Tarfumes

Wright Wronged

from Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor's latest column over at Socialist Worker:

After more than a month of media denunciations and racist abuse, Wright came out swinging. He framed the attacks against him as an attack on the Black church and Black religiosity, pointing to a long list of Black religious figures targeted for media and state vitriol--among them, Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X.

Moreover, Wright continued to challenge the hypocrisy of the U.S. government. He talked about U.S. support for the apartheid regime in South Africa and for the murderous right-wing contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s; he complained about the U.S. government spending billions on the war in Iraq while people are going hungry in the U.S.; he decried the U.S. sending 4,000 "boys and girls to die for a lie"; and he denounced unfair sentencing in drug cases that has resulted in 1 million African Americans being imprisoned.

Media pundits picked out two portions of the question-and-answer segment of his appearance at the National Press Club as the basis for declaring that Wright is racist and paranoid.

First, Wright refused to attack Louis Farrakhan, saying, "Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slavery. And he didn't make me this color."

Second, while the Times claimed Wright accused the U.S. government of creating AIDS, what he actually said was more damning:

Based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything. In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the--one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non-question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people. So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

Finally, Wright refused to back away from statements comparing Israeli treatment of Palestinians as apartheid -- as former President Jimmy Carter has, and anti-apartheid leader Desmond Tutu as well.

Of course, the media are incapable of engaging and debating Wright's ideas. Instead, like petulant brats, they resort to name-calling.
...
The media believe their own constructed and static caricatures of working-class white voters as irredeemably racist and unwilling to vote for a Black man -- even though Obama has gotten literally millions of votes from white workers, and cut into Clinton's massive leads among white voters in both Pennsylvania and Ohio in the days leading up to the primaries.

When the media got word of Wright's speaking engagements, it pre-judged that white Americans would be offended, and then shaped the story in such a way as to make sure they were offended, by couching Wright as a crazy Black racist.

Yet it is the American media that are craven and racist. They have always had a double standard for African Americans or any people of color who denounce racism and injustice in this country. Now, Obama is discovering -- if he didn't know already--that he can run, but can't hide, from race in this country.

As Taylor notes, one of those adding his misinformed voice to the chorus was Chicago Sun-Times columnist/make-believe film "critic" Richard Roeper.  That reminded me of a column he wrote in 1989 coming out swinging against the new Public Enemy single "Welcome To The Terrordome."  One line taken wildly out of context was used to paint them as anti-Semitic, and Roeper enthusiastically jumped on that bandwagon.  One of his main criticisms of the lyrics was their supposed "bad grammar."  I shit you not.  "Bad grammar."  Of course, the racist and sexist overtones (to say nothing of the rampant grammatical errors that apparently induce conniption fits in Roeper) of the Rolling Stones' "Some Girls" and "Brown Sugar" escaped Roeper's notice in his review of Shine A Light.  Must've been a coincidence.

Doing That Scrapyard Thing

What is it about musicians and our frequently auto-related day-jobs?  I don't know.  But Lorenzo Wolff and Garry Tallent and Bruce Springsteen do (from the Holler If Ya Hear Me blog):

Ghosts In The Eyes . . .    

                    

Lorenzo Wolff writes:

So my old Buick Le Sabre broke down a bunch of times coming back from gigs or rehearsals in New York and I decided that it’s time to put the old girl to rest. Me and my Pops go down to the local used car dealership and after looking around for a minute we walk into the office and sit down in front of the salesman. He’s a shorter guy with a goatee that was probably hip five or ten years ago, smoking a chewed up cigar and staring at a computer screen, looking tired and a little unhappy that customers are coming in right when he’s trying to close up. He grudgingly starts to talk about what kind of car I want and I mention that I’m a bass player and I play a giant Hartke bass rig, so the car has got to be pretty big. His eyes light up as he puts down his cigar, smiles at me and asks me to follow him into the back room. Through the door and I see six or seven electric basses and a big electric upright on a stand. He tells me that he spent three years of his life as a session bass player, living on the Lower East Side and paying rent (barely) with money from music, and a day job at a guitar store. He never quite got that big break and had to quit for a job with a little more security. I talk to him for a minute about the things that musicians talk about, what kind of strings he uses and what bands he played with, more out of habit than interest. He tells me about the tour than he went on with his band where Blink 182 opened for him, and how he could have made it, if only the guitar player had been a little bit better. Eventually the talk comes back to cars so he shows me a few and I thank him and I leave.

