Peter Spencer: Pete's Blog

The Ghost of Teen Spirit
Why we should let Kurt Cobain rest in peace.
By Simon Reynolds
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 23, 2011, at 3:20 PM ET

Nostalgia for the '90s—and Kurt Cobain—is in full force
For the final night of Britain's Reading Festival on Aug. 28, the promoters have something unusual lined up to entertain the 80,000-plus rock fans who congregate there annually. On the alternative stage there will be a screening of Nirvana's legendary performance at Reading in 1992, when Cobain and his bandmates triumphantly headlined a bill of grunge and alternative rock groups they'd personally selected. In an interview earlier this summer, festival booker Tania Harrison declared, "It was such a legendary performance that so many people haven't seen ... one of those seminal moments that changed everything, which is what Reading's all about."


PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
REPRINTS
SINGLE PAGE
This decision is perplexing on a number of levels. First, there's the obvious oddness of interrupting the schedule of live groups in favor of a dead group. Then there's the curious fact that Reading's promoters, aiming to capitalize on 2011's status as the Official Anniversary of Grunge, are showing the footage of the gig on its 19th anniversary, a year ahead of customary schedule. (Nirvana did actually appear at Reading in August 1991 but were still relatively unknown and played midway through the bill.) Perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this exercise in time travel, though, is how it isn't really that surprising. It's exactly the sort of thing that you'd kinda expect from a pop culture increasingly characterized by a compulsion to revisit and reconsume its own past.
One of the primary aims of my book Retromania is to defamiliarize an attitude that has gradually, insidiously installed itself as normal. To do so requires memory exercises and techniques of retro-speculation: in this case, asking yourself whether the promoters of Woodstock, or the first Lollapalooza in 1991, would have lowered a giant screen onstage and projected footage of a gig from two decades earlier? The answer is no: They were too busy confidently making history to bother with referring back to it.
Nirvana's ghostly reappearance at Reading is the first course of a banquet of grunge retrospection this fall. Early September sees the publication of Everybody Loves Our Town, a 555-page oral history of the Seattle grunge scene by Mark Yarm (a name freakily close to Mark Arm, Mudhoney's singer). On Sept. 20, Pearl Jam Twenty, Cameron Crowe's documentary about the band's career, is released to theaters in tandem with the PJ20 soundtrack, a double CD of rare and unreleased tracks plus a 36-page hardcover book written by the director. A week later Geffen will roll out the deluxe expanded reissue of Nevermind, which in its most extravagant form presents four CDs and one DVD and gathers up every last alternative mix, B-side, demo version, and boombox-recorded rehearsal take of the songs. More laudably, Nirvana bassist Krist Novoselic is staging a "whole album" rendition of Nevermind at Seattle's rock museum, Experience Music Project, to raise money for the band's former publicist, who is battling cancer.
Advertisement

