My Tears Dry on Their Own

2011, Age 39. "Back to Black," by Amy Winehouse, from the album of the same name.

It would probably be difficult to overstate my love for Amy Winehouse.

I first heard her thanks to a free download on iTunes. The song was "You Know I'm No Good." I was so taken aback by the record. I couldn't believe something this soulful, this melodic, this groovy was coming out in 2007. The production was good. There were horns. The sound was so warm, it sounded like vinyl. And then there was her voice.

She sounded to me like Ronnie Spector with a British accent, and I hadn't seen her picture yet. I bought the CD as soon as it was available. Then I went looking for her back catalog only to find that this was just her second record and that her first, Frank, wasn't available in the U.S. Ebay searches revealed that people were paying $35 or more for a copy. I lucked out and got a copy at a record store in Austin while visiting my friends, Steve and Michelle. I also bought the B-sides of both of those records. And downloaded her cover of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?" from iTunes. And several acoustic/alternate versions of songs.

I read cover stories about her in Rolling Stone and Mojo. I watched a Biography special about her. I played her records in my class. I played her for others, like my friend Kenya, until they were hooked, too. I accompanied one of my students singing "Love is a Losing Game" at our jazz cafe at school. I was a fan. I have even blogged about her previously.

Like all of her fans, I followed her tumultuous personal life through the media. It saddened me, but somehow I knew that this was part-and-parcel of her art, too.

I know there are those who reject this sort of thinking and are even angered by it. I will also add that I don't wish to romanticize her addictions and depression, nor suggest that these should be imitated by those hoping to achieve greatness. But you can hear it in her voice. There is very real pain coming through every note of that album. When people talk about soul, I think that is what they are hearing. It may not be necessary to be going through emotional turmoil while singing, but having that deep psychic well to draw from is an unquestionable artistic advantage.

This seems self-evident to me, however politically incorrect it is. Charlie Parker's genius, while perhaps not reliant on his turbulent inner life, was undoubtedly facilitated by it. I've heard countless musicians say, "Imagine what Bird might have done if he weren't on heroin," but the truth is, we don't know. While there have been many notable exceptions, one cannot look at music history without being struck by the many instances of depression and substance abuse.

I'm reading a good book right now called Touched by Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison. It's about instances of manic depression among artists and why bi-polar disorder seems to be such a frequent occurrence among that group. Jamison speculates that the emotional sensitivity that accompanies depression in its various forms is of real value to the artist. If there is also an attendant mania, the artist is able to tap into both the dark and light sides of her nature and work feverishly at times to produce works of exceptional beauty and power. To return to Bird as an example, it seems unthinkable that his legendary 16-hour practice days might have happened apart from a real mania.

Jamison also discusses the tendency of those who live with manic-depression to violate social mores and live on the edge of the culture. We love rock stars for this. When Cee-Lo sings, "My heroes had the heart to live their lives out on the limb," he is echoing something many of us feel. They take risks that many of us can't or won't. We secretly envy so much of their outrageous behavior and wonder if meeting Old Nick down by the crossroads might really be worth it after all. Drunken nights of debauchery and lost years are the stuff of rock legend. Winehouse certainly had that going for her and a great rock image to boot, covered in tattoos, beehive hairdo, cat-eye make-up and playing guitar.

I've speculated for some time about the issue of substance abuse among artists and I think that it is an under-discussed topic. Suggesting that it's only a physiological issue ignores what many of us know first hand. Creating art, especially performing, requires the artist to bring something deeply personal to the surface for everyone to see. This doesn't seem so hard when you are 17 and full of piss. But as you get older, your internal dialog begins to disrupt you, first saying things like, "Don't forget to use the forked F-sharp fingering in this passage." Then he grows more malevolent: "Everyone is embarrassed for you. They feel sorry for you. You should stop playing." Drinking makes that inner man shut up and lets you connect to your performance the way you used to, back when you were cocksure and the world was your oyster.

Apart from that, it's probably the way a lot of artists deal with depression. Amy Winehouse was famous for her alcoholism, but as she said, “I’m manic depressive. I’m not an alcoholic, which sounds like an alcoholic in denial.” You can hear this in her songwriting. "I don't ever wanna drink again, ooh, I just need a friend," she moans in "Rehab," the most notorious song from the album. But the album is thick with this insight into a very painful existence.

Her knowing self-deprecation in "You Know I'm No Good," is alluring as it is distressing to hear, the cheater rather than the cheated begging for a lover to stay, without asking or expecting forgiveness. "Love is a Losing Game" is at turns crass ("Five-story fire as you came") and grandiose ("Over futile odds and laughed at by the gods"). (This one has been my favorite for the last couple of years. Go look for the version with just Amy singing to Fender Rhodes accompaniment. As delightful as Mark Ronson's production is, with its Spectorish wall of sound throughout, this version is perfect and stripped to essentials.) "Tears Dry on Their Own" begins with arguably the best lyric on the album: "All I can ever be to you is the darkness that we knew, and this regret I got accustomed to."

It would be difficult to explain why I identify so closely with these songs. There are certainly elements in the songs that speak to my experience, though not many (although I always smile when she sings to her would-be rehabilitators, "There is nothing you can teach me that I can't learn from Mr. Hathaway.") When I'm going through my own "black" times, I listen to her album a lot.

It just so happens that I've been listening to it a lot this summer, for reasons that I won't go into here. I was eating lunch in Morgantown when I heard she was dead.

I almost wrote, "when I heard that she died," but that makes it sound like something that happened to her. Her death was certainly at her own hand, in one fashion or another. It struck me very hard, but of course, I was not surprised.

My grief at her death is two-fold. I'll go ahead and confess that it was, at first, a selfish grief. I was so upset that we would be hearing no more from this voice. I had been waiting anxiously for her next record and now it wasn't coming. The disease that gave her to us turned and killed her, just as it had other members of the "27 Club," along with Bird and Donny Hathaway, too.

Then I just grieved for her and what her life must have been. I know a bit about depression and have close friends who deal with it daily. Being a musician, it seems I know more than a handful, including many who have spent days and weeks crippled in a hospital, wrestling with their demons. And I've known a few, musicians and otherwise, who ended life at their own hands, whether intentionally or not. I felt like I understood something about what she went through and that type of emotional pain. I listened to her songs over and over again. And I cried. More than once.

Certainly there are more tragic deaths than Amy Winehouse's. I hope no one would infer than I find the death of a celebrity more heart-breaking than that of a soldier or any one of the thousands of children who die senselessly in our world every day due to war or hunger. But her death resonated with me particularly because it seemed itself representative of the pain of this life. I cried for her because she was able to express that for so many of us. As she sang in the title song from Back to Black, "I died a hundred times." Maybe this last time will be enough.

Drink Your Big Black Cow and Get Out of Here

1990, Age 18. "Deacon Blues," from Aja, by Steely Dan.

My friend Noelle hates Steely Dan. I just learned this yesterday.

"The Dan" are one of those acts I have been waiting to hear in concert for years. They have never played West Virginia and I found out last May that they were playing at the Clay Center - literally within walking distance from my house. Exciting stuff.

I've been a fan since I was 18. This was some years after they were popular, of course, as kings of the FM dial. I knew a few of their songs, maybe, but had never really paid attention to them until my freshman year of college.

I was a saxophone major in a studio that was incredibly talented and pretty tight. Our freshman class was good, but we were in awe of the upper classmen. They had serious chops. Scott Gumina. Bob Maxon. Scott Brockmeyer. Marty Ojeda. These dudes were serious bad-asses in our opinion.

We practiced all the time. If you went into the bowels of the CAC anytime, day or night, you could hear saxophones. Scales. Patterns. Ferling etudes. Bach suites. French recital pieces. Mouthpiece exercises. The Omnibook. Transcriptions of Coltrane, Dexter, Sonny Rollins. New music. Lots of new music, some of it too weird for other studios, but we played it all.

