Peter Spencer: Pete's Blog

I got a good book out of the library the other day, the new memoir by Suze (pronounced Susie) Rotolo, who is required to go through life remembered chiefly as the 19-year-old girl walking arm-in-arm with Bob Dylan on the cover of his album "Freewheeling."

When I knew her Suze was a nice lady, living on University Place with her husband and teenaged son, and she took very little interest in the music scene anymore. But she and Leyla, who I eventually married, and Andrea Vuocolo, who married Dave Van Ronk, were a trio. You could see the two younger women taking unspoken pointers from Suze, a certain way of walking down the street, a certain sense of yourself.

She was a powerful and subtle person, Suze Rotolo, and I expect she still is. "A Freewheeling Time" is a great memoir of New York in the '60s and a portrait of a certain kind of New York City girl, one who may not exist anymore. Certainly, there can't be many girls or boys of the current generation who can say that their parents were, in the happy phrase of the day, "card-carrying communists." Nor can many of these remember when Greenwich Village was a place of industrial lofts, whose workers ate lunch in small restaurants and bars which later in the evening became music venues, like Gerdes Folk City.

Much of that neighborhood is gone, quite literally, replaced by the highrises and sports bars of an expanding New York University. But the bright-eyed young people of today, in search of their own Elysium (Elysia?) might well benefit from Suze's clear-eyed take on the original Bohemian playground and a girl's path through it. How many other women do you know who were named Slum Goddess of the Month by a paper called the East Village Other?

The Triple Door is a big deal - proscenium arch, monitors set flush in the stage floor, a lighting director asking how much fog you want from the fog machine, a stage manager with a headset taking you to your place and running cues with the LD and the sound guy. And all those seats to fill. This last was my biggest concern beforehand but we did okay, better than okay for a Tuesday night. I'd call it two-thirds capacity - not too shabby at all.

The show was called the Fast Folk Revival (Jack Hardy told me it was okay by him if we used the name) and we tried to harken back to the annual FF shows they used to have at the Bottom Line in New York. The idea was to hear from seven Seattle songwriters in two sets with me talking in between about the old days. I also began the proceedings with a song I'd written in the FF days ("Restless Youth in Chinatown") and ended them with one from lately ("From the Island").

The crew was Carrie Akre, Erin Corday, Eric Miller, Megan Peters, Holly Figueroa O'Reilly (Holly did most of the work), Jeremy Serwer, and Kym Tuvim. I told some jokes, reminisced about Village characters like Dave Van Ronk and Howie Wyeth, plugged Suze Rotolo's book "A Freewheeling Life," and pontificated about songwriting. A more or less typical remark in that vein was, "A good singer-songwriter can follow any act in show business. A good singer-songwriter can follow Wrestlemania." A lot of what I said was stuff I've written here.

I had a script prepared and took it onstage with me at the outset, but I found I couldn't really get the performance out over the footlights looking down at the paper so after that I just studied the next set of remarks backstage and then went out and extemporized. That worked better.

I don't think I've ever spent so much time standing in front of an audience without a guitar, just talking. It felt quite strange, and I find I'm unable to remember much of the music that went on, but from the audience reactions afterwards it seems that the whole show worked pretty much just the way we wanted, which is satisfying.

Lots of friends were there. Greg Hoffer wore his red T-shirt. Stephan and Margot, Pete and Jackie, Saffy and Evan. Will Geuble missed the first ferry, took the next, and then ran the half-dozen blocks to the venue - what a guy! Karen looked utterly beautiful, like a cameo. I kept noticing her at ringside and losing my train of thought. Someone forgot to tell her that family sits in back.

YOU'RE TOO OLD TO PLAY GIGS WHEN:

It becomes more important to find a place on stage for your fan than your amp.

Your gig clothes make you look like George Burns out for a round of golf.

All your fans leave by 9:30 p..m.

All you want from groupies is a foot massage and back rub.

You love taking the elevator because you can sing along with most of your set-list.

Instead of a fifth member, your band wants to spring for a roadie.

You lost the directions to the gig.

You need your glasses to see the amp settings.

You've thrown out your back jumping off the stage.

You feel like hell before the gig even starts.

The waitress is your daughter!

You stop the set because your ibuprofen fell behind the speakers.

Most of your crowd just sways in their seats.

You find your drink tokens from last month's gig in your guitar case.

You refuse to play without earplugs.

You ask the club owner if you can start at 8:30 instead of 9:30.

You check the TV schedule before booking a gig.

Your gig stool has a back.

You're related to at least one member in the band.

You don't let anyone sit in.

You need a nap before the gig.

After the third set, you bug the club owner to let you quit early.

During the breaks, you now go to the van to lie down.

You prefer a music stand with a light.

You don't recover until Tuesday afternoon.

You hope the host's speech lasts forever.

You buy amps considering their weight and not their tone or "cool" factor.

You can remember seven different club names for the same location.

You have a hazy memory of the days when you could work 10 gigs in 7 days and could physically do it!

Your date couldn't make it because she couldn't find a babysitter for the grandkids.

The set list has to be in 20 point type.

Your drug of choice is now coffee.

It seems impossible to find stage shoes with decent arch support.

You fart on stage and don't laugh.

THANK YOU, ELLIOT!

