Peter Spencer: Pete's Blog

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?

The "Songwriters' Conversation" show at the Jewel Box Theatre in Poulsbo got a front page writeup in the local where-to-go-what-to-do. I always feel I go on too long in interviews, but this writer seemed able to slice and dice my comments without losing too much of their meaning. Co-star Eric Miller said nice things about me and everything was fine, although I still don't like punning headlines. "Fingerpickin' good" indeed!

I suppose I'd have liked that one better if I was still allowed to eat fried chicken. Ever notice in those accounts of condemned criminals' last meals they never ask for a salad?

The show itself was fine, I thought. Eric's tunes are very charming and I tended toward my darker stuff as a contrast to his sweetness, so there was a balance there. And yet we have enough in common, especially in our playing, that when I finally ran out of things to say we were able to collaborate on a couple of numbers and that sounded pretty good.

We went completely PA-free and the clarity and intimacy of the sound, the lack of barrier between us and the audience, was truly liberating. I was able to play extremely quietly behind Eric, so as not to disturb him, and yet be heard perfectly well. In fact overall the music had a dynamic range that would have been impossible if we'd been miked.

I had a senior moment at the end when Eric suggested we finish with "'Coffee' and 'Cookies'." I had no idea what he was talking about but, of course, the duties of a host require at least the illusion of competency and understanding so I sat there with an imbecilic smile on my face until I realized he was referring to his song "Good Strong Coffee." Even then I didn't make the connection with "Cookies" until La Bopperue (accent grave over the e) called out "Delicious Cookies" from out of the darkness. Hooboy!

It's only my most requested tune, after all.

Jewel Box Artistic Director Todd Erler had some good notes afterwards and the next Songwriters' Conversation, with local hero Matt Price, should be even stronger. See you there!

Quite by accident, I came across a copy of Sing Out! magazine (summer, '09) at work today. And it had a story in it that I think is hilarious. It seems that before he became Bob Dylan young Bobby Zimmerman spent the summer he was 16 at a Zionist summer camp in Wisconsin. At least I assume it was a Zionist summer camp, since it was called Camp Herzl.

Anyway, the lady who kept the camp's archives needed money recently, so she offered through an auction house that specializes in rock memorabilia a page in Dylan's handwriting that young Bob had submitted to the camp's poetry contest. It was only after the piece was shown to prospective buyers this year that someone noticed that the words were, in fact, a more-or-less-exact crib from a song by Hank Snow. Until then nobody had known.

The news did not deter the lady. She still refers to the page in question (still awaiting sale, according to last summer's Sing Out!) as a "handwritten Bob Dylan lyric."

When the news came earlier this fall that there was to be a Bob Dylan Christmas album (called "Christmas in the Heart") it seemed like some sort of horrible joke. When in the past Dylan has surprised the world with his choice of genres - veering into rock music, then country, then gospel - I snickered at the pious horror coming from both Dylan purists and defenders of the forms themselves. To me the moves seemed perfectly precedented and justifiable at the time. And nobody seems to find them in the least odd nowadays.

But a Christmas album, even one whose proceeds are earmarked for charity, just seemed like jumping the shark, an attempt to use the odd juxtaposition of Dylan's feral croak and the sweetness of the Season to create an uneasy novelty and thus stick in the overburdened memories of consumers everywhere. Considering that for my money Dylan hasn't done much worth hearing in 25 years the whole thing sounded like a shuck and I wanted nothing to do with it.

It didn't change my mind when Eric Miller told me he had heard the album and thought it the worst thing he had ever heard. I should have listened to what he said next, however: "But I really liked it anyway."

Tonight I saw a video for one of the tracks, called "Must be Santa," and I have to say that it's probably the most excited I've been about new Dylan music since the "Infidels" album in 1984.

