Category: Music

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Tree, Lights, Bells

Tree122407

We’re late with the tree this year. Kate and I went out and bought it yesterday from a place on University Avenue run by a San Francisco outfit that tries to help our burgeoning population of ex-convicts stay straight. We didn’t decorate until tonight, though — late tonight.

(And now, it’s tomorrow already. Christmas Eve. On Saturday evening, I turned on an acoustic music show on one of the local FM stations, KALW, and there was a song about bells playing. Kate, hearing the word “tintinnabulation” recognized right away that the lyrics were from Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Bells.” I thought, but didn’t say, that the singer sounded like Phil Ochs. We were both right. The poem and the song start with a lightness not often associated with Poe:

“Hear the sledges with the bells, Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars, that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells— From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.”

The poem gets darker as it goes along. The song is on iTunes. I want to say “amazingly, it’s on iTunes, but I guess it’s not so amazing anymore.)

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Wednesday at the Ponderosa

You know — the Cartwright place; not the steakhouse. This could also be called Late Discovery Wednesday.

Last night, one of the local public radio stations broadcast a discussion from a month or so ago about a singer/songwriter named Nick Drake. I had heard something of his story before: a wildly talented and deeply depressed singer/songwriter in the late ’60s and early ’70s; he made just three albums in what I would suppose you’d call the British-type folk-rock style — think Fairport Convention and Richard and Linda Thompson. He died in 1974, in his mid-20s, a possible suicide. His music never went away, though. The albums didn’t find a big audience, but they survived because the fans were devoted and sometimes influential. From listening to the program last night, it sounds like Drake’s big posthumous break was having a marketing guy at Volkswagen happen across one of Drake’s late songs, “Pink Moon,” and decide to use it as the soundtrack for a commercial (you can watch it on YouTube). That was in 2000, and the sudden mass exposure of the song moved 5,000 copies of the “Pink Moon” album in less than three weeks — more than it had sold in the two years between its release and Drake’s death.

Out of curiosity, I went looking for the Volkswagen ad. I remember it, though I wouldn’t have guessed it was on the air seven years ago already. Four young people in a Cabriolet or whatever those little Rabbit-like convertibles are called. They drive along beautiful moonlight roads and arrive at a roadhouse. They pull into the parking lot and are greeted by the yahoo-like carryings-on of their peers. Disgusted, too in touch with the wonders of the night (thanks to the car), they soulfully head back out to the open road. There’s no dialogue; just a minute of the Drake song, which is pleasant enough but not world-shattering. As commercial’s go, it’s a pretty good one (another VW favorte: the couple driving through the New Orleans French Quarter in the rain, where absolutely everything they see on the street — people walking, people unloading a truck, a guy sweeping the sidewalk, another guy dribbling a basketball — happens in time to the car’s windshield wipers. That one would have worked better without dialogue, too; it’s also on YouTube).

There are some Nick Drake videos on YouTube, too (sort of; there’s apparently no extant film footage of him playing, so people have just pieced together moody still images). “Pink Moon,” for one. And one called “River Man,” which is a lovely minor-key ballad that prompted me to see if iTunes has any Drake stuff. They do. I wound up buying a compilation album, “Way to Blue.” If you’re in the market yourself, go to AmazonMP3 — the album is three bucks cheaper than it is on iTunes (also, Amazon’s songs can be played anywhere and come without the digital-rights management limits that Apple imposes on most cuts at the behest of the record companies.

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Your Daily Fogey Flashback

As far as musical taste goes, I’m a confirmed fogey. I hear lots of stuff of undetermined recent vintage I like. But unless I hear a new song 98 times or can ask my family expert on such matters (Thom), I don’t know who’s playing, whether they’re a big name or not, or what the heck the lyrics are. Sometimes I catch on to someone, like Kurt Cobain or Elliott Smith (or in a different vein, Susannah McCorkle), well after they’re dead of self-inflicted injuries.

All of which is preamble to a burst of enthusiasm for a daily oldie experience on San Francisco’s KFOG-FM. The station often grates with its insistence on going back to the standards (I just hear “Touch Me” by The Doors for the second time today; KFOG would do itself, its listeners and the memory of Jim Morrison a big favor by losing that track for about 15 years or forever, whichever comes later). But day to day, one of the station’s old standbys continues to surprise and please: 10@10.

