horse farm
outside East St. Louis, Davis told his dad, who was paying his way and
sending him an allowance, that he was headed to New York to study at
Juilliard. Instead, once he got there he, like dozens if not hundreds of
younger jazz musicians, went on a pilgrimage to nd and play with Charlie
Parker. He succeeded big-time; he barely brushed through Juilliard before
he was playing, haltingly, semicompetently, with the crew that created
bebop at after-hours jams in Harlem clubs like Mintons and Monroes,
including Bird himself. Encouraged by Bird, who plugged Davis into Gillespies slot when the older trumpeter left his quintet, and Dizzy, who
famously taught Davis to look to the piano keyboard as the method for
understanding the complex developments in modern jazz, he soon
emerged as a remarkably young leader of the modern jazz movement.
In 1949, Tadd Dameron, the theorist and composer, asked Davis to join
his band for a European tour; there Davis was introduced to intellectuals,
love (in the enticing person of Juliette Greco), and acceptance as an artist
rather than a black jazz musiciana trade that in America was still barely
considered an art even as its mass popularity withered with the death of
the Swing Era. Like so many African Americans before and sinceSidney
Bechet, Josephine Baker, Bud Powell, James Baldwin, Jimi Hendrix
Davis found the disparity between Europe and his homeland jarring.
When he came back to the US, he got hooked on heroin. (In 1956, he
returned to France to improvise the soundtrack for Louis Malles
Ascenseur pour LEchafaud, which was screened a scene at a time for the
musicians, who then outlined a few chords and a mood and recorded.)

Miles Davis

71

Despite his increasing drug dependence, he starred on the recording

called Birth of the Cool, with the Modern Jazz Quartets John Lewis on
piano, Gerry Mulligan on baritone sax, Lee Konitz on alto saxan all-star
nonet of rising younger musicians. The album made his name. Here his
haunting lyricism and natural melodic ow were freed from bops frantic
virtuosity. Bebops complex harmonic sense was reabsorbed into a small
big-band format, whose minence grise was the then 30-odd-year-old Gil
Evans. Evanss softly burnished harmonies, his jazzy reformatting of the
classical concerto form of tutti response to Daviss solo calls, glowed with
an introspective light somewhere between the apparently unlikely Claude
Thornhill big band, where Evans had worked, and Duke Ellingtons
concertos. Davis himself thought no other arranger came closer to
Ellingtons uncanny skill at creating new sounds.
His life, however, slid downhill. There was his accelerating descent into
pimping and heroin addiction, which led him to steal from friends and
marks alike. Then there was the operation to remove polyps from his
larynx, which could have ended his career but instead left his voice a
famously, permanently husky ruin. Finally, there was his cold-turkey
recovery at his family home, powered by his fathers iron faith in him and
his own iron will. In his unquenchable search, determined autonomy, and
erce rejection of expected norms, Davis, so black in skin and so bourgeois
in background, seemed as if he had to overcome his own history in ways
roughly parallel to those of the overwhelmingly white Beats and bohemians
of the 1950s, for whom the jazz milieu was their exit from a society of
Organization Men and Gray Flannel Suits, Nuclear Apocalypse and Cold
War, and electroshock and lobotomy-prone Snake Pits. As Bird had been,
so Davis became for those outcats whom Norman Mailer, with his typical
combination of excesses and misunderstandings and unerring deftness,
characterized as White Negroes, the ultimate hipstera jazz existentialist.
And yet because Davis was black, even those apparent parallels fell
short. Unlike his bohemian fans, he was a recurrent target for cops even
in supposedly liberal New York simply because of his race. Even after he
kicked the habit and had become a jazz star in 1959, he walked a white
woman to her car outside Birdland, where he was headlining, and then
smoked a cigarette, and a cop started hassling him. Davis was a bit
nonplussed; the cop, who musicians later rumored was drunk, kept trying
to get him to move along, then started swinging. When Davis blocked the
shots, he was felled from behind; a detective billyclubbed him. This hit all
the New York City papers, accompanied by pictures of Daviss head
swathed in bloody bandages; he became something of a cause clbre in
the media and liberal circles. When he tried suing the NYPD for
$500,000, the lawsuit disappeared, via legal machinations and threats of
revoking Daviss cabaret licensethe time-honored method the largely
Irish police force and its WASP bosses had used to shut off work and
money for black musicians.

72

The Postwar Jazz Era

Also unlike his bohemian fans, Davis was far from antimaterialist.
He drove a Ferrari to his gigsthe same yellow Ferrari he was regularly
stopped by the cops while driving because they couldnt believe he could
own it, because he must have stolen it. Onstage he was so cool that he
could turn his Italian mohairsuited back on his audiences and listen to
them murmur in approval. And since those audiences were largely white,
he (and they) could revel in the reversal of power those moments in the
spotlight conferred.
In the mid-1950s, George Avakian, the patrician producer for the jazz
and pop divisions at Columbia Records, began luring Miles Davis away
from the indie labels hed been recording for. Avakian, a ne connoisseur
of jazz, was an apt representative of the label chief executive William Paley
thought of as the Cadillac of the record industry. The companys classical
catalog was all high sheen and big names and prestige, and Avakian, who
thought of Davis in similar terms, had to overcome the corporate scruples
and scal worries of his bosses, who feared they were taking on a junkie
who might well be dead within the year. Eventually Avakian signed Davis,
and his rst move was to reunite the trumpeter with Gil Evans, whose
arrangements, he said, were the sonic equivalent of Daviss horn. Classic
discs like Sketches of Spain, which was prompted by Davis and his thenwife seeing a Spanish dance company, followed. Avakian also helped
enhance Daviss romantic imagethe sharp pricey Italian suits, the sports
cars, the artsy covers of his albums, the hipster reticence surrounding him.
First with Avakian, then with producer Teo Macerowho produced
Davis as he did Charles Mingus, in very hands-on fashion, often
composing bits and pieces of necessary music, then spending hours editing
the tapes that continuously rolled in the studio for both their sessions into
albumsDavis crafted brilliantly enduring music that also doubled as
makeout platters for the postwar generations.
Other jazz artists, like Dave Brubeck, sold more records. But with
Davis, Columbia felt certain it was buying a future and would recoup its
payments and whatever troubles it suffered with the star it was helping
create from the mid-1950s on, via big publicity splashes and tours. The
strategy worked: to this day Kind of Blue remains jazzs best-selling
recording. So maybe then it shouldnt have surprised anyone when in the
1980s Columbia decided once again to create a star from a trumpeter
identied as the next Miles or the anti-Miles, depending on your perspective, one Wynton Marsalis.
Davis may well have been the monumental egotist his detractors
charged, but his willingness to risk his creativity and reputation was, in his
eyes, the inevitable accompaniment to his quest for challenge and change.
I nally gured out, remarked bassist Dave Holland of the 1960s
sessions he did with Davis, that when we were in the studio and the tape
was rolling all the time that Miles was into recording the process of

Miles Davis

73

discovery, as we came to terms with new and unfamiliar ideas. By

contrast, Marsalis has been much slower to grow as a musician at least
partly because of the rigid boundaries he himself imposed on the idea of
jazz when he was younger. Unlike Davis, he seems uncomfortable outside
scripted opportunities, musical and otherwise; he likes to be assured of
approval and/or control. Davis, on the other hand, may at times have
dared foolishly or without what others considered signicant musical
payoffs, but his catalog of work is dened by risk, which is part of why it
is studded with classics. And he was willing to work with so many diverse
people on his way to the top and afterward: Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane,
Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans the pianist, Red Garland, Philly Joe
Jones, Ron Carter, Tony Williams, Herbie Hancock, Wayne Shorter, Chick
Corea, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette, Airto Moreira, John McLaughlin,
Pete Cosey, John Scoeld, Mike Stern, Marcus Miller, Al Foster, Bill Evans
the saxophonist, Mino Cinelu, and so on. This too stands in stark contrast
to Marsalis.
I dont lead musicians, man. They lead me, Davis explains casually in
his hotel suite, as he has before, without a trace of condescension or
contempt, with the sort of easy understanding that has led a few perceptive writers to compare him to jazzs other long-lived band leader
nonpareil, Duke Ellington. Ellington famously listened to his musicians
and wrote for them, often using their improvised phrases as the basis for
composition, always trying to suit the composition to the improvisers
strengths. Davis has done the same for generations, urging his musicians
to stay totally in the moment, to call on that strangely bifurcated
consciousness any artist, but especially jazz musicians whose art revolves
around improvisation, must have of their work as it unfolds: the intensity
to pursue (or recognize) lines of investigation and the self-awareness to
shape and edit those lines as they appear. Davis again: I listen to them to
learn what they can do best. Like Darryl (Jones) play a bass line, and he
forget it. I wont. Ill say, Darryl, you did this last night, do it again. Hell
go, What? Ill say, Its right here on the tape [of the show]. Thats what
gives playing that feeling, like when you see a pretty woman and say, Shit,
wait a minute. Listening to what they do and feeding it back to them is
how any good bandleader should lead his musicians.
Can I categorize the different generations of musicians Ive played
with? Well, you know how that goes: the sounds change. You have to
match this now, he says wryly, patting his Yamaha DX7 keyboard, the
mainstay of studio work in the increasingly electronic end of the 20th
century, which is seeing studio musicians turned out in ever-growing
numbers, ironically recalling the end of the big band era, when so many
rst found refuge in studio and TV work. Its not the same thing. Youve
gotta kick musicians to do that, any kind of musician. I mean, jazz: I never
did hear the word jazz in St. Louis or anyplace else when I was a kid.
Anyway, young musicians now are hearing this constant subconscious

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The Postwar Jazz Era

things about critics. If I play this real fast and run all over my horn . . .
he mimicks, a startlingly squeaky, insecure voice, a ash of Davis parodic
wit. But theyre so lazy they dont even want to change the clichs. The
clichs are boring for me. And the approach of playing into a microphone,
bowing, and stepping backlike the audience did something. Hell, you
listening to the audience or are they listening to you? You giving them
something. But the younger guys been so brainwashed by critics and stuff,
they think its cool. Everybody wants to play their own style, but how can
you play your own style when every person who can ride a scale and back
has a record out?
He pauses, eyes me. My idea is you surround yourself with talented
people and make them uncomfortable. Then they gotta come up with
some shit. And then, as generations of his bandmates testify, he counterthrusts, putting his own creativity on the line and pulling together the
improvised threads of their solos in his own, summarizing, recapping,
underlining, making sure the process was foregrounded, embracing their
ideas while bringing them to fruition. This is the capacious generosity
listeners instinctively respond to in Miles Daviss music.
For years one of the central contributors to Daviss music was the
late great Gil Evans, who worked on or behind the scenes for many of his
most historic projects. Evanss friendship and collaboration became one
of Daviss pillars; he saw Evans as his artistic soulmate who could, without
cheerleading or malice, help him see and understand and realize his
musical needs and directions. Gil Evans is the only serious musician I
ever met in my life, he says. Like myself, hed listen to anything and
wouldnt have to comment on it, just sitting there enjoying it, everythings
okay. He snorts derisively. But you get those guys who want to play one
phrase cause theres a girl out thereI can feel it and see it and hear it.
The tall white soft-spoken Canadian and the short, combative African
American shared a lifetime of musical passions. They met on Swing
Street at the beginnings of both modern jazz and the postwar civil rights
movement, which was embodied in how boppers, mostly black, and
hipsters, black and white, made that scene. The Irish cops kept their
wary eyes on mixed-race couples on the Streetand this one of the
hippest streets in New York, the cosmopolitan center where a generation earlier Harlem had spawned a cultural revolution via theater and
literature and ne art and jazz. Because of the way it attracted young
white America from the Flapper era on, jazz created a kind of idealized
space in which some of Americas mythslike the myth of equality
regardless of racealmost became reality, where the usual hierarchy of
blacks dominated by or invisible to whites was inverted, at least on stage,
where it became clear that the prime inventors and movers of jazz were
African American. And so within the privileged, marginal site called jazz,
racism could, at least temporarily, be suspended or overcome by mutual

Miles Davis

75

respect for cultural achievement, which ultimately had signicant social

and political ramications.
The passions Davis and Evans shared spanned a wide imaginative
range. Several years before our 1988 meeting, I had interviewed Davis
about his projected sessions with Jimi Hendrix, whom hed rst seen in
Monterey Pop, when he went to the movies with John McLaughlin.
Producer Alan Douglas oversaw a number of posthumous Hendrix
records that had to be assembled from bits of tape, noodlings, partial
tracks, and raw takes; he told me that he had been working to set up the
DavisHendrix date when the guitarist died in England, after a lackluster
set at the Isle of Wight festival, choking in his sleep on his own vomit.
Davis hadnt wanted to say much to me about it: Whats the point? I
wanted it to happen but it didnt. I loved the way his guitar sounded, and
wanted to play with that. Soon after Hendrixs death, Davis started
feeding his trumpet through a wah-wah pedal, cloaking his trademark
breathy rasp with its electronic wash, reaching for his version of Hendrixs
engulng sound. It was a drastic change from his introspective lyricism,
however acid that could be at times, to this new aggressive attack, and
critics hated it, though he gained young fans like me at places like the Fillmores. It was no accident that Evans, too, was drawn to Hendrix; he
reharmonized and orchestrated a batch of Hendrix songs for his big band,
and in the process demonstrated how rock music could be adapted to
acoustic and jazz sensibilities in ways different from those of the rst wave
of jazz-rock fusion.
Evans died only days before my 1988 interview with Davis, and so, as
we sit in Essex House, he is very much on the trumpeters mindnot least,
I suspect, because Davis is himself staring death in the eyes once again.
After a pause, he says slowly, Like I just wrote a little something cause
Gil was dyingI knew it, it just came to me. Id been trying to get him for
three months; by the time Anita [Evanss wife] called me, Id written this
piece. The next day, he died. She called me to tell me he knew I was trying
to get him, and to tell me where he was. But the next day he died, so she
called me to say he was dead. And she said, I think he orchestrated the
whole thing by going away, you know, like Indians do. Cause nobody
wants you to say, Hey man, what the fuck is wrong with you, why do
you look so bad, that kind of shit? Hed lost all his uids, he had dysentery for a month. So it was just a matter of waiting. I knew it was coming,
cause I done died ten times thinking that he was gonna die. Which he did.
So anyway, I wrote this thing for him that just sounds like him. I might
play it at the end of every night on this next tour.
Gil, he drawls, shifting positions uncomfortably, gave me an album
by Harry Partch in 1948, where there were drums and keyboards that
really sounded like what John Cage was doing. This piece I did for Gil has
all of that in it, but it has a key, a tonality. Sounds good to me, its
refreshing. Its always nice when you have a bouquet of herbs all mixed

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The Postwar Jazz Era

together, and you drop em into a gumbo or a bouillabaisse. So when you

have all these drums you can listen to and something else, thats nice. But
not if you can say, Oh yeah, thats a bass drum and a snare and a cymbal.
You like to be teased a little bit, you know? And Ive used a lot of just
sounds on here; that shit sounds good after youve heard so much of something elsekinda clears it off.
Partch was Americas own classical-music renegade, an outsider visionary whose Emersonian ideas and inuence and Bukowskian prototype
after wandering as a hobo during the Great Depression, riding the blinds
like Woody Guthrie, he got a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1943 and then
became a research associate at the University of Wisconsineventually
reached from 1950s bohemia to more recent artists like Tom Waits, who
has refashioned himself into Partchs descendant via both his eccentric
sonic ideas and outsider-hobo image.
Partch has been described as a totally unrepressed individual and a nasty
bastard. Of John Cage, Partch, the man who invented some 30 instruments
and a notation system and then, unhobolike, lugged increasing loads of
stuff around, once snarled, with at least a touch of envy alongside the
righteousness, All Cage needs is a gong, a carrot juicer, and a toothbrush. He also said, The extent to which an individual can resist being
blindly led by tradition is a good measure of his vitality. Certainly he and
Miles agreed on that.
In the late 1980s, producer Hal Willner put together an album featuring
younger musicians like John Zorn, Geri Allen, Vernon Reid, and Robert
Quine enacting another of his characteristic ideas: a tribute to Charles
Mingus that radically redesigned his music to include the use of Partch
instruments. The nal results were uneven, but the best of it was highly
suggestive. And its irreverence and willingness to go for new sonic and
conceptual territory over literal-minded interpretations would have made
both musical renegades smile beneath their snarls.
The emphasis on the here and now in its endless passing and ux, the
afrmation of life in the face of death, beats at the heart of Miles Davis
and his music; fundamentally, if reductively, its one reason he has repeatedly sought out new avenues of artistic expression. A true disciple of
Charlie Parker and Louis Armstrong, he starred from the 1950s as the jazz
equivalent of a matinee idol, an outsider who was also tres chic. While
other no less talented players were polishing their bebop chops, their
modal spiralings, their fusion war cries, theyd turn around and nd Miles
had already moved on. The restlessness that fuels him never seems to quit.
He needs to constantly reimagine the sounds in his head, where most musicians inevitably slip, however imperceptibly, into a set working method,
a hardening musical vocabulary, a recycling of the glory moments of youth
to please a crowd. Miles, by contrast, is driven.

Miles Davis

77

Still, as Ian Carr, among the most detailed and perceptive of Daviss
biographers, has said, People say Miles Davis never looks back, but of
course he does. Only an idiot doesnt look back. But Miles just keeps
moving forward anyway.
When Davis felt he had nothing to offer in the 1970s, exhausted by
deaths and his own deepening dependence on cocaine and other drugs, his
increasing involvement in sexual orgies and bacchanals at his West 77th
Street brownstone in New York, he withdrew for several years into
silencebut a silence very unlike Sonny Rollinss. And yet his jazz existentialism, like Rollinss, like that of the postwar American generations
who have followed his trumpets wordless siren song so beloved by singers,
its patented parched and introspective yearning from the romantic behind
the cynical shades, the upper-crust boy who became a junkie and a pimp
and a jazz icon, has become so deeply entwined in American countercultures its hard to extract his inuence even in the abstract play of
imagination. Jerry Garcia wanted his band to play like Daviss great quintets of the modal era, and hence were born peaks of the Grateful Dead
experience like Dark Star. (When Davis shared bills with the Dead at
the Fillmores, the band was thrilled, though they never played together.)
Such examples are manifold. In effect, Daviss life and art mark one central
place where acidhead/counterculture synchronicity and bop/Beat life-inthe-moment met. I dont know that Davis and Bob Dylan ever met, but
Dylan is one of Daviss few equals in the art of being an artistic chameleon,
a disciple of Heraclitus, and projecting an image that stirs the mass imagination by leaving so many areas blank, to be lled in by the fan.
If I want to go back, I just think back, is how Davis responds to my
question, which hes been asked one way or another about a million times:
why doesnt he go back and recycle his classic material? He looks at me
openly and directly for a moment, stops ddling with his drawing materials. It makes me feel sad when I hear the old stuff, you know? Because
you cant get the same feeling; I cant get the same feeling. And I dont
want to try. When we made certain things, it was like, Hey Miles, listen
to this, or, Look at how thisll work. Like Gil Evans playing Ravel for
me. But thats over. When I listen to Kind of Blue now, its too slow; its
like somebody walking underwater. Now things are more upbeateven
the commercials are motherfuckers, they sound better than bands Ive had.
So I dont go back because I feel too sad, man. I think, How would it
sound if we had this part on drums, this pattern going. The only things
that sound good from then are the singers (he hums a verse from James
Browns I Got You) cause that aint too long and drawn-out like we
used to play. Some things we did, like Little Church, Im trying to nd,
cause Id like to do that again.
You could say Daviss music in the 1960s and 1970s became so aggressive and turbulent partly because it mirrored the world around him. His

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The Postwar Jazz Era

notes to his soundtrack to a movie documentary that was also a homage

to a great black athlete, Jack Johnson, make clear his identication with
Johnsons strugglesbedeviled by gangsters and the IRS, one of the long
line of visible African Americans to be targeted by the powers that be, an
especially resonant notion in the wake of the wave of 1960s assassinations
of black leaders like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. He wrote, The
rise of Jack Johnson to world heavyweight supremacy in 1908 was a signal
for white envy to erupt. Can you get to that? And of course being born
Black in America . . . we all know how that goes. . . . Johnson portrayed
Freedom. . . . He was a fast-living man, he liked womenlots of them and
most of them white. . . . He had ashy cars. . . . He smoked cigars, drank
only the best champagne, and prized a 7-foot bass ddle on which hed
proudly thump jazz. His amboyance was more than obvious. Flamboyance could be seen as one of the black mans cardinal sins in America.
Johnson was convicted of violating the ironically named White Slavery
Act, and went into exile in Paris.
The album bearing Johnsons name is the most overtly bluesrockoriented of anything Davis ever did, opening like a postwar South Side
Chicago electric blues, Muddy Waters with escalating twists realized by
guitarists John McLaughlin and Sonny Sharrock. Yesternow spends its
rst devastating 12 minutes reworking a James Brown riff. Its recording
and editing were informal and elastic even by Daviss deliberately loose
standards: Herbie Hancock happened to be walking through the building
where the band was recording when he was recruited to sit behind the
organ. Producer Macero drastically edited the four sessions worth of
material into the nished album; some outtakes were included on later
discs like Big Fun.
Two years before we meet at Essex House, Davis recorded Tutu, in
honor of the South African archbishop who was among the most visible
and effective antiapartheid leaders. Produced by Marcus Miller, one of his
bassists from the 1980s fusion era, this tribute to Tutu, second only to
Nelson Mandela in his power to command world reaction and esteem in
the ght to rid South Africa of apartheid, marks Daviss meshing once
again of politics and music. For this album, Miller self-consciously
modeled himself after Evans. I set up all the backgrounds, played and
recorded all the instruments pretty much myself, and then Miles came in,
he told me while they were editing the disc. I wanted this record to be like
something Gil Evans would have done in our time, with contemporary
instruments and sounds. Miles sat in the studio and listened to what came
over the headphones. BAM! Hed suddenly bend over and look like hed
been hit. Then hed start to play. It was amazing to watch.
Recording studios have changed a bunch of times since I started
recording, Davis continues, back here at the Essex House, so naturally
Ive changed what I do while Im in them. Musicians are so nervous about
playing perfect to a critic that it has its own effect. Critics are always crit-

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79

icizing the way we make records now. Thats because they dont have
nobody to write about: They cant say, Oh, that was Herbie [Hancock]
playing the drumshear what Im sayin? He knows what he wants to
hear, and he can get the same sound without the drummer and program
it, even that drummers same sound.
Hes talking about his next album, a project that will become Amandla:
Theres a number I wrote that never repeats, the phrases are completely
different from beginning to end. And I had to get my drummer to leave
that space open, because thats what had to go there. But wouldnt you
know, Darryl [Jones] must play in that space. I said, Darryl, we dont do
that anymore. I dont want you in the space. He said, I know, but I bet
you like that way I play it. I said, Yeah, but you know when people write
a melody, its because theyve exhausted all other melodies. Hell learn
that difference when he plays his own music. Ive seen Stravinsky do that.
And Mingus. In 1946, I rehearsed with Mingus every day. Id rehearse
with him just to hear what he wrote. You through with me?
Almost. Theres the inevitable nal question, the one where Miles is
asked to sum up a lifetime of artistic endeavor. He tolerates the clichd
question, looking around me almost evasively at rst, then suddenly
locking into full focus on my eyes. Well, he begins, I really didnt realize
what I did until I came back to play and there were all these books: He
did this and this and that and that. Sounds like Columbus. Then I nally
said, Damn, that wasnt that much; what I did somebody was gonna do
that anyway. Know what I mean? After we did it, somebody named it and
said it was this or that, but we didnt do that. Its like jazz; I dont know
what that means. Besides, we did it; I didnt do it by myself. Its just like
you hear so many hints all in a row. Somebody say, Why dont you go
outside and see if the papers there? Or, Why dont you do this outside?
Or, Why dont you do that outside? Finally you say, Damn, they want me
outside. He pauses, laughs. So I might go see the African Ballet with Gil
Evans and hear this thing, this thumb piano, where the guy starts on one
chord and one side and when he gets to the other side hes nished with it.
And Ill say, Damn, why cant I do that? I cant play that piano, what
sound can I get? The sound that I could get with the bandyou gotta
realize this was thenwas that I gured, Maybe Ill have the piano player
trill. So thats how it came out on Flamenco Sketches; all I could do as
say, Hey Bill, trill. But the bottom had the thing in it. Thats the difference between now and then. Nowadays a bass player would make that
downbeat so you could hear it more; then it was in the middle part, around
the third beat. Prince is always talking about get up on the one, and come
down on the three. Itd be nice to play it that way, wouldnt it?
Under his thinning hair and frailty, Miles Davis shakes his head and
hums a few bars of what it would sound like. Yeah, he says, pleased. I
might just do that.

8
Herbie Hancock
Techno is far from new. After forebears like Stockhausen and Kraftwerk (who synthesized, in several senses, the psychedelic eras sonic
radicalism), Herbie Hancock and Bill Laswell were among the earliest big
names to start messing with it almost two decades ago. On February 8,
1998, Hancocks 1980s techno landmarks, Future Shock, Sound System,
and Perfect Machine, were reissuedjust in timeor so the corporate
thinkers at this major label, facing the precipitous sales drop decimating
their industry at the onset of the 21st century, must have hopedto catch
the lastest heaving waves of house, techno, and electronica. Hence the
following meditation on Hancocks long and prolic career as an eclectic
and catalytic sonic explorer.
It was 1951, and the 11-year-old piano prodigy was onstage with the
Chicago Symphony, performing a Mozart concerto for his debut.
That would have been unusual enough. But in addition, to make things
more intriguing, the youngster was black, in an era when virtually all
American symphony orchestras were lily-white and, unthinkingly or not,
were determined to stay that way.
Welcome to the life of Herbie Hancock. Musically speaking, it seems
to have started far far away from the sound we call funkespecially
since funk, when Hancock was a boy, was a backyard word polite folks
listening to Mozart certainly didnt utter: it meant the pungent smell
of sex.
Hancocks talent hasnt been limited to his gifted ngers, though there
have been few greater or more versatile keyboard players, whether on
grand piano or Macintosh computer, in the annals of American music.
No, he is also a cultural synthesizer, a reimaginer, a visionary artist whose
ears have been able to pluck fascinating sounds, the sounds needed or
useful as grist to his creative mill, regardless of their pedigree. He is one
of those artists who is continually reintegrating the changing culture
around him, and in the process helping to change it. Funky, after all, was
not a word young Herbie Hancock would have used to describe nice

Herbie Hancock

81

people or places. It was suggestive, lewd, laidback, downhome. It was for

roadhouses and the back seats of cars, not symphony halls. It was usually
pronounced Fonky, with a blue-collar, ex-slave southern drawl that
Hancocks family would, like most upwardly mobile African Americans
then and now, have found dclass.
Beginning in the late 1980s, postmodernism seemed to proliferate,
become everybodys style de jour, and critics routinely tacked phrases like
genre-busting on to every artistic nitwit who managed to staple bits of
one musical genre to another, as if that in itself were revolutionary or
meaningful. From one perspective, this hyperbole was merely an
outgrowth of the brand of raried academic Marxism, dominant over the
last two decades, that nds potential revolution in every act of reinterpretation or cultural transgression. Meanwhile, Herbie Hancock keeps
doing what the best musicians have always donepursuing his art, using
whatever works to get where he wants to go creatively. Genre-busting
and other critical ideas are largely irrelevant to that process, where the
focus is on realizing the artists vision through any means necessary. The
point of creativity for Hancock isnt to violate rules for the momentary
cheap thrills of imagined or real cultural transgressions, but to forge a new
sensibility, a different understanding, another perspectivein short, the
complex set of social and personal communications we call art.
No good artist, not even the primitive cave painter of Lescaux, is a
simple mirror of his times. But if hes any good at all, his heightened sensibility acts for his audience like a lamp shining into previously darkened
corners, allowing us to see whats been hidden in the shadows from a new
and revealing perspective. Thus have the artistic products of Hancocks
synthesizing mind over nearly four decades given us glimpse after glimpse
into some of the undertows and paradoxes, bafements and triumphs of
American culture.
From its earliest days in New Orleans, where it was born of European, African, and Caribbean stock, jazz has always been about synthesis,
about fusion. And yet this mongrel cultural art form has been periodically
swept by the angry reactions of purists, who demand that its artists stop
the clock, so to speak, freezing jazz (or, more accurately, their prescriptions for jazz) in some alleged moment of purity. That happened in the
1940s, when Dixieland rose like a phoenix from the rediscovery of preSwing Era gures like trumpeter Bunk Johnson to oppose bebop, which no
less a colossus than Louis Armstrong infamously dismissed as Chinese
music. It happened again in the 1960s, when Miles Davis was on point
for the rapidly arriving waves of new mixes of popular music, like rock
and funk, with jazz, and won new younger audiences, to the derision of
the jazz crowd, who in insular postbop fashion derided anyone who
managed to touch large audiences with anything less pure than derivatives
from Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. (Gillespie himself, of course, was

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The Postwar Jazz Era

joyfully pirouetting and winking through jazz explorations of Afro-Cuban

and other foreign material, demonstrating once again that epigones, as
Harold Bloom has noted, are far more fearful of change, which risks their
status, than genuine avatars.) It happened again in the 1980s, when
Wynton Marsalis attacked anyone who dared to dabble in jazz that wasnt
based on his notions (originally distilled and dispensed by his father Ellis
and his mentors like Albert Murray) of blues and swing. Anyone
included his brother Branford and Herbie Hancock, whod given the
young trumpeter early exposure.
From either a historical or creative viewpoint, that sort of demand
enforced neoclassicismis both foolish and impossible, and whatever its
useful and benecial side effects (in this case, a salutary restoration of a
public sense of jazz history and its role in American life and culture), it
often heralds a sterile age of cultural decline. Time, after all, doesnt stop,
partly because people dont. Culture shrivels if it stalls. (Witness the diminished role of classical music as a cultural force and the concomitant
shrinking of its audiencesa continuing downward trend over the last
generation, which led directly to the installation of Wynton Marsalis at
Lincoln Center within the framework called Classical Jazz; the hope,
then and now, was that younger jazz enthusiasts would replace the dying
classical subscription ticket holders in those plush seats.) No surprise,
then, that the most durably signicant jazz artists have rarely succumbed
to the temptation to cry, Halt.
What Herbie Hancock sought to do from early in his career was to
reconcile and revivify the many musical styles he knew, the different faces
of culture that spoke to him as an artist. In the process of doing that
creatively, he helped open jazz up to new, popmusic inspired ideas and
structures. And vice versa: he interpolated jazz improvisation and sophistication into earthy, seemingly basic and even oversimple (to the
sophisticated jazz mind) pop formats. As a by-product of cultural miscegenation, his internal creative dialogues yielded music that could, as a
by-product, provoke a frank discussion of the racial and class-based interrelationships underlying American society.
This achievement wasnt a foregone conclusion in the late 1950s, when
Hancock was a young self-described jazz snob who listened devotedly
to Gil Evans and Bill Evans and classical music and ignored most contemporary pop. There was nothing inevitable about his transformation and
development, although his personal backgroundmiddle class and
educated, yet marginalized in key ways because of his colorput him in
a special, even privileged position to decipher the enigmas of American
culture, are outlined by W. E. B. Du Bois in his discussions of the Talented
Tenth.
So time and experience, the interactions of American history with his
own history, and artistic curiosity led Hancock away from notions of
aesthetic purity, beginning, however obliquely, with that day he joined the

Herbie Hancock

83

Chicago Symphony on stage. He worked closely with Miles Davis, Wayne

Shorter, Ron Carter, and Tony Williams in a legendary 1960s quintet that
unraveled and rewove the threads of jazz. We liked nding our way into
the unknown, Hancock has said. We liked getting lost. Hence the title
of his most famous tribute to Davis, The Sorcerer. He told Nat Hentoff,
I know him well but there is still a kind of musical mystique about him. . . .
There are times I dont know where his music comes from. It doesnt sound
like hes doing it. It sounds like its coming from somewhere else.
Hancock alternated his own acoustic recordings with the Davis
outts increasingly electric dates. It was while playing with Miles that
he discovered the Beatles, Cream, Sly and the Family Stone, Jimi
Hendrix, African music. His own music began to host a no-holds-barred
examination of how the manifold branches of African Americanoriginated soundsindeed, any soundscould creatively interact. That
lively and inexhaustible topic, at the heart of much American postwar
culture, is still Hancocks creative focus to this very day. Witness his late
1990s recording, Gershwins World. There he deftly puts the composer,
whose debt to black American music was at least as enormous as black
American musics debt to him, in the context of Scott Joplin and Duke
Ellington and the rest of the web of influences that made Gershwin
possible, and quite possibly necessary.
Lets put it this way: imagine a world without Herbie Hancock, especially without his most pivotal albums, like Takin Off, Headhunter, and
Future Shock, and youve got to reimagine how funky jazz and early
fusion and an awful lot of contemporary funk and electronica, acid jazz
and hip-hop jazz would have turned out.
Or to put it another way: despite fashionable intellectual trends, individuals can and do change the course of history. They work within
contexts, naturally. No man is an island, even if he is a cultural catalyst.
And ideas, even musical ones, have potential political effects: witness
Wagners cult within Nazism or the American folk revivals effects on the
civil-rights and antiwar movements. Evolution teaches us the theory of
parallel development, which says that key adaptations arise in several
places at roughly the same time to allow for a better chance of survival.
As anthropologists keep discovering, this is as true in cultural history as
in biology. The rise of funk with James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone,
Fela Kuti, and Miles Davis created a context for Hancock, a set of
languages he could learn, intermingle, retranslate, reformulate within his
art, nding a voice of his own in how he did that. That is his genius.
And its why, for nearly 40 years, Herbie Hancock has been making
things that didnt quite exist before.
Hancock was born into a musical family. He describes his father as
a bathtub singer and his mother as a gifted amateur piano player. The
Hancocks recognized their sons musical potential early, starting him on

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The Postwar Jazz Era

classical piano training when he was seven. He got a degree in musical

composition from the respected Grinnell College in Iowa. And even after
hed become a star, he continued his studies at the Manhattan School of
Music.
Hancock has never stopped being a student. His wide-ranging musical
skills, intuitive empathy, and shrewd intelligence propel him to roam
across the musical spectrum, from African folk music to European concert
music. He is perpetually looking for yet another learning experience in a
lifetime already crammed to bursting with them.
Heres a revealing example. In the early 1990s, I was at the Montreal
Jazz Festival when Hancock was a headliner there. He delivered a terric
jazz set, and then bypassed the mainstream-jazz jam session the promoters
had set up in the lobby of the hotel where musicians and press types were
quartered. Instead, Hancock hit the town, and found a couple of tiny acid
jazz and hip-hop clubs. He listened, then sat in. I dare you to name any
other jazz musician of his stature and age whod be doing that. Then I
dare you to name any other jazz musician of his stature and age whod
have good enough chops with funk rhythms, with pop-music concepts, to
be able to do it. And to do it without condescending, as if peering down
from high art to low.
Sonny Rollins once said to me, Jazz isnt a thing. Its what you do. The
material is what you make of it. It can come from anywhere. That openness is why Rollins and his peers in the 1950s and 1960s could explore so
many interconnections between jazz and other styles with such richly
enduring results. It was an analog of the social movement toward integration, and proffered an artistic complex of interrelations that shadowed
contentions by Malcolm X and Franz Fanon that racism in America was
directly related to international policy. Similarly, part of why more recent
Hancock albums, like Headhunters, Future Shock, and The New Standard, are so impressive artistically, and so important historically, is that
they offer the listener a chance to overhear ongoing dialogues between
cultural formats from funk to classical to jazz, to witness their histories
entwine. Its a vision of hope, of inclusiveness.
When The New Standard came out in 1996, Hancock asked me pointedly, What was the pop music of the 20s and 30s? It was called jazz.
Frank Sinatra was a jazz singer, according to the ads. The schism between
pop and jazz came in the 1940s, with bebop. So the material of those older
songs by Irving Berlin and Cole Porter and George Gershwin was easier
to bring into jazz, and still is.
Rock and roll started as a branch off jazz roots, but it moved pretty
far away. The harmonic content, generally speaking, wasnt as rich as the
older pop tunes, which were closer to the same roots as jazz. Groups like
the Beatles started the self-contained model of songwriting and
performing. Nowadays, its not the song itself as much as the singer, the
sound. Thats why there arent that many cover tunes any more in pop.

Herbie Hancock

85

Exactly the same thing happened in jazz. We used to have a lot of jam
sessions, and play pop tunes. We used to cover each others songs more
than we do now.
So for this record, I said, Okay, let me see if I can take contemporary
pop tunes and reconstruct them so that they sound like they were originally written to be jazz tunes, something more provocative for
improvisation. And then I decided I wanted to take tunes that would
make people say, Nope, theres no way to do a jazz version of this.
Each songs arrangement is strikingly different. Dave Hollands bass
limns the melody for Norwegian Wood against an initially stark backdrop; Kurt Cobains grunge translates into a modest piano-sitar duo (with
John Scoeld), impromptu, relaxed, sonic and musical warts and all. The
band came up with usually fascinating strategies for taking these songs
some of which, in their original forms, are to older jazz ears pretty stiff
harmonically, melodically, and rhythmicallyinto the more elastic zones
jazz improvisers prefer. Hancock and arranger Bob Belden reformatted
them, jazz-style, with generally striking results. Take Mercy St. While
Michael Breckers tenor sax states the melody over the signature chattering
percussion that reminds us this is a Peter Gabriel song, Hancocks piano
begins to prowl in the background, introducing the jagged rhythmic variants and expanded harmonic palette that soon kick in. I cant stand most
Simon and Garfunkel, but Scarborough Fair swirls through eddies of
white-water interaction, furious multipart conversations that transgure
it from a delicate folkie lament into a gutsy, bluesy celebration. Thieves
in the Temple nds the rhythm section chugging the Crescent Cityinected funk steadily, while the soloists embroider and explode the
winding melody, each in his own way: where Hancock eases into glinting
dissonance, Scoeld digs into biting, hot-blooded B. B. King guitar, snapping off lines like the heads of craysh.
Not every tune is successful. The least satisfying is Baby Faces, with its
string wash, its tinkling piano, its generally simplistic commercial feel.
Ditto Sades, which veers near easy listening, saved by a ferocious brawny
tenor solo. Still, just when things threaten to go limp, in comes Stevie
Wonders piece, all lunging ferocity with breakneck sax wailing and a
triumphantly joyful spirit of play.
That appealing mix of artistic daring and populism underlies the best
of Hancocks syncretic music, from Watermelon Man to today. Its not
mere historical coincidence that younger jazz artists, from Cassandra
Wilson to Charlie Hunter, from Greg Osby to Matt Shipp, from Jason
Moran to Bill Frisell, from Liquid Soul to Soulive now tread similar paths
as they reforge connections between jazz and contemporary pop.
In fact, you could easily argue that the dialogues Herbie Hancock has
created between pop music, especially funk, and jazz on albums like Headhunters and Future Shock have shaped the younger musicians whove
emerged over the last few years as they look to stir jazzy solos with rock

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The Postwar Jazz Era

and hip-hop atmospherics and contemporary dance rhythms. Hancock,

after all, has been doing thatand often doing it with unique brilliance
for decades. And his singles and albums sell in far bigger numbers than is
usual for jazz, partly because audiences sense Hancocks lack of condescension. They may not grasp all his artistic subtleties, but theyre moved
by what they hear.
Hancock started learning about ways to reach audiences right after he
arrived in New York. The story goes that Mongo Santamarias regular
pianist, a youngster named Armando Corea, couldnt perform one
weekend in 1962, and so trumpeter Donald Byrd, who had Hancock in his
band at the time, suggested Hancock as a substitute. The audience was
tiny, and so the band decided to amuse itself, jamming and talking. Byrd
was discussing the complex historical and musical relationships between
black American and Afro-Cuban music when he turned to Hancock and
said, Play that blues that you wrote. One by one the band found the
groove and jumped in; the nished tune became a permanent staple in
their repertoire, and when Santamaria saw how it wowed full houses, he
decided to record it. (It was, he later said, the only time he knew he was
cutting a hit single.) Watermelon Man zoomed onto Billboards Top Ten
pop singles in early 1963. Hundreds of musicians have covered it since.
At the time, Hancock said, I remember the cry of the watermelon man
making the rounds through the back streets and alleys of Chicago. The
wheels of his wagon beat out the rhythm on the cobblestones. That
quote is telling. Music, for Hancock, is fundamentally about experience.
Hes always looking to push the artistic envelope, but he wants his audience involved. He doesnt want them to just appreciate his music
abstractly, as art.
In the liner notes for his classic 1969 album The Prisoner, he said, I
am trying to write hummable tunes with a kind of rhythmic element
people can be infected with. Its an extension of the concept of simple
melody and rhythm related to a more advanced harmony. Its like a huge
door with a lot of little doors to the outside public, and Im trying different
doors.
In 1969, Hancocks former boss Miles Davis was already coming under
erce attack for helping to launch jazz fusion. Jazz purists were disgusted
that anyone would leave bebop behind for concepts coming from pop
music. They overlooked the fact that Charlie Parker loved the schmaltzy
Guy Lombardo Orchestra, that his favorite alto player was Jimmy Dorsey.
They apparently forgot that Duke Ellington wrote hit dance tunes as well
as serious works. They saw jazz as having evolved into a high art to be
observed and enjoyed by learned insiders, in the European courtly tradition. Though there was truth to this, they simultaneously chose to ignore
the implications of jazzs African and American folk roots, where the
distance between artist and audience was smaller and more interactive

Herbie Hancock

87

than in Europe. (In Harlem and Washington and Newark clubs, for
instance, jazz and R & B still inhabit the same sliding musical scale. Is this
because the clientele is largely African American?) On the other hand, jazz
fans and critics regularly make implausible claims, like how, if only serious
jazz were played on the radio as often as Madonna or Britney Spears, its
often minuscule cult followings would balloon. Of course, radio play
didnt help classical music, which until the end of the 20th century had a
well-established broadcast support system, subsidized by the usual elites.
Hence Hancocks slightly defensive tone about reaching to the outside
public.
Context matters. The tumultuous 1960s, when he was working with
Miles Daviss great quintet, turned Hancock around from jazz snob and
back toward an eclectic curiosity driven by his panoramic musical interests. The times, Bob Dylan wrote, they are a-changing. In many ways,
the decade culminated the rich postwar outpouring, a cultural renaissance
of painting and writing and music that gradually swamped the American
cultural landscape and changed a repressed society into one ripe for mass
creative experimentation.
The Beats like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs, and the New York School of painters like Jackson Pollock and
Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, and jazz musicians like Charles
Mingus and Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and John Coltrane tapped into
the same molten core of postwar energy that drove Americas expanding
economy and military might and space explorations. And they rewrote the
established rules as they did it. Mingus reimported slave spirituals and
worksongs into jazz, as well as drawing on Stravinsky and Debussy and
Ravel and Strauss. Rollins introduced West Indian rhythms, like calypsos.
Coltrane stacked implied harmonies on top of simpler tunes with the
audacity of a brilliant air trafc controller overseeing rush hour at La
Guardia Airport.
Miles Davis, part of it all, registered it all like a cultural seismograph,
and shared it with his sidemen. A painter as well as classical music fan, he
was oored by the sounds emerging from black America during the 1960s.
He adored the airborne, doppler-shifted sounds of Jimi Hendrixs guitar,
and plotted to record with himan encounter that sadly never came to be.
Why, Davis once asked me, would anybody expect me to play bebop
now? That was then. Charlie Parker was about what was happening then.
My music has to be about whats happening now. Why go back and repeat
yourself?
Sly Stone catalyzed Davis. Funks modal structure gave him a way to
redeploy the methodology hed developed since 1959s Kind of Blue: nd
the right creative mix of musicians, give them musical sketches, and work
as an enabler, challenging them to ll in his outlines with their art. Hancock

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The Postwar Jazz Era

watched his boss, and learned. Miles used to change my tunes, Ron
Carters tunes, Tony Williamss tunes, he explained to me. He would take
what we had, boil it down to the bare bones, and put it back togetherstill
just bare bones, because the band put the meat on it every night.
Funk brought back into jazz an element that had been downgraded by
bebop puristspopular reaction, audience participation. Funks rhythmic
insistence was irresistible. You had to move to it. That made it approachable, accessible to anyone. Perhaps predictably, that made it distasteful to
those who wanted to model jazz after European high art, with its emphasis
on more distanced, intellectual, or reective appreciation.
Inside jazz, Hancock once observed to me, theres been a backlash
against fusion, against a lot of pop music. A lot of the young lions like
Wynton Marsalis steer away from the pop side of things. But to restrict
yourself to studying the past, even if its Ellington, isnt the spirit of jazz.
Its my understanding that jazz has always been very open, that its always
borrowed from different musical genres and contributed to the shaping of
other genres too. Take that away, and you wont have anything I want to
hear. It may be jazz, but it aint gonna feel good. Its gonna to be cold, and
it aint gonna have no soul.
So a lot of jazz people still hate fusion, but they forget that there were
several kinds of fusion back then. One was jazz-rock fusionvery notey. Lots of notes being played. Modal solos. A lot of grandstanding. Me, I
took the funk side. I wasnt trying to play modally the way a lot of guys
were.
Perhaps the most signicant trend for contemporary jazz is the rediscovery of Hancocks funky kind of fusion, the kind that didnt lionize
noodling soloists, that kept the structures tight and focused on the funky
polyrhythms, the dialogic interactions, drawing audiences in and letting
them nd their own levels within it.
When Miles Davis was teaching Hancock to boil down his jazz tunes,
James Brown and Sly Stone were boiling soul music down to its bones, its
more African foundations, the insistently roiling polyrhythms and feverish
call-and-response formats that mesmerized listeners and hauled people up
onto dance oors. By 1972, when Davis released On the Corner, a powerfully compressed album of tonal colors and funky rhythmic displacements,
jazz acionados and musicians everywhere detested itand detested Davis
for making it. Uncharacteristically, he retreated into guitar-driven fusion
until the 1990s.
But Headhunters, Hancocks matchless 1973 record, extends that funky
facet of Daviss inuence into a more pop-based sensibility. The hit single
Chameleon is clearly partly homage to Sly Stone, but reimagined,
updated, jazzed. It became a hit, and made Headhunters one of the
biggest-selling jazz records of all time.
A decade later, Rockit laced hip-hop turntable scratches with
computer-generated industrial sounds over funk beats, and rode to the top

Herbie Hancock

89

of the MTV charts with an audacious and hilarious cartoon video that
poked implicit fun at racism. With his deft artists touch, Hancock was
breathing human life into the rst wave of techno via his sinewy and
sinuous funk. The album Future Shock was a smasheven with the jazzy
acoustic piano in the middle of the industrial-strength Auto Drive.
The way Hancock tells it, in the early 1970s he discovered that even his
friends, after buying his records, didnt play them. I realized, he said,
that I could never be a genius in the class of Miles, Charlie Parker, or
Coltrane, so I might just as well forget about becoming a legend and just
be satised to create some music to make people happy.
In fact, his genius resides precisely in his willingness and ability to make
people enjoy the challenges of his art. And its made him a star, and a
legend, and a cultural innovator of the rst magnitude.

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Rebirth
of the Blues

part III

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9
The Gospel Highway
The Gospel Highway, the church-based circuit toured by African
American preachers and religious entertainers, was paved largely by segregation, but it also meant to bypass the worlds sinful mores. To trace its
twists and turns is to follow strands of Americas cultural DNA, peer into
its cognitive dissonance and paradoxes. Observers, for instance, may
discuss the genetic relationships and stylistic afnities of gospel and blues,
but for true believers, one is holy and the other satanicperiod. That
explains why Ray Charles was so viciously reviled by the faithful in 1955,
when he rocked an old spiritual in the then-new soul gospel style, added
leering lyrics, called it I Got a Woman, and scored a hit that helped
launch soul music: He had blasphemed, as surely as if hed had sex in
Sunday school.
Charless new sound transposed the Pentecostal moans of soul gospels
male quartets into popular culture, with indelible results. Among the
outstanding quartets developing that style were the Dixie Hummingbirds,
and in his thoughtful, well-organized Great God AMighty! The Dixie
Hummingbirds: Celebrating the Rise of Soul Gospel Music, Jerry Zolten
both recounts their career and uses them as a lens to view larger contexts.
He sees the Hummingbirds consistently reinventing themselves within the
evolution of African American religious culture, and positions them as key
movers in the between-the-wars shift from old-time Sister Flute spirituals to the denser, more driving hard soul gospel of the male quartets.
These four-part-harmony groups (actual numbers could vary; the Birds
were usually a quintet or sextet with multiple tenors) shouted with a
raucous call-and-response fervor that fused Holiness Church grace with
devil blues, attracting women, young folk, and integrated audiences. In the
process, they helped link the Gospel Highway to the vast interconnected
web that the postwar American entertainment business was becoming.
Drawing on seminal books like Anthony Heilbuts The Gospel Sound
as well as his own research and interviews, Zolten skillfully navigates these
sometimes explosive changes. He conveys the complex moral codes of the
churches in which the Dixie Hummingbirds sang while illustrating how

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Rebirth of the Blues

crucial developing business acumen, building a fan base and booking

skills, and projecting a unique sense of style were to the groups success in
the sharp-toothed business of gospel entertainment. And he regularly pans
and dollies back to set this subculture within larger American themes: the
day-to-day effects of segregation; the Depression-era growth of radio and
recordings; the emergence of the church-based civil rights movement; the
upsurge of independent labels and booking agencies thriving on nonmainstream sounds in postwar America; the relations between Jewish showbiz
entrepreneurs and black entertainers; and the ineluctable appeal of African
American culture to white America.
As they labored for six decades within and sometimes outside gospels
walled vineyards, the Hummingbirds certainly helped blaze interesting
trails. In 1942, they became the second gospel group to play Caf Society,
the landmark political-musical cabaret; their band boasted tenor sax great
Lester Young, and they were hailed and befriended by glitterati from John
Hammond to Paul Robeson. In 1956, they participated in the second allgospel show at the Apollo Theater. (Characteristically, Zolten observes
that the Apollos change of music policy was prompted by its slumping
box ofce.) At the 1966 Newport Folk Festival, a year after Bob Dylan
was booed off the stage for going electric, the Birds were among the
front-rank gospel singers who joined bluesmen Son House, Skip James,
and Howlin Wolf as well as rock and roll godfather Chuck Berry. In
1973, they laid their distinctively kinetic blend of voices and rhythms on
Paul Simons Love Me Like a Rock.
Along the way, the Hummingbirds lead tenor, Ira Tucker, one of gospel
musics most charismatic growler-and-shouters, and bass Willie Bobo,
who originated trademark walking vocal lines, rst inspired doo-wop
idols like Little Anthony and the Imperials and then soul groups like the
Temptations to adapt the quartets approach to less exalted material.
From their 1928 North Carolina genesis as a staid, sweet-singing
old-style quartet until their retirement in the late 1990s, the Dixie
Hummingbirds remained, as early member Barney Parks put it, a clean
religious group. Tenor James Davis was the leader, and at age 12, he
already enforced our rst rule. No drinking. Other strictures banned
women and demanded professional reliability; the rare rulebreakers paid
nes.
To travel to their rst big performance, the youngsters borrowed a car
and coasted downhill to save gas. But as Zolten points out, They were
entering a long-standing performing arts tradition, one that unlike other
entertainments afforded African Americans the opportunity to present
themselves with dignity. . . . Strict adherents to the quartet tradition, the
group performed in their Sunday best, dark suits and ties. They stood in a
straight line and simply sang without moving, instead allowing the emotion
to come through in the expression of their voices and the words of the song.
They performed a cappella, no instrumental accompaniment at all.

The Gospel Highway

95

Their approach got jolted at a late 1930s quartet competition. Gospels

equivalent of jazzs cutting contests, these often attracted integrated audiences. Faced with the more assertive and incendiary delivery of the
northern-based Heavenly Gospel Singers, the shrewd Davis developed the
two-step contrarian approach that netted the Birds decades of competitive
victories: If a group in front of you goes over well enough, the last thing
you want to do is the same type of stuff theyre singing. A group get up and
raise a lot of sand, you get up and be as sweet as you can get! Get sweet as
a honeycomb before you get up there hollering. And then, to ice the
victory, he stole their handsome, dynamic lead singer who drove kids wild.
By the late 1930s, the group was changing rapidly, thanks partly to the
spread of radio and recordings, which aired formerly regional styles to
national markets and reshaped audiences and performers alike. As Zolten
explains, The Hummingbirds were able to draw on a variety of traditional
a cappella techniquesAfrican American vocal conventions like stretching
and playing on notes, switching leads, carrying the rhythm along in the bass
voice, adding soaring falsetto ornamentation, shifting tempos, and introducing counterpoint harmony weaves. As always, the rst and foremost
goal of any Dixie Hummingbirds performance was to sing for the Lord and
guide listeners to spiritual epiphany. But now as professionals, they also
had to think about putting on a show. There was room for spontaneity and
improvisation, but they had to be highly practiced.
Radio became one of their marketing stalwarts; at the local level, as
anyone who has seen O Brother Where Art Thou may recall, the medium
was frequently color-blind and easy to break into. Zolten avers, Station
owners cared only that listeners stayed tuned, heard the advertisements,
and bought the products. Radio also regularly put black performance style
in close proximity to white Americans. In fact, these qualities were
exactly what later allowed Alan Freed and Wolfman Jack and a handful
of white and black DJs across postwar America to break the overwhelmingly black world of rhythm and blues into the white teen universe.
With handshakes and verbal agreements as their contracts, gospel
singers were prey to ripoffs; with little cash but an aura of glamor, they
were also ripe for seduction. Unlike many of their peers, the Hummingbirds learned the business, eventually promoting and producing
themselves, and evaded temptation. You had to walk the line [Tucker]
says. If you didnt, the church people would take you down. Adhering
to Daviss strict moral code, they eschewed the sinful carousing that
permeated gospels sacred precincts and produced titillating gossip and
accusations about luminaries from Clara Ward to Sam Cooke.
Sexual and musical dalliances could cause equal scandal. Even established stars like Sister Rosetta Tharpe were subject to censure if they
crossed too far over the stylistic line. Tharpe found success singing the
Lords praises over blues-guitar runs out of Charley Pattona dicey
enough proposition in itself for many within the fold, but one that brought

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Rebirth of the Blues

her growing renown among white as well as black audiences. Then in

1938 she joined John Hammonds groundbreaking From Spirituals to
Swing concert at Carnegie Hall. Appealing to record buyers both black
and white, Zolten writes, Sister Rosetta Tharpe would not only fuel the
taste for rocking hard gospel within the black community but would
propel a growing interest in black religious music among whites, especially in the urban East. But she narrowly skirted danger: Tharpe . . .
had succeeded in broadening her appeal by performing not only in
churches, but also on records and in nightclubs, cabarets, and concert
stages backed by the jazz combos of bandleaders like Lucky Millinder and
Sam Price. She was walking a ne line and in late 1946, the New York
Amsterdam News reported that her indecision was costing Tharpe some
credibility with her religious constituency. It was only when she returned
to working churches steadily that the tongue-wagging of the faithful
slowed.
For the churchgoing, Sam Cooke was a far more pointed exemplar of
the unholy tensions that always exist in American culture between the
sacred and the profane. As a beautiful boy with a heavenly voice traveling
with one of gospels premier quartets, the Soul Stirrers, young Sam
seduced and was seduced with something like abandon. But then in 1956,
in parallel with Brother Ray Charles, he turned to pop. He crafted hits
crooning ballads like You Send Me and Cupid, party-time fun like
the clave-inected Another Saturday Night, the gospel-avored Chain
Gang and Bring It on Home to Me. Hed crossed over to mass white
audiencessomething that brought politically correct but misguided accusations from later white critics like biographer Daniel Wolff, who charged
that Cookes white handlers, the Italian producers Hugo and Luigi, had
forcibly bleached the singers music. This sort of thing had clearly
happened beforethink Jackie Wilson, for just one instancebut the
unavoidable fact is that Cooke made those artistic and commercial decisions for himself; as he fought for (and gained) control over his music, he
didnt have the white hipsters hangup about hard gospel being blacker
(and therefore truer to the black experience) than his hits. For Cooke,
these were simply different aspects of his voracious musical personality,
much as gospel and soul were. And if he wanted to be a major mainstream
star, and garner the rewards and celebrity thereof, what of it? But the
Christian gospel world never forgot or forgave his apparent treachery;
when he was shot at a motel in 1964, apparently by a prostitute, they
nodded righteously, serene in the knowledge that the Lords will had
nally been done.
By contrast, the Hummingbirds never ceased their rounds of churches
as they rose toward gospels version of commercial success. Early on,
theyd established a comfortable touring schedule: Florida in winter, the
Northeast in summer. Guided by Davis, they cemented fan loyalty by
arriving well ahead of concerts to mingle with their fans, and they stead-

The Gospel Highway

97

fastly honored commitments to church and religious promoters despite

more lucrative enticements. This devotion to their core audience and
repeated refusal to stray into overly secular material helped propel them
up gospels ladder.
In 1942, they joined the millions of black Americans who had migrated
north since World War I, leaving Carolina for Philadelphia. There they
soon appeared regularly on WCAU, a 50,000-watt clear-channel station
that was white-owned and catered to white listeners; they were rechristened the Swanee Quintet. Ironically, the radio spot led directly to their
following the Golden Gate Quartet into Caf Society, whose progressives
dubbed them the Jericho Quintet. Apparently Hammond et al. werent
quite progressive enough to forgo the need to control every nuance of
black artists career choices.
From 1952 on, following a series of small-label record deals, the
Hummingbirds landed with Duke/Peacock, a black-owned independent
whose secular stars included Little Richard, Big Mama Thornton, Johnny
Ace, and Bobby Blue Bland. The relationship embraced their 1950s
commercial and musical peak, when they added more instrumental
backing to their patented vocalizing. Their biggest hit, Lets Go Out to
the Programs, had them imitating in turn all their contemporary gospel
competitorsa tour de force that made them national headliners. In 1959,
they posed for the photo for their rst LP: The cover . . . against the backdrop of a star-studded sky, showed the white-tuxedoed Birds from the
waist up, handsome faces with pencil-thin moustaches smiling up. Later
that year, they headlined at the Apollo and joined a salute to Mahalia
Jackson at Madison Square Garden. Gospel was at its commercial apogee,
but, as Zolten notes, The Dixie Hummingbirds . . . would follow their
usual coursetop of the world one night, a small country church the next.
That pattern held even through their irtation with Simon, secular
material, and broader fame: And yet they complained to Sepia magazine
in 1973, We have already lost some of our audience. . . . It would be a
blessing if Sepia could help make it clear to our people that the Dixie
Hummingbirds are religious men, living God-fearing lives, who function
as ambassadors for Jesus.
Zolten unfolds this story, with its sundry subplots and themes, uently.
His musical descriptions are evocative, and he neither minimizes nor exaggerates the gospel worlds erce moral and showbiz competitiveness. He
shows how, like all the top-ight gospel quartets, the Birds drilled on
staging and presentation as well as music. And while he periodically overstates their broad innovating impact and their direct inuence on doo-wop
and soul, overall he makes a case that they were exemplars and conveyors
of cultural and musical changes then at hand in America.
For acionados, this book inevitably covers familiar historical ground.
But Zolten has an eye for telling details and counterpoints. Take his periodic snapshots of the gospel business: That year [1953], according to

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Rebirth of the Blues

gures compiled by Billboard, the Soul Stirrers had earned $78,000, the
Pilgrim Travelers $100,000 on 173 dates, and Clarence Fountains Mississippi Blind Boys, $130,000 in 40 weeks. . . . [Duke/Peacock owner] Don
Robey reported a million and a half records sold in 1953, most of them
Willie Mae Thorntons Hound Dog but 500,000, Lets Go Out to the
Programsby the Dixie Hummingbirds, an exceptional tally for a record
in any genre.
He also has a nice feel for historys ironies. When the Hummingbirds
auditioned for Hammond to play Caf Society, they were sure they knew
from experience what white folk wanted, and polished up their sweet
singing. The patrician radical was completely put off: He said, You all
from the South I know. Gimme some corn bread, baby.
And he offers some tasty vignettes: Tucker still remembers the night
in Norfolk, Virginia, when the Dixie Hummingbirds stayed in the same
colored hotel with Big Joe Turner, Ray Charles, Teddy Wilson, Duke
Ellington, and Louis Armstrong. . . . Tucker admired Armstrong for his
rags to riches climb to success. . . . I talked with Louis seven hours that
night. We talked all night and he missed the bus. So he said, What the
heck. Got him a cab from Norfolk to Reading, Pennsylvania.

10
Chess Records
The evolutionary history of American vernacular music over the last
half-century-plus has often hinged on entrepreneurs who hung out in
the shadows between mainstream culture and its marginal cousins. In
ways they didnt intend, these businessmen became mediators, even
advocates, for cultural outsiders.
Take black musicians. They had limited opportunities at major labels
(where they, like other ethnic and regional groups, were usually cordoned
into race and specialty record lines), major booking agencies, and
major venues. And so again and again, small labels offering blues or
rhythm and blues or gospel, black-driven musical formats not plugged
into mass-market distribution pipelines, popped up across postwar
America. The label heads, almost all of them white, had individual
motives, of course, but most shared a vision of potentially protable niche
markets going untapped.
Such were the Chess brothers, Leonard and Phil, who after World War
II started what became Chess Records. Born in Poland, the boys emigrated
to America with their family in 1922, and grew up in Chicago. Though
they kept links to their Jewish heritage, their businessesa junk store, a
couple of liquor storesmoved them steadily into the tangle of racial and
ethnic relations that crisscrosses American culture like fault lines.
In 1946, Leonard, the elder dominant Chess brother, took over a bar
in one of the black Chicago neighborhoods filling with southern
migrants. The liquor license was in Phils name. Like other tavern
owners, the brothers saw that live bands drew customers, that there was
money to be made in black music and its audienceand that idea shaped
the rest of their lives. They improvised shrewd, streetwise business
tactics, and they learned fast. By the time Leonard died of a heart attack
in 1969, at age 52, he and Phil owned several record labels, a recording
studio, a record distributor, a couple of music publishers, two radio
stations, and a batch of real estate. More important, they had recorded
more than their fair share of the best and most inuential sounds of the
postwar era.

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As Nadine Cohodas recounts in Spinning Blues into Gold: The Chess

Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records, Leonard Chess formed a
bond with his customers and artists that went beyond money. Phil and
Leonard apparently didnt feel African Americans were Otheror, if they
did, as immigrant Jews they understood what that could mean. They
were assimilated and secular: the word most frequently on Leonards lips
referred to, uh, Oedipal sexual contact. And they had drive and determination, so in black neighborhoods in Chicago, then all over the
country, they absorbed local culture and sounds, made connections and
friends, signed up musicians. They hustled records to DJs, record-store
owners, and distributors on a road that stretched for years from dusty
shacks to cities. By the late 1950s, Chess had grown from an ad-hoc twoman operation into a hitmaking group of record labels, a kind of
mini-major label wrapped in myth. On an early US tour, the Rolling
Stones came to Chicago so they could record in the same Chess studios
their blues and R&B idols, whose songs they covered and crossed over
to a white audience of millions, had used.
For in the minds of fans like the Stones, Chess was more than a record
company; it was a matrix where key elements of postwar American
popular culture were catalyzed. The births of gritty electric urban blues,
rhythm and blues, then rock and roll are among the moments Chess
Records helped create and chronicle. Framed by a world where the
white-bread mainstream and racism and payola and cutthroat competition were daily facts of life, the Chess brothers produced pivotal
innovators like Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry, and Etta James, and nearly
signed James Brown and Elvis Presley. They not only made money from
selling black music to black Americans; like their friend, legendary DJ
Alan Freed, they also introduced countless white American kids to those
sounds.
This is the by turns fascinating, complex, and dry-as-top-40-charts
story Cohodas wants to esh out. Overall, she succeeds pretty solidly. A
former reporter for Congressional Quarterly and author of The Band
Played Dixie: Race and Liberal Conscience at Ole Miss and Strom Thurmond and the Politics of Southern Change, Cohodas connects a lot of
dots and corrects earlier versions of Chess history by music writers who
relied too heavily on unchecked hand-me-down anecdotes. (Just one
example: a story Keith Richards has loved to tell journalists, including
this one, over the years relates how when the Stones made their rst
pilgrimage to Chess Records on their first US tour, he met Muddy
Waterswho was painting the ceiling. Though he hardly got a fair nancial piece of the prots he generated for Chess, Waters never did menial
work for the brothers, who treated him well, in their ersatz plantationmentality fashion.) Still, Cohodas has done her homework: rst-hand
interviews with a variety of witnesses enliven her wide-ranging research

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101

materials, which include artists biographies, local newspapers, city directories, and trade magazines like Billboard and Cashbox, useful for
tracking any record labels history.
Spinning Blues into Gold has a larger-than-life cast of characters.
Berry, Waters, James, Howlin Wolf, Little Walter, Bo Diddley, Ahmad
Jamal, Ramsey Lewis, James Moodysome of the brightest stars from
blues, jazz, R&B, and soul waxed their music for Chess, and their
records were instrumental in changing the shape of postwar popular
music. What combo of magic and ears and instinct led the Chess
brothers to hear a dim wire recording of a tune called Ida Red, played
for them by a disciple of Muddy Waters, and realize that young Chuck
Berry probably had a hitwhich he did, once the tunes name was
changed to Maybellene. With that, truly distinctive rock and roll
guitar, Berrys onstage duck-walk, and an entire genre of carkidslove
songs, were launched.
So very much of what the Chess brothers recorded became part of
the fundamental soundtrack for the 1960s garage-band eforescence
across America, at rst entering the standard repertory by way of white
blues-rock covers (the Stones, Eric Clapton, the Blues Project, Paul
Buttereld) and then, as larger rock venues like the Fillmores began to
book artists like them as part of their deliberate mix-and-match musical
presentations, directly. And then there are key DJs like Freed, who from
the 1950s on helped cross black music over to white radio listeners and
drew (make that demanded) steady and steadily increasing payola from
the brothers, as he did from nearly everyone, until the payola scandals
broke and his prominence and attitude combined to cast him as the
industrys available fall guy. (In this Congress and Freed were ushered
toward each other by Dick Clark, himself a walking conict of interestshe owned record labels, ran overpoweringly important teen TV
and radio shows like American Bandstandwho came off, by deliberate
contrast, as the battered industrys Mr. Clean.) Finally, there are other
independent label heads, an always colorful cast, which here includes
the Bihari brothers and Evelyn Aron, as well as a small host of behindthe-scenes Chess players.
Its almost inevitable that an institutional history like this will at times
lapse into somewhat potted thumbnail sketches of individuals, but
Cohodas usually keeps them evocative and on point as they intersect in
the buzz of life around Chess Records. Her delving into the business
ledgers and background, too often glossed over or reduced to easy and
comforting art versus commerce clichs by music writers, is particularly
strong. However, she does sometimes undercut the depth and strength of
her reporting by overinterpreting scenes and characters. She seems defensive, for instance, about calling Leonard and Phil anything tougher than
frugal, though she quotes plenty of witnesses testifying to their noto-

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Rebirth of the Blues

rious unwillingness to part with money. When production head Dave

Usher asked for a raise after a string of late 1950s hits, Leonards typically tart reply was, What do you think, youre one of my family?
Usher left Chess soon afterwards. His successor, Jack Tracy, negotiated
a better deal, including producer royalties. At the end of his rst year, the
royalties totaled $750, and Leonard barked in his unilateral way, Were
going to change things. . . . You wont be getting a royalty again. Tracy
didnt even bother to protest.
Perspective can change a lot, and Cohodas rightly, if a bit defensively,
tries to contextualize the Chesses nancial practices. They bought new
Cadillacs and rented apartments and paid lawyers fees for their artists,
but almost never handed out royalty statements. Atlantic Records
honcho Jerry Wexler, a friendly rival of the Chess brothers, saw their
approach as updated paternalism. Cohodas points out that many if not
most labels at the time did similar things, and eventually wound up in
disputes with their musicians over money, copyrights, and the likeand
that very much includes Wexlers pioneering Atlantic label. She also
points out that most of the business (as was often the case with small
indie labels) was in the brothers heads, so theres frequently no way to
verify Chess Records numbers and transactions. But once again, shes
done her homework: the books epilogue, Lawsuits and Legacies,
narrates the staggeringly numerous nancial and copyright clashes Chess
had with its musicians following Leonards death.
There are disconcerting moments when Cohodass sympathies overreach her facts. She describes the role played by the brothers wives, who
were kept completely in the dark about Chess business, as important
because they kept their houses neat and raised the children, and
Leonards wife Revetta packed the suitcases for his trips and got up early
to make breakfast. In fact, as her book inadvertently makes clear, the
Chess brothers were mainstream-traditional in terms of home life; what
set them apart, as it did their indie-label peers, was the raw, unanswerable desire to document this music and culture theyd been drawn into,
nd a hit, then another, and avoid the postwar straight worlds straitjacketed visions of lifes possibilities, personally and professionally. After
all, how many straight business execs hung out with motorcycle gangs
and con men and thieves, the way Leonard Chess liked to?
Overall, though, Cohodass dogged reportage powers her book past
its relatively minor aws and serviceable prose. Dotted by irreconcilable
memories and unresolvable disputes that she lets stand, Spinning Blues
into Gold adeptly mimics the often Rashomonlike residues of historical
memory from its various protagonists. One example: when Chuck Berry
was busted, tried, and ultimately imprisoned on Mann Act charges in
195961, the Chess brothers paid for his lawyersaccording to them.
Berrys autobiography, as Cohodas duly notes, denies it. Then again,

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103

Berry, who always demanded to be paid in cash for his shows often
before he even went onstage, then carted the proceeds around in paper
bags, was probably the only Chess artist as cheap as the Chess brothers.
In the end, Cohodas has crafted an in-depth, fact-and-story-rich tour
through an important site in American popular culture. If ultimately it
leaves Leonard and Phil Chess themselves as informed sketches rather
than full-lit characters, thats probably how they would have liked it.