And these dudes had ears. Ears like you wouldn't believe. You could play drop the needle and they'd tell you in three seconds if were Bird or Sonny Stitt. Hell, they could tell you if it were Marcel Mule or Sigurd Rascher. They were some obscure motherfuckers. Bob Maxon had perfect pitch, the first person I ever met who did, but they could all hear. They taught me how to listen.

They taught me a lot actually. I once asked Scott Brockmeyer what his practice routine was and he said, "First, I get a case of beer. Then I go up in my room and get out my horn. Then I practice and drink and when I can't feel my fingers, I stop." Good ol' Brock.

Listening was a big deal. You were expected to listen twice as much as you practiced and you were expected to practice a lot. Thursday night was masterclass with David Hastings and Curtis Johnson, our professors, and still two of the most incredible teachers and musicians I have ever met. Unlike other masterclasses, ours weren't always about critiquing other players. Some nights, Hastings would come in with some book he was reading about art or education or something and just read passages to us and ask us what we thought. Some nights, we'd just listen to music. Those nights were the best.

After masterclass, some players would stay and practice. Sometimes there'd be a recital to attend or maybe someone had a gig downtown. Or, we'd just head to someone's apartment and put on records and listen for hours. I was introduced to some great music on those nights. Coltrane's My Favorite Things. Tenor Madness. The Brecker Brothers' Heavy Metal Bebop. Anthony Braxton playing all kinds of out shit. Ornette's Free Jazz. Wayne Shorter's JuJu.

They were some esoteric cats, too. They would do some out kind of things on occasion. At least, it seemed out to me at the time. In retrospect, I think they were just having fun.

One day in my first spring in Morgantown, I was down in a practice room playing tenor. I didn't have an alto yet. I was probably working on some Ferling etude at something like 1/4 speed, because I had crap technique compared to everyone else in studio. Then I hear someone banging on my door. It was Marty Ojeda.

Marty was a cool dude. He was also from Logan County, which I have to admit did not jive with my idea of a cool dude. In my mind, Logan County residents were hillbillies. The problem with my idea was that it didn't hold water when I met Marty. He had serious chops. And serious ears. He was first chair in the Wind Symphony and lead tenor in Jazz Ensemble I (I think. This was all some years ago.) He was a great player. He sounded like Lenny Pickett. I just learned who Lenny Pickett was that year. So, Marty was banging on my practice room door. I opened it.

"You wanna go fly a kite?"

" . . . what?"

"You wanna go fly a kite?"

"Uh. Sure. Let me put up my horn."

Now, this was not the type of invitation I was accustomed to getting. I don't think I had flown a kite since I was ten. But when a senior saxophone major asks you, a freshman saxophone major, if you want to go fly a kite, you accept. I thought it might be some sort of "Zen and the Art of Kite Flying"-type of exercise which might have applicability to my playing.

So, I put up my horn and got in Marty's car. We drove across the street to the Coliseum parking lot to fly our kites. I can't remember what kind of car he had, but I remember being duly unimpressed. He did have a cassette player. Steely Dan was playing.

"You like the Dan, man?"

"Who?"

"Steely Dan! You like Steely Dan?"

"I don't know who that is?"

"What?! You've never heard of Steely Dan? They did 'Reeling in the Years.'" He sang a few bars. I remembered that one. "They are musicians' musicians. All good musicians like Steely Dan."

That was enough for me. I took him at his word. I started buying Steely Dan records, which in 1990 was easy enough. It seemed that everyone was getting rid of their vinyl that year and everyone was getting rid of their Steely Dan. The first record I bought was Aja at the Princeton Record Exchange in New Jersey. I paid $1.00. Wayne Shorter plays on the record. Wayne Shorter, who played with Miles and co-founded Weather Report. I bought them all eventually. I own the entire SD discography and I can honestly say that I think every single record is great, even The Royal Scam.

I've learned over the years that not everyone likes Mssrs. Becker and Fagan. I remember some lame George Carlin bit about how he hated people who had "Baby on Board" stickers on their cars. "Are these the same people who listen to Steely Dan?" he asked. I never thought that asshole was funny.

They've been blamed for a lot, including inspiring young rock and rollers to invent punk music in protest to the slick production and complex harmonies evident on most SD records. No doubt about it: it's music for people who like to listen. I don't mean that as a criticism of anyone. I certainly don't mean that if you like to listen you must like Steely Dan. I just mean that they require some attention to really appreciate.

The music itself is the main thing. They riff on standard forms of course - Fagan and Becker had fantasies of being Brille Building tunesmiths. But they play with them. "Bodhisattva" sounds like it's going to be a 12-bar blues shuffle, but has this fun extended turn-around. Nothing too crazy. And a lot of the tunes push radio time limits. This was definitely a band for album-oriented rock, or rather album-oriented jazz-rock. The harmonies are fun for anyone who plays jazz. A little modal, some typical substitutions, the infamous "Mu major chord" (essentially an add 9 major triad voiced in a particular way).

The lyrics keep me coming back, too. I was probably listening for years before I even knew all the lyrics to one song. I once got into an argument with a friend who insisted that the refrain on "Hey Nineteen" went, "Look where they go, the fine tooth numbing-uh . . . " Honestly, with Steely Dan, I wouldn't be surprised if those were the lyrics. Songs about incest, pedophiles, porn, prostitutes, California drug kingpins, upper Manhattan cougars (before they were called that), alcoholics, Moonies and Charlie Parker. They favored the American underbelly for song topics, but what could you expect from a band named for a fictional dildo imagined by William Burroughs? You will not find, "I'm down on my knees, I'm beggin' you please," in the SD oeuvre.

I dig a lot of the songs. Some of them speak to me a lot more now that I'm older. Sometimes I like music that makes me feel young, but sometimes I like music that acknowledges that I have been around a bit. I've seen some things and not all of them are good. I'm even responsible for some of them. These are songs for losers and I can really dig that some days. "Deacon Blues" is easily my favorite:

They got a name for the winners in the world, I wanna name when I lose.

They call Alabama the Crimson tide . . . call me 'Deacon Blues.'

I connect a lot more to that music at 39 than I did at 18. Things are different. I'm more broken and more familiar with that dark side of life. Everyone I knew when I was 18 is different, too. David Hastings and Curtis Johnson have left WVU, just like all of us. Brock is dead. Marty Ojeda is back in Logan County, after spending years gigging in Nashville. He's a band director down there. He missed the concert last night, partly because he had band camp. And I'm . . . whatever I am.

I feel like that a lot these days. I did yesterday, thinking about going to the concert. I spent the day posting lyrics to my Facebook. Those lyrics bring out Dan-haters, and I know a lot of them. Noelle told me that Donald Fagen has no sense of humor and that having good players on your record does not make a band good. That's okay. Noelle is good people and a good musician, too. My friend John's wife tolerates all of his musical forerays (this is a man who is as likely to put on Burt Bacharach, the Louvin Brothers or Coltrane's Ascension), but will leave the room if he puts Steely Dan on the turntable.

Those lyrics bring out the SD fans, too. My friend Mark may be as big of a fan as I am. We've traded thoughts about the music and favorite lyrics. We even talked about getting together and writing some music a la Fagan and Becker one of these days. Maybe we will, if I ever learn to work the saxophone . . . play just what I feel . . .

My Desert Island Jukebox

1983, Age 11. "Overkill," by Men at Work, from Cargo.

I'm a regular listener to several music podcasts. One of my favorites is from Chicago Public Radio, Sound Opinions. The hosts, Jim DeRegotis and Greg Kot, write about pop music for the Chicago papers. Like most rock critics, they suffer from occasional pomposity and seem to favor a lot of tuneless indie rock (the type I wrote about here), but it's fun listening to them. Also like most rock journalists, and critics in general, they never tire of making lists, a weakness I share. One of my favorite occasional features of theirs is the Desert Island Jukebox, where they take turns adding single tracks to a hypothetical . . . well, I don't really need to explain that, do I?