The next day I go to see Bruce Springsteen play at Nassau Coliseum. The crowd files in and the place is packed, I mean more drunk white old people than I’ve ever seen in one place. I’d never been so conscious of being eighteen in my entire life. It’s the Magic tour, so he’s playing with the E Street Band and they sound great. One look at Bruce and you can tell that this is what he was born to do, and this night is special. Just like every night when you step on a stage is special. But for some reason I can’t seem to enjoy myself like I ought to be. There’s something unsettling about the look on Garry Tallent’s face. He looks like a Vietnam vet tonight. Not that fresh shell shocked look, but that look of someone who’s had to think about the war every night, for thirty years. Thinking about his experiences and the experiences of his friends who were chalked onto the MIA column. I try to shake it off as Thunder Road hits the first pre-chorus. “Woa, Come take my hand, riding out tonight to case the promise land…” but Garry still looks exhausted and haggard. When the second chorus dies down I finally know what I’m feeling. I’m not just seeing Garry up there, I’m seeing all of the other bass players who didn’t make it. The old guys in Asbury Park, working at garages, telling anyone who’ll listen that back in 1973 Bruce Springsteen opened for them. And then the third verse starts, and I can hear Bruce’s voice, explaining it to me:

“There were ghosts in the eyes of all the boys you sent away,
They haunt this dusty beach road and the skeleton frames of burned out Chevrolets”

(Lorenzo Wolff can be reached at lorenzowolff@gmail.com)

I'm playing this Saturday (5/3) at the Red Room in Baltimore (with a set by 'cellist Rachel Gawell); you can see firsthand how a percussionist can benefit from a salvage-yard day-job.  It's increased my sonic palette far more than I thought it could.

So how was that last Barn Owl/ThRiLLpiLLow show?

All I can say about last Thursday's Barn Owl set is that we are the most panini-empowering motherfuckers on the planet.  This particular venue could not have been more ideally suited for our music, and precisely 99.7% of the audience told us so (we have the records, we have the questionnaires, and we have the data to back up our figures and assertions -- you couldn't refute us with an electrified refuting machine on the refutingist day of the year).  Which is why we will be playing there seven days a week from 5pm to closing, starting tomorrow and running through 2017.  This particular set that we played definitely was more on the quiet side, not to be confused with loud (I know, I always get those two confused).   

Petulant Child followed us with one of the better sets I've heard from them.  Their drummer, Rene Maserati (the coolest punk name that's not actually a punk name), is an absolute locomotive.  They didn't let up at all, and just kept hammering away.

ThRiLLpiLLow's set was fairly solid.  Working without a setlist always keeps us on our toes, and that's pretty much how we like it.  We worked in all of our new songs, plus a very special cover which you'll be able to hear at our May 9 record release show at the Elevens.  Our new EP Uh-Oh is done, thanks to the hard work of the incredibly talented Scot Coar over at Sow's Ear Studios.  When we said, "Can we have foot-stomping on this?" he said, "Of course!"  Didn't bat an eye.  AND he had the perfect foot-stomping board.  One of our new songs, "Danz," is on our MySpace page.

Concert Time Machine

My brother and I play this game where we try to think of what concerts we would see if we had access to a time machine.  Initially our choices were derived from concert recordings we were already familiar with (the Who's Live At Leeds, Otis Redding's Live In Europe), and then we realized that that'd be counterproductive; we already know what those concerts sound like.

So we narrowed it down to artists and years...say, the Who in late 1968, or one of the nights Albert Ayler's group with Milford Graves played at Slug's Saloon in 1967, or part of Charles Mingus' stand at the Five Spot in 1964 (but on a different show than the one our dad saw, because that'd be weird to run into him).

While perusing Ebay the other day, I found the destination for which I shall program the time machine's coordinates:

Can't see it?  Look at little closer:

Of course, I'd have to get there late to avoid It's A Beautiful Day.  But still.

"Something is wrong with capitalism as it now stands in the United States. We are not interested in being integrated into this value structure." -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

from the current issue of the International Socialist Review:

On Monday, March 18, King spoke to the sanitation workers for the first time, at the Mason Temple in Memphis. King was exhausted and depressed by his failed attempts to pull together a coalition to get behind the Poor People’s Campaign. The sanitation workers were exhausted and depressed by a strike that was dragging on, and having to endure wave after wave of police brutality and abuse. When these two joined forces, however, they energized each other and gave each other courage to carry on. Fifteen thousand people came out to see King that night.