11
The Folk Revival
I was in high school in the 1960s, when I rst saw Dave Van Ronk at
the Gaslight, one of those little cellar clubs that used to line a Greenwich
Village that now lives in myth and legend. I didnt understand what he
was doing. It didnt t anywhere neatly, musically speaking. It seemed like
a jumble whose elements I recognizedfolk tunes, ragtime, early jazz,
Delta bluesbut couldnt line up into what my 15-year-old mind thought
was coherence but was really my expectations, which were being uncannily exposed and exploded. I felt like Dr. P in Oliver Sackss The Man Who
Mistook His Wife for a Hat, scanning deconstructed faces for that single
telltale feature that would reveal to me who I was looking at. It took me
several days to recover from that set, to piece together what had hit me.
Aside from nagging annoyance, I didnt know how to think about it. I
couldnt have been more confused if Louis Armstrong suddenly ambled
onto the Ed Sullivan Show and followed Hello Dolly with The Times
They Are A-Changin.
Two things, however, I knew even as I was alternately squirming and
transxed through Van Ronks show: he was a hellacious guitar picker, a
realand therefore, in pop and folk circles, rare musician (I later studied
with two of his students), and he was the only white guy Id ever heard
whose singing showed that he truly understood Armstrong and Muddy
Waters. When he roared and bellowed, it felt like a hurricane blast shaking
that little club.
Oh yeah: Van Ronk was funny. Really funny. He did bits from W. C.
Fields, whose irreverently transgressive movies were being revived, part
of the 1960s rediscovery of great American anarcho-comics like the Marx
Brothers. He did Mack the Knife in mid-show with a suddenly acquired
tremolo I later found out was Marlene Dietrichs; it threw my teen spirit
and forced me to rethink what I thought I knew about folk music. When
he did Cocaine, the perennial crowd-pleaser and set-closer hed adapted
from the Reverend Gary Davis, his friend and teacher, his asides (Woke
up this morning and my nose was gone) seemed made to order for the
drug counterculture. (Of course, some of us had already discovered how

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105

deeply braided into American history and society drug use wasword
was out on how Coca-Cola got its name.) Decades later, Jackson Browne
revived this tune on his tours, his band parsing out the implications of Van
Ronks guitar.
There are many Van Ronk undercurrents owing through American
pop culture. The acclamation and small forest of obituaries that
followed his death of colon cancer in early 2002 ironically mirrored his
ghostly omnipresence during life. He was a missing link, an authentic
songster who voiced folk-made music. He directly connected the vision
of the folk artist, which Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger shared with
Alan Lomax, with both its black cousins in Piedmont and Delta blues
and the white, largely middle-class collegiate audience drawn into the
postwar folk-revival waves. In fact, from the early 1960s until his death,
Van Ronk became the minence grise behind those revivals. (Christine
Lavin presented him his 1997 ASCAP Lifetime Achievement Award.)
And he was more: the man who reconnected jazz to the other forms of
folk music that he, like his avatar Woody Guthrie, pursued, learned,
reclaimed, and kept aliveand, with the wit and humor that prevented
homage from freezing into reverence, even dared to reimagine without
prejudice or hierarchy.
A big burly guy whose personality was as oversized as his voice, Van
Ronk never crossed over to commerciality, never got famous, never
signed a major-label deal, never played arenas. In those ways, he was a
true descendant and avatar of the folk-music aesthetic: becoming too
visible or successful equaled selling out. He followed the time-honored
American path into this cultures musical heart: he studied African
American sources and learned directly from their living purveyors. These
included Piedmont ragtime pickers like Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller
and Delta deep-bluesmen like Son House. Then there was the Reverend
Gary Davis. Hed dazzled 1940s Harlem streetcorners with his stylistically
wide-ranging guitar and whooping singing, careening from biblical shouts
to leering lipsmackers, and by the 1960s had become a teacher who drew
Village hipsters to his small brick house in Queens. This was the era when
Moondog, the eccentric jazz poet, took up his daily post near the Museum
of Modern Art and did, well, whatever he felt like that day.
Maybe its not so surprising that I was so fascinated and confused by
these gures that I didnt guess until later that Id stumbled into the last
stages of Americas older oral culture.
Human society, being a conservative creature, tends to close its books
slowly, and revisit them often along the way, with however many misunderstandings and blindnesses of reinterpretation as it stumbles toward its
futures. But the acceleration of technological change, and the increasing
absorption of even apparently marginal subcultures into industrial models,
has inevitably altered the oral process of folk art transmission. In the 21st

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century, its pretty clear that, for better and worse, technology has probably rendered the Van Ronks oddly superuous, apparently redundant.
In evolution, if not always in architecture, form follows function. The
concept of folk music hatched by Charles Seeger and the Lomaxes and
embodied by Woody Guthrie, Lead Belly, and Pete Seeger has, in the age
of mass recording and mass media, lost its daily functionalities. Where
once songsters were the repositories and transmitters of our polyglot
national folk heritage, where Van Ronks generation of amateur and
professional musicologist-sleuths sought out records tossed into attics and
garages to nd artists obscured by the mists of time, now, thanks to the
omnipresent, protable avalanche of record-company CD reissues, almost
anything they had to dig for is readily available. Of course, the artists and
their cultures are not.
So our easy connection with the cultural past is shaped by the recording
studio, with its time constraints and pressures and implicit notion of a
xed performance guarded by copyright and potentially paying off in the
publishing royalties that are the core of the music industrys economy.
That inevitably alters performances from folk art, where borrowing and
repetition are demanded. Thus weve lost the idiosyncratic twists to the
oral/aural tradition that an artist of Van Ronks caliber introduces, almost
casually and yet integrally, however much they appear like asides.
This song has changed since Gary used to do it, he growls in introduction to one recorded version of the Reverend Daviss Cocaine Blues,
as he used to do onstage. Which was, of course, part of the point, as well
as the method of transmission, of real folk music: culture is a conservative
mechanism, a cumulative record of human activity, and change results
from disconnections and accretions precisely like Van Ronks sharp-witted
alterations of Daviss barbed blues, originally improvised add-ons drawn
from his memory of lyrics the way a jazz musician pulls riffs from history
and reworks them into his own voice. Millman Parrys deductions about
the Homeridae, the ancient bards wandering Hellas singing Homers epics,
from his study of Yugoslav oral poets who used metrical patterns and
preset textual chunks to recall and recompose their source texts, apply
to Americas bluesmen and songsters and jazz artists, describe some of the
armature of what we call improvisation, which is based in memory and
practice. As jazz historian Dan Morgenstern has pointed out repeatedly,
even gures like Louis Armstrong who are usually thought of as improvising titans rarely just blow off the tops of their heads; they rely on preset
phrases and ideas as raw vocabulary on which to draw, to recombine, to
anchor them, at least, in the process of creation.
What Bruce Springsteen, another of Van Ronks collateral relations,
called the human touch describes the process underlying Van Ronks
creativity. Naturally, Van Ronk was a die-hard collector of sources, living
and recorded. As the liner notes to the 1962 album In the Tradition put
it, Dave Van Ronk has established himself as one of the foremost

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107

compilers of Jury Texts regarding traditional tunes. (Jury texts are when
many verses are sung to one tune, usually with some new words appearing
with each subsequent recording.) Here, in Death Letter Blues, Van Ronk
has arranged some of the most moving verses of this song into a dramatic
slow blues. Behold the songster at worka process found in early
Armstrong, Guthrie, and Robert Johnson.
Although the building blocks of oral culture are plastic, preservationists in a non-oral culture tend toward reverence, simpler imitation, and
homage. A lot of that happened in the post-McCarthy era folk revival. (As
Van Ronk observed in a late 1970s Sing Out! interview, It was all part
and parcel of the big left turn middle class college students were
making. . . . So we owe it all to Rosa Parks.) While black rhythm and
blues was revving white teenagers into rock and roll, black folk artists
were becoming heroes to young white collegians. The left cast a romantic,
even sacramental aura over black (and white) folk art and its traditions,
which implicitly stigmatized creative change. The central notion of folkrevival culture, authenticity, meant avoiding commercial trappings and
articial personas and trying to replicate an idealized past from recordings, to see oneself as the latest worker in a continuum devoted to reviving
music that served as the repository of oral traditions while maintaining
for it some sort of contemporary functionalitya social dimension. Seeger,
Guthries friend and follower, insisted that was essential.
And so college men and coeds, enticed by his concerts and proselytizing
during his blackballed McCarthy exile, studied recordings of antique
ballads, which they sang along with songs of popular protest to audiences
largely made up of people like themselves. Nevertheless, their cultural
effectsor, perhaps better put, the effects of their having created a
culturesomehow eventually spilled into larger political and social
arenas, became a fundamental set of motifs in the soundtrack for the
protest movements of the 1950s and 1960s. Thus despite the inevitable
tensions between authentic preservationism and contemporary relevance,
between folk culture and industrial commerce, the notion that Guthrie
and Seeger shared with Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill, say, that art could
create a climate that would galvanize ideas into action, has been a bedrock
belief of leftist cultural politics from the postwar era until today.
Perhaps it was Van Ronks deep study of and familiarity with the past
that helped him avoid xing it. Part of what made him different from, say,
Mike Seeger and his New Lost City Ramblers was that he so internalized
what hed learned that he couldnt help altering it, in the deceptively
creative manner of human memory. He could (and did) annotate what he
played and discuss it in musicological terms. In a late 1990s interview
dealing with Harry Smiths Anthology of American Folk Music, which he
rightly called the bible of his generation, he noted dryly, I sat up and
took notice at how many tunes that, say, Doc Watson does that are on the
Anthology. . . . Some he would have known [via oral tradition]. But you

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can tell. There are hundreds of possible verses. When someone does [lists
three verses in order], you know theyve been listening to Bascom Lamar
Lunsford.
For Van Ronk, folk music was a living traditionmeaning he allowed
himself the authority, within somewhat squishy limits, to tinker with, if
not radically alter, what he knew to t his own needs as an artista
modern Homeric singer. Would I rather hear Son Houses recording of
Death Letter than Van Ronks live take? Was Van Ronk, as he once
acidly rephrased the record businesss conception of him, an albino
Muddy Waters? What, in the context of these questions, do the notions
folk music and authenticity mean?
The Reverend Gary Davis was one of the prize discoveries of the
postwar folk revival. He was as authentic a folk artist as they come, and
his blindness and blackness only added to the aura of inevitability his
outsized personality and music projected. It was one of the many ironies
of the folk movement that some questioned Daviss authenticity and depth
of real feeling because of his undeniably gripping and looselimbed virtuositya foreshadowing of garage-band and punker credos about
technique numbing raw feeling. In this and other ways, theyd certainly
out-Guthried Woody, who, though he kept his own skills carefully homespun, would never have denied the emotional depths of his pals Sonny
Terry and Brownie McGhee just because of their superior technical
prowess.
Terry, McGhee, and Davis went way back, to the heyday of streetcorner
performers in their shared home base of Durham, North Carolina, in
tobacco country, not far from Thelonious Monks birthplace of Rocky
Mount. Davis had moved to Durham in the 1920s, after coming of age in
Greenville, a seedbed of songsters: Josh White also hailed from there.
Guitarist Willie Walker, a local hero who played a now-shadowy but
legendary role for Piedmont pickers akin to the one Buddy Bolden played
in New Orleans jazz, was then in his prime. White, who was almost
twenty years younger than Davis, said of his skills, Walker was like Art
Tatum. They dont teach that kind of guitar.
Now, of course, there are piles of transcriptions and tapes and a fair
number of albums aimed at teaching Daviss music, although few among
even ace pickers, whether the well-known Van Ronk or disciples like
Jefferson Airplanes Jorma Kaukonen and blues guitarist Woody Mann,
can go past a certain point to duplicate the edge or depth or looseness,
the humor or raw sexuality or godfearing truth Davis had. There is an
authority about his playing, wrote Duck Baker, that always makes me
listen. His sound is hard, almost brittle, uncompromisingand perfect
for what he is doing. It is true that you will not hear the kind of dynamics
used by classical players any more than you will get them [sic] from a
sanctied choir. You could say the same of Louis Armstrongand his

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Dixieland-revival followers. And you could note the same rhetoric

authority and authenticity being the two key termsused to describe
them. And you could further note how these two illusory terms are still in
heavy rotation around the land of hip-hop, with its rote insistence,
however misdirected and (self-) deceptive, on keeping it real in the
glossy, advertising-heavy, contemporary pages of Vibe.
Davis was real enough. Born in 1896, he lost his sight as a child. In
small southern towns at the time, songsters found well-traveled corners
to park at and serenade folks, and bands often walked or rode a wagon
through town to gather a public. The rst time I ever heard a guitar,
Davis told historian Sam Charters in the mid-1950s, I thought it was
a brass band. It was a telling analogy with apt historical overtones. In
postCivil War New Orleans, the brass bands that incubated proto jazz
came into being partly because of the availability of army instruments
abandoned in warehouses; the black bands adapted the instruments to
new sounds, new uses Sousa never imagined. In much the same way, hiphop found music and art in old turntables and records just as
technological advances were scrapping the formats, once more highlighting one recurrent role for black American culture within the larger
society: a piecemeal underclass cultural enactment of Nietzsches reevaluation of all values. Junk, in this sphere, can beindeed, should be,
must be, will betransmuted, Midaslike, into art.
Told what the sound he heard was, Davis demanded a guitar, and to
learn to play made one, as so many didhis was a pie pan and a stick. He
soon got a banjo and learned the technique called frailing, heard his rst
blues at a carnival in his teens, and began playing in earnest. His wrist had
broken and been set very badly, so his hand was at an angle that should
have made playing the guitar difcult if not impossible. Like Django Reinhardt with his re-welded ngers, Davis turned liability into a conceptual
leaphe ngered chords no one had seen before. He performed in church
as well as on the streets, where he sometimes joined string bands, so his
repertoire, which hed play for knots of passersby and at factory gates at
shift-change time, rapidly grew to encompass gospel, ragtime, reels,
marches, blues, jazz, even minstrel-show tunes.
Davis left Greenville when his rst wife moved in with another guitarist,
and hit Durham around the late 1920s, where he was apparently recognized almost immediately as a master street musician. By the 1930s hed
hooked up with Blind Boy Fuller, another ragtime guitarist, and Sonny
Terry, and the trio played Durhams sidewalks for years. Charters thought
that Daviss style was too ashy to go over well with street audiences,
and he only recorded two blues sides with Fullerone of them called Rag
Mama Rag, a title and spirit The Band would later adopt. (J. D. Long,
the producer for the American Record Company, inserted his name as
coauthor, in the time-honored fashion that ran from W. C. Handy to
Leonard Chess, Dick Clark, Alan Freed.) And guitarists, though they

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Rebirth of the Blues

couldnt mimic Daviss off-the-cuff yet coiled brilliance, tried mightily, as

Piedmont blues recordings from the 1930s attestFullers own and Blind
Blakes and Josh Whites among them.
In the way of some bluesman, like the Georgia Tom who wrote Tight
Like That and then transformed into Thomas A. Dorsey, foremost composer of gospel, Davis gave up the blues for the Lord in the 1930s. He
was ordained and got $23 a month in welfare, while he sang praises on
the Durham streets for the rest. A welfare worker wrote, He has a very
aggressive manner . . . a religious obsession which inuences his activities
in an almost impractical manner. By the late 1930s he disappeared, in
1944, he married his second wife Annie and was living in Raleigh and
visiting her children in New York, where later they settled in Harlem.
Davis soon became a familiar gure on uptown streets, an ironic downhome counterpart to the suave, urbane demeanor and concert-hall
appearances of Duke Ellington. Davis yelled, stomped, banged on his
guitar, slid up and down the strings for onomatopoeic effects, and otherwise hollered for the Lord. He also returned to the studio in 1949; those
startling, unconventional efforts, along with his equally unique earlier
sides, are collected on Reverend Gary Davis 19351949.
Daviss holler, his uid voice with its baritone gravel, matched the
jaunty looseness of Armstrongs best vocals; his stuttering guitar, pausing
to run oblique twinkling riffs in the midst of contrapuntal ngerpicking,
is a one-man band. Only Joseph Spence, the Bahamas picker who became
a folk-revival stalwart thanks to his own jagged, irregular guitar stylings
and croaking vocals, approached Daviss self-condent musical exuberance. In a world where Robert Johnson had barely been rediscovered by
enthusiasts, Gary Davis was a living revelation of the power of the blues.
So, by the mid-1950s searchers and folkies began nding their way to
Daviss Bronx apartment, Charters being among the earliest. Soon he
brought his friend Van Ronk along; they played and studied and
researched together. Davis was recorded by students like John Cohen
(whose 1953 home tapes have been reissued by Smithsonian Folkways;
others have been reissued on Smithsonian Folkways as Pure Religion and
Bad Company). By the early 1960s, Davis was performing again, a star on
the folk-revival circuit, and he even mixed into sets of his fervent religious
hymns like Samson and Delilah and Twelve Gates to the City some
of the lewd blues and wild instrumentals, like the digit-twisting Buck
Dance, hed eschewed for decades. He said he did them for his growing
number of students, so they could learn. I aint no miller, aint no millers
son, but I can grind you a little corn till your good miller come, he sang
in his long salacious version of Hesitation Blues, far longer than the
three-minute limits of recording before the postwar LP.
His sentiments werent quite disinterested, though: he was notorious
for groping female folkies, planting himself in tight spots backstage, in
corridors, at parties, so they had to manuever past him while getting felt

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111

up. Such are the confusing ways of the Lord, as gospel artists like Sam
Cooke and Al Green (well only touch on preachers like Jim and Tammy
Bakker, Jerry Falwell, and their eternally recurring Elmer Gantry like) have
borne witness.
One thing I was blessed with is that I was a very, very bad mimic,
Van Ronk said in a 1997 interview. Which is another, better way of stating
how oral tradition straddles conservation and creativity. Van Ronks background allowed him to understand this uniquely.
He was born in Brooklyn on July 30, 1936, a Depression baby to a
mostly Irish working-class family. His father and mother split, and he grew
up in blue-collar Richmond Hill, where he went to Catholic school
which is to say, he played truant until the system gave up on him, at 16.
In 1998, he told David Walsh, I remember reading Grants memoirs, the
autobiography of Buffalo Bill. Lots of Mark Twain. . . . My brain was like
the attic of the Smithsonian. . . . The principal . . . called me a lthy ineducable little beast. Thats a direct quote. For the rest of his life, he
remained, like Guthrie, a formidably wide-ranging autodidact, another
Gramscian prole-intellectual.
While Van Ronk hung out in pool halls he was listening to jazz, his rst
lovebebop, cool, and increasingly traditional, aka New Orleans or
Dixieland jazz. (He always cited Armstrong and Bessie Smith, with Lead
Belly and Bing Crosby, as his major vocal inuences.) For a while he was
a self-described moldy g, a true believer that the only pure jazz was
from New Orleans and the era of King Oliver. (The concept of authenticity in jazz and folk is almost identical, as are the cultlike implications
of the term and its exclusionary uses. This shouldnt be surprising: jazz,
after all, was a folk music until its gradual transformation to commercial
and art music starting with Armstrong himself, and the almost millenarian
revivalism that attended the rediscovery of Bunk Johnson was like
nothing more than the similar contemporary rediscoveries of ancient
blues and folk masters from Skip James and Son House to Mississippi
John Hurt and Lightnin Hopkins.) One of young Van Ronks rst gigs
was playing tenor banjo with the Brute Force Jazz Band, one of thousands
of Dixieland revival bands serenading postwar America.
On Saturday afternoons, Van Ronk recalled, he headed to the Briarwood (Queens) apartment of guitarist Jack Norton, whod hung with
Bix Beiderbecke and Eddie Lang. Norton taught him old orchestral jazz
school fingerings la Count Basies Freddie Green, and did nearcontinuous blindfold tests with jazz records. The Old Man, recalled
Van Ronk, used to put on recordings and we would play name that
sideman . . . but it was listening training. You had to listen with a focus
and an intensity that normal people never use. But listening that normal
people do will not serve for a musician. He began toting his guitar
around to clubs to sit in, and played with the stellar likes of Coleman

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Rebirth of the Blues

Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, and Jimmy Rushing. Hed later remark in his
acid way, They were always very polite.
Like Odysseus, Guthrie and Houston, Kerouac and Ginsberg, and
Pynchon, without a clear calling for his energies Van Ronk decided to take
to the sea. He ended up in the merchant marine, a way to see the other
sides of the world without going military, a tramp tradition for American
artists. In 1957, the young seaman got a shore gig at the Caf Bizarre, one
of the Villages now-legendary spots. Odetta, the gospel-voiced black
singer who gave the 1950s folk scene there a sense of authenticity and
interracial connection as Lead Belly, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee,
and Josh White had to the rst Depression wave, heard him, liked what
she heard, and convinced him to make a demo tape that shed pass on to
Albert Grossman, folk-music maven, Chicago clubowner, wily semi-thug,
and future manager of Bob Dylan, Peter Paul and Mary, and a host of
1960s folk-music stars. Popping Benzedrine in the best Beat fashion, Van
Ronk hitchhiked to Chicago in 24 hours, got to Grossmans club, found
out the tape hadnt, auditioned, got turned down (Grossman was booking
black songsters like Bill Broonzy, and Van Ronk accused him of Crowjimming), hitchhiked back to New York City, had his seamans papers stolen,
and thus decided that he would, after all, become a folksinger.
Its the sort of story that threads the Beat Generation, but also marked
Van Ronk as different from those who would come in his wake, the white
middle-class kids answering Guthrie and Seegers pied-piper call for
cultural reconsideration and escape from 1950s conformity, the Baezes
and the Zimmermans, the Rambling Jack Elliots and Richard Farinas, the
Tom Paxtons and Maria DAmatos and John Sebastians, and the rest. Van
Ronk wasnt playing at being an outsider; he was onea blue-collar kid
with little formal education, a self-proclaimed leftist, a member of the
Workers League who could utter decidedly un-Romantic lines like, I have
more in common with a carpenter than you might think. (Think of
Springsteen in concert, unveiling a new song by announcing to the crowd,
This is my job, right?) Or Technology always determines the forms of
music. The bow and arrow had to precede the rst stringed instruments.
The bellow principles had to precede the organ. You cant have an organ
without smelting, right? You couldnt have a fugue without math. Or
math without a concern for who owns how much of what.
Given his sardonic realism, it was ttingly ironic that he and his wife
Terri became quasi-parents for that younger generation of dewy-eyed
collegiate folkies inspired by Guthries songs and Seegers indefatigable
college-campus concert proselytizing. Seegers concerts had planted folk
music on campuses across the country, but Harry Smiths Anthology
provided the rich soil and nurture for the next generation of folk musicians, whose connection with the oral tradition was far from Van Ronks
and even farther from Guthries and Seegers. Cast your mind back to
1952, he told one interviewer. The only way you could hear the old

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113

timers was hitting up the thrift shops. When the Anthology came
out, there were 82 cuts, all the old time stuff. I wore out a copy in a year.
People my age were doing the same. And the people who became his
musical stepkids, especially the young Bob Dylan, inhaled the set like
a drug.
Van Ronk once said of Seeger, What am I supposed to say about the
guy who invented my profession? But by the late 1950s that profession
was already migrating far from Lead Belly and Guthrie, actual songsters
who lived the lives they chronicled, and far from Seegers ercely idealistic
anticommercialism, that descendant of German Romanticisms emphasis
on the purity and truth of folk culture. Once McCarthyism ran its course,
Seeger, though he had refused to testify before the House Un-American
Activities Committee, had managed to resurface in the postMcCarthy
era. Still, less threatening gures like Burl Ives became the public commercial faces of folk music. As Joe Klein noted in Woody Guthrie: A Life, the
folk revival offered record companies an exit from the latest witchhunting:
they were swamped with payola scandals stemming from rock and roll (a
new congressional xation that paralleled investigations into TVs quizshow riggings), and inundated with public outcries based on racial and
sexual fears that had generated mainstream disapproval of rock and roll.
The patina of integrity and authenticity covering white collegiate folk
music helped the labels repolish their corporate images.
Starting in 1958, the Kingston Trio cleaned up old tunes like Tom
Dooley and Tijuana Jail and scored 10 top 25 hits. Neat folk groups
proliferated, feeding into the Village and Cambridge, where earnest young
men and women in recently acquired rural accents and denims recycled
the Anthologys songbook and hoped to catch a record labels ear. It was
no accident that Albert Grossman followed the money and sold his
Chicago club, then moved to New York.
In 1959, when Bobby Zimmerman was leaving behind his pounding
piano la Jerry Lee Lewis in front of a rock band for college and the
Anthologys lures, Van Ronk made his rst records for Moses Aschs
Folkways, now compiled on The Folkways Years. They reveal a singer
misclassied. As Van Ronk once put it, I never really thought of myself
as a folk singer at all. Still dont. What I did was combine traditional
ngerpicking guitar with a repertoire of old jazz tunes. Here he does a
Gary Davis-derived staple of his repertoire, Hesitation Blues, and more
blues and gospel. His big, rough voice and guitar dexterity are self-evident,
as is his improvisational feel. Both, however, seem contained; he hasnt yet
found himself fully.
In 1964, he yanged with Dave Van Ronks Ragtime Jug Stompers,
recording high-energy versions of old tunes with a wild and ragged
Dixieland outt. Everybody Loves My Baby has the sheer delight and
seat-of-the-pants playing that marked the best garage bands of the decades
second half. This was his recurrent folk-jazz dialectic. On his solo album

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Sings the Blues, Van Ronks coarse voice and nimble ngers got looser
like the irrepressible Davissand thus he found himself.
It was more academic than it is now, is how Van Ronk in the 1970s
remembered this era. It was de rigeur, practically, to introduce your
next song with a musicological essaywe all did it. There was a great
deal of activity around New Yorknot so much you could make money
at. But there were folksong societies in most of the colleges and the left
was dying, but not quietly. So there was a great deal of activity around
Sing Out! and the Labor Youth League, which wasnt afliated with the
old CP youth group. There was a lot of grassroots interest among the
petit-bourgeois left.
Spoken like the slyly sardonic observer who once told an interviewer
from the International Committee of the Fourth International, Ive
always like Trotskys writings as an art critic.
By 1961, Bobby Zimmerman was Bobby Dylan and arrived in New
York, Van Ronk had become the ultimate insider in the self-constituted
Village folk scene of social mists and deviants and critics and would-be
revolutionists, and the two, probably inevitably, gravitated toward and
around each other. Ramped up by commercial success, the folk revivals
second major peak was about to be reached even as debates about authenticity and commercialism crescendoed. All of a sudden, Van Ronk
recalled a few years back, there was money all over the place. If there
was ever any evidence to the trickle-down theory, the only evidence of it
Ive seen was in that period of 1960 to 1965.
At the height of the folk boom, pop was largely barren and formatted.
Elvis came out of the army domesticated, the rst generation of blue-collar
rockabilly rebels were either dead or incapacitated, and the Mickey Mouse
Clubbred predecessors of NSync and Britney Spears and Christina
Aguilera grabbed the top of the charts with echo-chambered confections.
College campuses turned to more overtly intellectual pursuits, which
meant what is now called roots music and jazz. Kids were necking to Kind
of Blue, Mississippi John Hurt, and Odetta. Buttoned-down acts like the
Kingston Trio were all over radio and TV. Some of the lids were popping
off the repressed cauldrons of cultural energy seething just below the
postwar gray annel era.
Van Ronk settled into the Gaslight Caf on Macdougal Street, a hub for
noncommercial folkies. Small sleazy pass-the-hat Beat-folk clubs proliferated. Caf Bizarre, where Odetta had heard him onstage in 1957, was
the rst, but within a couple of years several other coffeehouses, like the
Caf Wha?, opened. By 1962, Dylan settled in down the block, at the
grander Gerdes, where Izzy Young of the Folklore Center, part of the
older folk-revival wave, had set up a folk-music showcase, and WBAI
broadcast the shows, and clubowner Mike Porco soon realized hed stum-

The Folk Revival

115

bled into a salable product and ousted both, lining his bar with record
company covers of folk albums and his seats with earnest young beatniks.
Porcos Monday night Hoots were the dollar-admission descendants of
Youngs and Seegers more informal loft gatherings, and he showcased
rediscovered legends like John Lee Hooker with Dylan as the opener.
Tom and Jerry, later known as Simon and Garfunkel, and Judy Collins cut
their teeth there. Kids ocked to see, hear, and participate in this word-ofmouth semi-underground. Jug bands emerged as the intellectuals
equivalent of the 1950s blue-collar rockabilly outbreak in the South and
doo-wop in the North, preguring the nationwide garage-band explosion
of the 1960s after the Beatles and Dylan. The link: everyone felt empowered to pick up an instrument. These were all modern folk musics.
Still, Van Ronk was both gurehead and outsider. His versatility and
wide-ranging interests, his methodology and study aligned him more with
the radical Bob Dylan who would soon emerge than it did with the folkies
who hung around his Village haunts. Musically, he later recalled, it
was very interesting. [The folk revival] attracted a large number of talented
people, who probably wouldnt have been interested in folk music had it
not been so popular. Someone like Jose Feliciano. He played the guitar, he
sang, ergo, he was a folk singer.
Van Ronk always questioned the musical credentials of his ersatz ock.
I was one of the worst musical snobs that ever came down the pike, he
once said by way of explaining why he ignored the eras mushrooming
singer-strummers in Washington Square Park. Few of them had his
training, his credentials as a collector and interpreter who went back to
sources, his expansive notion of folk music, which he periodically redened
as saloon music or a grabbag. Few individual younger performers
imitated his complex grasp of arranging, which he repeatedly traced to
apparently abstruse inuences like Ellingtons horn section voicings or Jelly
Roll Mortons piano or even Scarlatti harpsichord pieces. Most of them
lacked his sarcastic sense of humor, his cynical sense of the world as fundamentally resistant to change. Children of the idealistic strain coursing
through Lomax and Seeger and Guthrie himself, they believed they were
creating an alternative world, that revitalizing cultural roots could create
an awareness that would somehow remake society. The irascible Van Ronk
saw through the glass walls.
The Newport Folk Festival, the crowning triumph of the postwar folk
revival, was rst organized in 1959 by jazz impresario George Wein and
Albert Grossman. It graduated even the purer wings of the folk movement
to big-time concerts; Seeger himself was deeply involved. I never liked
those things, Van Ronk recalled. It was a three-ring circus. . . . You
couldnt even really hear what you came to hear. Put yourself in my position, or any singers position: how would you like to sing for 15,000
people with frisbees? Most, of course, would have answered, I love it.

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Rebirth of the Blues

For Van Ronk, though, if there was a point to the tradition, it was personto-person communication, focus, the kind of outreach he saw as implicit
in Guthrie.
Along with his own musical catholicity, that may be why, even after the
Dylan-goes-electric blowup at the 1965 festival, he remained a defender
of Dylan, both personally and professionally, against more sectarian
folkieswhich included nearly everyone from Seeger on down.
Nervous. Nervous energy, he couldnt sit still, is how he spoke of
young Bob to David Walsh in 1998. And very, very evasive. . . . What
impressed me the most about him was his geniune love for Woody
Guthrie. In retrospect, even he says now that he came to New York to
make it. Thats BS. When he came to New York there was no folk music,
no career possible. . . . What he said at the time is the story I believe. He
came because he had to meet Woody Guthrie. . . . Bobby used to go out
there two or three times a week and sit there, and play songs for him. In
that regard he was as standup a cat as anyone Ive ever met. Thats also
what got him into writing songs. He wrote songs for Woody, to amuse
him, to entertain him. He also wanted Woodys approval. . . . [Dylans
music] had what I call a gung-ho, unrelenting quality. . . . He acquired
very, very devoted fans among the other musicians before he had written
his rst song.
Van Ronk was among the rst to record a tune Dylan claimed to write,
He Was a Friend of Mine, on Dave Van Ronk, Folksinger in 1962. (It
was actually on old folk tune somewhat revamped.) Three years later, the
Byrds redid it on Turn Turn Turn, whose title cut remade Seegers setting
of Ecclesiastes into folk rock, the new sound Dylan had kicked into high
gear during his 1965 tour.
Van Ronk once observed, The area that I have staked out . . . has been
the kind of music that ourished in this country between the 1880s and
say the end of the 1920s. You can call it saloon music if you want to. It
was the kind of music youd hear in music halls, saloons, whorehouses,
barbershops, anywhere the Police Gazette could be found. Thats not
exactly a full description of what he did over 30 albums and countless
performances from clubs to festivals to benets for CORE.
Theyll call me a blues artist even if I sing Pagliacci, he said once,
with some bitterness, though his rst albums were steeped in the early
blues. But its better to think of him as a songster, that older, more encompassing sort of folk artist. Lead Belly and the Reverend Gary Davis are
outstanding examples of this type, which goes back to the earliest
recorded bluesmen. They drew from multiple local and regional traditions
that, in the early days of radio and phonograph, still dened American
musical styles. Dance tunes, blues, ragtime, ballads, gospelanything to
keep the audiences on street corners or in juke joints interested and willing
to part with some cash. This was, after all, performance. Entertainment

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117

was its primary goal; improvisation, found in the vocal-guitar interplay

and instrumental backing as well as verse substitutions and extrapolations
or shortenings, played to audience reaction. This performance modality
reaches from Eastern Europe and ancient Greece to the Mississippi Delta
and Cubas son vocalists, and ad-libbing has always been at its core.
Like Lead Belly, Woody Guthries black analog and one of his foremost
models, Van Ronk covered a wide stylistic geography, embracing the blues
regional dialects: the Delta skills and sounds of Son House, the dark
stylings of Blind Willie McTell, the laconic attack of Mississippi John
Hurt, the ragtime-based fretwork of Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller and
Davis, the Texas laidback sound of Mance Lipscomb. But almost always,
as Van Ronk sought to remind newer waves of guitar-based kids who
would be faster and harder and cleaner and outer, the music was about
the dance between voice and instrument, the antiphonal approach underlying most black American musicand therefore much, if not most, of
American popular culture.
In 1962, with the Red Onion Jazz Band, he cut In the Tradition, which,
along with the solo Your Basic Dave Van Ronk album, has been reissued
as Two Sides of Dave Van Ronk. This somewhat odd couple makes a
wonderful introduction to the breadth, depth, and soul of his songsters
legacy. The smoothly idiomatic Red Onions pump joyful New Orleans
adrenaline and Armstrong trumpet into a raucous Cake Walking Babies
from Home; a sinuous Sister Kate, that early dance hit built from an
Armstrong melody; and Dylans characteristically caustic Over You.
Amid the Dixieland offerings are solo spots: a stunning version of Son
Houses Death Letter Blues (later recorded by Cassandra Wilson), Lead
Bellys Whoa Back Buck, the virtuosic ragtime of St. Louis Tickle,
signature pieces like Green, Green Rocky Road and Hesitation Blues.
There is no diminishing of talent or narrowing of perspective evident on
the tunes selected from Basic: Billie Holidays God Bless the Child (sung
with a tenderness that scorches periodically into Howlin Wolf) and St.
James Inrmary share space with songs by Davis and Mississippi John
Hurt.
In 1967, he cut Dave Van Ronk and the Hudson Dusters, a deliberately
amateur cross of jug band and electric folk that foreshadows the Blues
Project, the improvising garage band that the guitarist on this date, Danny
Kalb, later formed with fellow Van Ronk disciple Steve Katz. There was
doo-wop, Joni Mitchellwhose Clouds develops anguished depth
thanks to Van Ronks deft use of his torturous voices breaks as interpretative devicea move he learned from Armstrong and Bessie Smithand
the balls-to-the-wall garage rock Romping Through the Swamp, which
sounds more akin to Captain Beefheart than anything else.
Recorded in 1967, Live at Sir George University is time-capsule Van
Ronk on guitar unspooling favorite parts of his vast repertoire: Frankie
and Albert, Down and Out, Mack the Knife, Statesboro Blues,

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Rebirth of the Blues

and Cocaine, of courseall masterful, each distinct, a polished yet rawedged gem.
By then the folk boom, whose audience was bleeding into folk rock,
electric blues, and psychedelia, stalled and ended. Van Ronk continued
(except for a hiatus in the 1970s) to perform and record and gather newold material. And he had time, before his death, to deliver some acid
reections.
On 1960s folkies: The whole raison detre of the New Left had been
exposed as a lot of hot air; that was demoralizing. I mean, these kids
thought they were going to change the world, they really did. They were
profoundly deluded. . . . Phil Ochs wrote the song I declare the war is
over, that was despair, sheer despair.
On 1980s folkies: Youre talking about some pretty damn good songwriters. But Id like to hear more traditional music. . . . With the last wave
of songwriters you get the sense that tradition begins with Bob Dylan and
nobody is more annoyed with that than Bob Dylan. We were sitting
around a few years ago, and he was bitching and moaning: These kids
dont have any classical education. He was talking about the stuff you
nd on the Anthology [of American Folk Music]. I kidded him: Youve
got a lot to answer for, Bro.

12
Willie Nelson
On April 30, 2003, Willie Nelson turned 70, and celebrated with the
release of his latest greatest hits collection. The Essential Willie Nelson
(Columbia/Legacy), a two-CD set, has an intriguing 1970s-vintage cover
shot that sets exactly the right tone for 40 years of selective tracks.
Nelsons unkempt long red hair and scraggly beard frame his thin, almost
Bob Hope nose. His mouth twists slightly, a smile just short of a sneer, in
sardonic, knowing reaction to the world behind the camera. His eyes,
couched in wrinkles and bags, stare straight and deep into the lens, and
suggest hard-to-fathom distances and recessions at the same time they
focus you into connecting. This interaction, evasive, seemingly casual,
direct and subtle, represents the essence of Nelsons sly, almost unobtrusive art.
The Essential Willie Nelson demonstrates once again that the Red
Headed Strangers nonchalant gospel-avored, jazz-inected voice and
guitar have remained essentially themselves for decades despite an everexpanding variety of musical backdrops: barebones string bands, sleekly
glossy Nashville productions, twangy 1970s Outlaw country rock, jazzy
standards with strings, gospel-laced soul.
Maybe that breadth is a major reason Nelsons recurrent duets with
Ray Charles are almost always so chargedand so much fun. After all,
only Charles and Bob Dylan have traveled as sure-footedly across as farung a constellation of genres and expectations as Nelson has and still
remained themselves; Charles and Nelson have long shared material and
appearances. (A 1984 show at the Austin Opera House, captured on The
Willie Nelson Special, features excellent versions of Georgia, I Cant
Stop Loving You, and the old hillbilly fave Mountain Dew.) Part of
this odd couples magnetism stems from their representing opposite poles
of the American spectrum. Charles, the consummate be-suited black
professional trained in the tough world of low-rent postwar rhythm and
blues whose nonpareil voice inuenced countless singers, is a hard-bitten
recluse who heads a thriving business dynamo and a drilled band. Nelson,
the white country-music renegade, tried pig farming for a while when his

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Rebirth of the Blues

career soured, comes onstage in hippie-cowboy-Indian costume, calls his

band Family, and is the epicenter of the self-consciously laidback Austin
music scene (his disciples include Van Zandt, Lyle Lovett, Joe Ely, Jimmie
Dale Gilmore, and alt-country outts like Uncle Tupelo) he helped seed
and feed for the 30 years since he rst strode onstage at armadillo world
headquarters. Even on an off night, Charles can suddenly burst whatever
frames the ragged churchy elasticity of his scuffed and soaring trademark
voice. Nelson stays introspective: lacking Charless explosive interpolations, he subsumes his surroundings, enticing the audience into his voices
unexpected contours.
Think of Charles as Louis Armstrongs direct descendant, and Nelson
as a cross between Bing Crosby, Jimmie Rodgers, and Woody Guthrie.
Their duets are like oil and vinegar, always about to separate if not stirred
up, delicious because they dont. Thanks to the gospel-jazz core of their
artistic personalities, their encompassing self-assurance in their crafts
portability of application, they make singing symbolic of existential
struggle. It helps that they both love what Charlie Parker loved most about
country musicstorytelling.
Like Charles, Nelson absorbed the breadth of American music by living
it. Born in poor Texas cotton country, Nelson and his sister Bobbi, who
still plays piano for him, were raised by their grandparents, devout people
and gospel-music fans who encouraged their grandchildren to pick up
instruments. By the time the boy was seven he was writing songs. I
worked in the cotton elds around Abbott, he has said, with a lot of
African Americans and a lot of Mexican Americans, and we listened to
their music all the time. So blues and Mexican ballads underpin Nelsons
phrasing and narratives, along with the hillbilly and Western Swing (13year-old Willie once duetted with Western Swing founder Bob Wills) his
radio picked up from Nashville and the border. Following a quick hitch
in the air force and a tempestuous marriage to a Native American, Nelson
moved to Fort Worth in 1954, became a country DJ, and played bars,
mixing honky-tonk and preaching. (Nelsons longtime drummer Paul
English originally played with the Salvation Army.) In 1956, he made his
rst record in Vancouver; it sold 3,000 copies. Then he wrote (and sold
for $50 apiece) a couple of hits, which got him a publishing contract and
brought him to Nashville.
There producers had little interest in demos of his nasal voice with its
eccentric phrasing and capitalized on his songwriting. And yet now that
those demos have resurfaced on various reissues, they actually outline a
central portion of Nelsons work, since most made the top 20 country
charts, though almost always as performed by others. The low-key style of
his barebones demos, however, grants Nelsons lithe voice more space for
embellishment, pauses, and inection than his released 1960s Nashville
recordings while showcasing his off-kilter lyrics, which refashion clichs
from unexpected angles, like Hello Walls or Crazy. One outstanding

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example is I Never Cared for You, whose opening lines cleverly subvert
Tin Pan Alley macrocosm/microcosm imagery: the sun never shines, the
rain doesnt fall, and I never cared for you. In the liner notes to The Essential Willie Nelson, Emmylou Harriss longtime collaborator Rodney
Crowell recalls the songs effect when he heard it over the radio in the mid1960s: A voice rivaling Bob Dylans in authenticity delivered the fantastically ironic lyric to a weird-sounding gut-string accompaniment.
Ray Price was the rst star to cover Nelsons tunes; for a while Nelson
played bass in Prices band and wrote hits for Faron Young (Hello
Walls), Billy Walker (How Time Slips Away), and Patsy Cline
(Crazy). But Nelson the singer suffered: his rst label closed, and he
kept being wedged into the curtain of syrupy strings that dened Nashville
countrypolitana very 1950s sonic confection spun by producer Owen
Bradley, modeled after the bland but inuential approach to contemporary pop that A&R head Mitch Miller had fashioned at Columbia.
Countrypolitan gave the likes of Cline crossover appeal while trying to
erase the singing rube/cowboy image that, via earlier movie and radio stars
like Jimmie Rodgers and Gene Autry, rst brought hillbilly music into
mainstream markets. Nelson, who stubbornly resisted conforming, was a
problem child.
He scored a couple of middling hits, but even though he joined the
Grand Ole Opry and signed with RCA in 1965, as a performer he spent
the next several years in limbo. The then-pudgy Nelsons idiosyncratic,
limber vocalizing and noncomformity, insistence that his songs could sell
themselves, and unwillingness to glitz up his act caused a constant debilitating battle. Still, in the midst of a few blandly uneven countrypolitan
discs, he managed to cut one of country musics rst concept albums,
Yesterdays Wine, a dazzling song-cycle about a life from cradle to grave
that demonstrated what he could do given his head.
By 1972, he quit Nashville and moved to Austin, where he noticed that
young rock fans were turned on by honky-tonk and folk. (His way had
been prepared, in part, by friend and colleague Johnny Cashs 1970s
eclectic TV show, which showcased the Man in Black, who had been
performing at folk-music festivals for years, with folk-revival stars from
Dylan to the Carter Family.) Shrewdly, Nelson resurrected the countryfolk-rock style Nashville had rejected, enhanced by his lengthening hair
and cowboy-Indian duds and hippie-crossover ideas. His old Music Row
pals thought hed killed what was left of his career. In fact he had nally
found his audience, post-1960s types who thought rock was too corporate
and responded to Guthriesque storytelling minus the whiny self-indulgence
of James Taylor, Carly Simon, and Carole Kingthe same crowd
Emmylou Harris would wow and Bruce Springsteen would tap with
Nebraska and Tom Joad.
After an abortive stab at his own indie label, Nelson recorded with
Atlantic, by then a major label that had mostly jettisoned rhythm and

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blues and jazz for The Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. With soul-music
producer Arif Mardin and his own band (including pianist Leon Russell),
Nelson cut killers like Shotgun Willie, which crossed funky soul back
into country and rock, laced with the introspective touches and wry
phrase-turnings Nashville had scorned. In 1974, Bloody Mary
Morning, a Texas-swing smoothie with characteristic witty lines (Its a
bloody Mary morning cause she left me without warning sometime in
the night), hit number 14 on the country charts. At 42, Willie Nelson
was hitting his stride.
One of my Austin-based colleagues comments with bemused affection,
Willie is the Buddha. Hes also a duet whore. In terms of consistent
quality, hes right, but Nelsons duets, which have included outings with
Charles, Cash, and Dylan as well as U2 and Julio Iglesias, if nothing else
do reveal Nelsons prismatic musical curiosity. Two classics (Good
Hearted Woman and Mammas Dont Let Your Babies Grow Up To Be
Cowboys) boast Waylon Jennings, that other Outlaw who, with Nelson,
launched the 1970s back-to-the-roots country movement, its revisionist
rock and rockabilly and folk ingredients contrasting sharply with contemporary countrypolitan productions. Merle Haggard, another perpetual
Nashville outsider, shows up for Townes Van Zandts evocative border
ballad Pancho and Lefty, where Nelsons nuance nicely plays off
Haggards swagger while making clear that Haggard, whose band The
Strangers routinely improvises, is among the few country singers whose
jazzy phrasingthe dancing rhythms that inltrated the best American
singing after Louis Armstrongcompares to Nelsons.
Red Headed Stranger in 1975 marks a pinnacle, Nelsons John Wesley
Harding, an artistic restatement of purpose in the guise of an Americana
concept album about an Old West preacher who loved women; its brilliantly sparse, country-folk production features his voice and trademark
nylon-stringed guitar, and Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain shot to the top
of the charts to make him a star. RCA, tailgating his success, compiled an
album of Nelson and Jennings and others called Wanted! The Outlaws,
the rst country album to go platinum thanks to Good Hearted
Woman. A movement begun as a rejection of the Nashville music business became the businesss newest stack of chips in the hitmaking casino.
Nelson hit number one again with Lefty Frizzells sardonic If Youve
Got the Money Ive Got the Time, then cut a ne album of Frizzell tunes.
When Crosby died, to his labels dismay Nelson abandoned what corporate types saw as a winning formula and zagged into the unsure turf of
jazz-pop standards; he scored again: 1978s Stardust, arranged and
produced by the MGs Booker T. Jones, triumphs with slow tempos and
strings, as if Nelson internalized Nashville and subtly refocuses it. His
jaunty phrasing genially enlivens classics like Georgia, Someone to
Watch Over Me, and the title track. The album hung on the country
charts for a year.

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Nelson never played it safe, as in career-building, and so success, like

failure, didnt stop his eclectic wanderings: a jam-based feel (Willie and
Family Live); covers of another renegade songwriter (Sings Kris Kristofferson); pallid reprises of Stardust (Somewhere Over the Rainbow and
Always on My Mind); reunions with Price (San Antonio Rose) and Russell
(One for the Road). By 1985, however, old-timers like Nelson began to be
swept away by New Country, the latest Nashville formula brewed from
reheated George Jones and Buck Owens. That year, he founded Farm Aid,
which lured performers like Dylan. He also joined forces with Cash,
Jennings, and Kristofferson in The Highwaymen, a band of Nashville
mists who revivied the roots of country music and expanded the genres
possibilitiesand in the process extended its reach to the post-Eagles rock
audience, eventually helping to make country music pops best-selling style
with the widest radio play. In 1990, the IRS whacked him for nearly $17
million in back taxes and seized practically all he owned. Wholl Buy My
Memories, a 25-cut compilation of Nelson-only demos, outtakes, and
keepers, was issued in 1992 to help pay off the remaining debt; it remains
one of Nelsons most effective and affecting albums. The following year,
he was solvent.
A collapsed lung, a pot bust, induction into the Country Music Hall of
Fame, an ersatz acting career (The Electric Horseman, Thief, Wag the
Dog, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me)Nelson is now legend
enough to have songs written about him. Like Charles and Dylan, hes
grown so powerful and centered in his artistry that even his lesser efforts
outgun the best of others.

13
Lenny Bruce
The scene: Miami in 1951. A 25-year-old strip show emcee initiates his
rst public demonstration of what would, decades later, be called performance art. It is built around a scam: the Brother Matthias Foundation
for Lepers. Just out of the merchant marine, recently married to a
stripper, nearly broke, and meditating on contemporary defrauding
evangelists, Lenny Bruce decides hell raise money for lepers. And hell
only keep 50 percent. That, he argues forcefully, is far less than other
charities, even respectable ones like Community Chest, keep. So he lifts
a priests garb from a local rectory and starts soliciting on the street.
Almost immediately, hes invited into peoples homes, thanks to his
Roman collar. Hes making a good haul. His second day out, he gets
busted.
Welcome to the world of Lenny Bruce, where accepted and
normal values are regularly, ritualistically turned inside-out. A twisted
yet compelling figure, part brilliantly flawed pharmakos and part
implacable junkie, part perpetual adolescent and part First Amendment
crusader, he was reborn as a hero to the 1960s youth rebellions, and
with the rock revival of the 1980s again became an icon; he joins rock
critic Lester Bangs, Leonid Brezhnev, and Leonard Bernstein for a
stream-of-consciousness catalog of alternative-culture luminaries in
REMs machine-gunned Its the End of the World as We Know It. This
is typical of the way Bruces name tends to pop up in pop culture, a
mismatched juxtaposition that unwittingly says as much about punkerslacker attitude as it does about Lenny Bruce, who, as the old bumper
sticker goes, died for our sins of a morphine overdose in 1966 at age 40.
Bruce pioneered an outsider form of in-your-face standup comedy, a
kind of jazzy verbal performance art (think of George Carlin and
Richard Pryor, Bruces self-professed and best disciples, or Firesign
Theatre, who made Joycean improvisation into high-level pop art) that
is now widely accepted and widely practiced. Or is it? Certainly the
perpetual-teen side of Lenny Bruce is on display all over the media, on
Saturday Night Live and Comedy Central, in the late Andrew Dice

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Clays small-minded lth and Howard Sterns atulent shock-jock selfimportance. Anyone can easily claim Lenny as avatar and saintas
long as they elide the motives generating the best of his satirical art, the
stiff-armed jab he thought he was landing on Americas square-chinned
hypocrisy with each dirty word.
But thanks to them, almost half a century after he died weve discovered that Lenny Bruce was wrong: using words does not necessarily
defang them. Is nigger less potent because gangstas throw the word
down? Academics can pirouette in debate forever over that, so try something less theoretical. In the post-Reagan era, where taxes have been
decoupled from social programs by slogans like tax-and-spend politicians, where access to legal abortions is shut by bomb-wielding
right-to-life supporters, buzz words are more loaded and less culturally transparent than any time since the 1950s; their invocation is
enough to preclude discussion of the issues they cloak.
Miraculously enough, the coarsening of American popular culture has
accelerated at the same time that the fundamentalist Christian right
demands a society conforming to its clear moral sense. Is this the
outcome of social repression or the wages of sin? Reality TV deepens
the confusion between whats on and off the tube and deadens the need
for the distance between the two. The motto of the Fox News Channel
is We Report. You Decide, but nobody except the most rancid couch
potato could mistake its overbearing right-wing biases. The Patriot Act,
passed in the wake of 9/11, strips off protections guaranteed Americans
by the Bill of Rights, and the few who protest are mostly pooh-poohed
or ignored in the media. Here is the work of language as obfuscation.
The forces of social repression in America look stronger than at any time
since the late 1950s, when the slow-breaking cultural thaw began to
examine or reject Americas dominant mores via art, pop culture, social
movements, and eventually mainstream politics.
As a central character in the Great Postwar American Morality Play,
Lenny Bruce is usually framed by stark dichotomies of good and evil.
And so he has usually been painted as avatar or prophet, tragic hero or
manipulative junkie. But Bruce still fascinates not because he was larger
than life but because he so clearly wasnt: in many ways a failure of a
man and a uctuating undisciplined artist, he was both in and out of
sync with his time and place; he could oscillate between Holden
Cauleld and Sammy Glick. But in contrast to a fellow junkie like Chet
Baker, he was at least aware of that; he articulated it in his routines, and
shivered at it when he heated his needle and spoon. In the end, Bruce
didnt transcend his time; he made periodically brilliant stabs at representing it.
As he crossed the tracks into the forbidden zones of America,
unearthing race and sex and drugs and religion, Lenny Bruce was right
and wrong about a lot of things at the same time, the way Elvis was; he

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shared a sort of druggy naivete with The King. Crossing the tracks was
the direction that mattered for white rebels in the 1950s. African Americans didnt have to question The System; exclusion by color gifted them
with the curse of Du Boisian double consciousness. But for white Americans, opting out of The System meant rejecting its ideology of goals and
money and The Future that was dedicated, at least in theory, to them.
Almost as a fulcrum to escape, lots of them tuned in to the marginal
sites and people of America, turned on to drugs both to escape the world
of gray annel suits and to become more like the sainted outsiders and,
in the process, touch what they saw as natural spontaneous creativity
more deeply. They dropped out to become hustlers, collect the trust fund
money, or wake up in rubber rooms after electro-shock.
Lets back up to that opening scene, performance art before there was
a name for it. What makes it funny is the deliberate moral confusion it
evokes, its unsettling of symbols and their corollary economics. What
makes it disturbing and truly provocative is its blithe confusion of
fantasy and reality: is it a scam masquerading as art or vice versaor
both? This question threads Bruces legacy.
Maybe Lenny Bruces was the necessary and even predictable symbiotic reaction to a culture so desperately repressed it practically screamed
for outbreaks of adolescent revolt. Think of him as a talkative James
Dean. Or think of him as a burlesque comic: in the late 1950s and early
1960s, he single-mindedly rebuilt Borscht Belt humor into social shtick
with outrage as its engine and humor as its fuel. His mother, one of his
legends most zealous promulgators and guardians, proudly insisted she
raised him free of contemporary mores and guilt, which gave him new
eyes; his eternal adolescence, perpetuated by dope, fired up his
frequently infantile demands on everyone around him. In the unfathomable ways of art, these qualities also made his best work endure.
The hypocrisy that he attacked in America was something he reviled
in himself. A jazz musician who knew Bruce well told me a revealing
story of the 1950s. Bruce, he said, had been screwing his girl; Bruces
wife Honey got mad and screwed the musician. Bruce walked in on
them; his eyes filled with tears, and he backed out of the room. The
musician explained, He thought that kind of sexual freedom was
natural, the right thing, but he just wasnt ready. He couldnt really do
it, and it murdered him inside. A stupid scenario? Throughout the
Ozzie and Harriet 1950s, wife-swapping and swinging caught the eyes
of perceptive chroniclers of suburban America like John Updike and
John Cheever.
Twenty years after Ronald Reagan, cultural hypocrisy and repression
is in vogue again, its agents are legion, and, as Pogo said famously, They
Is Us. A society transxed by TV reality believes what it sees on The
Tube: one survey reported that most Americans in early 2003 believed

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Saddam Hussein toppled the World Trade Center, without proof, solely
thanks to George W. Bushs repeated linking of the Iraqi with Al Qaeda.
Clarence Thomas? Rush Limbaugh? Pedophile priests? The 2000 election? Camille Paglia? Monica Lewinsky? O. J. Simpson? Anthrax by
mail? Shock and Awe War with Iraq? These sound like punchlines for
routines Lenny Bruce, unfortunately, never got to try out.
I first heard Lenny Bruce not long before he died. A Creole
drummer I knew lived with his stepmother, his fathers third wife, and
two stepsisters, product of his fathers second wife, next to the house his
father lived in. Driving his chrome-covered Riviera, dressed in sharp
threads cut to transform his fat into beef, his hair conked and coiffed,
his mustache seductive, Mr. X sporadically gave money to his not-quiteex-wife the nurse to help support the kids, but reserved the right to his
own life. That meant a New Orleans-style second line of women visiting
his house.
The rst time my father saw my friend the drummer in my room, he
flipped but waited till the kid left, then cornered me and demanded,
What is that nigger doing here?
It was the era of white flight, and we lived in a neighborhood
mostly of working-class Italians and Irish, city workers and truck drivers
and small shopowners, surrounded and, as they saw it, increasingly
penetrated by the growing black population of Jamaica, St. Albans,
Hollis, and Laurelton. As a kid, I watched the local gangs lock and load
zipguns, knives, and chains for forays across the Belt Parkway, where
theyd ght black gangs. I wondered why the white guys dressed in the
same loud clothes and listened to the same music and drove the same
ashy cars as their enemies.
Mr. X overheard our band when we practiced in the basement of the
house where his son lived. One warm day, we were messing with Young
Rascals tunes when he leaned out a side window and yelled, You guys
wanna hear real organ trios? Get your asses over here.
For us, the Rascals were a real organ trio. Felix Cavaliere, the Italian
who sat behind the big Hammond B-3, and the others hailed from the
New York metro area. Ahmet Ertegun of Atlantic Records had signed
them after a set at a oating West Hampton bar called The Barge. It
was a gas watching Cavaliere pump those footpedals to create soulful
funky bass lines while he worked the Hammonds throaty tonal shades,
via its whirling Leslie speaker, to modulate the sustained chords that
revved the fans.
Nobody in garage bands had Hammonds. They were too heavy and
ridiculously expensive. Farsas, lighter and far cheaper and sounding it,
were ubiquitous. Many a Farfisa organist punched tone keys trying
vainly to dial in that unbelievable thick, sexy Hammond sound, with its

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microtones, its gritty smoothness, its sirens call. My colleague Bob

Blumenthal once described the Hammond as the synthesizer of its time;
it sure was like nothing wed heard, until we heard Jimi Hendrix.
The Rascals seemed odd and cool at the same timenamed after the
movie shorts that had been TV staples during our childhood, wearing
knickers and short jackets and schoolboy hats, visual clowns with an
obviously deep love of black music. Cavaliere once told an interviewer
that the Rascals musical concept was Marvin Gayes voice, Ray
Charless piano, Jimmy Smiths organ, Phil Spectors production, and the
Beatles writingput them all together and youve got what I wanted to
do. They were inventing blue-eyed soul. In bands like ours, their hits
I Aint Gonna Eat Out My Heart Anymore, with its StaxVolt-style
combination of endlessly sustained organ chords and soulful vocals;
Good Lovin, with its zooming guitar chords and hammer-down
rhythms; Ive Been Lonely Too Long, with its choked pleas and octavebumping basswere part of the basic vocabulary, the shared language
that opened doorways into music.
For whatever reason, the Rascals also opened to us Mr. Xs record
collection. When he wasnt there, wed wipe our feet on the front door
mat, take our shoes off before we crossed the white carpet in the living
room past the overstuffed, plastic-covered sofas, and ip through his
wall of LPs and 78s. Organ trios with Jimmy Smith and Jimmy McGriff
and Lonnie Smith, bebop and hard bop, Billy Eckstine and Nat King
Cole, big band stuff from Chick Webb and Duke Ellington, early R&B
and soulit was gold.
And comedy: everything from Moms Mabley to Redd Foxx, Dick
Gregory to Lenny Bruce.
Bruce zinged us with one-liners: Another martini for Mother
Cabrini. He startled us with his by turns bored and vehement rejection
of the attitudes and language hed inherited and snidely, violently,
crudely dismissed. We loved his adolescent moral inversions: the pope as
an evil businessman partnering with Billy Graham and Oral Roberts to
swallow the planets wealth while denying its inhabitants of color any
piece of the pie, or even human dignity, put us into stitches.
For the varicolored teen rebels I knew, Lenny Bruce spoke clearly,
directly, hilariously, unmasking the phony heart of the American Dream.
We felt like wed joined a secret cult. It was how we felt reading Mad
magazine or watching Rocky and Bullwinkle or, a bit later, listening to
Frank Zappas Mothers of Invention.
Think of Bruce as the Elvis Presley of standup. Short but well-built
with darkly striking good looks, a babe magnet, he was star material
for the bohemian crowd: sexy and dangerous. Like Presley, he made
visible to mainstream America a range of previously underground or
segregated, black-derived cultural streams that broke through in his jazz-

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inspired satirical thrusts. The effects are legion and culture-wide. Or, to
put it succinctly, no Lenny Bruce, no Dick Gregory, Richard Pryor, Flip
Wilson, Chevy Chase, George Carlin, Eddie Murphy, Robin Williams,
Chris Rock, The Simpsons, or South Park.
(Gregory, who knew and admired Bruce, once called him the eighth
wonder of the world. A remarkable riff Bruce improvised on the word
nigger when Gregory rst saw him perform in 1962 inspired the black
satirist to call his own 1964 autobiography Nigger.)
Maybe the most singular thing about Bruces turbulent, headlinegrabbing, bust-and-court-lled career is how it helped open doors for
black standup comics, who by the late 1950s had begun venturing into
such street-grounded satire in front of black audiences, to play before
integrated and white audiences. (Hugh Hefner, whose chic Playboy
magazine published excerpts from Bruces autobiography, also booked
Gregory into his Chicago clubGregorys rst big-time shot at white
folks.) Bruces language owed and bucked with a feel that paralleled
Jack Kerouacs prose or Charlie Parkers bebop sax; it was a hipsters
jargon compounded of black jazz slang, Yiddish expressions, four-letter
words, and neologisms (toilet for crummy club, for example). And he
aimed his motley, disreputable bullets, compounded of frustration, cynicism, and edgy, mordant humor, at Americas collective nerves and social
pretenses.
Take a sampling of a few titles of the classic 1950s monologues that
brought him the fame, major bookings, and big bucks at the short-lived
apex of his career. In Father Flotskys Triumph, he lampoons old
prison movies by agrantly using Uncle Tom blacks and gay whites,
along the way ring off digs at such American movie icons of saintliness
as Pat OBrien. Adolf Hitler and the MCA imagines how the huge
talent agency-turned-entertainment conglomerate would have discovered and shaped the career, even the name, of the Nazi leadera
prescient collusion of showbiz and politics that has even greater resonance in our time than it did in Bruces, when Richard Nixon hadnt yet
learned to wear TV makeup. Nixon himself is burlesqued in Ike, Sherm,
and Nick, which opens with Ike worrying about Sherman Adamss
famed vicuna coat, but quickly turns to Nixons ill-fated trips abroad,
where he was routinely stoned and abused (They spit on me, he tells
Ike, who responds that the problem isnt Nixon, but his wife Patshe
overdressesa reference to her famed cloth coat).
Religions Inc. depicts the pope and American evangelical preachers
like Oral Roberts cozying up to plot conspiratorial moves as the routine
links church and business interests and sales tactics (R.C. up 9 percent
this year). What would be better guaranteed to rattle America in 1958,
when Bishop Fulton J. Sheen appeared on TV weekly to inveigh against
Communists and for Christian morality, not long after the phrase under
God had been added to the Pledge of Allegiance to reafrm Americas

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role as Chosen People and counter the godless Soviet threat? Especially
since Bruce throws in jabs to that other American sore spot, race, when
he, as Roberts, goes off about how civil rights activists are pushing
church leaders: They want us to say something. Meantime, the evangelical preacher assures the pope, We put in two bathrooms on each
school bus.
His unsettling, cynical humor put cops and district attorneys on the
lookout for Bruces appearances. They scanned his recordings and found
bits called, How To Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties, with its
bumbling well-intentioned white racists; Psychopathia Sexualis, with
its playfully knowing allusions to Beats like Allen Ginsberg and jazzpoets like Lord Buckley; and To Is a Preposition, Come Is a Verb, the
most abstract, jazz-inspired composition of his oeuvre, an ingenious,
almost Dadaist hymn to sex. (These routines, now collected on Lenny
Bruce Originals Volumes 1 and 2, most directly inspired Richard Pryor,
as is especially clear on the early tracks of And Its Deep Too, which
collects Pryors complete Warner Bros. recordings.) Then theres The
Kid in the Well: Bruce takes a basic clichd human interest story
then in the headlines, twists it so the doctors who treated the kid get
sued, and nally asks, How come this gets headlines and a black guy
cant buy a house doesnt? The juxtaposition blew minds in 1958,
when this sort of information was usually left buried, unarticulated.
How times have changed: now Bruce would probably be accused of
advocating class and racial warfare while his charge would be denied,
spun, evaporated.
Sometimes the laughter Bruce drew was full-throated, a release of
tensions; sometimes it was strained, or seemed to be pulled out of an
audience almost against its will, as his raw witsick humor, as it was
labeledstrained listeners ability to step outside convention to the
emotional breaking point. With Bruce, the theaters fourth wall disappeared. His audience was forced to confront whatever he did as he did.
Standup, after all, was the art of process, enhanced by Bruces improvisational impulses.
He honed his act in strip clubs, where jazz musicians like Philly Joe
Jones, one of Miles Daviss drummers and a friend of Bruces, made up
the house band. Is it surprising, then, that Bruce understood jazz as a
kind of existentialism, used jazz as material besides adapting its process,
insisted on inserting improvisation into every show? In The Interview,
he parodies a nodding-off junkie bebopper called in for a job by a
Lawrence Welk-style bandleaderthe epitome of white-bread America.
Its hipster versus square. The staid boss doesnt understand in locutions like I have a monkey on my back; I dont want no animals on
the bandstand, he barks in an accent hovering somewhere between
Yiddish and German.

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Charlie Parker had said, If you dont live it, it wont come out of
your horn. Bebop insisted that the art of black jazz musicians was not
mere entertainment but worthy of respect because it demanded talent
and risk. Like Kerouac and most of the myriad Little Birds who
ocked to bebop, Bruce ew recklessly, without Parkers all-consuming
genius: he could soar like Daedalus or fall like Icarus in performance
during his few minutes of improvised shtick. On The Carnegie Hall
Concert or Live at Curran Hall, his improvisations can tail off into dead
ends; you can sense his language failing at the outer bounds of his frames
of reference. Even before he capitulated completely to addiction in the
mid-1960s and lapsed into self-absorption and despair and grandiosity,
maybe his complicated sensibilities just couldnt always find fittingly
complex expression. He was as adolescent as the society around him;
sometimes he sounds like a kid making faces while spitting out dirty
words.
On the other hand, maybe Bruce grasped the banality of so much of
the evil in America, especially in black American life. Pharmakos or
egomaniac? Before junk and The Law took him over, you can hear the
humanity in his best bits.
By the mid-1950s, after hed garnered his rst burst of notoriety by
traipsing onto a strip club stage naked, Lenny Bruce found his vocation:
to go onstage and, improvising from sketched-out routines, strip what
he, like other Outsiders in this era, saw as self-serving hypocrisy from the
powers-that-be, from the day-to-day mores of society, and project an
alternative picture of how America actually worked. And, in the process,
prick nerve endings and be funny.
He could also seem as stiffly self-righteous as his hip audience.
Conditions of unspeakable poverty, lth and humiliation exist right
here in the richest country in the world, he wrote in his autobiography How To Talk Dirty. (He had a heavy ghostly hand from Paul
Krassner, a New Left activist-journalist who later co-founded the
Yippies with Abbie Hoffman, one of Bruces truest and tragic disciples.)
This country, which magnanimously balms its conscience by helping
Greek orphans and buying bonds for Israel, but manages to pass up the
appeal for bail-bond money needed desperately by sixth-generation
Negro Americans ghting for their human rights.
Unlike Mort Sahl, whose more professorial political satire was detached
enough to make him a hero in liberal quarters, Bruce traveled wide and
deep in this demimonde of outsiders and weirdos, drug and sex ends,
whores and musicians and artistswhich meant he wasnt quite trustworthy. Still, this was where cultural change produced Abstract
Expressionism, the Beat Generation, postwar jazz, noir lm, and the new
form Bruce himself was instrumental in shapingstandup comedy.

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A descendant of Mark Twains comic 19th-century lectures and Will

Rogerss between-the-rope-tricks observations, arising in the 1950s
from the entracte bits by cabaret and burlesque emcees, popularized by
late-night TV talk shows like Jack Paars and Steve Allens, standup
comedy turned on addressing the audience directly. This was a new
tackdespite common misconceptions, vaudeville comics didnt traditionally address the audience, except for occasional asides. Most
standup comics smoothed their new format with familiar themes, the
stuff of blackout sketches and sitcoms, to win over audiences. Some,
like Milton Berle, thrived on one-liners, many of them lifted from black
comics at Harlems Apollo Theater. Some, like Redd Foxx, machinegunned raucous crowds with blue jokes. At his best, Bruce used sex
and situations to draw audiences into the contours of his off-angle
worldview. And for a few years he attracted bigger and better-heeled
crowds as he surfaced toward the mainstream despite the assumptionjangling nature of much of his material.
Onstage, Bruces intensitythe hooded eyes, the ready sneer, the
darting movementsmade him look almost like a human seismograph
registering the tremors and tensions building beneath the surfaces of
American society. And as often as not during his peak, Bruces humor
or, at least, the audiences laughterwas as much or more cathartic
relief from the satirical and verbal onslaught as it was spontaneous belly
laugh. Not that he couldnt be funny: one-liners like My mother-in-law
broke up my marriage: one day my wife came home early and found me
in bed with her stippled his routines like surreal signposts from the
Borscht Belt, marking places listeners could ease up for at least a breath.
With Bruce, as with later counterculture heroes like Ken Kesey and
Abbie Hoffman, part of the frisson for his hip followers was having to
maintain their insider status by keeping pace with chameleonic shifts of
attitude from the Leaderhaving to ght, without seeming to struggle,
to stay On the Bus. It could be a rocky ride. Few non-cultists clambered
aboard for long.
In an America where conformity was the social norm, maybe its no
surprise that Bruces life followed a course far beyond what most
contemporary Americans considered the pale.
His mother was an erstwhile vaudevillian and performer-wannabe
herself, he married a stripper, and he came to artistic maturity in the
1950s nightworld populated by Americas disappeared characters
black jazz musicians, strippers and hookers, homosexuals, junkies and
dopeheads, disaffected college students, straight men and women who
wanted at least a glimpse of something else. He played to them, on them,
with them, in his multifaceted psychological ways.
When his cult status grew big enough, the stories started about him
and his sick humor. In May 1959, the New York Times Magazine

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brought his underground reputation to wide notice, as writer Gilbert

Millstein primly warned, The newest and in some ways the most scarifyingly funny proponent of significance is Lenny Bruce, a sort of
abstract expressionist stand-up comedian paid $1750 a week to vent
his outrage on the clientele.
By 1961, his troubles with the law started to overtake sick humor as the
major theme in stories about him. In December 1962, he was busted by
the Irish Chicago DA and largely Irish police, who were upset by his parodies of Catholicism; that followed back-to-back busts for obscenity in
California. Soon his arrests escalated. It was easy pickings for The Man:
Bruce was using methamphetamine, heroin, Benzedrine, you name it.
Like the subculture he spoke for and to, Bruce saw drug use as rejection of societys constraints and hypocrisy. After all, millions of
Americans were using drugsprescription and over-the-counter drugs
for sleeping and waking and dieting and whatnot. So what was the big
deal? In Three Message Movies, Bruce muses about making a Hollywood lm about a normal, law-abiding, suburban family that lays aside
budget money for its drug needs. It wasnt the sort of advertising
parodythe exchange Isnt all marijuana the same? Thats the
mistake a lot of people make is right out of a Madison Avenue spot
about cigarettesthat a society believing marijuana use led to heroin
addiction wanted to hear, however funny it might seem to hipsters.
By 1964, Bruce couldnt get work. His passport was voided, his New
York cabaret license was revoked, and clubowners understood that if
they hired him they risked being shut down or ned by the law. And so
they didnt. His deepening involvement in court cases sapped his
creativity: he made it his personal crusade to prove to the courts that
his act, in its own words, was satire. He grew convinced he was being
persecuted for poorly transcribed, randomly lifted, and out-of-context
police versions of what he actually said. And so he marshaled strings of
star witnesses, including Nat Hentoff, Ralph Gleason, and Kenneth
Tynan, to testify that what he did was art. After all, he gured, Ginsberg
and the Beats, even old James Joyces Ulysses and D. H. Lawrences Lady
Chatterleys Lover, were either threatened with censorship or banned in
the United States.
Bruce grew more and more obsessed with First Amendment law when
work dwindled and disappeared and drugs became his life instead of his
recreation. He argued with his lawyers about tactics and presentations,
constantly hiring and ring them. He took over parts of trials himself;
for one, as he tried to deliver what he really said before the jurors, the
judge admonished them, and courtroom observers, not to laughan
order the bailiff found hard to enforce. But that was earlier on. For a
year and a half before he died, Bruces increasingly ragged, rare performances outside courtrooms matched those within: hed read from and
rebut transcripts from his trials for obscenity. He was a trench-coated

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shadow lurking in the spotlight, an obsessive disjointed defender, a

nonstop self-explainer; there were no laughs left. Junk had stripped him
of his human power to connect; the law had used it to turn him inside
out. How now to distinguish scam and reality, satire and transcript,
performance and life?
Before he died, he had ballooned in weight and virtually sequestered
himself in the Hollywood house that he kept redesigning while he was
running out of money and working endlessly on unfinished and
frequently incoherent legal briefs. The grimy black-and-white shots of
his fat naked sprawling indignity, taken by a river of press photographers the LA cops happily let pass through the dead mans house,
washed across front pages around America and the world.