The song is hardly the hushed piece of ersatz reverence so many pop stars produce under record company urging at this time of year. A minor-key tune over a rollicking polka beat, using the same kind of cumulative repetitions found in "Green Grow the Rushes, O!" or "A Partridge in a Pear Tree," it could almost be called Klezmer-rock. And that's its great charm and value - it is a secular song for an increasingly secular holiday, and its overt Jewishness (Dylan is both a devout Christian and a devoted student of his Jewish heritage) is as revolutionary in its way as the rock, country, and gospel trails he blazed in the past. This solves the "Hanukkah problem." It is Christmas music for Jews, Christians, and the great mass who consider themselves neither.

And the video itself is hilarious. In the middle of a raucous party, filled with all sorts, races, and ages of people drinking and dancing with each other, Dylan is nearly unrecognizable in a Santa hat and long blond wig - the same wig he wore for his recent return to the Newport Folk Festival? He dances (!) with the women and drinks with the men until suddenly two younger men begin chasing a third up and down the stairs. The reason for this is never explained and finally their quarry escapes by crashing through a plate glass window, leaving Dylan and Santa to exchange an eloquent shrug. None of Dylan's previous videos have been worth a second look but I'm heading back to YouTube right now to see it again. Merry Christmas and L'chaim!

I'm going to hate myself in the morning, but I have a couple of thoughts about the recent Tiger Woods imbroglio.

First off, isn't it against the law to physically attack one's spouse? We can all be pretty sure that if it was HE going after SHE with the 9-iron that HE would be in jail right now. But instead of Mrs. Woods answering questions at the station house there she is on the cover of People magazine, the chic, heartbroken victim of her man's wicked, wicked ways.

To which I have two words in reply: "Oh" and "Please." Did this fetching martyr have no idea the number of women throwing themselves at the greatest golfer in the world before they were married and after? None? It came as a horrible shock? Note the two words referenced above. It's a safe bet that in their courtship she went for him just as brazenly as all the others. It's just that she won - her looks put her higher on the food chain, high enough that she got the paper, the one that says if you ever, EVER respond in the slightest to ANY of the hundreds of women who are available to you on any particular day, no matter if I've been an utter bitch to you for months, no matter if you are thousands of miles away, no matter if our physical life together is fraught, frigid, or nonexistent, then you will lose everything. Everything.

And they say marriage is an institution whereby men oppress women.

Small, dark, and well-dressed, she spoke to me as I walked past her in the corridors of the Kitsap Mall. I could not understand what she said. Her thick accent sounded Israeli to my ears. I kept walking. She planted herself in my way and spoke again.

"I'm sorry," I replied, "I can't understand you," then made to move around her. She shifted as quickly as any NBA guard and put out her hand for me to shake. The other hand held an open jar.

"Do you know Dead Sea?" she asked. What answer could I make? To say "No" would be absurd. To turn and walk quickly in the other direction would be rude. And she would not let me pass. Her hand was still out, moving up and down in an unmistakeable shaking motion. "Do you know Dead Sea?" she asked again, admitting no escape. God help me, I took her hand.

Instead of introducing herself or saying "How do you do?" at this point, she instead grasped my hand in a grip of iron and pulled me toward a small kiosk, speaking again a mostly incomprehensible spiel of which I caught, from time to time, phrases like, "Dead Sea salt" and "Give me five minutes."

Abandoning myself to fate, I allowed her to rub a large-grained paste into my right hand while she repeated, perhaps four times in all, "Don't use on face, okay?"

Finished, she rinsed off my hand in a small basin and said, with great pride, "How do you feel?"

I wanted to say, "greasy," which was, in fact, the way my hand felt. But for the first time in several minutes she had relinquished physical possession of me, and I thought I should take advantage of the opportunity for escape. I said, in as formally final a way as I could, "Thank you very much." She gave me a look, more easily understood than any of the words she had spoken so far, which told me that if she had had a knife at that moment I would be a dead man.