She was nubile, perhaps not as nubile as she once had been. But a man could give her a baby if he wanted to. She was dressed simply enough that he had to look at her feet to determine her status and, yes, leather shoes. She was a respectable married lady and once he raised his eyes again he saw she had the rings to prove it, flashing out their warning from under the long sleeves of her plain denim jacket. Beware!

As the people in the terminal began to file down the 100-yard gangway to the ferry slip a young woman's back caught his eye in front of him. This one was truly nubile, not yet married. Her hips and upper thighs were firm, her walk steady and vigorous, her back straight. Older women might copy her jeans and low shoes (themselves a copy of every other girl her age) but the flirtatious modesty of her clothes above the waist - sheer overshirt, a long camisole underneath to protect her midriff, bra straps signaling out from under that - could only succeed for a girl. A woman, a woman who had married, honeymooned, nursed, never sent such mixed signals, however free from convention she might be.

The girl vanished in the milling crowd walking the ramp onto the boat without his having seen her face, but the back, the walk, the waist tells as many secrets as any part of a woman, and he felt he had known enough for now.

Sitting in his usual seat in the bow he opened his briefcase and got out a New Yorker, the quiet but desperate attempt to maintain some sense of the East in this boom-town on the Pacific. He opened it to a page of drawings, the twenty young (under 40) fiction writers the editors thought showed us the way forward. The drawings had obviously been done individually (whether live or from photographs it was hard to say) and then arranged together to look like some sort of panel or dais.

He had no idea where (academia, "little" magazines) any of these writers came from. He recognized none of the names but that was no surprise. The pictures seemed jealous of each other, aware that what would be the Big Break for a few would be the High Point for most. Who will it be? they seemed to ask. Who do I kill to land on the proper side of the divide?

He began to read. Perhaps because he was no longer young (under 40) all the stories seemed to him exactly the same. In their attempts to render the minutest of thought-processes in what passed for real time, the authors jettisoned all conventions of plot, character, storytelling. Forget about the timeless power of myth. Their voices were hushed, subtle, what was supposed to be ironic detachment coming across instead as a dreadful fear of making some kind of mistake: fumbling the repetitions, perhaps, or showing the characters too much tenderness.

The one story in which things seemed to actually happen was an updated slave narrative whose author might be Black (capitalize?) although the images on the picture page were all simple, stark line drawings so you couldn't really tell. She might be Jewish.

His arm ached when he lifted the briefcase and stood up to walk off the ferry. He was aware of the cotton balls taped into the crook of his elbow and, under them, the holes left in his skin where the nurse had tried and finally succeeded taking his blood for yet another test. Why was his heart behaving in this strange way? he had wanted to know. No one could tell, really, at least no one he could afford to see.

He would write a story in this fashion: so intense in its courtship of "real life" that it shot right through the confines of autobiography, barely gazed at memoir on its way past, and entered fiction by a hitherto undiscovered door as if stepping out of a bandbox or, better still, springing fully armoured from the brow of Jove. He would write everything that happened and everything he thought about it right up to the moment of his death. It sounded very Beat (Salinger had just died and he wondered if the '50s might return to importance) and transcendent and it might even allow him to steal a march on that phalanx in the New Yorker. Stranger things had happened.

Here again on the gangplank was the truly nubile one, seen in profile this time. Her bust was indifferent and the skin across her cheeks had some rough places, but the baby would clear that up. Look at her walk.

But then a prize to eclipse all others: a working woman in her early thirties leaning against a railing in bright lavender stockings, pushing buttons on a phone. This was no Island wife. You could watch the fruits of feminism turning to ashes in her mouth as she stood there, childless at her peak. She would have plenty of experience and the desire to show it off, but at the crucial moment she would still be capable of surprise, could still find that inexhaustible place where his desire for her would be enough and all else would follow. She would break just like a little girl.

He kept walking, as he always did. She could do better than him, until she couldn't.

He'd heard recently that in 35% of cases the first symptom of heart disease was sudden death. He, of course, had had symptoms for years now, which by logic must be a good sign, even if the episodes, while milder than in his drinking days, came with increasing frequency. Today he felt good. He was walking. His heartbeat was solid. He was breathing easily and his head was clear. Let's concentrate on that.

Along the pedestrian walkway leading from the terminal to the downtown streets where he would find his bus he came up behind a pair, their clothes more or less the same, the one on the right somewhat taller. It was only on coming abreast that he saw, as he had so many times before, that they were mother and daughter, no doubt on their way to a happy day at Nordstrom's.

The elder's Mother Courage face looked out grimly from under the expensive highlights, the willfully youthful clothes he could see now hanging like the flags of a defeated army on her bent, bitter frame. But the daughter was a pip, rosy, smiling, stylish but unglamorous, the shirt cut not too low, the camisole beneath showing only a hint of cleft, a tasteful, tasty, just-virginal-enough girl, a true pip. He felt better.

At the bus stop he found the usual array, perhaps fewer crazies than usual. His route to work lay through a neighborhood of social-service agencies so he had learned to harden himself against the smells and voices of the street. It always got better after a few blocks.

However, the only remotely threatening figure at the stop was a young black (Capitalize?) man whose clean clothes reassured. He wore an athletic jacket lettered "Wolves" across its back against the harbor breeze (the day's light clear but pale) and a fierce expression. Growing up where he must have grown up you need a fierce expression.

