Peter Spencer: Pete's Blog

Trixie, Bubbles, and Flo worked their collective magic at Bainbridge Island's annual Hank Wlliams/Patsy Cline Festival again this year, with an even bigger show and larger cast. In the concert program the complete title was "Trixie, Bubbles, and Flo with the Cadillac Cowboys and Pipes." Pipes is our vocal group, made up of the pride of Turloc, California the Fabulous Picata Sisters, LaVerne and Flambay. The Cadillac Cowboys (Riff, Biff, and Jeff) embodied the male virtues: cleanliness, flexibility, and unobtrusive support.

This year Trixie has emerged as the vocal star of the group, singing all the leads except "Walkin' After Midnight" (ably handled by Flo) while the chorus sang harmonies behind her. The audience thought she was the most glamorous thing they'd ever heard in their life and she even did a hilarious comic bit wiith Bubbles. I, too, got into the act, fulfilling a lifelong dream by telling Dizzy Gilespie's joke of "And now I'd like to introduce the band," then introducing them to each other.

Other moments during which the audience didn't know whether to yodel or go blind included Biff's vicious rhumba beat on "Strange," Trixie's soul-stirring black cocktail dress and pedicure, and Riff's final high note at the end of our encore "Hey, Good-Lookin'." Follow that!

I was mollying through Wikipedia last night, following a thread which went from Jim Kweskin (one of my greatest musical heroes) to Mel Lyman (not that good a harmonica player but his autobiography is called "Mirror at the End of the Road" and I used that line in a song) and then into a page called "Anti-folk." I first heard that term ten years ago from a New Hope singer-songwriter named Adam Brodsky, a nice guy but a terrible musician who was able to trade on his terribleness to have something of a career among punks. He called what he did "anti-folk" and I thought the term originated with him.

Well, according to the Wikipedia entry "Anti-folk" started at the Speakeasy, of all places, the Greenwich Village joint that served as my finished basement for a couple of years in the early '80s and whose bartender I eventually married, now the mother of my children. The entry said the whole thing started in 1984, right around the time I got tired of the scene and went back to school. Then it moved to the East Village where an annual "Anti-folk" festival continues to this day.

The names cited as early figures in the movement included a couple I remember ("Axeman" Horowitz, Michael America) as absolute neighborhood jokes, people with so little reason to play music in public that they made Adam Brodsky look like Brian Wilson by comparison. They came to the hoots every Monday night full of self-admiration and incompetence, and could not be convinced that they were wasting everybody's time - in a word, typical hoot-night punters of the sort I've seen all my life.

Now they're enshrined as elder statesmen of an Important Musical Movement. Did I miss something? I don't think so. These guys were utter no-talents, and I'm willing to bet the other names listed, the ones I didn't recognize, are just as worthless, most of them.

But they hit a nerve, I guess, in taking the piss out of mainstream folk, its pomposity and fuzzy-headedness. Anybody who's read this blog knows that I detest almost all of what's called "folk." But the folk movement did one incredibly valuable thing in its early days: It placed a premium on a wide-ranging knowledge of American music and the ability to play it with authenticity and authority through the only way a musician EVER gains authenticity and authority, hard work and native talent. This esthetic has long since been jettisoned by the Folk establishment, and it says something about humanity that the forces ranged against Folk succumb to the same ignorant smugness that did in the music they claim to be against. "Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss."

Quite independently of my previous post, my father sent me Dave Van Ronk's album "Going Back to Brooklyn" (Hightone HCD8192) this week. This is Dave's only complete album of original songs and I would recommend it to anybody, but especially to anyone involved in making "folk" music today.

Dave always insisted on using the term "folk" but I doubt he would recognize most of what passes for "folk" today. Dave was a dangerous man who made dangerous music. His sets went every whichaway through the history of jazz, blues, Celtic, and ragtime, with none of the smugness or tinkly goodvibesmanship that fills "folk festivals" today. Dave wasn't interested in good vibes. He was interested in good music.

You hear this most strikingly in his guitar-playing. What sets him apart is the complete avoidance of perfection. These are brilliant parts, drawing on Lonnie Johnson, Eddie Lang, Django Reinhart, Josh White, John Hurt, and other greats. They are tuneful and rooted and full of unusual twists. But it's easy to focus on the fact that some notes are flailed at, some fudged, and dismiss them as lazy or technically deficient. Then you try playing them, and you discover a) they're hard as Hell and b) the flailings and fudgings actually serve an expressive purpose. Afterwards, most folk and New Age guitar sounds utterly empty and soulless.