14
Sweet Soul Music
When Martin Luther King, standing on a platform, addressing
an off-stage white society, says, You dont have to love me to
quit lynching me, he is disinfecting his doctrine of agape from
sentimentalityfrom the notion of easy solutions by easy love.
Robert Penn Warren,
Who Speaks for the Negro? (1965)
To the white protagonists of this book . . . Ray Charles was a
god for almost the very reasons the White Citizens Councils had
warned about: sex, barbarism, and jungle rhythms.
Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music (1986)

As Trent Lott struggled to repudiate segregation 50 years after it

was outlawed, about the only point he left out of his incoherent counterattack is that he was a soul-music fan. Now, I dont know that he was,
but as a southern frat boy, he would have been ironically typical of the
initial audiences for Stax Records, the Memphis-based label whose music,
along with Motowns, helped transport cultural integration to a broader
plain. Good ol boys who wouldnt eat with the colored steadfastly
booked edgling southern soul acts year after year, providing steady
income and a tour circuit before singers like Carla Thomas and Otis
Redding found their ways into Americas mainstream.
For so they did, in that era of hope and recovery, of reopening possibilities after the McCarthyite witchhunts and hysteria had narrowed Americas
options. By 1965, the year after the rst landmark Civil Rights Act, when
optimism seemed to permeate the economy, the culture, the scent of the
airwhen the false dawns and cataclysms forming on the distant horizon,
presaging the long twilight of Thomas Pynchons Vineland, were still stsized bad dreamsMotown, a black-owned independent record label
rocketing from outsider to insider status, was already a top-of-the-pops
(read white crossover) hitmaking factory. In the mid-1960s, it suddenly

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Rebirth of the Blues

seemed that black Americans owned the top of the pop charts, breaking
out of their longtime racial enclave of rhythm and blues. In July 1964,
Where Did Our Love Go, cooing, lightweight pop by the Supremes,
elbowed Dean Martin out of the Billboard number one American slot. Just
as suddenly, it seemed, black entertainers zoomed from occasional to
continual sightings on TV, especially teen-oriented music programs like
Hullabaloo and Shindig and those hosted by Dick Clark and Les Cole.
Over the next couple of years, in a trend started by the British Invasion
bands, the idioms of black singers hits, from Whatd I Say and Do
You Love Me to Respect and Midnight Hour, became a core part
of the shared language of largely white garage bands across the land. For
a few years there, it seemed like Dr. Kings dreams were being enacted in
the arena of popular culture. As historian Peter Guralnick writes in Sweet
Soul Music, It was as if the rhythm and blues singer, like the jazz
musician and professional athlete before him, were being sent out as
an advance scout into hostile territory. It looked like the civil rights
movementwhich had always deployed the church music that gave birth
to soul for its uplifting anthems and rallying cries; whose leaders, from
King to Malcolm X, moved masses with the same churchy cadences that
soul singers nessedmight infuse a new generation via the genetic structure of American popular culture, white and black, right down to the
grassroots levels of homemade entertainment.
This had never happened before in quite the same way. In early jazz, the
best white players like Bix Beiderbecke and guitarist Eddie Lang worked
with black innovators; Beiderbecke jammed with Louis Armstrong, and
in 192829 Lang (born Salvatore Massaro) recorded duets with Lonnie
Johnson, his great black counterpart; to avoid appearing interracial, Lang
was credited as Blind Willie Dunn. Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing
Brakeman and godfather of modern country music, learned to play guitar
and sing the blues from a black railroad man. Before the war, the Swing
Era produced countless young white wannabes who lifted black jazz
innovations and styles and then proceeded to stardom. In the postwar era,
doo-wop found blacks and Italians synthesizing similar elements in abutting neighborhoods on the streetcorner hangouts of the lower classes.
Rock and roll was essentially rhythm and blues, as the black style
(formerly lumped under race music) was dubbed by the white executives running Billboards charts, with a rockabilly twist. Soul music,
however, was different: it had few white stars. And yet, as the lm The
Big Chills best-selling nostalgic soul soundtrack demonstrated in the
1980s, the spectrum of sounds soul offered in its heyday captured young
white American ears on a scale that foreshadowed (and would only be
rivaled by) hip-hop for later generations.
To me, the Supremes sounded like black cotton candyexactly what
Berry Gordy Jr., Motowns founder and maximum leader, wanted. (In

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New York, even white AM radio stations spun slices of black music,
and at the far right of the dial were black stations like WWRL and
WLIB, and after midnight came the erratic clear-channel stations from
around the country, crackling over the transistor radio hidden beneath the
covers pressed to your ear.) But I was drawn ineluctably to the springy,
powerful bass lines and drums driving the songs. The tensile rhythm
sections produced a chug-a-lug of interlocking parts often buried beneath
layers of vocal schmaltz and period-piece echo and overblown orchestration. (It was rumored that there were 2 by 4s stomping through Baby
Love to make sure white Americans could learn to feel the backbeata
cultural twist I remembered years later in Perugia, when I watched a
churchful of enthusiastic Italians at a gospel music concert by African
American groups clap resoundingly on the one and three.)
Hitsmainstream hits made for white teenybopperswere Motowns
raison dtre, and its stuff sounded transparently like what it was
assembly-line product. Now, the history of American pop is stuffed with
songs written to imitate hits; that sums up the role of Tin Pan Alley. But
Gordy made Motown self-generating, self-sufcient. He hired songwriters
and producers, and at the weekly production meetings held votes to decide
which songs sounded most like potential hits; theyd make it to the release
schedule. In that context, it shouldnt be surprising how repetitive the
Motown Sound could get. There were exceptions: Smokey Robinson and
the Miracles, whose material and arrangements were usually hipper;
Martha and the Vandellas, who unlike the Supremes slashed and burned
on Dancing in the Streets and Heat Wave; The Four Tops, who essentially kept recording the same old song (an egregious example of
Motowns prefab product) made irresistible by Levi Stubbs charismatic
gospel shouting and some of the funkiest bass and drum parts on the label.
Ironically, the sameness of the material crafted for each artist conveyed a
lesson that soul, molded from blues and gospel and jazz, could teach, a
lesson as applicable to bebop as hip-hop: what mattered more than stylistic range was emotional power and technical nesse in its variations.
Years before the Supremes triumph, the press had been snuggling up to
Motown and Berry Gordy Jr. The son of a southern immigrant-entrepreneur with a large close-knit family, Gordy started Motown, after failing at
other ventures, with money borrowed from the family credit fund (all the
Gordys used this for their business start-ups). Motown grew rapidly from
its 1958 launch, and Gordy spread the company vertically across buildings
on West Grand Boulevard. He encouraged a family-style feeling (with
many of his actual relatives at top jobs) in the informal day-to-day operations; it yielded big benets.
Set in Detroit, the citys only signicant record label, Motown attracted
a formidable but overlooked pool of local black talent of all musical
stripes. There were jazz musicians and modied doo-woppers, songwriter
and producer wannabes, kids who wanted to be starsthey all hung out

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in the connected stretch of little buildings that housed Motowns operations. There was the recording studio, a converted garage that usually
ran 24/7 as producers lined up to record their demos for the Friday
production meetings. There was the array of ofces for ever-expanding
departments: the charm school, which taught poise, right down to how
to sit; the booking agency, which handled all Motowns acts; spaces for
tutorials in dance steps and fashion and image-making; Quality Control,
which judged the hit potential of each weeks production output and
culled likely winners for the big Friday meetings.
While they swept oors and answered phones and typed and oohed
and ahhed huddling in the hallways, young Motown wannabes absorbed
the surroundings like Hollywood contract players hoping to be stars: here
they could learn, be remade, reborn into the record bizwhich, after all,
had supplemented boxing and other sports as possible paths into mainstream American life, culture, and economy, something the movies had
yet to do for them. And if Gordy paid most of his salaried employees
comparative peanuts, and some of them not at all, well, he also, like a
benevolent paternalist, oversaw an open, competitive shop where anyone
could in theory (and often enough in fact, just like the larger American
mythology, to make the myth credible) rise to the highest levels. His
employees believed. In book after book, interview after interview, the
constant refrain from everyone involved, however disaffected, repeats how
the family feeling shaped the corporate structure, reiterates the intimacies
and give-and-take of the constant creative ow. Motown was the black
corporate equivalent of garage-band heaven, a garage label, the cousin of
hundreds of backyard operations that sprang up in the postwar era to
chase that latest new American dream: the hit single.
In service of that dream, Gordy replicated the Hollywood studio
system, itself an adaptation of the auto industrys assembly line, annexing
functions to his label in ways no one else had, to attain total control, a
total product. Is it any wonder so much of it seemed interchangeable?
Gordys unbending will, his dream to take the white pop market,
powered Motown. Other black-owned labels, from prewar Black Swan
to postwar Duke-Peacock in Houston and Vee Jay in Chicago, had
produced great music but rarely broke it beyond black audiences; even
though Vee Jay was one of Gordys early distributors, signed the Italian
doo-wop group the Four Seasons, and had released the first Beatles
album in the United States, one of its owners ended up working for
Gordy. As Nelson George, author of several books on Motown, explains
in his Death of Rhythm and Blues, Motown promoted Gordy as an
afrmative, unthreatening symbol of black capitalism, one as acceptable
in the New York Times as on the cover of Ebony. He had the perfect
double image for showbiz: he was street (hed hustled at pool halls and
seethed with attitude) and middle class (his family was a hive of upward
mobility). And he was himself talented, not just a suit. Hed written hits

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like Reet Petite and Higher and Higher for Jackie Wilson, the brilliant singer mired in soppy material and gooey arrangements by white
handlers like Mitch Miller, the long-tenured head of pop music at
Columbia Records.
The rst record Gordy cut at his Hitsville Studios in 1960, the breeding
place for what he dubbed The Sound of Young America, was titled
Money (Thats What I Want). Thanks to his shrewd grasp of the music
business and the culture, along with his paternalistic sense of company
nances, over the subsequent decades hed get plenty.
The national marketplace he sized up was still generally balkanized,
serviced by small mom-and-pop retailers and regional distributors. Only
a couple of the major labels and larger indies like Atlantic had national
distribution pipelines; the rest was patch-quilt. The sprawling country was
only slowly losing its longtime, sharply dened regional identities to the
emerging mass media; it teemed with hundreds if not thousands of local
subcultures, each with its own musical spins. Thanks to technological
advances like the relative cheapness and portability of tape recording
equipment, a kind of speculative bubble inated the number of independent labels. Would-be producers wrote songs, put together sessions,
recorded them, and peddled the results to a label or distributor. If a hot DJ
broke your record and rode ita process lubricated by payola, which
small and large labels and distributors alike employed according to their
resourcesother local and regional DJs might well pick it up, and it could
turn into a hit. In a society touting Organization Men, this life was a leap
of faith into a crapshooting world where fame and glory and money could
roll in and roll out with the same blitheness, where sex and drugs and
creativity werent stuffed into gray annel suits, where the factory whistle
put out a backbeat that, if you were lucky, would be yours. Conmen and
hipsters and geniuses rubbed mohair-suited shoulders in a demimonde that
rejected the square world that rejected them.
A edgling indie-label operator needed a few traits. First was the ears,
that combo of instincts, training, and luck to spot a potential hit. Then there
was grit: you had to be willing to bet your nancial life over and over on
recording a hit, getting it pressed, nding listeners and buyers. Maybe most
important of all was access to deeper pockets. Collecting from regional
distributors, who could coax airplay out of DJs that would up demand and
sales, even on a hit single, was a difcult if not impossible task, and busted
many or most independents. As you might expect, a black independent
label head needed more of all these qualities than his white counterparts.
Gordy had them. He understood early, for instance, that his newborn operation would be choked by the failure of Chess and other regional
distributors to pay, and negotiated a national distribution deal with a major
label instead. Moves like that certied Gordy as The Great Black Hope,
and he cast his company as a vehicle for others; talent, which basically
meant hitmaking ability, was the only currency that mattered at Motown.

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That currency Motown produced in abundance. Between 1960 and

1979, it racked up more than a hundred top ten hitsmore than 30 at
number oneon the pop charts, the white listening gauges of where the
real money owed in the music industry. But Gordys ambitions soon
outstripped merely an enviable stream of chart-toppers. How many black
acts before the Supremes had raked in big bucks playing the mob-owned
Copacabana in New York or the mob-related hotels in Vegas? Virtually
none. But that direction meant the already lightweight trio learned old
standards with typical old-fogey charts. To my friends, the Sound of
Young America, as Gordy had dubbed his company, had become the
sound of our parents, slightly modied.
Gordy had tapped into big money, somewhat ironically following the
paths to mainstream stardom staked out for the rock and roll era by Elvis
Presley and Colonel Tom Parker, Presleys greedy manager. And he made
sure his people made no public missteps. Chuck Berry could be busted
under the Mann Act at the height of his popularity. Jack Johnson and Joe
Louis and Berry could all be bedeviled by the IRS. None of that broke
Motown, despite the inevitable proliferation of sex and drugs in the West
Grand Boulevard buildings after the money started rolling in and the IRS
investigations inevitably followed.
Gordy was incisive: he understood the crossover potential of black
music but buttressed it with artist development, keeping acts on contract
even for years until they landed a hit. But he was simultaneously a throwback to bad old practices black (and many white) artists had faced with
white label owners since the industrys inception. Motown stars had
apparently unlimited expense accounts, but in fact they were charged by
the label for everything from recording and tour costs to wardrobes. Their
royalty rates were extremely low to nonexistent; Motown didnt bother to
issue statements. And Gordy controlled the nances of many of his stars
right down to their bank accounts, which needed his co-signatures on
checks. Then there were his strict divisions of labor: few Motown artists,
aside from Smokey Robinson, were allowed to be songwriters or
producers, and vice versa. There were the low salaries. There was the way
he schmoozed the black DJs in the early days, when he needed them to
put his product across, then slid to the white side of the aisle. (No blackpower spokesperson, Gordy did start a short-lived labelone of the 39
hed ownto release speeches by the likes of Dr. King.) Overall, Gordys
tactics were no better and often worse than those of white label owners
like the Chess Brothers, or Syd Nathan, whose King Records became the
ambivalent home of James Browns soul revolution.
This stuff started to come out in the late 1960s, when the lawsuits
began. Following the Detroit riots of 1967, Motowns music diverged in
several directions. The Supremes, especially Diana Ross, now Gordys
lover and primo star, kept heading further into traditional showbiz.

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Meanwhile, Norman Whiteld, a new young producer who had risen

through the Motown ranks, was inuenced by the riots as well as the
sounds of Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone; he edged the Temptations into socially relevant, psychedelic funk like Cloud 9 and Ball
of Confusion, with improbable success. Then the shouting started.
HollandDozierHolland, Motowns key early hitmakers by then
promoted to central positions, sued Gordy and the label. Angered by the
ever-increasing time, money, and perks Gordy lavished on Diana Ross at
their expense, other artists sued, or left the label, or both. Gordys shoddy
contractual practices, which let Motown cream not only off the top but
the middle and even bottom of everything that happened at the label,
began to surface.
The Jackson Five saved Motown from this rst wave of deterioration
via back-to-back hits that made them huge stars. But in negotiating
contracts with iron-willed Joe Jackson, the clans monstrous patriarch,
Gordy pulled the same sorts of lowball stunts hed built into his labels
practices. By the late 1970s, Joe wanted his boys out of Motown, and
signed them to Epic, a wing of Columbia Records, for comparatively huge
advances and guarantees. Gordy was left to haggle about Motowns
ownership of the Jackson Five name; the group became the Jacksons. And
Motown the recording company was a hollowed-out shell.
In fall 1968, Gordy moved to Hollywood, and with his move Motown
in Detroit lapsed into a vestigial operation, though Hitsville was ofcially
open until 1975. The shift inevitably changed Motowns nature; whatever
was left of the camaraderie and improvising informality died with
Hitsville. But now Gordy wanted to conquer Hollywood, to make movies
and TV, where the real money lay. Ross, his manipulative paramour, the
would-be diva who graduated from Supreme to soloist, was his focus: he
wanted to transform Americas black sweetheart into a movie star, transfer
his Svengali touch to the silver screen. It didnt work in Lady Sings the
Blues, which miscast Ross as Billie Holiday, or in Mahogany, a muddled,
turgid mess directed de facto by Gordy himself, or in The Wiz, for which
Ross insisted on playing a ludicrous Dorothy. (She had by then broken up
with Gordy after having his child.) Still, the royalties from all those earlier
hits kept rolling into Gordys Jobete publishing company, to the tune of
millions per year, as he licensed scads of songs in the pop marketing explosion of the early 1980s, when Michael Jackson bought the Beatles catalog
and licensed Revolution to Nike for its ads. Gordy, after all, was
Michaels mentor. Remember the California raisins singing I Heard it
Through the Grapevine?
For me, the real lure at Motown was the backing musicians, a longfaceless shambling outt who, unbeknownst to most outside Hitsville,
called themselves the Funk Brothers. Aside from a couple of names gleaned
from music and fan magazines and DJs and such, all we knew was that

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this oating crew of musicians was responsible for the propulsive sounds
that outshone the vocals on so many Motown releases. Bassist James
Jamerson was a hero for musician wannabes like me long before we knew
his name; we could hear his afterimages in white bassists from Paul
McCartney to the Grateful Deads Phil Lesh.
During 2002, Standing in the Shadows of Motown, a documentary
offshoot of the book by Alan Slutsky about the Funk Brothers, came out
at a few theaters. Combining old footage with recreations and interviews with survivors, it also serves up musical segments featuring the
band, which sounds terric, backing a motley array of vocalists that
includes Joan Osborne, Bootsy Collins, Ben Harper, Meshell Ndegeocello,
and Chaka Khan.
The movie codies and augments the information that only slowly
leaked out about these people who controlled Motowns pulse. Most of
the couple of dozen musicians involved hailed from the South, had come
north with families looking for work at the auto plants, as southern blacks
had done since the days of Henry Ford. So Detroit simmered sounds from
raw country to urban sophisticate, and jazz thrived, yielding a crop of
top-tier as well as lesser musicians during the postwar era. The Funk
Brothers were among them: their members had played with Charlie
Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington,
John Coltrane, and a few hundred other jazz stars. Drummer Benny
Benjamin backed Bird and Ray Charles, Muddy Waters and Chuck Berry.
Pianist Joe Hunter worked to make his left hand like Rachmaninoffs and
Art Tatums.
Once you stripped the voices off Motown songs, you heard a tightly
tuned rhythm machine, its camshaft rotating pistons in a chug-a-lug
pattern of syncopated parts that put out enormous horsepower. At the
heart pulsed Jamerson, one of this documentarys dead, unheralded stars.
Born on Edisto Island in the Carolinas, Jamerson made his rst diddley
bowthe long-standing homemade string instrument rural southern
blacks trained on, which in this case was a string and a bowed stick that
the boy stuck down an anthole and made the ants dance. Using one
picking ngermost bassists use two or threeJamerson developed his
innovative attack, complex lines that dance within their patterns, subdivide time, create anticipation, build tension, and release into the rhythmic
moving bottom of pop music, an unpredictable camshaft that somehow
delivered more thrust. Harnessing the temporal creativity fostered by
bebop and developed on bass by Oscar Pettiford and Charles Mingus to
pop music, Jamerson seemed utterly free. Where he placed notes mattered
intensely; they surrounded the beat, stuttered across it, loped with an
exhilaration that was undeniable, upliftingsoul, the sheer joy of a selfassertive imagination cavorting across a musical canvas that somehow
magically freed the listener as well.

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In 1965, when the Motown Tour went to Britain, the musicians, generally unknown, were to their astonishment greeted by a James Jamerson
Fan Club.
The idea that jazz sophistication and blues fervor could meld into
popular music was the legacy of Atlantic Records, that feisty indie that
became a major label on the strength of R&B and soul, then eventually
signed the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin. In its pioneering days of the
1940s and 1950s, when it was one of the premier labels putting out jazz
and rhythm and blues, Atlantic developed a methodology for its recording
sessions: take an R&B vocal star like Big Joe Turner; hire jazz musicians
for their range, creative spark, and reading skills, drawing again and again
from a familiar rotating cast to encourage interplay and improvisation;
put together charts and rehearse; have the bluesy or gospelly singer weave
through them. Voila! Jerry Wexler (who as a Billboard editor had coined
the term rhythm and blues) and Ahmet Ertegun, Atlantics chief honchos,
had essentially copied this recipe from Ray Charles, who had stirred it
even in his early days as a somewhat colorless Nat King Cole imitator, and
heated it to fever pitch with churchy sounds gone sinful on 1950s classics
like I Got a Woman and Whatd I Say. Compared with most jazz
recording of the time, which was low-budget and haphazard and further
attenuated by widespread use of drugs like heroin, the process was surprisingly precise, well-tooled, and organized, and yielded artistically fruitful
as well as protable results.
Gordy adapted the Atlantic model to his Motown style. He hired the
core of his studio crew in 1958, and kept adding (and occasionally
subtracting) as time went by. He put most of them on exclusive contract;
they outed him by playing at jazz dives and strip joints, the kind of places
where everyone packed heat. (Strip joints were staples of 1950s jazz life,
when other gigs dried up. It was in that milieu that Lenny Bruce met the
jazz musicians who were his earliest fans.) In the movie a couple of the
Brothers point out in the movie how rhythms they cut in the studio came
from gigging with Lottie the Body, an exotic dancer whod worked with
Count Basieespecially Afro-Cuban rhythms, like the sinuous lick structuring I Heard It Through the Grapevine. Theres footage of Joe Hunter
digging into bebop piano, and Joe Messina wailing bebop guitar on a 1955
Soupy Sales TV show; from their jazz gigs, the Funk Brothers transported
voicings and melodies and lines into the Snake Pit, as they called the
converted garage that was Hitsvilles studio. When the producers would
hear those jazz changes, theyd say, Thats hip, recalls one. And
Motown may well have been the only label outside Atlantic to feature
vibes, a jazz instrument, on pop hits.
The Funk Brothers were overwhelmingly African American, but there
were longtime white participants, like guitarist Messina. They used to
call us the Oreo cookie guitar section, he reminisces during the lm; for

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Rebirth of the Blues

years, Motowns three session guitarists sat in blackwhiteblack order.

When Detroit erupted into its 1967 riots, another in the series that ashed
across the country during those years, the Funk Brothers hung together:
emerging from the studio, their workplace and prison, to a city in ames,
the black musicians looked out for their white colleaguestheir friends.
Music, the intensity of prolonged side-by-side creative work under factory
conditions, forged a bond that the movie periodically, to its credit,
manages to capture without lapsing into sentimentality. It was the musicians meshing at several levels, after all, that showed in Motown musics
ease and power; their mutual respect was clear in the ways they wove
around each others parts. They created those parts, mostly, revamping
sketchy arrangements into head Count Basie-style chartsarrangements
improvised in the studio. Giggling among themselves as they worked out
the next sessions ideas, they locked their pieces into staggered place, thickened chords, enhanced the syncopations and slinky beats that Motown
rode to hitdom.
In the late 1960s, Marvin Gaye began agitating to do a more involved
brand of music that reected the decaying reality of Detroit and America;
when Gordy agreed, in 1970 Gaye cut Whats Going On, giving the
Funk Brothers their rst unrestricted shot at foregrounding their musicianship within Motown. Their jazz chords came up front, foreshadowing
a new kind of soul that thrived in the early 1970s via producersongwriters like Philadelphias Gamble and Huff. For the rst time, too, the
musicians got credit on the album sleeve. At their peak, they might pull
down between $25,000 and $60,000 a year, peanuts compared to what
Ross or Gordy were raking in. So inevitably they cut tracks for other
Detroit studios and risked getting canned to do it: Motown paid informers
to shadow them, and ned or red them when they got caught. The pressure on them was awesome: studio work rolled on continuously, and they
were typically expected to complete four songs per three-hour session. By
the late 1960s, they hid out in a nearby funeral parlor to escape the endless
sessions.
When the Beatles and the Rolling Stones rst hit the United States,
their repertoire was mostly American roots music and Motown. They
enthusiastically translated the complex Motown charts into arrangements
for four or ve musicians of middling abilityextracting the sound, as it
were, to a rock quartet. This was like handing out keys to a musical
kingdom, and numbers among the most lasting cultural effects of the
British Invasion. Suddenly anyone in a garage or basement could take a
crack at that irresistible Motown grooveand, in fact, the growing spectrum of soul music. From Chicago, Curtis Mayeld warbled his sweet calls
to social awareness, like People Get Ready and Keep on Pushin; his
guitar style, with its hammer-ons and pull-offs running three-note moving
chords behind his vocals, created the template Hendrix would psyche-

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delicize. Otis Redding spearheaded Staxs penetration of white northern

audiences; the second wave, led by Isaac Hayes, reafrmed the musics
blackness. On Atlantic, which pushed forward into soul with Solomon
Burke and Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, Ray Charles truest heir,
brought gospel jazz directly and fervently into soul, rocking her piano with
a largely white southern rhythm section from Muscle Shoals, Alabama,
reiterating and embodying the lessons Charles had laid out for white and
black postwar American youth.
As Nelson George wrote,
Motown and Stax were the twin towers of sixties soul, feeding ideas
and energy into house parties and love scenes of all colors. Though
connected by their simultaneous success, the two companies were total
opposites. Motown in Detroit was black-owned, secretive, rigidly
hierarchical, totally committed to reaching white audiences, with
production styles that ultimately made its producers, writers, and
musicians the real stars of the Motown sound. Stax in Memphis was
initially white-owned, easily accessible to outsiders, lled with leaders
of all kinds. Its records, the offspring of musical miscegenation,
appealed primarily to black Americans.

Both relied heavily on black radio, at least at rst, to build audiences.

Evolution, in culture as in biology, takes parallel paths to try to guarantee the survival of new attributes. At Stax in Memphis, a southern town
more insidiously segregated even than Detroit and other northern cities,
blue-collar white kids ran errands, tended the record store in the lobby of
the old movie theater that doubled as the labels studio, boxed records,
moved equipment, and learnedlike their black counterparts at Motown,
like kids at countless record stores across black and white and brown
Americato analyze what made a hit. The foundations of the Stax sound
were related to yet different from Motowns: a mingling of country and
blues played with jazzy licks the young Stax players picked up from the
local black musicians they idolized. It was a blend kicking around the
South since World War II; its avatars included rockabilly and Chuck Berry.
By 1968, Time magazine ran a characteristically hyperventilating (and
characteristically late) cover story opening, Has it got soul? Man, thats
the question of the hour. If it has soul, then its tough, beautiful, out of
sight. It passes the test of with-itness. It has the authenticity of collard
greens boiling on the stove, the sassy style of the boogaloo in a hip
discotheque, the solidarity signied by Soul Brother scrawled on a ghetto
storefront. . . . Soul is a way of life, but it is always the hard way. Its
essence is ingrained in those who suffer and endure to laugh about it later.
It was the sort of insufferable condescension Time had displayed, in turn,
about jazz musicians, Beat writers, protest singers, hippie rock and rollers.
Contrast Guralnick, writing of a sound drenched in sex and love that

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was generated as a cultural expression of the drive toward racial integration after a decade of demonstrations, attempted school desegregations,
backlashes, National Guard and federal marshal face-offs, battles over
housing, and job discrimination: Musically . . . soul remains the story of
how a universal sound emerged from the black church. Historically it
represents another chapter in the development of black consciousness,
similar to the Harlem Renaissance, say, in its championing of negritude,
but more widespread in its impact. . . . It is the story of blacks and whites
together . . . of the complicated intertwinings of dirt-poor roots and
middle-class dreams, aesthetic ambitions and social strivings, the anarchic
impulse and the business ethic.
Soul music did give symbolic voice to the cultural changes in play. The
Atlantic and Stax-Volt varieties especially recombined black blues and
white blues, aka country music. The house bands at Stax-Volt and Atlantic
were integrated. Was soul music the cultural objective correlative of the
civil rights movement, a culmination nally come, thanks to the Kennedy
assassination and Lyndon Johnsons arm-twisting (which would lose the
South and many northern blue-collar areas for the Democrats for generations)? If Motown acts could play the Copacabana and Las Vegas, wasnt
that the American Dream?
It was, for Berry Gordy Jr., who by all accounts, including his own, was
utterly oblivious to the world around him. The civil rights movement
might have been peaking as Motown artists dominated the charts. Detroit
might have been going up in ames while Motown was beginning to
stagger and weave under Gordys increasingly distanced paternalism. The
Vietnam War might have been radicalizing and killing thousands of
youngsters, but Gordy barely noticed what was going on beyond his own
adroitly jiggered bottom lines.
Stax, run paternalistically by white owners Jim Stewart and Estelle
Axton, was forced to stay in tune with changing times. In 1965, Al Bell
took over as the labels head of promotion. At rst he seemed a token
black gure chosen partly as public relations, to balance Motowns black
ownership. But for artists like Isaac Hayes and David Porter, who would
create the second wave of Stax hits, Bell turned out to be secret hero, the
Jesse Jackson of in-house politics who changed the companys direction
until it blew up.
In the late 1960s, the dream of integration was under attack. The 1965
Watts riots, which for many shocked Americans had buttressed the argument for integration, gave way to an apparently open-ended series of riots
and the rise of Black Power and gures like Malcolm X and H. Rap
Brown, who rejected the entire project of racial integration. On July 24,
1967, the riots in Detroit left 43 dead, 7,000 arrested, 1,200 homes and
businesses destroyed. Then as throughout the 1960s, it sometimes seemed
as if history was answering to earlier events: in 1943, as southern blacks

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147

streamed into the converted auto factories for wartime labor, 25,000
whites rioted when 3 blacks at the Packard bomber engine plant got
upgraded, leaving a wake of 35 dead, 29 of them black, almost all of them
killed by a police force shot through with transplanted southern whites.
As African Americans disagreed ever more violently among themselves
about what was to be done in America, a more complex cultural equation
between visible black Americans and the mainstream came into view. Was
it coincidence that James Brown, after hitting the charts and the radio (and
having white teens sing along) with Say It Loud (Im Black and Im
Proud), in the idiosyncratic, ercely compelling syncopated funk he
invented, announced that he supported Richard Nixon, the rst beneciary of the GOPs new southern strategy, aimed at hiving off white
blue-collar, suburban, and southern voters via code words about simmering racial issues? Is it odd or representative that Soul Brother Number One
identied with the new ideology of black capitalism, its insistence on selfreliant separatism? How to reconcile this with the fact that at the same
time Aretha Franklin, the daughter of Detroits amboyant and strongvoiced Reverend C. L. Franklin and, as George writes, an heir to a legacy
of redemption through music, was embodying how white America was
open to the black cultural experience more directly than ever before? And
what to make of how Jimi Hendrix and Sly and the Family Stone appealed
to overwhelmingly white audiences but had little to no black following,
with Hendrix especially being dismissed as a white wannabe, blackballed
by black radio?
By 1969, as Hendrix was being played solely on FM rock radio, AM
radio was changing. WLIB, one of New Yorks white-owned black
stations, the natural homes of soul music, was sold to black owner
Percy Sutton, who immediately moved the ofces out of Harlem. White
stations like WMCA and WABC had already stirred dollops of black music
into their playlists. By 1971, the Harvard Report, commissioned by
Columbia Records to study the rise of black markets again, observed that
the CBS roster had two black artists, Sly and Santana, a Chicano-led outt
whose inclusion indicates both the scarcity of major-label black acts and
the still-potent American color bar. It also observed that 30 percent of top
40 records crossed over from black radio. Surpriseby 1980, Columbia
had signed 125 black acts.
In 1972, Al Bell signed Richard Pryor and Jesse Jackson to record for
Stax and oversaw Wattstax, a black Woodstock at the site of 1960s riots.
It was a bid for a black-power stance, an overt change apparently
reflecting the power shift from Staxs white founders to its black
managers and artists. But the venture was partly nanced and distributed
in movie and album form by Columbia. Schlitz poured in additional
money to keep ticket prices to $1; naturally, the concert sold out. The
vast Los Angeles Coliseum hosted all Staxs stars, after an opening invocation by Jackson. In the movie, intercut between scenes from the show,

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Rebirth of the Blues

are interviews with Watts dwellers, overwhelmingly in the funky,

offhandedly in-your-face style that was already as clichd a hallmark of
black-power rhetoric as Times stilted homages. Still, the concert raised
close to $100,000 that was donated to causes from the Sickle Cell
Anemia Foundation to Jacksons Operation PUSH. At the same time,
Bell followed Gordys drive to diversifymovies, a Broadway play, a
basketball franchise, none of which paid off in anything but ash. Back
in Memphis, as Guralnick reports, many white members of the Watts
family saw this as a direct affront: Whose cause was itWattsax or Al
Bells? Were they doing it for the people in LA, or were they doing it to
promote Al Bell in LA? And what did they ever do for Memphis? Not a
goddamn thing. Shades of Berry Gordy.
Two years after the Harvard Report, Columbia head Clive Davis was
dismissed; the label said for expense account violations, but speculation
claimed hed been countenancing drug and other payola for radio DJs. As
they had in the 1950s, the payola scandals would rapidly spread and help
wipe Stax out by the late 1970s.
But even in the early 1970s, when Stax was vying with Motown for
rst place in album sales, cultural trends signaled changes on the
horizonlike the surging, separatist movie genre dubbed blaxploitation,
cartoony action icks with black-power subtexts aimed at black audiences. In 1970, Sweet Sweetbacks Baadasssss Song launched the wave,
with a soundtrack by Earth Wind and Fire; the gentle if rm push toward
integration represented by Sidney Poitier was being ousted by black
versions of Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood. Shafts soundtrack by
Isaac Hayes made him a superstar; Curtis Mayeld wrote one for Gordon
Parkss Supery. The number of black entertainers topping the Billboard
charts crested between 1967 and 1973oddly but tellingly, the period
when indie labels processed the bulk of the music into the market.
By 1976, as American society recoiled from terrorism and thuggery
devolved from 1960s radicals like SDS and the Black Panthers, the blaxploitation wave ran out and soul music calcied into mechanized disco.
The 1960s had that aura of optimism, that may seem foolish in the
cynical 21st century; by the 1970s, after the KennedyKingX assassinations, Altamont, Nixons election and reelection, Kent State, and so
on, that optimism was dead or dying, and the reconsolidation of power
taking place across the society found analogs in the record industry.
Mergers among the majors, and the absorption of indies, accelerated.
FM radio was formatted in ways more like the vilified AM playlist
stylea straitjacket even more securely tied today by limited corporate
ownershipthan the looser album-oriented FM of the late 1960s;
stations were increasingly chain-owned, presaging todays nearmonopoly situation in the market. Payola scandals and federal trials
for the sorts of practices that also roiled late Motowncounterfeiting

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149

records, shipping new releases to industry accomplices as cut-outs and

collecting kickbacks off the books while the company lost money, very
like a classic mob scam out of Goodfellaspunctured the industry with
the disco collapse of the late 1970s. Flexing their distribution capacity,
major labels manufactured an articial sales bubble of a musically sterile
form that was among Motowns linear descendants by overshipping
records and posting them as huge paper prots; the scam blew up in
their fiscal faces when returns of unsold goods from record stores
swamped their ctionalized bottom lines with red ink.
Enron, anyone?
Disco was the product of the new black-music departments at the major
labels, rst formed in the early 1970s in response to the challenge posed
by indies like Gordy. One result: black music, with rare exceptions, was
again ghettoized within new-minted formats like urban contemporary,
but, unlike in the old days of black radio, the urban contemporary
playlists were perforated with white crossover artists. This was not,
however, a two-way street: black musicians were once again, as they had
been up through the 1950s, expected to play for their market. To take
just one example: Chic, synonymous with disco hits, formed as a rock and
soul band. When their demos circulated around record companies and got
them appointments, the jaws of the executives across the table inevitably
slackened or dropped when guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard
Edwards strode in. You guys did this tape? But youre black, was one
standard response. You should be doing disco. Years later, both musicians told me, We nally gave up.
Giving up meant a string of hits, and lucrative production work
injecting new and fresh ideas and sounds into a few established black stars
like Diana Ross as well as reshaping the agging careers of white artists like
David Bowie and Jeff Beck; without Rodgers formulating her debut, the
edgling called Madonna could never have own. Is it worth considering
Michael Jacksons ongoing self-mutilating reconstruction, along with his
superstardom and degeneration into tabloid fodder, as the most apt physical symbol of the Americas neurotic focus on and confusion about race?
In the 1980s, musicians like Vernon Reid, guitarist from the hard-rock
quartet Living Colour, and vocalist Cassandra Wilson helped form the
Black Rock Coalition to publicly counter renewed ghettoization. A small
upsurge of black rock bandsFishbone, go-go bands from D.C. like
Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchersgot a few moments notice. But
only with hip-hops cultural impact would the pendulum start to swing
back. It was a nice historical irony that the Sugar Hill Gangs rst 1980 rap
hit and harbinger of the future, Rappers Delight, used Chics Good
Times as its backing track. Within a couple of years the success of Sugar
Hill records, a black-owned indie with widely rumored nancial twists,
spawned small rap-oriented labels. The cycle was ready to repeat.

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part IV

In the Garage

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15
Bob Dylan
Here I sit so patiently
Waiting to nd out what price
You have to pay to get out of
Going through all these things twice.
Bob Dylan
Forward, into the past!
Firesign Theater

Everyone knows what happened when Bob Dylan fronted an electric

band at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. Which is why August 3, 2001,
saw 100 scribes from all over the country merging into a crowd of 10,000,
inching by vehicle and foot through the narrow tourist-choked streets of
the former center of the triangle slave trade later known for its wealthy
cottages; while others rode water ferries from the sailboats and power
boats anchored like ducklings around a mammoth cruise ship, sandwiched
by the graceful suspension bridge connecting Newport to the mainland
and Fort Adams. The pentagonal sandstone bastion with the recessed
barred windows, built to protect Narragansett Bay in the 19th century,
backed the big stage. At 5:30 P.M., to a standing and expectant sea of sunsoaked bodies whod been hearing Aaron Coplands Fanfare for the
Common Man and Rodeo pumped over the PA, half an hour late but
right on time, the short guy in the silver shirt and black suit with the fake
beard and wig topped by a tall white Stetson bounded onstage with his
four black-clad bandmates. A punchy acoustic string-band version of an
old folk blues called Roving Gambler got started. At 61, Dylan had
returned to the scene of the crime.
Or maybe he hadnt, and not just because of Heraclitus, with whom
Dylan would surely agree about feet and the same river twice. For the
assembled multitude who had come to the fabled rock where the prophet
had stood and been dishonored, it was, as it should have been, an Event;

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In the Garage

they made the biggest one-day crowd the festivals had in years. For the
enigmatic bard himself, his Cassandra streak and razor wit evident again
after years of trying to banish or submerge them, his restless decades-long
quest for something to believe in an implacable universe transformed by
his art into an uneven but awesome legacy crucial to American popular
culture (40-plus albums, 500-plus songs, 200-days-a-year of roadburn),
back in Newport and gunning his rapid-re way through the 90-minuteplus set of revamped classics and breaking out periodically into a smile,
like Mona Lisa with the highway blues, its impossible to say. Is the
shaman onstage for the umpteenth time more or less likely than we are to
know or care what this specic moment is supposed to mean? Is it just
another turn in the maze he runs outside the Gates of Eden, looking for
love, jubilation, transcendence, apocalypse, hope, deathan answer, an
exit? How can you tell the dancer from the dance?
Im mortied to be onstage, Dylan told the New York Times in 1997,
but then again, its the only place Im happy. . . . I dont want to put on
the mask of celebrity. Id rather just do my work and see it as a trade.
As listeners snaked through the dozens of vendors stands and past the
stages, they brushed against everything from traditional hill tunes to
country and rock and the confessional singersongwriter mode that is
now, after Dylan, usually thought of as folk music. One early act on the
main stage rammed home a Led Zeppelin cover. It was all far, far indeed
from the hallowed tale of 1965, in which Dylan led musicians from the
Paul Buttereld Blues Band and the Blues Project, two early improvising
rock groups, into a blistering version of his anti-Village folk scene screed,
Like a Rolling Stone, that drew such furious booing they soon split
the stage.
Myth can be more fun and sharper-sighted than history, and even, as
Dylan the mythmaker knows, truer. Over the years, variant accounts of
1965 Newport have surfaced. The standard version ultimately comes from
Pete Seegerthough Dylan himself helped. Seeger was then the keeper of
the folk-revival ame. According to this dominant form of the story, often
embroidered and heightened by succeeding writers for effect, the booing
was loud, spontaneous, and universal, as folk fans rejected Dylans
contemptuous noise, demanded a return to the authentic socially aware
sounds hed made his folkie bones with, songs like The Times They Are
A-Changin. But others have suggested that the booing came largely from
backstage, from Seeger and his cohorts, shocked by what they saw as
treasonor from fans complaining about the crummy sound systemor
even that there was no booing at all. Still others noted that Dylan had
used electric instruments on his records; that on 1964s Another Side of
Bob Dylan he abandoned overt political protest for Brechtian parables
about tortured love and striated life, thus bolting from the mission Seeger
saw as central to contemporary folk music; that Like a Rolling Stone
was hitting the charts across America (ultimately to reach number two on

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155

the Billboard rankings) and AM radio was bending its sacred three-minute
limit to air it; that you would have to have been deaf indeed to have been
shocked by what Dylan was up to at Newport.
Whatever. After three electric and three acoustic tunes, he quit.
As he moved over the last four decades from protest singer to surrealistic prophet, from born-again Christian to born-again Jew, Dylans life
and music registered, however unwillingly or elliptically, his times. This is
one reason people have interpreted his Mona Lisahighway blues smile
and his amphetamine/Beat attitudes in their own images. Theyve translated him into hero, antihero, sellout, savior, asshole, religious zealot,
burnout, political radical, and artist. Unless it was useful to him, Dylan
usually resented being reduced in rank from prophet (he has always credited divine inspiration for his work, and his most apocalyptic imagery
rages with echoes of Blake and the Bible) to mere mirror-holder, and he has
usually managed to translate himself anewthe protean artist. That is
part of his genius, the soul linking his tangled life to his web of artand,
for that matter, his art to his audience.
So like the decade he symbolizes, Dylan today is many things to many
people. Hes an aging rock star composer of some of the most powerful
and enduring songs of the century who loves the gypsy life of the road; a
multimillionaire with an Elvis-like entourage who has an un-American
lack of interest in personal hygiene; a double-talking celebrity with a ferocious sense of privacy who has spent most of his life in studios and on the
road with his ears fullto varying degrees, depending on exactly when
were talking aboutof the transcendent sounds he hears in his head, as
well as the roaring sound of the star machinery and its need for lubrication. Such is the dilemma of any commercial artist. Pop culture is full of
the tales. But few if any other pop songwriters have been considered for
the Nobel Prize in Literature.
The slightly pudgy 19-year-old came to the 1961 Greenwich Village
folk scene with a Woody Guthrie playbook on his knee, but he loved
Buddy Hollys Stratocaster and Elvis Presleys raw Sun recording sessions
and knew he wanted to be a star. He told Joseph Haas in 1965, I was
playing rock and roll when I was 13 and 14 and 15, but I had to quit when
I was 16 or 17 because I couldnt make it that way, the image of the day
was Frankie Avalon or Fabian, or this whole athletic supercleanness
bit. . . . I discovered Odetta, Harry Belafonte, that stuff, and I became a
folk singer. It was easier, he added, because you only had to perform by
yourself on acoustic guitar.
It was easier, too, because rock and roll had been supplanted as the
music of rebellionand wherever young Bobby Zimmerman was going,
dissatised rebellion was the propulsion. For collegians, the folk revival
doubled with jazz as rock and rolls more intellectual cousin, its stopgap
replacement, a more exotic form of the postwar rebellion that everywhere

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In the Garage

just below the crusts of mainstream America threatened to undam its hot
lava ows. While Park Avenue debutantes chased jazz musicians for sexual
whiffs and actual liaisons to catch the frisson of rulebreaking, folk music
lent buttoned-down collegians perspectives so alien to their obvious privilege, so hard to nd alternatives to in this era. The sullen, inchoate
existentialist forms of rejection that gripped white America worried about
its kidsgangs? juvenile delinquency? West Side Story? heavy petting?
refusal to slip into societys slots?made Life magazine stories on the
Beats and their passive willingness to scrape by, bypass careers and families, revel in drugs and sexuality, and follow black jazz more alarming and
all too much of a piece.
Their fears were well-grounded. Jazz and folk shared obvious magnetic
attractions for the disaffectedand for some of the same reasons:
outsiderness, an exotic and yet authentically human, American nature that
wasnt accounted for, owned, coopted, or polluted by the mainstream
culture in its values or goals. That these simplistic oppositions became
even more illusory as the period unwound does nothing to deny their
mythic power.
Pete Seeger spent the postwar era as a college-traveling troubadour,
spreading the gospel of True Folk Culture wherever he went. An engaging
performer, all gangly and earnest with ingratiating and often selfdeprecating humor, Seeger had been blacklisted at the height of his career,
and relegated to American cultures back forty, which he turned into the
pastures of plenty, the fecund seedgrounds for the urban folk revival that
was part of the great postwar American Renaissance.
As Dylan recalled his early days in New York to interviewer Bill
Flanagan: All these black guys would come up from south of the border
and recite poetry in the park. Now theyd call them rappers. The best was
a guy named Big Brown who had long poems. Each one was about fteen
minutes long. They were long, drawn-out badmen stories. Romance, politics, just about everything you could imagine was thrown into his stuff. He
came out of Texas, I think, and he was in jail a lot. I always thought that
was the best poetry I ever heard. Streetwise poetry. There were quite a few
of those guys around in the sixties. I heard them at Mardi Gras, too. They
were just brilliant speakers.
In 1961 Greenwich Village, the scenes lodestars included Seeger,
Reverend Gary Davis, Dave Van Ronk, and, of course, Joan Baez. Everyone knows how Dylan screwedand then screwedBaez after shed
helped launch his career by acting as his scene patron and covering his
songs. Most recently, David Hajdus Positively 4th Street puts early 1960s
Dylan into a pas-de-deuxing foursome with the Baez sisters, Joan and
Mimi, and Richard Faria, whose role is inated to make him almost
Dylans artistic equal, a major initiator of folk rock. Its the latest twist on
the creative and sexual intellectually charged soap opera that insiders
retold and reinterpreted over the years with Rashomon-style variations.

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By most accounts (and over four decades there have been plenty) Dylan
early on cast himselfrst in his minds eye, then, after hed established
the myths, in factas a shadow observer hoboing through life, with his
BO and irresistible charm and coldhearted focus and spew of genius.
According to a lot of the witnesses, Dylan lives in introverted, nearconstant turbulence, buffeted by internal as well as external winds and by
his own creativity, which produces constant alienation. The chorus for this
troubadours life has many members. There are women who sing his
praises, care for him, want to protect him; they include sincere Minnesota
folkie madonnas, Village political sophisticates like Suze Rotolo, celebrities like Baez, and his apparently endless lovers from white groupies to
black backup singers. There are ex-acolytes and musicians and business
associates wailing the I-been-abused blues. There are core loyalists and
friends. There are fawners, often drawn from the same pool as the abused.
They all generally agree, though, that the Bob Dylan they know is an unbelievably private, often surprisingly inarticulate man with nearly
unshakable drive and talent. In book after book about Dylan, the star of
the show ickers like a strobed and ultimately elusive image through the
crosscut glimpses of his intimates. The facts and tales pile up; the gure
behind the screen seems to come into clearer focus but never quite
emerges. In one recent biography, Down the Highway, Howard Sounes
gropes for the inner Dylan and often comes away silly. Trying to extrapolate insight from Dylans visual artwork collected in Drawn Blank, for
example, Sounes writes, Mostly Bob seemed to be alone in empty rooms.
He often drew the view from his balcony, a view of empty streets, parking
lots, and bleak city skylines.
Perhaps, as Sounes and others have asserted, Dylan has conservative
beliefs, in contrast to, say, the leftish countercultures of the folk and rock
scenes he galvanized without fully inhabiting. Or perhaps he simply has
always desperately wanted privacy for himself and his family and friends.
After all, how many of us have an A. J. Weberman ready to lurk outside
our houses and dig, on a daily basis, through our garbage, and then
publish the lunatic Dylanology? It does seem that Dylan, like most people,
has a oating mishmash of an ad hoc personal code of morality. Ive never
really cared, and so as I plow through version after version of his life, each
with its ways to carp, I wonder why Dylan is supposed to be different from
any other complicated human. Is it because his art delivers such emotional
rawnesss, such a heightened sense of self and surroundings, that people
are disappointed when the man dances interminably?
David Hajdus variants of the Dylan-Baez saga start with the young
Baez sisters seeing Seeger in concert and getting their own guitars, then
follow Joan to the thriving Cambridge folk scene, where she became a star
with a recording contract. We view her through a novelistic collage of
perspectives: Baez herself, those shed already left behind in California,
those watching her rise in Boston. This technique shapes the books story-

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In the Garage

telling. We see Faria, for instance, through Mimis eyes as a basically

lovable, if hurtful, rogue genius; through Joans by turns as accomplice,
potential seducer, and parasite. We watch Joans Cambridge friends fret
and fume at young Bobby Dylans riding her to the top while Joan loves
him blindly, and meet other Dylan lovers like Suze Rotolo and Sara
Lownds, whom Dylan later married. We wonder why Mimi cant see how
Faria is using her to get to Joan, since nearly everybody else, including
Joan, does, and we wonder if hell succeed. And we hear the chorus of
disharmony around the charged moment when Dylan abandoned his
image as folksinger; we note that Joan idealistically spurns manager Albert
Grossman and a major record label and Bob signs with both.
Evoking the long-standing theme that early Dylan was the parasite
creation of the people around him, Hajdu writes: By the spring of 1962,
Suze and Bob had known each other for about six months and had grown
close, despite Dylans reluctance to reveal much about himself. He tested
his songs on her, played Elvis records for her to hear, and brought her to
Gerdes; she loaned him books of poetry and took him to CORE meetings. A lot of what I gave him was a look at how the other half
livedleft-wing things he didnt know, said Rotolo. He knew about
Woody and Pete Seeger, but I was working for CORE and went on youth
marches for civil rights, and all that was new to him. It was in the air, but
it was new to him. And poetry, we read a lot of poetry togetherLord
Byron and Rimbaud, as well as playwrights, especially Brecht, a lot of
Brecht. As Dylan prepared to begin recording again, the failure of his rst
album still fresh, he focused on writing his own songs. Perhaps Albert
Grossman was right: he was a poet. And Suze might have a point: social
protest was in the air.
Aside from the sleek innuendo theres no news here: Rotolos role was
established long ago, and Dylan has always maintained that he became a
protest singer because its what was happening around him. His commitment to it was as an artistic form, not as a lifes work. Its easy to see why,
once hed mastered it, he would, as he would again and again with people
as well as ideas, move on. Its less easy to see, after all these years, why so
many around him register shock or surprise when he does.
The Village folkies, in full creative coffeehouse ight, were generally
leftish, middle class, longing for cultural authenticity and artistic purity,
and interested in making something apart from the loathed world of
commercial showbizeverything Albert Grossman, the ex-Chicago
clubowner now turned folk-scene maven, who would manufacture and
manage acts from Peter Paul and Mary to The Band and Janis Joplin while
building a world-class recording studio outside Woodstock, soon came to
represent.
After New York Times critic Robert Shelton raved about Dylan at
Gerdes in print, Columbia Records brass inked him. They wagered little

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159

money on his success, though; one reason they could sign up folkies with
such alacrity was the low budgets needed to record and promote them.
Dylans debut cost $403 to cut and sold 4,200 copiesnot Elvis, but not
the debacle some writers have made it out, given the small numbers most
jazz and folk discs sold then and now. Goldman, however, decided
shrewdly that, since the bulk of the money in the music business came
from publishing rights, he would market Dylan the Songwriter. And so, in
mid-1962, Dylan signed a three-year deal with Witmark Music, which
would publish 237 of his songs. And Goldman formed Peter Paul and
Mary, whose primary function was to record Dylan tunes.
One of those, Man on the Street, ended in a Brechtian stab at translating words into deeds, art into social action, Woody Guthrie style. And
there were caustic political tracts like John Birch Talking Blues, which
CBSs censor forbade Dylan to play on the Ed Sullivan Show. Hed drilled
into Americas nerves, and controversy and publicity dogged him: when
Blowin in the Wind rode high on the charts in 1963, rst Newsweek,
then Time, revealed his real name and background, sneering, trying to
undercut his credibility as a protester, much as they had sneered at Beats
and jazz musicians. But Dylan got it from all sides. In 1964, he courted a
storm of criticism, said critic Ralph Gleason, for the surreally tinged,
erce love songs on Another Side of Bob Dylan. The kicker was My Back
Pages, where he takes leave of the folk-revival movement with a typically
acid-etched, paradoxical goodbye to the black-and-white ideologies of the
folk world, as he heads toward making art of the tumultuous riot where
his inner and outer lives meet.
Folkies, like jazzers and much of the left, distrusted and often despised
American popular culture. And yet commercial pop culture is precisely
where Dylan dove headlong as soon as he could. Even before his fabled
asco at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Dylan drew electric guitars and
drumsthe evil talismans of showbiz and commercial selloutfrom his
toy chest, where theyd been waiting alongside Harry Smiths Anthology
of American Folk Music, Hank Williams, Little Richard and Elvis Presley.
In 1964, Nat Hentoff wrote in The New Yorker, Hes got a wider
range of talents than he shows, (producer Tom) Wilson told me. Later
Dylan told Hentoff, I dont want to write for people anymore. You
knowbe a spokesperson . . . from now on I want to write from inside
me. My Back Pages heralded the next year at Newport.
Fort Adams Park is actually several miles from Freebody Park, where
the Newport Folk Festival was originally held when George Wein, who
founded the Newport Jazz Festival in 1954, and his then-partner Albert
Grossman, who later managed the biggest names of 1960s rock, including
Dylan, started it in 1959. It died after two years. In 1962, Wein hooked up
with Pete Seeger and Theo Bikel, and by 1965 the revamped fest drew
71,000 people and sported a 64-page program with 40 ads. Folk music, the

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major record companies had realized, was big business. Still, each artist
was paid a democratic $50 per show; prots funded the Newport Folk
Foundations promulgating of folk music and musicians. This is the basic
model Weins Festival Productions still follows for the immensely popular
New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, as does Seeger, whose wonderful
annual Clearwater Hudson River Festival at Croton State Park has oated
the sloop and its miraculous river cleanup since 1964.
After 1965, Wein tried to realign the Newport Folk Festival with the
erupting forces of the post-Dylan world via acts like Buffalo Springeld,
but in 1971 it shut and wasnt revived for fteen years. Even as Dylan
walked off the Newport stage in 1965 he was reaching the rst pinnacle
of his 40-year career, and had already transformed American popular
culture. So many roads led to him and so many emerged from him that his
main rivals as transformative agents in popular American music may be
Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and Elvis Presleyand, like all of them, he
drew recurrent abuse from fans who saw him as betraying his talent,
abandoning the purity of his early days. But for Dylan, purity is a pointless abstraction; like St. Paul, he believes virtue is manifest only in being
tested. To live outside the law, warns one of his most famous ruthless
lines, you must be honest.
Dylan incarnates the Great American Songbook, its worst as well as
its best. Another Woody Guthrie manque when he hit New York, he grew
up on Buddy Holly and Little Richard. During the early 1960s, he
absorbed the totemic Anthology of American Folk Music, the last generations of true folk musicians, the folk revivalists who ocked to
Greenwich Village and Cambridge to Travis-pick guitars behind traditional ballads and Guthrie tunes and whatever else theyd picked up. He
was a deadly mimic, and learned to phrase inimitably from blues and
soul, though his voice was often ridiculed; his guitar skills, like Guthries,
varied from painfully rudimentary to quite accomplished. His creative
outbursts, the nonstop writing, tumbled all he heard and read and did
into his increasingly high-torqued personalized songs; tapped by the
shades of Blake and Rimbaud, hed become a seer or shaman, a seismic
artist who quavered to the times deep rhythmic structures whether he
willed it or not.
The Beatles and Rolling Stones survived past the British Invasion
largely because they jumped on Dylans millennial bandwagon, adapting
his Jeremiahs cry, his truthtellers story forms, his sly ironies and probing
sarcasm and haunted paradoxical loves; his far-reaching grasp of forms,
his impossible phrasing, his poets fecund sense of language in play for its
beauties and possibilities. They gave him back the gift of American rock
and its pop and roots forebears; he gave them art. In the process, they
morphed from talented cover bands of American roots music and R & B
who wrote pop ditties and novelty tunes into singersongwriters on
Dylans model, storytellers who strove to paint personal and social

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pictures that Tin Pan Alley couldnt. This self-contained model of artistry
became the industry standard, aside from prefab acts. It happened almost
immediately: no sooner was Dylan Dylan than the search was on for the
Next Dylan, the New Dylana list that, over the decades, accumulated
dozens like Donovan, Paul Simon, Arlo Guthrie, Springsteen, even Dylans
son Jakob. If the British Invasion upended the complacent American
record industry by demonstrating that the kids wanted something else
and would pay big bucks for it, Dylan altered the fundamental nature of
what the kids wanted. He had realized Woody Guthries dreama true
popular art.
Its a big stone to carry, but its Dylansand in the rollercoaster course
of claiming it this guarded, caustic person has left a trail of human and
other wreckage. Still, he earned it with the three classic albums of his
amphetamine-surreal-Beat period, the multifaceted Bringing It All Back
Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.
There are still anti-Dylan folkies as hardfaced about Dylan-goeselectric-at-Newport as jazz purists are about post-Bitches Brew Miles
Davis. Like jazz, folk music enjoyed a wider commercial appeal while rock
and roll regenerated through the early 1960s. They shared the cultural
cachet of being the soundtracks for intellectuals and Beats, college students
and hipsters. The versions of jazz and folk that dominated the radiothe
Kingston Trio, Ramsey Lewis Triowere dismissed as made-for-themasses pablum. Insiders lamented them but shrugged; they, after all, had
access to the real deal. When Dylan and Davis in the mid-1960s redened
for themselves what the real deal was, insiders faced a choice: take a
similar shot at redenition or excommunicate the heretic.
In his intuitive fashion, Dylan registered more jazz than most, just as he
absorbed and extracted more country, blues, and other forms than most;
his only real folk-scene rivals in musical catholicity were Pete Seeger and
Dave Van Ronk. Dylans tastes in jazz included Jelly Roll Morton and
Billie Holiday. Nat Hentoff, writing about the new folk as well as jazz,
interviewed Dylan in 1966 for Playboy. Theyd done this before, and they
had a score to even: Playboy had tried to edit an earlier interview, so they
decided to do a put-on.
In it, Dylan whiplashed the jazz snobs intellectual pretensions with
surreal humor, the common language of the counterculture, the Marx
Brothers attitude Abbie Hoffman tried to make into Yippies. Hentoff
asked him, In recent years . . . jazz has lost much of its appeal to the
younger generation. Do you agree? Dylan answered: I dont really know
who this younger generation is. I dont think they could get into a jazz
club anyway. But jazz is hard to follow; I mean you actually have to like
jazz to follow it; and my motto is, never follow anything. . . . What would
some parent say to his kid if the kid came home with a glass eye, a Charlie
Mingus record, and a pocketful of feathers? Hed say, Who are you

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following? And the poor kid would have to stand there with water in his
shoes, a bow tie on his ear, and soot pouring out of his belly button and
say, Jazz, father, Ive been following jazz. . . . Then the kids mother
would tell her friends, Oh yes, our little Donald, hes part of the younger
generation, you know.
At the peak of his powers in the early 1960s, Charlie Mingus would
bestow titles on his music like Folk Forms 1. He was acknowledging
the tradition of folk compositionadopt or adapt an existing melody or
song form to your uses. Minguss models were Bartk, Stravinsky,
Copland, Ellingtonpeople who made self-conscious art from the folk
traditions artifacts. By contrast, like Guthrie before him, Dylans early
compositions were new lyrics tted to existing or modied tunes. These
methods are genetically related. Jazzs common currency is standards,
popular tunes literate jazz musicians are expected to know how to navigate. A favorite pastime at postwar hootenannies was to pass the song
aroundeach person got a crack at improvising a verse or stanza. Think
of these as the folk scenes jam sessions, a way of transmitting information
as well as competitively rating players.
Improvisation is rooted in memory; its spontaneous creation is not
totally ad-lib. Dylan practicedspoke, ranted, typed, sang, performed
incessantly, honing his talent while he absorbed all around him like a
psychic sponge. Revved to fever pitch by speed-freak restlessness and his
shuttered but muscular sense of self and the power of his art, he had to
keep moving on. What else could he do? Or, as my colleague Stuart
Klawans put it, Since he could write Subterranean Homesick Blues, why
would he not?
My rst Dylan albums were Bringin It All Back Home, Highway 61
Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde, so for me Dylans real value has never
been only as a political symbol anyway: hes got everything he needs, hes
an artist, he dont look back. And his penetrating mysticism was blazingly
clear then, way before he got involved with organized religions.
As Dylan told Flanagan: Songs are supposed to be heroic enough to
give the illusion of stopping time. With just that thought. To hear a song
is to hear someones thought, no matter what theyre describing. If you
see something and you think its important enough to describe, then thats
your thought. You only think one thought at a time, so what you come up
with is really what youre given. When you sit around and imagine things
to do and to write and to thinkthats fantasy. Ive never been much into
that. Anybody can fantasize. Little kids can, old people can, everybodys
got the right to their own fantasies. But thats all they are. Fantasies.
Theyre not dreams. A dream has more substance to it than a fantasy. . . .
So you cant say what its about. But what you can do is try to give the illusion of the moment of it. And even thats not what its about. Thats just

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proof that you existed. Whats anything about? Its not about anything. It
is what it is.
As a friend of mine once put it, Dylan opened the toy chest of American
popular music so that anyone could play with all of its contents. The
remark underscores the breadth of Dylans catalog. Only a few musical
peersRay Charles comes to mindhave done anything as wide-ranging,
have magnicently ignored the notion that genius lives, as the popular
Malvina Reynolds song put it, in little boxes. Or as Dylan snidely
remarked to Hentoff in their 1966 Playboy put-on, What does it mean,
rock and roll? Does it mean Beatles, does it mean John Lee Hooker, Bobby
Vinton, Jerry Lewiss kid? What about Lawrence Welk? . . . Are all these
people the same? Is Ricky Nelson like Otis Redding? Is Mick Jagger really
Ma Rainey?
Maybe its not surprising that, like Charles, Dylan seems to have two
key qualities: genius and self-protective complexity. From the beginning,
the Dance of the Seven Veils between the (initially few genuine) facts that
surfaced about his private lives and the whirring rumors has been part of
his celebrity allure; it amplied his gyrating lyrics, gave insiders plenty to
guess and gossip about, and outsiders a contact high.
In 1965, when Bringing It All Back Home was released, D. A.
Pennebaker tagged along for Dylans last all-acoustic tour of Britain and
lmed Dont Look Back. The tour, completely sold out in advance,
repeated current songs like the epic Gates of Eden and the nearly epic
Its Alright Ma. The achingly bitter Its All Over Now, Baby Blue he
pulls out one hotel-party night to gun down a very young Donovan Leitch,
the Next New Dylan: Donovan leads off the battle with an insipid ditty,
and Dylan retunes the guitar and mows him down, looking like a
protopunk, black leather and closed tab collars and Cuban-heeled boots
and that tangled mop of hair. Subterranean Homesick Blues is number
six on the UK charts and everywhere on car radios while he tours. In soldout Albert Hall, the crowd is hushed to reverence.
Released in 1967, the movie caused a stir mostly because it unveiled
another few sides of Dylan. Now its been reissued on DVD, with the usual
enhanced menu of outtakes (here audio tracks) and commentary (some
useful, some silly). The good news is that it looks just as murky as ever.
With this backstage home movie, Pennebaker was inventing our notions
of cinma vrit: a wash of grimy, grainy images with weirdly impromptu
light, in-the-moment vignettes and scenes.
Pennebaker wasnt interested in converting Dylan into a poster boy for
activism or peace and love or the Francis Child ballad collection; he
grasped the artistic multiplicity that often came out as duplicity. During
the movie, Dylan reveals side after side: the manipulative creep; the defensive master of the counterlunge; the insular and sometimes inarticulate star;
the smartass provocateur; the hyperintense performer; the chain-smoking,

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coffee-drinking, spasmic-twitching composer sitting endlessly at typewriters and pianos. And yeah, the nice guy pops up too. Its a portrait of
the artist as Zelig.
In Pennebakers lm, this Zelig too has his handler: the owlish, pudgy
Svengali that was Albert Grossman, who negotiates about money in a
couple of thug-inspired, nasty scenes. Folk veterans tend to see him as a
representative of Moloch, though he did encourage Dylan to write and
experiment early on. He also produced the lm.
According to Pennebaker, Dylan came up with the movies famous
opening: Subterranean Homesick Blues plays while Dylan, wearing a
slight sneer, stands on one side of an alley. Allen Ginsberg and Peter
Orlovsky stand off to the other. Dylan is holding placards with bits of
lyrics from the tune, and drops each card to the ground when it goes by
on the audio track. Its a neat piece of visual business that bridges Buster
Keaton and MTV.
Hangers-on drift across the screen throughout the lm: producer Tom
Wilson, who carried over the acetates of Bringing It All Back Home; Alan
Price, the organist who had been red from the Animals, the blues group
he founded, after they hit the charts with House of the Rising Sun,
which they covered because of Dylan; and, of course, Joan Baez. She had
headlined a 10-day tour in the United States, which she thought was
continuing in the United Kingdom; it wasnt. Dylan and his sidekick/
roadie Bobby Neuwirth escalate from tolerating her to torturing her. They
make fun of her small breasts. She sings one of Dylans loveliest songs,
Turn Turn Turn Again, while he types, ignoring her. When he sings the
Hank Williams classics Lost Highway and Im So Lonesome I Could
Die, she tries to harmonize but doesnt know most of the words.
He shrugs off journalists, then as now, with Youre gonna write whatever you want anyway. But periodically hes exasperated into directness.
Do you think, he bursts out at one point, wriggling free of being pinned
by a stream of questions about his roles as youth spokesperson, movement leader, artistic gurehead, anybody that comes to see me is coming
for any other reason than entertainment?
The hero of Don DeLillos brilliant satiric novel of rock and paranoia,
Great Jones Street, is Bucky Wonderlick, modeled on Dylan with traces of
John Lennon and Mick Jagger. Hes in hiding when Running Dog News
Service uncovers his rundown loft lair and presses deferentially, gently for
information. We know its asking a lot expecting an interview. . . . What
about the rumors? Buckys response: Theyre all true.
When Like a Rolling Stone peaked at number two on the charts on
August 14, 1965, in the number one slot was Barry McGuires simplied
Dylan protest soundalike, Eve of Destruction. That didnt surpress the
outrage from the folk world and older fans that trailed Dylan as he crisscrossed America, then Europe with members of the Hawks and key-

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boardist Al Kooper for much of the year. The edgling new tour circuit for
rock, cobbled together out of small clubs, old theaters, and ball parks, was
barely aborning. As were all the engineering and logistics: only a couple of
years earlier, 50,000 fans at Shea Stadium screamed while the Beatles
played through tiny ampliers. The technology of large-scale rock concerts
hadnt gotten much better, until Dylan. Covering him for the Saturday
Evening Post in 1966, Jules Siegal notes the custom sound system worth
$30,000 being carted around in eight large crates. He also notes that to
date Highway 61 sold 360,000 copies in the US alone, that Dylan had sold
10 million albums worldwide, and that his tunes had been covered 150
times by artists ranging from Stan Getz to Lawrence Welk.
David Hajdus neatly shaped narrative skids with deliberate abruptness to its nish in 1966. That April, after a publication party for his
seminal counterculture book, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to
Me, Richard Faria died in a motorcycle crash. Three months later,
Dylan had his own motorcycle crash, which pulled him out of the public
eye for three years. Hajdu writes, Precisely what happened to Bob
Dylan on July 29 is impossible to reconstruct with authority. Except
that, as with Greta Garbo, it multiplied his mythological status. In Great
Jones Street, as DeLillo explores and exposes the mystique and business
of American mores and the counterculture, Bucky Wunderlick withdraws, overwhelmed by fans demands, the roads repetitions, the
claustrophobic celebrity that closes him off from his creativity. His
manager sees things differently: The press is getting the dry heaves over
your disappearance.
It might as well be Dylan who retorts, There is no freedom without
privacy. Souness biography retells familiar tales, as we watch obsessive fans stake out Dylans houses, hassle his women and kids, ransack
his garbage. We learn more of the grimy legal battles between Dylan and
Grossman, who for several years, at least, earned much more from Dylan
than Dylan did. According to Souness version, In 1981twelve years
after they had stopped doing business together, Grossman sued Bob for
back royalties. Bob filed eighteen counterclaims, complaining that
Grossman had exploited and mismanaged him throughout their association. Bob refuted suggestions Grossman had discovered him, pointing
out he had already acquired an agent and a record deal before they met.
Bob said he was completely unsophisticated in business at the time. . . .
He felt Grossman had taken advantage of this naivete, and it was not
just the money he had lost that rankled with him. He also felt hurt that
someone he had trusted had betrayed him. This hurt was apparent when
Bob gave a sworn deposition in 1981 in support of his counterclaims.
By this time he had seen more than $7 million of his earnings siphoned
off by Grossman. When asked how long he had known Mr. Grossman,
Bob replied carefully, Well, I dont think Ive ever known the man,
Mr. Grossman.