All this grunge retro-action takes place amid chatter about a '90s revival already in full swing and encompassing everything from tours by alt-rock stalwarts like Pavement, Soundgarden, and the Lemonheads, the return of Beavis and Butt-Head and 120 Minutes to MTV, and Nickelodeon's recent bout of '90s-nostalgia programming. The latter garnered good viewing figures, but what is striking about the recent "9ties R Back!" blather is the absence of any real sense of "by popular demand." The retrospection feels rote, the predictable upshot of the way that commemorative cycles have become a structural, in-built component of the media and entertainment industry. This revival is largely top-down, not grass-roots. Everybody benefits: Magazines generate content to fill their pages, record companies can bolster their ailing bottom line by rereleasing archival material (guaranteed profits, since the original recordings were already paid for long ago) in spiffy, bulked-up form, and the commentariat gets something to reassess and pontificate about. Yet the intervals—always measured in decades, the 10th or 20th birthday of whatever-it-may-be—are arbitrary, governed by a calendrical metric that has little to do with whether there's any actual yearning out there to relive the event/artist/era in question.
Not strictly '90s but closely related to this wave of pseudo-nostalgia is the forthcoming oral history I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution by Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum. The book ends in 1992, when The Real World debuted, prefiguring MTV's abandonment of music in favor of reality TV. As a Brit who in 1990-92 was spending something like 50 percent of my time in New York and therefore witnessed grunge's MTV breakthrough, it struck me that the music channel had become what America had always lacked before: a nationwide forum for pop music that played the same role that the state-owned pop station Radio One and BBC's weekly chart show Top of the Pops had done in the United Kingdom.
American radio had always been vastly more diverse and regionally scattered than the near-monopoly that was Radio One, while American Bandstand never loomed as large as Top of the Pops, a program watched by one-fifth of the British population. MTV was what made grunge's rapid crossover possible. At the same time, grunge confirmed MTV's gatekeeping power while giving it a dose of credibility sorely needed after the hair-metal years of Poison and Warrant. The channel's combination of flexing its power while also being musically and stylistically rejuvenated went to MTV's head: Remember the slogan "the revolution will be televised," the "Rock the Vote" campaign, and MTV's somewhat unseemly pride in supposedly having rallied the youth vote behind Bill Clinton?
What I'm suggesting is that an undercurrent to grunge retrospection is the music media's and record industry's own nostalgia for the heyday of the rock monoculture. It was already crumbling in the early '90s, thanks to rap (the rebel music of black youth, obviously, but a lot of white kids had defected to hip-hop, too) and to the emergence of rave and electronic dance culture (in America destined always to be a minority subculture, but in Europe the dominant form of '90s pop). Grunge was the last blast of rock as a force at once central in popular culture yet also running counter to mainstream show biz values.
Not only did grunge give MTV a timely Botox session but it underwrote the heyday of Spin magazine, which this year noticeably jumped the gun on everybody else with its "What Nevermind Means Now" cover story (Kurt in a swimming pool recreating the album's iconic baby-swimming-underwater image) and accompanying tribute LP Newermind (covers of the LP's tracks by Kurt's heroes the Vaselines and Meat Puppets, among others). The Spin website's own staff-written blurb for August's "Special Issue: the 20th Anniversary of the Album That Changed Everything" wryly notes the "symbiotic, borderline codependent" relationship between the magazine and grunge, and admits that "back in 2001, when we published a tenth anniversary Nevermind issue, one letter-writing wag remarked, 'So, still pickin' those bones, huh?'"
If grunge was a last blast, the aftershocks carried on deep into the '90s. Spin and MTV both tried to repeat the grunge effect (an underground sound going overground, overnight) with electronica. By the time nu-metal hit at the turn of the millennium, MTV had shrewdly shed the M in its name and moved decisively toward round-the-clock reality. The heavily edited and contrived quasi-vérité version of young life offered by these programs eclipsed the gritty authenticity that grunge had represented.
Along with reality TV, something else had risen up during the '90s that was all set to radically transform music consumption, music fandom, and music industry alike. In my mind, if nobody else's, the death of Kurt Cobain is freakily intertwined with the rise of the Web. During 1994, I was back living in the United Kingdom and—here's where you really have to do a memory exercise, mentally re-create a sense of what life was like then in terms of access to information and news—the remarkable thing was how little coverage there was in the British media of Cobain's suicide. So that grim weekend, my wife—an early adopter of everything to do with computers—went online, where we found teeming communities of grief, speculation, rumor, and memorialization. It was mindblowing, actually: the moment at which I woke up to the potential of the Internet, from its leveling effects (in one forum, Buzzcock Pete Shelley, who'd toured with Nirvana, chatted with distraught Kurt fans) to the threat it posed to traditional media.
Cobain, arguably the last rebel-rocker-as-star, had owed his rise to the centralizing power of the old media; now in his death, he was entangled with the emerging new media disorder. The old media and entertainment channels (what I think of as the analog system) constructed the mainstream while simultaneously creating the possibility of that mainstream being breached and reinvigorated by forces "outside." In grunge's case, that meant the flannel-wearing, slacker-minded alt-rock underground that had developed during the '80s, fostered by a network of independent labels. This curious process of inversion—the underground becoming the overground—was how the analog system had worked repeatedly in the past. ('50s rock'n'roll came initially from the regional independent labels.) And with Nirvana and their fellow travelers, that's how it worked one last time.
But what is also true is that that the media organs of the analog system generated what you might call the "Epochal Self-Image": a sense of a particular stretch of years as constituting an era, a period with a distinct "feel" and spirit. That sense is always constructed, always entails the suppression of the countless disparate other things going on in any given stretch of time, through the focus on a select bunch of artists, styles, recordings, events, deemed to "define the times." If we date the takeoff point of the Internet as a dominant force in music culture to the turn of the millennium (the point at which broadband enabled the explosive growth of filesharing, blogging, et al.), it is striking that the decade that followed is characterized by the absence of epochal character. It's not that nothing happened ... it's that so many little things happened, a bustle of microtrends and niche scenes that all got documented and debated, with the result that nothing was ever able to dominant and define the era.
The failure is bound-up with the erosion of the filtering function of the media and its increasing inability to marshal and synchronize popular taste around particular artists or phenomena. The Internet works against convergence and consensus: the profusion of narrowcast media (blogs, netradio, innumerable outlets of analysis and opinion) and the accelerated way that news and buzz get disseminated, mean that it is harder and harder for a cultural phenomenon to achieve full-spectrum dominance of the attention economy. Now triumphant, the digital system has interfered with our very sense of culture-time.
That is why it is so hard to see what, from the last dozen years or so of rock, could be the focus for future commemorative or revivalist impulses. Can you envisage the 20th anniversary of the Strokes' debut album, or the White Stripes's breakthrough LP, White Blood Cells, being celebrated? Spin will not be able to put either group on the cover under the legend "The Album That Changed Everything," because neither record came close to Nevermind's paradigm-shift. (Remember the droves of grunge-lite copyists like Silverchair and Bush? The undignified way that even superestablished bands like Metallica tried to de-metallicize their sound and image? How Axl Rose disappeared into a bunker of botched self-reinvention for 15 years?) Even less epoch-defining clout could be claimed for those Pitchfork-anointed bands who've codified the post-indie sound of the 2000s such as Arcade Fire and Animal Collective.
When people—fans, critics, industry, whoever—look back to grunge, then, what they feel wistful for is not just the particulars of that moment (flannel, shaggy hair, down-tuned guitar sounds, Tabitha Soren) or even qualities that music seemed to have then and since lost (anger, rebellion, spontaneity, anti-gloss realness, etc). It is for the concept of period vibe in itself, for "aura of era" in the abstract. It is a nostalgia for a time when the Zeit actually possessed a Geist.
***
"Geist" means spirit or ghost. Which brings us back to this year's Reading Festival and the spectral reappearance of Nirvana on its stage, in the form of that one-year-premature showing of the 1992 performance. A show that British rockmag Kerrang! ranked at No. 1 in their list of 100 Gigs That Shook The World ... and that turned out to be Nirvana's last-ever U.K. concert.
The Nirvana "repeat" derives its meaning and value from something historic that happened two decades earlier. But its presence in the present—its re-present-ation—works against anything equally world-shaking happening again. For sure, the chances are remote that something as momentous as the Nirvana show would have occurred during the hour or so that the old concert footage takes up in the schedule, should some contemporary band have played during that precise time slot instead. But we'll never know, and the more that the present is taken up with reunion tours, re-enactments, and contemporary revivalist groups umbilically bound by ties of reference and deference to rock's glory days, the smaller the chances are that history will be made today.
One thing we can definitively say is that the screening of the classic Nirvana gig is an anti-event, a black hole in history. That hour in which young and old alike gawp at a world-shaking performance from 1992, is dead time: the time of repetition and simulation. Another, harsher way of putting it: The dead man on that screen is more alive than the people watching him.