Gary Steiner, a professor of Philosophy at Bucknell University, was given most of the New York Times' Op-Ed page over the weekend to call us all murderers for eating turkey on Thanksgiving. It was the usual litany of dietary self-righteousness we have become used to, but toward the end of the piece professor Steiner exposed the true heart of his argument more recklessly than most of his cohorts.

"These uses of animals are so institutionalized, so normalized, in our society that it is difficult to find the critical distance needed to see them as the horrors that they are." Yes, professor, sometimes it's a curse being able to see things so much more clearly than the rest of us slobs. If only we all had your "critical distance"!

"People who are ethical vegans believe that differences in intelligence between human and non-human animals have no moral significance whatsoever. The fact that my cat can’t appreciate Schubert’s late symphonies and can’t perform syllogistic logic does not mean that I am entitled to use him as an organic toy, as if I were somehow not only morally superior to him but virtually entitled to treat him as a commodity with minuscule market value."

My cat is an "organic toy," a creature whose purpose is to provide me relaxation and diversion, not because she is not as smart as I am (there is some debate on this) but because, to put it plainly, I feed her. In the bargain we have struck, she and I, her "purpose" is to relax and divert me, in exchange for a lifetime of ease and comfort.

"We have been trained by a history of thinking of which we are scarcely aware to view non-human animals as resources we are entitled to employ in whatever ways we see fit in order to satisfy our needs and desires." This is another way of saying that since the dawn of time humans have dominated the Earth and its creatures. There is nothing wrong with this. Cows dominate the grass they eat. Quite a few animal species would dominate us if they could. Some can and do.

Like everyone who makes the moral argument against eating meat, wearing leather, using products tested on animals, etc., professor Steiner seems more concerned with some species than others. He does not, for instance, decry man's persecution of the AIDS virus and other micro-organisms who, if they were granted full rights to their beinghood, full scope to achieve their purpose, would kill us all. Professor Steiner claims to be concerned with all living beings on this planet, but really his concern is with those that give him the opportunity to tell the rest of us how ethically superior he is. The only species he really wants to save are the cute ones.

You will notice that professor Steiner is given a large, prominent space in which to vent his self-love. Rebuttals will be found, if at all, as one-paragraph edits in the paper's "Letters" column.

Rod MacDonald (a good friend who was an eminence on the Greenwich Village scene when I was a rookie) once described me as "an overwhelming performer." I took it, as I take most things in life, as praise. But, while it's not an unkind thing to say by any means, typical of sly Rod, it's very much a nuanced remark, and certainly more useful and instructive for it.

It's true. My approach as a performer has always been, if not to "overwhelm" exactly, at the very least to impress. I've talked a lot over the years, in this space and others, about great artists "stretching our sense of what's possible" and that's all well and good. I've always wanted people to respond to my playing, singing, and writing with a certain amount of awe, not just for the sake of my ego but because at its very best it awes me, too. I can't really claim it as my own. I find myself saying, and hoping audiences say, too, "I didn't think you could do that."

But there's something else people want in a performance, especially one that features the written word. They want a sense that you're saying what they're thinking, that this experience ratifies their own sensibilities. Woody Guthrie (not my favorite songwriter or even one of my Top Twenty - but hey) called himself "the guy that tells you what you already know" and, despite the potential for abuse that statement implies, I still think that in my quest to be the best player, singer, and writer I could imagine I left that element out.

I can impress people, but can I move them? It's not that it never happens, but among the compliments I get from listeners fewer than a third say they were touched or inspired. Perhaps twice that say they were knocked out at how "good" it was. I'd like to reverse that ratio. My friend Eric Miller - Seattle's best young songwriter, it says here - told me about listening to Bob Dylan's recent Christmas album, a set of seasonal standards complete with carollers and jingle bells. "It was the worst thing I ever heard," he told me. "But I liked it." Dylan's semi-competence has always been part of his charm, and while I may not ever sing with that tuneless croak or write that many self-consciously primitive non sequitors, I wouldn't mind writing something, someday, that transcends my ability. That would be sweet.