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In the Garage

He did know lots of women, though, and in book after book, article
after article they parade dizzyingly by: Minnesota coffeehouse girls, Suze
Rotolo, Baez, Suze again, his rst wife Sara, Baez again, back to Sara,
various sidetrips, a string of black backup singers like Clydie King and
Carolyn Dennis, who, Sounes reveals, had Dylans child and secretly
married him.
Those he got closest to talk little: a Woodstock neighbor who remembers him as a family man waiting for his kids to come home from school,
for instance. With such a rich, tumultuous interior life nding complex
creative form with such immediate impact, Dylan constructed a persona
of mumbled putdowns and monosyllables, a deliberate artifact of confusion, an existential challenge. His musical cohorts from over the decades
retail variations of the same tale: little contact, minimal-to-no rehearsal,
vague if any instruction. Even the Hawks, later known as The Band,
arguably Dylans closest creative associates in the late 1960s, shed little
light on the man and his muse.
Using his 1966 motorcycle accident as cover to withdraw from the
circus, Dylan hung out at Big Pink with The Band, a garage-band
funhouse where they played old songs and scrambled up some new ones.
They all, but especially Robbie Robertson, learned the architecture of
songs and the art of songwriting from The Master.
John Wesley Harding, released during this period, had been recorded
earlier. After Dylans rst reappearance, at the Woody Guthrie memorial
concert at Carnegie Hall on January 20, 1968, Lillian Roxon described it
glowingly as a completely folk record. Its plain gray cover had a
Polaroid for its picture. What you saw was what you got: John Wesley
Harding was back-to-the-roots; leave the overblown psychedelic heights
to the Beatles and Stones. It also previewed the next stretch of Dylans
road: direct, unaffected songs, at their best dashed with his surreal humor
and mystic moments. Within a month, John Wesley Harding sold 500,000
copies. His Big Three had each taken a year to sell that many.
Nashville Skyline, his 1969 silence-breaker, disappointed most fans
the newly lightened voice, the genially mild love songs, recalled why critics
have always found Miltons Satan more fascinating than his God. Then
came the bootleg Great White Wonder, the rst version of the Basement
Tapes of Dylan with The Band, again playing Janus, rooting around
Americas attic to nd ways to speak to its present.
In 1970, Bob Dylan got an honorary degree from Princeton University.
Academics armed with relevance taught his songs, his liner notes, his
scattered poems, his life.
Like most, I was bored, then lost touch with the 1970s and 1980s Dylan,
who dulled his edge and his vehement sense of humor, it seemed; a dedicated family man engaged in legal battles with Grossman, whom embrac-

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ing religions, evading stalkers, he slid further into irrelevance as his records
grew thin, boring, annoying. There were musical spots of light: New
Morning had some weird but wonderful spins like the tender waltz Winterlude, the soul-recitative-with-backing-scatting If Dogs Run Free.
1974s Planet Waves ranks with his greatest work. With Tangled Up in
Blue, 1975s Blood on the Tracks was hailed as a masterpiece, Dylan
Redux. Once he was born again in 1979, his songs edged toward existential hymns, as on Slow Train Coming.
But most of the albums over 20 years lacked wit and durable material,
as Dylan drifted through drug abuse, exploding relationships, nancial
crashes, religious fevers, public self-destruction at the Live Aid concert,
and a host of problems that culminated in the late 1980s, when he oated
a desperate offer to join the Grateful Dead. Dylan worshippers, the band
gently sidestepped the issue, but one upshot was 1989s Dylan & The
Dead, a reasonable album that marked the onset of his nal turnaround.
Always an improviser onstage and in the studio, he started to choose his
bandmates and his sets more carefully, keeping the loose, sloppy jam feel
(which grew whenever he played lead guitar); his bands got polished to a
roadhouse sheen. Hed become the touring troubadour hed imagined
himself as a kid.
In November 1994, dressed in iconic big-polka-dot shirt and black
sunglasses, 53-year-old Bob Dylan appeared on MTVs Unplugged. He
sang a handful of his greatest hits, mostly 1960s vintage, some of his most
wondrous and paranoid and surreal creations: Tombstone Blues, All
Along the Watchtower, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35, Desolation
Row, Like a Rolling Stone, With God on Our Side and The Times
They Are A-Changin. Not long afterward, he licensed that last tune for
use in ads by the Bank of Montreal and Coopers & Lybrand.
Yes, this is the enigmatic legacy of the 1960s, that tar baby of American
cultural politics. But the selling of the counterculture was built into what
was, after all, a pop phenomenon. The Grateful Dead started peddling Tshirts during the Winterland days with Bill Graham. By the time we got to
Woodstock, counterculture was a squishy advertising concept. No one
at the time saw this better than the artful enigma that is Dylan.
I see pictures of the 50s, the 60s, the 70s, and I see there was a difference, Dylan told one interviewer in 1995. But I dont think the human
mind can comprehend the past and the future. They are both just illusions
that can manipulate you into thinking theres some kind of change.
Thus spake Zarathustra.
By 1995s MTV Unplugged, Dylan was resurrected, though hardly the
same. He stopped tossing his old tunes off almost contemptuously; they
were persistently rearranged, reinterpreted, in jazzs (and 1960s rocks)
restless fashion, far from the freeze-dried recording reproductions that
now dominate pop concerts. At the time, his classic material was being

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In the Garage

reissued almost nonstop via the industrys rapid recycling of inventory

onto the new CD format. This remains his concert mode.
His near-death experience in 1997 from a heart infectionan eerie
bracket to 1966grabbed him headlines, and refocused and energized
him. Time Out of Mind, from that same year, was rightly hailed as his
best effort since Blood on the Tracks. Produced by Daniel Lanois, its
rootsy sounds drew from Delta and Chicago blues, rockabilly, and ballads;
its lyrics had bite and power, reestablished his wit and humor about loss
and hope and entropy and pain and faith and, of course, death in a hostile
and indifferent worldtopics for grown-up rockers. Songs with titles like
Not Dark Yet and Trying To Get to Heaven were delivered in a
weary, scuffed-leather croak whose phrasing danced with the rhythmic
subtleties hed learned from jazz and blues. One jazz musician told me, I
love to watch people try to sing along with him. He never does what they
expect with the melody. The closest thing to what he does with his voice
is Sonny Rollinss sax.
The albums epic tune, Highlands, epitomizes the subtle smarts of
Dylan Reborn. He never repeats his delivery; neither does the band, which
mingles Pops Staples with Delta blues, mutating its licks almost subliminally for every single verse of the 15-minute track. Meantime, Lanoiss
patented mix, deep with tremolo, gently rotates the instruments through
a roughly spherical soundstage, creating an unconscious complicity with
the lyricswhich ultimately, after some very funny verses (including a
vintage-Dylan shaggy dog story about a waitress who wants him to sketch
her), are about going into that good night.
Then again, Dylan was always the grown-up at the party in the 1960s,
disdaining airy talk of love and change. He was the closest thing to a real
bluesman born of that time. I remember what Al Kooper, who played
organ on Highway 61 Revisited and at Newport in 1966, once told me.
Tom Wilson, the only black staff producer at Columbia, owned an indie
jazz label before producing records by the Animals, Dylan, Simon &
Garfunkel and the Velvet Underground. Wilson said of Dylan, Put him
with an electric band, and youll have a white Ray Charles whos a poet.
That neatly describes both Time Out of Mind and 2001s Love and
Theft. His lyrics are so raw, so emotionally direct, said one friend who
revisited these albums about the time I did, that theyre almost blank;
you can project yourself onto them. At the same time, our own Heraclitus takes note of times passage in oblique but telling ways. Where once
he sang deantly, When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose, now
older he grumbles realistically, When you think that youve lost everything, you nd out you can always lose a little more.
On Love and Theft, Dylan even more overtly embraces jazz, especially
of the between-the-wars Swing Era when blues and jazz and early R & B
all blended in the likes of Armstrong and Nat King Cole. Bye and Bye
nds his croak skipping blithely, limberly, through sardonically high-

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stepping swing, recalling nothing more than Armstrongs vocals without

the heft, somewhere near Billie Holidays late singing. Moonlight is a
suave torch songDylan as Astairetinged with threat. And theres
heavy-duty Chicago blues, rockabilly, and rockers to ll out the album.
So maybe it shouldnt surprise anyone that in summer 2002 Dylan
headlined the Aspen Jazz Festival with Willie Nelson.
Which brings us back to Newport 2002. The Times They Are
A-Changin followed Roving Gambler with Dylans looselimbed
phrasing framed by mandolin licks, his sliding slurs on the title line ironically accenting world-weariness rather than battle cries. Desolation
Row too became less acerbic, less surreal, as if reality has caught up to
Dylans Boschian vision; he punctuated verses with a one-note lick la
Neil Young. Mama Youve Been on My Mind had a bluegrass, Deadinected feel; the Dead echoed again through the rst encore, Buddy
Hollys Not Fade Away. Positively Fourth Street shifted to a Percy
Sledgestyle pleaa delicious twist to this slashing counterattack on the
late folksinger Phil Ochs, a Dylan acolyte who ran with Abbie Hoffman
and ended his days dreaming of himself as Elvis. Subterranean Homesick Blues swelled with punk-tipped rage. The crowd, on its feet since
Copland wafted from the PA, was moving to the music, its energies
harnessed, the musicians onstage knowing they were doing their jobs.
And so it went: the tight, incredibly versatile and rapid-re quintet
guitarist Charlie Sexton, multiinstrumentalist Larry Campbell, bassist
Tony Garnier, drummer George Ricelliworked with roadhouse precision and timing, switching between acoustic and electric instruments
like race-car pit crews, dispensing (as usual with Dylan) with frills like
talking to the audience, just finding the zone and feeding the beast.
Summer Days revved up pedal-to-the-metal rockabilly. North
Country Fair had a backporch feel that sat the crowd down, then
Tangled Up in Blue snarled and brought them back up. Mr.
Tambourine Man, dazzling with phrases that skimmed like stones
across a rippling lake, offered more modest, but maybe more real, afrmation than it might have in 1965. Here I am, the revitalized chameleon
seemed to say, and we are now historyand thus open endlessly to reinterpretation. And then came You Aint Goin Nowhere, ironically
soothing, its lyrics a curse riding shining pedal steel licks like those of
The Byrds country-rock version.
They cranked into Wicked Messenger, which waxed erce, a Jeremiad blues; Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat ared with sarcasm. The encores
included a powerful Like a Rolling Stone. During Blowin in the
Wind, a gull hung improbably motionless over the American ag atop
the bastion while Dylan trilled, How many seas must a white dove sail?
Then it dipped into the wind and wheeled off, and a few moments later the
amazing band blasted out All Along the Watchtower in Jimi Hendrix
mode, the jutting fortress walls their backdrop.

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In the Garage

By the rst encore the crowd had started to dribble out, but thousands
remained: parents dancing with their smaller kids on their shoulders, next
to their teens; Gen Xers wearing Born to Run and Woody Guthrie T-shirts,
moving to the throbbing pulses and mouthing the words while Dylans
voice cut like a dolphin through the slippery beats and the sun sank
through the glowering haze toward the lip of the mainland. And as I
headed to the parking lot to inch oh-so-slowly out of Newport, I remembered how I used to carve Dylan lyrics onto desks in high school. Good
thing I never got caught.

16
Electric Blues Revival
In the mid-1960s, a small West Village club called the Caf Au Go Go
became a key site for roots revival then thriving in New Yorks Greenwich Village. It hosted acts from folk to blues, old-timers and young
wannabes all jostling for the small devout audiences that thronged alternative-culture centers like the Village, Cambridge, San Francisco, and
Los Angeles. On the corner and upstairs from the Au Go Go was a small
shabby theater: when the Mothers of Invention pulled into New York,
they stayed in residence there, almost as if they were lost, for months,
and drew almost as many fans each night as there were people onstage,
while they performed their titillating onstage cabaret of satirical music
and ersatz drama like Ritual of the Young Pumpkin, involving a
female doll and an array of vari-sized vegetables in ways guaranteed to
make 15-year-old males crack up.
Down the block were scene stalwarts like the Village Gate, home to
jazz, international music, folk music, revues, and shows; around the
corner and up and was the Caf Wha?, where the Fugs dug in with a
hot black guitarist named Jimmy James, who soon went to England and
became Jimi Hendrix. Also nearby were the Gaslight, where the folkie
likes of Eric Anderson and Tom Paxton still performed, and the Night
Owl, the plaster-dusted basement room where the Lovin Spoonful were
born and held court until they hit with Do You Believe in Magic, now
the score for a Mercedes-Benz commercial. Biker gangs like the Alien
Nomads lined certain bars, their motorcycles neatly aligned at the curbs,
and waited for prey. Dozens of acoustic guitars echoed and clashed in
Washington Square Park, as kids and semi-pros drawled renditions of
blues and Dylan and ancient folk tunes, while nickel bags of pot and
small chunks of hash and occasional hits of blotter acid were peddled
and imbibed. Times being what they were, the cops ignored as much of
the activity around them as possible.
On weekends, the narrow crisscrossing cowpaths turned into streets
crawling with kids from Long Island and Jersey and Connecticut and
Brooklyn, most dressed in the military castoffs or pseudoCarnaby Street

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toff fashions or frayed secondhand duds. Theyd string out along the
winding side streets, throng the park around the fountain plaza, knot
into small huddles, and elbow out the street people in order to
panhandle bemused tourists and increasingly bored and irate residents
the children of American privilege growing up absurd. Members of
British Invasion groups like the Animals moved among them, hungrily
roving the clubs, picking up on their heroes like Charles Mingus and
John Coltrane, sussing out unknowns like Hendrix, setting the nearfuture in motion. The times they were a-changin indeed.
Thanks to the explosion of media interest in the wake of Dylan Electric, the Village scene was changing fast. The no-mans land between the
old Lower East Side, the Village, and Gramercy Park, a Ukrainian neighborhood where Beats like Allen Ginsburg and artists like Larry Rivers
had moved during the 1950s to avoid the Villages overpriced rents and
tourists, lled with teenyboppers and hippies and was renamed the East
Village. FM rock radio didnt exist yet in New York, but within a year
Scott Muni would get one afternoon hour of programming on allclassical WOR-FM, where he would air underground heroes like
Hendrix and the Grateful Dead, people who until then depended on
word of mouth. Alternative newspapers like the East Village Other
sprouted, culturally outflanking the Beat-based Village Voice, which
scrambled to catch the eye of the latest teenaged bohemian-wannabes.
Bill Graham opened the Fillmore East with concerts that mixed the
Grateful Dead and Miles Davis, Jimi Hendrix and folkies like Richie
Havens and stone soul like the Ike Turner Revue. One unfortunate,
inevitable side effect was the closing of the small clubs that incubated the
scene Graham and the awakening record industry would cash in on.
It was a great time to be a kid with curiosity and ears in New York.
New worlds seemed to be rising all around, and all you had to do was
look. Nothing cost too much even for a poor student: the minimum
wage was $1.35 an hour, but a ticket to the Fillmore was only cost $3,
$4, or $5 for a three- or four-act show.
Before the Fillmore East opened, just before Highway 61 Revisited
galvanized popular music, in 1965 the Caf Au Go Go hosted a gaggle
of high school and college kids for a week of afternoon live recording.
A few of my teen friends enthusiastically showed up because the tapings
subject was the Blues Project, who came out of the New York folk-blues
scene captained by Dave Van Ronk; in fact, guitarist Danny Kalb was
Van Ronks former student and collaborator. The tapes became part of
Live at the Caf Au Go Go, the bands rst album, which we naturally
raced to buy once it came out.
We were probably weird even for the weird times. Other kids were
into the Beatles and Motown; we were learning about folks like Muddy
Waters and John Coltrane, Howlin Wolf and Charles Mingus, Big Bill
Broonzy and Robert Johnson by way of the Stones and the Yardbirds

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173

and the Project and the Paul Buttereld Blues Band and the like, digging
for their records, checking out their performances. In much the same
way wed learned about Woody Guthrie from Dylan and Baez and
Seeger. We made fun of top 40 radio and its bands, trawled around the
dial in the wee hours when our parents thought we were asleep to nd
the clear-channel stations that bounced around the ionosphere from
Texas and the South and even Chicago and Cleveland in the unpredictable post-midnight hour. We got earfuls of sounds we had no grids
for and it was, as they said then, mind-expanding, a jolting rush of raw
and unforeseen vitality, even if it meant you spent the school day skating
through tests and classroom work while replaying the latest discovery in
your head.
As we ventured into the clubs, nursing overpriced sodas to satisfy
table minimums for the underaged, drunk on being 2 or 6 or 20 feet
away from the musicians, we developed expectations. Songs were not
to be performed, like they were on Shindig or Hullaballoo or the Ed
Sullivan Show, as note-for-note renderings of a record. Live meant loose,
spiking shows with the unexpected, and so we began to expect and chase
the dynamics of live improvisation. Jazz, blues, R & B, rock, folkwe
were surrounded by them, and they seemed to ow into each other, at
least around the edges. The musical questioning we heard seemed part
of the broader questioning that was rocking culture and society. We
didnt have to understand the full possibilities we were getting a whiff of
to be intoxicated, especially at 14 or 15.
And the Blues Project intoxicated us, partly because they could have
been us, older and more experienced. Most of us didnt have too many
preconceptions about things like authenticity or musicianship, though
the dedicated young folk revivalists among us tended to be dismissive
of anything that smacked of pop. But we all played in bands and were
at least dimly aware of the folk revival and radical jazz and social
upheavals all around us, and we knew what we liked. So we followed the
Blues Project faithfully, from its 1965 beginnings through its recurrent
splinterings to its nal 1967 breakup. They opened unexpected doors
into worlds where wed meet other, older weirdos and intersect with the
still-living past.
Late one school night in 1966, for instance, a couple of my pals and
I showed up at Steve Pauls West Side club, The Scene, a downstairs holein-the-wall that rock history later deemed pivotal. We werent late
enough: the sets, we discovered, never started anywhere near the
announced set time. While we hung out nursing glasses of whatever we
were drinking, a tall, lthy, longhaired guy with a big nose appeared out
of the back room. He did a double take when he saw us, then slid into
a seat at our table. The interrogation began: How old were we? How did
we get in? What were we doing here on a school night? What did our
parents think? Didnt we know places like this could lead us astray to

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wickedness, drugs, booze, sex? He was, he said, brushing aside our questions, though not impolitely, the janitor, and Mr. Paul let him live in the
club when he had nowhere else to go; he was also, as part of the arrangement, the clubs usual opening act. Then he hurried to his back room
and reemerged with a battered Bible, which he opened as he folded
himself into his chair and began to read to us from Apocalypse. His
name was Tiny Tim, and that night we saw the shtick, from Hey
Paula to Tiptoe Through the Tulips, that he would ride to fame via
the Tonight Show.
Encounters like that began to teach us to read the scenes contours,
and we tried to map them. We learned to hang out to spot where Jimi
Hendrix headed after a Fillmore show, which was often The Scene, his
Revox tape machine under some roadies arm so no note would be lost
as he roared through his space-blues. We saw him devour the ercely
competitive Buddy Guy, one of our new blues-guitar heroes, in an
impromptu jam on that clubs tiny excuse for a stage. We followed Jerry
Garcia, an Eveready Bunny who wandered with a stoned smile and a
guitar from spot to spot around New York looking to sit in with
anyone still moving after hed nished two long Grateful Dead sets at
the Fillmore. We talked ourselves backstage wherever we could and
hung out, awestruck and giggly as girls, listening to the musicians toss
around names and ideas we tried to ll in later, like so many tantalizing
ellipses.
So we werent just thrilled; we were being educated, educating
ourselves in the oral tradition of garage bands across America, spinning
records and covering tunes and in the process creating a common folkmusical language. We were learning to make our own art, and that made
us potential connoisseurs with a particular perspective. We respected
and treasured old innovators like Gary Davis and Muddy Waters;
we were attached to electric blues revivalists like the Blues Project and
the Paul Butterfield Blues Band because we thought we could have
been them.
And so we had debates about who was better, Danny Kalb or Butterelds guitarist Mike Bloomeld, while we were copying their styles. We
analyzed Kalbs nerve-jangling, hopscotching-round-the-fingerboard
runs (which still sound to me like a talented dancing spider is being electrocuted on guitar strings, often in modal form) and his Danelectros
whining, nasal tone. We joked that, as he scrambled up and down the
guitar neck in characteristically skittering haste, he could induce ear
bleeds at 100 yards. We made fun of how he combed his hair up from
above his left ear to cover his desperate balding on top. Still, when Kalb
freaked out in 1967, one of my pals found his acoustic guitar, pictured
on the back of the Projects second album, Projections, in a pawn shop
and immediately bought it; another still has it.

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175

As the guitarist/leader, Kalb bore the brunt of our attention, but there
was plenty to go around. We mocked Al Koopers raggedly asthmatic
vocals and low-rent piano technique and learned all his Farsa moves
especially since hed played with Dylan on Highway 61 Revisited and at
the infamous Newport Folk Festival of 1965, even if hed written This
Diamond Ring, a mindless pop hit, for Gary Lewis (Jerrys son) and
the Playboys. We goofed on guitarist Steve Katzs inated psychedelicfolkie lyrics and Robert Goulet-ish baritone, and studied his gutsy
harmonica solos. We memorized Andy Kulbergs propulsive bass
patterns and winced at his inevitable 15-minute, jazz-simulated Flute
Thing. We laughed at Roy Blumenfelds unsubtle drum ailings and felt
our pulses race as the rhythms onstage pumped and oscillated, breathed
in and out, as Koopers organ and Kalbs guitar climbed and crescendoed in coiled, not quite coordinated sympathy, piling up tension that
was aching for release, as the bands energies focused and spiraled into
the kind of orchestrated group orgasm that we were beginning to intuit
could be a key component of the best live pop music.
Confusion? Teenage ambivalence toward heroes? Sure, that too. But
sitting here now, I think at least part of what we were learning was that
pop musics spectrum is a wondrously expansive thing that thrives on
both greatness and junkin fact, depends on the interaction between
the two for its raw materials and its evolutionary thrust. Its a clich, for
instance, that what has survived the test of time must be better than
what didnt, but luck and quantity always have something to do with
what lasts. Who knows what died with the burning of the library at
Alexandria? And what if those Renaissance detectives who started
scraping monastery palimpsests to discover ancient lost texts had
decided they liked the top layers better? Then too, not even Umberto
Eco knows what was lost with the scrapings.
This is one way I listen to Anthology, the two-CD compilation of
Blues Project stuff that includes (usually rightly) healthy chunks of previously unreleased material, omits (sometimes, though not always, rightly)
some previously released material, offers some titillating inside (if too
credulous and overstated) views of the band in its time without always
clarifying actual events and dates, and often sounds like it was recorded
on a windy day by two mikes oating past on an East River garbage
scow. And hearing this stuff now, a good quarter-century since I last
listened to any of it, I have to admit I still love it and hate it, often at
exactly the same time.
One reason is the musics sheer energy, its brash and raw vitality.
Another is its audacity. Theyre not separable. After all, the Blues Project
were nothing more than a garage band writ largein other words, a
potpourri of folk (an ethereal Catch the Wind), rock and roll (set highlights always included a Chuck Berry stomper like I Want To Be Your

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In the Garage

Driver), blues (lots of Willie Dixon, like Spoonful), jazz (Flute

Thing), taut pop (Cheryls Going Home), schlocky pop (singles like
Love Will Endure), classical touches (Steves Song), and pretty
much anything else they could think of, attacked in charmingly homemade ways.
Their grassroots naivete and openness were their greatest charm and
virtue. This early, Buttereld was more the outsider purist, copping notefor-note charts from his black Chicago blues mentors. The Project, by
contrast, took Muddy Waterss Two Trains Running and slowed it
way, way down, lled it with space and spiky blowouts to run for 11plus minutes. This was a recipe the Grateful Dead finessed. And
Butterfield took up the implicit challenge: on East West, his bands
second album fusing jazz, rock, blues, and raga, Bloomeld led a jam on
Nat Adderleys Work Song that had a finesse the Blues Project
couldnt have managed. But nesse wasnt why we liked them. Their
raggedy edge was part of the fun: check out how they pump Back Door
Man (included on this boxed set as a studio cut, not the live Au Go Go
version) or Who Do You Love (an alternate Au Go Go take) into
menacing, hurtling protopunk slashers.
With the passage of time, the bands technical limitations are even
more painfully apparent, but ultimately they dont matter any more than
the Ramones or the Sex Pistolsand for the same reasons. At its core
their music was about heart and energy. They found enough of both to
survive their constant schisms, reaching beyond their grasp, and a frustrating inability to make a splash outside New York. And yet without
the Projects spacey extended arrangements, headlong organ-races-guitar
climbs, unblended early Stones harmonies, all the inviting incompleteness of garage rock, the line that runs from San Francisco psychedelia to
contemporary jam bands like Phish and Dave Matthews Band and String
Cheese Incident might well have been different.
This somewhat garbled CD package captures some of this, with its
sometimes whimsical track selections and stilted and too reverent, if
useful, notes. Chronology dictates the track order. Some choices are
downright weird: it doesnt make sense to replace ery but muddy live
versions of Violets of Dawn and Back Door Man with earlier, tamer
and cleaner studio versions, and then shufe the tracks out of the original album order because of the dates they were recorded. By the
mid-1960s, LPs were presentations; the best albums had a pace and a
narrative that boxed-set dismemberment by chronology sabotages. The
procrustean bed of the timeline may be useful for the scholar and informative for the curious, but its not entertainment, and its not art. Me,
Id rather the reissue gathered the two key albums, Live at the Caf Au
Go Go and Projections, plus singles, and forget the later and earlier
tracks confusing the story here. But thats not how compilation product
gets made these days.

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177

Product versus Project: for the rst time in 30 years, while I strained
to listen to these discs, I thought about the signicance of this seminal
bands name. The liner essay suggests that its misleading; after all, they
werent just a blues band. Thats true but, like other points in the essay,
misleading by default. Project was precisely what these guys, and their
scene, and their audiences, and their times were about. The archer and
the arrow were meant, at least, to be one. It was an era when American
culture had become suddenly self-conscious again, aware of its voices
and powers coming of age in a world that seemed, so much more than
todays, a place that could be made better. The process was the goal. In
their idiosyncratic, sometimes cranky stylistic gropings and reworkings
and achievements, the Blues Project encapsulated that extraordinary
American moment when folk culture and mass popular culture overlapped, a place where art was possible, however accidentally, in a broad
commercial forum, possibly more than at any time before or since.
When the band finally quit, exhausted by internal tensions and
ignored by the larger rock world, Kooper and Katz started Blood Sweat
& Tears, an early jazz-rock fusion group with sharp-eared charts and a
horn section of jazz players and a ranginess that gave it heft. Its only
peer was Bloomfields swaggering, soulful Electric Flag, whose first
album opens with a recorded segment of an LBJ speech about Vietnam
that dissolves into laughter, then a smooth-running, 12-cylinder version
of Howlin Wolfs Killing Floor, pumped with stuttering horns, red
by trebly blues Telecaster snarls, focused by the understated delivery of
Nick Gravenites smooth vocals. Introduced by Bob Dylan for Highway
61 Revisited, Kooper and Bloomeld reunited on Super Sessions, largely
improvised instrumental outings in soul-jazz and blue; His Holy Modal
Majesty was a Grateful Deadinspired jam based on the language of
Miles Davis and John Coltrane. On the records other side, Kooper and
ex-Buffalo Springeld guitarist Stephen Stills joined forces, with Stillss
sweet countried wah-wah wafting across the Season of the Witch,
the Donovan folk song Kooper recast into a jolt-lled 10 minutes of
crescendos and decrescendos, by rippling horns and rumbling, sinewy
Hammond organ. No wonder the track was an early FM rock radio
mainstaywhich is why the record entered the top 20 in late 1968.
In the original Super Session liner notes by Michael Thomas its clear
how thoroughly the Beat-jazz mythos permeated this period in ux:
Always, the best things happen after hours, by accident, while the cats
away, when the moon goes behind a cloud and theres no one else around;
certainly the best music in America is made after twelve, deep in the rock
and roll dungeons, little clubs in New York and California, when
whoevers in town and feeling restless . . . rock and roll strays, they get
together and jam, sometimes they collide, more often than not they tempt
each other to take more and more risks, always they discover something
theyd perhaps had in mind but couldnt quite bring home before.

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In the Garage

Flaws and all, the Blues Project and its radiating semihidden inuence centered on thatthe element of risk frozen out of American
mainstream culture by its neurotic emphasis on security and
predictability and banished to the margins. Was it any wonder that so
many kids followed the siren call? Maybe thats why as I get older I nd
Im still laughing at a lot of the same places, and startled or moved by
some new ones, when I listen to the Blues Project.

17
Buffalo Springfield
Somethins happenin here
What it is aint exactly clear.
Buffalo Springeld
Do you have a movement?
Yes. Its called Dancing.
Abbie Hoffman
In the dark times will there still be
singing? Yes, there will be singing, there
will be singing about dark times.
Bertolt Brecht

Unstable chemistry can cause spectacular effectsthats one way to

think of Buffalo Springeld. Or frame them as an American musical smorgasbord (though three of them were Canadians). Or see them as dening
much of 1960s rock.
Or you can notice that their lifespan marked the moment when West
Coast folk-rock renegades joined mainstream commercial culture at its
heart, in Los Angeles, when AM radio played protest songs amid teenybopper treacle, and record labels competed for the weirdest, most
outrageous bands, trying to read marketing cues in the emerging counterculture: how to channel inchoate energies of folk art into commerce. TV
shows for teens proliferated: American Bandstand, Shindig, Hullabaloo.
Satiric comedy inltrated the mainstream on Laugh-In and the Smothers
Brothers Comedy Hour, hosted by two folksingers, where bands like the
Springeld appeared. Movies sprouted rock soundtracks. The music
industrys delivery systems adapted only slowly: FM radio and counterculture impresarios like Bill Graham only came along when Buffalo
Springeld had ended.
The larger society was buckling, as the icy repressions of the 1950s
thawed: civil rights legislation, the war in Vietnam, the prophetic scripted
selling of Richard Nixon in 1968, assassinations, race riots, the Chicago

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In the Garage

Democratic convention. The silent majority and the southern strategy,

crime and welfare queensthe murky idioms and repressions of American
politics from Ronald Reagan onward were being sketched.
Buffalo Springeld owed its start to a trafc jam. Richie Furay and
Stephen Stills pulled up behind Neil Youngs 1953 Pontiac hearse with
Ontario plates on the Sunset Strip. They knew each other from the folkrevival circuit of colleges and coffeehouses. Stills had come to LA to
audition for the Monkees; he failed because of bad teeth. But producer
Barry Friedman, looking for a youth-market hit, suggested Stills could
have a deal if he formed a band. Sitting in Youngs hearse was fellow
Canadian Bruce Palmer. Theyd come back to LA, after an abortive sidetrip to Motown to cut a record, to nd Stills. They agreed on the spot to
form a band, and went to pick up drummer Dewey Martin. They lived
and rehearsed at Friedmans house, and when they spotted the nameplate
on some road equipment they had their name.
By the time they debuted at the Troubadour, they were already the
subject of buzz. They toured briey with the Byrds and the bluegrass
Dillards, then got a six-week gig at the Whiskey A-Go-Go (thanks to the
Byrds Chris Hillman) and signed with Atlantic for $12,000. They cut
their rst single, Nowadays Clancy Cant Even Sing, less than two
months after the trafc jam.
Between 1966 and 1968, the Springeld held together, often just barely,
as pot busts banished their bassist back to Canada, and ego blowups
between Stills and Young escalated and sent Young packing for part of
1967. They had only one big hit. But for a while they were possibly the
most important rock band in America. Then in May 1968, after yet
another pot bust in Topanga Canyon and the nancial collapse of a
southern tour following Martin Luther Kings assassination, Buffalo
Springeld disintegrated.
BUFFALO SPRINGFIELD is a prosaically titled four-CD set that, for better
and worse, captures the bands kaleidoscopic range. They could be blandly
commercial. On their rst album, Beatlesy efforts like Sit Down I Think
I Love You and Do I Have To Come Right Out and Say It, with
earache-inducing harmonies right out of the British Moppet Handbook,
inadvertently highlight meatier material. For when the Sunset Strip riots
hit in 1966 as the LAPD cracked down on Pandoras Box, a teen rock
club, Stills penned the groups only AM hit, For What Its Worth; when
it made the charts, it was inserted into the hastily revamped rst album.
The song marked a new sound: ominous, with its identifying riff of two
single reverb-dripping guitar notes over rumbling bass, its vaguely threatened and threatening lyrics, its stark yet sweet harmonies. The lyrics are
deliberately shadowy, even amorphous, but embedded in that sound they
captured the lurking sense of foreboding and opposition. When the song

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181

made the Billboard charts in February 1967, it spoke to the crystallizing

counterculturethe resonant chamber of a potential mass audience.
For What Its Worth, a deliberately throwaway and dismissive title,
led Buffalo Springeld forever under folk rock, although its hard,
listening back, to imagine why. Live, the Springelds shows were
renowned for their volume and violence, as guitarists Young and Stills
dueled and thrashed for powera stagebound parable of the groups inner
workings, perhaps, but also a fabulous generator of sonic ideas. Youngs
experimentalism and lunges into feedback were complemented by Stills
sweeter melodic turnsthough they could, and often did, switch roles at
the drop of a beat. Furays rhythm guitar nestled between the athletic,
R & B-meets-McCartney bass of Bruce Palmer and the shape-shifting
drumwork of Dewey Martin. They ignited awesome homemade improvisations.
The box sets second disc gives glimpses of those, via previously unreleased jams. Kahuna Sunset is a hippie fantasy, an updated surf-guitar
lilt that left-turns into a raga-inspired jam. (Not to worry that raga is a
complex form demanding discipline and knowledge: Ravi Shankar,
discipled by the Beatles and John Coltrane, was the moments international-music icon. And thousands of teen guitar players, fascinated by the
altered sounds that would ower most fully in Jimi Hendrix, wanted to
sound like a sitar doing modal runs.) It closes with Youngs Yardbirdinuenced rave-up style, though his attack is almost diametrically opposed
to Yardbird guitarist Jeff Becks: Young frets slowly with his left hand and
with his right picks feverishly.
On Buffalo Stomp, guitars wind in and out until the jam revs into
squalls of feedback against a backdrop of interwoven solosrock Dixieland. Among the players is Skip Spence on kazoo; he was Jefferson
Airplanes rst drummer and would soon cofound Moby Grape, a multivocalist guitar army from San Franciscos Flower Power era, much like
Buffalo Springeld itself. And pieces like Bluebird, a guitar-stuffed fourminute mini-suite on disc, would open onstage into mammoth jams.
In the studio, Buffalo Springeld grazed even more widely. They could
unchain their pop imaginations and their record collections, and run wild
across an American landscape that had recently been opened wide by Bob
Dylan and the Beatles.
When British rockers invaded the United States in 1964, they peddled
reworked American R & B, rockabilly, and other pop to American kids
tired of saccharine hits by voiceless commercial fabrications named Bobby
and Fabianforerunners of todays teenypop idols. The Brits were especially good at recycling R & B hits by black artists, often invisible on the
white-dominated pop charts of the time, into guitar-powered pop with
Everly Brothers vocals. Far from the land where these forms were born,
British kids heard them as a release from the boredom of homemade UK
folk-revival offshoots like skife; they became building blocks to be played

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In the Garage

with as much as styles to be mimicked. It was the same energy that had
led 1950s blue-collar southern kids to refashion R & B and country into
rockabilly in their backyards.
Eclectic, populist, postmodernchoose what terms you likethis was
key to the 1960s transition of rock and roll into rock. The guitar, portable
and cheap, made music-making widely available; garage bands were the
ubiquitous result. As electric ampliers became smaller and cheaper, even
basement-bound guitarists could experiment with sound shaping
punching holes in a speaker to get fuzztone, loosening tubes for
distortion, rolling the volume pots for violin effects. Early effects boxes
for plugging into the signal chain started to appear. It was like getting a
do-it-yourself art kit.
It was also an extension of Americas postwar cultural renaissance.
Whitmans heirsjazz artists, the Beats, the Abstract Expressionists, the
folk revivalistsall shared a romantic, if sometimes romantically cynical,
critique of that hangover from the Great Depression and World War II, the
gray annel 1950s. As counterweight they reemphasized the value of play,
long recognized as one of arts core cultural values; inuenced by jazz
improvisation and the civil rights movement, they revamped play into an
artistic and a moral code. The subcultures of black America were valued
even when they were misunderstood.
The romantic notion of authentic popular culturea folk culture where
there is minimal mediation between artists and audienceis an elusive
grail. In modern commercial pop culture, that polarity is always in ux,
but the folkie notion was a potent one during the 1960s. It was ironic that
Bob Dylan, in a characteristic paradox, translated that model into both
artistic and commercial success; inevitably, he was accused of selling out.
And yet, he personied the folk revivals longing for a popular hero who
would forge a new sound and, incidentally, a new sense of community.
He had plenty to play with: postwar America was full of new musical
syntheses, broad cultural and social curiosityan openness that has been
bled from our society over the last two decades by the twin scalpels of
fear and complacency. Both jazz and folk musicians were interested in
music from Africa and India, the Caribbean and Asia, for instance, as well
as African American gospel and blues. Thanks to the likes of Dylan and
the Beatles, this legacy energized garage bands, crackling across the AngloAmerican world, where making a band became something countless
thousands of kids did. Think of garage bands as the inheritors of the
1950s folk-revival aesthetic, and as the precursors of hip-hop: the streetlevel site where the reassimilation of pop culture becomes a feedback loop.
In that sense, Buffalo Springeld was one of rocks ultimate garage bands.
They were also late for the party that was already cresting toward the
Summer of Love and Woodstock, but they quickly made up for lost time
and joined the central cast. Soul music was their touchstone; it wasnt just
an accident that they recorded for Atlantic Records, a big indie label that

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183

made its fame by recording black artists from Joe Turner to Solomon
Burke. And in the mid-1960s, soul music ruled the dance oors of
America. The Rascals and the Righteous Brothers lifted blue-eyed soul
into artistic and commercial payoff. Even whitebread folk-rockers like the
Byrds were, thanks to Gram Parsons, countrifying soul hits like You
Dont Miss Your Water.
Neil Young wrote Mr. Soul, a erce attack on celebrity (including his
own) and the record biz; his wispy vibrato quavered with metalloid and
country guitars over thundering Four Topsstyle bass. He also wrote
Burned: Been burned, he yelps, and with both feet on the ground,
a characteristic verbal incongruity backed by musical incongruity. Chugging Motown bass and honkytonk piano share center soundstage: the
piano takes a just-enough-out-of-tune solo, followed by Hawaiianavored slide guitar, which downshifts into a Beatles-knockoff rideout.
This was the bands second single.
With its demos and remixed and nished tracks, Buffalo Springeld
amply demonstrates how explosive and creative the bands chemistry
could be. It leaves a curious fan wanting more when a more casual fan has
had more than enough. In me, it inspires a list of highlights: two Young
demos of early interior dreamscapesthe painfully ethereal Out of My
Mind and vulnerable Flying on the Ground is Wrong. The tight-wound
Stills-Furay harmonies and beautiful acoustic simplicity on the demo for
Baby Dont Scold Me, ultimately released as a mix of stiff Supremes
drumbeats, reverb, and psychedelic guitar raunch that overshadowed the
bittersweet lyrics. Nowadays Clancy Cant Even Sing, an early Young
art-rocker with twining guitars, opaque lyrics, and a time-signature shift
that highlights Furays unpleasantly blocky phrasing. The massed-guitar
country rock and Miles Standish triangle of Go and Say Goodbye. The
R & B goodtime feel of Stillss Hot Dusty Roads, with its heavily treated
guitar solo and whimsical genre twist of a city boy who stays at home.
The Zombies-ish jazz-bossa inections of Pretty Girl Why, and the
walking bass and jazzy modal drone of Everydays, cut in the same year
as Miles Daviss Bitches Brew. The guitar-orchestra suite called Bluebird. The drippy psychedelic orchestration and Moody Blueslike choir
on Expecting To Fly. The vocal handoff, straight out of two-tenor gospel
groups, on Hung Upside Down, where Furays soulful lead yields the
chorus to Stillss raunchy wails. The gently stinging ironies of A Childs
Claim to Fame, underlined by hired hand James Burtons dobro solo.
(Burton played guitar with Ricky Nelson and Elvis Presley and Gram
Parsons.) The galloping drive and stinging guitar lines of Rock and Roll
Woman that leave you feeling like youve just danced with a truck. The
Dylan-modeled imagery and phrasing of Youngs demos like The Rent
Is Always Due. The arthouse melodrama and Sergeant Pepper orchestration of Broken Arrow. The dark blues of Stillss husky musings and
piano on the demo for Four Days Gone. The punk ipping the bird to

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In the Garage

convention of Special Care, where Stills plays all the instruments but
drums.
That last cut is from Last Time Around, which was recorded over
nearly a year; as time wore on, the band was disintegrating, as the Beatles
did during White Album. Stills and Young started producing their own
sessions; Stills sung and played nearly all the parts on cuts like Questions, here a biting soul-rocker with blues-drenched vocals, later cutely
rearranged as a harmony piece for Crosby Stills & Nash.
Is the box set an effective representation of the legend? Well, its got
the same middle-nger attitude the group itself had: the booklet, perhaps
as a tipoff to its sensibility, opens with a Wallace Stevensinspired page
titled Various Accounts of Their Meeting in Hollywood. And its taken
10 years to put together because of the same old egos. Its denitely worth
complaining that the 26 duplicated album cuts could have been replaced
by additional rarities. The booklets sometimes hard-to-read design, a
postmodern swirl of artfully collaged documents and pictures, leaves
misinterpretation rampant, though the one-page historical essay by Pete
Long is fact-packed. The fans-eye view by Ken Viola jumps disconcertingly around the booklet. The discographical annotation is thorough, but
could use explication. And theres a complete tour schedule, which ends
with Buffalo Springeld opening for the Beach Boys and Strawberry
Alarm Clock on the last 1968 tour. As another perspective on an overly
mythologized period, its worth recalling that at just about the same time
Jimi Hendrix was opening a tour for the Monkees.
Young was out of the band when Monterey Pop launched Summer of
Love. He was back for the Topanga Canyon bust. From then on his bandmates recombined like pop-culture DNA: bassist Jim Messina rst with
Richie Furay in Poco, then with pop singer Kenny Loggins. Stills joined
with the Byrds David Crosby and the Hollies Graham Nash and played
Woodstock. Young wandered between their band and solo work.
Less than a year after Woodstock came the Kent State shootings.
Within days Young had a tune about tin soldiers and Nixon coming and
four dead in Ohio. Its abrasive guitars and Youngs incongruous yelping
vocals pushed Ohio into the top 25, thanks to FM rock radio and adept
record industry executives, who had learned again that outrage and opposition could fuel a hit.

18
Gram Parsons
and Emmylou Harris
We drink our ll and still we thirst for more
Asking, If theres no heaven, what is this hunger for?
Emmylou Harris, The Pearl
No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those
pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy
Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss
and failure is ours, too. What Leary took down with him was
the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create
. . . a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who
never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid
Culture: the desperate assumption that somebodyor at least
some forceis tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.
Hunter Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

I didnt exactly lose track of Emmylou Harris between the late

1970s and the mid-1990s, but she did fade from my list of preoccupations. Id been listening to her on and off since I rst heard about her
making records and touring with Gram Parsons, the man who turned
the Byrds (and subsequently, it seemed, nearly all of LAs burgeoning
rock scene) toward what became country rock, founded the Burrito
Brothers, partied (and cowrote songs like Wild Horses) with the
Rolling Stones, elevated Harris to national attention, and in September
1973 was found dead (of coroner-ruled natural causes that included
morphine and tequila) in a motel in Joshua Tree. A friend stole his body
and burned it in the Joshua Tree National Monument.
How rock and roll can you get? Parsons, never widely famous,
instantly became a mythic cult gure. His life seemed appropriate: as a
kid in 1956, he went backstage at a touring Grand Ole Opry show to
meet Elvis Presley, who blew him away and made him want to play
music, which from then on totally absorbed him. In the early 1960s, he

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In the Garage

joined folk groups modeled on hitmakers like the Kingston Trio and
Peter Paul and Mary, one of which made it to Greenwich Village coffeehouses. After one semester at Harvard, he started a country-rock garage
band in 1965, the International Submarine Band, which previewed tunes
like Luxury Liner, later to number among the genres touchstones.
Already Parsonss eccentric American mixture of cosmopolitan rock
outlaw and Christian country boy was combining with his sense of
guilty privilege (his dark childhood was shadowed by family problems
and wealth) to fuel his charisma and his songwriting talent while
(mostly) overcoming defects like his wispy, often off-key voice and, for
a while, his hellbent chase after drug-and-booze-fueled insulation from
reality and concomitant bouts of despair.
Parsons put together rhythm and blues and country in rock in ways
no one had since 1950s rockabilly and updated it. Although he was only
a contracted sideman, not a charter member, of the Byrds, he transformed them with tunes like soul singer William Bells You Dont Miss
Your Water, reimagined as a sweet-harmonied, pedal-steel-lined
lament. Ironically, when Roger McGuinn, the Byrds leader, erased and
redubbed most of Parsonss lead vocals on the Sweethearts of the Rodeo
album, it underscored how much the disc owed Parsons. Left untouched
was his unironic reading of The Christian Life, a waltz adapted from
the Louvin Brothers.
Hunter Thompson had his points about the mysticism at the heart of
the 1960s, but Parsons exemplies how complex and American all that
confused ambivalence is. Drug-addled or drunk or screwing every available woman, Parsons maintained that he was a Christian. Is this due to
his southern background, the bouts in boarding schools, the saturation
of American culture by that Puritan claim to the City on the Hill?
Parsons never traded in his old-fashioned Bible Belt beliefs for hip
revivals of Eastern philosophy. But he still managed to incarnate the
contradictions and self-destructive aspects of the 1960s so perfectly that
they killed him.
Maybe like Elvis Presley, his earliest idol, whose rst recording was
for his mother and who sought grace between sin-soaked descents and
shooting up TVs, Parsons just ignored the glaring internal contradictions. This is the man whose garish Nudie suit, pictured on Sacred
Hearts and Fallen Angels: The Gram Parsons Anthology, had on its
back a red cross emanating rays of light.
Parsons was a restless and tortured American Romantic in the fashion
of the day. Cross or not, he hung out in London to party with the
famously debauched Keith Richards instead of touring with the Byrds,
so the band red him. Back to LA, he hooked up with ex-Byrds Chris
Etheridge and Chris Hillman, picked up the name Flying Burrito
Brothers, and organized a loose aggregate of country rockers to continue
where his edition of the Byrds left off. Sneaky Pete Kleinow augmented

Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris

187

his pedal steel with fuzztone and distortion, Hillman and Parsons
warbled Everly Brothers harmonies, and the band devised a sound
between Nashville and Memphis soul.
The Burrito Brothers rst album was called The Gilded Palace of Sin.
Parsonss two years with them marked a creative period when he wrote
definitive tunes. Christines Tune (Devil in Disguise) opened with
driving rock rhythms, careening pedal steel, and a typically direct lyric
that ran, A woman like that, all she does is hate you. Then there was
a surreal Beach Boys version of Aretha Franklins Do Right Woman.
On Sin City, Parsons and Hillman impersonated the Everly Brothers
rejecting runaway American materialism. And then there was Wheels,
almost quintessentially American, the urge to jump in the car and get
away, light out for the territory on the road like everyone from Huck
Finn to the Beats, amid the existential questions tearing Parsons, a
shrunken Elijah, apart.
By the Burritos more subdued second album, Burrito Deluxe, Parsons
was relegated to a supporting role; by 1970, he was out of the band for
the same reasons hed been bounced from the Byrds: unpredictability,
unprofessionalism, drug-induced disappearances for benders with pals
like Richards. He spent, he told one interviewer, the next two years
getting lost. But he came out of his blurry hiatus creatively rewired, if
with a much more ragged, weakened voice. He went to Vegas to steal the
core of the band hed long wanted to record with from Elvis, who was
now beginning his long-term residency in Americas Casino-and-Divorce
Central: rockabilly guitar ace James Burton, whod backed young Ricky
Nelson and then moved on to Elvis, amid myriad studio dates, punched
up Parsonss newest recordings with his tastefully outrageous lls and
solos, abetted by versatile pianist Glen D. Hardin, who later anchored
Merle Haggards jazz-inflected country outfit, the Strangers. (The
Burritos covered Haggards Sing Me Back Home, a blue-collar
country blues that, like most of Haggards ruggedly individual, Bakersfield-style honky-tonk music, found no home in countrypolitan
Nashville. Its impossible to say whether Haggard, notorious for his later
Okie from Muskogee flag-waving during the Vietnam war, would
have liked Parsons, but Parsons wanted Haggard to produce his rst
solo effort, which didnt work out.)
In the dying days of the Burritos, Parsons met Emmylou Harris. Hed
been looking for a female duet partner; now hed found one whose devotion would outlast his life and help enshrine his artistry in rock history.
With the manic energy that possessed him when he wasnt crashing or
smashed, Parsons put all his new friends in a studio and pulled out material from punchy country weepers like Well Sweep Out the Ashes in the
Morning to weaker originals like A Song for You. The result: the
1972 album GP was an uneven, weirdly mixed but suggestive semiwreck with small jewels. Parsonss voice, by now shredded, could still

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In the Garage

intimate a great deal; Harriss, almost entirely intuitive without much

road seasoning, adds timbre and strength without polish or certainty.
Their tour, which kept derailing thanks to Parsons, nevertheless tightly
wound their voices together, which showed a year later when they
released Grievous Angel: sharper materialthe autobiographical title
cut, the brutally honest Love Hurts, the careering Sin-City Redux
called Ooh Las Vegas, the prayerful In My Hour of Darkness, in
which the Nudie-suited country boy asks with disarming directness for
peaceand more sophisticated recording, better rehearsal, and all that
roadwork together gave this album more consistency.
And that was that. The hickory winds called Gram Parsons home
from the Mojave two months after Grievous Angel was nished.
The death of Gram Parsons wasnt unexpected but still shocked
Emmylou Harris. Her natural harmonizing had wowed Parsons and
completed his vision, and her personal empathy for him was as deep as
the music. Wrenched by his enthusiasm from her small niche in Washington, DC, as a folk artist, lifted into the aborning world of folk-rock,
she suddenly was left to carry on his musical legacy and plot her future.
When the teenaged Harris discovered folk music on the radio, she
grabbed a guitar and learned to play. (She also played alto sax in her
schools marching band and was a cheerleader.) Here I was, she told
Rolling Stone in 1975, a 16-year-old WASP, wanting to quit school and
become Woody Guthrie. Like so many, she headed to Greenwich
Village in the late 1960s, performed at coffeehouses, and lived at the
YWCA.
A marriage that broke up, a kid, and a move to Nashville led her back
to her parents Virginia farm, until Chris Hillman of the Burritos heard
her at a DC club in 1971. That was the Parsons connection. As she told
Holly George-Warren for the notes to the uneven Emmylou Harris
Anthology: The Warner/Reprise Years, Gram showed me that you can
bring all your inuences together if you have a focal point. . . . Singing
with him, I learned that one of the universal things about country music
at its best is the restraint in the phrasing, the economy of the
emotion. . . . I went from being a person who thought drummers were
evil, the killers of music, a folksinger with an attitude, to just going,
More more more more morelets get out there and rock.
Parsonss death stopped her cold; she regrouped in LA, where she
sang backup on Linda Ronstadt sessions. Parsonss ex-manager got her
a label deal and a producer, she regrouped the Parsons/Presley outt as
her Hot Band, and in 1975 released Pieces of the Sky; one track, her
own Boulder to Birmingham, was the rst of many yearning Parsons
tributes, but the Louvin Brothers If I Could Only Win Your Love
became her rst country hit. Her lilting, sweet-natured voice, with its

Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris

189

bluesy scoops and catches, was amplied by the Dillards Herb Peterson,
whose subtly moving voicings were more jazz and bluegrass than
Nashville.
I first saw Emmylou Harris in the 1970s, when she was making
records like Pieces of the Sky, Luxury Liner, and Elite Hotel, records
that werent quite country and werent quite rock but had more
idiomatic integrity than, say, the Eagles. On 1979s Blue Kentucky Girl
she got into bluegrass. A year later came Roses in the Snow, country
classics from Bill Monroe and Jimmie Rodgers, the Carter Family and
the Stanley Brothers, with a Paul Simon tune tossed in. After this she
lost me: her focus got more diffuse, her mood too tied up with ballads
and weepers. I didnt get the 1987 trios with Dolly Parton and Linda
Ronstadt. On the other hand, her all-acoustic Angel Band, with its desolate, soulful country-gospel hymns, grabbed me; only later did I nd out
shed been inspired by Bruce Springsteens bleak album Nebraska.
The sound of Wrecking Ball, Emmylou Harriss 1995 album produced
by former Brian Eno/Neville Brothers associate Daniel Lanois, drew
me back toward Harris. But it was her energetic if unevenly recorded
live disc, 1998s Spyboy, and the tour that followed with her postpsychedelic power trio that made me seriously want more for the rst
time in a decade. So I went back and replayed Pieces of the Sky, Luxury
Liner, and Elite Hotel, and even 1972s GP and 1973s Grievous Angel.
For me, her pretty, soulful folky voice with the surprisingly resilient
country-meets-blues cri de coeur got under my skin less as it settled into
Nashvilles more predictable contours. I kept waiting for the shakeup,
for the rock in country rock to reemerge and maybe even, with luck,
take over.
To my ears, thats what happened on Wrecking Ball and Spyboy. Fired
rst by Lanoiss Eno-inspired, wall-of-sound approach, then by her interracial power trio (guitar whiz Buddy Miller, bass monster Daryl Jones,
agile drummer Brady Blade), Harris didnt so much tear up her country
roots as reinfuse them with another set of musical ideas. Thick-toned
distorted guitar, galloping bass, a cyclone of sound surrounding that
angelic voice with the heartachy tremolo, even on the old spirituals that
have been part of her show for decades.
Then came Red Dirt Girl, Harriss rst studio disk since Wrecking
Ball, this time via arty Nonesuch Records, home of the sleeper hit Buena
Vista Social Club. There may be ironic hay to be made by somebody
(not me) out of the fact that Nonesuch has made its bucks as the trendy
yuppie label of the 1980s and 1990s, marketing leather-and-lace Eurotrash hits like the Gypsy Kings. The labels stock in trade is its (justly)
critically ratied, near-automatic intellectual heft, and its consequent
ability to target boomers who scan the Sunday New York Times each
week for what to absorb.

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In the Garage

They could do a lot worse than Harriss Red Dirt Girl, most of
whichrarely, for hershe wrote herself.
Its a clich that most people in America want someone elses life. Ever
since the Gold Rush was augmented by Hollywood and John Steinbecks
Depression, California has been the golden wet dream for Americans
imagining new identities, the place where you can retool your self and
ditch the nasty nagging past you might someday have to answer for
or to.
Harris, like Springsteen, doesnt leave folks or home or culture or
ideas behind. In fact, she has been a kind of bellwether of pop musics
directions for almost three decades, partly because shes so rooted in her
past shes aware of where changes of direction are likely to blow in from.
When she started singing with Parsons, country and rock hated each
other; over the last decade, as her boomer generation settled comfortably
into middle age, country stars all sound like the Eagles, who were just
reading some pages from Parsonss book. Before the current refashionability of bluegrass and that already-gone moment of alt-country, Harris
was there. On Red Dirt Girl, she connects the dots between the 1960s,
Springsteen, and the post-Hendrix production style Lanois has rened.
You could argue that Red Dirt Girl updates Hendrix by way of electronica, but with a (relatively) conservative ear cocked backward, for
the boomer audiences sake. The entire album is a potpourri of sonic
styles, somehow overstuffed and lavish and rippling with suggestive
overtones even when its spare. On the title track, for instance, wisps of
overdriven guitar leak almost discreetly into the corners of the soundstage, a sympathetic echo of the lyrics successive dislocations. Multiple
basses rumble and snort through I Dont Wanna Talk About It Now,
reecting the disoriented but overwhelming focus shaping the singers
emotions. Every cut nds sounds spurting, drifting, wafting, insinuating,
poking, or sizzling into the deeply textured stereo image with unexpected and sometimes unsettling bits of shock, humor, recognition.
Repeatedly jigs and reels, the staples of Appalachian-descended country,
get bushwacked and overlayed and saturated with fuzz and wah-wah
washes and distant jangly electric piano and guitars, of course, always
guitars of every aural hue and cry.
The guitar, rock and rolls conceptual anchor, is the symbol that links
Harris and Springsteen. Consider her in-concert staple, Born To Run;
not Springsteens song, it takes an angle on men-women relationships
that puts the woman in the rock and roll drivers seat. In fact, the title
track of Red Dirt Girl is a very Boss-like tale of doppelgangers, one of
whom gets stuck in the old hometown, has ve kids by age 27, starts
downing whiskey and pills and ends up dead.
Like Springsteen and Tom Waits, Harris often imagines the characters
in her songs as people (or aspects of herself) shes left behind. But in

Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris

191

contrast to Americas standard-issue California dreamin, she doesnt

want to erase her past. She doesnt disappear beneath each new persona.
Which is one of several reasons Gram Parsons never hovers far from her
music.
Michelangelo, the CDs second tune, is yet another in a long line of
Harris tunes that invoke his ghost, the tragic gure of the awed genius
surrounded by his past choices, via a melody that could have come out
of Leonard Cohen and a spare but textured aural background speckled
with rumbling bass and acoustic guitar strums and jetstream wisps of
overdriven feedback. Tragedy sets its tensions between industrial
drumming, a clutch of guitars (including a hovering pedal steel), and
Springsteen and wife Patty Scialfa on backup Everly Brothers-gorhythm-and-blues-avored vocals after the Bossish opening about how
we all harvest our own destinies.
That sense of responsibility is why Harris never forgets or erases
history, no matter how she may recast it in literary or imaginative terms.
(Bang the Drum Slowly, her eulogy for her father cowritten with Guy
Clark, is unabashedly sentimental and biblical, for instance, with an ebow winding through it like a church organ.) Its also why, along with
the likes of Springsteen and Waits, she has struggled with the theme of
redemption time after time, whether singing refurbished old hymns in
her soaring vibrato or switching to more profane journeys taken from
her own and others searching. Understanding, guilt, salvation, and love
are all bound together in songs like The Pearl which pictures humans
neoplatonically cast form a world of light into a dark world of pain
where we earn our destinies.
Its a story older than Piers Plowman, but may seem quaint in a day
when the word character has been vastly reduced in meaning, when the
world appears like a welter of wannabe victims lining up for a camera
shot. The process of living leaves us scarred like it did Michelangelo, but
thats the price. Cameos come relatively cheap. On the other hand,
theres always the twilight solace of Prozac Nation.
Startlingly produced by Malcolm Burn (who engineered and mixed
Wrecking Ball), featuring a dozen or so musicians (also including Dave
Matthews and Jill Cunliffe), Red Dirt Girl is roughly two-thirds dynamite, one-third breathing space. Sonically, it never stops pushing into
postHendrix wah-wah soundscapes, including telephone rings and
background conversations, tunes starting with the whirr of a tape
machine being turned onall the deliberate postelectronica carelessness of sonic references outside the soundstage that paradoxically
underscore that stages erce integrity. Conceptually, it does what the
best country music (which it only vaguely is) has always done: tells us
stories about where we come from and warns us to look twice about
where were going.

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In the Garage

For Harris never forgets for long that our only inevitable destination
is deathwhich is one big reason you might call this music for grownups. Sure, its boomer music, so theres inevitably nostalgia, but in
Harriss capable, determined, ironic hands, the disc raises more questions than it settles neatly down to bed. And you can hum nearly all of
it through the jabs at the job and downers from your parents and/or
kids and adrenalin rushes of joy and outbreaks of road rage and those
late, ominously clear and sparkling nights when everyone else is nally
out cold and youre rhapsodically wishing you had a telescope.

19
The Grateful Dead
Frenesi took her hand away from Flashs and they all
got back to business, the past, a skip tracer with an
obsessional gleam in its eye, and still a step or two
behind, appeased for only a little while. Sure, she knew
folks who had no problem with the past. A lot of it they
just didnt remember. Many told her, one way and
another, that it was enough for them to get by in real
time without diverting precious energy to what, face it,
was fteen or twenty years dead and gone. But for
Frenesi the past was on her case forever, the zombie at
her back, the enemy no one wanted to see, a mouth
wide and dark as the grave.
Thomas Pynchon, Vineland
Q:

How do you know when Deadheads have been

staying with you?
A: Theyre still there.
Were American. What we do is as American as lynch
mobs. America has always been a complex place.
Jerry Garcia

The Grateful Dead avoided social pronouncements like bad acid, but
they helped create the contemporary concept of lifestyle. Even in the
1990s, when the bands audience was mostly middle-aged, Deadheads
felt they stepped out of prefab social roles and into an alternate universe
of possibility.
For those off the bus, the Deads culture was childishly dangerous. So
were taking drugs and dropping out to sleep on the street and scamming
money, food, and tickets to the bands infamously uneven shows, as
young Deadheads did.

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In the Garage

So then, why did it work? The Dead and Deadheads persisted and
thrived, despite being the butts of jokes and harassment and rejection.
What could this tell us about the 1960s, the epicenter of the American
culture wars?
The Dead, wrote Entrepreneur in the 1990s, found a way to sell
without appearing to sell out. Their long strange trip there went the
hard way. In 1969, after recording their rst three albums, the band
owed Warner Bros. $185,000. The companys frustration about cost
overruns in the studio was exacerbated by the Deads lack of hit singles.
Then Live/Dead, a live double album, went gold in 1970, the label gave
them $75,000 to re-sign, and Lenny Hart, drummer Mickey Harts
father, the bands interim manager, walked off with it. By 1971, they
had been arrested repeatedly for drugs. One bust in New Orleans
sparked Truckin, their only AM radio hit.
FM radio saved the Dead. Live/Dead was the rst in-concert album
recorded in 16-track stereo, and its long jams fit the more relaxed
album-cut format that predominated on FM rock radio. Widespread
play on FM coupled with a multi-city US tour: the bands concerts were
simulcast on local FM stations, and listeners were encouraged to tape
themdespite the entertainment industry frowning on piracy. The
gambit won over thousands of listeners who had never seen the Dead
and cemented their outsider reputation.
When Warner Bros. executives rst met them, they were startled to
realize that this unknown bunch of weirdos would take a deal only on
their terms, and as a result the Dead kept rare control of their publishing
and licensing rights. They also pioneered the contemporary concert
industry: by 1971, tables at their shows sold T-shirts, and they unveiled
The Wall of Sound, a modular behemoth of vari-sized PA speakers that
lled two tractor-trailers, at a time when arena concerts barely existed.
That same year the cover of their second live double-album, Grateful
Dead, had a notice: DEAD FREAKS UNITE! Who are you? Where are you?
How are you? Several hundred wrote to the San Rafael, California, P.O.
box, and the rst Dead newsletter went out. By 1974, the list had 80,000
names. In 1983, they opened Dead Tix to control ticket access and prices
and promoters. They asked that bootleg tapes of their shows be
swapped, not sold, and tried to prosecute violators. Their Rex Foundation was funded by concert earnings and gave away $7 million.
Their corporate headquarters was a small house in Marin, north of
San Francisco, where they all lived for years. They evolved Dead
versions of corporate structure and Roberts Rules of Order. The question, Garcia said to Rolling Stone in the early days, is, can we do it
and stay high? Can we make it so our organization is composed of
people who are, like, pretty high and not being controlled by their gig
but who are actively interested in what theyre doing?

The Grateful Dead

195

At rst, people just showed up and hung out and maybe worked; sixty
stuck, and got well-paid, secure jobs with profit-sharing, health and
dental and retirement plans, home and car loans. Roadies were on salary
year-round, six gures. Grateful Dead Productions ultimately dealt with
all Dead business: mail-order tickets, catalog merchandising, concertsite merchandising, their label and publishing company, the fan club, the
foundation. It is certainly the rock industrys most fully formed
company, Inc. wrote admiringly in 1994. The chairmanship rotated
among band members as the staff ran their bailiwicks. No wonder Inc.
was enthusiastic: 1990s business consultants had caught up with the
Deads decentralized style of team management.
During the 1970s, the Dead placed among the countrys top-grossing
live acts. In 1985, trapped in a deepening addiction, guitarist and resident guru Jerry Garcia was busted in Golden Gate Park for cocaine and
heroin possession. The band, which had avoided the issue, finally
confronted him, and he entered drug rehab. In 1986, he had a diabetic
coma and nearly died. But in 1987 the Dead made Forbess list of toppaid entertainers. In the 1990s, they slowed their pace to three to four
week-long bouts on the road three or four times a year, but in 1992 they
pulled in $32 million; they were the highest-grossing act in show business. Garcia collapsed again. In 1993, 81 concerts earned $45.6 million.
After Garcia died in August 1995, the press had a field day. His
widow and his second wife and kids fought over $10 million in cash and
annual royalties of $4.6 million from his music and art, plus spinoffs
like painted neckties, an action gure, and branded Birkenstock sandals.
His bandmates fought over the hand-crafted guitars hed willed to the
man who made them, claiming they were communal property.
But for 30 years, while the straight world jeered or shrugged, the
Dead lived in a parallel universe and made it work.
Grateful Dead music was American music, polyglot, popular, spiked
with jazz, folk, rock, rhythm and blues, country, blues, electronic,
aleatoric, classical, and any other sound the musicians decided they
could use. The bands background had a lot to do with why that worked.
Garcias father, a Dixieland bandleader, named him after Jerome Kern,
but rock and roll and bluegrass made him want to play guitar and banjo.
His solos are an Armstrong-like process of melodic sugggestion and
searching: plangent lyricism, bursts of triplets, crying glissandos, unexpected icy edges of irony and wit. Ron Pigpen McKernan grew up in
black neighborhoods, where his father worked as a DJ on black radio;
he was the Deads sacred monster, its black-in-whiteface front man.
Bassist Phil Lesh learned violin at age eight, trumpet at 14, studied with
Luciano Berio at 22, and at 25 took up the bass, for the rst time, two
weeks before he first played the then-Warlocks. As a teen, Bill

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Kreutzman drummed for years in R & B bands, and drummer Mickey

Hart studied folk percussion around the globe: the Dead were charged
by a powerful generator of polyrhythmic, odd-meter grooves. Guitarist
Bob Weir was mostly self-taught, but he learned from Garcia to avoid
patterns and phrase like brass sections. He used to listen to trumpet
like Miles (Davis), for instance, Weir remembered, and so I started
listening to John Coltranes pianist McCoy Tyner. He was good at
phrasing, but he was also good at what I call a textured harmonic carpet
that hed lay down for a soloist. Thered be a given key hed be playing
in, and then thered be an overlay of notes on top of that that were basically suspended on the back half of the bar. I learned that youre not
there to make a pointyoure there to serve the music. Jerry taught me
to listen.
In the 1990s, jazz musicians jammed with the Dead regularly, and
jazz groups put on Grateful Dead tributes. Ornette Coleman had Garcia
guest on an album; asked what it was like, the guitarist told The New
Yorker, Like lling in the spaces in a Jackson Pollock painting.
Garcia was the Deads psychic and symbolic hub, and embodied the
cultural strands knotting the Beat and hippie periods, and thus jazz, folk,
and rock. Born in San Francisco in 1942, Garcia was Chicano. Not long
after the ve year old lost part of a nger in a wood-chopping game of
dare with his brother, he saw his father drown. After a few years living
with his mothers parents, where he had piano lessons but preferred
reading comics and Ray Bradbury and Edgar Rice Burroughs, he moved
into his mothers sailors bar and hotel in downtown San Francisco.
My grandmother listened to country music, he said, and my
mother listened to opera. My father was a musician; I was in the middle
of music. . . . Nobody was telling me rock and roll was out of tune. I
didnt get that. But when he was 15 and stung by Chuck Berry and
Buddy Holly and asked his mother for an electric guitar, she got him a
Neapolitan accordion from a sailor. He swapped it at a pawn shop for
a Danelectro, one of the cheapest electric guitars of the period, a postwar
triumph of functionality with its pressboard body, cheap finish, and
pickups made from lipstick holders. He taught himself to play: The
most important thing I learned, he told Bruce Barich, was that it was
okay to improvise.
He hung out with pot-smoking beatniks who went to poetry readings
in North Beach at the Coexistence Bagel Shop, so his mother moved to
the Sonoma County coast to get him out of trouble. It didnt work. Like
Jimi Hendrix, he was busted for stealing a car and joined the army at 17.
As with Hendrix, Garcias army time sharpened his interest in music.
The paratrooper Hendrix translated the Doppler effects he heard as he
fell into his outrageous space-age blues. Garcia was drawn instead to
the discipline of bluegrass: When youre blasting along straight eighth

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197

notes at a quick tempo, it requires a lot of control and a lot of practice.

Near-death in a car crash that killed a friend made him fanatical about
music. He slowed down Earl Scruggs records to learn ve-string banjo.
By the early 1960s, he was good enough to tour bluegrass festivals and
meet one of his heroes, Bill Monroe, the man whod brought jazzy
polyrhythms and harmonies into old-time string music.
By 1962, a member of the loose community of Beats around Palo Alto
and Menlo Park on the peninsula south of San Francisco, he devoured
records: string bands and blues, R & B and jazz, the Harry Smith
Anthology. His bluegrass and jug bands had period-piece names: Asphalt
Jungle Boys, Sleepy Hollow Log Stompers, Hart Valley Drifters, Thunder
Mountain Tub Thumpers, Wildwood Boys, Black Mountain Boys,
Mother McCrees Uptown Jug Champions. In 1964, he met David
Grisman, who a decade later fused bluegrass with the hot jazz of Django
Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli, which he dubbed Dawg Music.
During the late 1970s, Grisman and Garcia (on banjo) formed in Old
and In The Way, a jazz-bluegrass string quintet with fiddler Vassar
Clements.
Menlo Park was home to writers Ken Kesey and Robert Stone, who
were taking LSD, initially as part of Stanford University studies. (At
Harvard, Timothy Leary, with the advice of Aldous Huxley, was giving
LSD to creative people like Thelonious Monk and Allen Ginsberg.) In
1965, the Warlocks debuted at Magoos Pizza Parlor, playing anything
from plugged-in jug-band music to roiling rhythm and blues with spontaneous jams. Then they met Bill Graham, actor turned promoter; less
than a month later, they were the Grateful Dead, house band for Keseys
Acid Tests, and Garcia morphed into Captain Trips. For most of 1966,
they played constantly around the Bay Area for free. By the time they cut
their rst Warner Bros. recording, theyd been performing nonstop for
two years.
I rst saw the Grateful Dead in New Yorks Tompkins Square Park
on June 1, 1967. A schoolmate was hip to the new San Francisco bands
and heard about them doing a free afternoon concert. For us, the Dead
were a rumor, so we cut class and went.
The park looked full. The thick sweet scent of pot wafted over, but
though there were plenty of cops dealing with outraged Ukrainians
from the neighborhood we couldnt see any busts. The Diggers seemed
to be keeping things together. The Diggers organized squat housing,
food distribution, rst aid, and other vital services around the hippie
and runaway communities that suddenly sprang up in San Francisco
and the East Village. They hustled donations, worked out barter, but
always their watchword was free. They rejected money and The
System it oiled.