King told the Biblical story of Dives, who went to hell because he passed Lazarus every day and refused to see his plight. King warned, to raucous applause, “If America does not use her vast resource of wealth to end poverty and make it possible for all of God’s children to have the basic necessities of life, she too is going to hell.” He went on to show how the strike was a part of the new direction the movement needed to take.

With Selma and the voting rights bill one era of our struggle came to a close and a new era came into being. Now our struggle is for genuine equality, which means economic equality. For we know that it isn’t enough to integrate lunch counters. What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn’t earn enough money to buy a hamburger and cup of coffee?

[Going Down Jericho Road author Michael] Honey describes how the intense energy of the situation pushed King to put forward practical ideas about how to carry the struggle forward.

After this high-powered, emotional speech, the issue came down to, What should we do next? Amid cheering and applause, a new level of energy had been created—so much so that King could not end simply with rhetoric. He needed to take the Movement to a higher level. He paused for a moment, and seemed to be thinking out loud. “You know what?” he asked the crowd. “You may be able to escalate the struggle a bit.” Then he dropped the bombshell: “I tell you what you ought to do and you are together here enough to do it: …you ought to…have a general work stoppage in the city of Memphis!” .… Pandemonium broke loose.

So how were those last few Barn Owl shows?

This has been the highest concentration of Barn Owl concerts in years, and possibly ever.  We played at Hampshire College on February 15; in Boston on the 23rd; in Turners Falls, MA, the 27th; and at the wondrous Time Machine Records in Easthampton, MA, on March 15th.

We've gone on many hiatuses (hiati?), and like Mongo, shooting us only makes us mad (and candygrams make us stronger).  So we came into the Hampshire show with the screechy resolve of our namesake, and not a single mouse survived.  Chris Cooper and I sharpened our nerd credentials by making jokes about Yes between sets.  While my rapproachment with Steely Dan was amply detailed here, the details of my similar change of heart with regards to Yes will have to wait (in a nutshell: when they want to swing, which isn't often enough, they can, but the dopey lyrics mean my listening time with them will be limited).  Anyway, the trio of Jack Wright, Andrea Neumann, and Vic Rawlings followed us, and they absolutely killed.  There's an area of music that is, with a straight face, often referred to as "lowercase."  What they played would possibly fit into that genre, except they played it far too convincingly for it to be reduced to fitting into a genre.  They were then followed by Peter Bonos, Phloyd Starpoli, and Neil Young.  They were great too, but I think I preferred Bonos' solo set the week before at the Tavern at Hampshire.  That was the first time in a very long time that I was that knocked-out by a solo trumpet performance that was so effectively and confidently off-putting.

Between that and the next Barn Owl show I had a dream that I was a judge in a "battle of the bands" and that my impartiality nearly got me killed.  Fortunately, it was just a dream; I mean, the idea of encouraging bands in a local scene to "compete" with one another (in the most ill-defined terms) couldn't possibly exist in any kind of reality-based realm, except as satire or farce.  Right?  Once the relief that it was just a dream set in, Barn Owl shot over to Boston for a show at the same loft I played an ill (literally) solo show about a month earlier.  The acoustics were beyond perfect, and I'm not sure what it is about Barn Owl that we seem to be on some kind of streak lately.  I think part of it is that our language has been refined to  such a degree that we recognize said refinement only to the point that we want to explode it.  We went through periods where we decided we would only do certain kinds of songs, or only engage in certain kinds of dynamic shifts, and the overall effect was that we got tired of telling ourselves what we thought we wanted to do.  The various (and sometimes lengthy) hiatuseses I think just enriched our language by forcing us to forget what we did, while our other projects (my solo work, playing in Tizzy and Thrillpillow; Chris' work in Fat Worm of Error, with Bill Nace, and with the BSC; Andy's playing with Jake Meginski and Paul Flaherty) helped deepen our vocabularies, and bring everything we learned back to Barn Owl.

Our Turners Falls show was part of this new Phantom Brain Exchange series started by Neil Young (he's the drummer in Fat Worm of Error).  Sometimes we welcome the challenge of playing in talky bars, and this was one of the louder, more static sets we'd played in years.  And by the end, Andy's bass had been relieved of its strings.  A couple of weeks at Time Machine in Easthampton we went the opposite direction, as we were in a tiny room with an attentive audience (and opening for BJ Snowden).  You know that little crackly, burbly noise you felt at the back of your skull?  Yeah, that was us.  Sorry. 