This particular rant has been sitting in my rant box for years and years, mostly because slagging David Crosby seems so much like shooting fish in a barrel. He is, after all, the archetypal self-indulgent, bloviating, undertalented rock star, to all intents and purposes the poster boy for a certain kind of apocalyptic left-wing California pomposity. Nobody needs to hear me add my voice to a chorus that grows louder and more indignant every time he opens his mouth, which he's been doing since middle '60s, through the Byrds, Crosby Stills and Nash and whatever else.

But still.

The Wikipedia page for the Byrds has evidently been edited by one of his partisans, or by Crosby himself, to include the anecdote he tells in TV interviews, about his being fired from the Byrds in 1967. "They said they could do better without me," he says with a wry face and a sardonic shake of his head. After all, he went on to Crosby, Stills, and Nash and they made all kinds of money, right?

Well, ya know what, Dave? (May I call you Dave?) They did do better. The Byrds got rid of a (granted) very good harmony singer who was also the most pretentious, self-congratulatory songwriter of that pretentious, self-congratulatory era and they got Clarence White, a brilliantly innovative guitarist, who with Roger McGuinn crafted a two-guitar interplay people use to make great records to this day. In the meantime, who in folk, rock, or country tries to sound like CS&N? Nobody, that's who, because the records Crosby, Stills, and Nash were making when McGuinn and White were reinventing the guitar are today embarrassingly dated.

They did do better without you, Dave, a lot better. They became one of the most influential groups of all time while you became a nostalgia act. So, to summarize: David Crosby is a pompous ass.