One of my favorite songwriters wrote me today in defense of Sarah Palin, citing the need for "divided government" as a deterrent to liberal group-think, an example of which he cited as its malign influence on music and which writers should be canonized among folkies. Here is my reply.

Dear Steve,
Thanks for writing. I expect that I am more conservative than you on some issues, and I'm sure my career has suffered for it. We can talk that out when when we get together next. My problem with Sarah Palin is that she seems stupid; and instead of trying to educate herself for the national stage she has suddenly found herself on she appears to be selling herself as someone who is "just like us," who "shares our values," and "understands the problems of ordinary people." I don't want a President who is just like me. I want a President who is smarter than me, because this country is in deep trouble. We're getting our lunch eaten by countries whose governments are a lot less divided than ours is even now. I voted for Obama not because I'm a Democrat (I'm a Republican) but because he seemed the more intelligent and thoughtful of the two candidates. Eight years of incompetence was enough for me. And I fear that the Cheney/Palin wing of the GOP will do to conservatism what the hippies did to the New Left, which is to say render it irrelevant, at best a joke, more likely a dangerous mob of undefined and unmanageable resentments. If Sarah Palin were talking about energy independence, consumer debt, and the crisis in our educational/cultural establishment I would be all ears. If she sticks with abortion, death panels, and winning in Afghanistan then the Ron Paul sign stays up in my front yard. I hope this finds you well. warm regards, pete

Last night, when I told Ian Turner how much I appreciated his drumming after our short set at the BritFest songwriters' tribute at Island Music Center, he said, "Oh, it's easy when you've got a good bass-player." Taking nothing away from Ian's good wrists and thorough knowledge of his instrument, I can see the point.

Unlike the soloists on a group's front line, the bass and drums need to work as a unit. That's why it's called a "rhythm section." And one of the innovations British rock bands brought over with them is the primacy of the bass/drums unit. Think Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones (would the Stones be the World's Greatest Rock Band without them? I doubt it) or John McVie and Mick Fleetwood of Fleetwood Mac, whose arrangement of Duster Bennett's "Jumpin' at Shadows" was our set-closer last night.

It remains to be seen whether Mike Wittekind and Ian Turner turn into another of those legendary units (after last night's success, though, I expect they'll want to try) but already you could see Mike giving Ian what he needed, which is to say time that was both rock-solid and breathing, and a subtle complexity of melody and phrasing that gave the drums plenty to pulse against.

Before my previous bassist Liam Graham left for Nashville he found Mike for me. I don't know if he actually auditioned him but the gesture was still well above and beyond: one excellent bassist making sure his substitute was up to the high standard that had been set. I think about it every time I play with Mike, just as I think about Mike every time I play with Liam in Nashville, or every time I see those videos we made in Paducah, Kentucky a year ago.

Just go to the "Videos" page.
The BritFest set was great fun. I don't play the electric as often as I did a year or two ago. For one thing, long sets playing rock music can be exhausting to a 58-year-old such as myself, however well-preserved. But last night's three songs, while new, offered a good range of effects. We opened with "Tired of Waiting," a song by Ray Davies that was a moderate hit in 1965 for his group the Kinks. It's a short, punchy little number and, without a guitar solo, makes a good mid-tempo opener for a trio.

Then we played Richard Thompson's "For Shame of Doing Wrong" and I got to throw in lots of Thompson quotes in the two guitar solos. Naturally, only the other musicians got them - to everyone else I probably sounded more like Clarence White, a great hero of mine. Someone compared my singing in this key to Barry White, a first but I'll take it. Then we finished with "Jumping at Shadows," a tribute to the great guitarist Peter Green, of whom BB King once said, speaking of that whole generation of British blues guitarists, "He's the only one who gave me chills." It's a very understated chart with lots of room for dynamics and Mike and Ian followed me beautifully. A good rhythm section is hard to find. Let's see what happens with this one.