The charm of the conceit is that they don't have to commit to entire albums. We've all played the game at parties (or on Facebook) about your Top Five Desert Island Records. I've given mine several times and while the list changes slightly from month to month, there are no real surprises there: John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, Pablo Casals' recordings of the Bach cello suites, Aja by Steely Dan, the last set of master takes of Charlie Parker with Strings, and Songs in the Key of Life would probably go in the steamer trunk if I had to pack right now. (I know there's no country/bluegrass/old-time on the list, but I'm not sure I want to listen to "There's a Tear in My Beer," until the Professor can rig those palm trees into a raft.) The game has gotten sillier since Apple has announced the new 42 Bijillion Gig iPod the size of a nickel. Let me take my iPod and no phone and I'll sign up for the desert island excursion right now. But back when we had to limit ourselves to five albums, it could be a tough call. I mean, I love Pet Sounds, but I couldn't hum the melody to "Let's Go Away for Awhile" right now. Could I really afford to use up that vinyl real estate for a less-than-memorable track?

The "Desert Island Jukebox" anticipated the type of listening many of us now do on our iPods. I have all kinds of single tracks by artists whose entire opus I neither know nor particularly care to know. I also find myself listening to playlists almost as often as albums. I've never become a big fan of the shuffle mode, but I have friends who only listen to their iPods on shuffle. The other thing is that it doesn't really limit your choices. Just like our iPods, jukeboxes come in all sorts of sizes, but they all hold a bunch of songs.

So I thought I'd share a "Desert Island Jukebox List" with anyone who cares to read. I've set just a few guidelines for myself.

First, the tracks on this list are ones that I don't associate with their albums. For example, "Wanna Be Startin' Something" is a great song that is probably on five playlists I've made in the last year, but I listen to Thriller from start to finish fairly frequently, so it's a no-go. Likewise, you won't find "Eleanor Rigby," "Just Like a Woman," "If I Was Your Girlfriend," or "Just the Two of Us" on this list either. I would highly recommend, however, you go immediately listen to Revolver, Blonde on Blonde, Sign o' the Times, and Winelight, if these have inexplicably escaped your notice.

Second, this is not a "best of" type of list. It's a jukebox - no need to figure out for our purposes here which are the best five or ten or twenty-five tunes. In the interest of keeping this blog to something like a reasonable list though, I'm going to limit it to ten selections. Not the best ten, mind you, just ten totally listenable tracks that I wouldn't mind listening to while I wait for some stray aircraft to notice the "SOS" I've scratched in the sand.

Last, and related to the previous point, I thought I'd use this as an opportunity to talk about a few favorites that I probably can't fit into any other posts. I'm not going to limit myself to also-rans and one-hit-wonders, but honestly, when will I get another chance to write about Hurricane Smith?

Enough with the rules. Here's the list. And yeah, I'd love for you to add a tune or two in the comments.

"Oh Babe, What Would You Say?" by Hurricane Smith. I heard this song first sung by my oldest brother when I was very small; I actually thought he made it up. I heard the original recording about three years ago for the first time and can say that my brother gave a very faithful rendering of the the vocal, though I hadn't imagined the strings. The saxophone solo sounds like it could have been played by Zoot, from the Muppets (that's a compliment, by the way). Smith was actually Norman Smith, who had engineered The Beatles' early records for EMI and produced the first few albums for Pink Floyd. This song was #3 on the pop charts in the U.S. in 1972 and Smith's biggest hit. To me, it sounds like English dance hall music and demonstrates Nick Hornby's premise that British kids never really rebelled against their parent's music

"Brown-Eyed Handsome Man" by Chuck Berry. One need not justify including a song by Chuck Berry in the desert island juke box, I suppose, but this may seem like an odd choice. Like most Berry classics, this one just rocks and rollicks, but the words really send me. The sly play on racial tensions of the time, including fears that white women would be attracted to black men, are subversive yet fun. The verse about Venus de Milo losing her arms in a wrestling match makes me smile every time.

"Que Sera Sera" by Pink Martini. Have you ever heard a song that you've known your entire life covered by someone new in a fresh way and it made you finally realize what the songwriter intended to say? For most of us, I can imagine that Doris Day's original just sounds like a bright bachelor-pad waltz; you can almost taste the champagne cocktails. Pink Martini's rendition is melancholy, perhaps even a little bitter. The instrumentation - which shimmers at first, then bellows, then shimmers again - coupled with the pedal tones through the verses give a creepy edge. This is music to drive children to alcohol.

"All the Young Dudes" by Mott the Hoople. David Bowie's gift to Mott was their biggest charting hit and became an anthem for the glam-rock era. The song takes swipes at the peace-love generation and their idealism and has more than a just a dark tone to it. I dig the guitar intro especially and it has one of the best rock lyrics of all time, in my opinion: "Television man is crazy, says we're juvenile delinquent wrecks. Ah man, [why do] I need t.v. when I got T. Rex?"

"Game Is My Middle Name" by Betty Davis. Somewhere between Prince, Macy Gray, Sly Stone & Lady GaGa, Betty Davis was one of the wildest wild children of funk. Mrs. Davis, née Mabry, was Miles' one-time wife and a New York fashion model. She was the cover girl for her husband's Filles de Kilimanjaro and even lent her name to one of the tunes, but her eponymous debut album is gritty, dirty funk. Davis was noted for her sexual bravado, as in this track, and her outrageous style. Her voice is gravely. Her delivery is almost conversational, but fierce. She's not the best singer, but that doesn't make her any less compelling as a performer. The band of studio musicians includes Neil Schon, later of Journey, who acquits himself nicely in the company of musicians from Sly & The Family Stone, Graham Central Station, and Tower of Power.

"If I Were Your Woman" by Gladys Knight & The Pips. It's difficult to say what makes this song so compelling to me. The theme is a well-worn, though universal, sentiment; the lyric is obvious ("Life is so crazy, love is unkind"). Even the melody, which is fine, is not particularly memorable. But Gladys' vocal is striking. When she sets to pleading, you can hear all the heartbreak, all the anguish. Alicia Keys re-made the ballad years later (released as "If I Was Your Woman") on her sophomore album The Diary of Alicia Keys paired with "Walk On By." While Keys does an admirable job, the best thing about her version is that it points listeners back to one of soul's most important singers. This is my favorite pop ballad of unrequited love.

"I Guess That's Why They Call It the Blues" by Elton John. Let me start by saying that I am not an Elton John fan. I think "Benny & The Jets" is just plain silly and when I hear "Candle in the Wind" it makes me want to stalk and kill celebrities. Having said that, I love this song. Like, play-it-five-times-in-a-row love. Like, sing-along-loudly-even-when-people-can-hear-me love. "Dust out the demons inside" - what a great line! And when he gets to "Rollin' like thunder - under the covers" I like to add a little extra growl on the word "rollin'" (just ask for a rendition next time you see me). Great melody with classic chord changes and a lyric that is mercifully not sentimental ("Between you and me, I can honestly say that things can only get better"). I'm surprised I've not heard a cover of this one.

"Overkill" by Colin Hay. Like "Que Sera Sera," I heard this song for years before I even thought about it. It took Colin Hay, the lead singer of Men at Work, remaking his own song before I gave it a second listen. This version, recorded for the television show Scrubs, is pared down to acoustic guitar and Hays voice. Maybe stripping away those layers of production highlights the angsty lyric. Maybe Hay's delivery is just more reflective, informed as it is by 20+ more years of experience. Or maybe it's just my own ears that are ready to hear what he's saying. I get hooked from that very first scale ("I can't get to sleep") and when he finally begins the final verse, sung an octave higher than the first two, all my own anxieties are ready to make my heart burst.