We will be heading into the studio very soon to make a new record.  It's about that time.  And we're playing on April 3 at the Sierra Grille with Petulant Child and ThRiLLpiLLow.

I Dig Rock And Roll Music

Here's an MP3 of my dad playing alto saxophone in a group with Noel Stookey, aka "Paul" from Peter, Paul & Mary, recorded in a basement in Birmingham, MI, in 1955 or thereabouts.  It originally appeared as a "hidden" bonus track on their 2003 box set Carry It On.  They misspelled his name in the credits and never sent him a promo copy.  Bastards (Warner Brothers, not Peter, Paul & Mary...although I always had it in for them for the monumentally patronizing and wrong-headed "I Dig Rock And Roll Music").  Anyway, I'm going to now start billing myself as "son of Warner Brothers recording artist Mike Weston."

ADDENDUM:  my dad sent me the following details on this recording:

The recording date probably was 1956.  Stookey graduated high school in
1955, a year before I did, and went to Michigan State, where he began
making  a name for him self as a guitarist/singer/comedian.  I think it was
in the summer of '56, just after I had graduated, that we made the record.

The song, performed by "Noel Stookey and his Corsairs," actually made its
"original" appearance on Shadow Records, the name Stookey used when he had
the tape made into a 45 rpm record (of which maybe 50 were cut). "Goodbye
Baby" is the B side; the A side  is "Ivy Covered Castle," another Stookey
original, on which I did not play.  Yet another example of a B side's
making as a surprise hit.  Who knew?

The others on the date were Jim Ewing on bass and Tom Halsted
on drums.

Lives on water, feeds on lightning

ThRiLLpiLLow (the band I play guitar and sometimes sing in) played a few Kinks songs the recent Kinks Night at the Elevens.  One of them was "Picture Book," which my band in high school used to play all the time.  And I mean all the time, because we pretty much only knew three other songs.  But the recently heightened profile of obscure Kinks songs is a little unsettling to me.  It's like if your cat ran away and then suddenly appeared in TV commercials.

I vividly recall the first time I heard "You Really Got Me" when I was seven, and I thought that the backing vocals sounded like Muppets -- bitter, frustrated Muppets, not contended-ass twee Muppets.  But it wasn't until I was 17 that I started investigating the Kinks in earnest.  I'd been unhealthily obsessed with XTC a couple of years earlier, and I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to discern the appeal of their highly-anticipated Oranges and Lemons, only to finally conclude that they had settled into a workaday pattern of Professional Beatlesque Songwriters; they may as well have been writing commercial jingles, which was about the level of depth and insight of their new songs.  Oranges and Lemons also had the unpleasantly unintended effect of revealing the flaws in records of theirs I'd previously found flawless.  I once wrote that "their clever quirkiness was starting to curdle into smarmy cutseyness."  I just wasn't interested in being in on Andy Partridge's in-jokes anymore -- he seemed more interested in trying to convince listeners of his cleverness than in just being clever.  The Kinks filled certain gaps left by XTC, and they represented something far more open and welcoming, but almost secretive; you were invited to their party, but unlike with XTC, the purpose of the party wasn't to make snide comments about the parties you weren't invited to.  The secrecy was heightened by the fact that, in the late 80s, the Kinks couldn't get arrested.  About half of their records were out-of-print (and impossible to even find used), and the current incarnation of the band was busy desperately trying to scale the arena scaffolds that their peers the Rolling Stones and the Who were perched atop.  This meant that, even to the band themselves, those mid-60s records didn't exist; playing long-unavailable fey obscurities to arena audiences wouldn't have helped their standing in that area.  If these records were anachronistic in 1967-69, they were positively invisible in 1989.

My brother had cassette dubs of two of these records, The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society and Arthur (or The Decline and Fall of the British Empire).  I only knew one song between them ("Victoria" from Arthur), but was immediately struck by Village Green's simultaneous delicacy, nastiness (the little guitar-and-drums skirmishes that introduce each chorus of "Do You Remember Walter?"), and swing; as delicate as the songs were, they always swung.   