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The Dead were playing Dancing in the Streets, with Pigpen the
anti-hippie, a greasy, ugly, beery biker, centerstage. It reminds me now,
after decades of hearing how trippy and abstract and slo-mo their live
shows were, that the Grateful Dead I saw so much in the late 1960s was
a dance band. Rhythms were their fuel, that New Orleans-avored lilt
of their sprung beats that swung with such joy and freedom. In 1967, I
felt it, like everybody else, but I didnt realize theyd absorbed jazz
syncopations and modal improvising into psychedelic rock, that they
grasped Miles Daviss modes and melody and Herbie Hancocks way of
turning the beat around repeatedly, a cyclonic effect that suspends time.
But I didnt have to realize it to move to it.
The Dead and the Diggers scared and repelled the American mainstream, but they descended from an American tradition: the ecstatic
utopian community, a consistent but repressed side of American history
that stretched from peyote-taking, tobacco-smoking Native Americans
through the Quakers and Shakers and Baptist snake-handlers and Jim
Jones. Psychedelic drugs were this sects casual sacraments, mostly pot,
hash, mescaline, peyote, psylocibin, and LSD, though speed and
downers and cocaine ickered around the edges.
Forty years later, it still seems bitterly hilarious to me that after
spending countless billions of dollars Americas perpetual War on Drugs
continues without evident effect, except for millions in prison, while
more millions gobble proliferating pharmaceuticals marketed by drug
conglomerates, like Viagra and Prozac, spurred by what are now called
lifestyle choices, despite the spotty knowledge about their long-term
effects.
Welcome to Brave New World.
Psychedelic drugs deepened the tribalism and distrust of ideology
fundamental to the Diggers vision. They rejected the use of money, the
totem of American society, because they rejected The System where
everything had a dollar value or else had no value. So they begged,
scammed, panhandledthe modes the straight world despised and
feared in white youth. Diggers are niggers, a slogan that was obviously less than true, was really the sound of some who had grown up
absurd, slouching out the exit from the rat-race and Manifest Destiny.
But, in 1967, black and white America were separate worlds ruled
by economics and racism, not ecstasy. Black Power and black separatism
replaced the religious-led civil-rights crusade in the South; Martin Luther
King was broadening his political platform to oppose the Vietnam War.
There were few Deadheads or Diggers of color, and as few whites in
black revolutionary groups. As the war escalated, Lyndon Johnson
slashed Great Society programs to fund it, and the rage broke in the
restorm of riots that swept the nations cities around the time the Dead
coalesced outside San Francisco, crescendoed just about the time their
New York City blitz converted thousands into Dead freaks. From then

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199

on New York was their second home: we saw them a lot at the Fillmore
East, three- and four-hour phantasmagorical shows that inexorably fed
the legend.
They headed back west to play the Monterey Pop Festival, rocks rst,
blanketed with media coverage that showed the counterculture in
confusing, frightening, blissful drug-powered glory onstage and off,
culminating (in the movie) with Jimi Hendrix making his debut and,
after burning up the music, smashing and burning his guitar. Was this a
representation of the politics of ecstasy? What about the playfulness, the
way he detonated Wild Thing while casually chewing a huge wad of
gum? Despite the noise and cavalcade of stars, the movie Monterey Pop
lost money and slowed Hollywoods rush toward rock: I saw it in a Kips
Bay theater, the seats mostly empty and the screen washed with deep
blue and black for Otis Redding, who died soon after the festival, the
speakers bursting with sound and fury and hippie irreverence and Marx
Brothers-inspired subversion.
The Dead did the concert but not the movie. They wanted the shows
profits to go to the Diggers, refused to sign releases for their performances when that didnt happen, stole amplifiers and gave a free
all-night show at a local college to retaliate, and returned the equipment
the next day.
A month after Monterey, Time magazine did its cover story on The
Hippies, and 75,000 middle-class white kids looking to drop out and
party, most with no street smarts, poured into San Francisco during the
Summer of Love, and the deluge buried the Diggers and their fragile
experiment. On October 6, 1967, the rst anniversary of the outlawing
of LSD, the Diggers marched in a symbolic funeral procession for The
Death of Hippie.
The attempt to set up a viable alternative infrastructure in the physical world was over before Woodstock or Altamont ever happened.
Garcia grew mythic, aureoled with curly black hair and thick beard,
his glasses glinting with merry irony. Like Dylan, he used double-talk
and put-ons to slide out from the role of leader. He did not direct or
speak for the Dead, the Deadheads, the hippies, the Diggers, the
antiwar movement. Each of us had a path for our steps alone that we
had to nd.
Enigmatic, Zenlike: Garcias best solos led the Dead to the risk of the
unforeseen to seek those moments of transport, walking on air; sometimes
he seemed like a cartoon character, Pynchons Benny Profane, ne as long
as he didnt look down. Sometimes he fell. Sometimes he fought his way
free of gravity and, pumped by the Deads oscillating feedback loop,
stepped back into space and searched again. If the quest for musical
ecstasy imbued the Dead with homemade drama that hooked their audience, it also displayed character in their endless willingness to try.

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The 12-CD set called Golden Road (19651973) gathers their 10

albums for Warner Bros. (The individual albums with outtakes have also
been reissued.) With improved sound, original art, multiple sets of wellinformed notes, and elaborate packaging, it can be riveting, then
downshift into something so painful you wonder all over again how
these guys ever made it. Then you hit Live/Dead and hear the onstage
torque this band could put out, its kinetic ability to spot problems and
trampoline them into possibilities, send Garcia back out soaring on
those skipping triplets and crying glissandos, those sudden unexpected
edges of irony and wry wit, those clean, crisp, cascading lines that wink
like shooting stars on a clearing night.
Not for nothing was Dark Star the totemic Deadhead hit: it epitomized the Deads participatory musical democracy. The volume rolls up
on Leshs bass and Garcias guitar twining in a contrapuntal canon that
claries gradually into John Coltranes themes from India and Your
Lady, burnished by double-drummer cymbals and nessed by Weirs
guitar, which scratches and claws two-note and three-note chords and
hammered-on and pulled-off lls. The modal conversation hovers, then
swells into full view: the voices in the band wind in and out, bob and
weave through the foreground, dancing in their heads as they sway (if
youd seen them, you knew this) gently out of time onstage. The Deads
command of dynamics was exceptionally deft, and Dark Star pivoted
on it. The improvisation was dominated by modal interaction, but, as
later Miles Davis would, they also segued into patches that were less
thematic development than sidebars, sudden sonic windows opening
along the way because of something one of the musicians said.
Their first recording sessions, for the Autumn and Scorpio labels,
included on the box set, are forgettable, except for a weird track with
jazzs master of scat vocals Jon Hendricks. The rst album for Warner
Bros., Grateful Dead, sounds like the Ritalin they were swallowing: the
folk songs and blues from their huge repertoire were transmogried into
amphetamine blues. Engineer Dave Hassinger was ummoxed by the
snorting psychedelic behemoth he faced in the studio for four days, so
he turned the volume down and edited out the jams. (The reissues
restore them.) When I nally heard the album, it didnt sound much like
Tompkins Square, except for the material. (Birth of the Dead, an early
live disc in the box, comes closer to what they sounded like.) There was
Pigpens dirty-old-man reading of Sonny Boy Williamsons Good
Morning Little Schoolgirl, riding that bouncy Dead beat, Leshs bass
loping with his eerily agile grace, stirring lyricism, and daredevil timing.
There was Cold Rain and Snow, whose double-guitar solo set the
pattern for the Allman Brothers and their ilk.
Sitting on Top of the World, an old Mississippi Sheiks tune redone
by Howlin Wolf, revved into a high-speed, key-shifting chase.
Morning Dew, a contemporary folk song about nuclear holocaust,

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201

was a longtime Dead setpiece, at its best a tour de force of their rockmeets-Dixieland call-and-response. Viola Lee Blues, the album closer,
put this over a march beat that accelerates into a one-chord rave-up, a
rolling avalanche that climaxes with feedback billowinga glimpse of
what the Dead sounded like live. Only the explosively galloping opening
of Golden Road (to unlimited devotion), aswirl with Hammond and
combustible guitars, matched it.
The album introduces the American patchwork quilt of material that
remained the Deads trademark: tunes from Gus Cannons Jug Stompers, the Memphis Jug Band, Otis Redding, Smokey Robinson, Howlin
Wolf, Noah Lewis, Reverend Gary Davis, Bob Dylan (their single largest
source of outside material), Jesse Fuller, Merle Haggard, and the everpopular Anonymous lled their bulging songbook. This was one reason
they never made set lists; the other was to take the risk, and try to read
the audience via the feedback loop that eliminated the fourth wall of
the stage.
Anthem of the Sun took them into conceptual-art music, sonic
collage, tape manipulations, lapping overdubs, and endless splices, parts
inchoate and other parts brilliant as they learned the latest technology,
the eight-track recording studio. Their Buddhas grin and jug-band
history periodically surface: Pigpens Alligator opens with cheerfully
sneering kazoos as horn section. Next came Aoxomoxoa, which spent
almost as much time and money while they tackled the new 16-track
studio; it also marks the appearance of Robert Hunters lyrics, and with
them, a new direction. Duprees Diamond Blues is the rst of a line of
Dead originals: twists on old folk lyrics into a comic tall tale of the
surreal or deadly supernatural, with mostly acoustic instruments in a
densely subtle arrangement stippled with eccentricities (an ersatz
calliope, for instance), and, at the end, a cosmic shrug.
Recorded in the midst of Aoxomoxoa, Live/Dead was cut onstage at
a few shows to let kids who hadnt seen them nd out what the buzz
was about. Dark Star, which opened the double album, was an instant
FM radio hit. But as popular on the airwaves was the earthy balls-to-thewall rhythm and blues of Smokey Robinsons Turn on Your Love
Light, which wrecked the house whenever I saw them go for it: the
band pumps and chugs and snorts in a multifaceted arrangement behind
Pigpens lewd asides, comic grunts and gestures, and soulful vocals.
Garcias scratchy thin tenor yelp alchemized the dread of Reverend Gary
Daviss Death Dont Have No Mercy: he learned to use his hiccups
and even the cracks in his fragile voice skillfully, phrasing with a storytellers timing, translating bluegrasss high lonesome sound into
psychedelic blues even as his guitar navigated around the blues clichs
choking nearly every other rock guitarist of the time.
And so the next two albums were a shock at first: the Dead were
trying to be Crosby Stills and Nash or The Band. Then I listened to the

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In the Garage

sturdy song construction, the nuanced arrangements, the narratives that

were harrowingly dark and surrealistically funny and sometimes both at
once. This makes sense, I thought, from a band named from one of the
annotations for Childs Ballads that describes grateful dead, the
unavenged who wander without rest until the wrong done them is
rightedwhich grants them peace and makes them grateful.
With Workingmans Dead and its follow-up, American Beauty, lyricist Hunter and Garcia (they teamed up far more than the others)
explored the nature of evil, the casual damage inicted by time, history,
loved ones, society, lifean American version of the Brothers Grimm,
with lots of Dylan-style storytelling etched with steel and tenderness. So
theres little sentimentality but plenty of mists and outcasts, laughs and
fear, fables and tall tales and even folk realism. And always there is the
genial acceptance of fate tempered with irony and spine. Even when
Uncle Johns Band calls you home, the dire wolf lurks everywhere,
and the best you can do is sit down and let him deal the hand though
every card in the deck is the Queen of Spades, shrug like Humphrey
Bogart, cornered but in the moment, and play out the scene, knowing
that you can run but you cant hide and that sometimes you cant even
run, like Black Peter, a dying old man who wants be surrounded in
peace by a couple of close friends but whose neighbors run to see him
suffer and die in pain.
Live, the Dead were among rocks worst ensemble vocalistseven
when they hit the right notes, their voices didnt blend texturally. That
made these albums, full of elaborate harmonies demanding nuance,
more of a shock. The Band studied the Staples Singers to learn to max
out on their limited voices, emulating the gospel singers staggered entry
and pacing. The Dead were far less inventive. Still, Workingmans Dead
and American Beauty have some lustrous singing, like the taut
harmonies of Cumberland Blues and Uncle Johns Band. And if
Till the Morning Comes sounded like the Beach Boys straining, well,
fallibility made the Dead more approachable and reminded us that
human perfectibility was an ongoing activity, a road that never ended.
These two albums went gold, thanks to FM radio, and gave the Dead
a place among rocks most accomplished songwriters. So naturally their
next two albumstheir last for Warner Bros.were recorded live.
Deadheads call Grateful Dead, their 1971 live double album, the
Skull and Roses album, because of the four-color skeleton adorned
with roses that stretched across the fold-out cover. The name was a lastminute compromise; the band, mischievously provocative, demanded it
be called Skullfuck. (Spinal Tap, anyone?) It leaked to FM radio even
before it was released.
I was at one of the Fillmore East shows where parts of the album
were taped, and all I remember was that the band smoked. Pigpen was
sick with a much-reduced role; Merl Saunders added occasional organ.

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203

Mickey Hart, shamed by his fathers theft, was on sabbatical. So the

Dead regrouped around their quartet fundamentals and got even tighter.
Bertha galloped on Leshs bass, which suddenly climbed out of its
soul-music patterns to loosely double and pump Garcias solo; Mama
Tried and Me and My Uncle, their cosmic cowboy tunes, put Weir
on ironically smooth lead vocals framing solo sections where Garcia and
Lesh danced in fierce telepathy; The Other One was as smart and
sophisticated a long-form improvisation as Dark Star; Big Boss
Man gave the sadly diminished Pigpen (and the Deads R & B side) a
moment in the spotlight; Wharf Rat was a long tale of hope crumbling but unabandoned set to chiming guitars and rumbling, prowling
bass rippling with the Deads dynamic nesse; and the closeout medley,
Not Fade Away/Going Down the Road, was so open-ended, so
buoyant, so good that Dylan copped the arrangement.
Europe 72 closed the Deads time working, as Hunter put it, for
Bugs Bunny. It was also their rst tour outside America, so they naturally brought The Wall of Sound (which they pictured inside the fold-out
cover) and 50 or so family members, dependents, staff, and roadies.
They had added a keyboard player and female backing vocalist, Keith
and Donna Godcheaux. They had a clutch of great new tales, like Jack
Straw and Hes Gone and Ramble on Rose, from times that never
quite happened about people who never quite lived in places that looked
like you mightve been. And they had old ones revamped as well: China
Cat Sunower undulates on snarling, braided lines that could have been
Sly and the Family Stones. Godcheaux was a busy pianist; what he
added in texture and support he could subtract in the breathing room
essential to the Dead, but they usually managed to absorb him into their
dialogues, and his wife shored up their woeful live harmonies.
And with that they were off to start Grateful Dead Records, which
folded, though they did not. During the 1980s their shows lacked edge:
after Pigpens death in 1973 they banked their R & B res. But the soldout crowds of Deadheads, aging and newbies, lled airplane hangars
like Nassau Coliseum, so far from the Acid Tests, those complicated
moments of transcendence that inevitably look dangerously goofy after
the fact: mysticism is never clear in words, and the utopian dreams
bursting from beneath Americas Puritan Taylor-ized crust arent always
easy to decipher. Or maybe, in our dwarsh and cynical age, they are:
In essence, wrote Entrepreneur, the Dead werent selling music, they
were selling a unique, spontaneous experience, a version of lifestyle
marketing embodied by Harley-Davidson and Nike. Each concert was a
unique event, with the same songs rarely repeated for weeks or even
years.

20
The Band
W hen I rst saw The Last Waltz in 1978, I almost walked out, although
I was a fan of both director Martin Scorsese and The Band. I admit I was
one of the folks whose tickets for the original 1976 show at San Franciscos Winterland were refunded by impresario Bill Graham in light of
the scheduled movie shoot, when he decided to have a sitdown Thanksgiving turkey dinner precede the concert, which translated into a
then-hefty $25 price tag.
Twenty-six years and a new DVD version with compelling video and
redone audio have changed, or at least made subtler, some of my reactions. But I still think two of Scorseses typical dynamics are in play:
seeking out Americas underbellies, and monumentalizing or sacramentalizing them. And so The Last Waltz teeters between grit and awe
perhaps unintentionally but tellingly, like rock itself at the time and rock
history ever since.
When it premiered, Pauline Kael famously dubbed it the most beautiful rock movie ever. As a formalist she had a point. With seven
cameramen who included Vilmos Zsigmond, Scorsese professionalized the
deliberately nonprofessional documentary sensibility of DL Pennebaker
and the Maysles. Now that seems a tting sign of the times. In the 1970s,
mainstream rock had been professionalized, from the boring arena-ready
music itself to the new national distribution systems, while pop sputtered
with the industrys search for commercially viable trends, like disco.
Almost in answer, new forms of folk art appeared. Bruce Springsteen
prowled stages toward apotheosis with shows that exploded somewhere
between Elvis, an R & B revue, and West Side Story. Breakdancers with
turntable artists were appearing on the streets of cities like New York, as
punk rockers were in the clubs. It was another return to the do-it-yourself
folk aesthetic consistently underlying evolutionary developments in
American popular culture.
And so now The Last Waltz gives me a kind of double-vision: its an
elegy to The Band that is also, perhaps unwittingly, an elegy to an era. The
sense of reverence toward the motley parade of music stars trooping across

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205

its lenses is intercut with open-eyed realism during the best of the
connecting interview segmentsthough those too are frequently tinged
with Scorseses romanticism.
The opening scene is a good example. Rick Danko, scarred face and
blurred eyes and coiled street-punk energy, gets ready to shoot pool when
Scorsese asks him what the game is. Cutthroat, he replies, swaggering
slightly while he explains that the object of the game is to knock everyone
elses balls off the table, then smashes the cue ball into a newly racked,
now caroming pack.
When MUSIC FROM BIG PINK appeared in 1968, it sounded to me like it
came from some musical Bermuda triangle sketched by the Anthology of
American Folk Music and Booker T and the MGs. Its album cover was a
painting by Bob Dylan.
Dylan heard about the quintet through blues revivalist John Hammond
Jr., who used them on the recording sessions for his 1963 album So Many
Roads. (Hammonds father was the famous John Hammond who signed
Dylan, Billie Holiday, and Bruce Springsteen.) When Dylan called to hire
them for shows at New Yorks Forest Hills tennis stadium and the Hollywood Bowl, they didnt know who he was.
This kicked off Dylans revolutionary 196566 tour. He and the
Hawks, as they were known then, revved up his music into garage grunge
while being booed coast-to-coast by folk purists. It was enough to make
one band member quit. Al Kooper remembers that at shows he played
with Dylan during this time audiences sang along with Like a Rolling
Stone, and then booed. But the crowds werent all hostile: in Berkeley,
Allen Ginsberg brought Ken Kesey, Michael McClure, and Gary Snyder.
Theres a picture of the poets with Dylan that shows Robertson standing
a bit apart, as if wanting to join but not sure he shouldor could.
After his 1966 motorcycle accident, Dylan pretty much disappeared
from view, and there were regular rumors of his death or disgurement.
But the smartest word was that hed been hanging out at Big Pink, a
nondescript house at the foot of Woodstocks Overlook Mountain,
jamming and writing songs with The Band. (These would soon surface as
bootlegs; selections have been remixed and ofcially reissued on The Basement Tapes, intercut with other material by The Band alone.) Dylan
encouraged them to nd their artistic vision. No surprise that Music from
Big Pink opened with one Dylan track, Tears of Rage, and closed with
another, I Shall Be Released.
Dylans near-invisibility only augmented his cultural aura, a marketing
lesson his widely disliked, thuggish, Svengaliesque manager, Albert
Grossman, absorbed and soon applied to his latest clients, The Band.
Hadnt there already been a major-label bidding war to sign them thanks
to their time with Dylan? The word of mouth preceding their rst album
release was amplied by then-emerging FM rock radio, which played

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album tracks, not hit singles. This late 1960s development created openings for groups like The Band, who were not really top 40 AM-radio
material, but could survive from FM airplay thanks to album sales and
touring. (Even so, Music from Big Pink was certied goldrecognition
of 500,000 copies soldonly in 2001.)
From the late 1960s on, power and money shifted to FM rock stations
as audiences and album sales grew exponentially, displacing other genres
in the music businesss hierarchy. Classical, jazz, and folk stations dwindled. Through the 1970s, standardization of format and consolidation of
ownership proceeded apace with the rest of American business trends. By
the centurys end, virtually 90 percent of all American radio stations were
owned by two or three corporations. But at the time, the birth of FM rock
radio seemed to bring gusts of fresh air through newly opened windows.
Inside the double sleeve of Music from Big Pink were pictures of The
Band: ve guys dressed like extras in an early Hollywood western, visual
kin to the road-warrior hobos and evicted tenant farmers who peopled
Grapes of Wrath and Woody Guthrie tunes. Their mothers and fathers
and kids. Their house, Big Pink, every bands dreama clubhouse to jam
and practice and record in, surrounded by a hundred acres of mountain
meadows and woods, though The Band, like millions of post-Beatles and
post-Dylan American kids picking and singing in their cellars and backyards, still had to keep the volume down for fear of riling the neighbors.
Nestled in Big Pink, playing cards and getting stoned and writing and
working out new stuff as well as tweaking old bar-band tunes and
Anglican hymns and backwoods country and pieces of Harry Smiths
Anthology of American Folk Music, Dylan and The Band forged a
remarkable creative symbiosis. Thanks to their Dylan-paid salaries and a
rent that, depending on who you believe, was somewhere between $125
and $275 a month, The Band played musical chairs with instruments as
they groped for fresh ideas. As Robbie Robertson, The Bands chief songwriter and guitarist, has shrewdly observed, Sometimes the limitation of
the instrument can provide originality.
Improvising was key to their artistic process, as their shortcomings or
imaginations prodded them from instrument to instrument, lineup to
lineup to nd what worked with the tune at hand. The result was contemporary folk music, new-minted yet old-sounding, with strains of
Appalachia and the Delta, rockabilly and soul. It wobbled foggily somewhere between jug bands and Stax-Volt, surreal wet dreams and revival
meetings.
Despite rock historys standard myths, the instruments on Music
from Big Pink were in many ways less unfamiliar, even in rock contexts,
than idiosyncratically foregrounded and mixed and matched. Each track
got a particular sound, a special treatment. The keynote was a kind of

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homespun versatility, at times reminiscent of Woody Guthries sawn

ddle tunes.
Robertsons guitar stayed mostly low-prole, rearing for occasional
stabbing outbursts; he rarely sang. The three vocalists were startlingly
different, but found offbeat ways to blend. As Robertson has wryly
observed, A lot of the time with The Band they were somewhere between
real harmonies and, because of our lack of education in music, they would
be things that just sounded interestingor they would be only thing the
person could hit.
And yet there was more art to it than that. I wanted, Robertson has
said, to discover the sound of The Band. . . . I didnt want screaming
vocals. I wanted sensitive vocals where you can hear the breathing and the
voices coming in. The whole thing of discovering the voicesdont everybody come in all together. Everybody in records is working on getting all
the voices together until it neutralizes itself. I like voices coming in one at
a time, in a chain reaction kind of thing like the Staples Singers did.
Levon Helms singing was gritty and soulful and at times sardonic; he
doubled on drums and mandolin. Rick Danko had a clear, yearning tenor,
played bass that burbled like a McCartneyesque tuba, sawed a backwoods
ddle, and strummed guitar. Richard Manuel doubled on engagingly
ramshackle drums and pounded what has been described as rhythm
piano; as for his voice, Robertson has said, Theres a certain element of
pain in there that you didnt know whether it was because he was trying
to reach for a note or because he was a guy with a heart thatd been hurt.
Garth Hudson was classically trained, said he learned to improvise from
playing at his uncles funeral parlor, loved Scriabin and Anglican church
music, and invented one after another black box, the kinds of soundshapers so integral to the eras musical sensibility. Hudson didnt sing, but
the sounds he made became The Bands sonic glue, as they tted parts
together that breathed, leaving spaces that oat, stepping into others, with
the sort of interlocking discipline found in, say, the jammed-out music of
Count Basie, or Muddy Waters, or Booker T and the MGs. Not surprisingly, they cut their rst two albums mostly live in the studio. (See The
Band for an informative, if talking-head-heavy, video history of the
making of the groups rst two records.)
Tears of Rage, cowritten by Dylan and Manuel, kicked Music from
Big Pink off-kilter from the start. Manuels eccentric R & B cry and
falsetto staggered dangerously, seductively, around the confessional lyrics,
Robertsons treated guitar approximated organ tones, Hudsons winding
churchy organ swelled and subsided, and a drunken Salvation Armyish
horn section (courtesy of Hudson and producer John Simon) punctuated
the ow over the spare, Booker-T-and-the-MGs-style bass and drums.
Simon has observed of the distinctively moaning horn blend, Thats the
only sound we could make.

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In the Garage

The rest of the album was uneven but ear-opening, challenging, even
wonderful. To Kingdom Come bounced airily, blearily beneath
Manuels vocals, The Weight mixed Curtis Mayeld guitar licks into a
surreal gospel setting, Long Black Veil tipped its classicist hat at Lefty
Frizell, and Chest Fever was an instant FM-radio hit, with its swelling,
skirling, gnashing organ and nightmare-incoherent lyrics.
With Albert Grossman behind them, The Bandor at least Robertson,
who was rapidly becoming primus inter pareslearned to use reticence
and image to enhance their music. Like Wynton Marsalis a decade later
in jazz, they self-consciously looked back to tradition. We were rebelling
against the rebellion, Robertson has said. It was an instinct to separate
ourselves from the pack. That instinct drew the attention of the aborning
rock press, which became their champions: outlets like Rolling Stone,
cofounded by jazz historian Ralph J. Gleason, fused the old fanzines and
more critical and historical perspectives. These new media helped make
The Band counterculture heroes.
As did the lyrics, which were increasingly written by Robertson. Enigmatic and vaguely religious and poetic, full of questions and retorts that
never necessarily mesh, painting realistic scenes and Dadaist laments, they
clearly owed a great deal to Dylan. Robertson had also been reading Steinbeck and Cocteau, thinking in terms of movies, wanting to replicate what
hes called Dylans disruption of song forms. To many, he appeared as a
contemporary James Agee, determined to nd the artistic secrets in the
backwoods margins of Americas soul.
The look and sound, the entire presentation of The Band, evoked the
notion of authenticity that has underscored writing about them ever
since, usually to contrast them with the countercultural rebellion they
were supposedly rebelling against. As Grossman, who knew show business, surely understood, this was both an iconic extension and an ironic
inversion of the folk revivals would-be purity. For the counterculture
and show business were The Bands home. They were outriders on
Dylans panoramic inuence, mountainside avatars of the Jeffersonian
back-to-the-land ideal that recurred in the Woodstock generations
ideology. The Weight became a radio hit largely because of its appearance in the lm Easy Rider. Their music wasnt played at the Grand Ole
Opry or juke joints. They werent Waylon Jennings or Willie Nelson or
Merle Haggard.
The appearance of Music from Big Pink helped seal the shift to rock
culture from rock and roll. Musically, this described a nely braided
process of more self-conscious reassimilation of musical inuences and
ideas that fed a creative surge in post-Dylan/post-Beatles American
popular music, washing away years of teen idols and Tin Pan Alley and
crewcut collegiate folk singers dominating the radio and record industry.
Everyone, following the new model, wanted to write songs.

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For The Band, it was no accident that so much of their materials

imagery feels derived from southern models. The South was the part of
the country they knew best; Helm was born there, the others met it rsthand from the road trips as the Hawks backing Ronnie The Hawk
Hawkins, a second-tier rockabilly rebel, in roadhouses and clubs where
tempers blew and bottles ew. But, more to the point, it was a space the
Canadians already imagined clearly, since theyd grown up listening to
American clear-channel radio. Seekers of native American roots music
generally headed south: think of W. C. Handy or the Lomaxes. It was in
the South that the raw blue-collar energy of rock and roll had rst erupted,
precisely because, following the Hegelian laws of inversion that seem to
govern social evolution, black and blue-collar white cultures in that most
overtly segregated section of the country were paradoxically closer and
more alike after spending hundreds of years side-by-side than they could
possibly be elsewhere.
These four Canadians and lone Arkansan were a long way from their
days as the Hawks. Instead, as Greil Marcus perceptively if rather romantically noted of their early music, It felt like a passport back to America
for people whod become so estranged from their country that they felt
like foreigners even when they were in it.
Maybe. To me, a kid playing in garage bands, it felt like eccentric, fascinating sounds that reopened acres of imaginative possibilities.
The rst two records were almost the same project in my mind,
Levon Helm has said. When The Band followed Music from Big Pink a
year later, it cemented their reputation, and enhanced their Dylanesque
mystique of invisibility: refusing to tour, partly because of Band members
car crashes and ip-outs, they had watched promoters offers climb from
$2000 a show to $50,000.
In the postWoodstock Festival world, rock had accelerated its move
from roadhouses and clubs, which became unable to compete nancially
for rock headliners, to theaters, then arenas. Bill Graham had led the way,
rst with San Franciscos Winterland, soon with his Fillmores West and
East. The Band were in the midst of recording their second album far from
the Catskills, in Hollywood at Sammy Davis Jr.s poolhouse, which theyd
converted to a studio, when they decided to resist no longer. But before
they debuted onstage as themselves at Winterland in April 1969,
Robertson got such a bad case of nerves (he has always claimed he had the
u) that he stayed in bed for three days of rehearsal and had to be hypnotized to go onstage.
Since theyd been musically weaned in roadhouses and spent such care
on recording live, its always been one of the odder ironies of The Bands
career that they were erratic, often uncomfortable performers. Having so
meticulously worked out their parts in clubhouse fashion, they seemed

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In the Garage

unable to adapt them easily to theaters and arenas. Taking our music out
and performing it, there was something very private about it, Robertson
has argued. There was some kind of yin-and-yang between our nature
and what concerts were really about. It was almost more like classical
music in performance. Perhaps, as with Marsalis years later, that sensibility sapped the musics vital forces. As Jim Miller wrote in Rolling Stone,
They displayed an awful slickness. . . . Even the raw edges seemed
planned. These bar-band auteurs were only too ready to embalm their
own work beneath a veneer of professionalism, as if to exhibit it behind
a glass case in some museum.
Unconsciously extending the folk revivals ideology, many reviewers
tended to explain their unevenness as an emblem of honest authenticity,
which, in the ways of do-it-yourself folk-culture amateurism, it sometimes
was, though this was somehow also the culture that The Band was posited
to be different from. A lot of mysticism was built up around The Band,
Robertson has said. These guys up in the mountains. . . . At any rate, the
quality of their concerts was as fully unpredictable as that of their putative opposite numbers, The Grateful Dead.
From Winterland they hit the Fillmore East, where I can testify they
did at least one good show, then they nished recording at the Hit Factory
in New York City. The Band still stands as their masterpiece. Loosely built
around a harvest-is-in, carnival-is-in-town feel, its incredibly consistent
and divergent at the same time, the strength of their studies and abilities
ramifying its depth and breadth. After all, their brand of self-consciousness of sources and sounds marked one key difference between rock and
earlier roll and rock.
From Across the Great Divide, with its bouncy rhythms, yearning
Manuel vocal, bleary horns, and slippery guitar lls, to King Harvest
(Has Surely Come), the surprisingly downbeat rural closer that cuts in
snapshots of union struggles, the album has a rare scope and power. Up
on Cripple Creek, with its bump-grind rhythms and allusion to an old
folk tune, was all over FM radio, as were the hoedowns-in-your-basement
Rag Mamma Rag, which rode its two-beat feel with one of the groups
most off-kilter and inspired lineupstuba, ddle, acoustic guitar, drums,
pianoand Jemima Surrender. Unfaithful Servant gave Dankos
aching tenor a Dylanesque vehicle, while The Night They Drove Old
Dixie Down told a moving tale of one southern familys civil war hardshipsthough to my teen New Yorkers ears, it also echoed suspiciously
like an apology, revisionist kin to the D. W. Grifth movies Id been
watching at the Museum of Modern Art. (In 1967, the ex-Hawks, still
nameless, had toyed with the idea of calling themselves the Crackers or the
Honkies. That, as Manuel wryly put it, was too straight.)
With characteristic acuity, Ralph Gleason reviewed this record as a
belated soundtrack for James Agees Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
This t: Agees gothic sensibility and tortured neo-Elizabethan prose had

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become a classic leftist touchstone, a legacy of the New Deals political

constituencies that were, even as Gleason wrote the review, being pried
apart by prosperity, civil rights backlash, the divisive war, and Richard
Nixon. To shoot the evocative, Guthriesque album cover, a brown border
for an outdoor group half-portrait, they stood for hours in the rain. As
Danko once observed, Thats why we dont look too cheerful.
After the second album, the madness and musical unevenness accelerated. In 1969, The Band played the Woodstock Festival, backed Dylan at
the Isle of Wight Festival, and made the cover of Timea rarity then, a
harbinger now. It was already a clich that anything Time covered was
probably past its peak. This was sadly true of The Band.
Their substance abuseManuels endless drinking and coke binges,
Dankos omnivorous drug consumption, Helms pill popping and heroin
addictiondeepened, especially when they were off the road, as they
were for months at a time. They took turns having serious car crashes
and being incapacitated, which made touring difcult. Partly by default,
partly by his devising, Robertson had become the dominant figure
reading widely and watching movies, dealing with Grossman, writing
rst most, then all the songs, disciplining the others into rehearsing and
recording. He was standofsh, sophisticated, and managing as well as
directing them musically now; he was also getting the lions share of
songwriter royalties. If, as fans insisted, the alchemical creativity of The
Band depended on a relatively equal distribution of ability, the equation
was now unbalanced.
Maybe theyd just hit the natural limits of their talent. Maybe
Robertsons songwriters imagination lacked some adaptability essential
to longevity. Maybe their image itself, the mythic history they evoked,
even the ghosts of folkie authenticity they and Grossman had conjured
trapped them. Whatever the cause, most of their later albums, even Stage
Fright, sound more airless, stale, fussy, strained. The vocalists didnt
interact nearly as much in the neogospel fashion that had made the rst
two albums so winning. It was as if The Band was conned conceptually
to an inelastic, increasingly romanticized and nostalgic space and mode.
As Greil Marcus wrote, The past no longer served them.
They didnt go straight downhill. In 1970, they headlined at the
Hollywood Bowl on a bill that included Miles Davis. But for years,
despite Robertsons bleary-eyed talk of the road in The Last Waltz,
they performed live very little. They toured Europe in 1971, where Garth
Hudson fantasized about having Ben Webster open for them. They
recorded Rock of Ages live, mostly at New Yorks old Academy of
Music, augmenting their tunes with horns charted by Allen Toussaint
and played by jazz vets like Howard Johnson, Snooky Young, and Joe
Farrell. (Johnson would later do horn charts for and perform in The
Last Waltz.) Gleason compared the album to landmarks like Mingus at

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In the Garage

Monterey, but though its energy levels were unusually high, the material
felt worn, and The Band didnt tour at all the year it was released.
They played at Watkins Glen with the Grateful Dead and the Allman
Brothers to 650,000 people, after Altamont was supposed to have ended
the heyday of huge rock festivals. In late 1973 they rejoined Dylan to cut
Planet Waves; it seems telling in retrospect that Robertson, at least, felt
uncomfortable recording the album in the informal manner The Band and
Dylan had once used so fruitfully. The Band then joined Dylan on his
comeback tour, where the music they made raged as ercely as their revolutionary howl in 196566, as if, critics agreed, he had once again
sharpened their creative edge. This also happened to be the rst major
stadium tour of the new rock era, and was very well paid; according to
Barney Hoskyns book Across The Great Divide, Dylan and The Band
netted $2 million between them. Tickets were expensive, averaging $8;
still, 658,000 were sold. Naturally, there was a live album, Before the
Flood, which modulated between high energy and roadburn.
Their several tours with the Grateful Dead, though the pairing confused
many reviewers, were studies in similarity and contrast that sometimes
sparked great things. In 1970, Danko told Jerry Garcia, We thought you
were just Californian freaks, but youre just like us. They double headlined with Crosbys Still Nash & Young, whose generally ghastly live
shows may have helped The Band seem sharper partly because of its relative professionalism.
On the albums, a few standout songsThe Shape Im In, Stage
Fright, Dylans When I Paint My Masterpiecedisplayed the old wit
and dexterous touches. (To Kingdom Come offers two CDs that cull
much good and some indifferent material from all their recordings.)
Overall, though, everyone seemed frozen, stunted, content to coastafter
all, women, booze, and money were plentiful. Robertson kept telling
interviewers about some grand instrumental work they were preparing,
but that was more in keeping with his growing sense of self-importance
than The Bands steady disintegration and ossication. The ambitious
songwriter, whod begun producing other artists records and thinking
about movies, nally decided to pull the plug in high style. Hence The
Last Waltz.
Scorsese had been one of the junior editors on Woodstock, the movie
that eventually translated the myth into cash. The festival organizers had,
of course, lost lots of moneymillions, they said, though estimates vary
dramatically starting at $2.4 million. (The festival had sold $1.1 million
worth of tickets, but had also written $600,000 worth of bad checks
during the event, which were later covered by one producers trust-fund
monies.) Budgets for everything (except performers, who all signed on for
fractions of their usual fees) balloonedhelicopters, food, lodging, you
name it. Among the steadily mounting nancial woes: early in 1970 New

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York States attorney general, following an investigation, directed Woodstock Ventures to refund ticket prices to between 12,000 and 18,000
payees who couldnt get near the site because of closed roads.
Nine months after the festival, when the movie nally leaked into
theaters, Woodstock had supplanted San Franciscos Summer of Love as
The Counterculture Event. But the question was, after Monterey Pop
bombed and Dont Look Back didnt break the surface, would it sell
tickets? Winning the 1971 Oscar for Best Documentary helped; by 1979,
Woodstock: The Movies worldwide box ofce gross topped $50 million.
This surprised Hollywood and netted Warner Bros. millions: the festival
organizers had signed the movie rights over in return for $100,000
nancing up front on a handwritten contract at Yasgurs farm two days
before the show. (Twenty years later, they resolved their ghts with each
other and Warner Bros.)
Director Michael Wadleigh, just out of lm school, cobbled together a
crew that included young Martin Scorsese, listed as an assistant director,
and Theresa Schoonmaker, who won an Oscar as supervising editor.
Schoonmaker would edit several of Scorseses lms and Scorsese became
identied with the split-screen technique that shapes so much of Woodstock. His leanings toward monumentality showed up, early but
unmistakable, in the widely parodied segment with guitarist Albert Lee,
singing to himself in an orgy of split screens. And there was producer
Michael Langs hogging camera time and credit as he romantically perched
on his motorcycle. (Six weeks after the festival, he sold his share to two of
his colleagues for $31,240.)
The Band wasnt in Woodstock: The Movie. Albert Grossman refused
to let their footage be included. Others, including the Grateful Dead, made
the same decision, though not for the same reasons. Grossman, entranced
by the power of the Garboesque mystique of disappearance, decided that
The Bands best marketing ploy was scarcity. The Dead, in debt to Warner
Bros. for their rst three albums, standing onstage in pools of water and
getting electric shocks when they touched their instruments, felt they
hadnt played well.
Its worth remembering, in this context, that the rst day of that rst
Woodstock festival was devoted primarily to folk music.
There are beautiful sequences in The Last Waltz, and the best are
those of The Band itself. Scorseses desire to work tight means fewer establishing shots than some (including me) might want, but the aesthetic does
reect The Bands subtle, intimate music. At its best, the lm can be stunning. Stage Fright, for example, shoots Danko from almost 360 degrees,
lit only by an overhead spot, creating gorgeous interplays of shadow and
light, heightening the songs lyrics. Mystery Train, to which Paul Buttereld adds harp and vocals, has a similar self-conscious beauty, which jars
with the raggedy unison singing. The Staples Singers joining on The

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In the Garage

Weight, in a sequence lmed after the show itself, aurally demonstrates

The Bands vocal debts to them. For Emmylou Harriss turn on Evangeline, another post-show scene, Scorsese lls the soundstage with blue-lit
smoke, which feels hokey, but redeems it a bit visually with arresting
camera angles that frame the stark, lovely geometries of Hudsons accordion, Dankos ddle, and Helms mandolin.
A concert lm is ultimately about the music, however. The Last Waltz
translates The Bands broad tastes into a narrative punctuated by interviews and special guests onstage. But the frame is only as strong as its
content. Eric Clapton? Ron Wood and Ringo Starr? Dr. John? Neil
Diamond? Joni Mitchell? Even Muddy Waters? Broad-based roots, farreaching sounds, all spokes in the wheel of the 1960s rock resurgence that
Scorseses narrative contextualizes and justies via the interviews. (Neil
Diamond, for instance, is preceded by a tale of The Band in New York
City and Tin Pan Alley. Probably more to the point, Robertson was
producing him at the time.) But theres little about the performances of
these artists that is special. No particular chemistry emerges to make this
a momentexcept that its The Bands Last Waltz. I found myself
wondering if part of The Bands artistry consisted of its ability to musically
disappear. (The companion four-CD set, The Last Waltz, has state-of-theart sound and a bunch of added musicmost of it, unless youre a
completist, better left unheard.)
This is part of why some critics at the time, including Marcus, Dave
Marsh, and Jim Miller, raged against The Last Waltz as an overblown
Entertainment Event, a betrayal of the do-it-yourself aesthetican ironic
if transmuted echo of the folk-revivalist reaction to Dylan and The Band
a decade-plus earlier. For Pauline Kael, however, rock wasnt a way of life
or a mode of salvation. It was show business. And since she knew as much
about rock as about kayaking, she judged the movie in formalist terms.
Certainly The Last Waltz makes clear why The Band ended. Though
Scorsese tries to balance his time with the ve members, Robertsons
hooded eyes enthrall him. Its palpable that Robertson is surrounded by
goodtimey, undisciplined mates who have trouble articulating or nishing
their stories, and often steps into the breach. (Helm is incisive talking
about music and cultural roots; the others work in a haze of fractured
sentences, bits of cynicism and mysticism, and defer to Robertson.)
Robertson had become the groups public face, more and more the
businessman, the guy who had the vast bulk of the publishing income and
royalties from all that collaborative imaginative work that made the songs
timeless. He was also the sole producer of The Last Waltz. He wanted
out; if the movie is unclear what the others wanted, the fact is that the
rest, minus Robertson, reformed in various congurations over the years.
Aside from The Bands own sequences, the best moments in The Last
Waltz belong, ttingly, to Ronnie Hawkins and Bob Dylan, the two front
men who helped catalyze their chemistry. Hawkins is wonderfully unself-

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conscious during his rave-up version of Who Do You Love, cuing and
teasing The Band as if a dozen years hadnt passed between them. Dylan,
at the lms end, leads The Band through Forever Young, making it their
gentle envoi. Watching him goose them through his abrupt transition to
the snarling reworking of Reverend Gary Daviss Baby Let Me Follow
You Down, one of the electric tunes theyd rattled audiences with in that
now-legendary 196566 tour, offers us a glimpse into the chemistry of
their fruitful relationship, and the perfect closing bookend to The Bands
career.
The Last Waltz had an ironic afterlife. This Is Spinal Tap was a hilarious deconstructive remake by Rob Reiner, and more widely known than
its cousin, The Last Polka. Written by John Candy and Eugene Levy soon
after the demise of SCTV, the satirical group that did for TV what the Firesign Theatre did for radio and LPs, it traces the rise and ultimate breakup
of The Shmenge Brothers, polka mavens born in Leutonia, where they
began as child vaudevillians who played the gelkies, or glass jars, in imitation of their American idol, vibraphonist Lionel Hampton.

21
The Firesign Theatre
In the late 1960s and 1970s, millions of us walked around with alternate visions of reality dancing in our heads. No, it wasnt just drugs and
the stupidity of youth; even senators and Congresspeople dared to seek a
newer world, to argue about social dynamics and priorities, to doubt and
oppose Ofcial Lines and corporate power.
Now that everything has changed so drastically, that the 30-year-old
conservative backlash has so engulfed America that alternative visions are,
as they were in the 1950s, pushed to near-invisible margins, it gets hard
to remember that tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of us were getting
deeply coded comic messages about the structures of ofcial reality from
our record players and a four-man, multivoiced, multitalented madcap
troupe called The Firesign Theatre.
The 1960s may be dead, but they arentfar from it. It was absolutely
tting that, on the eve of the millennium, the group reunited, as they regularly do, to release Give Me Immortality or Give Me Death, a brilliant
send-up of Americas obsessions, foibles, and unawareness that razors the
chattering detritus lling a cultural void left by an absence of dreams.
Theyve come to steal my dreams, whimpers a female voice. A series
of male voices drift past: Get up, lady. Its the trade of the century.
Theres monster money in every sweaty mattress when you trade in your
used dreams at Unconscious Village. But those dreams have been with
me since the beginning, she asserts weakly. The very masculine ad
voiceover cuts in: Dont be stuck with leftover dreams in the terrible days
to come.
Thats the kickoff that brought the Firesign Theatre back from the
shadows again in 1999 and onto Radio Now (If its not now, its too
late). Theres the digitized Princess Goddess (She may be dead but shes
obviously a very caring person), now starring in Bottom Feeder Films
Pull My String. (She had to die to star in the movie of her life. Now
shell live for you.) Princess Goddess passed on while mud-boarding in
the Alpsstraight into a landmine. Shes a spokesperson for Princess
Goddess Airlines (Let her take you for all youre worth) and sponsors

The Firesign Theatre

217

doll drops at Homeless Stadium (Bring a kid and maybe a doll will
drop on her).
Y2K obsessions? Replacement body parts, from and for Americans
(You can live forever while your friends fall apart like rotten fruit)?
Celebarazzi taking pictures of each other? Contests like triple ripoff,
millennial scratch and lick, and, of course, itch-and-sniff (one winner
exults tearfully, Finally I can afford to have someone kill my husband)?
Dr. Onan Winkydink, expert on self-help? Promise Breakers causing
massive trafc tieups in Metroburbia? Fundamentalist preacher-politicos
running eternal sales on mattresses? Slo-mo SUV chases down freeways
infested by plagues of locusts and helmet heads checking motorists for
circumcision, while funny foam blocks the seven exits between Perdition
Pass and Great Satans Village? Straitjacketed formats (desensitized
environmental radio) that change up on DJ Bebop Loco with every shift,
thanks to endless focus groups? Low-key corporate-image ads, complete
with plausible deniability, for US Plus (We own the idea of America)?
The Firesign TheatrePhil Proctor, Peter Bergman, David Ossman, and
Phil Austindont own the idea of America, but wed all be better off if
they did. Back in the 1960s, they walked by night, waiting for the electrician or someone like him, trying to gure out how to be in two places at
once when youre not anywhere at all. They translated classic radio into
the TV and psychedelic eras, via Joycean stream of consciousness, jazzy
improvisation, and rapidly evolving technology that amplied their mindbendingly discontinuous plots and characters. In the process, they
revolutionized comedy and comedy recording.
The Smothers Brothers were battling censors on network TV and
George Carlin was unpacking Seven Little Words on campuses when the
Firesign Theatre became a counterculture cult. They toured sporadically,
appeared on virtually no national media, and survived on word of mouth.
But the buzz among fans was devoted and nonstop to the point of obsession; decades later, Firesign cultists cant bump into each other without
reenacting favorite sketches: Pastor Rod Flash and that rousing hymn,
Marching to Shibboleth; The Howl of the Wolf movie presenting
honest stories of working people, as told by rich Hollywood stars; Porgie
and Mudhead in High School Madness, the saga of the struggle between
Communist Martyrs and Morse Science high schools that segued, via the
TV channel-surng that was one of Firesigns vital narrative devices, into
World War II (Dont eat with your hands, son, use your entrenching
tool); and, inevitably, Vietnam (from Dont Crush That Dwarf, Hand
Me the Pliers):

lieutenant tirebiter: How was it out there?

pico: Weird! We been shootin reds and yellows all day.
alvarado: Hoo boy! Am I sleepy!
lt. tirebiter: What about the gooks?

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In the Garage

pico: Bad news, Lieutenant. Therere gooks all around here.

alvarado: They live here, Lieutenant. They got women and pigs and
gardens and everything.

pico: I was talking to this one little gook . . .

alvarado: I was talkin to his daughter. Shes got the biggest . . .
lt. tirebiter: Thats swell, Corporal, but we got orders to surround
these little gooks.

alvarado: Thatll be easy, lieutenant. Theres millions of them on all

three sides of us.
lt. tirebiter: That means weve got these little gooks right where we
want them, right?
It was silly, strange, exhilarating, scarya roller-coaster ride of the
mind. As Proctor told me years later, Remember, the Firesign Theatre
was an opportunity for a bunch of mavericks to liberate people from
set ways of thinking, which came out of accepting a certain presentational form as a reality. If you heard it on the radio, it must be true. If
you saw it on television, it must be true. But we all know how slippery
reality can be. Truth is a relative idea. We built our comedyour
comedy, mind youon that premise.
How very 1960s, eh? But as the Iraqi war spills out into TVs across
America in herky-jerky green video-game images, as CNN and MSNBC
ll their screens with right-wing talking heads to stanch their losses in
the ratings war that Fox is sweeping with its steady assault on objectivity and truth, screaming all the while about the alleged left-wing
biases of the media, as the culture and society fracture into unresolved
oppositions and interest groups who, thanks to the proliferation of
targeted media, never have to leave the cocoons of their beliefs, maybe
its time again to jack into Firesigns nonstop perceptual shifts, their
sci- tumbling between supercially unrelated events and situations,
and be jolted as the familiar suddenly becomes as strange as it should
be. According to Proctor, Things have become so distorted in America
today that surrealism has to compete with hyperrealism.
The Firesign Theatre made hyperliterate outsider comedy for hip
college insiders who wanted out. They were sharper and funnier than
Mort Sahl, who struck kids like me as a brainy professorinteresting
ideas but boring. They made Lenny Bruce seem old-fashioned, even
quaint. They hooked you because their alternate sketches of America
and its history were hilarious. The fertile wordplay echoes Abbott and
Costello and the Marx Brothers and old radio comedians like Bob and
Ray, with a dash of Kafka and a dollop of Joyce; the surreal perspectives evoked Ernie Kovacs and Stan Freberg, Marcel Duchamp and
Marshall McLuhan; the kinetic interplay mimicked jazz and jam bands
like the Grateful Dead. The Firesign Theatre records were, like good
musical recordings, palimpsests that demanded and repaid study; it was

The Firesign Theatre

219

as if all of American popular culture and history had been sliced and
diced, tossed into a blender, and spewed back via a recording studio in
high-speed dissolves, a Rorschach test for your soul. Knowing the lines
and routines meant you had a glimmer, at least, of the machinery
framing the pictures most people thoughtlessly accepted as reality.
If high art and popular entertainment merged in Firesign, the cultural
space for them was created by recording and sonic experiments in rock
and the rise of FM radio. The quartet harnessed multitrack studio
effects to comedy, creating satiric soundscapes that sprawled across an
entire album: not Bill Cosby bits, but extended-form satire. The staggering range of oddball voices and bad-joke names popping out of
corners of the audio image, the dissolves and crossfades and collages
and jumpcuts mimicking channel-surng, the reams of winceable puns,
the multiple Bizarro narratives zigzagging through time and spaceas
the needle rode through 20- and 30-minute-long album sides, the
impact was disorienting and dizzying, could make you laugh so hard
you couldnt breathe or catch the next ve lines, since those four Bozos
were riffing like machine guns armed with Mel Blancs voices and
Chuck Jones panache. Once you were sucked in, reality forever became
an issue, an open question. This may explain why their fanatical
followers include Steve Martin and Robin Williams.
Surreal, questioning, philosophical, snotty, stoned, acute, ideologically restless, technologically prescient, and, above all, side-splittingly
funny, the Firesign Theatre was more than the sum of its parts: their
work represented participatory democracy as comedic process. The
foursomes backgrounds dovetailed, making them, as Proctor explained,
a comics committee. We had the advantage of a built-in audience.
None of us was so aware of what was going to happen next that we
couldnt be caught up in the spontaneity of creation and expression of
the work.
In 1964, Peter Bergman, Firesigns catalyst, participated in a Ford
Foundation gathering of playwrights in Berlin, with Tom Stoppard and
Piers Paul Read, part of a larger workshop that included Shirley Clarke
and Roman Polanski, the Living Theater and Gunther Grass. I could
go to my window, he recalled, and see Allen Ginsberg and Tim Leary
going into some consortium where they were going to show images on
the wall and take acid. He hung around The Factory in New York
with Andy Warhols gang, then headed west, where LSD was mushrooming through hippie streets. It seemed so pass to me by then,
he said.
Moving from San Francisco to LA, Bergman did a benet to raise
money for his rent on KPFK, the Pacica Foundations listener-sponsored FM radio station in LA, which was on the tip of FM expansion
into the aborning youth market. (A hand-to-mouth politically leftist
foundation, Pacica Radio was a counterculture staple; it could afford

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what were soon choice FM radio slots in New York, San Francisco,
and LA because at the time FM radio meant classical music and low
audience numbers, which in turn meant broadcasters werent ghting
over the FM dial yet.) Once he got on the air, Bergman revved into a
nonstop tornado. Austin pointed out, He becomes more candid when
he performs. The station signed him up to spearhead their 1966
fundraising marathon, and then gave him a show. He called it Radio
Free Oz; it was a wacky call-in talk show where he tried to pull back
the curtains on the machinery generating Official American Reality.
Soon he met Ossman, an actor-poet whod been laid off as KPFKs
program director and hired by ABC-TV, which he hated. Austin, a
musicianactordirector, was Bergmans engineer, who kept joking his
way into the show. Proctor knew Bergman from their studying at Yale
Drama School, so he called him when he fled the stale New York
theater scene for LA. The Firesign Theatrethe name evokes FDRs
Depression-era reside radio chats as well as the fact that theyre all air
signswas open.
So there we were, four friends, Austin wrote in The Firesign
Theatres Big Book of Plays, which collects some of their early scripts.
You see, we had no ambitions. It was a pure jam and the instrument
we each played was verbal glibness or radio. Hard to imagine these
days, when careers and ambitions are all most people seem to dream of.
Or, as Bergman told me, There hasnt been anything like the Firesign
Theatre because you cant get four extraordinarily strong egos to come
together, as we did, under what I consider war and hippie conditions.
It was like a platoon: nobody goes out of the foxhole until everybody
agrees.
When their records ltered back to the East Coast and college towns
around the land, they sounded like a sort of electronic cubism enhanced
by LSD, an omnidirectional perspective-exploding gaze that panned and
zoomed and tracked in and out, cutting and pasting its dizzying scrambled way across Americas sense of itself, channel-changer at the ready,
decoding hidden agendas by means of what looked like loopy associations. They were a lot more fun than Noam Chomsky.
Because they are artists, not academics or politicians, when they
went into the recording studio they wanted to show, not tell; they
etched their process of search and discovery into the vinyl grooves,
forced their listeners to join, not overhear, their searches, U-turns, speed
bumps, and all. Proctor explained, When we started on the radio as
a four-man group, taking the audience on a crazy ride and seeing how
far out we could go with them, we learned to interact in a live moment,
sustain comic characters and comic ideas, feed off each others
themesalmost like playing jazz. Then, when we started performing
our stuff as radio plays at the Magic Mushroom, when Radio Free Oz

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221

went into a live-audience format, we began to add sound effects, to

experiment a la the Goon Showsthe style of simultaneous comedy. If
somebody was saying something funny and we could augment with a
funny sound behind it, we would. In the early radio shows, we did an
awful lot of spontaneous comedy by responding to what whoever was
performing was doing. That was experimentation with the freedom that
the multitracking allowed us. It was a very musical approach to
comedy.
Over the last three and a half decades, the Firesign Theatre came out
of their foxholes with 22 albums, seven radio series, and several videos;
theyve been nominated for two Grammys, celebrated by the Museum
of Broadcasting, and, in 2002 were tapped to boost fundraising by local
PBS channels, offering their latest album and their rst four reissued
albums as premiums. We are, Proctor deadpanned, the American
Monty Python. They dont have endless PBS reruns, but they tour
every couple of years, started their own website in the 1990s, and regularly broadcast new episodes of Radio Free Oz over satellite radio.
According to them, the most famous Firesign segment is what they
call the Ralph Williams mantra from How Can You Be in Two Places
at Once When Youre Not Anywhere at All? (Its subtitle was All Hail
Marx and Lennon; its cover pictured Groucho and John.) Ralph Spoilsport (like most Firesign Theatre characters, his name changes but he
recurs across their work) began life as a parody of Williams, an LA car
shyster whose ad spiels were notorious: Hiya, friends! Ralph Spoilsport, Ralph Spoilsport Motors, the worlds largest new used and used
new automobile dealership, Ralph Spoilsport Motors, here in the city
of Emphysema. Lets just look at the extras on this fabulous car! Wirewheel spoke fenders, two-way sneezethrough windvent, star-studded
mudguards, sponge-coated edible steering column, chrome fender dents,
and factory air-conditioned air from our fully factory-equipped factory.
Its a beautiful car, friends, with doors to match!
The albums hero Babe, one of the groups Kafkaesque characters
who, like Benny Profane, is a schlemiel, buys a car so he can get out,
and careens across American history. Right after he metamorphoses
into Woody Guthrie (This land is made of mountains! This land is
made of mud!), he is shown how things really are: the immigrants
from Smegma, Spasmodic, and the far-ung Isles of Langerhans ee
here from poverty, injustice, the Law, and the Army, to help Them steal
America and its natural abundance from the Indians. We needed,
Babe is told, as voices ricochet around the audio stage, the Hope, the
Faith, the Prayers, the Fears, the Sweat, the Pain, the Boils, the Tears,
the Broken Bones, the Broken Homes, the Total Degradation of . . .
Who? he whimpers. . . . you! The Little Guy. A train chuffs over
the steel rails flung across The Little Guys, the chanted swoosh of

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Rockefeller, Humphrey, Nixon, Kennedy, Wallace, Ford overlapping

and entwining, the sound of hope for America pulling out of the
station. In the end, Ralph Spoilsport fades, slightly out of phase,
into Molly Blooms nal soliloquy from Ulyssesthe optimistic reinstatement of natural owing reality over the power of The Grid.
Have we outgrown the Firesign Theatre, like we have the rest of the
childish decade that nourished them? Turn on your TV and decide for
yourself.

22
Bruce Springsteen
Head up I-95 through Connecticut, pass through the I-95/I-91 linkup
and on out of New Haven toward Hartford, and the clustered cityscape
and small suburban sprawl slip away after a few minutes. By the exit for
Wallingford, about halfway between those two ethnically divided and
economically blighted urban centers, the landscape is almost pastoral:
open elds dotted with lakes and rimmed with hills, darkness deepening
under a rising moon. On September 18, 1996, Im driving that way, for the
second show on the second leg of Bruce Springsteens acoustic toura
tour that, by years end, will land in 33 cities around the Northeast,
Midwest, and South.
For this swing behind The Ghost of Tom Joad, his thirteenth album,
Springsteen is packing a 6- and a 12-string guitar and a box full of
harmonicas and neck racks. Hes been at it on and off since the discs
release the preceding November, hitting 20 US cities, swinging over to
Europe for 35 dates, taking a break for summer, then back on the road,
where hes been hustling for 30 years now.
I turn off I-91, part of a small line of cars snaking through the hilly
plain, past open elds and a sudden construction-equipment-clogged
acre, looking for the Oakdale Theatre. After curves and climbing appears
rst a spreading parking lot, then a complex. Until recently, the Oakdale
Theatre was a supper club, home to tired acts like Steve Lawrence and
Eydie Gorm. Now its a 5,000-seat venue with clean sightlines and good
sound, with a 150-degree seating plan on a gentle grade with tight
mezzanines that make it feel half its size. It splits its bookings between
rockers avoiding hockey rinks and ballparks, and subscription deals like
Family Broadway, which includes Grease and Hello, Dolly. Like
politicians and everybody else in show biz, its owners are trying to cobble
together several audiences, chasing the vanishing masses in the age of
fragmentation.
The venue is as welcoming and intimate as a mini-arena can get. Still,
several folks, from the New Haven Registers Entertainment Editor to a
local cop, run variations on a theme for me: Theyve sunk an awful lot

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of money into this, and everything else thats been here before has opped.
I sure hope this works. Their rooting for the underdog home team,
tugged by anxiety, speaks to their downsized America, its bewildering
decline, its confusing loss of values and hope, the ebbing of its dreams in
their lives.
This is one of the places that Springsteens audience has lived ever since
he came out of the bars along the Jersey Shore. So the Oakdale Theatre is
a handy metaphor for this threshold in his career. Can its refurbishment
make people come out to it more than once? Is it making a comeback
or staving off the inevitable?
Thirty minutes before showtime, the parking lot roads inch lines of cars
toward ever-more-distant spaces, like mice pulsing through snakes. Slowly
the sprinkling of plates from New York and Massachussetts and even New
Hampshire and Pennsylvania and, of course, New Jersey among the dominant Connecticut tags nd slots. The cordoned-off area for limos is full.
The folks leaving their cars: New Haven and Hartford yuppies and
students, thirty- and fortysomethings in casual mallwear, snatches of twentysomething Bossalikes with bandannas wrapping their heads and bearded
scraggle. No big hair on the women: this aint Jersey. The small memorabilia concession in the spacious lobby is tucked discreetly next to the
center-orchestra entrance and the mens bathroom, and does a steady but
not crunching business.
Kinda like The Ghost of Tom Joad Itself. Springsteens latest disc, a
Woody Guthrie-meets-John Steinbeck look at what used to be called The
New Depression, has gone goldin sharp contrast to his twelfth album,
Bruce Springsteen Greatest Hits, which hit double platinum. The tour is
selling out: tickets for the theatres 5,000 seats were gone in a few hours.
But paralleling the Bosss roadwork is a deliberate fudging of his neofolkie
direction, no doubt thanks to sales. Last week, for instance, saw the
release (on laser disc) of the ne documentary, rst aired in March on the
Disney Channel, about his 1995 reunion with the E Street Band for songs
included on Greatest Hits. (The videotape comes later this year, with a
limited-edition EP included.) Those sessions marked the rst time hed
joined his longtime sidekicks since his commercial peak, 1984s Born in
the USAa fact that helps explain the distance in sales between Hits and
Joad. One reason Im in Wallingford is to take another measure of that
distance.
Bob Dylans John Wesley Harding is the last song on the preconcert
tape, and ends once the audience nds seats and the lights drop. A ragged
harmonica ourish stabs the hall. The spotlightthe show is resolutely
low-techhits Springsteen as he strides centerstage, anchored between
the microphone and the bins to his left, each with a different-keyed
harmonica mounted in its own neck rack. The house nds its feet, the
ovation pouring out like a premonitory Brechtian catharsis, lapsing into
quiet only when he starts The Ghost of Tom Joad.

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225

Knowing how to get intimate with huge crowds is a key trick to being
a pop star, and no ones better at it than Springsteen. We root for him so
hard because he came up the same way we did and can speak to and for
us, and we ignore the fact that hes become The Boss living in the Hollywood Hills mansion, whose music and career outline a n de sicle
summary of rocks history, a narrative reworking of its genetic strands into
one nal, do-not-go-gentle scream. But with this tour, as with the album,
hes straddling several ssures, any of which can open beneath him at any
timeas the Wallingford show illustrates.
The audience revs up at the close of Joad, prompting the rst of
Springsteens characteristic between-songs asides. Were gonna rerelease
the album, he deadpans in his sandpapery drawl, as The Ghost of Tom
Macarena, so we can sell a few more. The videos gonna have 16-yearold girls in silver hot pants and all. The fans love it. Here he is, poking
fun at himself, not taking his serious folk songs too seriously, and in the
process positioning himself somewhere in the American psyche between
Will Rogers and Woody Guthriea nuanced, evocative site hell try to
inhabit for the rest of the show. At the same time hes spoong the brave
new post-MTV world of pop that hes never seemed comfortable with
that is, in effect, after his time.
Cut to halfway through the two-and-a-half-hour set. Forget about
Born in the USA; that was ten years ago, he says, with at least a trace of
exasperation. The crowd isnt rock and rolling any more. We break out
sometimes, like for the Pinball Wizard-y recasting of Darkness on the
Edge of Town, but mostly were respectful, quiet, supportive, a bit
bafed, hanging in there for The Boss but not always quite sure why,
except for the intricate, unspoken allegiances that have bound us to him,
and him to us, for decades now. His asides keep us connected, but remind
us whos in charge. He asks for quiet, explaining its for the shows effectiveness, and to an astonishing degree, gets it. (One preteen, sitting with
her dad in the row behind me, is almost alone in yelling out between nearly
every tune: Bruce, play The River. He never does.) Several times he
growls, Will you please put those Brownies and Instamatics awayor
step on em? And so ashes pop in relatively rare bursts.
Theres no intimacy without trust, and he doesnt hesitate. When his
12-string keeps going out of tune, he interjects, Thats 30 years of experience there, folks. For a new song, Sell It and They Will Come, which
lists the horror-mall wonders of late-night cable TV, he explains, I got
the idea from watching one of those shows about the stuff that you spray
on your head to make your hair look like Astroturf. He tells a story about
a guy from Belgium whos followed him for six months, asking for My
Fathers House, and how hes consistently refused to play ituntil
tonight. And, to nish up the tale of how he and his roadie had this $100
bet on the correct spelling of friend (Springsteen lost), he quips, Thats
the kind of drama weve got on this Tom Joad tour, folks.

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Springsteen doesnt condescend. His intro to Straight Talk: Sometimes the things that make you feel alive are the very things that are
bringing you down. For Spare Parts: The tricky thing about getting
older is not giving in to cynicism. About having kids: As we get older,
part of what people search for is ways to get grace into their lives. Kids
are like open windows; they let it in. The audience sits hushed, hoping
for rapture, wanting to share it with the small gure onstage. And yet . . .
Its hard to be a folkie in an arena. Its hard to bring your audience,
hungering for the slamming backbeat thats your musical signature, into
a reective mood for two and a half hours. Its hard to reroute your image
after 20 years. Its hard to be the avatar of recapitulation, the man who
sums up rock and roll in time for it to trail off into history.
Bruce Springsteen wants to matter, has always been about mattering.
But the culture has moved since Born to Runand not just politically.
The seismic shifts have fractured it. No more do subcultures meet at the
mainstream. Markets, like politics, are micro. Celebrity, like power, is
balkanized, making Andy Warhol seem like an optimist. Consensus is a
box of jigsaw puzzle pieces that dont t back together. Springsteens job
is reassembly, not innovation. His stardom is permanent, but possibly
irrelevant. His fans want to stand with him, but cant quite always get
there from here. His music has to nd a new way to be. Hence Tom Joad.
Its no accident that as Springsteen struggles to reinvent himself, he reaches
back to the Depression, evoking the furnace that forged the last American
consensus. Whats doubtful, in 1996 America, is whether scared or
nostalgic yuppies and suburbanites, twentysomething hotrodders, and
blue-collar refugees are forgeable into a meaningful group, culturally or
politically.
But Springsteens gonna give it his best shot. At Wallingford, his audience strains to be on his side, even when he launches into a quiet
story-song trilogy about the hardscrabble life of immigrants and the evils
of the Border Patrol. We accept it, because hes Bruce. We listen as he
quotes Carlos Fuentes about California being part of Mexico, and the
border between the United States and Mexico as a scar that never heals.
But we dont love it the way we love Thunder Road. We cant. The
whiff of possibility, of hope, the touch of bravado in the restless search
for even a marginal way out that powered the music we love is gone
from him, from us, from the country. Now, we have to face the scars that
crisscross America, and hope for grace from our kids.
Late in the show, he pauses to tell the story of how he rst saw John
Fords classic lm: When I was 26, a friend showed me The Grapes of
Wrath. It really hit me. Id wanted to do something like that, my whole
life. I wanted to make something that would be a thread running through
peoples lives. . . . Before Tom leaves, theres a scene where everybody in
the camp is dancing. The looks on their facesits like John Ford was
holding out the possibility of beauty in a brutal world.

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Afrmation against the darkness made Bruce Springsteen a culture

hero. The bravado may be lost to us now, but the beauty of what he does
lingershis effect on his audience, who knows him and roots for him. At
Wallingford, Springsteen is hammering uptempo, trying to recreate a rock
and roll stomper on a 12-string guitar, giving em what they want the way
he wants ita key ingredient of leadership, as well as celebrity. He busts
one, then two, nally a few of his strings. He reaches into his harmonica
shelves for a solo, to cover his confusion, and picks out a wrong harp
several timessomething he discovers only as he blows, time after time,
into the microphone. At long last, somewhere between nonplussed and
disgusted, he gives up trying to nish the tune hes so doggedly chasing.
While his roadie resets the equipment and The Boss waits, softly at rst,
then quickly gathering strength, the crowd begins singing to the stagean
impromptu Happy Birthday. Five nights from now, Bruce Springsteen
will turn 47.
Family values were a hot-button issue when Blood Brothers came
out in 1997. My kids didnt care much about Bruce Springsteen, so I
loaded the video and was watching it myself when, after a few minutes of
overhearing it, they edged one at a time into the den and sat down and,
to my surprise, got into it. Theyre a real band, exclaimed the older one
into trance-dance and electronica. I had no idea they worked like that in
the studio. They act like family, said the younger one, the way they
clown around. But he really runs things, doesnt he?
Yes, he does. Gary Tallent, the E Street Bands longtime bassist, kicks
off Blood Brothers: In his striving for spontaneity Bruce often wont tell
you what key or what song were gonna playits Follow me, boys.
That could be right out of Mingus. Whats fascinating is the shorthand
exchanges that telegraph between him and the band, spending their rst
few days together in the studio after 11 years, the to-and-fro-ing while
The Boss alludes to and sketches and implies what he and the songs need:
sometimes hes very specic (the piano gure in Secret Garden should
be less dened, and yo, Steve van Zandt, drop that Never On Sunday
mandolin part) and sometimes he leaves it to them (Atmosphere on the
guitar, he grins crookedly and waves broadly at Nils Lofgren). Hes a
good Boss, uses street versions of nicely turned diplomacy. When drummer
Max Weinberg wants to atten the videos title track with his typical arena
4/4 snare beat, Springsteen sidesteps him, says, I hear those cymbals
and the next shot shows Max sitting rather glumly behind the snare, a
little kid corrected, doing like he was told.
Striving for spontaneity is one way Springsteen keeps it real, the need
jazz and acting (and hip-hop, the child of both) share to stay in the
moment. Reenacting the tribal community of the E Street Band is a big
lure for him (and us) to go back into the world of MegaMusicBusiness,
after the perpetual tours of the 1980s, the burnout, the contractual

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lawsuits, the Reagan campaign attempts to appropriate one of the most

coruscating antiwar songs since Vietnam, the disappearance (not end) of
the New Depression and fracturing of his effective social coalition, the
audience he built of his threatened and marginal and disaffected blue- and
white-collar fans, the relative commercial failure of his folkie directions.
That last, of course, is the compelling reason the E Street Band is sitting
around the studio in the opening shots of Blood Brothers, clustered as he
straddles a chair with his battered acoustic and strums the song that gives
the documentary its title, their notebooks open and felt pens scraping
down chord changes and rhythmic and other inections as he picks and
mumbles through this piece theyve never heard, which theyre about to
record.
Welcome Home, Boss.
Ernie Fritzs 90-minute documentary, which covers the sessions that put
together the title track and Murder Incorporated and a couple of other
new sweeteners for a Greatest Hits album The Boss needed, is a reasonable insider look at how this garage band works. All the years Ive
known him mutters Miami Steve Van Zandt, The Sopranos tough guy,
hes never had less than ve songs ready to go on a given day. I hate that
about him. So we see Springsteen, the garage-band Ellington, leaning
against the packing cases in the studio to scribble while the group goofs
off. He stays up all night to gure out why their two earlier takes of
Blood Brothers didnt click, worries at the rhythms, comes back in
ngerpicking it a la Merle Travis on acoustic in a modied shufe, lets the
band listen and nd and follow that groove so that the song breathes the
way hes dreamed, and voilathe last take is the keeper, another jigsaw
piece of Springsteen bittersweet that promises to transcend what time
and memory fade away, and the band dances in the control room
listening to the playback.
Fritz sees, too, how encircled The Boss is by layers of handlers and
managers, how only his personal integrity and charisma keep it at all real.
Its amazing this Brechtian rocker can hold the multibillion dollar industry
at bay at all, but he can only as long as he sells, even if hes Bruce. Hence
this record. Three decades ago Jon Landau wrote for Rolling Stone, I
have seen the future of rock and roll and its name is Bruce Springsteen,
and found himself with a job when Springsteen spent years in contractual
suits. Now hes the manager, aka the ofcial ponticator. He choreographs the intricate pas-de-deux around a big commercial property
making a big record: the press releases, the photo shoots, the number of
tracks, the deadlines, the expectations of fans and marketers. Its fun to
watch the machinery whirr around the Wizard of Oz. And at least these
guys dont bore us by telling us how real they are; they just do what they
do, craftsmen at work, making music inside the family most of them have
been with for most of their lives.