"All I Could Do Was Cry" by Etta James. There are just so many songs of this era that are neither offensive nor memorable for any real reason, and taken by itself, this is one of them. Or, it would be if Etta James wasn't singing it. Like "If I Were Your Woman," this ballad tells the story of one woman's love for a taken man, only in this one she . . . wait, can you guess? Etta is BRILLIANT and this is another I occasionally listen to several times in a row. I would take this one to a desert island just to hear the way she sings the word "rice." Good, good stuff.

"Show Me Your Teeth" by Lady GaGa. I had to include something new to play while I wait for Hurley to get back from the bunker with dinner. I must confess that I'm not entirely sure what this song is even about. Well, it's about sex, I got that much. Like, something kind of dirty even. But beyond that, I'm not so sure. Like most of GaGa's output, it's hooky and completely danceable. It's also a little scary. The spoken intro ("Don't be scared. I've done this before.") reminds me of Prince's "Computer Blue," and the hook ("Take a bite of my bad girl meat") hits pretty high on the freak scale. Lots of people can do dirty though. GaGa makes it groove hard.

There's my first installment. Care to put in a quarter and pick a tune?

John Holmes, King of the Delta Open Mic

(Originally published July 8, 2009)


1985, Age 13. “Voodoo Child,” by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, from Electric Ladyland.


Once in a while, as a listener, you have those experiences that help crystallize your love of music. Sometimes they happen when you are listening to a record, but more often, it seems, they happen while you are listening to someone create music live. Philosophers in music education refer to these as "peak experiences" and they believe that these are central in creating a real love of music in the listener or performer.


I have had many of these in the course of my life and I would guess that you have, too, especially if you are anything other than a casual fan of music. My first peak experiences with live music probably happened at church, though I don't really remember. I can remember a very important formative experience playing with the marching band for the very first time in 7th grade. I'm sure that our musicianship was far from flawless, yet it had a deep emotional impact with me. That's one of the interesting things about music. You can listen to a technically flawless performance sometimes and be left cold, while inexpert renditions can, on occasion, be intensely moving. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s true.


I guess that most of the vacations I take are in search of these peak musical experiences. They tend to be quite successful, which is why I keep coming back for more. Some of the most memorable over the years include hearing a “cultural troop” perform on Aran Isle, watching Carmen in Prague, and several shows by the Soul Rebels in New Orleans. My most recent vacation has certainly been focused on this search. We arrived by plane in New Orleans, then drove to Memphis and back, traveling through the Mississippi Delta on renowned Highway 61, including a one night stay in Clarksdale, MS. On this trip, we heard funky brass music in New Orleans (including the Soul Rebels and Big Sam’s Funky Nation); blues on Memphis’ Beale St. and in Clarksdale; New Orleans’ blues legend Little Freddie King; and performances at the Essence music festival by John Legend, Salt N Pepa, En Vogue, Beyoncé, Teena Marie and Al Green. It has been an exceptional time listening to music.


Sometimes the most memorable moments are quite unexpected. You go into a club or stop by some street performers not expecting much and you get totally blown away. Or maybe you just see something really surprising, but the effect is the same. I had one of those moments on this trip. If you stop in Clarksdale, MS, there might not appear to be much going on. It’s a slow-moving Delta town with a population under 20,000. There are no crowds downtown. Most of the town, in fact, seems to be a museum to the music that was born here. You can visit the birthplaces of Ike Turner, Sam Cooke and W.C. Handy. You can see the spot where Muddy Waters was “discovered” in 1943. You can drive by (or even stay) at the hotel where Bessie Smith died after a car accident (Ike Turner supposedly rehearsed the seminal rock-and-roll song “Rocket 88” in the basement of the hotel before going to Sam Phillips’ studio in Memphis to record it). Then there is the infamous crossroads of Highways 61 and 49, where Robert Johnson supposedly sold his soul to the Devil (it’s actually Highway 161 now, but does that really matter?). And no visit would be complete without a stop at the Delta Blues Museum, which houses the cabin Muddy Waters lived in on Stovall Plantation, along with lots of other blues paraphernalia.


If you want to be close to downtown, there aren’t many options about where to spend the night. Most of the chain hotels lie on the highway outside of town. One option you have is to spend the night at Ground Zero Blues Club. Ground Zero is a club owned by Morgan Freeman and it looks like a more authentic version of House of Blues. The building itself is a former cotton house and the word that most readily comes to mind when you see it is “ramshackle.” They have apartments above the club that you can rent nightly, which are really convenient if you don’t want to risk a post-midnight trip by the crossroads after the club closes. We stayed there on a Thursday night, which is especially convenient as the club has about the only show in town on most Thursdays. The night we were there, they were hosting an open mic, emceed by one “Razorblade,” a Clarksdale resident who came complete with pin-stripe suit, pork-pie hat and two-tone shoes. He sang a full set with the house band (all of whom seemed like they might attend Clarksdale High School). As the club gradually filled to near-capacity of about 150, we heard not just blues, but soul, country, southern rock – the whole fare from the region. Several of the performers seemed like “characters,” not just Razorblade. There was the enormous cowboy in a black hat who sang Alan Jackson songs. There was an older British man who was doing his very best to look and sound like Eric Clapton. There was a man named Tater who sang in a manner very reminiscent of Clark Terry’s “Mumbles,” though after hearing him speak afterward, it was apparent that that was his normal diction. Then there was John Holmes.


We had noticed this man earlier, maybe just a little younger than us, making his way around the club with a sort-of gimpy shuffle, not so much a gangster lean as a grandpa in house slippers. He had long hair which was pulled back into a bun (!), two-tone shoes (apparently the most popular footwear in Clarksdale), khaki pants and a greenish-yellow long sleeve shirt. He also kept the earbuds of his iPod in his ears, even as the band played. After the first break, he made his way to the stage; he was apparently the first name on the open mic sign-up. The first real sign of something going on was when he asked the sound man to tune his guitar for him.


When the break was over, Razorblade mounted the stage, took the microphone and said, “We’re gonna let this gentleman play for you – for just a little while. Maybe five minutes. Please welcome: John.” I suppose I thought this was an unusual way to introduce him, but then I guessed that perhaps there was a five minute limit on each of the performers. After that introduction, the man removed the earbuds from his ears, took his red Ibanez electric in hand and walked to the microphone.


“Some people call me selfish,” he said with a smile. “Some people call me strange. Some people call me ‘Mr. Holmes.’ Other people don’t call me at all.” I began to sense that we were in for something really special. “If you think I suck,” he continued, “just watch my muscles flex.”


At this point, John Holmes took off his dress shirt to reveal a gray undershirt of the “wife-beater” variety. His biceps and forearms were tattooed and he was indeed, rather muscular. He hung the shirt on the back of a chair placed center-stage and then sat in the chair. Though the other performers of the night would opt to perform with the house band, John would be performing solo.


When he began playing, it was without any discernible sense of pulse. The guitar’s tone was cleaner than is typical for electric blues and Mr. Holmes’ technique was not what one would call “practiced.” Upon hearing him, in fact, one might have guessed that he had been playing for about one week, practicing maybe twenty minutes a day. He wandered around the fret board of the instrument, through several keys, executing patterns that seemed familiar to neither the audience nor the performer. There were no scales, no arpeggios, no familiar blues licks that every adolescent guitarist learns within an hour of first touching the instrument. At one point during the improvisation, for I am assuming that is what it was, there was a very brief quote of the lead riff from “Voodoo Child,” inexpertly executed but clearly discernible, the only real suggestion that the guitarist had even a passing familiarity with the blues canon. John Holmes continued in this manner for perhaps three minutes, ending as inauspiciously as he had begun, concluding with neither a grand pause nor a cadence typical of any known style of music.