The format has been pretty much the same for decades: Each day at 10 a.m. (Pacific time), the station plays a pre-produced selection of 10 songs from a single year chosen probably not at random from the prior 40 years or so (the emphasis is on mid-60s through mid-80s, the prime boomer cum fogey era). The selection of songs isn’t earth-shatteringly original, but it’s usually a couple cuts above what the station’s standard playlist inflicts on the audience.

But the money part of 10@10 comes with the period clips — snatches of news stories, speeches and advertisements — that the producers mix in to the music (I’ve come to assume that the DJ who intros the show, Dave Morey, also has a major part in producing it). It helps a lot to have the framework for the snippets in mind, but at their best, “10@10” is sort of a history mini-lesson. The occasion for holding forth on this show, which I’ve listened to for years without feeling the need to comment, was today’s edition. At a listener’s request, it toured 1968 (among the songs played, The Band’s “Chest Fever,” which ain’t on anyone’s playlist anywhere). The middle of the set was the Chambers Brothers “Time Has Come Today,” which the show used as a vehicle for a news tour of the year from beginning to end. It was extraordinarily well done; if you’re inclined to take my word for that and want to listen, it will be replayed Saturday morning (not sure what time, but I’m guessing sometime around 9 a.m. PT/11 a.m. CT).

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Melting in the Dark

Robert Goulet died and has been widely obituarized (a Google News search suggests 750 stories have been published on his passing). Goulet was widely mocked (Exhibit A: Will Ferrell doing Goulet as a rapper), and even self-mocked (Exhibit B: Goulet spot for ESPN), as an over-the-top ham. But compared to some, Goulet never even saw the top, much less went over it. Exhibit C: this puddle of sentimental treacle from Vegas crooner Wayne Newton: “His incredible voice will live on in his music, and as Bob so brilliantly sang, ‘There will be another song for him and he will sing it,’ for God now has another singing angel by his side.” (Actually, Wayne, what “Bob” sang was, “There will be another song for me, and I will sing it.” But that’s OK — we know what you meant.)

It tickles me that Newton plucked a lyric from the goofy, loopy “MacArthur Park” to wish “Bob” well on his new gig. Maybe he’ll get a chance to do a duet with Richard Harris.

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Guest Observation: Steve Goodman

Kate’s a huge Steve Goodman fan, still. Steve Goodman was a huge Cubs fan. And I’m pretty sure Kate introduced me to this song, which allegedly debuted on WGN radio in March 1983 (there’s a live version on the album “Affordable Art“; someone’s posted a Wrigley Field montage on YouTube with “Last Request” as the soundtrack). I’ve always loved it, though of course I have a bone to pick: I believe the reference to “Na Na Na Na Hey Hey Goodbye” is out of place; I’ve always though that was a White Sox thing. I don’t recall ever hearing it at Wrigley Field (though admittedly my visits have been few since the Ford administration).

The most memorable occasion I heard this song was on Berkeley’s KPFA. Examiner jazz and pop music critic Phil Elwood had a show there, and when Goodman died — in 1984, after a long, long bout with leukeumia, just a week or two before the Cubs clinched their first division title ever and their first postseason appearance since the 1945 World Series — Elwood played this. Someone at The Examiner taped it, and after we put out the first edition one morning, the handful of Cubs fans on the early desk repaired to a back office to listen to it. Bunch of tough newspaper types. There wasn’t a dry eye among us.

(And oh, yeah: I’ve been too busy ambivalatin’ to say anything about it, but the Cubs are back in the playoffs! And … get ready … they lost Game One to the Diamondbacks.)

The Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request

By the shores of old Lake Michigan

Where the hawk wind blows so cold

An old Cub fan lay dying

In his midnight hour that tolled

Round his bed, his friends had all gathered

They knew his time was short

And on his head they put this bright blue cap

From his all-time favorite sport

He told them, “It’s late and it’s getting dark in here”

And I know it’s time to go

But before I leave the line-up

Boys, there’s just one thing I’d like to know …

Do they still play the blues in Chicago

When baseball season rolls around?