I saw a guy riding his bicycle no-hands today, and decided that there is no physical attitude I've ever seen cooler than riding a bicycle no-hands. To keep your balance you need to sit back in a slight slouch, with your hands hanging loose at your sides, a posture the epitome of hang-loose. You can't turn your head sharply to look around or indeed tense up in any way. You just gotta let it slide.

I took some pride in my ability to ride no-hands when I was a boy - uphill, downhill, gravel roads, you name it - and the personal detachment expressed in the action came back to me when I read "On the Road" a few years later: speeding through a landscape I was relaxed enough to appreciate, without really being part of it, or of the world at all. Leaning forward to take the handlebars again, that inevitable reluctant gesture, always seemed like a surrender to the material. I saw that guy a few minutes later, bending forward and pumping up a long hill. He zipped right along, but it looked like work.

I went to hear Peter Serkin last night in a subscription concert with the Seattle Symphony. For my money, no other major soloist equals Serkin at communicating the freshness and emotional truth of the 20th-Century modernist repertory. And he's one of the few major artists (which is to say an artist who appears as a soloist with provincial orchestras in places like Seattle) who routinely programs modernist music for middle-of-the-road audiences.

This involves some strategy, of which last night's concert was an interesting example. The program opened with Ravel's "Le Tombeau de Couperin," then continued with Messiaen's "Exotic Birds," with Serkin, followed by Mozart's Rondo in D Major, K.382, also with Serkin, the Fourth Symphony of Brahms coming after intermission. At first glance it seemed that the Ravel (French but not too French, modern but not too modern) was intended to prepare the audience for the rigours of "Exotic Birds," with Mozart offered as a reward afterwards, and the Brahms ensuring that nobody left before the end. But it turned out there was more to it than that.

The Messiaen was bracing, full of color and verve, and certainly benefitted from its placement after Ravel's pretty pastels. Serkin was plainly exhilarated afterwards, racing around the orchestra to shake hands with various section leaders, reveling in applause that was, if not exactly tepid, certainly no more than polite.

Then came the Mozart. The Rondo in D, according to the program notes, was written to substitute for the last movement of an existing concerto before its Vienna debut. It is not part of the concerto's standard score but is sometimes played by itself, as it was on this occasion.

It is, it turns out (I had not heard it before), a simple, not to say simple-minded, copybook theme and variations, with little of Mozart's trademark emotional depth or Olympian powers of invention. It seems to me that Serkin (who, one assumes, was responsible for programming his part of the concert) wanted to show the piece in an unflattering light compared to what had gone before, as a way of making his case for a favorite composer by playing a second-rate work by everyone else's favorite composer. Of course, the Mozart received loud cheers, as did the Brahms, which was glossy and forgettable.

The concert was promoted with the banner legend "Serkin plays Mozart!" Closer to the truth (and certainly more interesting for this listener) might be the phrase "Serkin trashes Mozart to boost Messiaen!" And good for him.

Was I the only person surprised to find the Detroit rapper Eminem in two different Super Bowl commercials? The one he did for a sugar drink was literally a cartoon and the one he did for Chrysler was dressed up in the righteous return-of-the-American-worker schtick we've been hearing pretty much every year since the first Arab oil embargo. And is there something odd about using Eminem as an icon of tough-minded heartland unionism. The thing that made him special, to my ears, is the hurt and fear so close to his bombastic surface. When he pointed his finger at the camera I didn't see the unstoppable resolve of American Industry. I saw a vulnerable child.

Anyway, here's a great column, slighly edited, by Hamilton Nolan from the usually super-snarky gossip site Gawker:

"There's a very good reason that our culture's most enduring artistic and moral icons all died young: because if they'd stuck around long enough, they'd have ended up shilling for sugary beverages during the Super Bowl. So long, Eminem. You were fun while you lasted.

"Last night's Super Bowl featured not one, but two commercials starring Eminem, the great battle rapper, the perpetual underdog, the guy who made himself the biggest-selling artist on the planet by appealing to the downtrodden, to the unpopular, to the spat-upon, whose glorious appeal was based on his sly ability to say "Fuck the man" in oh so many new and different ways.

"So let's get all of the objections out of the way up front: "This will be great for Eminem's career. He needed to do something to stay in the spotlight. This is a way for him to promote his music. You have to do ads to stay relevant in the music industry today. Lots of rappers have done commercials. Some of these ads really respect hip hop. That commercial was funny and knowing. And the Chrysler commercial was amazing. He did it for Detroit. He did it for his fans. He did it for his career, and I love him, so I love it. Everybody knows this is just how things are now."