Then there's Dave's iconoclasm. He was farther to the Left than anybody you will ever meet, but his patience with the Tolerance/Inclusion school of lyric-writing was, at best, thin. There are no wimpy anti-war songs here. There is the a cappella "Luang Prabang." It opens "When I came back from Luang Prabang/I didn't have a thing where my balls used to hang/But I had a wooden medal and a fine harangue/Now I'm a fucking hero." There's enough anger there to peel paint, which is what I felt in 1968 and it's what I feel now. Thanks, Dave.

I've been reading a book called "Chasing the Rising Sun" by Ted Anthony. It documents the various versions of the old folk song "House of the Rising Sun" from its earliest commercial recordings, by Clarence Ashley and the Callahan Brothers, through Alan Lomax's various Library of Congress recordings; commercial folk records by Josh White, Bob Dylan, and others; the Animals' 1964 rock hit; and the many subsequent records made since then.

The book itself has left me underwhelmed. Aside from whatever interest there may be in watching Anthony do his research there isn't much there there. But it has had one surprisingly powerful benefit: I've started singing the song again.

My take on the tune comes most strongly, I would guess, from Dave Van Ronk's, widely considered the definitive "folk" version of the early '60s. It uses the minor key melody (the first examples are in a major key) and Van Ronk's use of a descending bass line rather than the more familiar ascending line the Animals popularized. It's a strong piece of material and sits in my voice well, but what I like best about it is that singing it brings me closer to Dave, who was my friend.

Dave died in 2002 and, for reasons I won't get into, I was not able to attend his funeral. This has always rankled. Dave was a great teacher, full of valuable insight even when he was taking me to task. Hey, being told by Dave Van Ronk that you drink too much is something of an honor.

I'm sober now and in his last years so was Dave, but singing "It's one foot on the platform and another foot on the train" I can smell the coal dust Dave talked about in the air at the Gaslight Coffeehouse on MacDougal Street (the place began as a coal scuttle and was never properly cleaned) and hear the rattle of old expresso machines. Thanks, Dave.

You hear it a lot in my business, or at least read it a lot. Any writer wanting to fill up a slow news day will address the question, if only to establish his or her all-important anti-racist bonafides. They will say that it doesn't matter whether Paul Butterfield, say, could actually play the blues well (he could) because he shouldn't have been doing it at all. Paul Simon's "Graceland" album comes in for a lot of this, too. Despite that fact that he paid the South African musicians who played on it more money than they'd ever seen in their lives, it was still a piece of "colonialist cultural imperialism" and as such invalid, inauthentic, racist.

Artists take what they hear and work with it without preconditions or reservations. That's what makes them artists. Louis Armstrong used a European instrument, the trumpet, along with European music notation and the sonorities of European brass bands to make his own personal statement, a statement that went around the world and still inspires almost a century later. Should he NOT have done this? Was he a cultural imperialist? How about Duke Ellington or Charlie Parker, who were influenced by Delius, Stravinsky, and Ravel? When Alan Lomax first recorded Muddy Waters for the Library of Congress all he wanted to sing was Gene Autry cowboy songs. It was Lomax, the Eastern liberal, who insisted Mddy sing blues. It was more authentic.

Interestingly, nobody in hip-hop complains about white artists like Eminem. He's good and there's an end on't. Perhaps when Barack Obama is elected President, which I sincerely hope will happen, we'll hear less of this kind of orthodoxy-mongering.

I've been jamming with pianist Dave Bristow lately. He's the Executive Director of the Island Music Guild and a good jazz pianist and producer. He's spent most of his career programming electronic keyboards for Yamaha, playing at trade shows and clinics with many of the best players in the world.

We've started recording at the Guild on slow days and so far we have nine songs down: Charles Mingus's Goodbye Porkpie Hat (which fans of long standing will remember from many years ago) and the originals Down the River; In the Pines; Godzilla Feet; Nobody's Daddy; Never Do Right Blues; My Old Car; Mirror; and That's Alright, Baby. Dave has added MIDI percussion and other sweetening and we're going to send the tracks to Nashville so Liam Graham can add some vocal harmonies and perhaps bass-guitar.

It's a little odd, considering that the "From the Island" album is mixed, mastered, and sitting on my desk waiting to be manufactured. But this new project is very rewarding and, truth be told, the most commercial (in a good way) recordings I've ever made. I like them a lot and I think others will, too.