What was most striking about the performance, however, indeed the thing that rescued it from being anything other than a bizarre joke, was John Holmes’ utter dedication as a performer. It was clear that however strange his phrasing, however unusual his melodic choices, he was committed to this moment. One could easily imagine that this was, perhaps, an exercise by a Zen master who was dedicated to unlearning what he had known about music. Far from another studied and predictable rendition of “Mustang Sally,” Mr. Holmes played with a freshness and exuberance that one hears on Muddy Waters’ early recordings done on Stovall Plantation. He kept his eyes closed throughout and bobbed his head in accompaniment to the guitar.


When he had concluded, applause rippled through the room, from politeness or habit it was difficult to tell, and John Holmes walked again to the microphone.


“I’m sorry if I wasted your precious time, I’ll give it right back to you one of these days,” he said, misquoting Hendrix for the second time that evening.


“One more thing,” John Holmes said as he looked out again with that mischievous smile.


“Rick Springfield – eat your heart out!”


Eat your heart out, indeed.

What Is Hip?

(Originally published June 6, 2009)


1995, Age 23. “What Is Hip?” by Tower of Power, from the album Tower of Power.


Let’s begin with first principles, things that we can all agree on; those truths that are beyond all dispute and the foundation of what reasonable people believe.


Firstly, being a musician is the hippest thing a person can do, vocationally or otherwise. Now, while there are exceptions to this truism, the general principle still holds. It may be true that Philip Marlowe is hipper than a violist in the Des Moines Symphony Orchestra, but private detectives outside of the world of fiction are generally more poorly dressed and exhibit less sardonic wit. James Bond has a higher cool quotient than the average 7th grade bassoonist but again . . . we’re dealing in fiction there. While sports stars are (rather inexplicably to me) held in high regard in our culture, you’re much more likely to see a hip 50-year-old guitarist than a hip 50-year-old running back.


Next, we should make sure our terms are well-defined.


I’ve already muddied the waters a little by mixing two different, though closely related, terms: hip & cool. Hip, as has been noted by John Leland and other writers, has something to do with enlightenment. It may even relate to a West African word (Wolof, according to Leland) meaning “to have one’s eyes open.” Cool, on the other hand, denotes a detachment from strong emotional involvement. In my mind it is closely related to black musicians of the forties and fifties who were producing works of exceptional quality and insight, only to be treated as 2nd class citizens in the culture at large. Their public face was cool, whatever their feelings about their treatment were. Blue (and blues) is the color of cool, the very opposite of “hot under the collar,” i.e., “red-necked.”


In practical terms, at least as far as music is concerned, the two terms are often used interchangeably, and rightfully so. Miles Davis’ music is some of the hippest there ever was. Each of Miles’ developments predicted a major shift in the music. But he is also responsible for midwifing The Cool. Hip is almost always cool, though they are not the same thing.


What hip does not mean is “good” or “excellent.” There are plenty of musicians who are technically excellent without being hip. Whoever didn’t get voted off the island this week on American Idol is probably a technically excellent singer. He or she is almost certainly not hip. I love Brahms’ First Symphony; but I doubt anyone will put up much of case for Johannes being a hipster. Hip is often excellent, but excellence is not hip’s essence.


So . . . what is hip? Or, for my purposes here, who are the hippest artists in music? Who are those artists that are not simply trend-setters, but musical seers? Who are those musicians who are agents of change and open the eyes of their fans? Who are the enlighteners, the musical lamas and yogi who point their listeners to yet unchartered corners of the musical map and say, “Go”? My opinions will not be particularly unique or unexpected, but here are my top five. And let me reiterate: these are my top five of “hip,” not my top five of all time.


Since his name has already been introduced, I guess I should start with the most obvious: Miles Davis. Miles is to hip what Abe Lincoln is to honest. If one were to begin a record collection with the sole purpose of collecting the hippest records of all time, it is hard to imagine that there wouldn’t be at least three or four of Miles’ records among them. The great thing about loving Miles’ is that you get the whole package: not only are 90% of his records timeless classics that were years ahead of their time, Miles himself is the epitome of cool. He is easily the most quotable jazz musician of all time. “Don’t call me a genius,” he once said, “just call me ‘Miles Davis.’” (On a related note, I would highly recommend Miles’ autobiography for anyone interested in music or American culture generally. It is an eminently readable book . . . unless you have a strong aversion to the word “motherfucker.”) His gravely whisper, his sleek sense of fashion, his brooding facial expression . . . Miles is the acme of hip.


Even his album titles are hip. Kind of Blue is the largest-selling jazz album of all time for good reason, but one suspects that more than one neophyte jazz fan has walked out of the record store with this disc because of the title alone. The record itself is flawless, with perhaps the greatest (not to mention hippest) ensemble in the history of the style: Miles himself, John Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Paul Chambers, Jimmy Cobb and Bill Evans (with Wynton Kelly replacing Evans on one track). Every track is a commentary on the blues (hence the title), and the blues are, of course, the psychic protoplasm out of which all things hip are made.


Kind of Blue, though his magnum opus, is not Miles’ last word on hip. Birth of the Cool (again . . . I hope someone got a fat Christmas bonus for that title), In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew, Jack Johnson, On the Corner, etc. It’s almost impossible to go wrong with one of Davis’ records. My personal fave is probably Filles de Kilimanjaro, an under-appreciated record from his “transitional” period. Sending it over the edge is the cover, featuring Miles’ then-wife, Betty Davis (née Mabry), herself a pre-eminent hipster and future funk cult star who introduced Miles to Jimi Hendrix.


It might be equally impossible to imagine “hip” without Charlie Parker. His heroine addiction and early death make him something of a hipster saint/anti-hero, though not to me. Bird’s ability to transcend the expectations of his most ardent devotees may be his most admirable quality. I have written elsewhere of my love of his work with strings, which was rejected by fans and critics at the time it was released and after his death. Bird referred to these sessions as his personal favorites and for me at least, it is easy to see why. He was not bound by either critical expectations or public opinion. What is hipper than that?


Charlie Parker’s entire output was hip, of course. I have listened to the alto break on “A Night in Tunisia” several dozen times and think it nothing short of brilliant. “Now’s the Time” may be the very best solo ever played over a twelve-bar blues. The blistering runs on “Kim,” the tortured (and yes, drug-induced) melody on “Loverman” . . . it’s almost impossible to come away from Bird without at least a touch of enlightenment. For jazz fans of a certain age, Bird was the pinnacle of hip. Terry Southern wrote of two hipsters deciding what record to spin next. One suggests either Charlie Parker or Bartok. The other answers, “Bartok, man . . . where do you go after Bird?”


I was relatively late in my awareness of the genius of James Brown. Had I been ten years older, I would have grown up knowing just how “super bad” the Godfather was, but those of my age probably most associated Soul Brother #1 with Rocky IV, a movie that was only hip if you were ten years old. He was legendary, sure, and everyone knew “I Feel Good.” What you didn’t know about (necessarily) if you were born after 1970 was “Mother Popcorn,” and getting’ on the good foot, givin’ the drummer some, tellin’ Maceo he’s “got to blow,” being black and proud, etc. I didn’t even know who Maceo Parker was until I was in college, let alone Fred Wesley, Bootsy Collins, and all those funky drummers.


Well, for all of the uninitiated out there, let me hip you to the truth: there ain’t nobody bad like James Brown. There is a reason he is the most sampled artist in hip-hop. There is a reason T.O.P. is still diggin’ on J.B. Let’s be clear about this. If there were no James Brown, there would probably be no soul music; there would definitely be no funk. There would be neither Prince nor Parliament. No hip-hop. Nothing.