"All of those perspectives are perfectly valid—if you consider Eminem to be just another pop star, and you consider pop stars to be just another extension of the vast commercial consumption-encouragement apparatus that powers America. In that case, of course, who cares? The problem with that view is that it assumes, and requires you to assume, that nothing the musician in question says is real, or should be treated as real, or taken seriously, or felt in an honest way; it's all just so much space-filler for drive-time radio shows, feel-good background muzak for retail stores, aesthetically pleasing warbling that complements the gleaming lines of whichever auto it's supposed to be hyping up in the ad of the day. In this formulation, any music that's popular automatically sacrifices its claim to art, to unbounded expression, in favor of its claim to popularity—because popularity, the ability to command an audience, is monetizable, and must be maximized and exploited at the expense of art, which is just some weird selfish flight of fancy.

"All of which is just a long way of saying: it doesn't matter how cool you think the commercial is. It just matters that it's a commercial, and that it's using Eminem to sell sugar-flavored bubble water and a near-defunct brand of automobiles. Being in a commercial means taking the credibility and popularity you've built up over your entire career and exchanging it for a sum of money. It means lending a corporation your halo effect; trying to slyly transfer the good will that your fans give you, the artist, over to a corporation's product. And if that good will was built up on the back something worthwhile, something honest, something from the heart and untainted that resonated with people, no matter how profane—then the act of trying to make that good will rub off on a soft drink, or a car, or a sneaker, is essentially a trick. It's sleight of hand, a con job perpetrated on people who gave an artist their own good will in good faith. That's the reason that "selling out" used to be a taboo—because no amount of money is a reasonable price for the good will that an artist earned with their very soul, through art. It's especially sad when the artist in question gained lots of their fans with the type of unfiltered rage that stands in refreshing opposition to the sell-sell-sell society that leaves many of us with a vague sense of unease, the kind of unease that great music taps into, making us fans. Hardcore, loving fans who so adore an artist for putting words and music to our own feelings that we'd do damn near anything they say, even listen to a sales pitch for Brisk Iced Tea.

"And Eminem was already rich. Shame."

Everyone has heard of Amy Chua by now, whose "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" recommends denying your children play dates and sleepovers, calling them "garbage," throwing handmade birthday cards back in their faces if they don't show sufficient effort, the better to help them prevail in a dog-eat-dog world. This space has little to say on the subject of parent-child interactions and most who know me would place me closer on the scale to the Tiger Mom than most. I expect my ex-wife could tell plenty of stories of my lack of patience with picky eating or the inability to write thank-you notes.

But one item in the litany of Ms. Chua's bullying struck a a quite literal chord - how she refused to let her daughter go to the bathroom one evening until she mastered a difficult piano composition.

I remember in my music critic days an educator telling me about the demographic shift his conservatory had seen in the past 20 years. In the '70s and '80s, he said, the students willing or able to take on the tremendous workload required tended to be Soviet Jews. With the fall of Communism this pattern shifted dramatically and by the time he was speaking the great majority of his applicants were Asian.

Ms. Chua has indulged in enough ethnic stereotyping already for me to want to avoid any generalizations about the Chinese attitude towards creativity, hard work, individuality, the imagination, and so on. This isn't about that. But when parents of any race arbitrarily choose their children's hobbies based on the effort required to pursue them the result (at least in the arts) can be rote, dutiful, anything but creative.

Witness the superstar pianist Lang Lang, or "Bang Bang" as I've heard him called in several quarters. He tells stories of his father's maniacal discipline and sacrifice (at one point insisting they both commit suicide when a piece wasn't coming along well) after they had left Lang's mother in the countryside and moved to a tiny Beijing apartment so he could study music. There had been no music in the home, no family tradition of music, until the day Lang's father declared that the boy was going to make the family's fortune as a pianist.

The result, repeated in dozens if not hundreds of cases, has been dutiful, proficient playing that, while retaining some interest (it's hard to make Beethoven boring) often makes a listener ask why, exactly, is he listening? Even Lang Lang's much-publicized flamboyance has a packaged quality. I'm supposed to smile so I will smile. I'm supposed to wave my arms so I will wave my arms.