I have, in fact, never worked with a pianist, let alone recorded with one. For the past forty years I've been loyal to the one-man-band aspect of guitar fingerpicking and I'm not sure it's done me any favors in the studio. "Handsignal" was an attempt to make fuller, more arranged recordings but these arrangements tend to feature lots of other guitars, played by me, so the effect is not always what I originally had in mind.

In this case the piano fills out the space behind the guitar without hiding what I'm playing behind similar-sounding textures. Dave is very good at voicing chords to stay out of the way of the intervals I'm playing, and there's a fullness there that gives my voice a nice cushion. Sometimes we sound like Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, which anyone who knows me knows will thrill me to death. Sometimes we sound like Joni Mitchell with Herbie Hancock behind her, an unexpected but deeply flattering comparison. Quite often we sound a lot like my three favorite '70s groups: the Band, Steely Dan, and most often and most gratifyingly Little Feat, with the great pianist Bill Payne. I've made a list of another dozen tunes I'd like to try and I'm willing to bet that half of them work out well. That's an album, people. And a damned good one.

On one level Nashville reminded me of Hartford, a mid-sized commercial city with lots of insurance companies and lawyers. The problem for those Nashvillians who wish to enforce a surface conventionality is that the music business is too successful to be completely ignored. So in the center of town, surrounded by soaring new office towers, there is a lovingly preserved strip of fleabag souvenir stores, bars, and the Ryman Auditorium, whose front declares its origins as a church and revival center and whose rear backs onto Tootsie's, the Broken Spoke, and Jack's.

All of these, along with every single public establishment in town, feature a near-constant flow of musicians, banging away at original songs, usually on guitar. There is music everywhere: some of it hopeless, some of it trading on the performers' good looks, some of it as good as you're ever going to hear. Being a songwriter in Nashville is about the best gamble in show business. You invest little more than your time, which means you have not much to lose (except your self-respect) and, if you hit, a huge amount to gain.

My favorites were the old guys. Nashville is a bit like a world-class ski resort, filled with talented bums. When I lived in Aspen, Colorado I saw how much the local economy depended on people who had dedicated their lives to skiing and nothing else. They worked odd jobs, slept where they could, and spent as much of their time as the season would permit honing their skills. There are plenty of pickers in Nashville with the same mystical attachment to music - and you can keep doing it long after your ligaments get too stiff for Rocky Mountain mogul fields. These guys (all the women I saw were young) had huge repertoires, an encyclopedic knowledge of the form, and a Zen-like disregard for material success. It was great to watch them work.

One other note, having little to do with what I just got through saying: at the Country Music Hall of Fame I saw a video of Wanda Jackson, an artist I had heard of but never heard. She is generally described as the first female rockabilly singer, which gave me the mistaken impression her work was the province of record collectors, obscurantists, and other Brits. Well, I'm here to tell you. Wanda Jackson was the first female rock STAR, the female Elvis, a dark-eyed spitfire who knew how to pick them up and lay them down. I don't know if she "went country" later on but the clip I saw was rock and roll you could put beside Little Richard, Elvis, or anybody you'd want to mention. If all male performers need to study Elvis, then all female performers definitely need to watch Wanda Jackson. She slew me.

I had a great week in Music City. It really is Music City, too. Ever single public place, it seems, has its musician, at all hours, sometimes hopeless, sometimes extremely good, banging away his or her songs on a guitar. I found a place to play every night I was there except one and people seemed to like me. There's a lot to say about this visit, though, and I think I'll talk about the music in my next column. For now I'll just write about what I did and saw and save the deeper ruminations until I've had time to think them over some.

I flew in Tuesday night and Wednesday I parked downtown and started at Jack's on Broadway for a lunch of pork barbeque with greens and sweet potatoes. Cornbread, please. Now I was back in the South. Jack's has a rear exit onto the alley behind the Ryman Auditorium, former home of the Grand Ole Opry radio programme and now a much-renovated concert venue. But the alley is still there, ghosts of oldtimers like Cowboy Copas, Hawkshaw Hawkins, Kirk McGhee, and ole Hank himself flitting from the stage door across to Tootsie's Orchid Lounge.

This was not a drinking tour, however, so I walked out of the alley and around the corner to Gruhn Guitars. The staff there treated me with practiced indifference but nonetheless I got to play a Martin 000-18 from 1940 worth 20 times what I had just paid for a car. That may be a comment more on the car but yes, it was a fine instrument.