This Dumb Little Town
Cupertino
Hard Times
Casanova's Waltz
Belle Virginie
Honeymoon In Mississippi
Down the River
Delicious Cookies
Dark by the Rain
Sweet Dreams
From the Island
With Bierce in Mexico
It's Supposed to Snow at Christmas
Allegheny River
The Little Death Rag
Mirror
Turn to Me

Bassist Mike Wittekind played especially well, I thought. My favorite numbers were With Bierce in Mexico and Dark by the Rain, where we got to stretch out a bit instrumentally. Also It's Supposed to Snow at Christmas, the evening's only blues.

I hope we brought in enough people to please the management. The place was pretty much full. I worried that we were too loud, although we had no complaints. I just always think we're too loud. I'd like to play there with no PA at all, actually. My guitar would reach - I'm sure of it. We sold some CDs, including the Christmas one I'm glad to say. 'Tis the season, at least in retail terms.

The new songs held up well, I thought, especially Belle Virginie and Allegheny River. The whole purpose of the non-blues setlist was to give space to the new things I've written this year. I missed having blues to sing, though. It relaxes me as a singer. This was the first time in 25 years or more I did not do Restless Youth in Chinatown in a full show. Other longtime A-listers did well, including Mirror, Casanova's Waltz, and Down the River.

My one complaint was the preponderance of jokey songs, especially in the first set. I can't help it - I write 'em, after all - but last night showed how the oddball material doesn't set off the serious songs that well. I could have trusted a little more that my tunes are distinct from each other and don't need comic relief.

There were several students in the house last night. I hope I gave them enough guitar-playing. Each set had at least one extended instrumental passage but without blues it doesn't really tell the tale guitar-wise. I hope that holds them for a while.

Yesterday I closed out a singers' jam at Dusty Strings with "Amazing Grace," mostly because nobody knows how to sing "Down in the Valley to Pray" anymore since "O! Brother, Where Art Thou" came out. Afterwards, someone took issue with the use of the word "wretch" in the lyrics. She said I could have sung "...saved a 'soul' like me" instead.

"I don't like all that sin talk," she said (I'm paraphrasing). "I believe I'm a wonderful, perfect being filled with God's energy. I'm not a wretch."

Typically, I couldn't think what to say. I mumbled something about the hymn's author John Newton, a slave trader who renounced his former calling and spent the rest of his life in atonement. These piecemeal remarks achieved nothing in the face of the cast-iron self-regard this new (?) and growing (at least on the West Coast) theology tends to breed in its adherents.

So now, 24 hours too late, I've finally come up with what I'd like to have said. It begins with this. When I view God's creation and all His works, it does not make me want to worship myself. Yes, I am one of God's creatures but this does not automatically make me perfect. We work toward perfection. It isn't our birthright anymore than a field mouse deserves to be invisible to an owl.

If God wanted to create a perfect world I have no doubt he could have done so. But he didn't, and there has to be a reason for that even if we cannot apprehend it. Otherwise why cling to the redemption offered by Jesus Christ? He's a saviour, not a motivational speaker. He is here to uplift the meek and lowly, and if, as I believe, the last shall be first when He comes into His kingdom then I want to be among the meek and lowly.

Sure, the everybody's-already-perfect crowd have a point about finding the Grace within, but there's a note of moral superiority there that makes me queasy. Because on the other side of EAP theology is the disturbing notion that, since there is no evil in the world, bad things happen only to those people who have not yet attained the enlightenment being proclaimed. When Stalin killed 10 million people in the forced collectivization of the Ukraine was it THEIR fault? When my friend Warner Bacon died of brain cancer in his early 50s was it HIS fault?