What's missing is what my Catholic friends might call vocation, what prospective Protestant divines refer to as the Call, the sense that God has taken you aside and asked you personally (not your parents) to do this work. Plenty of Asian performers have this quality - Midori comes to mind, and Mitsuko Uchida - but Lang Lang isn't one of them. Neither, I suspect, are Amy Chua's daughters, no matter how much they practice.

Every day I get two or three entries for the discussion board, most of them in the Cyrillic alphabet or touting various financial, online, or erectile products. About once a week I get one which reads, "I really like this blog" or "great site!" or some such. These I delete the way I delete the others but I wonder sometimes if I'm cutting off somebody who is genuinely interested in being a part of whatever this is.

So. If you're reading and want to comment, then PLEASE put something in your comment relating to a specific aspect or entry. So "great site" will continue to be dumped (unfairly or not) and "when you conflated the Monkees, the Sex Pistols, and the Grateful Dead I became convinced you were dropped on your head as a child" will be included.

Coming soon: Lang Lang, or as we sometimes call him around the Ponderosa, Bang Bang.

I have to say, with apologies to my children, that I'm not crazy about the music known as metal, formerly heavy metal, more recently new metal, punk-metal, metalcore, grindcore, and other semantic subdivisions on and on into the distance, a march of ever-narrower stylistic definition that would do a medieval theologian proud.

My problem isn't the volume or the nihilism or even the fact that you can't hear the words. My problem is the emotional sameness of it all, one screaming rant after another, a one-note act repeated until the performers (and the audience) can't stand up anymore. There is one thing I really like about metal, though, specially the newer varieties that present themselves as a variation on the punk thing.

I never liked punk, for the same reason I never liked the Monkees: You're expected to pay good money to see people who can't play their instruments. I know the '70s punk explosion was a reaction to the bloated pretension of much post-'60s rock and blah blah blah. But if you're calling it music it's supposed to be music, and better music than you could make yourself at home.

Say what you will about metal, it involves being able to play. One metal band is better than another metal band because they can play better - the rhythm section drives better, the guitars shred more. I find this a tremendous relief, because I thought the Sex Pistols, the Monkees, and the Grateful Dead were conspiring to lead their respective followings, and the rest of us, over a cultural cliff into the place the visual arts can be found these days, a place where what you do doesn't matter as much as what you think, which means, really, how cool you are.

Metal isn't cool. Never has been. It can be smart or stupid, but by definition it can never be half-assed. The fact that an entire generation came out of the punk thing wanting music that challenged the players' skill does more to restore my faith in humanity than any other cultural trend of my lifetime. Metal - long may it wave.

The title comes from an article written by Natalia Ilyin, and it doesn't even really fit the subject here. But it's so good I just had to use it.

I went to a Christmas show the other night, a benefit for the local food bank given by one of the younger musicians on the Island and several of her musical and non-musical friends. The word that came to mind was "collegiate," meant in a good way - silly, slaphappy, trashy, good-humoured. There was irony, plenty of it, in the winking celebration of things like the Andy Williams Christmas album and songs like "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "White Christmas."

I need to be careful here, because these were good people, doing a good thing. And I need to stress that what I'm about to say may, in fact, be dead wrong. It's just something to think about, not a fact, not even a surmise, just ... something.

In the past year or so I have had to admit that there are more and subtler forms of racism in this society than I used to think there were. A kind of hysteria has greeted President Obama from seemingly ordinary people who doubt his citizenship and religion, whose reaction to any of his programs has been a strange sort of terror. It makes me think that we are not the color-blind society I once insisted we were. And I'm starting to think about the covert racism that might have replaced the overt brand the '60s made obsolete or at the very least unfashionable.

What does this have to do with a "White Christmas" sing-along led by a young man with a ukulele? Before I answer that another tangent. When Napoleon invaded Russia some 200 years ago the Czar's army adopted a strategy akin to Muhammed Ali's notorious "rope-a-dope." They fell back before the invaders, even abandoning their capital, avoiding any large-scale engagement with the enemy and, most important of all, destroying the countryside behind them. This "scorched-earth" policy critically reduced the French army's ability to forage and, as their supply lines grew longer and winter closed in 80 to 90 per cent of the men who marched into the vast country never marched out again.

Is the ironic celebration of the worst of American culture a kind of cultural scorched-earth policy? Unconscious, perhaps, but still having the effect to deny non-white newcomers a cultural patrimony? "Okay, we have to accept you into our culture. But we'll do everything we can to make that culture worthless, by elevating the worst of it, using irony as a shield."