When the snow melts away,

Do the Cubbies still play

In their ivy-covered burial ground?

When I was a boy they were my pride and joy

But now they only bring fatigue

To the home of the brave

The land of the free

And the doormat of the National League?

He told his friends, “You know the law of averages says

Anything will happen that can,

That’s what it says,

But the last time the Cubs won a National League pennant

Was the year we dropped the bomb on Japan.”

The Cubs made me a criminal

Sent me down a wayward path

They stole my youth from me

(that’s the truth)

I’d forsake my teachers

To go sit in the bleachers

In flagrant truancy

And then one thing led to another

and soon I’d discovered alcohol, gambling, dope

football, hockey, lacrosse, tennis —

But what do you expect

When you raise up a young boy’s hopes

And then just crush ’em like so many paper beer cups

Year after year after year

after year, after year, after year, after year, after year

‘Til those hopes are just so much popcorn

for the pigeons beneath the ‘L’ tracks to eat.

He said, “You know I’ll never see Wrigley Field anymore before my eternal rest

So if you have your pencils and your scorecards ready,

I’ll read you my last request.”

He said, “Give me a doubleheader funeral in Wrigley Field

On some sunny weekend day (no lights)

Have the organ play the “National Anthem”

and then a little ‘na, na, na, na, hey hey, hey, goodbye’

Make six bullpen pitchers, carry my coffin

and six groundkeepers clear my path

Have the umpires bark me out at every base

In all their holy wrath.

It’s a beautiful day for a funeral! Hey Ernie let’s play two!

Somebody go get Jack Brickhouse to come back

and conduct just one more interview.

Have the Cubbies run right out into the middle of the field,

Have Keith Moreland drop a routine fly

Give everybody two bags of peanuts and a Frosty Malt

And I’ll be ready to die

Build a big fire on home plate out of your Louisville Sluggers baseball bats,

And toss my coffin in

Let my ashes blow in a beautiful snow

From the prevailing 30 mile an hour southwest wind

When my last remains go flying over the left-field wall

I will bid the bleacher bums adieu

And I will come to my final resting place, out on Waveland Avenue.

The dying man’s friends told him to cut it out

They said stop it, that’s an awful shame

He whispered, “Don’t cry, we’ll meet by and by near the Heavenly Hall of Fame.

He said, “I’ve got season’s tickets to watch the Angels now,

So it’s just what I’m going to do.

He said, “but you the living, you’re stuck here with the Cubs,

So its me that feels sorry for you!”

And he said, “Ahh play that lonesome losers tune,

That’s the one I like the best”

And he closed his eyes, and slipped away

What we got is The Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request,

And here it is

Do they still play the blues in Chicago

When baseball season rolls around?

When the snow melts away,

Do the Cubbies still play

In their ivy-covered burial ground?

When I was a boy they were my pride and joy

But now they only bring fatigue

To the home of the brave

The land of the free

And the doormat of the National League

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Johnny Appleseed, from Cincinnati

After week two, the thing I think I like best about David (“Deadwood,” “NYPD Blue”) Milch’s new “surf noir” drama on HBO (“John from Cincinnati“) is the song that plays over the opening credits. I listened the first week and couldn’t really catch any of the lyrics. The second week, I replayed the opening a couple of times, and at least got an intelligible first line: “Lord, there goes Johnny Appleseed.”

Armed with that much, the rest was easy. It’s Joe Strummer, late, and late of The Clash, and the song, “Johnny Appleseed,” was recorded with his last band, The Mescaleros. Finding out it was him, it was easy to hear a link to The Clash; one, anyway: “Lost in the Supermarket.”

Among other Google results for “Joe Strummer” and “Johnny Appleseed”: the band’s original video, shot in London, and a 2001 performance on Letterman.

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Can You Hear It?

“He emerged from the Metro at the L’Enfant Plaza Station and positioned himself against a wall beside a trash basket. By most measures, he was nondescript: a youngish white man in jeans, a long-sleeved T-shirt and a Washington Nationals baseball cap. From a small case, he removed a violin. Placing the open case at his feet, he shrewdly threw in a few dollars and pocket change as seed money, swiveled it to face pedestrian traffic, and began to play.”