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229

The distance between what they actually do and what everyone around
them does focuses at Tramps, the small New York club that specialized in
blues and R & B and soul for decades. Thats where director Jonathan
Demme shot the music video for Murder Incorporated; Fritz shot his
shooting. It was an intense night: we watched the band charge headlong
into the song a few times for Demmes multiple cameras and hot lights,
then they roared into random songs till about one in the morning. That
generosity is their strength, the virtue that ties fans to them as surely as
Deadheads to the Dead. What strikes me now (They just recorded this
live, Dad?) is how superior Fritzs underexposed grainy footage is to
Demmes glossy nished product: Fritz understands and mimics the experience, but the maker of Something Wild and Silence of the Lambs tries to
distill ithis video is too nished, airbrushed; the lighting too good, the
staging too staged. Is this Demmes fault? Or is it because music video
conventions, designed in the MTV era for prepackaged acts, dont breathe,
cant capture live shows that run on real in-the-moment existential
dramawhy bands like E Street and the Dead toss set lists and y into
the wind with their audience at their backs?
Hey mister can you tell me / what has happened to the seeds Ive
sown? I watch my kids watching This Hard Land and its opening
question, think of the dreams of the 1960s erased, buried, replaced by
greed and opportunism and lies. The sense of hope that a change is gonna
come is gone, along with the notion that there could be a different better
world built on the wealth and power and achievements of the greatest
nation on earth. Now, no one imagines alternatives. Few want them. They
just want a bigger piece of the existing pie. So when my kids tell me they
still hate Springsteens videos but see how the band was really a band and
how come nothing like that exists any more, I dont say a thing, just bask
in the vestigial glow of hope that, for a moment, lls me like a dream of
this hard land.
When Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, reunited to tour
behind The Rising, came to Madison Square Garden on August 12, 2002,
they juxtaposed 41 Shots, Springsteens powerful song about Amadou
Diallos shooting by NYPD ofcers, with Into the Fire, the new albums
uplifting gospel tribute to the emergency workers who climbed into
the burning Twin Towers never to emerge. Stripped to incantatory
simplicity, the newer songs chorusa litany, reallyinvokes the healing
circle of community that on 9/11 magically materialized-as hordes of
volunteers and photo-covered memorial walls abruptly elevated the NYPD
and NYFD and EMS to hero status. The crowd, mostly middle-aged in
suburban summer attire, stood in rather stony silence for the rst tune,
which drew boos and threats from the NYPD when Springsteen unveiled
it at the Garden in June 2000; for the second they eased into a reverential

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In the Garage

hush. Everyone around here knows, after all, that Springsteens music,
especially Thunder Road and Born in the USA, resounded through
countless post-9/11 memorial services for the many blue-collar victims.
Springsteens set lists are typically narratives; a sort of rock cabaret,
they build emotional tensions and releases to tell some larger story. So at
the Garden, he donned his plaid shirt as High Priest of the secular religion rooted in his audiences belief that he is somehow one of them writ
magically large, as were the Local Heroes who ocked toward danger that
beautiful, deadly September day, transgured by necessity, rising to the
call. Here he stood, with the E Street Band, his own symbolic community,
ready to transform this site not three miles from the fallen towers into a
temple of expiation, release, remembrance, hope, loss, despair, acceptance,
resolve, loveand, of course, a rock and roll party.
Like the strain of American populists he springs from, Springsteen has
always seen this country as a dichotomy, the Promised Land that waits
within the dream of This Hard Land. Originally inspired by what he has
called class-conscious pop records like the Animals 1960s hits We
Gotta Get Out of This Place and Its My Life (Id listen . . . and Id
say to myself: Thats my life, thats my life! They said something to me
about my own experience of exclusion.), during the 1970s he delved into
Flannery OConnor and John Steinbeck, William Carlos Williams and
John Ford, country music (a very class-conscious music) and Guthrie,
Walker Percy, and Robert Frank.
Ive made records, Springsteen told Percys nephew Will several years
ago, that I knew would nd a smaller audience than others Ive made. I
suppose the larger question is, How do you get that type of work to be
hearddespite the noise of modern society? . . . Theres a lot of different
ways to reach people, to help them think about whats really important in
this one-and-only life we live. Theres pop culturethats the shotgun
approach, where you throw it out and it gets interpreted in different ways
and some people pick up on it. And then theres the more intimate
approach like I tried on Tom Joad.
For The Rising he grabbed the shotgun. For the rst time ever, the E
Street Band blasted through endless TV talk shows and promo spots and
you-name-its to launch the record and tour. When the CD was released on
July 30, 2002, it was ubiquitous, and the marketing campaign looked like
an avalanche. The number of editorial pundits in places like the New York
Times and the Economist whove felt they had to comment on what is,
after all, a pop record struck me as remarkable. No wonder, issues of
artistic quality aside, the disc debuted at number one and went gold in the
rst weekan unprecedented hit for The Boss.
Boss or not, Springsteen hasnt exactly been burning up the charts since
the breakup of the E Street Band, exceptpredictablyfor the Greatest
Hits packages. But he has been looking for new entrance ramps onto the
artistic freeway. In 1992, he made Human Touch and Lucky Town, essen-

Bruce Springsteen

231

tially by himself, and got complaints that hed lost the old power, that the
songs had gotten clichd, or repetitive, or supercialall of which had
some merit. He tried touring with a mostly black, largely female band, but
the new group was loud and oddly bland. With The Ghost of Tom Joad
he walked the footsteps of Steinbeck and Guthrie and Ford, but for whatever reasonsthe prosperity of the times? The alien heroes? The lack of
Max Weinbergs bedrock backbeats and Clemons predictable sax?
despite a terric acoustic tour, most of his fans bought in only because the
themes and approach interested them. They really wanted the Friday-night
adrenaline rush of his earlier hits, their imaginary glory days represented
to them in rocked-out concert form, but still they came, in reduced but
dedicated numbers, to see Bruce because . . . hey, hes Bruce.
One PR edge about The Rising pushed Springsteens calling victims and
families, piecing together reportage for the album. Theres a queasiness
about this among longtime fans, including me, although Springsteens
genius has always shone in his talent for telling other peoples stories.
Which may be the main reason fans like me believe in Springsteen: this
pop megastar who describes what he does as a job and bikes around the
country during his down times. Unlike Michael Jackson, Springsteen
doesnt live in Neverland. He believes in his abilityhis duty, the requisite for his gift of talentto move us to more than adoration and sales. His
human touch is the ghost in the pop industrys machinery.
Im more a product of pop culture: lms and records, lms and
records, lms and records, Springsteen told Percy. I had some lofty ideas
about using my own music to give people something to think aboutto
think about the world, and whats right and wrong. Id been affected that
way by records, and I wanted my own music and writing to extend themselves in that way.
My rst reactions to The Rising album were mixed. I dont know what
I wanted to hear, but the marketing onslaught about 9/11 had shoved me
into an emotional corner. Listening however expectantly, I felt my enthusiasm drain: a lot of these songs sounded like retreads whose earlier
incarnations told fuller-bodied stories. Some of them, despite the hype,
were barely if at all about 9/11. Shifting critical gears, I postulated problemsthe limits of realism, the boundaries of Springsteens talents and
vision, the impossibly tangled American weave of commerce and culture,
Reagans attempt to appropriate Born in the USA as a campaign tool,
all kinds of intellectual reasons why I wasnt blown away. I groused about
the sketchy thinness of the tales, their atness, their itchy transcendental
yearnings, their failures. It didnt, I kept repeating to friends I played it to,
really work.
A month later, I still think that whole chunks of The Rising dont work.
I just dont care. Why, I keep asking myself, does the albums title track
choke me up every time I hear it, its call-and-response gospel chorus with
Bruce listing the skys contradictory attributes and the chorus answering

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In the Garage

each entry, A dream of life. The story of a rescue worker who left his
house on the y to alarm bells everywhere, wearing his red cross and
burning rubber, an apocalyptic Elijah who ends up inching through the
dusty dark lit by bright-eyed spirits to his death, and the vocal erupts into
the wordless jigging chorus. This mini-epic opens with drawling guitar
and spare backing gradually thickened by swirling keyboards and more
guitars, grinds into a blues-rock basher for the race to the disaster site and
the climb, dissolves into kaleidoscopic textures as the hero dies dreaming
of his children dancing in a sky lled with lighta dream, he says, of life.
It closes with gusts of contrapuntal voices that fade into the bands nal
unresolved chord.
The opening of Into the Fire is the last time the narrator sees his
comrade, who climbs into the ames because of love and duty. Its incantatory chorus is backed by an organ gure over a taps-derived beat.
The instruments growl and skate with that understated amazing grace the
E Street Band at its best can dazzle with. On Empty Sky, Patti Scialfas
ghostly, quavering vocals frame Springsteens tight-lipped narration in a
stark rock ballad with doomed minor-major modulations and a foreground-shifting mix. The Fuse chuffs electro-tech industrial sounds
while a couple grope for comfort in sex as funeral processions wind
through town-carrying on, living, as times beats tick into forever.
These are the songs I cant stop playing.
The reunion of Springsteen and E Streeters reafrms The Bosss basic
mythic community; musically the album integrates the surprisingly varied
styles the Worlds Greatest Garage Band has tackled over 30-odd years.
The albums title signals reassurance. The Boss has gathered us tonight in
the Church of Rock and Roll, as he used to holler in those ferocious live
gospel set pieces, to gather us, to bear witness, to go onto live. Because
that, as cliched as it is, is what we do, with a snatching of images, pangs
of emotion, and a gazing at the skies.
One musician I know called The Rising comfort foodclassy, welldone comfort food. He was right, but it didnt really matter. Over the
years Springsteen has become part of the soundtrack for our lives, as the
Animals were for his. The albums failures are part of its package, its
blandness a necessary function of the afrmation, reconciliation, and
healing. Think of Springsteen as the plugged-in troubadour who shapes
his artistry into what his audience wants and needs, not cynically but
because he wants to bring them with him, and its structure comes clearer.
Structure and intention, however, cant save all the songs. They move
effortlessly, though not always successfully, from one tempo and soundscape to another as they talk of heroism and transcendence, devils in the
mailbox and dreams of the garden of a thousand sighs. There are no Big
Statements; there are sketchy stories. The standard imagery of romantic
love and loss is tilted into the post9/11 world. Sometimes, as in Youre

Bruce Springsteen

233

Missing, this leaves us with a catalog of unsatisfying cliches against

generic synth backgrounds. On the R & B-avored Countin on a
Miracle, which explodes after a gentle acoustic-guitar intro, it plays off
Springsteens long-standing hope-against-hope in love trope. The familiar
language tries to embrace the unimaginable; mostly, inevitably, it fails.
But when it doesnt it cuts deep. Among the albums speakers are the
dead, the determined and fragile living, the suicidal and transgured and
living dead: Nothing Man is a breathy ballad about a working-class
hero who makes his hometown paper, gets glad-handed and bought
rounds, and, like Coleridges Life-in-Death, mutters about praying to nd
courage others can understand in the pearl-handled revolver on his night
table. The linguistic conceit gets tangled, stretched. The earnest Worlds
Apart, where star-crossed lovers meet to an Arab-music inection and a
Pakistani chorus, is camp-hilarious. Sounds like Sting on a bad day,
quipped one pal who hates Sting. Every three or four tunes is a party piece
like Skin to Skin, a throwaway emotional release.
Still, even the failures reect Springsteens vision of an unpredictable,
hostile world in which individuals overcome, evade, understand in defeat,
or are simply crushed by the loaded dice of the Powers-That-Be, whether
they are the fates, the rich, the government, or the lonely crowd. He sees
community as a necessary refuge: Marys Place, bubbling R & B, is
about a survivor throwing a post-9/11 party while haunted by her dead
lovers voice. These songs dont lay out a political agenda. Who needs
more of that in a world where endless voices politically spin What
Happened every day? Catch the Rashomon-style perspective shifts in
Lonesome Day.
This is the ineluctable lure of Springsteens storytelling at its bestits
suggestions of lifes complexity. His voice, soaked in blues and gospel,
sounds incredible, and its sheer allure, its phrasing and catches, its
demands and pleas, carry many of the weaker songs. The singings allusive
cracks and crannies evoke empathy and redemption, separation and
defeat, wrapped in religious imagery that suggests, among other things,
that the ways we were on 9/11 are more complicated than anyone can
capture. How long, after all, did it take for Vietnam to yield Going After
Cacciato and Dog Soldiers and Born in the USA?
Which brings us back to the Garden, where the band pranced through
nearly three hours, delivering note-perfect renditionsthe blues-rock
throb of Into the Fire, the chug-a-lug suspensions and industrial-metal
thrust of The Fuse, the stark-yet-full acoustic colors of Empty Sky, the
skirling keyboards and snarling guitars that alternate sections of The
Risingthat often ared but never quite built into the emotional peak
that is their hallmark. The crowd leapt from its seats and sang the shows
carefully salted oldies like Prove It All Night, Darkness on the Edge of
Town, and The Promised Land. They danced to Marys Place and

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In the Garage

cheered the second half of the line from Empty Sky that runs, I want
a kiss from your lips, I want an eye for an eye. For the rest they mostly
milled and sat and drank. The encores were all classics, from Thunder
Road to Born in the USA.
Careful, controlled, scared, wondering if the glory days are past, sifting
for omens. Thats how the concert felt. Maybe thats who we are now.
What kind of oracle did we expect?

23
Tom Waits
Mass market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never
existed. . . . Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line
straight.
James Ellroy, American Tabloid
What price freedom? Dirt is my rug.
Tom Waits

Tom Waits is an imaginary hobo. He cruises the oddball corners of

American pop culture and collects the deft and moving and loopy short
takes he sees and imagines there. Like Raymond Carver, he judges only
when judgment is utterly unavoidable, a last resort on the journey
through life.
Back in 1973, Closing Time rst caught Waitss then far less grizzled
voice on disc, growling about unguarded moments in real lives. Unlike
that eras Me-Generation singersongwriter crop of hit-generating navelgazers, the solipsistic James Taylors and Carole Kings and Carly Simons,
Waits made you feel other people because he did. He was ironic or direct,
caustic or unabashedly torn open by loss and hope and love and fear and
the pivotal emotions that daily face folks who dont live inside recording
and movie and TV studios, ivy-covered towers, newspaper and magazine
ofces, the Beltway, or their own swollen heads.
His sense of being on the outside may have started at birth: the story
goes that he was delivered in the back seat of a cab outside a hospital in
Pomona, California, on December 7, 1949Pearl Harbors eighth
anniversary. His parents, both schoolteachers, were divorced when he was
10; growing up, he and his two sisters moved around California a lot. As
a teen, Waits hung back from the regional craze for surf music, hotrod
music, or even psychedelic music. Instead, he listened to his parents 78s
of Perry Como and Bing Crosby, and tacked Bob Dylan lyrics up on the
walls of his room. This was when he started writing down ideas that came

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In the Garage

to him during the night, taught himself piano at a neighbors house,

learned to play some guitar. At school he was a clown whod blow
harmonica and do a soft-shoe during his loosey-goosey art class. Cars
consumed him. A beloved beat-up station wagon inspired the song Ol
55, which the Eagles covered on their rst album, after it appeared on
Closing Time.
Waits, working as a doorman at LAs Heritage Club, was exposed early
to the opening up of pop culture. As he told Rolling Stones David McGee
in 1976, I listened to all kinds of music there, all kinds of stuff from rock
to jazz to folk to anything else that happened to walk in. One night I saw
a local guy onstage playing his own material. I dont know why, but at
that moment I knew I wanted to live or die on the strength of my own
music. I nally played a gig there. Then I started writing down peoples
conversations as they sat around the bar. When I put them together I
found some music hiding in there.
He started readingJack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg,
Beat after Beat. He started listening more widelyIrving Berlin, Johnny
Mercer, even Stephen Foster. When he got a shot at the famed stage of the
Troubadour in 1969, Herb Cohen, manager of the Mothers of Invention,
Captain Beefheart, and Linda Ronstadt, liked Waits enough to sign him.
Then, in 1972, Waits recorded Closing Time, which got nice reviews and
slid down the charts even faster than it rose up them.
But the album established Waitss Beat persona and noir sensibility; its
not hard to imagine Sam Fuller directing Sterling Hayden and/or Susan
Hayward in video versions of some of these tunes. And theres a tenderness and understanding about Americas marginal types that reects that.
Randy Newman, who emerged as a singersongwriter at about the same
time, and Warren Zevon, a friend of Jackson Brownes, shared with Waits
an irascible sense of irony and the conviction that the world was surreal
and tragicomic, that individuals were surrounded and molded and
buffeted by the absurd. They served as a useful astringent to counteract
the cloying, soppy wave of Me-Generation singersongwriters. But while
Zevon (a favorite of Hunter Thompsons) cast himself as a swashbuckler
gloating over startling images like Roland the headless Thompson
gunner, Newman and Waits could look without shame or embarrassment into the odd angles of the human heart, and were far more inventive
about musical attire for their storytelling.
In fact, Martha from Closing Time could be a genre tune from the
Newman songbook, a vaguely parlor piano piece looking back in
genuinely sweet, if eccentric, nostalgia. (Newman and Waits, The Band
and the Grateful Dead were among the few pop and rock musicians in
1972 interested in Stephen Foster.) The title track portrays a subtle series
of empathetic vignettes at a bar: a man and a woman (the woman is sitting
with another man) exchanging crossing but not quite meeting glances, an
abandoned seat next to her, tentative but never actually realized gestures

Tom Waits

237

toward meeting, a refrain that alternates and I hope that I/you dont fall
in love with you/me, the nal nonintersection and a resigned shrug into
the night.
And there are gifted musical touches: the breathily muted horn that
winds like a ribbon through the album to evoke Miles Davis; the Lead
Belly avor and Dylanesque vocals of the exuberant waltz Ill Be Gone;
the hilarious homage to lovers betrayal called Rosie; the abstracted
stepwise blues of Lonely; the subverted Tin Pan Alley of And Its You,
with Davis-style trumpet and Satchmo-style scat. Like the best musicians
of the time, Waits was a kind of amateur archaeologist.
It was natural that he gravitated toward lms and acting, consistent
with his Charles Bukowski outlook, even. For an adept musical character
actor like Waits, it was only a short step from creating and realizing imaginary scenes to movie stardom in roles about outsiders and eccentrics.
When Waitss death-and-sound-obsessed 1992 disc Bone Machine
won him his rst Grammy, Rolling Stone, by way of yuppied praise,
summarized his output to date this way: For more than twenty years,
Tom Waits has chronicled the grotesque losers of the seedy underworld.
More revealing and to the point, Bruce Springsteen covered Waits Jersey
Girlone master chroniclers homage to another.
Waitss long career falls into two congruent pieces. For his rst 10 years
and eight recordings, the So Cal boho (remember Rickie Lee Jones? She
was his girlfriend, shared his Beat existentialism and love of jazz, which
she inected into her music) collected noirish pictures for his outsiders
album of Americana. He started acting in 1978, with a small part in
Paradise Alley. Hes notched four Coppola icks (he did Robert Altmans
Short Cuts and half-a-dozen others since), but his most telling performance was in Jim Jarmuschs offbeat 1986 Down by Law, which teamed
him with a then-little-known Italian comic named Roberto Benigni.
What led Waits to outsider auteurs like Jarmusch and Robert Wilson
(Waitss 1993 album, The Black Rider, is music for the folk-tale-based
opera Wilson directed) was his eccentric muses 1983 pivot. With Swordshtrombones, Waits hopped a creative freight train into the downtown
New York arts scene, where postmodern genre-scramblers like John Zorn
and John Lurie and Laurie Anderson searched in parallel (and sometimes
in combination) with hip-hoppers like Run-DMC for ways to recombine
and recycle musical ideas. Swordshtrombones ditched hi recording and
noir songwriting for Impressionistic soundscapes dreamed in rude
facilitiesbathroom echo chambers, a hotel room in Mexico, a concreteand-wood bunker studio on a chicken farm. Waits began amassing an
18-wheelers worth of weird instrumentscalliopes, Balinese metal
aungigongs, glass harmonicas, bowed saw, pump organ, accordion,
mellotron, bass boo-bams, brake drums, parade drums, even one he built
called a condundrum. Hanging out with these grotesques has helped Waits

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In the Garage

grow into an American original, a wonderfully gifted miniaturist with a

Romantics seeing touch and bruised ironies, like Sherwood Anderson.
Mule Variations was Waitss rst album since 1993, but its unmistakably the sound of him opening up his outsider scrapbook again. A sharp
pal whos a fan heard the advance CD and said to me, Good, huh? He
paused, a shade defensive. A lot like the last two. Another beat. But
thats who he is. Exactly.
Its hard not to be yourself when youre as much who you are as Waits
is. With cowriter/producer and wife Kathleen Brennan, he covers so much
stylistic and dramatic ground, you could call him a musical avantarchivist. Mule Variations naturally catalogs a lot of American music.
Theres gospel (Come On Up to the House, parlor songs and civil war
ballads (Take It with Me, Pony, Georgia Lee), jazz noir (Black
Market Baby), Stax-Volt soul (House Where Nobody Lives), jungle
funk (Big in Japan). Theres electro-blues-surrealism out of Captain
Beefheart (Eyeball Kid, Filipino Box Spring Hog). Theres the gently
insistent, buoyant clave of Hold On. Theres more than a hint of Weill
and Brecht in Chocolate Jesus, with a coruscating chorus about the
cellophane-wrapped Messiah melting.
An old-blues hound, Waits now makes his own. Lowside of the Road
rides a lo- sonic rumble made by Harry Partchesque instruments with
names like Optigon and Chumbus and Dousengoni. The booze-soaked
raunch called Cold Water stumbles along like an imaginary hobo whos
hooked down some LSD with his hooch; Marc Ribots bitingly thicktongued guitar is hilarious. Get Behind the Mule marshals Delta-blues
doggedness, a saying attributed to Robert Johnsons father, and Chicago
1960s blues revivalist Charlie Musselwhites lurking harmonica to backjabbing vignettes of murder and fear that nish with a simple moral:
Never let the weeds get higher than the garden/Always keep a sapphire
in your mind.
Our imaginary hobo aint churchgoing, but he believes how you live
matters. His lyrics put old queries in moving ways, and dont mind
exploring standard answers. Between simple maxims and irony, comedy
and satire and suspense, tragedy and surrealism, Waits is never afraid or
embarrassed. Take the heartbreaking (and real) story of Georgia Lee,
where he comes back over and over to the basic, unadorned, chilling question, Why wasnt God watching? You can sense hes probably a lapsed
Catholic boy before you conrm itthat sense of impatience and bafed
anger in the face of the worlds repeated failures, its daily litany of banal
evil. This is a different side of the coin from Randy Newmans And The
Lord Said, with its Joblike irony: Oh Lord if you wont take care of us,
Wont you please please let us be?
Waits has a smashed foghorn of a voice, somewhere between Beefhearts and Howlin Wolfs, and he uses it to ruminate and yelp and scream
and croon and plead and threaten. It can be a blunt, heavy instrument,

Tom Waits

239

but he wields it with incongruous dexterityeven, at times, lightness. The

ways he can ask Why wasnt God watching? makes your pulse bump.
His clashing vocal overtones sometimes surround a note like a clot
forming around a gash.
You cant make a hobo, even an imaginary one, inch easily, and
Waitss scrapbook is full of things wed mostly rather sidle past or turn
our backs on.
Like Whats He Building? Musique-concrete clanging and hissing and
the like sets spoken lyrics that start by wondering about the neighbor who
has subscriptions to vague magazines, who never waves when he passes,
who makes building noises in his workshop, who must be hiding something while he keeps to himself. Sound familiar? Dont you recognize the
face of American paranoia?
With all these snapshots rolled into his knapsack, Waits is an American
bricoleur. Before you grab a brick to heave at me, lets say that just means
hes one of our very own cranks from a very long line, the yowling and
yawping sort of Romantic barbarian seer who gets tossed into the tank
by bored cops and takes in the turned backs and locked doors as he passes
through town, sympathizes with the pregnant women and Vietnam vets
begging on the freeways, steps into the cool and still graveyard for a nap,
and then hunkers down with an old stray dog in front of the furniture
store window to catch a little TV. In fact, you probably dont want a guy
like him hanging out in your neighborhood, even if hes named Walt
Whitman or Harry Partch or Kenneth Burke, Woody Guthrie or Charlie
Mingus or Allen Ginsberg. Youre thinking 911 if hes named Howlin
Wolf or Captain Beefheart. Why put up with Tom Waits?
Heres one reason. He can show you what you already know and make
you believe it again.

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part V

Possible Futures

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24
Ken Burns, the Academy,
and Jazz
Lets cut to the chase on Ken Burnss Jazz by invoking Wallace Stevens.
1. Is it entertaining TV? Mostly, in PBS fashion.
2. Does it leave out people and places and whole periods and genres
normally considered vital parts of jazz history? Yes.
3. Does it need more editing? Yes.
4. Does Louis Armstrong claim 40 percent of its 19 hours? Yes.
5. Does post-1960s jazz claim 10 percent? Yes.
6. Does it tell an informed and informative story? Usually.
7. Does it identify the 500-odd pieces of jazz that serve as its soundtrack?
Rarely.
8. Does it have rare and evocative pictures and lm footage? Absolutely.
9. Is it good history? Its made-for-PBS history.
10. Will it satisfy jazz fans and musicians and critics? Even before it aired,
and before most of them saw a fraction of it, it didnt. Once it came
out, there was plenty of noisy debate about it, sometimes with good
reason, more often not.
11. Will it save the jazz industry? That depends: CDs labeled Ken Burnss
Jazz are bullish.
12. Will it make jazz a part of mainstream American culture again? Not
likely, but it may help make it an ofcial part of popular American
history.
13. Is it part of the transition jazz has been making for three decades into
the academic world? You bet.
Now lets dolly back and try to tell the story.
The numbers have to come rst. The 10-episode, 19-hours-long series
was six years in the making, and it sprawls: 75 talking heads, tens of thousands of still photos, 500 pieces of music, and so on. Costing some $13
million, about a third of it from General Motors, its the biggest documentary thats ever been done about jazz.

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Possible Futures

And yet a lot of jazz musicians and critics and fans, in print and on the
Web, started complaining even before it was aired that its too constrictive.
Its easy to see why. Its certainly not comprehensive. For Burns and collaborator Geoffrey C. Ward, history unfolds in the textures of individual
lives. (Ward won the Francis Parkman prize for A First-Class Temperament, one volume of his biography of FDR.) Jazz for them is the story of
a few great men (and the odd woman) who changed the way Americans,
then the world, hear and think and act. Chief among them: Louis
Armstrong and Duke Ellington. There are places of honor for the likes of
James Reese Europe and Jelly Roll Morton, Sidney Bechet and Bix Beiderbecke, Benny Goodman and Count Basie, Artie Shaw and Charlie Parker,
Miles Davis and Dave Brubeck. This sort of survey is easier to sustain
until about 1929, because jazz musicians were few (though not as few and
or as limited to New Orleans and Chicago and New York as the movie
implies). But Burns & Co. can tell a credible if reductive story of jazzs
rst decades using a handful of pioneers.
One reason for the noise from the jazz community is that this overlaps the story of jazz according to Jazz at Lincoln Center, a ashpoint
in the jazz world. J@LC teaches that jazz is a clear-cut genealogy of a
few outstanding gures, and it excludes many important artists, especially after 1960, often for ideological reasons. The basic plot for both:
taking its building blocks from slave music and marching bands and
blues and the church and European dance and classical music, jazz
began life as a mongrel in New Orleans, came up the river to Chicago,
met up (via Armstrong) with New York proto-swing bands and Harlem
stride pianists, and exploded, drawing young white players into a blackdeveloped music. Its a true enough, though it ultimately means ignoring
uncomfortable parallel developments (Red Allen and Armstrong) or
scenes (between-the-wars LA jazz) or entire genres (Latin jazz, European
jazz). But schematic history can be good TV, and Burns, like earlier PBS
lmmaker Frederick Wiseman, makes long, long movies that depend on
strong, heavily delineated characters and themes to keep them from
dissipating.
His storys heart is Armstrong. Its head is Ellington. And its soul is the
Jazz Age and the Swing Era.
In Episode 5, Swing: Pure Pleasure (19351937), writer Albert
Murray declares, Jazz is primarily dance music. Though that hasnt
been true for nearly half the musics history, its clear hes speaking for
Burns: three episodes, nearly six hours, discuss the big band era, when
jazz underpinned Americas popular music and lifted Depression-era
spirits, saved the record industry, and dominated that then-new
omnipresent technology, radio. Nevertheless, as the often intrusive talking
heads tell us, from Ellington on down the musicians knew the difference
between the business and the music: stage shtick and chart slots were as
important then as now. This is a bittersweet Golden Age of speakeasies,

Ken Burns, the Academy, and Jazz

245

hoods, the Great Depression, squealing bobby-soxers, lynchings, jitterbugging, novelty tunes, and early moves toward racial integration. It is
described without apparent irony as a time of adult sensibility, and is
the series gravitational center.
The great-man schematic creates escalating difculty for the plotting
starting with Episode 7, which begins with Charlie Parker and spends
nearly as much time on Armstrong as it does on bebop. By the mid-1940s,
the musicians had multiplied and moved onout of Harlem and swing
time. And so jazz dissolves into hundreds of musicians searching for
different sounds, styles, approaches, languages, multimedia formats. The
last 40 years of Ken Burnss Jazz are a choppy and unreliable ride; a lot
disappears, and whats left can be telegraphic or confusing and look
exactly like J@LC speaking.
Burns says post-1960s jazz is too controversial even in the jazz world
to be history. Maybe he should have ended, then, with John Coltrane; his
series Baseball, after all, stopped at 1970. For in less than two hours, faces
from Charles Minguss to Sonny Rollins ash across the screen between
inevitable reprises of Duke and Satchmo. Miles Daviss push into fusion
shrinks to his alleged desperation for teen fans. Ornette Coleman is
dismissed. Keith Jarrett and Chick Corea dont appear. The 1970s and
1980s are a quick-blur artistic wilderness until the arrival of Wynton
Marsalis, Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and the lms Senior
Creative Consultant and prime talking head. And there, after a brief
survey of new stars (Cassandra Wilson, Joshua Redman) and a recapitulation of key gures and themes, it ends.
The signal irony: if Burns had cut the nal episode and billed this as
Jazz: The First 50 Years, more of the discussion might be where it
belongsthe movie.
Until pretty recently nobody thought enough of jazz to point a movie
camera in its general direction for very long. There are snatches of footage
of Armstrong and Ellington and Fats Waller and Bessie Smith and the like
from the early days. By the mid-1930s the popular swing bands cropped
up in lms and then in soundies. But the video record of what fans like
to call Americas greatest art form is sporadic and discouraging.
This problem plays to Burnss strengths: he loves having his staff dig
up old photos (for this, they turned up millions), and he loves working
stills to make them kinetic. He pans across and slowly zooms in and out
of a single shot to give it a movielike temporal depth. In one vignette about
Harlems Savoy Ballroom, where drummer Chick Webb held court and
introduced Ella Fitzgerald in the 1930s, he intercuts shots of separate
white and black dancers to hammer home the voiceovers point about its
integrated patronsa rst in America. He assembles a deft mix of photos
and lm to recreate the stage-fright-to-triumph of Benny Goodmans 1938
Sing Sing Sing concert at Carnegie Hall.

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The series boasts tours de force. The evocative segment called The
Road strings out a head-turning daisy chain of wondrous footage: bands
on trains and buses and touring cars, chugging 500 miles a day six days
a week, making whoopee and changing tires, riding high onstage and
coping with breakdowns and prejudice offstage. The recently deceased
bass and photography great Milt Hinton recalls how at band stops his
wife would head into town looking for black homes where the musicians
could eat and stay, how musicians were people of prestige in the community. Readings from journals and newspapers and diaries sample big band
lifes dizzying ups and downs, while the lm rolls from impromptu baseball games to a couple of female jazz fans pufng fake reefers while
hugging the sign of a town named Gage.
And in the background rolls out more jazz by far than 99 percent of
America has heard. Much of the time, its as snippets in the background
when one after another talking head pops up. The heads are duly identied time after time. The tunes arent, unless theyre key to a biographical
or sociological set piece. Why not ash a subtitle to tell the audience
whats playing?
Because jazz is the soundtrack for this series as much as or more than
its subject. To put it another way, this isnt really a movie about jazz
history. Think of Burns as PBSs Oliver Stone. Like the civil war and baseball, jazz for Burns and Ward is a lens to focus on basic questions: who
are Americans, and how do they manage to get alongor not? And their
central query concerns race.
So they lm jazz as the tale of black redemption in and of America, a
narrative of conversion and triumph whose shape recalls St. Augustine
and Dante. From the days of slavery through the humiliations of Jim
Crow and minstrelsy to the assertive freedom of the blues and jazz, Burnss
movie resounds with the apocalyptic ring of apotheosis, as it examines a
few crucial candidates for cultural sainthood. For it wants both to carve
jazz greats into the American pantheon and to underline jazzs pivotal
centrality to 20th-century America as an afrmation of African American
creativity and endurance.
This, coupled with Marsaliss camera-savvy polish as a spokesman as
well as his insistent championing of jazz education over the years, explains
why a lmmaker like Burns would feel drawn to J@LCs version of jazz
history. (Actually Dan Morgenstern, the respected head of the Rutgers
Institute for Jazz Studies, was the lms senior historical consultant and
vetted the script, and there were 17 consultants in all, so until the nal
episode there are inevitable contiguous plot and character points, but not
necessarily identity, with Lincoln Centers tale.) But dramatic necessity
also helps explain why some characters, like Armstrong and Ellington,
are the storys recurrent focus.
Swing, you might guess, is a buzzword in this series, and youd be right,
even though the lm itself doesnt swing much. The earnestness that

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suffuses PBS cultural products wont let it oat for long. At times, the
musics lilting ease and re contrast vividly with its deliberate, selfconscious pace. Thats exacerbated by Burnss 75 talking heads: watching
can be like sitting through a course team-taught by the UN.
Besides Marsalis, Burnss other main soloist is writer Gary Giddins, and
Giddins swings: his wide-ranging learning rides his love for jazz easily.
Other commentatorsStanley Crouch, Murray, Artie Shaw, Gerald Early,
James Lincoln Collier, Dave Brubeckgive good camera and consistent
historical edutainment. But too many proffer vague impressions, cliched
memories, breathless interpretations, and warmed-over anecdotes. They
could easily have been edited or edited out. Then there are periodic
pileups. In Episode 7, Joya Sherrill, and Ellingtons granddaughter, and a
few others repeat that Duke and Billy Strayhorn were a rare and
wonderful match. In Episode 5, the same two dancers appear twice with
virtually the same observations about Harlems Savoy Ballroom.
Sometimes the anecdotes are fun or fabulous, and sometimes theyre
bad history. Take Jon Hendricks, who in Episode 4 retails the disproven
mythic origins of Armstrongs scatting (sheet music fell off his stand at a
recording session). Or director Bernard Tavernier, who gushes about
Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grappelli introducing the guitar-violin
combo to jazz, though they themselves would have ngered Eddie Lang
and Joe Venuti. Ballplayer Buck ONeil rambles good-naturedly about
Billie Holiday giving listeners the greatest moments and the saddest
moments, amply demonstrating how a tighter edit could have sliced the
series lapses into vacuity.
Marsaliss starring role has several sides. He delivers very effective
musical glosses and explanations, polished by years of shows and clinics
with adults and teens and kids. His knowledge of and passion for the jazz
he loves, and his conviction that it represents American life in full, is infectious, if sometimes hyperbolic. But when he holds forth about Ellington
and Armstrong and the semilegendary Buddy Bolden as if he knew them
intimately, its TV, not history.
History can be light-ngered instead of heavy-handed, and Jazz could
use more humor, more of the light Marsalis ascribes to the best jazz
musicians. It has some fabulous vignettes from Crouch, the series thirdranked talking head. Except for the last two hours, Crouch swings. In one
priceless bit, he mimics pre-Armstrong pop vocalists and then Armstrong
himself, and asks why anyone would want to revert. That would be a bad
choice, he deadpans. Anybody who makes that choice, he adds, should be
deportedcount a beatto somewhere. Another beat. Maybe Pluto.
Its impossible to disagree, especially when youre laughing.
To some extent, Burns has himself to blame for the unjoyful noise that
greeted his lm in the jazz world. In conversation, he tends, rightly, to
underplay his works ambitions. Its not the history of jazz, he says.

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Viewers will get to know a handful of musicians, meet another dozen or

two, and brush past a few dozen more. He cant possibly compete with
books like Giddinss Visions of Jazz or jazz histories like Ted Gioias or
Marshall Stearnss; hes made a movie that tells an educational story for
a mass audience. This is reasonable and accurate and no small feat. And,
in fact, the movie is steeped with rich human detail of the sort most music
historians rarely touch on. But the PR bombast trumpets him as jazzs
Joan of Arc, and once hes on-message he cant stop selling. Jazz, like academia, is small and marginal with plenty of defensive, combative types;
the music is a secular religion. Burnss perceived power inevitably lights
territorial fuses.
As it happens, the jazz industry, now down to under 1 percent of US
music sales, once you exclude Kenny G and his clones, looks incongruously like a Victorian maiden lashed to the tracks awaiting her hero.
Burnss movie is a mantra, as labels crunch despairing numbers and weed
out personnel and artists after the latest wave of megamergers and Internet
terrors. For his well-designed ve-CD companion set (subtitled The Story
of Americas Music), the lmmaker brokered a deal between Sony and
PolyGram, bitter corporate rivals, then brought in other labels; all are
hoping for sales like the companion books, which had a 300,000 rst
printing. This is mind-blowing if youre a jazz label head used to dealing
in niche sales (Marsalis himself rarely moves more than 10,000 CDs,
Cassandra Wilson and Joshua Redman several times that many) and
waiting for the next guillotine.
Potential audience numbers were tossed around fervently in advance
of the shows screening: 40 million viewers for Baseball and The Civil
War, and probably Jazz will draw less, but. . . . (Ultimately it reached
about 12 million.) It fascinates me that few of the lms critics ever
addressed that. Why not consider an America where 20 million more
peopleor 3 million, or however many watch this in repeats or on
DVDknow something, anything, about Louis Armstrong, Duke
Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and a few others? Where, if they
survive the overstatments, talking heads, and pacing, they learn some
hidden history?
Am I Pollyanna? Maybe. Reality check: this is a made-for-TV movie.
But I too think race is Americas central issue, even more multifaceted in
the 21st century. What holds this joints pasted seams together, beyond
the Founding Documents, is the frequently intangible glue called culture.
TV is a major place American culture gets made. Can anyone measure
what it meant to have Bill Cosby playing an upper-class Dad next door for
a generation? What it means now that there are black and Hispanic and
Asian and gay and you-name-em channels lling cable and satellite TV?
Can anyone guess what it might mean in ve years to have Jazz, whatever
its warts, playing over and over to a country as terminally divided and in
search of itself as this one?

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These are not delusions of grandeur about the power of jazz or Ken
Burns. They are possibilities written in the history of jazz in America. Take
Burnss vignette about Charlie Black, a white Texas teen who saw
Armstrong perform in the 1930s. It changed his life. He joined the
NAACPS legal team working on what became Brown v. Board of Education. The sociology of jazz is full of such stories. And they are very real.
For instance, no one with a brain disputes that jazz was initially an
African American creation. But as Marsalis, Giddins, Crouch, Murray,
and Early point out over and over, jazz was welcoming, inclusive, open.
It replaced minstrelsy with a cultural site where all Americans could
participate, speak to each other, override or ignore or challenge or slide
by the societys xations on racial and ethnic stereotypes. Black Americans (and other ethnic outsiders) could use it to enter mainstream
society, white Americans could ee to it from mainstream society, and
the transactions created a ux and ow that powered American cultural
syntheses.
Jazz, the theme goes, represents America at its bestthe dream of
America. In the Depression, as Early reminds us, it rivaled MGM musicals
in lifting the countrys spirits. Of course, since jazz is a human activity, it
also reects the deepest divisions as well as the ideals at Americas core.
Race, sex, money, power, capitalism, creative freedom, the interaction of
the individual and the groupthese are all questions embedded in jazz
history. Theyre the questions Burns and Ward are truly interested in. At
its best, Jazz gets us interested in them too.
Burns admits he never listened to jazz until he started considering it as
a subject. Ward became an Armstrong fan at age 10, when he was hospitalized with polio. Jazz is lucky theyre interested in it.
Right now, jazzs commercial future is murky. The major labels are
wreckage. Marsalis, who used to get $1 million a year to make nichemarket records in hopes that they would turn into catalog gold, for years
didnt have a label. High-prole jazz promoters are hemorrhaging. The
Knitting Factory is reported in the hole for $2 million, after luring a big
entertainment rm to take a stake, opening a club in LA, and losing its
annual jazz-festival sponsor. The Blue Note chain is said to be spurting
red ink from expansions into Las Vegas and midtown Manhattan. Nor
are jazzs nonprot arms thriving. The Thelonious Monk Institute, so
closely aligned with the ClintonGore administration its head was reportedly hoping for an ambassadorship if Al won, has resituated its rump
organization in LA. And the long-dormant board of Jazz at Lincoln Center
red executive director Rob Gibson in a swirl of intrigue: changed doorlocks and computer codes, red and rehired personnel, and persistent
rumors of nancial malfeasance, bullying, and drug abuse.
Jazz has been on a commercial slide since the 1970s, when it racked up
10 percent of US retail music sales. At the same time, it began entering the

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groves of academe. Today, most jazz musicians are trained at schools; jazz
history is laced through American Studies and music curricula.
This process has already fundamentally changed jazz itself and its relation to American culture, though how isnt always clear at rst. As a
colleague reminded me recently, in the jazz heydays celebrated by Burnss
Jazz, musicians fashioned their own idiosyncratic solutions to musical
problems, drawing on oral tradition (which varied considerably) and their
own ingenuity and needs. This meant individual creative solutions to
problemshow to nger this note or sequence, how to get that timbre,
how to connect those chord changes. Now, a professor distributes
computer analyses of famous solos, templates for solutions that are shared
by hundreds and thousands of students. This has a paradoxical effect: it
raises the general level of and standardizes jazz training, but it also tends
to vitiate the individualism traditionally at the musics heart. This is why
older musicians routinely complain that younger schooled players all
sound alike. On the other hand, theyre well suited for jazz repertory
programs like J@LC.
That is part of jazzs changing contemporary dynamics. So is Ken
Burnss Jazz.
Over the last decade, What is jazz? became a hotly contested issue
in cultural circles. But while the debate about the jazz canon and other
such issues swirled around neotraditionalists and avant-gardists and their
advocates and critics, jazz was opening new paths into contemporary pop
music and revisiting others, like the jazz-rock fusions of the 1960s and
1970s, that had been discredited, debased, or dead-ended. Out of this
came some of the most interesting trends of the 1990s.
Meanwhile, to a greater extent than ever before, the question What is
Jazz? has become academic, because jazz programs are being taught at
more and more US campuses, even though theres less and less steady
work for the graduates, fewer big bands like Maynard Fergusons that
they can get road educations with. Nevertheless, the programs grow.
These are the rst generations of jazz musicians trained more in the
academy than on the bandstand.
What do these newcomers want from jazz? What is jazz getting from
them? How does an academic jazz program deliverand fail to deliver
on its implicit promise to create a better musician? Does it help students
in dealing with day-to-day scufing?
Many middle-aged and older musicians grouse that the youngsters they
hear sound more and more alike. Theyre processed, like Velveeta, says
51-year-old bassist Ray Drummond, one of the most in-demand sidemen
in jazz, veteran of more than 200 records and countless club and concert
dates.
Technically they can be very good, but they sound like they come out
of a generic white box. Developing a personal sound, a personal vision of

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who you are as an artist, is not an issue they address. Its not important
to them. Neither their peers nor their elders are making them address it.
And its a serious issue that cuts to the heart of the credibility of the artistic
process. And its why so many younger players on all instruments sound
the same.
When I was coming up, younger guys hung out on the scene, looking
for any way to break in we could nd. Wed already sat down and listened
to hundreds of tunes, learned and practiced them, developed our ears. And
youve got to know who youre playing with, so you can gure out how
theyll approach whatever youre doing. Thats the kind of discipline
youre supposed to bring to this job.
Bill Pierce is head of the woodwind department at Berklee School of
Music, which has one of the oldest and most respected jazz training
programs. A performing veteran as well as an academic, the baby boomer
has played tenor with Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, and his own former
student Antonio Hart. In these ways and others, he straddles the cusp
between the old and new worlds of jazz performance.
Though he has a college degree in music himself, Pierce broke into the
major leagues via Art Blakeys Jazz Messengers. So he knows how jazz
education used to be. In the past, he begins, you studied with masters,
you worked with some older guys who showed you the ropes. I was fortunate; I had that and college training. I got to hang out with Blakey and
Freddie Hubbard and Tony Williams, and listen to what they did and how.
I took lessons and hung out with older guys like George Coleman. But
thats not the case so much these days. A lot of the older masters are gone
now. So its less learning by doing than by being incubated in academia.
At Berklee, the students are getting their training the same way most
people have been doing it for a while. Its secondhand information, in a
sense. Instead of going in and listening to Coltrane, or all the masters who
have already passed on, they listen to recordings and do analysis, applying
the tried-and-true procedures of music study to jazz. But everything we
use is somewhat tempered by the fact that jazz is a different animal, with
a different aesthetic and history. The idea that jazz is at its root a black
American music thats based on the blues and improvisationthat permeates what we teach.
Pierce notes that not all good musicians make good teachers, which
could make jazzs traditional on-the-road education a spotty curriculum.
In academia, people know how to teach, he insists, although anyone
who has nodded through classes taught by professors who cant lecture
might disagree. Some of the older guys didnt always know how to share
information, or didnt always have the time. Oh, learn that for yourself,
theyd say. Now that was good for some peopleit forced you to use your
own ingenuity, to develop your own methods for learning. But for other
people it was less helpful than someone with a background in education
who knows how to teach.

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Still, Pierce admits that jazz-in-academe has a central problem: Its

always better to have someone whos actually done something explain it,
but there are more younger guys coming up through jazz programs who
are now just teachers. They havent played seriously. So I guess the musics
lifes blood is thinning a little bit.
Thats one key point older working musicians criticize. Another is the
clubhouse atmosphere of the dorms, where friends cheer each other while
cutting enemies downjudgments that can be more social than musical.
Of course, you could argue that the old cutting sessions did the same. But
a dorm is more a womb than any scene or club, and the variety and levels
of experience and understanding among musicians there vary far less than
in the real world.
As Pierce sees it: On a certain level, the students can learn to interact
improvisationally, but its really an introductory level. The interaction
between musicians, in this music, comes before the interaction between
musician and audience. So students can learn the techniques, though its
one or two steps removed from the actuality, and its denitely not the
oral tradition.
But you still have to learn how to create soul, emotion, feeling, a spiritual connectionwhatever you want to call it. You have to connect with
people that way. All the technique in the world doesnt make you a real
jazz musician if you cant do that. Its not just about technique. People
study Trane like they study Mozart, and sometimes they glean the technical aspects but they miss all the spirituality thats the core of his music.
And look at Monk: people used to think he couldnt play the piano at all,
and yet he expresses so much.
Thats one of the drawbacks of studying jazz in the conservatory
setting: the spiritual and emotional contexts of the music dont get emphasized. And thats important. Jazz started as black American music. For the
early musicians, it was about the aspirations and the feelings of being
excluded. There are still white kids from the suburbs taking that life out
of context and trying to live it. You dont have to go that far. But you do
have to address those issuesand its hard to do in the conservatory
context.
More and more, though, teachers are realizing thats lacking in the
musicians were putting out. Theyre very competent, but theyre not
necessarily touching the soul. Music has to make you feel something. It
always has to come back to thatand whether that can be taught in
school, Im not sure. But we have to try to get it across.
One of Pierces better-known ex-students is Javon Jackson, who was
drawn to the tenor by his fathers love for Gene Ammons burly Texas
tenor lines. In his early 30s, Jackson sits on the cusp of pre- and postacademic jazz. In the early 1980s, Branford Marsalis, then with Blakeys
Jazz Messengers, heard Jackson play, and suggested he study at Berklee

Ken Burns, the Academy, and Jazz

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with ex-Messenger Pierce. Jackson went, but didnt nish the four-year
course. Instead, boosted by Marsalis and Pierce, he left after two years to
join the Messengers himselfone of the last of the great drummers
informal graduates. In the decade since, hes become a leader himself,
with a rare major-label contract: hes recorded a couple albums for prestigious Blue Note.
At Berklee, a lot of the teachers are musicians who are actually
working, so they can give you good information about the real world,
Jackson begins. And Berklee puts all these kids who might be big sh
locally into a very competitive situation, which puts things in perspective.
It humbles you, and puts you around other musicians you can share ideas
with. The networking is maybe the most important aspect. There are so
many musicians and so few slots out here, anything helps.
Of course, university training doesnt prepare you for most of life on
the road. My rst two weeks with Art Blakey almost cancelled a lot of my
schooling. What happens when Sarah Vaughan walks into the club where
youre playing in mid-set?
Then there are the practical things. You have to grow up. Youre
getting this amount of money. You have to make sure you have your passport before you get on the plane. Youve got to nd your own places to
eat, deal with credit cards and bills, gure out what to do before and after
the gig. Youre on your own. Its like going from high school basketball
to the NBA.
And you cant develop yourself as a musician in the university settings
the same way. Playing for a few friends is not the same as playing for an
audience thats got a 60-year-old man or a 30-year-old woman. You have
to learn to articulate varied emotions for audiences. You learn to play
ballads, medium-tempo things. You learn to balance a set. You have to
learn these things on the job, not in school.
Still, Jackson understands that the old world is gone: There arent a
lot of clubs any more, so musicians have to develop within the universities, even if it would be better for them to develop in the clubs. I was part
of the last generation of musicians who worked with bands. So Blakey
would tell me to go hang out with Clifford Jordan, or Junior Cook, or
whoeverthese are the cats who will show you how to do what you need
to know how to do. It got me thinking about hanging around older
people who had the information. Now musicians come to New York
looking for a record contract, because its not really possible to do what
I did anymore.
Jackson believes younger musicians are responsible for gathering the
oral information that school doesnt provide. Its like a library: its not the
librarys fault if the books dont fall off the shelves and hit you on the
head, he insists. If I walk past a 50-year-old musician and dont ask him
about his experiences, thats my own fault.

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Pierce agrees. Innovation is something that just happens, he

says. I dont think Trane or Bird started by saying, I want to be an
innovator. It happened because of their talent and their work ethic,
how they went about what they were doing. Some of the attitudes
I see in some of the younger musicians amaze me: they see themselves on
the same level as these guys, and they havent done anything that legitimizes that.
Even if theyre still wannabes, many jazz students have big plansand
according to Pierce, who agrees with Drummond, the distortion starts on
the business side: Jazz is driven from the top down these days, by the
music industry. Whos making it big is kind of odd: people who get a shot
because of the way they look and dress, their potential marketability.
Thats not the musicians fault. Do you tell them to give the big bucks to
the other guy?
But its changing peoples aspirations in jazz. A lot of kids see Wynton
Marsalis and Josh Redman and want to be instant leaders, stars. They
start worrying about getting an agent, marketing themselves. Its a
different perspective from the one people my age went into the music
with. And its not really what the music is about. If you dont take care
of the music, the rest of it wont do you any good. There only about ve
people on the industrys top shelf, and everybody else is scufing.
Jackson concurs: There are older musicians who are bitter about
some of the younger stars. There are probably older basketball players
bitter about Michael Jordan. But its not his fault. He exploited the situation, and the situation exploited him. Still, just because people have more
and live better than earlier generations doesnt mean that they know
more. The way I see it, its my responsibility to seek a rapport with a
Cedar Walton and a Ron Carter. But its very hard; not all those musicians are accessible. How many young sax players can get to Sonny
Rollins? There isnt the access there was 30 years ago.
Sam Thomas recently graduated Berklee, and is confronting the move
from the sheltered world of school life to the very naked world of jazz
and the music business that surrounds it.
Like most Berklee students, Thomas got his musical start in elementary school. He chose the sax because, he says, when the teacher came
around with the instruments, it looked ashy. In junior high school, he
switched from alto because the newly started jazz band had an opening
for tenor sax. Soon he was listening to Coltrane and Joe Henderson
records, and was hooked on the tenor for life. Once you nd heroes like
that, you want to emulate them, he says almost shyly.
An older high school pal dazzled Thomas one day when he came off the
eld from marching-band rehearsal reeling off signature licks from Charlie
Parker. The pal was going on to study at Berkleethe rst Thomas heard
of the school, which gave him a degree in jazz composition.

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Like Jackson, Thomas perceived that being a jazz student in academia

would have advantages and disadvantages. So he exploited it for both
its insider and outsider aspects. He says: The good thing about Berklee
is I got systematically exposed to many different areas of music. I graduated with a degree in jazz composition. I could have had a dual major
in performance. But who needs a performance degree to work in jazz?
And besides, I could study with more teachers with more varied ideas
and approaches outside Berklee, thanks to the schools reputation and
connections.
The drawback, he continues, is that its not real life; its not like
being on the road with a band. So when you do hit the real world, you
have to learn to put your ego in place. Or else you sink. So I now have a
realistic perspective on myself. See, your rst inclination is to be really
competitive. Some of that comes from dorm life and the academic environment, some of its just natural, because were young. Its a lack of
maturity. But music isnt a competition. So I had to rethink what I was
doing.
Or, as Jackson puts it from his veterans perspective, You have to be
humble enough to take criticismbecause its sure going to come back
at you.
One survival strategy Pierce tries to implant in his students is to
branch out in their skills: Be diversied, I tell them, so they can do other
musically related things to sustain themselves. If I dont think theyre
ready to go to New York, Ill suggest they go back home, if they come
from a reasonably large city, and see what they can develop there. And
if I think theyre ready, Ill send em to New York, which is still the center
of jazz, the ultimate testing ground for jazz musicians. But no matter
what, I stress versatility. If youve got the inner strength to stick with it,
you might, at the end of the process, be able to consider yourself a player.
It doesnt mean youll be wearing Italian suits with money in the bank.
Thomas has been following his teachers advice on both counts. I
worked my way through Berklee on computer graphics, he explains. So
I can apply that to my music for notation. And I can use it to develop my
own package for record labels, public relations people, and marketing,
and make it professional and attractive. And, of course, to supplement
his musicians earnings.
He plans on heading back to his California roots. Breaking in to the
jazz world, he says wryly, still relies a lot on the old method: jump in
and get your ass kicked and learn. But I know some people in San Francisco, so Ill start doing self-promotion there and see what develops. I feel
the move-right-to-New-York thing that a lot of young guys do is actually
disrespectful to the music. They dont have the experience. I know I need
more practical experience. If you dont have it, youre setting yourself up
for some real hardship.

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Besides, he continues, thats the kind of thing that makes me understand why older guys see us as primarily technicians. Its true in a lot of
cases. Music is about deeper things, and I know I need to develop that.
I dont have it yet. Then, too, the whole premise of jazz is to push the
music further. Lots of my peers are just regurgitating. I feel Im just on the
cusp between regurgitating and a deeper understanding. Its why Im doing
it the way Im doing it. Music has to be real.
Or, as his teacher puts it, Out of all these hundreds of real competent
students, maybe ve or six will be the real item. Thats all anyone can
hope for.

25
The Politics of Music
Don Byron and Dave Douglas
Everyone knows how Plato mistrusted the politics of music. And some
may remember that Theodor Adorno saw pop music, in particular, as an
insidious form of brainwashing. That current runs through philosophy
and theology worldwide, reminding us to be grateful we dont live in
Platos Republic or fundamentalist theocracies. In 2002, the return of
music to Radio Afghanistan became an instant symbol of castoff oppression. In this context, Nietzsche was rare in his praise of musics historical
and social functions, an embrace that let him appropriate its textures and
effects into his sensibility and prose.
Its clear that music, even popular music, which includes jazz, has some
power that frightens philosophers and politicians, enough so that they try
to harness it when theyre not censoring or disparaging it. The gure of the
bard, the Orphic seer whose power can penetrate the worlds veils and
change its bent, still exerts a powerful, if largely subliminal, pull on the
imaginations of artists and audiences alike.
And why shouldnt it? Homo ludens, whom the artist represents at his
best, is fundamental to our nature, and a wondrous and compelling thing
to behold, whether its Michelangelo brooding on his scaffolding in the
Sistine Chapel or Derek Jeter dancing at shortstop at Yankee Stadium. As
Nietzsche wrote in The Gay Science: Every great human being has a
retroactive force: all history is again placed in the scales for his sake, and
a thousand secrets of the past crawl out of their hideoutsinto HIS sun.
There is no way of telling what may yet become history some day. Perhaps
the past is still essentially undiscovered! So many retroactive forces are
still required!
But unlike the forces in Newtonian physics, these never operate in a
social vacuum. Both left and right nurture a disdain for and suspicion of
popular culture, unless its nostalgic or carefully dened and hence safe.
Today in America, art swims in a near-all-encompassing commercialism
that functions, at times, as gatekeeper and censor. Under Stalin, Lenin, and
the tsars, the governing powers made sure art was molded and censored
and suppressed. As a Russian expatriate professor-friend once remarked

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to me, At least we valued art enough to censor it. Here you just let
anyone shout whatever they want. I cited Lenny Bruce, whom hed never
heard of and, when I tried to explain, didnt want to understand. Dirty
words? he asked, shaking his head. My attempted point: gatekeepers
exist always and everywhere, and even in freewheeling consumer America,
entertainment capital of the world, art is understood, at least by some, to
possess gravity.
So there are always some artists who aspire to be Shelleyan bards, no
matter what their medium. They take the time to study and learn, sometimes in tidy or systematic ways, like ants converting a fallen leaf to
portable pieces, and sometimes in meandering, maddening fashion, like
bees seeking nectar. In our postindustrial culture, their status and power,
like old magic, aint what it used to be. That loss is one motivation behind
the multiplication of New Age phenomena in recent years.
Still, most people, like most philosophers, tend to think of musicians as
talented beasts. Ra Zabors fairy-tale novel, The Bear Comes Home,
inverts that notion with whimsical charm and some nice satiric turns.
Zabors bear plays cutting-edge jazz saxophone, and develops a whole
quasi-human life, including human lovers, inside the jazz world, where
hes mostly accepted, even considered a star. Now jazz musicians, thanks
no doubt partly to race, have long been treated as, well, semi-trained
bearsespecially insulting given the body of work and extended discipline jazz artists developed in half a century. Some, like Charles Mingus
and Anthony Braxton, to name two men who are very dissimilar in most
other ways, raged against it in extensive writings and speaking. Louis
Armstrong and Duke Ellington, in their very different ways, sidestepped
it or ignored it, at least in public. Beboppers subverted it, as Amiri Baraka
pointed out in Blues People, adapting and tweaking the costumes and
mannerisms of European bohemians in their claim to be artists.
Political or social commentary has always been part of jazz, implicitly
or explicitly. How could an art form originally formulated by outsiders
be otherwise? There are famous examples: Black and Blue by
Armstrong. Freedom Now by Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln. Fables of
Faubus by Charles Mingus. Jack Johnson by Miles Davis. Alabama
by John Coltrane. But now, post-9/11, new resonances have been added,
unlooked-for surplus value, to art that has something to tell us about who
we are now, much as it has to so much elsenormal bits of life in our
times, like airplanes falling out of the sky, suddenly acquire newly active
potential meanings, a spreading shadow of possible contexts.
Enter clarinetist Don Byron, 42, and trumpeter Dave Douglas, 37. Both
have garnered lots of press coverage, gathered awards, attracted musicians and followers, produced varied and important bodies of work that
are stylistically and conceptually diverse as bandleaders and composers.
Both are those fortunate jazz rarities, possessors of major-label deals. Both
are widely read and intellectually cultivated, and infuse that sensibility

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into their art, which includes how they use liner notes, album illustrations,
the whole package surrounding the disc that effectively embeds it in a
perspective. Both recorded their latest albums before the World Trade
Center came down. Each had particular social as well as musical concerns,
creative speculations, the process of rebraiding realitys DNA into something that, in that magical way of art, steps out of time while
simultaneously reecting a vision, a personality, a series of moments
rooted like Yggdrasil in our world. Both albums have acquired new
echoes, courtesy of history, as inevitable as they were unforeseen.
Byron rst. Articulate and funny with a sarcastic wit, he says: I dont
think everything I do has to be explained. Thats one of the weak parts of
this era: everything has to be literal, you have to get it right now. I often
end up having to justify what Im doing in interviews: something about
me rubs up against their belief-systems.
Twenty years ago, studying clarinet at the New England Conservatory
of Music, he discovered Mickey Katz, whose klezmer music, which
featured intricate possibilities for clarinet, was pretty much forgotten. He
revived it, and became a novelty act that was extremely smart and musical.
The elderly Jewish couples who came to Manhattans old Knitting Factory
years ago for his shows loved it, maybe even more because Byron is dreadlocked and black.
Byron is generally credited with bringing the clarinet back into jazz as
more than an instrument sax players double on. Stiffer, less able to ow
and bend notes and sounds than the saxophone, the clarinet stopped being
crucial to jazzs mainstream around the time of Benny Goodman and Artie
Shaw, despite subsequent technical extensions like Buddy DeFrancos
bebop clarinet. During the 1960s and 1970s, it was mostly avant-gardists
or nostalgic traditionalists who picked it up.
Byrons clarinet, which carries this history within its sound, is at once
ancient and modern. His licorice stick moves from dry woody piping to
edgy squeals to hiccups and vocalizing growls, and his penchant for
chromaticism, polytonality, and hanging odd passing tones in unexpected places evades nostalgia. His circuitous, unexpectedly jumping
lines are stamped with his harmonic knowledge and melodic invention,
informed by Bach and Schoenberg, Armstrong and Coltrane. And his
rhythmic sense is sharp: he can make any two notes dance. A tireless
experimenter, hes played silent movie accompaniments, hip-hop
rhythms, spoken-word performance pieces. That range was one reason
Byron was jazz artistic director at the Brooklyn Academy of Musics
Next Wave festival for four seasons.
As a composer, Byron is eclectic, thoughtful, and provocative, usually
with a political or social agenda. Attitude bursts from his personal and
artistic DNA. His album debut as a leader was The Tuskegee Experiments,
inspired by the federal governments horric wartime syphilis experiments

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on unsuspecting African Americans. His rst Music for Six Musicians

album followed.
Most of that record, he explains, was inspired by political events
around the time I was writing it. So there are pieces about Ross Perot and
Clarence Thomas and Shelby Steele. My music refers all the time to intellectual concerns. Why do that? Why not just play? My answer is, I think
a lot about Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln and Mingus, and you cant
strip the politics away from that music. The music holds up without it
if it didnt, it wouldnt be worth discussingbut its the motivation. If you
read what they were saying and thinking then, it makes even more sense.
People can learn the notes Coltrane played, but unless theyre willing to
embrace some of the politics that produced them, theres a whole piece of
him theyre skirting.
The ip side is, listeners expect political music to sound a certain way:
if its about race, its either got a McCoy Tyner sound or its free. But every
tune on that rst Six Musicians record has techniques that dealt with the
subject matter differently. Take Shelby Steele. It states the melody, then
states it upside down in the clave, then states it two beats off in the clave;
so it talks about how if you state something out of context it changes
meaning. My point is that you can talk politically in any context, even
repertory. Any lump of clay you pick up, you can use to say anything
you need.
And Byron has become an accomplished bricoleur. Bug Music, like The
Music of Mickey Katz demonstates what he means about the cultural politics of repertory music. In his historical revisionism, Duke Ellington,
Raymond Scott, and John Kirby are presented side by side, as implicit
equals. Everyone knows Ellington. Scott wrote wacky music often used
as cartoon soundtracks. Kirby pursued chamber jazz. Byrons sly goal: to
recontextualize Ellington and the others, changing the angle of vision and
hence the potential meanings of the music. His album Romancing the
Unseen, did something similar with ghosts from Benny Goodman to Walt
Disney.
Byrons second, recent album for Music for Six Musicians is entitled
You Are #6. It alludes to The Prisoner, the late 1960s TV show starring
Patrick McGoohan as a British spy who tries to resign and is kidnapped
to The Village, a pleasantly surreal totalitarian holding pen for such as
he, where he is expected to be broken. Instead, he mounts one escape
attempt after another and plots to undermine the nameless powers, which
seem to include his own government, who run the place. Failing to get
cover art from the show, Byron substituted A. G. Rizzolis equally surreal
The Bluesea House, an intricate system of buildings and symbolology
that, as it sprawls across the opened CD booklets innards, resembles a
board game for a Platonic life system. It had, Byron felt, the right resonances to enhance his music.

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261

Why The Prisoner? Whats interesting about that show, says Byron,
a self-described connoisseur of pop culture, is the scenario. Essentially,
The Village is a comfortable place, a nice place to live, had all the amenities, but no one was really free. They kept wanting The Prisoner to get
relaxed in that. In some ways they were right: once youre clean and
comfortable and everything is taken care of, it really doesnt matter whats
happening, in a certain kind of way.
Byron is of West Indian descent; his father played bass in calypso bands
in the Bronx when the clarinetist was growing up. Hence another
embedded context for his music: the Anglo-Caribbean tradition, whose
cultural roles in the West African diaspora he feels may be forgotten in
the current Latino renaissance. Calypso, he says, Haitian music,
theyre part of it; the English-speaking part of Nicaragua and the
Caribbean is part of it. When people see me they often think, youre an
avant-garde guy. Actually, no, Im very West Indian. My politics, the way
I approach the humor in my music. West Indians are pretty ironic, nastily
judgmental, frugal, angrily political and yet joyfully politicalWest Indian
politics is usually a band. When I was growing up there were lots of
Sparrow songs about Martin Luther King. The lyrics unfold into pretty
long stories, always with a twist and irony. Take my approach to Brazilian
musicfunny twists and turns, Schoenberg type of harmonies, stuff in
places that if you look hard they shouldnt necessarily be together and yet
they go together, because theyre in my imagination.
That, and the fact that clave resides partly in the ambiguity between
duple and triple meterwhich multiplies out to sixhelped shape an
album that is wide-ranging, effective, and shot through with knowing,
releasing humor.
It opens with Henry Mancinis Theme from Hatari (Baby Elephant
Walk), which Byron has remade in clave with percussionist Milton
Cardona overlaying a santeria chanta wicked irony for a comic lm starring John Wayne as a big-game hunter in Africa. You Are #6 Latinizes
the shows theme, tagging the end with a taped quote from a sardonic
panhandler, who classies peoples habits about giving on the street.
Klang mixes Brazilian and funk beats with deft sonic touches, like
plinking guitar as mbira. B-Setting, with its musical and extramusical
puns, draws on classic soulthe bridge is pure acoustic-jazz-style James
Brownand sports a witty vocal mixed nearly into the background. A
Whisper in My Ear nods to Afro-Cuban jazz architect Mario Bauza; the
band here best demonstrates its rhythmic suppleness and torque. Shake
Em Up was a local calypso hit for the band his father played in, and it
grooves like Eastern Parkways annual West Indian Day parade, which it
invokes. No Whine is pointedly blues-free but poignant, resigned,
moving. Dark Room blends Miles Davis, lm noir, and Machito. Dub
Yataken, Byron says, from a suite he is writing about animals that

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look and sound dumbis a tape-loop foray with Mingusy overtones

thats hilarious. And one of Byrons growing number of lm pieces,
Belmondos Lip, gets two treatments, the second a stuttering, psychedelicized remix by DJ Spooky that reassembles its deconstructed pieces
over its irresistably chugging beats. That closes the disc.
From one perspective, Dave Douglass Witness got a horrible boost
when the Twin Towers fell. Inspired by Edward Saids Representations of
the Intellectual, the suite-like album draws extensively on Arabic music
sources for its celebration of cultural activists: the Ruckus Society, Nawal
El Saadawi, Eqbal Ahmad, Naguib Mafouz, Taslima Hasrin, Pramaoedya
Ananta Toer, and Ken Saro-Wiwa. Though it sidesteps the complicated,
tangled role of music within Islamic and Arabic societies, it does, with
good reason, stake a claim for Douglas.
Like Byron, Douglas has become a jazz-based bricoleur. In fact, one of
his rst prominent recording gigs was with Byrons Mickey Katz lineup.
He attended both Berklee and the New England Conservatory, came to
New York in 1984, and studied and worked with Joe Lovano. In the late
1980s he got interested in Central and Eastern European folk musics,
which later led to his forming the Tiny Bell Trio. He worked with pianist
Myra Melford and joined John Zorns Masada, which uses eastern and
central European Jewish idioms as thematic materials for free-ish improvisation.
His chosen horn was already the subject of a renaissance, thanks to
Wynton Marsalis. Whatever you think about Marsaliss abilities or depth
as either player or composer, youd be hard pressed to argue he isnt the
best-known jazz musician alive, that hes pursued Armstrongs position in
American cultural mythology, the iconic man with the trumpet, with
single-minded intensity and success. Besides, unlike the clarinet, the
trumpet had never been benched with jazzs backup squads. In fact, in his
early days, Douglas sometimes seemed like a downtown white alternative
to Marsalis: in his serious and self-conscious intellectualism (he wowed
jazz critics with references to Benjamin and Foucault and Said, much as
Marsalis had by talking about Thomas Mann and Ralph Ellison), in the
cerebral virtuosity and golden tones of his horn, in his carefully controlled
approach to music and the world, in the image he cultivated of straddling
the classical and jazz genres.
Sometimes I tend to think of Byron as more Dionysian and Douglas as
more Apollonian, sometimes I think of them as the fox and the hedgehog,
sometimes I think of them in McLuhanesque terms as warm and cool. For
me, as Douglas unfolded a variety of projects with different personnel and
goals, his solos, especially in Zorns group Masada, exhibited more of that
unselfconscious grace that I look for in matured artists, what Castiglione
called sprezzatura. I admired Douglass work with his Tiny Bell Trio and
Sextet and Charms of the Night Sky, but from a distance, where I felt the

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263

musics sensibility in some ways kept me. But his tribute to Mary Lou
Williams struck me more deeply; Douglas seemed more emotionally
attached to this project, and it coincided with Linda Dahls Morning
Glory, a solid biography.
Now hes assembled a rst-rate cast of players for Witness, which grew
from his several-year-old Thoughts Around Mahfouz. He says: The
music, just like the culture and the society, has retreated from experimentation quite a bit, retreated into entertainment. And yet I thinkand I
dont want to generalizethat in the American improvised idiom theres
a lot of awareness of other art formsdance, poetry, and so onbut also
of politicssocial justice movements and the like. But its been muted in
the ways its been able to speak. Over a period of time it became much
harder to make any kind of statement in the art itself. While were seeing
things like Ani DiFranco and Steve Earle and even Springsteen making
statements in song, for those of us who are instrumentalists and dancers
and even novelists in the United States its been harder to make any kind
of impact. The resurgence of community spirit and activism in the wake
of 9/11 has made that easier to do, in some ways.
Hes also looking to move beyond what he sees as the end of postmodernism. I dont relate at all to postmodern ideas. If anything, whats
going on in the music now is post-postmodern, if there can be such a thing.
I think artists are believing in something again. This music is passionate.
There are melodies and harmonies and sequence and ow. The juxtaposition of genre language is not happening gratuitously or in a forced way. If
you look across the spectrum of the music, thats a fairly universal new
area, that theres not this edgy self-awareness and self-consciousness, that
artists are looking for meaning.
This is somewhat disingenuous; like Byron, Douglas will talk on, given
the chance, of how hes mixed and matched previously unmixed-andmatched genres and style in unique ways. But more than Byron, who
prefers to be subject to interpretation, Douglas has embedded his music as
deeply in extramusical signposts as he can to x the inherent instability of
the relationship between sounds and meaning, especially when translated
into another idiom. And so his CD booklet cites and briey glosses the
people and materials that inspired each piece, proffers lists of suggested
readings (Arundhati Roy, Howard Zinn, and so on) and websites,
describes the epiphanic moment behind his need to speak out more directly
in his music, which produced this project (reading a newspaper on the
Yugoslav border on the rising stock of American weapons makers during
the NATO assault on Yugoslavia). He released a formal interview as part
of the accompanying press materials for the disc, which he refers to regularly during other interviews as a vetted source. Some of this, of course, is
simply information-sharing; some is simply control, artistic or otherwise,
of a processtranslating music into emotion, thought, actionthat is
necessarily messy and virtually unduplicatable.