I accuse the kids who put on this particular show or others like it of nothing. They are at worst merely the unconscious inheritors of a dubious legacy. In fact, the whole thing may be unconscious. I don't think a renegade CIA operation or military/industrial star-chamber decided to start this trend in the weeks after the Civil Rights Act was signed. But just how corrosive is the ironic celebration of trash? How self-destructive? How pathological? I'm probably just in a really bad mood.

An article in a recent issue of the New Yorker argued for the acceptance of rapping as a form of poetry. This is nothing new - people have been making the point for as long as hip-hop's been around - but what was new to me was the author's emphasis on "not the content of hip-hop lyrics but their form."

In arguing for the inclusion of rap in the poetic canon various critics were cited who spoke of top-level rappers' use of enjambment, assonance, alliteration, internal rhyme, stressed and unstressed syllables, the whole critical lexicon. Not nearly as much space was given to meaning. This may be all well and good. Black music from the beginning has championed the esthetic of "it ain't what you do it's the way how you do it" and the examples included in the article were impressively sophisticated.

But is that what poetry is? I think you could make a good case for hip-hop as a powerful new medium of personal expression, a compelling spoken-word performance, but can anyone deny that its subject matter is extremely narrow? It's "about" a very limited sample of human existence, and none of it, at least none of its content, that I have heard, exalts, uplifts, or takes us out of ourselves. The meaning of the performances, the texts under the performances themselves, boils down to simple-minded bragging, even more simple-minded sexual come-ons, and true-crime narratives.

Hip-hop lyrics may use the technical devices of poetry, to startling and bracing effect. But despite being spoken they aren't poetry, because poetry uses its metrical and rhythmic devices in the service of meaning, not the other way around. In "Dover Beach" Matthew Arnold makes the case for love as bulwark against an uncertain world. In "Prufrock" T.S. Eliot paints a portrait of post-war anxiety and anomie. You don't remember how they did it, you remember what they mean, what they're saying. The devices they use make their messages more powerful, but they aren't ends in themselves.

I don't know why the public marking/marketing of John Lennon's 70th birthday should take me by surprise, but it did. The date is not incised on my memory, but still. His status as modern society's "apostle of love" is the day's big story, but something else has been forgotten - along with the son he to all intents and purposes abandoned.

One of the pianist Glenn Gould's most quoted epigrams is that, in his opinion, Mozart died not too early but too late. I don't remember what exact year Gould set as the date of Mozart's artistic demise, but specifics don't matter as much in this case as the dinner-party feather-ruffling implicit in his tone. Because I'm quite sure that when the story of John Lennon is written generations from now the second half of his career will be held completely unworthy of the first. He'll be seen like Keroauc, unable to touch, even view, the heights he commanded at the beginning.

I've written about "Imagine" elsewhere in this space, and what I said about that song (sappy, hypocritical, bland, empty) can be applied to every track he recorded after "Come Together." I'm not just saying that the "rock stuff" is better than the "ballad stuff," or that the Beatles were a better band than the various session cats he used for his solo albums (although they were), or that he was one of those guys whose music lost all its punch when he became better adjusted.

Lazy, drugged, happy-at-last, whatever, I don't think he wrote better rock songs than "Please Please Me," better ballads than "In My Life," better messiahtry than "The Word." And as for performance, follow any of his I-hate-Mom screaming with "Twist and Shout." I rest my case.

So when did it all go South for John Lennon? "Come Together" is great, but "Abbey Road," the album it appears on, was an attempt to go out nobly, so you could see it as one last gesture toward a glorious past, right down to the lyrics' Chuck Berry references.

What else? "I Want You" and "Don't Let Me Down" are certainly more compelling than anything from the solo years, but no better than mid-level Beatles material. Before that, what? "The Ballad of John and Yoko" is an embarrassment, the less said of his "Let It Be/Get Back" songs the better (except "Across the Universe, written years before), and none of his White Album material measures up even to George Harrison's tunes. Before that the post-Sgt. Pepper landscape is cheery B-sides and "I Am the Walrus," collage-rock he had done better the year before.

There it is: Sergeant Pepper's Lonely-Hearts Club Band, number one on oh so many lists, the place where John Lennon lost his mojo, his last sustained greatness. Can anyone tell me LSD boosts creativity now?