So what made the Hardest Working Man in Show Business the Hippest Working Man in Pop Music? Single-chord, riff-and-rhythm-based jams; punchy horns; chicken-scratch guitars; hard-grooving bass lines; and fat, fat, PHAT drums. Rapping before there was rap. Inexplicable grunts and indecipherable shouts of ecstasy punctuating every line. Then there was the dancing: spinning, ass-wiggling and foot-shuffling. And the clothes! Loud colors, tight pants and capes! J.B. took the blues and made them serve the rhythm. The result was greasy, southern-fried funk.


That last comment betrays a bias I have. I have a deeply-held conviction that about 95% of anything interesting in American music has its roots in the South. King may have been in Cincinnati, but James Brown was from Augusta, Georgia. Likewise, the Chess studios were on 2120 S. Michigan Ave. in Chicago, but Muddy Waters was from Rolling Fork, Mississippi.

I had heard the name “Muddy Waters” for years before I had ever actually heard a Muddy Waters record. I am young enough to have missed his “revival,” so most of my knowledge of him was limited to what I had heard from The Rolling Stones. Actually, most of my knowledge of the blues was second hand. In my early musical snobbery (something that seems endemic to youth), I believed blues to be inferior to jazz. Blues singers seemed like hillbillies compared to jazz musicians. I knew that jazz had its roots in the blues, but no one had suggested to me that Howlin’ Wolf was as fly as Sonny Rollins.


In college, two of my friends joined a blues band, partly to pay for school. They were mostly jazz players, so they had to immerse themselves very quickly in the music to keep up with what was expected on the band stand. I remember walking down two doors to their apartment one Saturday morning while they had Muddy’s Hard Again album on the stereo. They must have played the opening of “Mannish Boy” for me ten times in a row. They were particularly thrilled by the opening lines as Muddy sang, “Everything . . . everything . . . everything’s gonna be alright this morning’,” and Johnny Winter screamed back, “Yes I know!” There was a thickness in the sound that I hadn’t expected. To me, blues sounded like somebody’s grandpa picking away feebly on a ten-dollar guitar, but this was really powerful, sexual even. It was unexpected and vibrant. I had heard the term “electric blues,” surely, but to me that just meant they used electric guitars. This was something else. Even the singing was electric.


That record is still one of my favorites and I like this version of “Mannish Boy” better than the original. I know that sounds blasphemous to blues purists, but I can’t help it. Over the next couple of years I would “discover” the rest of the canon: “Can’t Be Satisified,” “Got My Mojo Workin’,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Hoochie Coochie Man,” etc.


Muddy Waters was hip in a way that almost no one else has been since. He had such an intrinsic sense of hip that anything he did became cool. I remember listening to an interview with his daughter who said he used to eat black walnut ice cream and drink grape soda-pop and thinking, “Man . . . I gotta get me some of that.” He is one of the progenitors of hip – his music, certainly, especially his voice, but also his sense of style, his cool demeanor . . . even his name for crying out loud! It would be harder to come up with a hipper moniker.


Steely Dan may have the hippest band name in pop music history, though, based as it is in a William Burroughs novel. (For those of you who don’t know the origins of the name, I will let you explore that one on your own. Suffice it to say that the story is a little less “PG” than I like for my blog.) The duo of Walter Becker and Donald Fagen are slicker than most. Their blend of rock, R&B and jazz was more sophisticated than anything on radio at the time or, in my opinion, since.


I was introduced to “The Dan” in college, too, this time by my friend Marty. He was a senior saxophone major when I was a freshman. He walked into my practice room one day, uninvited, and asked, “You wanna go fly a kite?” I thought that must be a euphemism until I saw that he was, indeed, holding a brightly-colored nylon kite in his hand. So, I packed up my horn and we got in his car and drove across the street (yeah, I know – but it seemed like a long walk at the time) to the parking lot of the Coliseum at West Virginia University. He had a tape playing in his stereo and he said, “You like Steely Dan?” I told him I’d never of them and he informed me that all good musicians like Steely Dan. I guess that was all it took to convince me.


I think I was ready to dismiss them when I found out that the band was really just two guys and a whole bunch of session players. But then I looked at the names of those “session” players. Tom Scott. Lee Ritenour. Patti Austin. Joe Sample. Michael Brecker. Wayne Shorter. Wayne Shorter, for crying out loud! He had played with Miles in the 60’s and here he was, an established jazz presence at the height of the popularity of his band, Weather Report, doing session work on a rock album.


Steely Dan knows how to build a sophisticated groove; none of this silly little straight back beat for them. They open up room for solos – real solos – right in the middle of the song. But it may be the lyrics that send Becker and Fagan into the red on the hipness scale. Sly, esoteric and ironic in the extreme, half of the words are indecipherable and the other half are cryptic. It took me five years to realize they were singing, “The Cuervo Gold, the fine Columbian” on “Hey Nineteen.” They name-check bebop musicians, Chinese acupuncturists and avant-garde opera singers. Lyrics about the Guernsey Fair, drinking the German liqueur Kirschwasser from a shell and the Moonie enclave of Barrytown, NY, are mixed with themes concerning the darker side of human nature. This is rock-and-roll for the literate, but it still grooves hard.


I’d be interested to hear others’ “top fives” in this category, but if these wouldn’t make your top twenty, you better keep listening. Honorable mentions go to Prince, George Clinton and the P-Funk mob, Hank Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Elvis Presley (yes, Elvis Presley, jungle room and all). Oh, and the Tower of Power, who first made me ask, “What IS hip?”

Why Can't White People Sing Anymore?

(Originally published April 26, 2009)


2007, Age 34. “Love Is A Losing Game,” by Amy Winehouse. Acoustic version of song from Back to Black.


Why can’t white bands sing any more? When did matching pitch with one’s voice become this esoteric skill that was lost to descendants of Europeans? Has singing itself become so passé that bands can’t be bothered to attempt it – even the lead singers?


I was listening to a music podcast the other day where the topic of conversation was favorite singers who can’t sing. I imagine a sports show where the anchors discuss their favorite quarterbacks who can’t pass or their favorite swimmers who can’t swim. And yet here was this group of thirty-something music writers (I picture them wearing horn-rimmed glasses and Lucky Charms t-shirts) huddled around a microphone talking about this phenomenon as if it were normal. The strange thing about it was, indeed, how many relatively successful contemporary bands they were able to name who cannot carry a tune.


Mind you, I cannot remember the names of any of these bands, I simply must take the word of these arbiters of hipster taste that these are successful, popular bands in some milieu. I do not listen to any of these groups. I don’t say this to be a music snob or anything, it’s just that one of my prerequisites to listening to vocalists is that they possess the ability to sing. I routinely get irritated listening to these shows as they slag off one of my favorite bands or singers knowing that their sole reason for doing so has to do with the singer’s musicianship.


I remember listening to one critic have a go at Amy Winehouse’s Back To Black record when it came out. I could just hear the condescension in his voice: “Sure she can sing, if that’s why you buy records.” Yes, yes it is, as a matter of fact. It is at least a major factor. When I read those end of the year “Best of” lists it is evident that there is a bias against good singers. I thought Sharon Jones & The Dap Kings 100 Days, 100 Nights was one of the very best records of 2007, but it made almost no showing on anyone’s “best of” lists, I am convinced, because Sharon Jones has a set of pipes that make you want to screw in church when you listen to her. End of the year lists are instead dominated by skinny white-boy bands with ambient angst that are backed either by guitars that sound like they’re being played through 10-watt amps or else an ironic combination cello and steel drum.


One of the especially ridiculous things about these critics is that they seem to recognize great singers of the past: Aretha, Otis, Etta. But let someone carry on in that great tradition now and suddenly it’s cliché or too “done.” As a consequence the zines and radio shows are filled with praise for tone-deaf, whiny mumblings from bed-headed, hipster douche bags.


I blame two things, or more properly one person and a musical genre: Bob Dylan and Punk.