His bus came. There were fewer seats than usual, so he elected to sit beside a young Mexican (Filipino?) man who didn't seem to have been in this country long enough to grasp the concept of moving over to make room. Sitting next to a woman was out of the question, of course. Women by themselves on the bus seemed even more than usually aware of the unspoken theme.

Passing Macy's he enjoyed again the carnival procession of its busy sidewalk, well-dessed, attractive women parading among the bums, hippies, cops, crazies, and shouting teenagers. They seemed to feel they were doing us a favor, these women, by just being here; and, of course, they were. It would have been a lot easier to stay in their suburbs and shop in the mall, but "street credibility" is important, it really is, not just to roughen up the surface of your glamour, to distress it like a pair of jeans, but to show the flag, like those schoolteachers who went South after the Civil War to teach freed slaves to read.

Writing is hard. He wished he had started sooner in life, the better to be used to the grind of it all by now; but when he'd had his vigour other, more strenuous activities occupied his days. Now that no woman would have him and he had time to look around, he lacked the stamina it turns out is required to organize these briefs into sentences, no matter how many technological breakthroughs mediated between him and his computer.

Besides, where would all the ones and zeros go when the electricity ran out?

He saw the bridge at the bottom of the hill, beyond that his stop and the store where he worked. It was warm on the bus. He was suddenly faint and



-30-

It was a steamy night in Lambertville Saturday. For once I didn't fret about the size of the audience. If there had been any more people they'd have rubbed against each other uncomfortably. As it was, both of my brothers and my sister were there, plus our father. Mom says she'll be strong enough to make the next one, and I believe her. Here's my set from which I cut three numbers (Root Man Boogie, Nobody's Daddy, and Sweet Dreams) on the fly:

Mystery Woman Blues
A Philly Thing
Cupertino
Delicious Cookies
Belle Virginie
The Battle Is Over
Down the River
By the Allegheny River
Crime Against Love
Turn to Me
(encore) From the Island

Below is the opening set. The first three tunes Caleb did by himself, the second three I played guitar and sang harmony, and the last three had his cousin (my nephew) Gilbert Spencer singing trios.

It's Time (Tom Waits)
I Hurt Myself (Trent Reznor)
Lonesome Suzie (Richard Manuel)
Nothing Was Delivered (Bob Dylan)
Wolverine (Peter Spencer)
With Bierce in Mexico (Peter Spencer)
Streets of Montreal (Peter Spencer)
This Wheel's on Fire (Dylan/Danko)
It's All Over Now, Baby Blue (Dylan)

Dad made an interesting observation about the trio set. He noticed that Gilbert (St. Thomas's Choir, NYC; American Boychoir School) reflected his training by standing very still throughout, producing an even, silky tone on every note, while Caleb and I moved with the performance and attacked each phrase separately, varying tone and texture from note to note.

I thought Gilbert's approach worked in this context, especially because he was singing what bluegrassers call the "high baritone" part, the top note in each chord. But blues, or any song style that derives from blues, repays the more varied approach, and any singer would benefit from learning it. A blues or post-blues singer wants to keep the audience off-balance, both to heighten the music's expressivity and to keep them constantly engaged - the way circus performers constantly take bows.

In musical terms I'd say the best example is not a singer at all. Listen to Miles Davis, especially on ballads. He's constantly making technical mistakes - lip flubs, missed notes - and constantly recovering in ways that heighten the music's emotional authority. Davis turns what in any other trumpeter would be clams into expressions of touching vulnerability, or ecstatic, technique-be-damned inspiration.

It was a huge treat to hear "Streets of Montreal" done the way I'd always intended it. And the arrangement for "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" has been hanging fire for 40 years, since I first heard the Byrds version. Caleb sang brilliantly throughout. In the trios he had the most difficult position, in the middle of the chord, which he held tenaciously despite a near-total lack of support from my extremely shaky alto part. We'll hear the results when the DVD is edited, but the fact is I couldn't be prouder of him.

Here is a webcam video of the traditional song "Pretty Peggy-O."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EL-_yv5rO-o

Despite the fact that 'Pretty Peggy-O' is obviously a composite, with no one author, edited and reedited by literally thousands of performers in succession over generations, some constants remain. One is the "tripping down the stairs/Tying back your hairs" verse, which remains a vivid image of heedless beauty all the more powerful for the information left out.

This technique underpins post-Folk songwriting to this day, the best example being Bob Dylan. 'Pretty Peggy-O' leaves the listener asking questions the very asking of which provides the 'sense' of the song, questions whose mystery deepens the emotional engagement initiated by the song's gorgeous melody.

What happened upstairs? It could have been nothing, it could have been everything, but whatever happened the outcome is tragic, all the more painful for the lack of hard information at the happenings' core.

The other question cuts even deeper - who is speaking? With the exception of the "What would your Mama think?" verse, evidently quoting the Captain, the rest of the text, in this version or any others I've heard, has a particular narrator who seems at least somewhat privy to the action. After all he (a junior officer?) or she (a servant in quarters?) sees Polly coming down the stairs.

And what is this narrator feeling? It's a sad song, there can no doubt, but is its mood of wistful regret (again, driven by its powerful and profound melody) an expression of jealousy? Of love? And for whom? Each choice the listener makes in interpreting the text (a junior officer desires Polly for himself, a servant desires the Captain for herself, an aging sergeant reflects on the youthful folly of his superior, and so on) raises the emotional stakes higher as options supplant each other. And in the end, because of this lack of specifics, we're left with pure feeling, a deeply affecting mood of disillusion and regret, a perfect abstract for our own inchoate feelings, whatever they are.