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For like Byron, Douglas is well aware that the history of engaged music
in whatever form is littered with detritus that was neither good propaganda nor good art. He says: One of my big fears was that the message
not cut into the artistic strength of the project. That was one of my reasons
for not using dogmatic statements, even on the tune where I chose to use
voice. I dont think anyone is gonna want to listen to it if the art doesnt
come rst. Said being such a big inuence on how I think about the world,
the quote on the liner notes steered me along: maintaining a constant state
of alertness. The message of the record is, if anything, for people to think.
I think thats what the arts are capable of doinggetting people to think.
The music in itself confronts a lot of categories, peoples assumptions
about what jazz should be or could be, what world music should be.
Where do I put this in my cultural le?
Listening to the albums enveloping, often dazzling sense of textures
and depth, which adheres and coheres as the well-paced CD runs, should
also be enjoyable and entertaining, and it is. Ruckus kicks off lustily
by dofng Douglass cap to the Seattle riots against the WTO; it also
rather neatly ts Byrons observation about genre-expectations for
protest music, with Arabic sounds replacing Coltranes Indian sounds.
The title track, emotionally centered on a brilliant, achingly beautiful
violin solo by Mark Feldman, juxtaposes plaints with bursts of rage over
a droning backdrop. One More News is a short and lively dance piece
about tragedy fatigue. Woman at Point Zero takes its title from
Saadawis novel and boasts a scintillating use of moods and tension-andrelease tactics. Kidnapping Kissinger, dedicated to Ahmad, lacks
Ahmads sharp sense of humor but is an effective genre piece, right
down to the electronic music portions. As for Mahfouz, the nearly 24minute-long work is the albums deserved centerpiece, and allows Douglas
and several sidemen (there are 11 in total on the album) extensive improvisational freedom within well-developed arrangements, and they all
shine. Tom Waits reads excerpts from Mahfouz and Gilles Deleuze, his
voice mixed as far back as Mick Jaggers on the early Stones recordings,
occasionally dissolving into smokers laughter. Here, in the music, Douglas
nds meaning by layering, interweaving, creating possibilities for interpretations, and, in fact, loosening his control.
How do you protest a system, Douglas writes in the liner notes, that
coopts and marginalizes almost every unique and original thought that
confronts it? And how do you stay silent? When I read that, I thought
of my old Russian professor. One critic, reviewing the album, raised and
dismissed this issue by noting that Douglas has a rare major-label deal.
Id just note that such Chomskyite rhetoric, the self-defeating vision of
totalitarian control of culture that arises from Adorno, cant adequately
account for the shape of Douglass own career.
Consider that idea another external puzzle piece of meaning to ponder
while you spin this disc.

26
Cassandra Wilson
After more than two decades of hustling and a series of overlapping
personasthe Joni Mitchell-wannabe days of her youth, the time with
avant-jazz alchemist Henry Threadgill, the experimental jazz-funk fusions
with the 1980s M-BASE Collective, the commitment to the Black Rock
Coalitions antiracism-in-the-music-biz drive, the major-label recasting as
a mainstream diva, the follow-up sidelong plunge into hip-hop/jazz
crossoverafter all that and more, Cassandra Wilson became, at 40, an
overnight success.
Born in Jackson, Mississippi (As long as Ive been in New York I still
retain some southern valuessome southern black woman values, she
drawls), Wilson grew up in a musical household. Her mother was a pop,
especially Motown, fanatic; her father, a semipro musician who played
trumpet, then electric bass, then guitar, was a swing-band lover with a
taste for Monk and vocalists like Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan,
Dinah Washington and Nancy Wilson. At six, Wilson took piano lessons,
then moved on to guitaran instrument her dad started her on, that
would return decades later as the epicenter of her breakthrough to jazz
stardom. The instrument focused her evolving artistry in much the way
that Jerry Wexlers sitting Aretha Franklin down at the piano while she
sang and recorded unleashed the fullest thrusts of that singers jazzy gospel
fervor and creativity. So, too, her early tastes, typical of the times she grew
up in, would reenter her eld of focus in the 1990s as potential material
ripe for radical redesign: the Monkees, female folksingers like Joan Baez,
Judy Collins, and especially Joni Mitchell.
After touring coffeehouses in the South, a stint in New Orleans, and a
rst marriage, Wilson found herself in New York in the early 1980s.
Heavily into her bebopper phase, studying and singing Charlie Parker
solos and absorbing Betty Carters nervy model and hard-won lessons
about vocal rhythmic elasticity, she landed gigs with Woody Shaw, Abbey
Lincoln, Dave Holland, and Olu Dara. (In a small parallel movement,
Dara, an avant-garde cornet player in the 1980s, subsequently remade
himself, rst as an entertainment-oriented dance-bandleader, then more

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successfully as a guitar-toting bluesman.) When Wilson met Steve Coleman at a jam session celebrating Birds birthday, the duo began a
partnership that was one core of M-BASE. She rened her undivalike
musicality with Threadgill, who cast her sensual, warmly timbred voice as
just another instrument that had to nd its appropriate place within the
ensemblea role she insists still shapes her approach.
Wilson has been one of the lucky artists in jazz or any other medium:
for her, success and the chance for artistic reintegration of her various past
selves have coincided. Blue Light Til Dawn, her groundbreaking, critically acclaimed 1993 album with then-neophyte producer Craig Street,
racked up six-digit sales gures, and set her on tour steadily as her star
climbed rapidly. TV and radio loved her too. So by the time New Moon
Daughter, also produced by Street, was released, she was working larger
venues and selling more albums. Within a couple of months of its release,
Daughter clocked nearly 300,000 copies worldwide, phenomenal
numbers for jazz, even jazz with accessible pop strains.
Much of this was due to Streets acute instincts about music and his
ability to tune into Wilsons often intuitive insights. I rst met Street in
the 1980s; he was a member of the Black Rock Coalition, and devoted to
the legacy of the blues, rural and electric, and James Marshall Hendrix.
He was widely cultivated and intensean avid lm buff, a curious reader
of philosophical texts, an oddly low-key yet insistent guy who seemed to
home in on both the weaknesses and central points of arguments, a man
who was amassing a catalog of sounds. He admired famed producers like
Jerry Wexler and Leonard Chess; one of his favorites was Tom Wilson. In
1988, when the rst Black Rock Coalition event took place at the Kitchen,
a night of Hendrix and other stuff from an orchestra that included Wilson,
pianist Geri Allen, and guitarist Vernon Reid, Street steered it. Now hes
producing A-list vocalists like k.d. lang.
With Wilson, Street was a natural t, and it showed in the afnity that
brought Wilsons cultural politics closer to the surface. Strange Fruit,
the horric, powerful protest song Billie Holiday rst gave voice to at Caf
Society, is one of New Moon Daughters most powerful cuts. The
haunting lyrics, the unusual cantilevered structure of a brilliantly disguised
blues, were written by Abel Meeropol in reaction to the widespread lynchings across the South spurred, in part, by D.W. Grifths Birth of a Nation;
Meeropol was a Bronx schoolteacher who irted with the Communist
Party during the Depression, and, with his wife, adopted the sons of Ethel
and Julius Rosenberg. Wilson revels in the tunes dark brilliance, its suffocating atmosphere. A native of a city where churches were burned and
children shot, Wilson is the dispassionate teller of a passionate tale, yet
lures the listener to see through her eyes, the eyes of innocence and terrible
understanding, the unavoidable, towering Tree of Knowledge of Good
and Evil that is racism in this county.

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267

Wilson is the right diva for the fractionating cultural landscapes of the
post-1990s: syncretic yet unique, a voice for a generation that grew up
listening to more rock and soul and pop than it did to Ella and Sarah and
Billie and the rest.
For this interview, I met Wilson at her spacious Harlem apartment.
Looking from her seventh-oor living-room windows across the Harlem
River, winding its way from the George Washington Bridge to the Triboro,
I watched the Met Life blimp hover over Yankee Stadium on the other
side, celebrating with the rest of us the Bronx Bombers rst Series shot in
15 years. I can hear the crowds, says Wilson in her honeyed drawl, and
Im glad.
GENE SANTORO:

Just this fall, you opened for Ray Charlesa man whos
made musical crossovers in any number of directionsat Radio City
Music Hall. What was it like?
cassandra wilson: It went by so fast, the whole evening, I didnt have
time: didnt have time to get nervous, didnt have time to really react to
the event. All I could do was live through it. Im still digesting that
and all the things that have happened over the last few months. Radio
Citys just part of that. God, its the biggest placejust cavernous. It
was the rst time I experienced not being able to touch or see or feel or
sense an audience, them being so distant I was feeling like I was in a
shbowl.
gs: Thats a different kind of output demanded from you onstage. How
did you deal with it?
cw: I think you have to create your own universe on the stage. Thats
what you have to rely on, in the end, to give to the audience: the feeling
that you have about being in that circle of musicians, and the relationship that you have with them. You invite the audience in. At times it
got pretty vocal, actuallyreminded me that there were a few thousand folks out there. But I could not see them. And when they talked
they sounded as if they were miles away.
gs: Like early Brother Ray, youve been through a number of different
personas. What youre doing now seems to summarize or recap most of
them in some ways. Talk a little bit about your chrysalis stages.
cw: Oh, trying to get me to talk. But youre right: now is a pivotal point,
the end and the beginning. Its like a summation of everythingwell,
not everything, but . . . well, unexpected things came out of the box.
Like the guitar playing. It was the rst instrument that I really started
improvising with, but I was never really able to connect the dots, to
bring together the knowledge and foundation that I have in jazz with
that part of my musical personality. Bringing that and the stint with MBASE, Henryall of that really came together in these records, in these
last couple of years.

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gs: Its gotta be a little dizzying when that rst happens: my lifes caught
up with me.

cw: You know it. When you start doing Monkees stuffyeah, my life
has really caught up with me now, the sixth grade. Shewwww! Its an
elevating experience, clarifying, gives you continuity. And it lets you
build a rmer foundation to get to the next place.
gs: This foundation started with Craig Street and his broken foot.
cw: You know the story. Craig and I have known each other for 10 years.
We did a gig together for the Black Rock Coalition at Citibank, downtown on Wall Street. So weve been running into each other for a long
time. I had just signed with Blue Note, and Bruce (Lundvall, Blue
Notes president) was pushing me to nd a producer. He had made
some suggestions: George Duke, coupla other people. But I told him I
wanted somebody who was completely fresh, somebody who was
familiar with my work, who knew that I need to stretch out, whod
understand that that is a really important part of my musical personality. So I kept running into Craig in the lobby here, because his foot
was broken from a construction accident, and he was just hanging out
at home a lot. We started talking about this album I was supposed to
do, and I told him I needed to nd a producer. He suggested himself
and . . . I laughed. I mean, he was doing construction. But he talked,
and we just kept talking. It occurred to me that he had a thorough
knowledge of my background, my history, and he had these incredible
ideas, these wild, bizarre ideas about stringed instruments, and the
songs from the folk period of my life. So I said, Lets do a demo. The
rst tune we did was You Dont Know What Love Is. He knew that
Id played guitarId mentioned it to him in passing years beforeand
so he forced me to sketch the song out on guitar, which really opened
me up. That clinched it: when he made me do that, I knew he was the
producer I wanted.
gs: He was thinking about Jerry Wexler and Aretha. Shed done stuff for
John Hammond that didnt quite gel, but Wexler sat her down at the
piano when she was singing, and it changed everything.
cw: It was amazing. I felt new. I felt as if Id just stumbled onto a whole
other spacethe tunings, the song. I just thought, Wow, heres a
space I can go! I think Id backed myself against the wall in a lot of
ways by that point. The idea Id pitched to Bruce was going in (to the
studio) to do a bunch of R & B tunes with a jazz interpretation. I had
my piano trio, and I was trying to do that: I gave him Cant Stand
the Rain and Loveland and a couple of other tunes. Bruce was
checking it out, but he said, Why dont you go back to the drawing
board? Thats when Craig and I started really talking. I played Craig
the demo, and he said, Well, this is cool, but its mostly pedestrian.
Hes a Taurus to the bitter end. But hes very comfortable with it,

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very Zen about it, so you dont feel this massive opposition. Hes got
a subtle approach. So we argue a lot.
On the rst album, there was a lot of give and take. We had arguments about all kinds of things. We had arguments about the drums,
problems with what part would the drums play. That was the biggest
thing that we faced off on. Specically, we disagreed about Blue Light
Til Dawn. Craig is into the minimal kick, and I tried to explain to
him that Blue Light is a slow drag, and theres a certain thing that the
kick has to do, the kick and the snare, actually, and they were the only
things I really wanted to make sure made sense with the song because
the song is supposed to evoke a particular kind of body movement.
Well, Craigs from Oakland, California, and . . . well, if they do slow
drag they dont call it slow drag, so it wasnt a pattern he was familiar
with. I even danced with him to try to show him what I meant. I won
that one. There were two mixes, and the other one is cool, but its
just . . . airy. It ows just a little too much.
See, the thing about Craig is he had so many terric ideas. And actually, with a few exceptions like the ones Ive told you, we agreed about
all of themin the end.
gs: What happened when you went in to do Daughter? You already had
Blue Light as a model.
cw: I was scared to death for New Moon Daughter, because I wasnt at
all prepared for it. I had three or four tunes done, and I wrote
Solomon while I was up at Woodstock. Find Him I didnt write
until we went back in the studio two months later. We had sketches of
things. Id sketch things out on the guitar and then pass it on to Craig,
whod listen and then pass it on to Brandon [Ross, guitarist and music
director], whod do the arrangements.
The thing about it I learned was, its okay to go into a project with
maybe six or seven tunes you have a sketch of. We had that leisure this
time, the time and the money. So we could actually go up to Woodstock, I could hang out for three days before the rest of the gang came
up. Craig had them make the barn at Bearsville Studio into a studio,
and it was open, so we could interact. We started with Memphis,
something I pieced together with Brandons help. Then we did what we
did the whole time we were there: hang around at night and talk about
what the next day would be like. Bearsville is really special; if I could
make music like that all the time Id be happy.
Oh, the Monkeesyeah, I had fun with that one. Its nice going back
to the sixth grade. I really got excited when I could hear that piece out
front, the intro, stretched out in 9. When I stumbled onto that, I
thought, Okay, now I can bring this piece of knowledge into this other
thing and see how we can get it to swing. Onstage now, its evolved into
this interesting kind of swing piece, a combination of swing and what

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it was before. I really love it now. Its okay on the album, but its really
fun to watch the songs grow onstage, evolve.
gs: Staging this band has to be real tough, given the instrumentation.
cw: It is, because its very delicate, and Brandons very precise about what
he wants. So its been difcult. But Brandons pretty much on top of it:
hes the maestro. Hes very meticulous and very patient. It takes him
two hours for soundcheck, but when he nishes you know hes got the
perfect guitar sound. Thats the hardest part. Lonnie [Plaxico, bassist]
can pretty much just dial his sound quickly almost anywhere. As we
play bigger places, it obviously gets more difcult. Its not like bringing
a saxophone or a piano out. The guitar is a delicate, nontempered
instrument, and we have to deal with all that. There were many
nightsmany nightsat the beginning of this where I didnt know
where I was. Charlie [Burnham, violinist] would be in one place, Lonnie
would be in another place, and Brandon would be in yet another place.
And Id hear this A somewhere, this one somewhere else, and this one
somewhere else again. But after a while, it was liberating. I could just
kinda swim around, because I knew how to tune my ears, rather than
relying on that A440 from the piano.
gs: A little harmolodics, there.
cw: Oh yeah, it was harmolodic many a night! We got into some serious
harmolodics. But eventually we moved toward each other. Now I really
enjoy the timbre of the strings and the nontempered aspects of it.
gs: What do you like about it?
cw: Its thick. Thick and spare at the same time. Everything isnt spelled
out, but the sound is dense, rich. I dont know any other way to
describe it.
gs: Like with Ray Charles 40 years ago, your musical setup and success
is one of the signs, I think, that some aspects of jazz are doing their
once-a-generation crossover into the broader culture.
cw: Hi, were over here! Yeah, and its all exciting. The music has to reinvent itself to keep going, to get where its going. I think thats the nature
of jazz. As hard as some people ght against it, that just propels it
forward even more. It just gets to the point where you nd youre
desperate. I am desperate to get excited. Im so desperate . . . I think Ill
go and play guitar! Its that kind of immediacy.
gs: Youre playing with people who are trying to extend that bridge too.
cw: You mean Vinx and Courtney Pine? Well, I had to get involved; I
always have to challenge myself. I get bored with myself. If Im inside
my thing for too long I have to get out and do something else. It stimulates me. I just love Courtneys playing, and hes got an incredible
imagination. His music is . . . happenin, a nice kind of mix: jungle and
jazz. Anyone whos doing that I want to support. If its not the formula
that I would use, well, thats why Id support it. And if I can go inside
it maybe I can see something else, and learn something. Like Wynton.

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gs: Lets talk about that: Blood on the Fields.

cw: Its a work in progress, and Wynton wrote all of that music in some
ridiculous amount of time, so its a really impressive body of work. And
hes a terric bandleader; hes got this tremendous wisdom for somebody his age. Yet theres another side thats still kind of young. I have
to study him more.
Theres a big difference, in terms of the music and what we can do
for each other, from 10 years ago. I guess I now feel like an equal.
Maybe I didnt feel that way then. I feel like I can actually have a
conversation with him about music, share my ideas. We certainly didnt
have that 10 years ago. Ideas that wouldve gotten a sneer and a
dismissal are now possible for him. And Im glad to see that hes open
to that. Theres a lot more middle ground now we can meet on, because
of the way the musics moving.
Walking into Lincoln Center is still like walking into the biggest
boys club in the world. But what I like about it is that Wynton appreciates what I bring to it, which is what makes it really rewarding for
me as wellthis kind of . . . skewed approach that I have to the music.
Maybe its just skewed in his eyes; it might seem a little off. But Im
happy that he appreciates it enough to invite it into his context. He
knows who I am, and hes not afraid of it.
gs: What did he want that you can do?
cw: I dont know if theres a word for it. I heard him say my voice was
thick with the South.
gs: Its where you come from.
cw: Yes, and he as well. Different part, but we have more in common
than not. I think hes beginning to see that. Ive even heard him call
himself country. A couple of years ago, itd be unimaginable that hed
admit to being country, which is something that I do every day. Yes, Im
country. Thats why my records sound like that now: its all in there.
Its not as if I stepped outside myself to nd something that might sound
good for me to sing.
gs: One jazz singer said to me a while ago, Jazz singers really dont nd
themselves until theyre older.
cw: Its really true. Theres a whole lot of experience that you have to
absorb to do justice to the tradition of jazz singing. Its a storytelling
tradition, and unless you have the experience to give it an emotional
depth youre not really doing anything. Youre just benchpressing some
changes. Age equals experience. The older you get, the more you have
to place inside of the music. You have more to call on. I dont really
know very many singers who dont age into something better. Even
Sarah: listen to early Sarah and its a beautiful voice, but it doesnt
have nearly the weight that it has when she gets older. Certainly people
like Billie Holiday had a fullness of life early on, a massive amount of
experience. I led a pretty sheltered life compared to Billie Holiday.

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gs: Compared to Billie Holiday that wouldnt be hard.

cw: True. But compared to a lot of that generation of singers as well. For
the next generation the way has been paved a little bit more, so you
dont have to run into as many obstacles. Still, the obstacles are there;
theres still a course that you have to run.
gs: Lets talk about the obstacles.
cw: The chick singer thing is still the biggest obstacle to overcome, from
the audience and the musicians. Being the object instead of the subject
determining the context. Being able to communicate with the band and
really mold them so that they are able to get past all of the preconceived
notions about the way singers communicate music. See, singers have a
very different way of communicating music. Even if theyre really wellschooled and really understand the language and theory, theres still a
really different way of communicating ideas, because youre dealing
with words, the emotive quality of a song. Youre painting with words
as well as music, and its really difcult to relate that to an instrumentalist. Traditionally, the language of the singer has come, for the most
part, from women; and traditionally, the language of the musician has
come, for the most part, from men. So bridging that gap is a big task,
still. Its just a matter of everybody coming closer.
gs: Does it make it easier that youre a schooled musician?
cw: Oh, yeah, denitely. A lot of singers who arent musicians cant really
communicate well at all, and they conrm the musicians prejudices.
And I understand how they feel: you go through years of training to be
a musician, master the language, and someone comes up and stands in
front of you and then begins to dictate to you what to do musically
and they reap most of the benets, the applause, the money. I really
understand it. Singers have a tendency to be a little bit lazy in terms of
learning theory, in terms of learning what they can do when they sing.
A lot of my scatting technique comes from having dealt on the front
line with the horn players with Henry Threadgill and Steve Coleman.
Ive had to develop a style of improvising thats not imitating them
didnt make any sense to me to go brrp-brrp-de-frrp-fop. I think theres
a way to do what the horns do, though. Theyre dealing with very difcult intervals that singers dont sing because they dont listen to them
and dont work on that. If you listen to a singer improvise, most of the
time theyre just dealing with some very simple intervals and using some
syllablesand thats it. But you listen to horn players and you hear
them dealing all over, moving up and down. Which is why I really
encourage singers to become musicians. Thats a large part of breaking
down that wall.
The genealogy of female jazz singers reaches back to Bessie Smith
and Ethel Waters, who took blues out of the juke joints and put it into
vaudeville theaters, and snakes its way through the distinctly unbluesy

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Ella Fitzgerald, who otherwise followed Louis Armstrongs formidable

lead and sang and improvised like a horn, through Dinah Washington and
Sarah Vaughan, who bridged jazz and R & B. Of course, theres a host of
others: Carmen McRae, Betty Carter, contemporaries from Diana Krall
to Dianne Reeves. But historically speaking, they all have shared a mission:
to personalize and make audible jazzs often esoteric art for folks who
short out on sax and piano solos unless theyre trapped in supermarkets
or elevators.
For the historical facts speak plainly: divas have always been the
primary way jazz has leaked its musical and cultural advances and attitudes into the mainstream society. (There are, of course, major exceptions,
notably Louis Armstrong and Miles Davis.) The fact is, most Americans
dont like instrumental music. Just ask any radio station program director,
any record label head, Nissan (which threw in the piano after dropping a
couple of million dollars in sponsoring two years of the Thelonious Monk
Institute awards on network TV), or any of the guys and dolls slouching
down todays mean streets with Walkmen and MP3s clipped onto their
bobbing heads.
Historically, this American lack of interest in instrumental music has
created some signicant sales problems for jazz, whose early 21st-century
market share of recording sales is hovering below 2 percent. Jazz can
hardly avoid being labeled a mostly instrumental music; worse, it doesnt
necessarily adhere to simple melodic and harmonic forms. Still making its
listeners think isnt a complete turnoff works as long as they can dance to
itwitness the Jazz Age, when Americans apparently liked the idea of jazz
bestor make out to itwhen cool stars like Miles Davis helped young
people seduce each other.
And while the last two decades have marched to a steady beat of reappraisals for the likes of Louis Armstrong, its still essential to note that
yeah, he revolutionized music by outplaying Gabriel on cornet and reinventing the virtuoso improvising soloist European classical music had
lost inside a new homegrown American musical format. He wowed
apper-age hipsters and thrilled and inspired musicians of all sorts in
the process, but he only became every Americans Satchmo when he
opened his mouth to sing standards like Wonderful World, Hello
Dolly, and Mack the Knife.
Even other apparent exceptions to the rule of divas in pop-jazz
culture, like Duke Ellington, arent. Amid the more ambitious works he
started during the 1930s, Ellington continued to pen hit songs that were
sung so endlessly as pop fare by others they became mainstream standards. Even so, it was his carefully forged combination of elegant charm
and iron willtouring 300-plus days a year for decades, including stops
at roller rinks and aquacadesand nonstop composing on trains and in
hotels that kept his name out there. Meanwhile, his steady stream of
composers royalties subsidized the beloved instrument that otherwise

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he, like virtually every other bandleader by the late 1940s, would have
had to give uphis orchestra, the reason and mode of his composing to
begin with.
Lets play What If. If John Coltrane hadnt hit with his exotic version
of My Favorite Things, an inane but lilting Broadway waltz-time hit
that every right-thinking American could hum by the time Trane reimagined it, many folks who today know his name but not his searching,
revolutionary music wouldnt know either. As it happens, when he operated on My Favorite Things, Trane was working very much within a
traditional jazz mode for dealing with pop music: take the latest hits,
however banal, and tweak them, move their parts around, add jazzs
inevitable irony as it undercuts or toys with pops contrived innocence
or sleek commercial sophistication. Why is the irony inevitable? Because
jazz, thanks to its cultural roots and its time and place of development,
has played an unmistakable historical role in our culture: it functions as
the return of the repressed, whether race, sex, drugs, or other less
targeted American problems. Even before Armstrong broke across the
color bar, jazz gave voice to the dark sides of the American psyche. At
its best, its Socratic irony questions its materials, its methodologies.
Ive been thinking about this for the last decade, as Ive watched the
industry try to sell jazz as lifestyle, the perfect accompaniment for coffee
or fashion or sophistication. And Ive listened to musicians and critics and
industry executives explain how contemporary pop and rock tunes are
too simple for jazz musicians to deal with.
My notion is different: that jazz must regularly sharpen its creative
teeth on its far more successful sibling rivals in popthe process Ive
described earlieror risk becoming purely historical art music out of
touch with the popular mind. That may be whats occurring: the upsurge
in jazz-school registrations and the success of Ken Burnss Jazz may indicate that jazz has no future as contemporary pop art. And that would be
too bad. Fortunately, lots of younger jazz musicians are following
Cassandra Wilsons lead and their own souls to disagree.
Is Wilson the Miles Davis of this time? She discusses him in circuitous,
mystical terms: a light that recedes as you near, a Chesire Cat smile that
mocks anyone, including himself, who gets too comfortable.
And yet Wilson seems quite at home on Blue Light Til Dawn, a studio
backporch of acoustic guitars and bass and gently persistent percussion
and odd daubs of color, like oating steel guitar or a skirling ddle. The
dense arrangements swayed to allow improvised solos and ideas into radically revamped material ranging from Son House to The Monkees. As it
has been throughout jazz history, rhythm was the engine of change, here
embodied by the nuanced athletics and emotional charge of Wilsons
brooding, introspective vocals.
And so next she confronted Davis directly, with a provocative disc
called Traveling Miles.

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With guests like violinist Regina Carter, altoist Steve Coleman, and
vibist Stefon Harris augmenting her crew, Wilson takes on tunes from all
over Miless long and checkered history, including the evil post-fusion
days. The discs rst single (for EZ-listening jazz radio) is her deep-blue
revision of Miles version of Cyndi Laupers hit, Time After Time.
Crossover, anyone? Even Miles would have smiled.
Over the last decade, Cassandra Wilson has become jazzs prima diva.
And she did it her way: by making her sultry voice the gravitational center
of an expansive musical cosmos encompassing soulful improvisation,
back-porch acoustic blues, and contemporary pop.
Belly of the Sun, which she produced herself, continues lling in the
map Wilson (and then-producer Craig Street) started to chart on 1993s
Blue Light Til Dawn. On Belly, new and familiar galaxies enter Wilsons
orbit and are altered: The Bands The Weight, which launches the
albums civil rights subtext; a dreamy Wichita Lineman (Im a big
Jimmy Webb fan, she says, and watched Glen Campbells TV show
growing up); bossa novas by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Caetano Veloso
laced with country; James Taylors Only a Dream in Rio; Bob Dylans
Shelter from the Storm; Robert Johnsons careening Hot Tamales;
and a worksong, You Gotta Move, that the Rolling Stones covered in
the 1970s. Rounding it out are originals, like Wilsons Justice, a funky
call for racial reparations.
This is the new vision of jazz Wilson has been exploring since Blue
Lighta sophisticated yet rootsy feel that is creative, catchy, and spontaneously elastic.
Delicate yet taut arrangements and instruments that dont sound or
look like standard-issue jazzresonator guitar, bazouki, mandolin, steel
pan drumsweave an engaging sonic web around Wilsons voice, whose
earthy force ensnares listeners. Meanwhile, the band and vocalist bend
and utter notes, redraw melody lines, warp time and shift accents in ways
that can sometimes seem subliminal.
To record Belly, Wilson took the 26-hour train trip (I dont y, she
says) to Clarksdale, Mississippi, the Delta center of blues lore and home
of the Blues Museum, to reconnect with jazzs blues roots.
Partly she was inspired by her ongoing model, Miles Davis. Miles
never left the blues, no matter how far into experimentation in forms
and electronic stuff he took his music, she says. So that was the
impetus. Which meant I had to go home, really get an education about
myself.
And so she retraced her steps to nearby Jackson, Mississippi, where in
1955 she was born to a teacher-mother and a jazz-musician father; where
she grew up hearing Billie Holiday, the Stones, Aretha Franklin, and Joni
Mitchell; where she performed folk music at political rallies before heading
off to New Yorks jazz scene.

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We went down to Clarksdale, she explains, and the train station

became our studio. She had a few sketches and ideasa couple of blues,
Jobims Waters of March, Wichita Lineman, pieces she and the band
had been messing with.
But only after she started jamming with Boogaloo Ames, an 81-year-old
local jazz-blues pianist of a dying breed whod also worked at Motown,
did the albums shape fully emerge.
Listen, Wilson explains, to the Latin rhythmic feel on The Weight,
and the Caribbean thing happening on Wichita Lineman. Thats because
we were in Clarksdale. Or the bluesy quality of the Jobim: bossa nova, a
friend of mine says, is Brazilian blues, a joy born of sadness. So bossa nova
is superimposed over Clarksdale. Waters of March has chord changes
that are not busy, so they allow me to do a lot more with the melody, take
space to improvise, create more colors.
For Wilson, jazz is less form than process, an improvising approach
applicable anywhere. Here she joins a long tradition. Billie Holiday, Dinah
Washington, Sarah Vaughan, and Nina Simone infused whatever they
sang with jazzs ad-libbing craft, its rhythmic play and melodic freedom.
After all, Ella Fitzgeralds rst hit was A-Tisket, A-Tasket. Its about
the rhythms, Wilson says.
Her rhythmic nesse underpins her virtuosity. On Wichita Lineman,
her molasses voice pours artfully out of what seem pent-up pressures; its
an introspective struggle become improvised siren song, a la Miles Daviss
trumpet, where the spaces between notes hover with a suggestiveness that
articulation would only diminish.
She says, For me, Miles is the embodiment of Legba, the god of the
crossroads, the trickster. You have no idea whats gonna happen with him;
he will play with you just to play with you. I study that. Theres a lot to
study about it. Its mercurial. It recedes as you come closer. Its something
that you can never fully know or understand or analyze.
On December 5, 2001, a concert titled Made In America, featuring
hours of jazz musicians, was staged at New Yorks Town Halla benet
for some of the many funds dealing with the aftermath of 9/11. Despite
the long list of jazz artistsKenny Barron, Ruben Blades, Michael
Brecker, Paquito DRivera, Bela Fleck, Kenny Garrett, k.d. lang, Joe
Lovano, Brad Mehldau, Greg Osby, Danilo Perez, Dianne Reeves, John
Scoeld, and Cassandra Wilsonthe nearly full house was mostly
nonpayers.
Jazz, a marginal form, is disappearing from the major labelswhich,
to me, is a good thing. Besieged by their own poor planning and arrogance, the entertainment conglomerates that grew from the endless
mergers of the 1990s are too big and dumb to deal in the small sales
numbers jazz generates. The exception is Wilsons label, Blue Note, which

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still uses the old corporate model of subsidizing new or prestige artists
via protable acts. The small labels that have been popping up like mushrooms have no choice but to operate within economies of scale. Radio,
owned by two conglomerates, is hopeless, but the Web beckons, once jazz
musicians get the hang of how to use it. Maybe they should study folkies
and garage bands and hip-hoppers.
At the fundraiser that night at Town Hall, Wilson joined bluegrass-jazz
banjoist Bela Fleck, who picked behind her while she sang This Land Is
Your Land, drawling into the mike, Im gonna sing the verse thats
always left out.

27
Marty Ehrlich
THE LONG VIEW is aptly named. With this album, multireedman and
composer Marty Ehrlich shoulders a series of challenges that go to the
heart of what jazz composition is, or might be. His musical dialogues with
the paintings of a St. Louis compatriot, Oliver Jackson, yield a strikingly
original and thoughtful musical work that doubles as a recapitulation of
the manifold ways earlier key jazz composers from Duke Ellington to
Charles Mingus to Andrew Hill have responded to similar offbeat but
stimulating situations.
Ehrlich is a rarity: he crisscrosses the often self-segregating scenes that
proliferate within the jazz milieu as they do across America. Partly this is
because Ehrlich, once an aspiring poet and married to an established poet,
has a rather philosophical and historical bent. And his music, from his
outside excursions to his through-composed pieces, reects his sense of
continuity with the past (as he, like any artist, denes the past, which is
to say in his image) alongside discontinuity. To put it another way, his art
is subtle enough to speak to Darwin and Foucault.
An adept student of jazz history, Ehrlich grabs fewer fanzine headlines
than more outrageous or outspoken or controversial sorts. He is not a
post-modernist seeking to epater les bourgeoisie, replicate the shock of
the new that animated the avant-gardes of 20th century European
modernism. To underline the contrast, witness the two-decade long and
provocative history of John Zorn. Zorn has built several groups and
musical formats, an independent record label and a family of contributors (including Ehrlich) who both perform with his bands and record
for his company, and several versions of the downtown New York
scene in various venues. Zorns musical and career trajectory has been
fascinating, as hes moved from using game theory to create diverse
improvisational and compositional structures to recomposing spaghettiwestern soundtracks to Naked City, his blistering punk-jazz pomo
amalgam.
Then theres Masada, his brilliant reconception of Eastern European
Jewish music and Ornette Colemanish free jazz. Here Zorn made an

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emotional commitment that enhanced his playing: he practiced so ercely

for years that his technique has grown uid and daring, thanks to the
depths of feeling freshening his music. Unlike Ehrlich, though, Zorn has
a large cult partly because of his music but also because of his punk
persona (snarling, Minguslike, at ringing cash registers and noisemakers
during his shows, scufing verbally with the press). But with Masada
Zorn has creatively exited from postmodernism and the aging and mislabeled avant-garde.
Will postmodernism and the worldwide web and omnipresent cell
phones help accelerate the Death of Interiority, the space where artists
have historically resided? Does the virtually constant feedback loop reassure the plugged-in that their lives exist because they are always monitored
even if it hollows experience into a kind of eavesdropping? This is not the
sort of world Marty Ehrlich has created The Long View for.
At his age, and with his background, training, focus, and introspective cast of mind, perhaps its not surprising Ehrlich steers toward The
Long View. Born in 1955, he started clarinet at seven in St. Paul, and
when his family moved to St. Louis the young teen moved to sax as well.
He studied classical music until his high school orchestra director asked
him to leave because hed improvise during pieces. In his teens he
hooked up with BAG; he also wrote poetry and performed at jazz-poetry
readings.
His credits as a sideman, starting from his days at the New England
Conservatory (where he began on classical clarinet and nished as a jazz
major) read like a Whos Who of jazz innovators, from avantists to Third
Streamers: George Russell, Jaki Byard, Gunther Schuller, Ran Blake, Julius
Hemphill, Chico Hamilton, Anthony Braxton, Roscoe Mitchell, Leroy
Jenkins, Muhal Richard Abrams, Anthony Davis, John Carter, and
Andrew Hill. Along the way, Ehrlich built a reputation as composer and
instrumentalist.
The Long View, Ehrlich told me, is a kind of retrospective musical
autobiography that recapitulates back to my life in St. Louis. All the
ensembles Ive written for, like the brass quintet and sax sextet, nd
places here. I combine those two, which are among this pieces building
blocks, into a big band of a sort too. This was a very exible strategy. I
didnt want to cut and paste. I did not censor my impulses to use any
kind of material but I wanted to avoid pastiche, keep the music moving
without fetishizing its components, which collage is always in danger of
doing.
The rst of six movements nods to Mingus like a poetic invocation:
the long postbop melody that dominates the movements midsection,
accelerandos, springy hard-bop 4/4 walking bass, call-and-response
sections, Eddie Allens a cappella trumpet solo. Mingus, frustrated by the
limits of bebop and popular tune structures, probing for new ways to
structure jazz composition and improvisation, was fascinated with mixed-

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media works. Outside of Louis Armstrong, he was jazzs most literary

voice, writing his own powerful (if distorted) autobiography, and he
always befriended painters; a painter was his closest mentor. In the early
1950s Minguss friend Franz Kline listened to Minguss music while he
worked, using a house painters brushes to wield thick, bold lines, often
stark black, that were his gestural language, his equivalent of Jackson
Pollocks drips and Willem de Koonings sign painters strokes. One of
Klines paintings, Blue Center, artistically mirrored Mingus pieces like
Haitian Fight Song: it was structured around a handful of varied visual
riffs that recalled the bridges and elevated trains of Klines earlier work
as an Ashcan School urban landscapist. Like Minguss music, Klines art
could seem abstract but unearthed its roots in realism with his predominant dirty blacks and whites, which evoked the manufacturing lofts and
coldwater ats where postwar artists huddled cheaply in nameless neighborhoods now called Soho and Chelsea, long since remodeled and
upscaled and housing corporate ofcers and lawyers.
It is this world Ehrlich wants Mingus to evoke for us, in order to shed
variant light on hisand ourown.
In spring 2000, Ehrlich had a residency at Harvard; his stay overlapped
with Oliver Jacksons. Theyd known each other for decades; Ehrlichs
musical mentor and founder of the radical Black Artists Group, saxophonist Julius Hemphill, noted for his tenure with the World Saxophone
Quartet, introduced them. From the 1970s, BAG, like other local groups
across the United States, seized culture as its platform for commentary
on the ongoing social wars, sometimes directly, sometimes by suggesting
expanded conceptual possibilities. And so part of its agenda encouraged
multimedia collaborations by jazz musicians, an echo from the 1950s and
1960s.
There were several reasons, besides liking them, that working with
Olivers paintings appealed to me, Ehrlich told me. They can be
abstract and gurative at the same time, which parallels how I think of
my sense of musical expression, mixing tradition and innovation but not
quite either, in a pure sense. His work ranges from very minimal to very
dense and layered, and that represented some visceral thing that translated to my musicmaking. Or, as he writes in his album notes, Jacksons
paintings . . . have long acted as a visual counterpoint to what I have
imagined in sound.
And so the duo decided while at Harvard to collaborate. Jackson
created six paintings that Ehrlich used as inspiration. Though, Ehrlich
continues, there is no direct correlation between specic movements and
specic paintings. My compulsion was to give expression to the place
where beauties that should not be forgotten and beauties that have yet to
be imagined collide, coexist, and transform. It is in this place that my
artistic heart resides.

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281

The fruits of this collaboration, dedicated to Hemphills memory, were

installed at Harvards Sert Gallery from August 2002 to January 2003.
The exhibit created a zone of potential interactions to be dened and
improvised by each attendee. Jacksons paintings limn many moods but
share a sense of passion and energy distilled into form; the inchoate chaos
suggested by his more abstract tactics is transmuted into visual rhythms
and shaped by structural organization and the suggestion of realism
emerging from his segments of black lines. (The cover and fold-out liner
booklet for The Long View reproduce two of the paintings, inviting the
listener to recreate, if more narrowly, the experience.)
Ehrlichs music is his response to Jacksons creative modalities. After
their dual residency, he writes, I began working backwards and forwards
in composing the musical images, much as I had observed Oliver paint, his
large canvases stretched on the oor, moving in a circle around the
emerging visual images. The resulting opus for saxophone sextet, brass
quintet, string ensemble, and combinations thereof, he explains, has a
dual life: as music interacting in exhibition with paintings by Oliver, and
as a through-composed, autonomous work.
In fact, four of the movements were through-composed, except for
improvised solos. Two were recorded with different combos; the results
were then edited into a fully realized form, a la Mingus or Miles Davis
with producer Teo Macero. We had two days in the studio, Ehrlich told
metypical for jazz albums.
This one doesnt sound it. Each diversely structured movement suggests
both an individual mood and an overarching cohesion to Ehrlichs
reaching, shape-shifting piece. The second movement evokes a somber
contemplative air: spare cymbals alternate with a simple string trio gure,
then a burst of short themes is topped by pirouetting solo clarinet. About
halfway through the movements 12 minutes, cellist Erik Friedlander,
violinists Mark Feldman, violist Ralph Farris, and bassist Helias swell
into simultaneous motion somewhere between Dixieland and a late
Beethoven quartet. The nal section insinuates Afro-Cuban rhythms
beneath the strings, which can skid across dissonant glisses, oat almost
serenely, or stab angular harmonies above; the coda is pizzicato,
suggesting the circular pentatonic riffs of an African kora. And yet there
is an integrity rather than disjunction of elements.
All the movements delve into complexities of tone and texture,
tension and release, form and plasticity. Movement three features the
full ensemble with modernist classical dissonances and discontinuities,
so inuential on bebop; its ute solo heralds a suspenseful thematic recapitulation ecked with the blues while skirting nal closure. The fourth
movement evokes Ornette Coleman, its nursery-rhyme themes devolving
into simultaneous spontaneous composition. In movement five, the
blues dilate into a noise fest of sonic effects. The sixth movement

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Possible Futures

refracts hip-hop through an acoustic ensemble, laying the foundations

with the resonant power of Marcus Rojass tuba, Pheeroan AkLaffs
precise, powerful 4 /4 snare, and building to a rousing and erce nale.
One of the by-products of certain wings of jazz having become art
music is that they demand listeners willing to shed their passivity. Ehrlichs
music offers a portal into the rich interior dialogues that have always
powered human imagination in a world threatening to shrink into virtual
narcissism.

28
New Jazz Fusions
Jazz fans like to say that jazz history compressed into a century developments that took European classical music 400 years. The last 25 years
held to that breakneck pacealthough it often didnt seem that way,
especially to detractors and warring factions.
After the economic collapse of the popular big bands 50 years ago,
jazz lost most of its mass commercial appeal. But until the mid-1960s
rock explosion, it managed to draw audiences of collegians and beatniks and debutantes, the disaffected for whom jazz opened an exit from
the gray conformities of American mass culture to a largely African
American devised art form that began as folk art from a marginal
subculture.
Bebop insisted that jazz was art, not entertainment; in its wake, jazz
idioms diverged, annexed, multiplied: hard bop, Third Stream, modal
jazz, soul jazz, free jazz. Soul jazz found broad audiences in the 1960s,
but first the eras folk revival, then the British Invasion siphoned off
younger listeners. No surprise, then, that by 1970 jazz-rock fusion dominated jazz.
The story of fusion was more interesting and complexand raised
more serious creative issuesthan it seemed to at the time. In hindsight,
jazz and rock were as inevitable a pairing as jazz and Tin Pan Alley; Bill
Grahams putting Miles Davis and the Grateful Dead on the same bills
only acknowledged what the musicians were doing. After 30 years of
dodging the issue or leaving it in the accid hands of radio noodlers like
Kenny G, more serious jazz artists are revisiting how to meld jazz and
rock. Some, like John Lurie and Steven Bernstein, are old enough to have
lived through rocks heyday two and more decades ago. Some are young
enough, like Vijay Iyer or Ethan Iverson or Brad Mehldau, that 1960s
rock is their Tin Pan Alley, the standards of an older generation.
Evolution, according to the late Stephen Jay Gould, can be described
best as punctuated equilibrium: it proceeds in fits and starts almost
behind the scenes. That applies equally well to cultural history.
Though jazz record sales and venues shrank after the 1960s, jazz festi-

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vals mushroomed around the globe. Their draws were older stars: Duke
Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Miles Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah
Vaughan. Only a few younger gures like Keith Jarrett, with his ecstatic
gospel solos-cum-Glenn-Gould vocalizing, or Herbie Hancock and
Chick Corea, who simultaneously played fusion and jazz and classical
music, could successfully headline halls.
Today the jazz industrys economic backbone is radio, which means
instrumental treacle like Kenny G and nostalgic romance like Diana
Krall. Jazz fans and critics generally disdain the stuff, with good reason:
its risk quotient is close to zero. (Krall is a much better musician,
cunningly packaged, than the wheezy soprano saxophonist, but her
recordings and concerts are scripted for only a frisson of uncertainty,
not its reality.) The existential drama that res jazzs soul has nowhere
to dance, although in a culture as averse to risk on every front as
Americas this would probably be the sort of mild distraction most
people wanted to hear even if radio wasnt owned, operated, and
programmed by two corporations with nothing but demographics, ad
dollars, and focus groups on their minds.
Off the mainstream, away from classical jazz, other voices have been
evolving. For instance, although jazz fans mostly scorned hip-hop, musicians from M-BASE to Max Roach got interested in the beats, the lyrics,
and the culture. DJs began to appear as parts of avant-jazz bands; in the
1990s Disposable Heroes of Hiphopracy, Cypress Hill, 3rd Bass, Jungle
Brothers, and Us3 stirred jazz into hip-hop. Then came TJ Kirk, Charlie
Hunter, Medeski Martin & Wood, Phish, Dave Matthews, Govt Mule,
String Cheese Incident, Iverson wailing on Blondies Rapture without
being hobbled by the simple structure (what could be more direct than
modal soloing? What could be simpler than rhythm changes?), Iyer
reshaping Hendrixs Hey Joe into an acoustic jazz quartet without
losing the raw emotional power of the blues.
The unnished business of 1960s fusion has been reopened. And yes,
some of the impetus for this comes from cynical and desperate commerce looking for a prot line, the undignied scramble of an industry
drowning in its own waste and trying to woo boomer buyers back into
stores after alienating Gen Xers and Yers, who download their music.
But trying to prosecute instead of accommodate, refusing to drop retail
prices to the $8.95 that surveys show would drastically curtail, if not
quash, what the RIAA insists on mislabeling piracy, well, thats the
business of American music.
Jason Moran is an outstanding exemplar of how, in cultural as in
biological evolution, nobody can realistically expect what directions or
form a new artistic breakthrough will take until it presents itself. The
cultural historian, like the biologist, then works backward from effects

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to causes. So think of Moran as simultaneously an effect of recent jazz

history and a probable cause of possible futures, as sketched on
Modernistic. It suggestively sets new spins on sounds from James P.
Johnson to Afrika Bambaata.
In his late twenties, Moran is young enough to have absorbed hiphop as a native, not an acquired, language, and hes schooled enough to
have absorbed lessons from a century of jazz and classical music. Born
and raised in Houston, he and his brothers started music lessons young,
were in the school orchestra, and then quit. But Morans father had an
extensive record collection, which the boy enjoyed overhearing, especially Thelonious Monks Round Midnight. By the time he was in
high school, he said, That gave me the kicking in the butt I needed to
go back to the piano. For college he headed to New York, where he
studied for four years with Jaki Byard at the Manhattan School of
Music.
The late Byard, a unique pianist with a wide-angle conceptual lens, is
unknown to the general public, but he shouldnt be; his music is a cornucopia of Americana. Born in 1922, he doubled on many instruments,
and in his long career worked everywhere from strip joints to the New
England Conservatory, playing ragtime, greasy R & B, adventurous
Third Stream, free jazz, and whatever else struck him or was needed;
like Charles Mingus, with whom he worked over several years, he
ignored convention, which is why his big band, the Apollo Stompers,
dished such an eclectic potpourri laced with dollops of humor on songs
like Aluminum Baby.
Jaki, Moran said, used the entire piano. Certain piano players
and instrumentalists stay in a certain range because it is comfortable,
and that is what you are used to listening to. Moran recalls seeing
Randy Weston, for instance, at a solo concert of Duke Ellington material: He made that piano sound like an entire band, made the bass
register of the piano really sing, the rhythm and time wasnt all straight.
He really surprises you; the same with Muhal (Richard Abrams) and
Andrew (Hill).
Whats most interesting about Morans piano heroes, including Byard,
is their distinctive combinations of broad scope and individual attack
and their repeated attempts to reexamine jazz composition and its
recombinant relationship with improvisation.
Weston, the eldest living member of Morans pantheon, studied informally with Monka rare claimand is admired for his African jazz
pieces and rough-grained, sweeping piano; his tunes Hi Fly and Little
Niles are now jazz standards. Abrams, who founded the Association
for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, reaches to stride piano and
Schoenberg on Blues Forever. Hill, 65, studied with Hindemith, played
bop as a teen, was music coordinator for (then) Leroi Joness Black Arts

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Possible Futures

Repertory Theatre, and has been a Smithsonian Fellow; Point of

Departure illustrates his Monkish piano and elliptical compositional
sense.
Hooking up with alto saxophonist Greg Osby (who has worked with
Hill for years) not long after graduation marked Morans rst step into
a major-league career. Osby, his senior by two decades, has mentored
Moran both within his own band and outside it. Their rapport is evident
in their seamlessly nonstop live sets and their recordings.
Osbys album The Invisible Hand projects the new logic of his music
against the backdrop of established material. Over the last decade, Osby
has come a long way from the M-BASE collective. He has always had a
richly mature tone, and on ballads he plumbed uncanny depths of soul.
His poised maturity on this disc is supported by his choice of material and collaborators. Theres his longtime employer Andrew Hill,
whose deeply introspective music twists and tugs at basic elements like
time and harmony. Guitarist Jim Hall, whose band Osby also joined, is
one of jazzs subtlest harmonic colorists. Bassist Scott Colley (of Halls
band), drummer Teri Lyne Carrington, and ute/woodwind player Gary
Thomas mingle in several congurations from piano-sax duo on up.
The record is serious fun. Osby takes Fats Wallers Jitterbug Waltz
and stretches its rhythms and harmonies: the postbop abstract alto lyricism, wispy intrusion of cymbals, skittering piano teetering around the
beat, times lagging way behind chord changes. Yet it seems natural,
thanks to the discipline of the players. The foreboding version of
Nature Boy makes sense once you remember it wasnt just a Nat
King Cole hit but also the signature tune for the 1948 antiracist/antiCommunist witchhunt sci- thriller, The Boy with Green Hair; it braids
Halls slurring guitar, Thomass sinuous ute, and Colleys stuttering
bass around Osbys edgy, uttering alto. Theres Indiana (a agwaver
for Swing Era soloists frequently rewritten by boppers and here reformulated into postbop cell-like structures), and Quincy Joness Who
Needs Forever (from 1967s A Deadly Affair, about a British spy and
a turncoat Communist ofcial). Theres superb original material: Hills
Ashes, a brooding, cantilevered ballad; Osbys The Watcher, an
impressionistically yearning, Wayne Shorteresque piano-sax duo; and
Halls Sanctus, an intricately textured piece with a sinewy structure
and snaking melody that like most of Osbys work, avoids the bop headstring-of-solos-head approach.
That brings us back to Morans Modernistic, where six Moran originals nestle alongside compositions by Johnson (Modernistic),
Abrams (Time into Space into Time), Schumann (Auf Einer Burg),
and Bambaata (Planet Rock). The title cut skips and dances through
rhythmic breakdowns and shifts into impressionistic abstraction. Body
and Soul tethers its romantic deconstruction to a recurrent figure.
Planet Rock is rendered via prepared piano, tape reversals, and several

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overdubs. And Morans continuing series of Gangsterism compositions (all based on a theme from Hills Erato) are like short takes from
a jazz movie in process.
Call what Moran is doing not deconstruction, from that lingering but
passed postmodernist moment, but reconstruction. Did I mention how
much fun it is to listen to?
The last two decades watched American pop culture reliving the
postwar era, so it shouldnt be a surprise that The Grand Unication
Theory, from vibist Stefon Harris, surfaces a re-emerging Third Stream.
A tone poem of 11 movements for 12 instruments, it skillfully avoids
pastiche while weaving a rich musical tapestry that tells a story of birth,
life, death, and rebirth against the backdrop of a multifaceted universe.
Moving from grander themes (The Birth of Time) to more focused
ones (The Velvet Couch) and, via death, back to Big Ideas (the title
track), this pieces ambitious program includes translating Harriss fascination with physics and philosophy into musical form.
Harris seems born to do this sort of thing. Still shy of 30, he has
rapidly risen to an enviable tier among jazz artists: he has a major-label
deal with three albums as a bandleader, plays name-brand clubs and
festivals, and collects rave reviews from national publications. But what
shaped his talents was an education in two too-often divorced modes:
academic and on-the-bandstand training.
Born in 1973 in Albany, New York, hardly a hotbed of jazz, the boy
taught himself piano from age six, and could read music by the time he
hit rst grade. By eighth grade he was taking classical marimba instruction and could play all the band instruments. One of my teachers used
to say, If we needed a trombone, we gave it to Stefon, he jokes. He
saw the Empire State Youth Orchestra on TV, auditioned on clarinet and
percussion, and eventually became principal percussionist.
While he was studying on a full scholarship at the Eastman School of
Music, his roommate played him some Charlie Parker records and
changed the direction of his musical life. Two things, he says of
hearing Bird. The rst was spiritual liberation. He sounded extremely
free, like he could go wherever his imagination took him. Second, I realized how much harmony you had to understand to do what he was
doinghow you had to hear the chord the pianist was playing and be
able to use it right thenand I found that extremely challenging intellectually. He instantly dropped his plans for a career in classical
musicplans that werent possible for earlier generations of black musicians who became jazz players, like Charles Mingus, an early stalwart of
the original Third Streamswitched from percussion to vibraphone,
transferred to the Manhattan School of Music (though still as a classical
performance major), and began learning to play jazz and improvise with
other students.

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The vibraphone and jazz have an almost coextensive history. As with

all instruments, jazz musicians have tested its capabilities, probed its
multiplicity, adapted it to their self-expression. In 1930, Lionel
Hampton, who died in 2002, improvised an introduction on vibes to
Louis Armstrongs Confessin ; he was a drummer, but Armstrong
encouraged him to take up the decade-old mallet instrument. Hamptons
highly extroverted performance style on drums and vibes and his appearances in movies with Les Hites band brought him wide recognition; his
shimmeringly fast vibrato and quick, articulated touch became lifelong
trademarks.
In 1936, Benny Goodman, who had reached the first peak of his
popularity, decided to add Hamp to his big bands chamber jazz trio,
already (unusually, for the times) integrated with pianist Teddy Wilson
and drummer Gene Krupa. (Goodmans radical and wealthy brother-inlaw, John Hammond, pushed him hard to do this, just as hed later push
Goodman to sign up guitarist Charlie Christian.) Hampton crossed the
racial divide to mainstream stardom, and soon led his swaggering
powerhouse of a band; in 1942, a young tenor saxophonist named Illinois Jacquet ignited a burly, raunchy solo that launched rhythm and
blues for the Hampton bands hit version of an old Goodman smallgroup piece, Flyin Home.
This being jazz, different hands brought the vibes different sounds.
For Red Norvo, moving from xylophone in 1944, it was a vibratoless
attack, the opposite of Hamptons. Milt Jackson, an early bebopper who
played with Parker and Dizzy Gillespie and cofounded the Modern Jazz
Quartet, favored a long, almost drawling vibrato to yield sonic pools,
enhanced by soft mallets and blues-based lyricism. Within the Third
Stream MJQ, Jacksons vibes counterpointed the precise, Basie-esque
understatement of John Lewiss piano.
Since hes been in New York, Harris has joined a variety of musical
situations to stretch and season himself. He worked with Max Roach,
Charlie Hunter, Wynton Marsaliss Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra and
the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. He toured with Blue Note
New Directions, a feisty postbop group that included Osby and Moran.
And he recorded two tunes with Cassandra Wilson for Travelling Miles.
Harriss touch on vibes reects his devotion to melody, but its also
functional: hes an ensemble player who tweaks his tone and attack to
suit the environment. And so hes adept at his complex instruments technical aspects, varying motor speed and vibrato for effects, for instance.
Its Harris the Composer and Leader, not Harris the Soloist, who
informs The Grand Unication Theory.
Doubling on vibes and marimba, Harris takes only a handful of solos
on this extended composition, but his sonic sensibilities and compositional map shape its soul. Avoiding players who might be more brilliant
soloists, hes chosen a team that can harness ego to structure while

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creating contrasts and tensions. The result is a tone poem thats a worthy
successor the works of Duke Ellington, Gil Evans with Miles Davis, and
Mingus.
Utilizing elements from jazz and musique concrete, Impressionism and
funk, each section of the programmatic piece moves differently.
Following the percussion rumbles (the Big Bang) and tick-tick funk of
The Birth of Time, the soul-jazz of Velvet Couch, with its winking
stereo horns and easy grooving, represents a kind of garden of earthly
delights. The circular African beat of Transition, with its last breaths,
the sonic atmospherics of Corridor of Elusive Dreams, and the cooljazz-horns-plus-salsa of Escape to Quiet Desperation ease us into
Death. Song of the Whispering Banshee, a funeral dirge, features part
of the Koran keened by bassist Tarus Mateen Kinch. The odd-metered
March of Angels and dark, quavering ostinato opening the multipart
Mystic Messenger begin the transition to Rebirth, with its Ravelish
interludes, lush Gil Evansy harmonies, and cloudy vibes nish. The title
track resumes three of the pieces key melodies within a rotating backdrop drawn from all the sectionsa summa.
Though its acoustic, the piece is redolent of Harriss intimacy with
hip-hop and electronica, whose sonics are gracefully translated into
acoustic-instrument textures, while stereo imaging effects remind us this
is the 21st century, not 1930. In fact, Harris says his next project is an
electric band. My generation, he points out, expects sound to be big.
I was able to do that acoustically with this project. But we all grew up
listening to all kinds of music. Our job as a generation isnt to produce
great soloistshow many have there really been in jazz?but to learn
to compose more than rhythm changes and blues forms using all these
sounds and idioms.
The year 2002 marked the tenth anniversary of the Jazz Composers
Collective, a noteworthy New York-based entry in the long history of
jazz-musician cooperatives. Gen X composers like bassist Ben Allison,
pianist Frank Kimbrough, and drummer Matt Wilson form the JCCs
core. Each has a distinctive approach: Kimbroughs Chant tends toward
cool; Allisons latest, Peace Pipe, integrates kora and cello into a brand
of world jazz; Wilsons postmodern playfulness infuses As Wave Follows
Wave and Arts and Crafts. And yet they and others central to the JCC
maintain a group cohesionplaying on each others albums and tours,
exchanging business info and cross-pollinating creative ideas about how
to reopen jazzs past.
Since 1992, The Herbie Nichols Project has been one of the JCCs
central undertakings, yielding three signature discs: Love Is Proximity
and Dr. Cyclops Dream and Strange City. Meanwhile, its members
stepped out as individual leaders while seeking alternative venues and
methods for producing and showcasing their work. The JCC is building

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a homemade creative and distribution system outside the mainstream

music industry. In the Internet era, thats clearly the way to deal with a
marginal art formespecially since the corporate megaliths resulting
from a decade of mergers are staggering under debt, firing staff and
dropping artists, and muddling around looking for The Next Thing
while ghting rear-guard actions against piracy that alienate the very
consumers they need.
The JCC musicians have signed with small independent labels that
give them creative control, and have developed presenting partnerships
with not-for-prots nationwide; in 1996, they forged an alliance with
the New School, where they mount an annual concert series (so far, 90
shows debuting 300 pieces by 45 composers) and sell CDs at the door.
Their website and newletters (sent to 3500 people) attempt to foster
dialogue and word of mouth. (Wilson, who regularly tours heartland
America in non-jazz venues, notes, This generation of high school and
college students are the most receptive people to hit with improvised
music, whether its because of grunge or acid jazz or whatever.) Like
alterna-poppers such as Ani DiFranco, the JCC has revived and
expanded the old vital model that, until the entertainment megamergers,
was fundamental to interaction between performing artists and audiences since prehistory: tour, tour, tour. That means also stepping outside
usual clubs and spots and using the Web to shape audience and
support systems.
For the JCC, Herbie Nichols was an astute choice as calling card. A
contemporary of Thelonious Monk, formally trained from age nine,
Nichols is a quintessential overlooked jazz artista near-pleonastic
usage that unfortunately suits him well. He apparently didnt fit in
around Mintons, the postwar bopper academy, though he participated
in seminal swing-to-bop sessions there. His working bands rarely lasted,
he performed more smooth swing and raw stripper accompaniments
than arty bop, and only a small percentage of his often gnarly work
reached records. His funny and/or pungent song titlesLove, Gloom,
Cash, Love; Argumentative; Infatuation Eyes; Step Tempest;
Cro-Magnon Nights; Blue Chopsticks; Hangover Triangle; Riff
Primitif; Shuffle Montgomeryreflect his frequently whimsical,
provocatively offbeat art. But in the bop pantheon of characterssmack
addicts and musical giants, deliberately cartoonish goatees and hornrim
glasses, and jive talk unintelligible except to initiatesthe retiring
Nichols was elbowed out of what little limelight there was.
From the late 1940s to the Korean War, the live-music scene catastrophically collapsed; jazz musicians scrambled for work in thenaborning television, or played toilets behind strippers and dirty
comics like Lenny Bruce, or backed blues and soul singers for indie
labels like Atlantic. Mingus, who was incessantly organizing new venues
and cooperatives, and Max Roach convened a 1950s meeting in a

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291

Brooklyn warehouse for a one-night hole-in-the-wall concert that drew

the scrambling likes of Miles Davis and MJQ pianist John Lewis. Independent labels, some artist-operated like Roach and Minguss Debut or
Dizzy Gillespies DeeGee, tried to ll the void as major labels withdrew
from jazz, but many artists like Nichols got little studio time, though he
counted Mingus and Alfred Lion, founder of Blue Note Records, among
his champions.
In fact, the couple of dozen cuts Nichols recorded for Blue Note (The
Art of Herbie Nichols) and on Love, Gloom, Cash, Love pretty much
sums up his output as a leader. These trio tracks present bracingly
nuanced sketches of potentially far richer compositions. Take Shufe
Montgomery, Ellingtonian in its onomatopoeic echoes of street life, the
cultural parade in ux. Hangover Triangle ashes glints of Monkish
discordance for a chromatic melody that typically seems to meander
without obvious resolution, like a drunk the morning after. Or Love,
Gloom, Cash, Love, a ambitious waltz with interpolated tempo shifts
and turnarounds of jagged scalar riffs, a skeletal X ray of a deeper
psychological picture.
Listening to pieces like Hangover Triangle clarifies why critics
compared Nichols to Monk. Both were preoccupied with revamping the
Tin Pan Alley format, though Monks pithy deconstructions gyred and
stung, while Nichols liked to linger, and Nichols piano technique is
rened and polished, where Monks is percussive and disjointed. Still,
their common focus was on strong short pieces that instill respect for
form while soloinga discipline Monk drilled into Sonny Rollins and
John Coltrane.
Kimbrough began researching Nichols legacy in 1985, and from the
JCCs birth it became a central issue, leading to discoveries that included
nearly 30 unrecorded pieces at the Library of Congress. Why Nichols?
His music has an intellectual aspect that I suspect appeals to the JCC
sensibility: like Nichols their music has re but more often burns like
ice. Then theres his sly humor: along with skill and taste, what enlivens
the best JCC material is evident intelligence, supple irony, and satiric
wit. Unlike 1980s jazz neocons, these urbane neoclassicists have fun
while paying homage to a past they want to extrapolate and extend in
their own work.
Strange City, the most recent Nichols Project CD featuring Kimbrough, Allison, and Wilson, is a coolly unpredictable yet genre-smart
treat of tunes Nichols himself never got to record. It can also function
as a kind of primer about ll-in-the-dots jazz composition and arranging,
the organic mesh linking written and improvised music woven by jazz
performance. Onto these pieces bare bones the band has layered some
alluring skin. Moments leads off with four horns improvising on the
intro and outro in now twining, now dissolving harmonic lines to the
typically lengthy Nichols melodya nicely doubled irony, since Nichols

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Possible Futures

never recorded with horns, and this piece survives only as a solo-piano
acetate. The musics tensile delicacy is underscored by Wilsons seemingly hand-played drumsthumping his ngers on the snare or cymbals,
for instancein gently wry commentary. Delights is translated from
4/4 to 6/4 and 3/2, allowing the head to sway even more asymmetrically
over half-time drums. Happenings boasts another four-horn improvised head, then opens into noir dappled with sunsplashes, a movement
vaguely reminiscent of Mingus pieces like Far Wells, Mill Valley. Its
apt that Nichols is said to have used the March Theme from Prokoevs
Love of Three Oranges as its intro.
With NU BOP, pianist-composer Matthew Shipp leads what is now, in
some circles, becoming a normal jazz quintetit includes D. J. Flam on
synths and programming. Flams insidious synth work helps make the
disc a thought-provoking, at times circuitous journey; in part, it aims
to reincarnate the ever-present ghosts of a century of jazz-pop fusion via
drum-n-bass and contemporary sounds, which it does with real success.
Space Shipp evokes Herbie Hancocks Rockit; the title cut nds alto
saxophonist Daniel Carter scrawling Ornette Colemanesque lines across a
funky backdrop. ZX-1 features angular, post-Webern solo piano. Ds
Choice opens with Asian piano pentatonics integrated with Flams quickwitted sonics. X-Ray is a cool ute-bass duo by Carter and Shipps
mentor/sideman William Parker that sports Hendrixy delay on the ute.
Rocket Shipp nods again to Hancock, crossing him and Cecil Taylor in
Shipps now-scrunched, now-skittering piano. Nu Abstract offers 1970sstyle burbly sonics against stark Satie piano and grumbling arco bass.
Select Mode 1 and Select Mode 2, which nish the album, ride (and
often turn around) rock rhythms and are engineered for pop radio.
Nu Bop is not merely survey or menu: its diversity has integrity, and
means to challenge and provoke as well as titillate and seduce. Shipp is
usually called an avant-gardist, and if that outmoded term indicates
anything, its attitude. But lets put him in context rather than label him.
Over the last few years, more musicians have been revisiting the intersections open to present-day jazz and pop. Shipp was one of the rst on
the block.
He came at music directly and indirectly, in the same multitiered,
nonlinear fashion his compositions and improvisations still favor. Born
in Wilmington, Delaware, 40-odd years ago, at 12 Shipp decided he
wanted to be a jazz musician after seeing Ahmad Jamal, whose sense of
space so inuenced Miles Davis, and Nina Simone, whose crossover hits
rendered her jazz credentials suspect to some, on TV. His father, a nowretired police captain, encouraged the boy, who at 14 read a biography
of John Coltrane and found a lifelong hero, whom he venerates for
creating probing, visionary music from mysticismone of his own aspirations. A religious youth who read Carl Jung and links his way of

New Jazz Fusions

293

thinking to Emerson and the American Transcendentalists, Shipp got

early lessons from his church organist, then studied jazz with Boysie
Lowery, who also taught trumpet great Clifford Brown, and classical
music. In high school he learned bass clarinet and listened to Coltrane,
Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin. A quick stop at the University of
Delaware, where he spent his time practicing, listening to jazz classics,
and working in a record store, led to the New England Conservatory of
Music, where Ran Blake, a lonely practitioner of Third Stream jazz, was
his mentor. But the most overt influence on his emerging, very unBlakean piano, dense and furious with note clusters and pronged
dissonance, was Cecil Taylor, a dean of the postwar jazz avant-garde. A
1991 MacArthur Fellow, Taylor also attended the New England Conservatory, in 1952, but left because he felt it was culturally racist.
In 1984, when Shipp hit New York, the downtown scene was in its
heyday: 1950s- and 1960s-vintage pioneers of its idioms were alive and
working, and young and old neotraditionalists, spearheaded by Wynton
Marsalis, were patrolling jazz orthodoxy. Shipp, then shy of 30, found
his musical choices very limited, and felt he had to pick a side. For a
while, he was the Anti-Wynton. His dense piano work, the aural equivalent of layers of impasto, was often compared to Cecil Taylors: both
used classical training and ideas in their aggressive, even when tender,
and non-linear approaches. With albums like Circular Temple, Shipp
threw down impressive credentials in the now-traditional avant-garde
idioms: dense tone clusters, serrated solo lines, multiple time signaturescubism in motion. And he built a longterm working relationship
with Taylors ex-bassist William Parker.
But over the last few years, Shipp has been at the tip of expanding
the conception of and the audience for alternative jazz. He makes regular
appearances at College Music Association conventions, and his recordings make the CMA charts; theres something about the headlong ight
of Shipps music, maybe its mystical roots and yearnings, maybe its
sometimes bafing ow, maybe the personality that shows through
Shipp speaks in a soft but insistent urry, with an intellectual focus that
shows in his marshaling of arguments toward key points and conclusions. The clich is that jazz musicians often speak as they playbut
once you think about it, why wouldnt they, since a traditional goal for
a jazz soloist was to nd his own voice? At any rate, Shipp is a cult star
on college campuses.
That hasnt stopped his questing. He renounced the studio, la Glenn
Gould, then released several drummerless chamber jazz albums like
Gravitational Systems, where he duetted with violinist Mat Maneri, and
Strata, with his Horn Quartet. Most strikingly, he stripped his playing
into a lean and hungry style.
Nu Bop is the impressive yang to those yins. It reached the number
one jazz album slot in 2002.

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Possible Futures

With BLUES DREAM, an album that interprets the blues as the foundation
for jazz, bluegrass, Thelonious Monk, soul, Western Swing, heavy metal,
and other styles, guitar hero Bill Frisell closes several circles in his life
and music. Or, more accurately, he opens a spiral of possibilities that,
viewed two-dimensionally, looks like circles being closed.
For the truer perspective, lets fade out and then iris back into postwar
Colorado. There, in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains, Frisell played
clarinet in his school band but picked up a guitar because of B. B. King
and Paul Butterfields Blues Band, and worked with local bar bands
doing James Brown covers. That musical bifurcationthe trained artist
versus the populist playertook years to resolve.
King, a postwar blues idol, pioneered soul-blues hybrids with The
Thrill Is Gone. Buttereld, a white harmonica virtuoso who mastered
the moves of black pioneers like Little Walter, fronted Chicagos foremost white blues band; featuring guitarist Mike Bloomeld, Buttereld
band is given credit by some (including me) for an early jazz-rock fusion
record, East West, which tackled Nat Adderleys Work Song and the
title tracks raga-blues-rock. Everybody knows that James Brown
invented whatever Ray Charles didnt. And dont forget Jimi Hendrix,
whose pyrotechnics and sonics inuenced even Miles Davis.
But Jim Halls lambent harmonies and complex melodic sense lured
Frisells guitar into jazz. He went from the University of Northern
Colorado to Berklee and became a jazz snob. Which means he dumped
his soundshaping boxes and 1960s rootsno more fuzztones, overdrives, blues, soul, whatever. Time to master theory and make his music
deep, difcultart.
By the mid-1980s, though, he was making his name in New York as
a sonic pioneer, an avid extender of Hendrixs psychedelic soundscapes
into abstract music. After squeezing into the vintage 1950s jazz guitar
sound, Frisell fell back in love with soundshaping devices like delays
and choruses. Like guitarists Adrian Belew and Vernon Reid, he was
looking for new jazz-rock fusions that werent about blizzards of notes,
that reimagined sound with wry and resonant effects.
Then as now, Frisells sense of history anchored him. Even on the
radical Smash and Scatteration, where he and Reid deconstruct guitar-duo
music from the 1920s on, the insightful, often hilarious results are
grounded in knowledge and understanding. Hooking up with John Zorn
in the iconoclastic late-1980s combo called Naked City accelerated his
development. Naked City drew on Ennio Morricone and the Meters,
Japanese anime soundtracks and blistering hardcore punk, surf music and
Henry Mancini. Zorns jumpcut compactness prompted Frisell to pare
back his own music; blues forms, then country and blues forms, merged
into modal jazz to become his building blocks. He avoided ashy solos,
absorbing from Miles and Monk and Muddy Waters invaluable lessons
about space and the value of a single noteand the spice of wry humor.