Next was the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum, where I hyperventilated a couple of times - over Jimmie Rodgers' guitar, Elvis's Cadillac, and the Atkins family guitar that Chet learned on as a boy. In addition to the permanent collection there was an exhibit of Williams family memorabilia, but it seemed more focused on Hank, Jr. and his mother than on the old man himself. I left a flatpick in the fountain on my way out.

The real museum experience came on Friday, at a place called the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum. This is pretty much a one-man operation, in a building quite close to the CMHF, and anybody who goes to Nashville must see it. I can't begin to tell you the jaw-dropping array of instruments and studio equipment they have. I'll let one example suffice.

It is widely acknowledged that Jimi Hendrix first learned his craft in the music clubs of Nashville when he was in the 101st Airborn Division stationed at Fort Campbell just outside of town. This museum has in one room the original dance floor, walls, ceiling, and doors of the Jolly Roger club with a lifesize standup photograph of Hendrix with Billy Cox playing in that club.

I played the owner "Godzilla Feet" and he refused to take my money. Then, when I was done, he said, "Lemme show you something just came in this morning" and got out a double bass that had belonged to Lyle Ritz, one of the Wrecking Crew, Phil Spector's house band at Gold Star studios in LA. He started playing the take-down section from "You've Lost that Lovin' Feeling" - DOOM... doom DOOM... doom DOOM... doom DOOM DOOM - on the same bass that had recorded the original. I started singing "Baby, baby, I get down on my knees for you" and I couldn't go on. It was too much.

Saturday was another beautiful day, driving in the country near where Liam and I had played Thursday night (more on this later) in the little town of White's Creek. The dogwoods were out, and I'd had another plate of barbeque at Jack's (there was a branch within walking distance of my hotel - God loves me) and I drove listening to Merle Travis along the road the James Gang had used to get out of town. I'll post photos in a few days.

When I was in seventh grade I performed Tom Lehrer's "Irish Ballad" at my Junior High School talent show. It was in the spring of 1964, so naturally there was a Beatles act, four eighth-graders lip-synching with brooms and tennis racquets to "All My Loving." As soon as the record started the whole auditorium erupted with screaming, so loud that several of the baby brothers and sisters in the audience began to cry. Everybody knew it wasn't the guys with brooms and tennis racquets these girls were screaming for. They were the same bra-snapping pests they had always been and would always be.

On the surface, these girls were screaming at a record. But, more than that, these girls were screaming through the record at something bigger. They were flexing a new kind of public muscle, showing a new, uniquely female power, and you could tell it felt good. They had become a new kind of army, seizing cultural leadership through sheer lung-power and announcing this leadership in no uncertain terms. And that night at Westminster Junior High cultural leadership was only the first item on their agenda.

After all, stars of European music have been acclaimed with screaming hysteria for hundreds of years - since the days of the castrati, at least - but it could be argued that in the 20th Century, as women won the vote and other rights, these demonstrations took on a new meaning. In fact, if you accept that two World Wars and the failure of Communism begat a thorough disillusionment with all the institutions of Western society, then this group action by a sector of society that had been completely disenfranchised to that point takes on a lot of significance.

And who were the screamers screaming for? Who were they boosting into the spotlight? Effeminate men: the skinny, vulnerable Sinatra; the racially indeterminate Elvis Presley; the Beatles with their long hair and their gay manager. This was a real - if, for most girls, unconscious - statement about the manly, warlike men who had run the world for as long as anyone could remember, and seemed to be doing such a poor job of it lately.

A few years after that talent show pop groups were making public statements on a range of social and political questions. Joan Baez was saying that no girl should sleep with any boy who still carried his draft card. As our presidents have come increasingly from the ranks of the noncombatants and our culture increasingly reflects a new emphasis on the secular and the ironic, you can hear the screams in the background. And if you listen closely to the screams you can hear the thoughts behind them. A new kind of man will soon be in charge and, after him, a new kind of woman.

Dear Gil,
I just discovered some music I really think you'd like. It's an album from the '60s that it's hard to believe I'd never listened to before (#80 on Rolling Stone's list of the 500 greatest albums) but there you are. It's by the best of the second-tier British Invasion groups, the Zombies, and it's called "Odessey and Oracle." The misspellling is, in that flashing '60s style, more or less intentional.

I had heard the album's hit single "Time of the Season" plenty of times - great rhythm track, great engineering, great singing, great organ solo - but that did not prepare me for how good the rest of the album was. The closest comparison to an album you might be familiar with would be the Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds." Recorded a year later, in 1967, "Odessey and Oracle" has the same sense of trying to find new ways to approach harmony singing in a pop context. Also, like "Pet Sounds," the songs themselves are kind of corny but redeemed by spectacular arrangements.