Let me say from the outset that I accept Bob Dylan’s artistic genius. I didn’t always, but I’m a convert. Big fan. Highway 61 Revisited? Love it. Blonde on Blonde? Like it lots. So none of you angsty superfans need to get up in my grill with your collectors’ editions of The Basement Tapes: I get it.


Dylan made it fashionable for pop music to “say something,” and he really did have a lot to say. Of course, this presupposes that pop music hadn’t really been saying much till then, but that’s just not true; it’s just that it was using the music to do the “saying” more than the words. R&B and blues singers had, for decades before white singer-songwriters burst onto the scene, used phrasing and melodic ornamentation to give a presence to their lyrics. Black songwriters used innuendo and double-entendre to shade the meaning of their words. Singers would tease, spit, bark, coo and coax each phrase. It seems that all the white teenagers who started making rock and roll in the fifties never really realized what all those Big Joe Turner and Howlin’ Wolf songs they were singing were really about:

“I had a little red rooster too lazy to crow for days,
I had a little red rooster too lazy to crow for days,
Keep everything in the barnyard upset in every way.”

There is no reason they should get them: they were just teenagers. But as the decade turned, their understanding of that music doesn’t seem to have especially deepened. Instead, they began looking for songwriters who could express all that pent-up anger these young adults were feeling.


White artists of the sixties made explicit in the lyrics those themes that were more subtly expressed by black artists of the forties and fifties. Of course, black music was changing at the same time. Social issues were no longer the sole province of so-called “folk” singers like Odetta or Ledbelly: Sam Cooke was singing “A Change Is Gonna Come” and James Brown was black and proud. Yet black music of the sixties was still mostly driven by exploring relationships between men and women. Black music had always taken a decidedly more adult viewpoint. Black records were marketed to adults with jobs and bills, not teenagers with college funds and time on their hands.


I’d like to think that Dylan has never viewed his vocal inabilities as an asset. Certainly he is well-versed in the recordings of many able vocalists. I will also admit that there is an immediacy to his singing that is in itself expressive. It is almost as if there is such an urgency in his songs that he simply has to be the one to sing them. That’s not quite the same thing as a general scorn for good singing though. Also to his credit is the fact that Dylan’s singing seems to have noticeably improved over the years. I don’t know if he ever did something so pedantic as hire a vocal coach, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that he occasionally uses phrases like “vocal folds” and “facial mask.”


The problem in the world of pop music is that so many artists of lesser brilliance than Dylan and with much less to say have used their vocal inabilities to mask their artistic sterility. Where musicians previously used technical virtuosity to hide their lack of imagination, today’s artists feel that creative impotence is best disguised by technical incompetence. Maybe I’m being too hard on Mr. Zimmerman, but I think he bears a fair share of the blame. Too many of today’s tuneless navel-gazers cite him as a primary influence. The rest of them cite punk.


I’m probably not the first to note that many bands of punk’s first wave did have a general scorn for good singing and for musicianship in general. That was the point wasn’t it? “Learn three chords and ruin the neighborhood” or however that went. The punk ethos was supposed to be something about capturing the raw nature of early rock and roll. This does seem to fly in the face of convincing aural evidence to the contrary: no one is going to mistake “That’s Alright Mama” for “Anarchy in the U.K.” Even the axiom regarding punk’s cacophony seems to be truer of some punk bands than others, most notably the British. The Ramones sound downright melodic at times (e.g., “Do You Wanna Dance?”) compared to their counterparts across the pond. Although a fair amount of lip service was given to musical ineptitude, it is evident while listening to Blondie or Patti Smith that they are not devoid of pop sensibility. Yet punk’s second, third and fourth waves – which split into myriad subgenres with mystifying names like “terrorcore” and “oi!” – relished bad singing more and more.


The burgeoning grunge scene of the 90s and the whole alternative movement seemed to be built on vacillating instances of nasal-toned whining and screaming. Even though I was in college during the early 90s, I couldn’t bring myself to listen most of what was on college radio. Perhaps the lyrics were insightful and ironic and all, but I could not get through the terrible singing. I remember the first time I heard someone refer to Kurt Cobain as a “musical genius.” “That guy who just sort-of moans tunelessly? And then screams a bit? The one in the flannel?” (On a side note: I was, unfortunately, influenced by so-called “grunge fashion” in the early 90s, as flannel shirts were seemingly the only casual wear available in stores.)


That leaves us where we are today. I actually think many of today’s rock writers are too scared to note the poor musicianship of the bands they hear. They have been fooled into believing that great artists would never bother learning to sing. It’s a classic case of the emperor’s new rock band and the joke is on the independent music press. They have become so reactionary against the “American Idol” phenomenon that they have lost any sense of taste they may have had.


Well I say, “Critics be damned!” Go ahead and put on those records by good singers that you want to hear. Put on some Aretha, some Otis, some Etta, some Ray, some Gladys, some Chaka, some Curtis, some Solomon, and some Wilson. And while you’re at it, go ahead and put on Angie Stone and Jill Scott and John Legend and Sharon Jones. And if there is enough time, save room for those white people still dedicated to the art of song. There may not be many of them, but they’re worth listening to.

Threnody

(Originally published April 19, 2009)



2009, Age 36. “Balm In Gilead,” by Sweet Honey In The Rock, from the album Sacred Ground.


I went to a funeral earlier this week of a friend – more of an acquaintance really, someone I had worked with professionally for a number of years that I really admired and respected. It seems I’ve been doing that a lot more lately, which I guess is what happens. The strange thing is that I seem less capable of dealing with death as the years go by, and that afternoon found me nursing a beer and seeking the comfort of my iPod. The songs I want to hear when someone has died, or when I am thinking about death, are an unusual mix of the uplifting and the outright morbid.


Do you know that scene in High Fidelity where Dick and Barry discuss their top five songs about death? The list they generate is both amusing and profound: “Leader of the Pack,” “Dead Man’s Curve,” “One Step Beyond,” “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” etc. It’s one of my favorite scenes in the movie and I always wish I was having that conversation with them. In spite of its association with The Big Chill (as Dick notes), “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” by The Rolling Stones is one of my favorite rock songs about dying. I love the incongruous boys’ choir intro and weird narrative and the unusual imagery (I’ve tried figuring out “in her glass was a bleeding man” since first hearing the song). “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” is another favorite and perhaps the only song by Gordon Lightfoot that I have ever really appreciated. I love they way the melody ascends at the end of each verse and the lyrics are old-fashioned and heartrending all at once: “Does anyone know where the love of God goes when the waves turn the minutes to hours?” Good stuff.


It will come as no surprise to anyone that the first pop song that made me think about death was by The Beatles. It wasn’t “She Said She Said,” however; it was “In My Life.” Much more profound than the typical paean to undying love, Lennon and McCartney set up their pledge with a verse about the nature of change and decay:

“There are places I remember
All my life, though some
have changed.
Some forever, not for better,
Some have gone and some
remain.”

I get pensive just typing the words today, because they are so true. You know the song is somehow about death before it is even mentioned, because what is death but a very great change? Still, the next bit seems a little unexpected:

“All these places have their moments,
With lovers and friends I still can recall,
Some are dead and some are living,
In my life I’ve loved them all.”

The mention of the dead seems jarring, especially from a voice so young. The reminder that even in the midst of love and youth, death is never far away, keeps the lyric from meandering into the saccharine dullness of most teenage love songs.


When I was very young and heard this song, I used to mentally tick off the dead that I knew personally. The list was short then and easy to remember. It takes me longer now, longer than the two minutes and twenty-eight seconds it takes The Beatles to finish singing.

“Fire and Rain” was one my favorites in college. All of the urban legends surrounding James Taylor and the meaning of the lyrics made it intriguing. I especially remember listening to it in the days following September 11 and finding it strangely appropriate: “Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground.” But my favorite lyric in the song has to be:

“Won’t you look down upon me Jesus?
You’ve got to help me make a stand,
You’ve just got to see me through another day.
My body’s aching and my time is at hand –
And I won’t make it any other way.”