I do not come off well in this story, but I told it to Steve Simels today so I guess that puts it in the public domain.

If you've ever worked on a night desk writing headlines you know it gets a bit Scrabble-like afterwhile. Sometimes you just lose track of what you're writing in the effort to fit the information necessary into the space available. And as a writer I've always hated heds that simply rehash my lede, so that adds an extra layer of difficulty.

Anyway, the Trenton Times was throwing me extra work as a copy editor part time while I was trying to catch on as a music writer, around 1989/90, and we had a big story. A local lady, pillar of the AME Zion Church, beloved aunt, grandmother, etc. had died when St. Vincent's Hospital gave her the wrong type blood during a routine operation. Sad story.

It happened on, I think, a Thursday. My next shift on the desk was Sunday night. By this time we had already done the news story, the various reaction stories, and the various city hall stories about the upcoming investigation. Sunday was the actual funeral. But by this time other stories had taken over above the fold and I remember the layout for Monday's edition left me an oddly-shaped space for the hed.

I tried and tried. It needed to be poetic, yet factual, and everything you really needed to know about the story was already in the lede, which was out of bounds. I really gave it my all, what with it being a beloved local pillar, etc., and as the time went by and the folks downstairs started asking where the page was I started to lose sight of what I was writing about.

Remember, this is a person who died from a botched blood transfusion.

The headline I so proudly sent down read, "Local Woman's Funeral Taps Deep Vein of Feeling."

There is a car in the parking lot here with two bumper-stickers on its tail. One reads "Kill Your Television," the other, "Art Saves Lives." I can agree whole-heartedly with each, taken one at a time. But side by side on somebody's rear bumper they make a combined statement I fear reflects an error of observation.

Together, the statements "Kill Your Television" and "Art Saves Lives" suggest that our culture suffers from to much of the one and too little of the other, that these two form a kind of yin and yang. I think, instead, that we have too much of the one BECAUSE we have too much of the other.

However stupid and degrading television may be, its place in the lives of the people who watch it is the same place Art has had since the days of Boethus. Stupid art for stupid people is still art, because stupid people consume it for the same reasons smart people consume smart art. There is no difference between a college professor listening to Mozart while smoking a fine cigar and an unemployed dropout watching "American Idol" while chugging Diet Sprite.

It may not speak well for our culture that so much of our art is addressed to stupid people, stupidly. But there it is. For most of human history "fine" art was for the elites, who understood it and to whom it communicated with subtlety and grace. The unwashed made their own art, much of it as subtle and graceful in its own way as the "fine" art produced for aristocrats by professional artists. The idea of professional artists addressing the ignorant is a new one, and may turn out to be the defining cultural story of the age.

The idea of fine art, for most moderately educated people, begins with the plays of Shakespeare. Anything before that feels like History. The end-point, for Catholics, might be Puccini; for Episcopalians Henry James; for the AME Zion Duke Ellington, and so forth. The point is that it has ended, in this view. What we have left is a hegemony of professional artists, most of them fleeing the middle class, who earn their living creating for money what the uneducated classes used to produce for free, and better. There is too much art in the world - go home!

Believe it or not, we were a fairly athletic family when I was growing up. We especially went for winter sports, not that we had much choice. We lived in Erie, Pennsylvania, conveniently located on the south shore of Lake Erie, a large flat surface designed to accelerate Canadian weather systems. Winter doesn't flirt in Erie, Pennsylvania. It greets you at the door wearing nothing but Saran Wrap and devises new and ever more passionate ways to hold on to you for the better part of eight months.

So we skied. We skated. And these slippery sports taught me about music in ways I'm only now beginning to understand. When newly on a pair of skis, feeling them move more or less of their own volition and usually down a hill that looks steeper than it did a moment ago, a child's first reaction is to stand up very straight and hold his arms out in a quest for greater wind-resistance. My father's advice was simple - "Bend your knees!" - and it worked. I could feel my center of gravity lower, feel the sickening top-heaviness go away, feel myself bouncing around corners. On skis or skates I was imperfect but serviceable.

When things go wrong in a musical performance, as they always do, inexperienced performers who still believe in perfection tend to lock their metaphorical knees, retreating into themselves searching for the moment where it all went wrong so that when they find it they can begin the process again, correctly this time. The equivalent to "Bend your knees!" is what I say to students over and over: "Listen!"

What you want to do when there has been some sort of train wreck between you and the other musicians is not to go back but to move forward, so you can all meet up at some point further along in the score. The passage, now safely behind you, may even turn out to have been rather special, in a terrifying sort of way. But it has no chance of being ANYTHING if you don't do what you can to put it behind you. Open your eyes, look around, hear what the others are playing (this works if you're by yourself, too), and accommodate yourselves to it. Then, there you are. Nobody got hurt. The composer might have a migraine but he would have had one anyway.

Bend your knees. Lower your center. Move through. Listen. There you are.

As Mother's Day came and went, a Facebook friend posted a well-meaning message that, like so much in the world today, bugged me inordinately. It was, to paraphrase, that anyone who nurtures - a child, an old person, a pet, a garden - deserves to be called a mother and receive all the honor and respect thereunto pertaining etc. etc.