Being English, the Zombies have more of the choirboy thing (which made me think of you, natch) and less of the streetcorner/doowop thing than the Beach Boys. But the album has the same superb musicianship and the same yearning, questing quality. It's tremendously satisfying and quite timeless. I really think you'd like it. Of course, you may be all over it already. My students constantly correct me in matters of '60s arcana, and why should you be any different?

The group's story is as interesting as their music. They were teenagers in a backwater town in Hertfordshire who won a local battle of the bands, recorded a hit with the prize money, spent the next three years touring the world, then recorded their masterpiece after breaking up. Anyway, check it out. vvv, Uncle Pete

Those that can, do - and those that can't, teach. It's an old saw (from George Bernard Shaw?) whose principal application seems to be by students crying sour grapes over a poor grade. Of course these days the job market for poets, 12-tone composers, and experts in Medieval Field Systems is such that often masters of these fields must teach somewhere to earn their livings but never mind. There's another reason that Shaw's old put-down has no special sting.

I'm convinced that the best teachers, at least in the arts, are rarely the "best" exponents of the art they teach. What you want in a teacher is not so much mastery of the art itself as thorough, objective study of it. Too often the visiting genius stands at the lectern and says, "I dunno how I do it. It's in me and it comes out. Where's my check?" This person's understanding of the form extends only to the point of his own understanding, no further. with no need to know how other great artists do their work or, indeed, how to become a great artist at all.

The teacher, on the other hand, poor, benighted hack whose own work doesn't rise past the level of competence, is far better able to compare, contrast, explicate for students' benefit the work of all the major figures of the form, his study fueled by the hopeless desire to someday understand the way the geniuses that inspired him understand.

More than that, the teacher, in his loyalty to a muse who will never repay his love, does work just as capital-I Important as the genius, if not moreso. The teacher is the one who nourishes the line, his consciousness extending past the rewards of self and into the satisfactions of history. It is great work, perhaps the greatest of all.

When you go to that part of the world that has actual stores in it, with actual goods on actual shelves for purchase with (sometimes) actual cash, the word "music" on a sign means either musical instruments or recordings of people playing musical instruments. Let's leave aside the potentially explosive question of whether hip-hop is music or a new form of spoken-word performance.

Before the advent of recording, "music" usually meant sheets of paper with music notation on them. You bought sheet music, took it home, practiced it on whatever musical instrument you had in the house, and that was where music came from. Shopping in today's virtual retail universe, when you see the word "music" it means recordings. You can buy instruments online, but the button you push reads "instruments."

So what is "music"? Is it sheets of paper that tell you through an elaborate code what to do to bring notes to life? ("I was late for rehearsal because I forgot my music.") Is it a recording? ("With this portable player I can listen to my music anywhere I want.") Or is it the mysterious vibrations themselves, filling the air with physical pulses that our ears decode for us as an (often) pleasant adjunct to our interior lives?

The thing to remember about the second of those three is that it requires electricity, to run another decoding mechanism between the hardware and our ears. Electricity has become something we take for granted, despite the fact that little more than a century ago most of our society still lived without it. And we may yet live without it again, when we use up the fuels that run the machines that produce it.

Regular readers of this space have heard me talk about the "Martian anthropologists" before. We have no idea what impression of our culture people in the future will form because we don't know which artifacts will survive and which will be lost. But we can be reasonably sure that, if (when) we run out of electricity, ALL the information we have so carefully stored in electronic media will be lost. The Martian anthropologists would probably be able to decipher written music, using some sort of Rosetta Stone, and they would probably be able to work whatever instruments survived through trial and error. But what are all these little discs for?

Electricity did not play a part in the creation of (it says here) the most valuable American music of the 20th Century. Art-music composers like Copland, Ives, Ellington, and Gershwin used written music as their medium. And even if these composers had electric lights to read their work by, much of the greatest American music of the 20th Centrury was created in the light of kerosene lamps and transmitted via an oral tradition that lives to this day and may very well last after all the trees have been cut down and all the oil has been burned.

But will this music be heard by the Martian anthropologists? The Romans, like all ancient civillizations, had plenty of music. But we have no idea what it sounded like. Pictures of their instruments survive, which we can use to build replicas. But what do we play on them? Nobody knows.