New Jazz Fusions

295

Like Miles or Monk, he made his sound his signature. It expanded from
bleary delay rippling with looped phrases to embrace molten metalloid
raunch and blues grit, acoustic guitars and pedal steels. He was reaching
into the history of several sorts of American chamber music.
Jimmie Rodgers, the Father of Country Music, learned to pick guitar
from a black railroad hand. (Virtually all modern American vernacular
musics share this creation storyoriginated with blacks, adapted by
others.) In the 1920s, Gid Tanner and his Skillet Lickers wed hillbilly
string-band music to jazzy ddle and guitar improvisations. By the late
1930s, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys forged Western Swing from
big band jazz and country. (This paralleled the rise of electric-guitar
pioneers in jazz like Charlie Christian, whose hornlike solos made him
a star with Benny Goodmanand gave him a role in the birth of bebop
when he jammed with Monk and Dizzy Gillespie at Mintons in
Harlem.) By the 1940s, Bill Monroe formulated bluegrasss high lonesome sound from old-timey string bands, jazz, blues, complex time
signatures and harmonies, tight ensemble work, and solo improvisations.
The process never stops. As post-1960s experiments and hybrids
washed across American culture, a Grateful Dead pal named David
Grisman, a mandolin virtuoso, created Dawg Musican amalgam of
Django Reinhardt and Monroe. The Dead themselves ew on Djangoinspired guitar and modal improvisations: one of them, Dark Star,
reworks John Coltrane themes from Your Lady and India.
So, can country music be jazz? (Hint: ask Merle Haggard.)
On Blues Dreams, these echoes merge and collide and mix, where the
sound of the prairie and the mountains and the hollers is laced with the
hard-earned tang of the blues and the surprise of jazz and the textures
of rock, where its all transformed into a wonderfully evocative, surprisingly and even sneakily off-kilter and thought-provoking musical world.
Blues Dream paints a rootsy, atmospheric place rife with complexity,
with so many diverse elements that only art, rooted in dreams, could
make them this coherent. Like Cassandra Wilson, Frisell envisions a
musical world that is charming, simple-seemingvery American, and
very subtly rich, in its range and contradictions.
The album charts many paths across the American landscape. The
tremolo-shimmery title track is a brief minor-mode intro, an evocation of
post Kind of Blue Mile Davis. Track two, Ron Carter, named for the
great Miles 1960s bassist, opens with metallic horn squiggles that
wind over a brief bass ostinato and off-kilter guitar licks, then builds with
horns and overdriven guitar solos and electronic and bottleneck-guitar
squiggles at the soundstage edges. It evokes 1960s experimentalism while
organizing and updating itno mean feat, which the rest of the disc
continues.
Music has one big advantage over the real world: resolution is always
possible, if you want it. Take The Tractor. It kicks off as backporch

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Possible Futures

bluegrass, drummer Kenny Wolleson and bassist David Piltch laying

down a shuffle behind Frisells arpeggiated rhythms and sometime
doubling of Greg Leiszs mandolin strumming doubletime and picking
hot licks. Suddenly a snaky, slightly dissonant horn section slices across
it. A chorus goes by before it cuts in again: this time, two asymetrical
riffs. More furious bluegrass. And horns. With each chorus, the fine
sectiontrombonist Curtis Fowlkes, saxist Billy Drewes, and trumpeter
Ron Milesconnects the riff-dots, lling in until theyre almost continuous, a Monkish counterpoint to hillbilly jazz heaven.
Its a brilliant piece of work, a wondrous musical portrait of a melting
pot or tossed salad or whatever metaphor you prefer for the multiracial, multicultural place America has never, in sad reality, managed to
become.

29
Ani DiFranco
As the 2002 election results came in, I surfed through 100 cable channels with nothing on and hit an infomercial hosted by John Sebastian for
a Time-Life eight-CD set of 1950s and 60s folk and folk rock. For the
nth time I thought, What hath the Coen Brothers wrought with O Brother
Where Art Thou? Who wouldve guessed a hillbilly cross between Homer
and Preston Sturges would make America friendly again to the idea of folk
music, catalyze the latest generational revival that follows two earlier
upsurges: the New Deal, which sent researchers and artists to delve into
and chronicle and represent Americas myriad pasts, and the postwar
McCarthy era, when the crust of American political and cultural monism
hardened while, seething below, countercultural currents were owing
toward the mass reaction of the 1960s and 70s?
Santayanas adage about how those who dont know history are
doomed to repeat it crossed my mind. Here in the lengthening shadow of
the Reagan era, we seem to move outside history in a kind of projected
nostalgia, like Platos fools in a cave of their own device. History textbooks have been dumbed down and decontextualized along the lines
Frances FitzGerald drew at the dawn of Reaganism in America Revised;
our mass media have no memory. The timeless imaginary space they help
create allows opportunistic replays of the 1950s, Reaganisms favorite era,
when the need for a united front against our Great Satans (communism,
sex, drugs, Big Government, taxes, Al Qaeda, Iraq) sties dissent, opposition, and even discussion by branding them anti-Americanploys
recurrent in American history, right out of Richard Hofstadters Paranoid
Style in American Politics. Remember how, in 1984, a torrent of pundits
mused how Orwell imagined the future wrong? Guess they never imagined a contemporary day spent being ahistorically glared at by CNN and
Fox and talk radio.
The bedrock of Reagans legacy was the invention and spread of a
language, from tax and spend to partial-birth abortion, that successfully banishes opposition to the margins in near-total silence. Which is
why one lesson from 1950s America seems pertinent: when opposition

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Possible Futures

can nd no voice within the government and public arenas, it runs underground to surface elsewhere, as it did in McCarthys heyday. So the
question is: since the governing classes can no longer manage their own
opposition and the governed are fractured by slogans of ever-narrowing
self-interest or bloody banners, or bored into passivity, or simply hiding
out, who will open the possibility of debate?
That brings us to Ani DiFranco, who says that for her politics and art
are inseparable.
As the 32-year-old tours the country in a return to her roots as a solo
singer with an acoustic guitar, her recent live double CD, So Much
Shouting So Much Laughter, instead features the kinetic, musically polymorphous sounds of her now-defunct band of the past two years and the
growing sophistication of her vocal delivery. The two merge into generally
enticing mixtures of jazz, R & B, funk, hip-hop, bossa nova, and salsa that
recall Gil Scott-Herons similar 1970s melanges, like The Revolution Will
Not Be Televised.
The album opens with the sound of DiFranco screwing up a guitar
lickan overt nod to her overall projects resolutely homemade nature.
Reviving the antique model that served musicians for centuries and the
record industry for decades until the 1990s entertainment megamergers,
DiFranco developed her audience via constant touring; she then graduated to packaging and selling her own product via her own Righteous
Babe label. (Its worth noting that the last peaks for indie labels were the
postwar era, during the rise of blues, rockabilly, R & B, rock and roll,
country and soul, and the 1980s, when Reaganites began to dream
America back to those glory days.) Like other early-adapting musicians,
DiFranco started using her website as a combination marketing springboard/fan chatroom, thus updating the pre-web feedback loop:
performers building fan lists so they could mail info about performances
and recordings. And shes set up a foundation funneling money to what
she describes as grassroots cultural and political organizations around
the country.
Americans still love Horatio Alger, which offers DiFranco her marketing opening into the mainstreamand like Dylan a generation ago, shes
savvy enough to use it. Then there are her attitudes and language: she
gives her slacker fans an indisputably recognizable voice in her hip
sarcasm, cutting put-downs and political alienation, as well as in her
nuanced focus on relationships and power. Her audience, mainly college
and postcollege women, has grown so large that she routinely nets mainstream-media headlines and big-hall dates despite, and often because of,
her outspoken political beliefs and sexual preferences. For Big Media,
controversy is raw meat. How far controversial ideas are neutered or
proliferated in this process is a conundrum that recalls the arguments
about mass culture rampant among postwar public intellectuals like
Dwight Macdonalda conundrum made even more complicated by the

Ani DiFranco

299

now ubiquitous presence on mass media of familiar songs, even protest

songs, as decontextualized advertising soundtracks.
What is certain is that DiFranco has come a long way from her early
neofolkie outsider days, when she was scufing around Buffalo and clubs
of other Rust Belt cities with an acoustic guitar, passing the hat and
looking for crash pads. And thanks to the way shes built her career, her
fans adore her not just for what she says but what she represents to
themwhich is down-the-line opposition to ofcial America, outsidership
in political and personal terms.
Recorded on the bands last tour, So Much Shouting So Much Laughter
showcases DiFranco in the round as an artist, with often stunning singing
backed by abstractly conceptual as well as hard-driving music. Swan
Dive, the opener with her ubs, catches her at her nihilistic damn-thetorpedoes, Romantic-with-a-capital-R best. The bridges odd-meter horn
licks wind and curl around her increasingly elastic phrasing, her palpably
maturing condence, to head back into the verses rhythmically layered,
edgily staccato funk. As she told one interviewer, Im slowly learning, as
my life whizzes by me, how to sing them [her songs]maybe in a slightly
calmer voice, maybe with a little bit more self-possession.
Most of the songs revamped by this jazzy sextet will be familiar to fans.
Take Letter to a John: a lapdancers dismissively sarcastic refrain, I
just wanna take the money I make, unfolds into a hurt and angry admission that she was a molested child, and offhanded observations about how
social mores have set back women (and simultaneously imprisoned men)
now more than at any time since the 1950s. The pumping rhythm section
and sinuously suggestive horns, the well-paced and spiky dynamics,
DiFrancos free and easy rhythmic phrasing that rides across as well as on
the beats, all underline her artistic growth. Shes learned a lot from Dylan;
still, even in her most poetic forays, she generally forgoes his surrealistic
leaps for realism.
As with Dylan, the rawness that dominates DiFrancos more personal
tunes about love and yearning, like Grey, packs the immediacy thats
one of her strengths. Or, as she sings in Dilate, You always disappoint
me . . . / I just want you to live up to the image of you I create. Her
slacker sarcasm delivers plenty of good zingers, like I live in New York,
New York, the city that never shuts up on Cradle, whose high-energy
funk is laced with stop-time breaks and atonal curlicues. She shares that
ironic-punk sensibility with a galaxy of her generations alternative stars,
from the late Kurt Cobain to David Rees. (In fact, Reess online cartoons,
popular after 9/11, have been published as Get Your War On by Soft
Skull Press.)
On Self Evident, her long exploration of 9/11, DiFranco, to her
credit, once again wants to bite the hand that feeds her with a sometimes
moving, sometimes nave mix of the personal and the political. Us people
are just poems, she recites in the opening to background keyboard squig-

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Possible Futures

gles, Were 90 percent metaphor . . . rushing down a long hall in a

building so tall that it will always be there. She shifts from setting that
beatic day to the day America fell to its knees, after strutting around
for a century without saying thank you or please. She scoffs equally
at hypocritical chants of freedom forever and newscasters struck
dumb watching the Twin Towers fall, as if the two were somehow equivalent or implicated; she throws down a countertribute to El Salvador,
Mount Rushmore, inmates on death row, and all those nurses and
doctors who daily provide women with a choice, who stand down a threat
the size of Oklahoma City just to listen to a young womans voice. These
days in America, the cultural agendas linking Muslim and Christian and
Jewish fundamentalism are usually blurred or submerged; when DiFranco
makes the connection in concert with this song, fans scream in approval.
She nishes by lamenting 3000-some poems disguised as people should
be more than pawns in some assholes passion play and suggesting
Borschtian action.
In an interview, she described performing Self Evident at Carnegie
Hall several months after the World Trade Center fell: There was something very ritualized for me about going back to New York, where I was
on September 11, and bearing witness before . . . all of the other
witnesses. . . . About three seconds in, panic just hit me, like how dare I?
Who knows who these people in this audience are, what happened to
them that day, or whom they lost? She found the experience cathartic
and empowering. And yet her sense of trepidation, her momentary uncertainty in the face of a complex horror, wasnt unfounded. Listening to lines
like Keep each and every TV thats been trying to convince me to participate in some prep-school punks plan to perpetuate retribution, I
wondered what impact a pamphleteer can have on the language of opposition when ofcial policy in America is routinely disguised as airless
slogans.
You can, for instance, revel in her Bush-bashing and still have trouble
imagining how turning off CNN could transform Al Qaeda into reciprocal pacists. Contrast her approach with Reess: Arabs, Muslims, radical
Islamists, whoever, the spectrum of millions actually involved in American
policy dont much appear in DiFrancos political sallies, in sharp contrast
to the shaded insights that enliven her depictions of gender and personal
politics. Although she rejects what she sees as the media-framed big
picture, it can frequently feel as if shes replacing one America-centered
mode of seeing the world with another. Is this partly a consequence of her
own brand of personal/political ahistoricism? Does it bare the limits of
the truism underlying so many of the positive changes as well as the ferocious culture wars of the last three decades, the axiom that the personal
is the political?
These are not questions that spring to mind with Guthrie or Seeger,
Baez or Dylan. (Much as Dylan was accused in the 1960s of deserting

Ani DiFranco

301

social protest for personal examination and pop stardom, his acute sense
of The Other, apparent in his overtly political songs, never fully deserted
him; and in his surreal world, where the gures, like Goyas or Dantes, are
distorted by the artists penetrating vision of their inner light, multiple
frames of reference, including politics and sociology, are almost always in
play.) On the other hand, DiFrancos intractable opposition to All War All
The Time has already had potentially signicant ripple effects. Hearing
Self Evident in concert red Chuck D of Public Enemy to record and
release the song before DiFrancos own version came out. This illustrates
one of the more promising cultural undercurrents of the last decade-plus
the linking of alternative rock and nongangsta hip-hop. (Prince, whos also
tried this, is one of her biggest boosters.) Continuing to nurture those
connections musically and politically may ultimately go down as one of
DiFrancos most durable contributions to the emerging countercultures of
the 21st century.
Meantime, theres her winning black humor and well-honed personal
sensitivity and obvious talent to help spur her continuing artistic development. Just as in a Guthrie/Dylan talking blues, DiFrancos asides often
shoot her best barbed lines: Take away our PlayStations, and we are a
Third World nation under the thumb of some blueblood royal son. And
she wants to move her audience to action: To the Teeth begins
Schoolkids keep trying to teach us what guns are about and ends with
exhortations to besiege media and politicians with antigun messages.
Will she be a torchbearer out of Reaganisms long twilight? Who knows
what America these days will follow as it wanders its deepening chasms
of alienation? But thats not really the point. Right now, its enough that
shes out there.

Index
Abrams, Muhal Richard,
279, 285
Abstract Expressionism,
131, 182
Ace, Johnny, 97
Across the Great Divide,
210
Across the Great Divide
(Hoskyn), 212
Adderley, Cannonball, 73
Adderley, Nat, 176, 294
Adolf Hitler and the
MCA, 129
Agee, James, 208, 210
Aguilera, Christina, 114
AkLaff, Pheeroan, 282
Alabama, 258
Ale, 61
All Along the Watchtower,
167, 169
All Rise, 37
All the Things You Are, 61
Allen, Eddie, 279
Allen, Geri, 36, 76, 266
Allen, O.K., 23
Allen, Red, 45
Allen, Steve, 67
Allman Brothers, 211
Almanac singers, 2425
Altman, Robert, 237
Always on My Mind, 123
Amandla, 79
America Revised
(FitzGerald), 297
American Bandstand, 101,
179
American Beauty, 202
American Record Company,
109
Ammons, Gene, 252
Anderson, Eric, 171
Angel Band, 189
Animals, 168, 172
Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), 64
Another Saturday Night,
96
Another Side of Bob Dylan,
154

Anthem of the Sun, 200

Anthology of American Folk
Music (Smith), 1078,
11213, 118, 160, 197,
2056
Aoxomoxoa, 201
Apollo Theater, 94, 97,
132
Aquarius, 34
Aries, 34
Armstrong, Louis, 17, 27;
career of, 5152, 54, 64,
76, 98; early life of, 911;
music/talents of, 79,
1116, 104, 106, 107,
109;
Aron, Evelyn, 101
Arts and Crafts, 289
As Wave Follows Wave,
289
Ascenseur pour LEchafaud,
70
Asch, Moe, 17, 2224, 34
Ashes, 286
Association for the Advancement of Creative
Musicians, 285
A-Tisket, A-Tasket, 276
Atlantic, 102, 121, 127, 139,
143, 14546, 15859,
18283
Austin, Phil, 217
Austin Powers: The Spy
Who Shagged Me, 123
Autry, Gene, 54, 121
Avakian, George, 71
Avalon, Frankie, 155
Axton, Estelle, 146
Ayler, Albert, 53
Baby Face, 85
Baby Let Me Follow You
Down, 214
Back Door Man, 176
Back Where I Come From,
25
Baez, Joan, 29, 15658,
164

Baker, Chet, 6467

Baker, Duck, 108
Baker, Ginger, 4243
Baker, Josephine, 70
Baldwin, James, 70
The Band, 109, 158, 166
Bangs, Lester, 124
Baraka, Amiri, 258
Baron, Joey, 39
Barron, Kenny, 276
The Basement Tapes, 166,
205
Basic, 117
Basie, Count, 33, 52
Bauza, Mario, 261
The Bear Comes Home
(Zabor), 258
Beat Generation, 112,
131
Beatles, 83, 84, 115, 128,
144, 160
Beats, 40, 71, 87, 133, 182
Bebop, 1314, 22, 74, 131;
African Americans and,
5556, 74; drugs and,
5659; harmonic sense in,
71; innovators of, 35, 37;
jam sessions, 25; musicians, 3940, 4345, 81;
sound, 55, 64
Bechet, Sidney, 10, 70, 244
Beck, Jeff, 149, 181
Been Down So Long It
Looks Like Up to Me
(Hadju), 165
Before the Flood, 21011
Beiderbecke, Bix, 10, 64,
111, 136, 244
Belafonte, Harry, 41, 59,
155
Belden, Bob, 85
Belew, Adrian, 294
Bell, William, 186
Belly of the Sun, 275
Belmondos Lip, 262
Benigni, Roberto, 237
Benjamin, Benny, 142
Berberian, Cathy, 41

Index
Bergman, Peter, 217, 21920
Berio, Luciano, 41, 195
Berklee, 253, 262
Berle, Milton, 132
Berlin, Irving, 84, 236
Bernstein, Leonard, 124
Bernstein, Steven, 283
Berry, Chuck, 94, 100101,
142, 145; arrest of, 1023,
140
Bertha, 203
Big Boss Man, 203
The Big Chill, 136
Bikel, Theodore, 159
Billboard, 98, 101, 136,
148, 181
Birdland, 5657, 71
Birth of a Nation (Grifth),
266
Birth of the Cool, 40, 41,
46, 71
Birth of Time, 289
Bitches Brew, 183
Black and Blue, 8, 9, 258
Black Artists Group (BAG),
280
Black Arts Repertory
Theatre, 286
Black, Charlie, 249
Black Peter, 202
Black Rock Coalition, 149,
265
The Black Rider, 237
Blades, Reuben, 276
Blake, Blind, 105, 110, 117
Blake, Ran, 279
Blakey, Art, 33, 40, 46, 251
Blanchard, Terence, 62
Bland, Bobby, 97
Blind Willie Dunn, 136
Blonde on Blonde, 16162
Blood Brothers, 227
Blood on the Fields, 271
Blood on the Tracks, 167,
168
Blood Sweat & Tears, 176
Bloody Mary Morning,
122
Bloom, Harold, 82
Bloomeld, Mike, 174, 177,
294
Blowin in the Wind, 159
Blue 7, 49
Blue Center (Kline), 280
Blue Eyes Crying in the
Rain, 122
Blue Kentucky Girl, 189
Blue Light Til Dawn, 266,
274, 275
Blue Light Til Dawn, 269
Blue Yodel No.9, 8, 16
Bluebird, 183
Blues Forever, 285
Blues People (Baraka), 258
Blues Project, 101, 154,
17178
Blumenfeld, Roy, 175

Blumenthal, Bob, 128

Bob Wills and His Texas
Playboys, 295
Bobo, Willie, 94
Bock, Dick, 65
Body and Soul, 52, 286
Boise De Legg and His
Hottentots, 33
Bolden, Buddy, 108, 247
Bond, Lisa Galt, 65
Bone Machine, 237
Booker T and the MGs, 205
Born in the USA, 224,
225, 230, 23334
Born to Run, 226
Boulder to Birmingham,
188
Bound for Glory, 28
Bourgeois Blues, 23
Bowie, David, 149
The Boy with Green Hair,
286
Brando, Marlon, 66
Braxton, Anthony, 41, 279
Brecht, Bertolt, 107, 158,
179
Brecker, Michael, 85, 276
Brennan, Kathleen, 238
Bridgewater, Cecil, 41
The Bridge, 61
Brilliant Corners, 57
Bring It on Home to Me,
96
Bringing It All Back Home,
16164
British invasion, 160, 172,
18182
Broken Arrow, 183
Bronson, Charles, 148
Broonzy, Bill, 112, 172
Brown, Clifford, 37, 40, 41,
62, 293
Brown, H. Rap, 146
Brown, James, 77, 83, 88,
100, 140, 148
Brown, Ray, 16
Browne, Jackson, 105, 236
Brownie Lives, 58
BrownRoach Quintet, 38
Brubeck, Dave, 65, 72, 244
Bruce, Honey, 126
Bruce, Lenny, 2, 218; career/
life of, 12427, 12834,
143
Bruce Springsteen Greatest
Hits, 224, 228, 230
Brute Force Jazz Band, 111
Buck Dance, 110
Buckley, Lord, 130
Buena Vista Social Club,
189
Buffalo Springeld, 160,
17984
Buffalo Springeld, 180
Bug Music, 260
Bukowski, Charles, 237
Burke, Frank, 2021

303

Burke, Kenneth, 239

Burke, Solomon, 183
Burn, Malcolm, 191
Burned, 183
Burns, Ken, 24349
Burrito Brothers, 185, 187
Burrito Deluxe, 187
Burroughs, William, 87
Burton, James, 183, 187
Buttereld, Paul, 101, 176,
213
Byard, Jaki, 279, 285
Byas, Don, 62
Bye Bye Blackbird, 55
Byrd, Donald, 86, 257,
25962
Byrds, 116, 180, 183
Caf Au Go Go, 17162
Caf Bizarre, 112
Caf Society, 34, 57, 94,
9798
Cage, John, 7576
Cahodas, Nadine, 100103
Cake Walking Babies from
Home, 117
Calloway, Cab, 45
Campbell, Larry, 169
Candy, John, 215
Cannon, Gus, 201
Cant Stand the Rain, 268
Cant We Be Friends, 16
Captain Beefheart, 117
Car Song, 19
Carlin, George, 129, 217
Carnegie Hall, 22, 34, 53,
96
The Carnegie Hall
Concert, 130
Carr, Ian, 77
Carrington, Teri Lyne, 286
Carter, Benny, 52
Carter, Betty, 265, 273
Carter Family, 18, 19, 21, 26
Carter, Regina, 275
Carter, Ron, 42, 73, 83, 88,
254, 295
Cash, Johnny, 121, 123
Catholic Worker movement,
36
Cauleld, Holden, 125
Cavalcade of America, 25
Cavaliere, Felix, 127
Chain Gang, 96
Chameleon, 88
Chant, 289
Charles, Ray, 42, 98,
11922; music of, 9394,
96, 128, 142
Charms of the Night Sky,
262
Charters, Sam, 109
Cheek to Cheek, 16
Cheever, John, 126
Chess, Leonard, 99103,
109, 266
Chess, Phil, 99103

304

Index

Chess Records, 99103, 140

Chest Fever, 208
Chet Baker: His Life and
Music (de Valk), 65
Chet Baker with Strings, 65
Childs Ballad, 202
A Childs Claim to Fame,
183
Chins Cat Sunower, 203
Chocolate Dandies, 8
Chocolate Jesus, 238
Chomsky, Noam, 220
Christian, Charlie, 33, 39
Christines Tune, 187
Chuck Brown and the Soul
Searchers, 149
Chuck D, 301
Cinelu, Mino, 73
Circular Temple, 293
The Civil War, 248
Clapton, Eric, 101
Clark, Dick, 109, 136
Clark, Guy, 191
Clarke, Kenny, 39, 4445
Clarke, Shirley, 219
Claxton, William, 65
Clay, Andrew Dice, 12425
Clearwater Hudson River
Festival, 160
Clements, Vassar, 197
Clifford BrownMax Roach
Quintet, 58
Cline, Patsy, 121
Closing Time, 23536
Clouds of Joy, 33
Cloudy, 34
Cobain, Kurt, 85, 299
Cocaine Blues, 20, 104,
11819
Coen Brothers, 297
Cohen, Leonard, 191
Cold Rain and Snow, 200
Cold Water, 238
Cole, Cozy, 46
Cole, Les, 136
Cole, Nat King, 55, 128,
143, 168
Coleman, George, 251
Coleman, Ornette, 53, 196,
245, 281
Coleman, Steve, 266, 275
College Music Association,
293
Colley, Scott, 286
Collier, James Lincoln, 247
Collins, Bootsy, 142
Collins, Judy, 115
Coltrane, John, 52, 5355,
5859, 73, 87, 142
Columbia, 72, 121, 141,
147
Comedy, standup, 12425,
13132
Cook, Junior, 253
Cooke, Sam, 54, 95, 111
Copland, Aaron, 24, 153
Coppola, Francis Ford, 237
Corea, Chick, 73, 245

Cornpone Philosophy, 21
Corridor of Elusive
Dreams, 289
Corso, Gregory, 236
Cosby, Bill, 219
Cosey, Pete, 73
Cottonelds, 23
Countin on a Miracle,
233
Cowboy Songs, 17
Crazy, 120, 121
Cream, 42, 83
Credence Clearwater
Revival, 23
Crissman, Maxine, 2021
Crosby, Bing, 12, 13, 15,
111, 235
Crosby Stills Nash & Young,
184, 212
Crouch, Stanley, 247
Crowell, Rodney, 121
Cumberland Blues, 202
Cupid, 96
Dahl, Linda, 3536
DAmatos, Maria, 112
Dameron, Todd, 70
Dancing in the Streets,
136
Danko, Rick, 205, 207
Dara, Olu, 26566
Dark Room, 261
Dark Star, 77, 199, 201
Darkness on the Edge of
Town, 225, 233
Darwin, Charles, 27
Dave Matthews Band, 175
Dave Van Ronk and the
Hudson Dusters, 117
Dave Van Ronk, Folksinger,
116
Davis, Anthony, 279
Davis, Clive, 148
Davis, Eddie, 56
Davis, Reverend Gary, 104,
1056; career/life of,
10811, 116, 117, 201
Davis, James, 9495, 9697
Davis, Miles Dewey, III, 34,
244, 291; at Birdland,
5657; career/life of, 61,
6466, 6879, 83, 161;
drugs and, 6869, 7071,
77; Mingus and, 72, 76,
79; music of, 40, 42, 44,
46, 5455, 7479, 81,
8689
Davis, Tyrone, 41
Dawg music, 295
Day, Dorothy, 36
de Kooning, Willem, 87
de Valk, Jeroen, 65
A Deadly Affair, 286
Dean, James, 66, 126
Death Dont Have No
Mercy, 201
Death Letter Blues, 107,
108, 117

Death of Rhythm and Blues

(George), 138
Deep in a Dream: The Long
Night of Chet Baker, 63
DeFranco, Ani, 263,
297301
DeFranco, Buddy, 259
DeJohnette, Jack, 73
Deleuze, Gilles, 264
Delights, 292
DeLillo, Don, 164
Demme, Jonathan, 229
Desolation Row, 167, 169
Dickerson, Carroll, 11
Diddley, Bo, 101
Dig, 55
The Diggers, 19799
Dilate, 299
Dillards, 180
Dixie Hummingbirds, 9398
Do I Have To Come Right
Out and Say It, 180
Do Right Woman, 187
Do You Believe in Magic,
171
Do You Love Me, 136
Dodds, Baby, 40
Dog, 123
Dog Soldiers, 233
Dolphy, Eric, 53
Domingo, Placido, 62
Dont Crush That Dwarf,
Hand Me the Pliers, 217
Dont Look Back, 163
Dorsey, Jimmy, 52, 86
Douglas, Alan, 75
Douglas, Dave, 36, 25859
Down and Out, 117
Down by Law, 237
Down the Highway
(Sounes), 157
Dr. Cyclops Dream, 289
Drawn Blank, 157
Drewes, Billy, 296
DRivera, Paquito, 276
Drug(s), 15, 58, 68, 7071,
197; addictions, 5659,
64, 6671, 133; bebop
and, 5659; Charlie Parker
and, 64; Miles Davis and,
6869, 7071, 77; war on,
198
Drum Conversation, 47
Drummond, Ray, 250
Drums. See Percussionists
Du Bois, W.E.B., 7, 82
Duchamp, Marcel, 218
Duke, George, 268
Duke/Peacock, 97, 138
Dust Bowl Ballads, 21
Dylan & The Dead, 167
Dylan, Bob, 2, 77, 87, 119,
214; career/life of, 94, 112,
11417, 15370, 201; in
New York, 15559;
Newport Folk Festival,
15355, 15960; women,
156, 16566

Index
Dylan, Jakob, 161
Dylanology (Weberman),
157
E Street Band, 22728, 230,
232
Earle, Steve, 27, 263
Earth Wind and Fire, 148
East West, 175, 294
Eastwood, Clint, 148
Easy Rider, 208
Easy Winners, 41
Eckstine, Billy, 128
Ed Sullivan, 104, 159, 173
Edwards, Bernard, 149
Ehrlich, Marty, 27882
Eldridge, Roy, 43
The Electric Horsemen, 123
Electric Flag, 177
Elite Hotel, 189
Ella and Louis, 16
Ella and Louis Again, 16
Ellington, Duke, 1516, 33,
3435; career of, 60, 83,
98, 247; music of, 39, 44,
46, 73, 86
Elliot, Jack, 28, 112
Ellis, Herb, 16
Ellison, Ralph, 7, 8, 15
Ellroy, James, 235
Ely, Joe, 120
Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8,
18
Emmylou Harris Anthology:
The Warner/Reprise Years,
188
Entrepreneur, 194, 203
Ertegun, Ahmet, 127
The Essential Willie Nelson,
119, 121
Europe 72, 203
Europe, James Reese, 244
Evangeline, 214
Evans, Bill, 61, 73, 82
Evans, Gil, 40, 46, 7476,
7779, 82
Eve of Destruction, 164
Everly Brothers, 181, 187,
191
Everybody Loves My
Baby, 113
Expecting to Fly, 183
Fabian, 155, 182
Fables of Faubus, 258
Fanfare for the Common
Man, 153
Fanon, Franz, 84
Far Wells, Mill Valley, 292
Frina, Mimi, 15658
Frina, Richard, 112, 156,
165
Farmer-Labor Train, 20
Farris, Ralph, 281
Father Flotskys Triumph,
129
Fear and Loathing in Las
Vegas (Thompson), 185

Feather, Leonard, 34
Feldman, Mark, 264, 281
Ferguson, Maynard, 250
Festival Journey, 38
Finn, Huck, 18
Firesign Theatre, 2, 153,
21622
The Firesign Theatres Big
Book of Plays, 220
Fishbone, 149
Fitzgerald, Ella, 12, 1516,
55, 265, 273
Flamenco Sketches, 79
Flanagan, Bill, 156, 162
Fleck, Bela, 277
Fletcher Henderson
Orchestra, 51
Flute Thing, 175
Flying Home, 52
Flying on the Ground Is
Wrong, 183
The Folkways Years, 113
Folkways Records, 17, 23,
113
For What Its Worth,
18081
Ford, John, 226, 230
Forever Young, 214
41 Shots, 229
Foster, Al, 73
Fountain, Clarence, 98
Four Days Gone, 183
Four Tops, 137, 183
Fowlkes, Curtis, 296
Foxx, Redd, 128, 132
Frank, Robert, 230
Frankie and Albert, 117
Franklin, Aretha, 148, 187
Franklin, Reverend C.L.,
148
Freberg, Stan, 218
Freed, Alan, 95, 100, 101,
109
Freedom Now, 258
Freedom Suite, 59
Friedlander, Erik, 281
Friedman, Barry, 180
Frisell, Bill, 85, 294
Fritz, Ernie, 228
Frizzell, Lefty, 122, 208
Froggy Bottom, 34
Fuentes, Carlos, 226
Fuller, Blind Boy, 105,
10910, 117
Fuller, Sam, 236
Funk Brothers, 14142,
14344
Furay, Richard, 180, 184
The Fuse, 232
Future Shock, 80, 83, 8485,
89
Gabriel, Peter, 85
Gantry, Elmer, 111
Garcia, Jerry, 77, 174, 193,
195203
Garland, Judy, 56
Garland, Red, 73

305

Garnier, Tony, 169

Garrett, Kenny, 276
Gaslight Caf, 114
Gavin, James, 6467
Gaye, Marvin, 128, 144
The Gay Science (Nietzsche),
257
Geer, Will, 2122
Gemini, 34
George, Nelson, 138
George-Warren, Holly, 188
Georgia, 119, 122
Georgia Lee, 238
Georgie Js 78th Street
Tavern, 45
Gershwin, George, 24, 84
Gershwins World, 83
Gertrudes Bounce, 58
Get Behind the Mule, 238
Getz, Stan, 165
The Ghost of Tom Joad,
22325
Gibran, Kahlil, 18
Gid Tanner and His Skillet
Lickers, 295
Giddins, Gary, 9, 13, 14,
24748
The Gilded Palace of Sin,
187
Gillespie, Dizzy, 13, 37, 299;
career of, 64, 70, 142;
music of, 39, 4143,
4546, 8182; Woodrow
Guthrie and, 22, 26, 3435
Gilmore, Jimmie Dale, 120
Ginsberg, Allen, 87, 130,
133, 172, 205, 219
Gioia, Ted, 248
Give Me Immortality or
Give Me Death, 216
Glaser, Joe, 12, 13
Gleason, Ralph J., 133, 159,
208, 210
Go and Say Goodbye, 183
God Bless America, 19, 22
God Bless the Child, 61,
117
Going After Cacciato, 233
Golden Gate Gospel
Quartet, 25, 97
Golden Road, 200
Good Hearted Woman,
122
Good Lovin , 128
Good Morning Little
Schoolgirl, 200
Good Times, 149
Goodfellas, 149
Goodman, Benny, 11, 33,
3435, 244
Goodnight Irene, 23, 25
Gordy, Berry, Jr., 13641,
144, 146, 14849
The Gospel Sound (Heilbut),
93
Gould, Stephen Jay, 283
GP, 187

306

Index

Graham, Bill, 70, 167, 197,

209
Gramsci, Antonio, 15
Grand Coulee Dam, 25
Grand Ole Opry, 121, 185,
208
The Grand Unication
Theory, 287, 288
Granz, Norman, 16, 4647
The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), 18, 28 (lm), 226
Grapes of Wrath Concert,
24
Grappelli, Stephane, 197,
247
Grass, Gunther, 219
Grateful Dead, 77, 167, 174,
193203, 203
Grateful Dead, 194, 200,
202
Gravenites, Nick, 177
Gravitational Systems, 293
Great God AMighty! The
Dixie Hummingbirds:
Celebrating the Rise of
Soul Gospel Music
(Zolten), 93
Great Jones Street (DeLillo),
164, 165
Great White Wonder, 166
Greco, Juliette, 70
Green, Al, 111
Green, Freddie, 111
Green, Green Rocky
Road, 117
Greer, Sonny, 39
Gregory, Dick, 128, 129
Grevious Angel, 188, 189
Grey, 299
Grifth, D.W., 210, 266
Grisman, David, 197, 295
Grossman, Albert, 112, 113,
115; as manager, 158, 159,
165, 208
Guralnick, Peter, 135, 136,
14546, 148
Guthrie, Arlo, 27, 161
Guthrie, Nora, 27
Guthrie, Woody (Woodrow
Wilson), 1, 34, 239;
career/life of, 2029, 76,
107; folk revival and,
1720, 105, 112, 117;
Gillespie and, 22, 26,
3435
Guy, Buddy, 174
Guy Lombardo Orchestra,
86
Gypsy Kings, 189
Hadju, David, 15657, 165
Haggard, Merle, 187
Hall, Jim, 61, 286, 294
Hamilton, Chico, 279
Hammond, John, 22, 33, 94,
96, 9798, 288
Hammond, John, Jr., 205

Hampton, Lionel, 215, 288

Hancock, Herbie, 42, 73,
78; career/life of, 8089
Handy, W.C., 109, 209
Hangover Triangle, 291
Happenings, 292
Hard Bop, 57
Hardin, Glen D., 187
Hardin, Lil, 11
Harlem Renaissance, 8, 146
Harper, Ben, 142
Harris, Emmylou, 121,
18592, 214
Harris, Stefon, 28789
Hart, Lenny, 194
Hart, Mickey, 194, 196, 203
Hassinger, Dave, 200
Havens, Richie, 172
Hawkins, Coleman, 39,
5152, 6162, 111
Hawkins, Ronnie, 209, 214
Hayden, Sterling, 236
Hayes, Isaac, 145, 14748
Hays, Lee, 24, 27, 28
Hayward, Susan, 236
He Was a Friend of Mine,
116
Headhunters, 83, 84, 85, 88
Heat Wave, 136
Heavenly Gospel Singers, 95
Hefner, Hugh, 129
Hello Dolly, 16, 104, 273
Hello Walls, 120, 121
Helm, Levon, 209
Hemphill, Julius, 279, 280
Henderson, Fletcher, 11, 16
Henderson, Joe, 254
Hendricks, Jon, 200, 247
Hendrix, Jimi, 70, 75, 83;
career/life of, 141, 14445,
147, 171, 196, 199
Hentoff, Nat, 83, 133, 159,
161
Herbie Nichols Project, 289,
290
Hes Gone, 203
Hesitation Blues, 110,
113, 117
Hey Paula, 174
Hi Fly, 185
High Society, 8, 9
Higher and Higher, 139
Highlands, 167
The Highwaymen, 123
Highway 61 Revisited,
16162, 165, 168, 175,
177
Hill, Andrew, 285
Hillman, Chris, 186, 187
Hines, Earl, 14
Historic Concerts, 41
Hite, Les, 288
Hobos Lullaby, 20
Hodges, Johnny, 52, 11112
Hoffman, Abbie, 131, 132,
161, 179
Hold On, 238

Holiday, Billie, 12, 34, 49,

5657, 62, 141, 169
Holland, Dave, 72, 85, 265
Holland-Dozier-Holland,
141
Holly, Buddy, 155, 169
Hooker, John Lee, 115, 163
Hope, Elmo, 58
Hot Dusty Roads, 183
Hot Fives, 7, 9, 11, 16
Hot Sevens, 7, 9, 11
Hot Tamales, 275
House of the Rising Sun,
23, 164
House, Son, 94
Houston, Cisco, 17
How Time Slips Away,
121
How to Relax Your
Colored Friends at
Parties, 130
How To Talk Dirty (Bruce),
131
The Howl of the Wolf
(movie), 217
Howlin Wolf, 94, 101, 239
Hubbard, Freddie, 251
Hullabaloo, 136, 173, 179
Human Touch, 230
Hung Upside Down, 183
Hunter, Charlie, 85
Hunter, Joe, 142, 143
Hurt, Mississippi John, 111,
114, 117
I Aint Gonna Eat Out My
Heart Anymore, 128
I Cant Give You Anything
But Love, 12
I Cant Stop Loving You,
119
I Got A Woman, 93, 143
I Got You, 77
I Heard It Through the
Grapevine, 141, 143
I Never Cared for You,
121
I Shall Be Released, 205
Ida Red, 20, 101
If Dogs Run Free, 167
If I Could Only Win Your
Love, 188
If Youve Got the Money
Ive Got the Time, 122
Iglesias, Julio, 122
Ike Turner Revue, 172
Ill Get By, 54
Im Gonna Sit Right Down
and Write Myself a
Letter, 54
Im So Lonesome I Could
Die, 164
In My Hour of Darkness,
188
In the Tradition, 1067
Indiana, 286
Into the Fire, 229, 232

Index
Invisible Man, 8
The Invisible Head, 286
Isle of Wight festival, 75
Isnt She Lovely, 61
Its Only a Paper Moon,
55
Its the End of the World as
We Know It, 124
And Its Deep Too, 130
And Its You, 237
Ive Been Lonely Too
Long, 128
Iverson, Ethan, 283
Ives, Burl, 17, 2122, 25
Iyer, Vijay, 283
Jack Parr, 132
Jackson Five, 141
Jackson, Javon, 25253
Jackson, Jesse, 146, 14748
Jackson, Mahalia, 97
Jackson, Michael, 141, 149
Jackson, Milt, 288
Jackson, Oliver, 280
Jacquet, Illinois, 288
Jagger, Mick, 61, 16364,
264
Jamal, Ahmad, 101, 292
Jamerson, James, 14243
James, Etta, 100101
James, Jimmy. See Hendrix,
Jimi
James, Skip, 94, 111
Jarmusch, Jim, 237
Jarrett, Keith, 73, 245
Jazz, 8, 63, 182; African
Americans and, 7475, 87;
Age, 8, 11, 62; bands, 52;
careers, 6061; clubs, 87;
commercial future of,
24950, 28384; contemporary/modern, 13, 57, 59,
74; in Europe, 43, 6566,
8687; funk and, 84, 85,
88; fusion/synthesis in,
8183, 8485, 88; improvisation, 5455;
innovators, 76, 27980;
language of, 3941, 44; at
Lincoln Center, 244, 245,
288; milieu, 10, 22; musicians, 15, 37, 145; New
Orleans, 11, 108, 111; at
the Philharmonic, 16;
political activism within,
41, 59; post WW II, 70;
rock, 61; singers, 27277;
tunes, 5455; Workshop,
40. See also Bebop
Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns,
24349, 274
Jazz Composers Collective
(JCC), 28990
Jazz Messengers, 40, 251
Jefferson Airplane, 108
Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 23
Jenkins, Leroy, 279

Jennings, Waylon, 122

Jericho Quintet, 97
Jersey Girl, 237
Jesse James, 23
Jitterbug Waltz, 286
Jobim, Antonio Carlos, 275
John Birch Talking Blues,
159
John Wesley Harding, 122,
166, 224
Johnson, Bunk, 81, 111
Johnson, Jack, 77, 140
Johnson, James P., 285
Johnson, Lonnie, 126
Johnson, Robert, 107, 172
Jones, Darryl, 79
Jones, Elvin, 46
Jones, George, 123
Jones, Leroi, 285
Jones, Papa Jo, 39, 43
Jones, Philly Joe, 73, 130
Jones, Spike, 19
Joplin, Janis, 158
Joplin, Scott, 83
Jordan, Clifford, 253
Jordan, Louis, 40, 45, 53, 60
Josephson, Barney34
Joyce, James, 133
Jung, Carl, 292
Jury texts, 107
Justice, 275
Kael, Pauline, 204, 214
Kahuna Sunset, 181
Kalb, Danny, 172, 17475
Katz, Mickey, 259
Katz, Steve, 117, 175
Kaukonen, Jorma, 108
Keb Mo, 29
Keep on Pushin , 144
Kenny G, 248, 28384
Keppard, Freddie, 15
Kern, Jerome, 195
Kerouac, Jack, 87, 129, 131,
236
Kesey, Ken, 132, 197, 205
Khan, Chaka, 142
Khayyam, Omar, 18
The Kid in the Well, 130
Kidnapping Kissinger, 264
Killing Floor, 177
Kimbrough, Frank, 289, 291
Kind of Blue, 72, 77, 87,
114
Kind of Blue, 295
King, B.B., 85, 294
King, Carole, 121
King, Chris Thomas, 29
King, Clydie, 166
King Harvest, 210
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 41,
59, 78, 135, 148, 180
King Records, 140
Kingston Trio, 29, 113, 161,
186
Kirby, John, 260
Kirk, Andy, 33

307

Klang, 261
Klawans, Stuart, 162
Klein, Joe, 2223, 113
Kleinow, Pete, 186
Kline, Franz, 87, 280
Knitting Factory, 249, 259
Konitz, Lee, 46
Kooper, Al, 165, 175, 177,
205
Kovac, Ernie, 218
Krall, Diana, 284
Krassner, Paul, 131
Kreutzman, Bill, 19596
Kristofferson, Kris, 123
Krupa, Gene, 40, 46, 288
Kulberg, Andy, 175
Kuti, Fela, 83
Ladies Auxiliary, 20
Lady Chatterlys Lover
(Lawrence), 133
Lady Sings the Blues, 141
Land, Harold, 58
Landau, Jon, 228
Lang, Eddie, 111, 136, 247
lang, k.d., 276
Lanois, Daniel, 168
Lao-Tzu, 27
Last Time Around, 184
The Last Polka, 215
The Last Waltz, 2045,
21214
Laswell, Bill, 80
Laugh-In, 179
Lead Belly. See Ledbetter,
Huddie
Leary, Timothy, 197, 219
Led Zeppelin, 122, 142, 293
Ledbetter, Huddie, 2324,
29, 11112, 116
Lee, Spike, 38
Lefty Lou. See Crissman,
Maxine
Lennon, John, 164
Lenny Bruce Original:
Volumes 1 and 2, 130
Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat,
169
Lesh, Phil, 142, 195
Let Us Now Praise Famous
Men, 21011
Lets Get Lost, 65, 67
Lets Go Out to the
Programs, 97, 98
Letter to a John, 299
Levy, Eugene, 215
Lewis, Gary, 175
Lewis, Jerry Lee, 113, 163
Lewis, John, 3940, 46, 71,
288, 291
Lewis, Noah, 201
Lewis, Ramsey, 101
Libra, 34
Lifes Other Side, 20
Like a Rolling Stone, 154,
164, 205
Lincoln, Albey, 41, 258, 265

308

Index

Lindbergh, 19
Lindbergh, Charles, 19
Lipscomb, Mance, 117
Liquid Soul, 85
Little Anthony and the
Imperials, 94
Little Church, 77
Little Niles, 185
Little Richard, 97, 159
Little Walter, 101
Live at the Caf Au Go Go,
172, 175
Live at Curran Hall, 130
Live at Sir George University, 117
Live/Dead, 194
Living Colour, 149
Loggins, Kenny, 184
Lomax, Alan, 2224, 26,
105
Lomax, John A., 17, 2223,
26
Lonely, 237
Lonesome Day, 233
Long Black Veil, 208
Long, Pete, 184
The Long View, 27881
Lost Highway, 164
Louis Armstrong & Duke
Ellington, 16
Louis, Joe, 140
Lovano, Joe, 49
Love and Theft, 168
Love, Gloom, Cash, Love,
289
Love Hurts, 188
Love Is Proximity, 289
Love Me Like a Rock, 94
Love of Three Oranges, 292
Loveland, 268
Lovett, Lyle, 120
Lovin Spoonful, 171
Lowery, Boysie, 293
Lownds, Sara, 158, 166
Lowside of the Road, 238
Lucky Town, 230
Lurie, John, 237, 283
Luxury Liner, 189
Mabley, Moms, 128
Macero, Ted, 72, 78
Mack the Knife, 8, 16,
104, 117, 273
Madonna, 86, 149
Mahfouz, 264
Mahogany, 141
Mailer, Norman, 71
Malcolm X, 79, 84, 146
Malle, Louis, 70
Mama Tried, 203
Mamma Dont Let Your
Babies Grow Up to Be
Cowboys, 122
Mamma Youve Been on
My Mind, 169
Man on the Street, 159
The Man Who Mistook His

Wife for a Hat (Sacks),

104
Mancini, Henry, 261, 294
Mann Act, 102, 140
Mann, Woody, 108
Manne, Shelly, 59
Manuel, Richard, 207
Marable, Fate, 10
March of Angels, 289
Mardin, Arif, 122
Marsalis, Branford, 49, 62,
82, 252, 270
Marsalis, Ellis, 82
Marsalis, Wynton, 37, 43,
271; career of, 7273, 82,
245, 249, 254
Marsh, Dave, 214
Martha, 236
Martha and the Vandellas,
137
Martin, Dean, 136
Martin, Dewey, 181
Martin, Steve, 219
Marx Brothers, 161, 218
Marys Place, 233
Masada, 262
The Master, 166
Max and Dizzy, 41
Max RoachClifford Brown
Quintet, 50
Maybellene, 101
Mayeld, Curtis, 144, 148
M-BASE Collective, 26566
MBoom, 39, 41, 42, 47
MBoom Live at S.O.B.s, 41
McCartney, Paul, 142
McClure, Michael, 205
McGee, David, 236
McGhee, Brownie, 18, 108,
112
McGriff, Jimmy, 128
McGuinn, Roger, 186
McGuire, Barry, 164
McLaughlin, John, 73, 75,
78
McLean, Jackie, 39, 49
McLuhan, Marshall, 218
McRae, Carmen, 273
McTell, Blind Willie, 117
Me and My Uncle, 203
Meeropol, Abel, 266
Mehldau, Brad, 276, 283
Melford, Myra, 262
Mellencamp, John, 27
Memphis, 269
Memphis Jug Band, 201
Mercer, Johnny, 236
Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 9
Mercy St., 85
Messina, Joe, 143, 184
Michelangelo, 191
Midnight Hour, 136
Mike Seeger and New Lost
City Ramblers, 107
Miles, Ron, 296
Miller, Jim, 210, 214

Miller, Marcus, 73
Miller, Mitch, 121
Millinder, Lucky, 96
Millstein, Gilbert, 133
Mingus, Charles, 35, 87,
142, 162, 239, 289; Max
Roach and, 37, 39, 46;
Miles Davies and, 72, 76,
79
Minton Club, 22, 39, 70
Mississippi Blind Boys, 98
Mitchell, Roscoe, 279
Modern Jazz Quartet, 39,
71, 288
Modernistic, 285, 286
Money (Thats What I
Want), 139
Monk, Thelonious, 3435,
39, 49, 5758, 62
Monkees, 180, 184, 269
Monroe, Bill, 8, 189, 197
Monroes (club), 39, 70
Monterey Pop, 75
Montreal Jazz Festival, 84
Moody, James, 101
Moonlight, 169
Moran, Jason, 85, 28487
Morgenstern, Dan, 10, 11,
16, 106
Morning Dew, 200
Morning Glory (Dahl),
3536, 263
Morton, Jelly Roll, 7, 8, 115
Mothers of Invention, 128
Motown, 13549
Mountain Dew, 119
Mr. Tambourine Man,
169
Mule Variations, 237
Mulligan, Gerry, 40, 46, 64
Muni, Scott, 172
Muranyi, Joe, 13
Murder Incorporated, 228,
229
Murder Incorporated, 228
Murphy, Eddie, 129
Murray, Albert, 7, 8, 15, 82,
244
Music for Six Musicians,
260
Music from Big Pink, 2059
The Music of Mickey Katz,
260
Musselwhite, Charlie, 238
My Favorite Things, 274
My Funny Valentine, 64
Mystery Train, 213
Mystic Messenger, 289
Nash, Graham, 184
Nashville Sky, 166
Nathan, Syd, 140
Nature Boy, 286
Ndegeocello, Meshell, 142
Nebraska, 121
Nelson, Oliver, 61

Index
Nelson, Ricky, 163, 183,
187
Nelson, Willie, 8, 42,
11923
Neuwirth, Bobby, 164
Neville, Aaron, 54
New England Conservatory
of Music, 259, 262, 285,
293
New Moon Daughter, 266,
269
New Morning, 167
New Orleans Jazz &
Heritage Festival, 160
The New Standard, 84
Newman, Randy, 236, 238
Newport Folk Festival, 94,
115, 175; Dylan and,
15355, 15960
Nichols, Herbie, 28992
Night at the Village
Vanguard, A, 59
Night Owl, 171
The Night They Drove Old
Dixie Down, 210
1913 Massacre, 20
No Whine, 261
North Country Fair, 169
Norwegian Wood, 85
Not Dark Yet, 167
Not Fade Away/Going
Down the Road, 169,
203
Nothing Man, 233
Nowadays Clancy Cant
Even Sing, 180, 183
NSync, 114
Nu Bop, 29293
O Brother Where Art Thou,
2627, 28, 95, 297
Ochs, Phil, 118
OConnor, Flannery, 230
Odetta, 114, 155
Ohio, 184
Okeh, 12
Okie from Muskogee, 187
Ol 55, 236
Oliver, Joe, 1011
On the Corner, 88
On the Outside, 61
One for the Road, 123
One More News, 264
Organs, Hammond B-3,
127, 128
Original Dixieland Jazz
Band, 15
Osborne, Joan, 142
Osby, Greg, 85, 276, 286
Ossman, David, 217, 220
Out of My Mind, 183
Over You, 117
Owens, Buck, 123
Page, Hot Lips, 62
Paglia, Camille, 127
Paley, William, 72

Palmer, Bruce, 180, 181

Paradise Alley, 237
Paranoid Style in American
Politics (Hofstadter), 297
Parisian Thoroughfare, 58
Parker, Charlie, 13, 22, 26,
49, 86, 131, 244;
death/drugs and, 58, 64;
music of, 3940, 45, 52,
56, 62, 81, 87, 88, 129,
142
Parker, Colonel Tom, 140
Parker, William, 292
Parks, Barney, 94
Parks, Gordon, 148
Parks, Rosa, 107
Parry, Millman, 106
Parsons, Gram, 183, 18588
Partch, Harry, 7576, 239
Parton, Dolly, 189
Patton, Charley, 95
Paul Buttereld Blues Band,
154, 17374, 294
Paul, Steve, 17374
Pavorotti, Luciano, 62
Paxton, Tom, 112, 171
Peace Pipe, 289
The Pearl, 185, 191
Peer, Ralph, 26
Pennebaker, D.A., 16364
People Get Ready, 144
Peoples World (newspaper),
21
Percussionists, 39, 43, 47
Percy, Walker, 230, 231
Perez, Danilo, 276
Perfect Machine, 80
Peter, Paul and Mary, 112,
158, 159, 186
Peterson, Oscar, 16
Petrillo, James, 39
Pettiford, Oscar, 45, 57, 142
Phenomenology of Spirit
(Hegel), 7
Philadelphia Lawyer, 20
Pieces of the Sky, 188, 189
Pierce, Bill, 25156
Pilgrim Travelers, 98
Pinball Wizard, 225
Pine, Courtney, 270
Pipe Smoking Time, 25
Pisces, 34
Planet Rock, 286
Planet Waves, 167, 211
Plaxico, Lonnie, 270
Poitier, Sidney, 148
Polanski, Roman, 219
Pollack, Jackson, 87
Pope, Odean, 41
Popular Front, 24
Porco, Mike, 11415
Porter, Cole, 84
Porter, David, 146
Positively Fourth Street,
169
Powell, Bud, 3435, 37,
4546, 49, 56, 70

309

Presley, Elvis, 100, 114, 140,

155, 159, 185
Pretty Girl Why, 183
Price, Alan, 164
Price, Ray, 121
The Prisoner, 26061
Proctor, Phil, 217, 218, 220
Profane, Benny, 199
Projections, 174, 175
The Promised Land, 233
Prove It All Night, 233
Pryor, Richard, 124, 129,
130, 147
Psychopathia Sexualis,
130
Public Enemy, 301
Pure Religion and Bad
Company, 110
Put My Little Shoes Away,
20
Pynchon, Thomas, 135, 193
Queen of Spades, 202
Quine, Robert, 76
Quintet at Massey Hall, 41,
46
Rabbit Foots Minstrels, 53
Rabelais, Franois, 27
Radio stations, 26, 9495;
AM, 155, 179, 194; black,
137; DJs in, 95, 100101,
13940, 284; FM, 172,
177, 184, 194, 220;
KFVD, 20; KPFK, 21920;
Mexico clear channel, 20;
Pacica Radio, 21920;
radio shows on, 21, 25,
22021; WBAI, 114;
WCAU, 97; white, 137;
WLIB, 137;
WSM/Chicago, 27;
WSM/Nashville, 27;
WWRL, 137; XELO, 20
Radion Free Oz, 22021
Rag Mamma Rag, 109,
210
Ragtime Jug Stompers, 113
Rainy Day Women #12 &
35, 167
Ramble on Rose, 203
Ramblin Round, 20
Ramones, 175
Ramsey Lewis Trio, 161
Rangel, Charlie, 41
Rappers Delight, 149
Rascals, 12728, 183
Ray, Nicholas, 25
Read, Piers Paul, 219
Record labels; mobs and, 26,
40; payola and, 13940,
14849
Red Dirt Girl, 190, 191
Red Headed Stranger, 122
Red Onion Jazz Band, 117
Redding, Otis, 135, 145,
163, 201

310

Index

Redman, Don, 11, 52

Redman, Joshua, 49, 248,
254
Rees, David, 299
Reet Petite, 13839
Reeves, Dianne, 273, 276
Reid, Vernon, 76, 149, 266,
294
Reiner, Rob, 215
Reinhardt, Django, 109,
197, 247
REM, 124
Rent Is Always Due, 183
Respect, 136
Reuben James, 19
Reverend Gary Davis, 110
Revolution, 141
Rex Foundation, 194
Reynolds, Malvina, 163
Rich, Buddy, 40, 46
Richards, Keith, 100, 186
Righteous Brothers, 183
The Rising, 229, 23032
Rivers, Larry, 172
Roach, Max, 38, 49, 258;
activism of, 41, 59,
29091; career of, 3741,
57; interview, 4248;
Mingus and, 37, 39, 46
Roberts, Oral, 129, 130
Robertson, Robbie, 166,
2067, 20910, 214
Robeson, Paul, 20, 94
Robey, Don, 98
Robinson, Smokey, 137,
140, 201
Rock, Chris, 129
Rock and Roll Woman,
183
Rocket Shipp, 292
Rockit, 8889, 292
Rodeo, 153
Rodgers, Jimmie, 8, 16, 18,
26, 121, 136, 189, 295
Rodgers, Nile, 149
Rogers, Will, 18, 19
Rojas, Marcus, 282
Roll Em, 34
Roll On, Columbia, 25
Rolling Stones, 61, 100101,
122, 14344, 160
Rollins, Sonny (Theodore
Walter), 3739, 4041,
5152; career/life of,
4963, 73, 77, 87; as jazz
improviser, 49, 84; Max
Roach and, 37, 38, 3941
Roman Catholicism, 35
Romping Through the
Swamp, 117
Ronstadt, Linda, 188, 189,
236
Rosenberg, Ethel, 266
Rosenthal, David, 57
Roses in the Snow, 189
Ross, Diana, 14041, 144,
149
Rotolo, Suze, 15758, 166

Roving Gambler, 153

Ruckus, 264
Rushing, Jimmy, 112
Russell, George, 279
Sacco and Vanzetti, 20
Sacred Hearts and Fallen
Angels: The Gram Parsons
Anthology, 186
Sade, 85
Sahl, Mort, 131, 218
Samson and Delilah, 110
San Antonio Rose, 123
Sanctus, 286
Santamaria, Mongo, 86
Santana, 147
Satchmo (Giddins), 9, 13, 14
Saturday Night Live, 124
Saunders, Merl, 202
Saxophone Colossus, 49, 59
Scarborough Fair, 85
Schuller, Gunther, 3940,
49, 279
Scialfa, Patti, 191, 232
Scoeld, John, 73, 85, 276
Scorsese, Martin, 204,
21213
Scott, Raymond, 260
Season of the Witch, 177
Sebastian, John, 112
Seeger, Charles, 24
Seeger, Pete, 17, 22, 2426,
41, 59; career of, 105,
107, 112, 154, 156, 159
Seeger, Ruth, 24
Segovia, 47
Select Mode 1/2, 292
Self-Evident, 299301
Sesame Street, 19
Sex Pistols, 175
Sexton, Charlie, 169
Shaft, 148
Shake Em Up, 261
Shakespeare, William, 8, 9
Shankar, Ravi, 47
Shape Im In, 212
Sharrock, Sonny, 78
Shaw, Artie, 244
Shaw, Woody, 265
Sheen, Bishop Fulton J., 129
Shelton, Robert, 158
Sherrill, Joya, 247
Shindig, 136, 173, 179
Shipp, Matthew, 85, 29293
Shmenge Brothers, 215
Short Cuts, 237
Shorter, Wayne, 42, 73, 83
Shotgun Willie, 122
Siegel, Jules, 165
Silence of the Lambs, 229
Silver, Horace, 40
Simon and Garfunkel, 29,
85, 115
Simon, Carly, 121
Simon, Paul, 94, 161
Simone, Nina, 292
The Simpsons, 129
Sin City, 187

Sinatra, Frank, 12, 84

Sing Me Back Home, 187
Sing Out!, 107
Sing the Blues, 114
Sister Kate, 117
Sit Down I Think I Love
You, 180
Sitting on Top of the
World, 200
Sketches of Spain, 40, 72
Skin to Skin, 233
Skull and Roses, 202
Slipknot, 20
Slow Train Coming, 167
Slutsky, Alan, 142
Sly and the Family Stone,
83, 141, 147
Smash and Scatteration, 294
Smith, Bessie, 16, 111, 272
Smith, Harry, 1078, 159
Smith, Jimmy, 128
Smith, Kate, 19
Smith, Lonnie, 128
Smithsonian Folkways, 17,
110
Smokey Robinson and the
Miracles, 137
Smothers Brothers Comedy
Hour, 179, 217
So Long, Its Been Good To
Know You, 20
So Many Roads, 205
So Much Shouting So Much
Laughter, 298, 299
The Solo Album, 61
Some Like It Hot, 33
Someone to Watch Over
Me, 122
Something Wild, 229
Somewhere Over the
Rainbow, 123
Somewhere Over the
Rainbow, 53
Son House, 105, 108, 111
A Song for You, 187
Sonny Rollins in Stockholm
1959, 59
The Sorcerer, 83
Soul Stirrers, 95, 98
Soulive, 85
Sound System, 80
Sounes, Howard, 157, 165
Soupy Sales, 143
South Park, 2, 129
Space Shipp, 292
Spare Parts, 226
Spears, Britney, 86, 114
Special Care, 184
Spector, Phil, 128
Spinning Blues into Gold:
The Chess Brothers and
the Legendary Chess
Records (Cahodas),
100102
Springsteen, Bruce, 27, 106,
121, 161, 191; career/life
of, 22334
Spyboy, 189

Index
St. James Inrmary, 117
St. Louis Tickle, 117
St. Thomas, 49, 54, 59
Stage Fright, 212, 213
Standing in the Shadows of
Motown, 142
Standish, Miles, 183
Staples Singers, 202, 213
Stardust, 122
Statesboro Blues, 117
Stax, 135, 14548
Stax-Volt, 206
Stearns, Marshall, 248
Steele, Shelby, 260
Steinbeck, John, 230
Stern, Howard, 125
Stern, Mike, 73
Steve Allen, 132
Stewart, Jim, 146
Stills, Stephen, 177, 180
Stone, Oliver, 246
Stone, Robert, 197
Stone, Sly, 88
Stoppard, Tom, 219
Stormy Weather: The Music
and Lives of a Century of
Jazzwomen (Dahl), 36
Straight No Chaser, 57
Straight Talk, 226
Strange City, 289, 291
Strange Fruit, 20
Strata, 293
Strawberry Alarm Clock,
184
Strayhorn, Billy, 247
Street, Craig, 268, 269
String Cheese Incident, 175
Stubb, Levi, 137
A Study in Brown, 41
Subterranean Homesick
Blues, 162, 16364
Suebonnet Sue, 5455
Sugar Hill, 149
Sugar Hill Gang, 149
Summer of Love, 182, 184,
199, 213
Sun, 155
Supery, 148
Supersessions, 177
Supremes, 13637, 14041
Surrey with the Fringe on
Top, 55
Survivors, 41
Swanee Quintet, 97
Sweet Soul Music (Guralnick), 135, 136
Sweet Sweetbacks
Baadasssss Song, 148
Sweethearts of the Rodeo,
186
Swordshtrombones, 237
Synder, Gary, 205
Take a Whiff on Me, 20
Takin Off, 83
Tallent, Gary, 227
Tangled Up in Blue, 167,
169

Tattoo You, 61
Tatum, Art, 34, 47, 108, 142
Taurus, 34
Taylor, Cecil, 41, 43, 283
Taylor, James, 121
Teagarden, Jack, 14
Tears of Rage, 205, 207
Temptations, 94, 141
Terry, Sonny, 18, 25, 108,
109, 112
Tharpe, Sister Rosetta,
9596
Theme from Hatari, 261
Thief, 123
Thieves in the Temple, 85
This Is Spinal Tap, 215
This Land Is Your Land, 19
This Land Is Your Land,
29, 277
Thomas, Carla, 135
Thomas, Sam, 25455
Thompson, Hunter, 185,
186
Thornhill, Claude, 40,
4546
Thornton, Big Mama, 97
Thornton, Willie Mae, 98
Three Message Movies,
133
Thrill Is Gone, 294
Thunder Road, 226, 230
Tight Like That, 110
Tijuana Jail, 113
Time Out of Mind, 168
Times They Are AChangin, 104, 154, 169
Tin Pan Alley, 11, 54
Tiny Bell Trio, 262
Tiny Tim, 174
Tiptoe Through the
Tulips, 174
To Is a Preposition, Come
Is a Verb, 130
To Kingdom Come, 208
To the Teeth, 301
Tobacco Road, 22
Tom Dooley, 113
Tom Joad, 121
Tombstone Blues, 167
Toot Toot Tootsie, 49, 54
The Tractor, 295
Tragedy, 191
Transition, 289
Traveling Miles, 274
Trumbauer, Frankie, 52
Trying to Get to Heaven,
167
Tubman, Harriet, 20
Tucker, Ira, 94
Turn on Your Light, 201
Turn Turn Turn, 116
Turn Turn Turn Again,
164
Turner, Big Joe, 98, 143, 183
The Tuskegee Experiments,
259
Tutu, 78
Twain, Mark, 21

311

Twelfth Street Rag, 7, 8

Twelve Gates to the City,
110
Two Sides of Dave Van
Ronk, 117
Two Trains Coming, 176
Tynan, Kenneth, 133
Tyner, McCoy, 196
U2, 122
Ulysses (Joyce), 133
Un Poco Loco, 45
Uncle Johns Band, 202
Unfaithful Servant, 210
Unplugged, 16768
Up on Cripple Creek, 210
Updike, John, 126
Uptown String Quartet, 41
Usher, Dave, 102
Vallee, Rudy, 12
Van Ronk, Dave, 11114;
career/life of, 1048,
11418, 172
van Zandt, Steve, 227, 228
Van Zandt, Townes, 120,
122
Vaughan, Sarah, 142, 253,
265, 273
Veloso, Caetano, 275
Velvet Couch, 289
Velvet Underground, 168
Venuti, Joe, 247
Vineland (Pynchon), 135,
193
Vinton, Bobby, 163
Viola Lee Blues, 201
Violets of Dawn, 176
Virgo, 34
Vision of Jazz (Giddins), 148
Wabash Cannonball, 20,
25
Wadleigh, Michael, 213
Waiting on a Friend, 61
Waits, Tom, 23539, 264
Walker, Billy, 121
Walker, Willie, 108
Waller, Fats, 33, 54
Walsh, David, 111, 116
Walton, Cedar, 254
Wanted! The Outlaws, 122
War of the Worlds, 50
Ward, Clara, 95
Ward, Geoffrey C., 244
Warren, Robert Penn, 135
Washington, Dinah, 142
Watermelon Man, 8586
Waters, Ethel, 272
Waters, Muddy, 29, 78,
100101, 174, 176
Waters of March, 276
Watson, Doc, 107
Way Out West, 59
Way Out West, 54
We Insist: Freedom Now!
Suite, 41
We the People, 25

312

Index

Weavers, 29
Webb, Chick, 40, 46, 128,
245
Webb, Jimmy, 275
Weber, Bruce, 67
Weberman, A.J., 157
Webster, Ben, 34, 52, 62
The Weight, 208, 276
Weill, Kurt, 107
Wein, George, 115, 15960
Weinberg, Max, 227
Weir, Bob, 196
Welk, Lawrence, 130, 165
Well Sweep Out the Ashes
in the Morning, 187
Wells, H.G., 50
West 52nd Street, 40, 62, 74
West Side Story, 204
Wexler, Jerry, 102, 143, 266
Wharf Rat, 203
Whatd I Say, 136, 143
Whats Going On, 144
Whats He Building?, 239
Wheels, 187
When I Paint My Masterpiece, 212
When the Saints Go
Marchin In, 20
When the Yanks Go
Marchin In, 20
A Whisper in My Ear, 261
White Album, 184
White, Josh, 17, 23, 25, 34,
110, 111
White, Lulu, 8
White Negroes, 71
Whiteld, Norman, 141
Whitman, Walt, 8, 18, 239
Who Do You Love, 214
Who Needs Forever, 286
Whoa Back Buck, 117
Wholl Buy My Memories,
123

Wichita Lineman, 275,

276
Wicked Messenger, 169
The Wild Thing, 199
Wildwood Flower, 19
Williams, Hank, 159, 164
Williams, Martin, 59
Williams, Mary Lou, 3336
Williams, Ralph, 221
Williams, Robin, 129, 219
Williams, Tony, 39, 4243,
73, 83, 88, 251
Williams, William Carlos,
230
Williamson, Sonny Boy, 200
Willie and Family Live, 123
(Willie Nelson) Sings Kris
Kristofferson, 123
Willie Nelson Special, 119
Willner, Hal, 76
Wills, Bob, 8, 295
Wilson, Cassandra, 85, 149,
248; career/life of, 26567,
27277; interview with,
26772
Wilson, Flip, 129
Wilson, Jackie, 96, 139
Wilson, Matt, 289
Wilson, Nancy, 265
Wilson, Robert, 237
Wilson, Tom, 164, 168
With God on Our Side,
167
Without a Song, 61
Witness, 26263
Wolff, Daniel, 96
Wolfman Jack, 95
Wolleson, Kenny, 296
Woman at Point Zero,
264
Wonder, Stevie, 61, 85
Woodstock: The Movie,
21213

Woody Guthrie (Klein),

2223, 113
Woody Guthrie: The Asch
Recordings Vol. 1-4, 19
Work Song, 176, 294
Workingmans Dead, 202
World Saxophone Quartet,
180
Worlds Apart, 233
The World Is Not My
Home, 21
WPA program, 38
Wrecking Ball, 189
WW I. See World War I
WW II. See World War II
Yardbirds, 172, 181
Yesterdays Wine, 121
Yesternow, 78
You Aint Going
Nowhere, 169
You Dont Know What
Love Is, 59, 268
You Dont Miss Your
Water, 183, 186
You Gotta Move, 275
You Send Me, 96
Young, Faron, 121
Young, Izzy, 114
Young, Lester, 33, 49, 52,
5556, 94
Young, Neil, 180
Your Basic Dave Van Ronk,
117
Zabor, Ra, 258
Zappa, Frank, 128
Zevon, Warren, 236
Zodiac Suite, 34
Zolten, Jerry, 9398
Zorn, John, 76, 237, 262,
278, 294
Zsigmond, Vilmos, 204