I was raised to ignore Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, and all the other "retail holidays" society has been burdened with over the years. Even so, this message, loudly taken up after the initial post, takes the "everybody wins" aesthetic further than it deserves to go. Because, while you can feed your cocker spaniel, visit your grandparents, water and weed your truck patch, one defining aspect of motherhood remains beyond your reach if you haven't experienced it.

I'm talking about pain. Having been an acolyte to the process twice I can testify that the onset of motherhood involves states ranging from a continual mild discomfort to the truly terrifying and horrific. It is the sacrifice of a woman's physical autonomy in the service of mankind's highest impulse. It is James's "moral equivalent of war" but it is more than that, because all altruism, all idealism, all that is good in human nature comes from the experience or at least the contemplation of that sacrifice.

So, please. I'm sure you mean well. And Heaven knows we all need encouragement in this world. But there is no moral equivalency between motherhood and gardening, okay? They may come from the same generous, life-giving impulse. But that impulse, evoked by the one, is embodied - literally - by the other.

As regular readers of this irregular space may know, I am a frequent participant at the blog of my old friend Steve Simels, powerpop.blogspot.com, where he posts audio clips from my salad days, New York City in the late '70s and early '80s. Today Steve talks briefly about the guitarist John Fahey, as copied here. I responded at greater length, as I sometimes do. That response is included below.

"From his 1994 Let Go, please enjoy unclassifiable American guitarist John Fahey and his breathtaking overdubbed solo version of "Layla."

Fahey died, one assumes of a surfeit of the blues, in 2001. I only saw him play once, at some point in the mid-80s, when I lived around the corner from Folk City; he was a little drunk, I think, but very funny between songs. Frankly, I didn't think he was that hot musically, though; I remember thinking "That's what people have been raving about for all these years?" In retrospect, of course, I suspect he was just having an off night, at least if this "Layla" is any indication."


I may have been the opener for that FC show - if not that one then another. I opened for Fahey twice, once in Atlanta, once in New York. Despite having gone through a serious Fahey phase in the early '70s, I was disappointed both times, disappointed enough that I put him aside as an adolescent fling (Paul Revere and the Raiders, anyone?) and never really went there again until the day I had to write his obituary for Sing Out! - after which I spent the afternoon playing everything of his that I knew.

In Vienna, overlapping but some years younger than Beethoven, a composer named Carl Czerny did his best (along with dozens if not hundreds of others) to match or at least live up to the master. He didn't come close to making it. His concert works aren't in the repertory and probably don't deserve to be. But his student pieces became part of every intermediate pianist's library, because they offered Beethoven's expressiveness in a form developing players could handle: Beethoven's feeling without the daunting technical challenges.

I think of Fahey that way. He was not a master, but nobody could match him for writing simple, deeply expressive pieces informed by his long study of American roots music (his biography of Charley Patton, written as an MA thesis at UCLA, remains in print). His playing did not live up to his Jove-like attitude, but he was a great teacher and scholar who offered young suburban players a path into the remote fastness, or at least the outskirts, of country/blues guitar.

As for my personal experience of Fahey the two nights I met him. The Great Southeast Music Hall in Atlanta was roughly comparable to the Bottom Line as a hangout for local record-biz types. One such was in the dressing room that night, and when he mentioned that he worked for Paramount Records Fahey positively lit into him for the poor quality of Paramount 78 pressings in the 1920s, well before the poor guy was born. Eventually the flack excused himself and left.

My other memory is somewhat more cliched. In the dressing room downstairs at Folk City Fahey summarily appropriated a half-pint of whiskey I had mistakenly opened in his presence, drank most of it at a gulp, and spent the rest of the evening alternately insisting I find him cocaine ("Aaaaww, you know where there's some cocaine, doncha?") and pinching my ass. His girlfriend took part in these frolics, with the clear understanding (at least in retrospect) that I should accompany them back to the Grammercy Park Hotel afterwards. Occasionally I regret not having done so, but only occasionally.

I think we did two shows that night, and after my second set I fled to the bar were I sat with Erik Frandsen and Odetta. At one point Erik said, not especially softly, "O! tune it, you fraud," which made Odetta laugh, something she never did softly. It's been my experience, as both teacher and student, that all teaching is part humbug and sometimes the most fraudulent teachers have the most to offer. That's certainly true of Fahey, for me and I expect for many others.

I just posted a Byrds video on Facebook with the comment that it's hard to remember now just what a mythic place California seemed in the '60s, especially to those of us in the East. Of course there are plenty of aging types here in Washington who illustrate just how gone that myth is now. "There is no California," says the song ("Holding On," on the From the Island CD, available at this site right here) and certainly Bainbridge Island has its share of former religious cultists, burnouts, survivalists, and refugees from the megalopolis.

But something of the old West Coast hippie pastoral remains. It's mostly in the women, because a race of goddesses (and that's what it was - a new kind of woman, a new kind of elegance: physical, comfortable in one's own skin, a scent of horse barn, salt water, and really good French perfume) doesn't just disappear after they've sprung fully armored from the brow of Jove.

Even crossing a parking lot or waiting for a ferry, a woman of a certain age will turn her head or cant her shoulders and a world of possibility will open up. And on those rare occasions when that possibility includes you, when it's not just the head or the shoulders but the eyes that come into play, a man can feel himself both fully in command and entirely at sea, a feeling seductive in the purest sense of the word.