I'm looking forward to the show Monday night at Highway 99, although there have been some last-minute changes that ramp up the uncertainty level. First, Justin the host won't be there. He got another guy to take his place, a very good, jazz-influenced player named Jeremy. But I don''t think this guy sings, so where I thought I would split singing with someone else, like Justin, now I'm wondering if I have to sing the whole 90 minutes by myself.

It'd actually be fun if I did, but if so I need to fatten up the list I'm taking. And it would be good to catch my breath for a number or two. Ah well, there's always instrumentals. And I'll miss playing some of Justin's arrangements, too: a nice "Sympathy for the Devil" and "For What It''s Worth," where I could play the Stills part against Justin's strng harmonics. Those are just two.

I've been playing the telecaster more lately, getting the chops up. This guy Jeremy is well-educated in jazz and I'll need to make my case that short and sweet gets the bear, too. And speaking of bears, I've decided to bring along the Blues Bear, who lives on my dashboard, to sit on my amp. It's time for more of us to learn to love the Blues Bear.

And I'm not going to have to host the open jam afterwards, right? That would be disaster. I just don't have the temperment. Justin is very, very good at it. He knows how to make people feel good, a valuable skill in any field. Turns out I know his father, also a nice guy, who plays guitar with Deb Seymour. Small world.

So the Times didn't print my letter, which is not the end of the world. They printed four letters today in reply to the Scottish novelist's account of his happy adventures with the Really Terrible Orchestra. Three of them were full of praise for the idea that music should be used to such a noble purpose. At least two of these were from people calling themselves music educators.

The one dissenting voice came from a woman who identified herself as the wife of a musician, and she spent her designated 150 words talking about how one wouldn't feel so jolly about the RTO after hearing one's husband forlornly practicing day after day only to be replaced with drum machines and sequencers and the like. He must be a drummer, I guess.

Nobody talked about, or at least the Tmes did not choose to print anything that talked about, the effect on a society's musical culture of the PUBLIC display of self-consciously bad music. I will not rehash my arguments here, considering that they lie only a few inches below this post. But it does seem as if the Times, and its favored correspondents, have missed the point, perhaps, in the Times' case, deliberately.

Let's start with the question of what music's purpose is. All four published letters seem to agree: the purpose of music is to boost the self-esteem of the people who make it, either through the everybody-wins esthetic of modern education or in a professional musician's satisfaction at being able to support his family.

Is that music's sole purpose? Let's not quarrel with modern man's pursuit of self-esteem. That's too big a subject to be ventilated here. Instead let's talk about another form of self-esteem, the pride one may justly feel at being part of a society whose PUBLIC musical culture features the finest music human beings can play, music that challenges and expands a listener's sense of what it is possible for human beings to do.

I'm talking about PUBLIC music-making here. There's a widely anthologized Norman Rockwell painting of a rural barbershop, after hours. The only light comes from the back room, where you can see a small group of men concentrating with sweetly comic earnestness on the piece of chamber music they're playing. This is a heartwarming image of amateur music-making, with all the hard-won self-esteem the term implies. But this music is not being played in a public forum. The players make no statement of inclusion in the history of their time. Future anthropologists will not include their work in any survey of the era's musical culture, saying, "Well, some of it was pretty good but some of it was awful." They are esteeming themselves where people are supposed to esteem themselves, outside the public gaze.

Perhaps an Op-Ed piece....

Charlie Film and I were talking last night, after the Pegasus gig with Rick Barrenger, and he asked when the last time was that I bought a new allbum - that is to say, an album of new music that had been released fairly recently. It stumped me completely. The closest I could come was the remixed Beatles album called "Love," which I wrote about when I bought it however many years ago that was.

"I don't think that counts," Charlie replied. And when I said I was thinking about getting the Herbie Hancock album that won this year's Album of the Year Grammy Charlie didn't even have to say anything. It's all Joni Mitchell songs - new record, old music.

I've said before on this space how slim the pickings seem to be in new popular music, despite the vast number of young bands and soloists. Usually I ascribe this to the a general lack of musical knowledge or education among the younger generation. Less often I'll say I'm being stodgy or resistant to change. These both are true, but there's something else. People born between 1940 and 1960 claimed a kind of ownership of rock music, whether it was the rock and roll of Fats Domino and Little Richard or the later folk/rock of Bob Dylan and the Beatles. And it's still "our" music. The only thing that's changed is that the people whose music it isn't are now younger than us, not older.