The most talked-about, presumably most popular, song of the year is entitled "F*** You." Let's let that sink in. A teenage couple on their first date, college students discovering real adult love for the first time, new parents out for a rare night without the baby, rediscovering the fascinating person they married all those diapers ago, are more likely to be serenaded by a song entitled "F*** You" than by anything remotely expressing the emotions they're feeling or society's approval and support of those emotions.

Twenty-plus years ago a group called 2 Live Crew became a lightning-rod for worries about the coarsening of our culture and the vanishing of the great R&B tradition in a cloud of smut. The song in question was called "Me So Horny." In a television comedy called "Evening Shade" an aging football coach played by Burt Reynolds lamented at some length that a local juke-box where he used to hear romantic hits of his youth like the "The Duke of Earl" now played only coarse, stupid, modern acts like 2 Live Crew.

"'Me so Horny?' Whatever happened to the 'Duke of Earl'?" he cried.

My question is: will some nostalgic 40-something ask, in his own lament of lost civility and romance, "'F*** You'? Whatever happened to 'Me So Horny'?"

I listened to the Swan Silvertones' "Mary Don't You Weep" this morning, several times. I was alone, so I could turn my head and snap my fingers without self-consciousness, one of many things I envy in black people.

O! Mary don't you weep.
Martha don't you mourn.
O! Mary don't you weep.
Martha don't you mourn.
Pharaoh's army has drowned in the sea.
So Mary don't you weep.
Martha don't you mourn.

Pharaoh's army has drowned in the sea. What consolation that is! In the week before Election Day one may be forgiven feeling beset by Pharaoh's army, in this case a horde of sub-reasoning mouth breathers, all hopped up on gibberish, resentment of anyone smarter than themselves (did I hear a Republican say "class warfare"?), and the power that comes of mobs.

Above them sits Pharaoh in his counting-house, perfectly happy that millions should suffer and die so that his pyramid might be built. With that in mind, in the spirit of we're-all-niggers-here-now, let me ask a question, indeed veer off on a tangent inspired by those heavenly harmonies.

Has any institution in our society done more to help African-Americans than the Protestant church? The abolition of slavery was incubated in it, the underground railroad was financed by it, the education of freed slaves was spearheaded by it, and it was the one institution racist post-reconstruction society allowed African-Americans to use for themselves to win the 20th century's struggle for human decency and civil rights.

The Church gave Martin Luther King and thousands like him a pulpit from which to preach the non-violent overthrow of oppression and a moral authority to face down racist violence armed only with The Right. And while this was happening, the Swan Silvertones and all the other black gospel greats of the 20th century were able to console us with the news of Hope and Grace, arguably more accessibly and with greater immediacy than anyone in human history. Pharaoh's army doesn't drown until you believe it will drown.

So, with Christmas soon after Election Day it seems worth the time to ask a question. Does the embrace of Kwanza'a, a made-up non-Christian holiday designed to give Black people a more "African" holiday experience, strike anyone as a bit ...ungrateful?

Here's something I submitted to another publication:

I may feel like the oldest person in the world sometimes (when a student expresses amazement that I saw Led Zeppelin play the night men first walked on the moon, for example) but I know I'm not. Still, as trends, events, notions have begun repeating themselves - sometimes in pure form, sometimes with a twist - I can only wonder if everyone else is too young to see the resemblances.

The flush of nihilistic entitlement we see on the Right these days looks awfully familiar to someone who went to college in the early '70s. The search for conspiracies, demonization of opposing views, and apocalyptic rhetoric we hear recalls the frenzy of the '70s' cocktail-party revolutionists in the period between Richard Nixon's election and Jimmy Carter's.

There, too, you saw otherwise sensible people assume the postures of victimization, as they called for Revolution in the names of Mao, Che, Ho Chi Minh, even Stalin, and a whole range of pathological behaviors from nonsensical dinner-table rants and petulant shin-kicking right up to actual political violence: bombings, bank robberies, kidnappings.

You don't have to agree with the Tea Partiers to worry that they seem poised to do to Conservatism what the Hippies did to the New Deal. When George H.W. Bush made the word "liberal" a punch-line in the 1998 election he knew that for many people the word evoked the community of spoiled, nonsensical elitists who (in Paul Krassner's memorable phrase about Jerry Rubin) "yelled for Revolution the way a kid yells for an ice cream cone."

I'm no Reaganite, but it would still be shame if Reagan conservatism's legacy of thoughtful disagreement with the AFL-CIO/New Deal orthodoxy of the time devolved into a demagogic media circus, from Yippees to Birthers in 40 years.

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.