The way he pleads . . . it does seem to be a prayer. The more death I know as I get older, the more certain I am that I will feel exactly this way one day. Hopefully not too soon.

Geoffrey O’Brien’s book Sonata for Jukebox revealed the true meaning of the words and the identity of the song’s “Suzanne.” She was a friend of O’Brien (and Taylor) who suffered for years from depression and spent time in a mental institution. She committed suicide and the song is partially James Taylor’s reflection on that. (The “flying machines” in the title are a reference to the break-up of J.T.’s first band “The Flying Machine,” not, as we all speculated, a reference to an actual plane crash.) The truth is more poignant to me now that I am older than the legends were when I was 19. I don’t listen to much James Taylor these days and I think it’s a little weird that I can hear such a dark song in the grocery store. Still, it’s a nice song.


Of course, “Fire and Rain” seems like a Disney tune compared to the darkness of “Death Letter” by Son House. The scope of that song amazes me every time I hear it. The sheer range of emotions surrounding the death of a loved one – nonchalance, powerful grief, real fear – make me shake a little. It starts so simply with a repeated bottle-neck slide figure that seems to grow more ominous as the song builds. House’s voice, one of the rawest in the blues, begins casually:

“I got a letter this morning, how do you reckon it read?
It said, ‘Hurry, the gal you love is dead.’”

It may be one of the most brilliant opening lyrics of all time. The imagery throughout the first stanzas is more powerful in its understatement, from seeing his dead lover on the “cooling board;” to the 10,000 people standing around the gravesite; till the moment the singer says he didn’t know he loved her “till they began to let her down.” He mentions judgment day twice, once promising her he’ll see her then.


From there, it just gets creepy.


“You know I didn’t feel so bad till the sun went down,” House sings, and one begins to wonder if he misses his unnamed woman or if there is something perhaps more sinister at work. “It’s hard to love someone [who] don’t love you,” he continues and it’s difficult to tell who’s who in this scenario. Is he saying she didn’t love him? Didn’t he say he didn’t know he loved her until she was dead? And then you start wondering how she died anyway . . . The last verse (in the recorded version I have anyway) is the one that gives me the chills:

“Oh – hush! I thought I heard her call my name!
It wasn’t so loud, so nice and plain.
Yeah . . . ”

His voice is urgent in its delivery and foregoing the normal repetition of the lyrics, he moans “mmmmm . . . ” to the end of the song.

I listened to this one with students in my music history class a dozen times and we discussed it repeatedly. The students were convinced the narrator had murdered the woman, hence his indifference at seeing her dead body. He knows he’ll see her on judgment day because she’ll stand as his accuser. He begins to regret the deed, at first, because he realizes he loves her; then, because he hears her voice whispering his name once the sun goes down. And when she whispers it, it’s not “so nice.”


After I told them that Son House had spent 15 years in prison for killing a man, any further doubts about the song’s mysterious meaning were removed.


“Death Letter” fits fairly well in the tradition of Southern Gothic song-writing where the murder of a loved one or their unquiet grave is a prominent feature. Southerners both black and white have written more than their fair share of macabre music and the traditions extend into the old worlds of West Africa and the British Isles. There are all the Child Ballads of the “Barbara Allen” variety, where true love leads to a broken-hearted death. There are all those unfortunate young ladies named “Pretty Polly” or “Omie Wise” or a dozen other quaint names who find that spurning a lover’s advances may lead to a shallow grave. There are all of those songs about hellhounds and the devil by Robert Johnson, et al, just reminding us that a painful, unpleasant death may not be the worst of it for some of us. There are the ghostly “Unquiet Graves,” etc., where the dead speak to comfort a loved one or accuse the murderer. There are plenty of songs about dead children and dead mothers; deaths from sickness, fire, childbirth, flood, war . . . the list goes on. Then there are the almost endless religious treatments of death from the joyous (“I’ll Fly Away”) to the bone-chilling Calvinist variety (“O Death”). There are those who find this fascination with death in southern music repugnant, but I am not one of them. Maybe it’s some type of catharsis; I don’t know. My personal favorite in the genre might be “What Did the Deep Sea Say?”


Of course, macabre music is hardly a purely southern phenomenon. Billie Holiday’s “Gloomy Sunday” has, for years, been the subject of urban legend and has even been called a “haunted song.” The song, which was written by a Hungarian pianist and originally sung in Magyar, is about lost love and the contemplation of suicide. There were supposedly dozens if not hundreds of suicides inspired by the song, some after only one hearing. Most of those stories are completely unsubstantiated, though the composer, Rezső Seress, did commit suicide in 1968. I find the melody not particularly gloomy at all and the lyric actually a little banal, especially compared to “Strange Fruit,” Holiday’s gruesome and grisly indictment of southerners’ indifference to lynching. No surprise that one didn’t make the Hit Parade.


These days though, I find myself in need of something more. I find that my faith is sometimes shaken in ways I didn’t expect when I was younger. I’m not so brave about dying as I was when I was younger, which is why I suppose they send young men to do all the killing and dying that needs to be done. My friend Cori, now 20, was 19 when she had a near-fatal car wreck. Her insouciant attitude about her extraordinary survival is inspiring, but I must confess that it is something I don’t share. I still get a little sick thinking about the phone call I got telling me she had been in an accident. I am truly thankful to God that she lived. At the time I remember hoping that I wouldn’t be mentally ticking her name off the next time I heard “In My Life.”


So this week, on that afternoon after the funeral, I was looking for comfort. Music does that, too, doesn’t it? Its hymns, mostly, that help. I don’t know what people do for comfort if all they have are pop songs. I mean, they definitely serve a function, sometimes even helping express all the complex emotions one feels looking at death. But there is something in those old hymns especially; words written by long-forgotten authors who have since joined the choir invisible themselves . . . those are the ones I want to wrap myself in like a blanket of sound. I want to hear them sung by heavy, powerful voices, those voices that sound like they believe those words they are singing. Songs like “Amazing Grace” of course, and “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” and “Abide With Me”:

“When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.”

Or Horatio Spafford’s achingly beautiful “It Is Well,” written after the drowning deaths of his wife and daughters, that begins:

“When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll . . .”

An image that could seem overused and tediously Victorian is instead rendered eloquently and dignified further with Philip Bliss’ near-perfect melody.

Sometimes, though, you hear a song you’ve known for years like it was the first time. When that happens, the words and melody flood your mind and soul and seem to speak to you in some timeless way, like the Ancient of Days. So I found myself listening repeatedly that afternoon to “(There Is A) Balm In Gilead,” sung by Sweet Honey in the Rock. I’ve known the hymn for years, but it came to me fresh and potent and almost overwhelming. All female voices, mature and rich in timbre, singing a cappella in free tempo . . . it sounds more camp-meeting than funereal, yet death is in it, too.

“There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole,
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.
Sometimes I feel discouraged,
And I think my work’s in vain,
But then the Holy Spirit,
Revives my soul again.
There is a balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole,
There is a balm in Gilead to heal the sin-sick soul.”

The voices blend in harmony that is more vibrant than sweet. They rise and fall in gospel melismas at key words in the phrase. The verses make no mention of Death by name, though his co-stars, Sin and Sickness make cameo appearances. The soloist and the quintet in turns forbid the listener from disconsolate grieving. “Do not mourn as those without hope . . . there is help for the dejected and the sinner such as yourself.”

I pushed the play button on that song three or four times that afternoon and I’ve come back several times since. Maybe it’s that I’ve felt more wounded and sin-sick these days. Maybe it’s just that I find myself going to more funerals than I used to. Maybe it’s that I need an answer to Gordon Lightfoot and James Taylor and Son House. After all, death is never far away.