Today's New York Times featured an op-ed column by a Scottish novelist named Alexander McCall Smith about his work with a classical group called the Really Terrible Orchestra. I won't print the whole piece here - it's the usual grinning half-assedness so beloved by our British cousins - just a couple of grafs and then my reply to the Letters editor.


"WHY should real musicians — the ones who can actually play their instruments — have all the fun?

Some years ago, a group of frustrated people in Scotland decided that the pleasure of playing in an orchestra should not be limited to those who are good enough to do so, but should be available to the rankest of amateurs. So we founded the Really Terrible Orchestra, an inclusive orchestra for those who really want to play, but who cannot do so very well. Or cannot do so at all, in some cases.

....Our initial efforts were dire, but we were not discouraged. Once we had mastered a few pieces — if mastered is the word — we staged a public concert. We debated whether to charge for admission, but wisely decided against this. That would be going too far.

Our first concert was packed, and not just with friends and relations. People were intrigued by the sheer honesty of the orchestra’s name and came to see who we were. They were delighted. Emboldened by the rapturous applause, we held more concerts, and our loyal audience grew. Nowadays, when we give our annual concert at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, the hall is full to capacity with hundreds of music-lovers. Standing ovations are two-a-penny.

....There is now no stopping us. We have become no better, but we plow on regardless. This is music as therapy, and many of us feel the better for trying. We remain really terrible, but what fun it is."


Sir,
The Really Terrible Orchestra continues a long tradition of deliberate incompetence in British music, a tradition the critic Donald Francis Tovey complained about 100 years ago. It is sporting of them to forego charging admission, but we should remember that the people who attend RTO concerts and give them standing ovations have still chosen to attend these events in preference to the other concerts available to them, concerts by musicians who, often at some sacrifice to themselves and their families, try to earn a living by making the best music they can make. The RTO are probably great, goofy fun, but are they really the jolly band of anti-elitists they pretend to be? Or are they heedlessly lowering the aggregate level of our public musical culture just for the satisfaction of appearing more egalitarian than the rest of us?

I remain, sir, yours sincerely, etc. etc.

The Right Honorable Algernon Smoot-Faversham

Okay, I didn't really sign it that way. I just love the idea of writing an angry letter to the Times.

I ran into Todd Houghton the other day and he invited me (again) to the open-mike he hosts every month at the Harbor Pub on Bainbridge Island. Todd's one of the good guys; he recorded about half the tracks that later became the "Nobody's Daddy" album. Besides that, this particular open-mike was the first place I ever played on the Island, before I knew a soul. I was flying back East the next morning and sold my last CD to make bus fare to the airport. I may not go to it every time anymore, but I went gladly this time.

It was a good night, in part because Todd is a fearsomely good player on guitar and bass and in part because of all the musicians in the audience and because the rest of the crowd liked music, too. Another good thing was the fact that the whole thing wasn't just a procession of acts. Different combinations of people got up and when nobody wanted to do anything nobody did anything. Then after a while another ad hoc group got up. People kept asking me to play with them and yet it didn't turn into All Pete All The Time because every two or three songs somebody else would sing or something else would happen.

Also, Todd requested a song of mine I had more or less forgotten - "Root Man Boogie" - and it worked so well that now it's back on the A list again. I love when that happens.

Went out last night to hear a band called Planet Groove at the Treehouse in Poulsbo. Bubbles and I saw them a few weeks ago but I was not prepared for how tight they'd gotten since then. I expected what I sometimes call "a 'Mustang Sally' band," playing raucous, not terribly disciplined R&B for dancers and drinkers. Instead, they've turned into a razor-sharp funk band, full of precise turnarounds and well-cued endings, the kind of band that does James Brown well, which is not as common as one might hope.

They let me sit in for most of the second set. Charlie Film lent me his amp and came along for moral support. It's interesting how valuable a friend can be on these occasions. You would think a visiting fireman would have plenty of society, but the conversations you have under these circumstances tend to be professional, not personal, so it was nice to have someone there I could talk to in a regular sort of way.

I started off playing by myself while the band was off the stand, fingperpicking "Hey Jude" and "Across the Universe" and trying to get in tune. Then I grabbed James, their guitarist, as he walked by and he played second guitar on "Stop Breaking Down." Slowly the thing began to gain momentum and one by one the various Planet Groove members materialized and it turned into a big thing with people dancing and all. Then we did a few of their things, then I sat down for a few numbers, then they brought me up for a couple of others at the finish. Lots of people were dancing, which I love.