That’s the opening paragraph of an April 8 piece in the Washington Post Magazine that explores how disconnected modern urban American humans are from each other and the world around them. At least that’s my take on what the story’s about. In brief: Joshua Bell, a renowned violinist, went with his Stradivarius to a subway station in downtown D.C. There, he set up as a street musician and over an hour played some of the most celebrated and difficult pieces ever written for the violin. Bottom line: hardly anyone in the 1,100 people who passed Bell as he played seemed to register what was happening. The consistent exception: young children, who when they appeared seemed drawn to Bell and the music. Unfortunately, they were in the company of adults who hustled them on their way — to day care or other appointments.

Great idea for an article, even if the conclusion one is led to is somewhat disheartening:

“In his 2003 book, Timeless Beauty: In the Arts and Everyday Life, British author John Lane writes about the loss of the appreciation for beauty in the modern world. The experiment at L’Enfant Plaza may be symptomatic of that, he said — not because people didn’t have the capacity to understand beauty, but because it was irrelevant to them.

” ‘This is about having the wrong priorities,’ Lane said.

“If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?”

The Post followed up with a couple more pieces: An online discussion of the experiment and the article and a more optimistic take on what it all means from poet laureate emeritus Robert Pinsky.

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Cultural History of The Loner

Partyofone

Once upon a time, the idea of “the loner” extended beyond the way the term is nearly universally used in media today: for destructive psychopaths, after they’ve unleashed some horror or other. I carried on a little bit earlier about the Virginia Tech official who first uttered the term in connection to Cho Seung-Hui. It was true as far as it went — and that wasn’t far at all, as Cho demonstrated both in action and in his special delivery to NBC the other day.

Anyway. Didn’t the idea of the loner once carry an aura of austere self-sufficiency, hardy individuality or at least admirable anti-heroism? In recent decades in pop culture, Clint Eastwood’s the type, especially in the Sergio Leone remakes of the Kurosawa epics. Further back, Humphrey Bogart owned the image in his Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade roles. Film noir is the loner’s genre. I could take a leap backward from there to the James Fenimore Cooper novels and his Hawkeye character. Same thing, though incredibly trying in book form. [Belatedly, I note that all the example characters above carry guns.]

But those are sort of limited, shot-in-the-dark examples and ones that rely on the distortion and romance of fiction. I went looking for a little more evidence and context, and came upon the noble example of “The Loner,” a one-season, mid-’60s western series starring Lloyd Bridges (and created by Rod Serling). Then there’s Neil Young’s “The Loner,” which focuses on the menacing stranger. Still a long way off from real life.

Finally, I hit on this, through Google Books: “Party of One: The Loners’ Manifesto.” It’s by Anneli S. Rufus, a Berkeley writer Kate and I know from our time, during the relatively enlightened and carefree days of the Reagan era, at The Daily Californian. It’s a serious consideration of the idea of the loner in history, in culture, in society. An excerpt from the introduction:

“Loners, by virtue of being loners, of celebrating the state of standing alone, have an innate advantage when it comes to being brave — like pioneers, like mountain men, iconoclasts, rebels and sole survivors. Loners have an advantage when faced with the unknown, the never-done-before and the unprecedented. An advantage when it comes to being mindful like the Buddhists, spontaneous like the Taoists, crucibles of concentrated prayer like the desert saints, esoteric like the Kabbalists. Loners, by virtue of being loners, have at their fingertips the undiscovered, the unique, the rarefied. Innate advantages when it comes to imagination, concentration, inner discipline. A knack for invention, originality, for finding resources in what others would call vacuums. A knack for visions. A talent for seldom being bored. Desert islands are fine but not required.”

The Anneli lives less than two miles from us as the crow flies. I haven’t seen her in 25 years, since before she was Anneli. Now I know one reason why. But just one.