Look. Honey. The world is a place of extraordinary beauty and extraordinary cruelty. We humans, on the evidence, are the only species that conceives of Creation and a Creator. That's what it means to be "made in His image." We have that beauty and that cruelty within us. My struggle to promote the one and defeat the other begins inside me, when I get down on my knees and pray for forgiveness. This is not guilt-mongering or morbidity. It's an active engagement with those forces in the world I would love to ignore as blithely as you do.

They seem to have come out of nowhere, shouting about socialism and repeating the most absurd lies as Gospel truth. They are being egged on by a cynical communications empire and headline-hungry politicians, but the real question is: Who are they? How can anyone be that stupid, that gullible, so blindly, unthinkingly hostile that they are willing - happy! - to vote against their own best interest and that of the country they love. What rock did they climb out from under? On what planet, to paraphrase Congressman Frank, do they spend most of their time?

However little they seem to have in common with our idea of thinking adults, they've always been here. But up until this generation there have always been more of Us than of Them. Now I'm not so sure. Stupid people seem to have reached a kind of Critical Mass. And they've done it the old-fashioned way.

Fucking.

Sarah Palin has what? five children? And her 17-year-old daughter has begun work on the next generation already. Stupid people are breeding because their ideology gives them no choice. And what, in the meantime, of smart people?

My mother, who took a backseat to nobody in brains or ambition, had four children between 1951 and 1959. This was considered perfectly ordinary among women of her class at that time, but in my generation and subsequent generations any graduate of Smith College with that many children is considered not so much an exception as an apostate. Intelligent, ambitious women are supposed to have better things to do than bear children. They have careers to pursue, freedom to exult in, selves to burnish.

Today's man deserves just as much blame as today's woman. The sacrifice of college-educated wives having four children in 8 years was matched, in the mythology of mid-century marriage, by husbands going to work, giving up their dreams of indolence or creativity, and dedicating their lives to the support of their families. How many male writers made fortunes limning the despair of the Man in the Grey Flannel Suit? Certainly my college friends were having none of it. We had guitars to strum, drugs to take, highways to drive, girls to seduce. At a reunion of my college class any man with four children would be looked on as a freak, a polygamist, a glutton for punishment.

We see the result in the news every day: hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of people whose eyes are a little too close together, carrying misspelled protest signs, chanting gibberish. And these slopes are going to rob us of our healthcare. This is what happens when intelligent, ambitious people won't reproduce.

When I was a child in the late 1950s there were, I think, five grade schools in my school district and field trips often included all five, students riding in their own buses from their own schools. Only one of the five schools had any black students, as I recall. So on these trips, especially in the times when we all milled about waiting for our buses, they tended to stand out.

Except "stand out" isn't really the term. I remember, as probably everyone does, that these trips gave the tough kids an opportunity to act out, especially sitting on the bus where they could call out insults without being seen. Girls were insulted, and weaker boys, but when the black kids from Tracy School came into view something changed.

"Hey! Black babies! Hey! Chocolate!"I remember being shouted out the windows of the bus. (This was before "black" was the correct term.) It was not the usual catcalling - there was an electric edge to it, a pathology that I recognized but did not understand. What made these particular kids so much worse than the stuck-up girls and sissified boys that were these bullies' normal target? They didn't dress or act any differently than the rest of us, it seemed to me then. Why did these boys react like wild animals at bay?

As the years went by the Civil Rights movement came and prospered. I got used to being alternately amused and put off by the excesses of our racial politics, the parade of self-serving demagogues claiming the mantle of Martin Luther King, the tortuous logic used to justify manifestly silly positions, the constant invocation of racism to nullify any criticism, however restrained and respectful. It got to the point, for me, that racism had been claimed so often and so speciously that the word didn't have any real meaning left.

But in recent months the mindless hysteria among critics of President Obama has given the word its definition back. The pious horror at the thought of the President of the United States addressing schoolchildren on closed-circuit television isn't about any policy disagreement. It's the same pathology that made my grade-school bullies react as if they had been touched by a cattle prod, a rabid, fearful, snarling, attack on The Other. It's a pathology I had come to think didn't exist. But it's there. It needs to be faced. It needs to be named.