And when the attitude is backed by the heart, when the inner life is as genuine as the facade, well then, boy, you have a goddess on your hands. I can tell you that from personal experience.

It may have been exploited and betrayed, messiahed and commercialized. It may have collapsed under its own weight or under the weight of the expectations of the rest of the world, taken for all there was to take, smashed by those whose reaction is always to smash, but (for want of a better term) the California Dream lives on in those goddesses in exile, farm girls and beach chicks who made themselves into the template for modern femininity around the world. Wish they all could be California girls? Brian, today they ARE all California Girls.

I've been posting daily webcam performances on Facebook, one song a day through my whole A-list, instrumentals on Sunday, and the result has been both more and less than I thought it would be.

To begin with, I thought that since I have something like 180 Facebook friends at least half of them would look at the vids, give me some feedback, pass them along to their friends. None of that appears to have happened, although Tom Walz, my old bass-player, has posted perhaps a half dozen of his favorites. But as the weeks go by fewer people comment or like. What I had hoped would become part of many people's daily routine has become something they may have done for a week or ten days but now has lost all freshness. What I had hoped would "go viral" has instead gone dormant.

The version of "Nobody's Daddy" I posted this week was really, I thought, one of the three or four best performances I had ever recorded of any original song in any medium. And nobody commented or liked - there's no evidence that anybody even looked at it. I actually thought it was a Facebook problem - they've been a little squirrelly lately - and posted it a second time later that day. How pathetic is that?

Sure, there is a sameness to the videos - that's sort of the point. Each is a plain, at-the-desk headshot with the same guitar (a beautiful 1896 Washburn, but still) and roughly the same background and composition. The idea was to emphasize the songs by de-emphasizing the visuals, but I suppose it just got boring.

On the "more" side of the equation is the opportunity it has given me to work through the song list number by number comparing and contrasting. It's been useful to see which tunes stand up and which don't. There've been some surprises on that score, but I'm not going to say what they were because I don't feel like telling the world which of my tunes I think are dogs. Suffice it to say that a good half-dozen numbers are going to be heard less and less as time goes on.

But really, why should anybody care? Career retrospectives aren't always good news. I'm going through what I think of as the highlights of 30 years' work, and it doesn't amount to much. It hasn't helped anyone. The breakthrough acceptance I've been waiting for hasn't happened. It's time to start being nice to people, because no one's going to remember me for my music.

Those of you who frequent Facebook probably know that I'm in the middle of a project called "40 Songs in 40 Days," where I record an original song every day until I've done my entire book or close to it. On Sundays I play instrumentals and today I recorded Davy Graham's "Anji" in the well-known Bert Jansch arrangement with its quote from Cannonball Adderley's "The Work Song."

Ever since the early '60s "Anji" has been a defining test (one I feel I've never quite passed) for any aspiring guitarist - but what kind of guitarist? It's not jazz. It's not blues. It's not really world music despite Graham's half-Guyanese background; and it's definitely not folk. What I call it is "coffeehouse music."

Like other styles named after the venue for the music rather than the music itself (think disco) the stylistic parameters here can be a bit elusive. I suppose you should begin with the room. The coffee bars of London, New York, and San Francisco in the early '60s were small storefronts, low-rent in every sense, usually filled with cigarette smoke and steam from an espresso machine. There was no stage or lights or PA. Usually there was only room for one performer. You went in with a guitar (unamplified, portable), sat in the corner, and did your best to fill the crowded space with your unaided voice. Pay was in tips.

These were not the hygienic quasi-libraries invented in Seattle and exported around the world. I'm quite fond of those, but they're not exactly dangerous, are they? The dark-haired girls you find there have fewer secrets, the lighter-haired girls don't imitate the dark-haired girls so assiduously and they don't have parents who would be aghast to know where their daughters were tonight.

I think the venue, and the music, may have reached its apotheosis (who declared this National Thesaurus Day?) in London, perhaps because of the British Left's embrace of bad food as a political statement. Certainly I can't listen to early Davy Graham or Bert Jansch records without imagining the hiss of steam and a thick fog against the windows, inside and out.

It may have been their voracious eclecticism (if it works use it - who cares where it comes from) that kept Graham and Jansch (and in New York, Dave Van Ronk) from the mass-market acceptance of the Folk Boom. Or it may just have been the raffishness of the milieu they defined - and the bad habits you can pick up there. But the empowerment so prized by Mass Folk, the Blues crowd's nostalgia for a past that never existed, the false transcendence of so much '60s rock, is nowhere in evidence in coffeehouse music. The dark-haired girls I knew would never let you get away with that shit.

The New York critics have spilled a lot of ink (or its digital equivalent) this week over conductor Leonard Slatkin's debut at the Metropolitan Opera in Verdi's "La Traviata." Slatkin, who had never conducted the work before, was described as "shaky," "unprepared" and quite out of synch with the singers. Slatkin has withdrawn from the rest of the opera's run, "for personal reasons," and in today's Times the curtain calls with new conductor Marco Armiliato were described as something of a love feast.

On the surface this seems like something of an embarrassment for Slatkin, but I think he comes off rather well, considering. Slatkin is an important American conductor, whose tenure with the St. Louis and National Symphonies built his reputation as a champion of contemporary and especially American orchestral music. A day or two after the Met debacle he led the Juilliard Orchestra in a tribute to William Schuman at Carnegie Hall that sounds like it was a fabulous evening.