It took me a couple of years, but I snapped up every Kinks album I could find, thinking that each one had to at least have a couple of songs that could stand proudly with their peak material.  In a few cases, most records only had one such song (Give The People What They Want's "Better Days," State Of Confusion's "Come Dancing," Phobia's "Scattered").  Two records I only listened to once (Soap Opera and Preservation Act 2 -- I don't think I even listened to that last one all the way through).  And one discovery, Sleepwalker, became an obsessive listen.  I still don't entirely know why.  The only song on it that sounded to me like it could have been a holdover from the Village Green era was "Full Moon," and the approach was strictly late-70s LA Studio -- a reverb-free slickness that conflicted nicely with the determined drunkenness of the playing.  It was one of those records that I was lucky to hear when I heard it, and I don't know if I would have had the same reaction if it had hit me at any other time.  I wouldn't necessarily be able to defend it against criticism; I wouldn't necessarily think doing so would matter one way or the other.  I'm not able to be objective about it, nor would I want to be.

Things ended badly between us, though.  The last record of theirs I got was 1978's Misfits, which I bought in 1991.  I more-or-less knew what to expect from it, an AOR approach with the possibility of a decent song or two.  What I didn't expect was racism.  From "Black Messiah":

Everybody talking about racial equality
You hear everybody talking about equal rights
But white's white, black's black, and that's that
And thats the way you should leave it
Dont want no black messiah to come and set the world on fire

That just about killed my interest in them stone dead.  It could be argued that "Black Messiah" was written from the perspective of someone other than Ray Davies; after all, character studies were his stock-in-trade.  But the same could be said about the unrelentingly racist rantings of Axl Rose (in Guns 'N' Roses' "One In A Million") and Lou Reed (on "I Wanna Be Black"), and I'm not prepared to cut either of those two shitheels any slack.  In a way, I felt a certain sense of betrayal (not to mention confusion, as Davies had long talked about making a film about Charles Mingus, who was as outspoken in his anti-racist views as any musician), and I wasn't able to seriously listen to them for years (it was also rumored that they'd played in South Africa during apartheid, but they have strenuously denied this).

Next thing I know, years later, I heard "Picture Book" in an ad for HP Printers, which reminded me that I used to be nuts about them (uh, the Kinks, not HP).  But it's like how I can't really enjoy Seinfeld anymore; knowing what we know about Kramer, it seems tainted.   Adding to the confusion is Davies' recent (and, I have to say, heartening) declaration in Rolling Stone: 

Another reason I wanted to move to New Orleans was to escape Tony Blair.  I'm a socialist, and Labor is not socialist anymore.  The working man is still downtrodden and unheard.  And now they're vanishing.  Blair came in and it became uncool to be working class. ...when you forget your origins -- that's bad.  That's why I don't fit into this culture anymore.  I take the side of the underdog.

I'm still confused, but their great records are still great, and ThRiLLpiLLow was happy to be a part of the tribute.  Being in a room full of Kinks-o-philes was exactly halfway between joyous and bizarre.  The highlights of the evening for me were: Rick Murnane's renditions of "Come Dancing" and "Juke Box Music," bucking the evening's trend of sticking to songs from the 60s ("Juke Box Music" worked surprisingly well with just acoustic guitar and voice); the Novels charging through "Berkeley Mews," complete with barrelhouse piano; School For The Dead using "Waterloo Sunset" as a pair of very stylish, and confident boots; the Fawns playing "Starstruck" and a crashing "I Go To Sleep"; JC Hammer bravely tackling "Australia"; Ella Longpre's stunning "Sitting By The Riverside," with just voice and glockenspiel; and Sitting Next To Brian's "Too Much On My Mind," one of my all-time favorites, done expertly.

And now I'm going to Princeton, New Jersey, to play a solo percussion + electronics concert.  See you tomorrow.

OK, please stop talking now.

This is excerpted from a review I decided not to post, of one of the most disappointing records I've ever heard.  Arrg.
=======

There are but a handful of instances in which recitation in music really works -- just off the top of my head: Marvin Gaye's "Save The Children," the Shangri-Las "Leader Of The Pack," Jacques Coursil's Clameurs, and Bill Dixon's "Letters To Myself: Round Up The Usual Suspects."  The recitation on this particular record, though, is some of the most laughably pretentious twaddle I've ever heard by anyone in any area of music, ever.  When it began I literally said out loud, "You have GOT to be kidding me."  It reads like some high-school stoner's essay on Pink Floyd, missing the essence of the music so broadly that it comes off as satire (I'm still not 100% convinced that it's not meant to be a joke).  It spells out that which should never be spelled out.  You know in The King Of Comedy where Jerry Lewis tells Robert DeNiro's character, "You don't say, 'Folks, here's the punchline.'  You just do the punchline"?  This is like the lengthiest and most patronizing explanation of the worst joke you ever heard.

Radio City

On stage at Radio City Music Hall

Huh?