I tried not to clutter the arrangements up, which a second guitar often does. James plays fat parts - he's the only guitar and he uses a lot of effects - and the drummer was busy (in a good way) so I generally tried to find the one accent that somebody wasn't playing and play nothing but that, leaving big silences in the riffs so the holes could act as a kind of reverse percussion. All in all a fun night.

Dear Dad,
I went looking for the NYT review you mentioned and found Dave Marsh's blast at Marybeth Hamilton - was that it? Anyway, Marsh is a maddeningly obscure and pompous writer and most of the time, as in this review, I just can't tell what he's about. In this case you can see he's furious at Hamilton for some reason but he doesn't tell an alternate story or do much to summarize the book he's supposed to be reviewing, so the whole thing turns into an empty rant.

That's too bad, because the story of the misunderstanding of the blues and its distortion in the culture at large by, often but not always, well-intentioned acolytes is crucial to the future of the music and the racial reconciliation those acolytes generally wanted to bring about. Alan Lomax in particular is a classic type, the falsely benevolent liberal/progessive/socialist New Deal bureaucrat who doesn't pay his sources. Son House, the Delta's leading bluesman at the time, was given a Coke after recording one of the seminal documents of Mississippi blues, his session with Leroy Williams recorded by Lomax at Lake Cormorant in 1941. Williams got a Coke, too. And if you listen to the interviews Lomax did with several black musicians (Blind Willie McTell and Jelly Roll Morton among others) his condescending tone will make your skin crawl. I talked about his interview of Morton (and Morton's revenge) in a blog entry a year or so ago. It should still be up.

Anyway, from what I can make out through Marsh's torrent of abuse, Hamilton's book wants to address this question and fails. Elijah Wald's "Escaping the Delta" is better, focusing in particular on Robert Johnson and using a close reading of his recordings to establish the ways in which his work was misunderstood and distorted by subsequent fans, writers, and apprentices. It's well worth reading, one of the two or three finest (and fairest) pieces of blues scholarship I know, even though Wald doesn't do much with the question that interests me the most, the way post-Socialist English artists and commentators, raised on Kitchen Sink drama in a rigid class system, missed entirely the freedom and social mobility that blues offered rural blacks, turning the music into an expression of tortured solitude and oppression that is, at best, only a fraction of the story.

This letter is becoming nearly as overwritten as anything by Dave Marsh, but I think I'll put it up on the blog anyway, if you don't mind. It's a chance to plug Elijah's book, for one thing. love, pete

This blog is primarily about music, naturally enough. But I've written about movies and about my family and about our culture and society. This week I'm going to do something I haven't done before and may never do again. I want to write about politics.

More and more Democrats seem to want their presidential nominee to be Senator Obama. This feels like a mistake to me. Even leaving aside the unfair and unequal standard by which Senator Clinton is often judged - nobody criticizes Obama for his fat ankles - there is an unhealthy element of personality at work here. People just like Obama more than Clinton. They respond to him personally. They find her cold and ambitious and respond to his appeal for a different kind of politics.

There is essentially no difference between the two candidates on the issues, but Obama is able to turn this to his advantage by calling himself the candidate of "change." However nebulous and undefined this change may be, his strategy forces Clinton to be the candidate of the status quo. This is empty symbolism. It may be great television but it's bad politics. And the party will pay for it in November, because if the Democrats can't win the White House in 2008, after all the advantages handed them by the Bush administration, they will no longer deserve to be a viable force in American politics.

I am less concerned with the future viability of the Democratic Party than with the growing acceptance of the idea that the first qualification of any president is his or her personality. You would think that after eight years of George W. Bush people would now value competence over geniality. But because the people who voted for Bush are not "our" kind of people many of us feel we don't have anything to gain from paying attention to them. It's worth noting that the people who voted for Bush did so because they liked him and they wanted someone like themselves (in this case, an evangelical Christian) to have that place on the world stage. And those people got screwed far worse than any of the smug liberals you see with "Impeach Bush" stickers on the bumpers of their Volvos. The Bush voters are the ones whose children are being killed in Iraq. They voted for an appealing personality and they got a dangerous incompetent.

The most widely reviled politician of my lifetime was without a doubt Richard Nixon. But I would love to see Richard Nixon in the White House for the next eight years. Why? Because Richard Nixon was not cool. He did not look good on television. He did not have an ideology or a demographic to hide behind. All he offered (as even his loudest detractors admit) was competence and hard work. That's what we need, a competent, hard-working chief executive, not a poster boy.