On Saturday Congressman Jay Inslee held a Town Hall meeting at North Kitsap High School to discuss health care reform. Emily Groff, one of my favorite singers, shamed me into going by saying it was my patriotic duty and, considering what I've seen of the healthcare debate so far (and what I know about North Kitsap County) I expect she was right.

Several hundred people filled the High School gym, but organizers had been pretty careful with their planning. You had to give your ZIP code to get in, which may not have kept out every outside agitator but at least forced people to think about this as a local event for citizens of Kitsap County. Anyone who wanted to ask a question had to write their name on a card and put it in a box marked, "Pro," "Con," or "Undecided." Cards were chosen at random from each box in sequence, so no one view could predominate.

People carried signs, roughly half in favor, half opposed, although more of those opposed looked commercially printed. There were a few shouts and taunts early on, but these were met by shouts and taunts of our own and died down pretty quickly. The questions themselves (regardless of perspective) were voiced with thoughtfulness and civility.

Inslee was a composed and sympathetic figure throughout the two-hour meeting and I'll bet he prepared himself pretty thoroughly beforehand. At the start he brought out the High School's cheerleading squad to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance and then asked for a moment of silence for a Kitsap boy killed in Afghanistan last week. In fact, he talked a lot about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, both to celebrate the troops and remind us where the current budget deficit came from.

The crowd seemed evenly split between left and right, with some interesting differences of style between the two camps. In their questions the righties tended to concentrate on the constitutionality of government-run health care and the fact that the government had never made a profit in anything it had tried in the past. (Inslee parried this fairly easily by pointing out that leaving heathcare to profit-making organizations had gotten us in this fix in the first place - that "rationing healthcare" and "faceless bureaucrats making decisions about grandma" were toxic features of the current system.) Applause from the right tended to be sharp, loud, full of cheers and whistles, but short. Those on the left tended to talk about personal experience with the health bureaucracy and won applause that was quieter but more frequent and longer-lasting.

Toward the end a few of the more professional-looking hecklers seemed to realize that their opportunity was slipping away and increased their catcalls. Then a woman stood up (since the hecklers couldn't tell who was for-'em and who was agin-'em until the question was out, they had no choice but to listen) and said she had been a VA nurse for 22 years and the care in THOSE government hospitals was excellent. Then she said that she appreciated the opposite viewpoint but wished people would stop "playing politics" with it, which got sustained, building applause, people standing one by one until roughly half the room was on its feet. If the folks who had come to disrupt the meeting had had the ability to feel shame, they would have felt it then.

I still haven't gotten used to the normalcy pursued by so many gay people these days. I came of age at a time when to be gay, especially for a man, was to be extravagantly flamboyant, almost obnoxiously obvious, and often as promiscuous as it is physically possible for mammals to be.

Part of this was the tenor of the times, of course: the rise of identity politics and the violent, militant, anti-intellectual edge brought to political discourse by the Black Power Movement among others. And part of it was a convulsive casting-off of centuries-old taboos. It was a heady time, a time without perspective. And most of those guys are dead now.

Dead too young. Badly dead.

So, in the words of one magazine cover I saw a few years ago, "When did Gay people get so straight?" It could almost be argued that, in their quest for "marriage equality" and a more general embrace of "family values," there's a certain me-tooism at work. Still, somebody has to do it, I suppose, what with all the conservative Republicans who seem to be cheating on their wives right now.

Speaking of wives, I went to the wedding of two men a couple of years ago, in Victoria, British Columbia, and except for both parties wearing trousers it was the most traditional wedding I'd ever seen. They even read the long-abandoned vow from the Biblical story of Judith: "Whither thou goest I will go and whither thou lodgest I will lodge and thy people shall be my people." When was the last time you heard a college-educated woman get up in front of all her friends from work and say that?