In a classical-music scene dominated by compositional warhorses, where new voices are marginalized by an increasingly sclerotic arts establishment and audiences look anywhere else for interesting, compelling performances, it is refreshing to see a major figure like Slatkin saying, in effect, that he has better things to do with his talent than make yet another sumptuous "Traviata" for yet another Met opening for yet another gathering of glossy plutocrats.

Metropolitan opera boss Peter Gelb, whose first season has been generally knocked as inconsistent, comes off pretty well, too, it says here. He's taking chances, which is what they hired him to do in the first place. And if the new "Tosca" sounds gimmicky and faddish, mounting a "Traviata" that ruffles the feathers of its diva doesn't strike me as altogether a bad thing.

My daughter has introduced me (and, I assume, quite a few others) to the music of Joanna Newsom, a California songwriter whose principal instrument is the harp and whose singing, lyrics, and arranging strike a lot of people as coming from well beyond the left-field fence.

To me, Newsom is nobody's naif. She reminds me a bit of a distaff Captain Beefheart, cloaking real insight in a surface of eccentric inscrutability. Instead of bluesman's swagger her surface comes from the more Alice-in-Wonderland style of second-generation hippiedom, her voice moving from maiden to mother to crone and back again in its journey to the Eternal Feminine. Whew! I'm being followed by a moonshadow, here.

To me one of the cultural stories of the 20th century was the efforts of newly accepted female artists to find a uniquely female artistic voice, which led down a lot of dead ends. I keep thinking of Janis Joplin, the object of much triumphal feminist analysis. The fact is her singing was less the sound of an entire gender seizing equality than the cries of a wounded soul longing to die.

Nobody can accuse Joanna Newsom's music of being unhealthy. To me she's more like Aretha Franklin, complex and elemental at the same time. Of course, Aretha (ever notice how geniuses are called by their last names, royalty by their first?) was the preeminent female artist of the 20th century, it says here. Standard-issue critical wisdom holds Newsom too "quirky," too "eccentric," too... attentuated to play in that league. But who really knows? She's certainly more than the sum total of her quirks. In fact, they may not be quirks at all. They may be a vocabulary of female expression that could once and for all free American literature from the ghost of Ernest Hemingway.

Reductio ad absurdum. It's Latin for "Reduce to absurdity." As in so much of American culture, society, and politics leading up to and away from the turn of the century, the concept looms larger and larger as you look at the story of our popular music. The desire to reduce musical styles to their essentials, then grind those essentials to powder, then blow that powder to the winds, all the while declaring your loyalty to those styles, is as American as televangelists, transvestites, and tea parties.

That sounds like I'm going to begin another rant about the end of American popular music and its significance in the decline and fall of society as a whole but, frankly, I'm just too tired. Still, there is one area I can use as an illustration: Dancing.

Let's start with one of the indisputably great rock and roll records, Little Richard's "Good Golly Miss Molly." Listen to the Specialty Records original, recorded in New Orleans, and you'll hear a relentless, swinging syncopation you won't hear in any subsequent versions of the song, not by the Beatles, not by Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels, not by the legion of bar bands that have covered it since. With Earl Palmer setting the pace on drums, "Good Golly, Miss Molly" is rhythmically all over the map, moving sideways as it moves forward, inviting dancers to swing their hips, loosen up, move in two or three directions at once, just like the music does. It's three minutes of liberation.

The dancers you see on teen-dance television shows of time are responding to that unspoken message. Their dances involve moving forward and back while shaking their hips from side to side. Listen to Metallica, or to Kanye West, and the dancing it prompts is the same for white rock or metal fans and black hip-hoppers. Both camps do essentially the same dance - up and down, up and down. The white kids may bob their heads a bit more, the black kids wave their hands around a little more, but the groove is the same: slog, slog, slog, slog. The backs bend and straighten, the knees bounce, but all that varies is the tempo.

I suppose a case could be made for the racial progress implied by the utter lameness of both sides, the absence of a social or artistic divide between what used to be rival camps. But I'm too tired.

I saw a short film on hulu.com the other day, concerning a duo from the '70s called Aztec Two-Step. They were an East Coast acoustic songwriting act with close two-part harmonies. I met them a couple of times and open for them I think once. Nice guys.

The film spent pretty much its entire 28-minutes asking why Aztec Two-Step hadn't made it. They had great material, great management and record companies, they worked hard, toured and played good shows for years, but none of their albums ever sold more than a certain number and none of their songs ever became hits, despite being considerably more worthy (in the talking heads' opinion and also in mine) than those of their folk/pop contemporaries. Not in Jim Croce or John Denver territory, perhaps - that kind of success is something else again. But Aztec Two-Step could easily have been another Jonathan Edwards, say, or Pure Prairie League.

This question resonates with me at the moment more than most stories of showbiz disappointment might, because later this week my old friend Suzanne Vega is coming to town on a much-hyped concert tour. I call her "my old friend" less because she might feel she was (I doubt she would, actually) as in a deliberate use of the cool irony that brought her such success, a success Aztec Two-Step never came close to equalling.

Why?

It's safe to assume that Suzanne's many fans are not morons, drugged zombies, or tools of the corporate music industry. Her success is genuine and legitimately earned. Honest people honestly like her songs. Yet her music does not equal ATS's in depth, emotion, technique, rootedness, any of the attributes by which I measure the quality of an act like this. And I'm not the only one who finds her work bloodless and disengaged. At the time of her biggest hit "Luka" the New Yorker called her "designer-folk" - it's the chance to deliver sharpened truths like that which made me want to be a music writer.