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Byline Alert

First, let it be noted that Thom Brekke has a couple music reviews in the weekly arts section of the University of Oregon Daily Emerald: “A Warm Slice of Indiepop” and “New Crime Mob disc is nothing revolutionary.” All I can say is, be ready to get crunk.

Second, I finally pulled everything together on my “Dylan Hears a Who” reporting. The story, “Tangled up in Seuss,” is up this evening on Salon.com.

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Low Art, High Principle

I’m doing some reporting and research for a story on a website that ran afoul of a big copyright holder and federal copyright law. The crux of the tale is fair use: when is it legally defensible for an artist or commentator, say, to use the copyrighted work of another to create a new and distinct work. Specifically, the story I’m working on involves parody.

As it happens, the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken on this issue. To jog your (and my) memory, the case, Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, involved the rap group 2 Live Crew, which had borrowed elements of Roy Orbison’s “Pretty Woman” as part of a vulgar, mocking remake. The original song’s publisher sued, claiming copyright infringement. A federal district court bought the argument put forward by 2 Live Crew’s Luther R. Campbell (aka Luke Skyywalker), the remake’s author, that his work was a parody that deserved protection under the fair use exception to U.S. copyright law. An appeals court reversed the district court, and the case went to the Supremes.

Just for context, here’s a sample of the lyrics (quoting them here, as part of a commentary, is also an exercise of fair use, or so I’d argue if Campbell, aka Skyywalker, sued me; there’s a nice side-by-side comparison of the Orbison original and the Campbell parody here–unaccompanied by any copyright notices whatsoever):

Verse 1

[Pretty woman] Ha haaa, walkin’ down the street

[Pretty woman] Gir, girl, you look so sweet

[Pretty woman] You, you bring me down to the knees

[Pretty woman] You make me wanna beg please

[O-o-o-o-oh, pretty woman] …

Verse 4

[Two-timin’ woman] Girl, you know you ain’t right

[Two-timin’ woman] You was out with my boy last night

[Two-timin’ woman] That takes a load off my mind

[Two-timin’ woman] Now I know the baby ain’t mine

[O-o-o-o-oh, two-timin’ woman]

O-o-o-o-oh, pretty woman!

The court heard the case in November 1993 and delivered its opinion the following March. In a unanimous decision–that’s right: Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Ginsberg, David Souter, Anthony Kennedy, Wiilliam Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, John Paul Stevens, and Harry Blackmun, conservatives, liberals, middle-of-the-roaders all on the same side–the court found that 2 Live Crew’s work was protected under the fair use doctrine.

I was talking to my friend Pete about this yesterday, and I said that this is the kind of thing that makes me believe we live in a great country. This wasn’t a case of high art. In Souter’s opinion for the court, he drily notes that having found the Campbell’s song to qualify as a parody of the original, the justices will not take the further step of evaluating its quality.”

But it was a case of high principle, and as such, it was accorded the most serious consideration by the most august tribunal in the land.

“While we might not assign a high rank to the parodic element here, we think it fair to say that 2 Live Crew’s song reasonably could be perceived as commenting on the original or criticizing it, to some degree. 2 Live Crew juxtaposes the romantic musings of a man whose fantasy comes true, with degrading taunts, a bawdy demand for sex, and a sigh of relief from paternal responsibility. The later words can be taken as a comment on the naivete of the original of an earlier day, as a rejection of its sentiment that ignores the ugliness of street life and the debasement that it signifies. It is this joinder of reference and ridicule that marks off the author’s choice of parody from the other types of comment and criticism that traditionally have had aclaim to fair use protection as transformative works.”

The rest of the opinion is an evaluation of 2 Live Crew’s work against the four factors that must be weighed in determining fair use: the purpose of the work, whether it is commercial or not-for-profit and whether it has “transformative” value in commenting on or criticizing the original; the nature of the original work and whether it deserves copyright protection; the “amount and substantiality” of any copying and whether it appropriates the heart of the original work; and the likelihood that the new work may kill the market for the original work or foreclose new ones.

It’s an absorbing exercise. Go and read it. It’s well worth the time. And I guarantee it’s the only Supreme Court decision in which you’ll find the words, “Big hairy woman/all that hair it ain’t legit/Cause you look like `Cousin It’.”