For the record, the New Yorker had an item about Suzanne's upcoming tour in a recent Talk Of The Town section. The author spent most of the piece amazed at how much she still looks like girl in the "Luka" video from 25 years ago.

So, what is it Suzanne Vega had that Aztec Two-Step didn't? Both acts wrote good songs, but I think to be successful singer-songwriters need more than just good songs. They need to write songs to fit a persona the audience can identify with. It's too much effort parsing a song and appreciating it for what it is, then moving on to the next. It's far easier to see the songs as part of a whole, a constructed personality. That way you only need to take a line (or, to a lesser extent, tune) here or there. It's all only about one thing, anyway.

Bruce Springsteen is a good example. Somewhere along there he stopped writing songs that stand alone. Now he writes albums that let you know what concerns him this year - the unemployed, or the Iraq War - and people consume them not so much because they care about the unemployed or Iraq, but to be close to a personality they find compelling.

For songwriters in the country field, all that matters is that you be sufficiently country, for songwriters or rappers in R&B sufficiently "urban." But if you're going after the "singer/songwriter" crowd you want to give them more than music. You want to give them somebody to want to be then they grow up.

Plenty of people have talked about it, and I've talked about it here, too. It's the idea that with the demise of the old aristocratic patron class cultural leadership has been ceded to profit-making organizations which, in their ongoing search for new customers, inevitably throw their weight behind art which speaks to the largest number of people - which is to say, dreck.

As I said, I've written about that before. And I'm not terribly keen on revisiting the subject today. But there is a side to the story that doesn't get told so much. We can talk about soulless media corporations all we want, but the question we don't ask is this: Where did all the aristocrats go?

Well, to begin with, most descendants of the patron class don't have as much money now as their illustrious forbears did then, so it's an open question whether they're really aristocrats or not. But they're still here, money or no money. And because they're still intelligent, cultured people they're still interested in art.

So, with the inclination towards art still in them, but the ability to promote art by helping artists now behind them, what do they do? They become artists themselves.

This is a problem.

Because throughout history the greatest artists have tended not to come from the patron class. Artists were the kind of people one doesn't invite to dinner, either because of their lower-middle-class origins (Shakespeare, the Beatles) or because they belonged to "outsider" racial groups (Bob Dylan, Louis Armstrong). Aristocratic patrons thought of artists as servants. And that's what they are.

These aristocrats may have been quite good at deciding that Beethoven was a greater artist than Johann Nepomunk Hummel but most of them were not very good at making art themselves. Neither are their descendants. So our culture fills up with, on the one hand, stupid exploitative art promoted by corporations to the ignorant masses; on the other a subset of deposed aristocrats doing tepid, self-referential work that does as much to lower our cultural tone through it's bland competence as do the cheap hustlers in their expensive suits we saw at the Grammy Awards the other night.

Sometimes I think the Soviets had the right idea when it came to art. Establish a State board to certify artists. Sure, with the government there is no recourse. And sure, at least half the musicians now working would have their guitars taken away and be reassigned to more useful work, or shot. But sometimes I wonder if that would be such a bad thing.

Just saw a film called "loudQUIETloud: a film about the pixies" (sic) on Hulu and would recommend it to anyone with 90 minutes to spare. The Pixies were a rock band from Boston that could be said to have played Chuck Berry to Nirvana's Rolling Stones, which is to say primary influence and stylistic guidepost, a generation previous. They broke up just as the Seattle grunge thing that owed them so much was getting started and the film finds them reuniting in 2004 after 11 years apart, to much greater acclaim and reward than they had ever enjoyed in what might be called The Day.

Although I no longer purchase rock music that I didn't first listen to in High School I like the Pixies. They can actually play their instruments and write songs, always a plus for a punk band, and the wide dynamic shifts alluded to in the title always seem more musical than those done in their memory by Cobain and his pals. But even if I hadn't liked the music this much I would still have liked the movie.

"loudQUIETloud" is more than a concert film. In fact, I don't think it contains one complete song. What it is instead is the best portrait of road life I've ever seen, and a moving story of four musicians at the cusp of middle age forced (for financial reasons mostly) to revisit their youth in some very uncomfortable ways. Recovering addicts need to take extraordinary measures to avoid temptation. Men with families speak to their children via computer hookup (the lead guitarist is introduced to his infant son in a hotel lobby) all the while performing music of heedless, unfettered anarchy to audiences as heedless and unfettered (and young) as they themselves once were, audiences that are far larger and more ecstatic than ever before.

A new group dynamic is required, but it seems out of reach. The old patterns prevail. The four like each other well enough and are happy to be making music (and money) together again, but they don't talk. The drummer's burgeoning drug use threatens the bass-player's hard-won sobriety but nobody says anything until the band falls apart onstage one night. The songwriters keep writing songs hoping to record them with the group but nobody says, "Okay, let's make an album."

And everywhere, always, the audience - utterly uncritical and very, very young, going nuts when the band simply walks out onto the stage. You can tell this adulation is earned, but still it discomfits. Again and again you hear a distant roaring, then a door is opened and the sound springs at you like some sort of beast. What must it be like to face that every night? What must it be like to get used to it? To take it for granted?