Night Light

Music For Madison: Steve Earle Steps Up (With A Digression About The Fall Of Communism)

Steve Earle, who's hands-down one of the best songwriters of our time, has re-released two union-themed songs on iTunes to support the Madison protesters. “Harlan Man” and “The Mountain” are being issued as a special "2-track digital single" (I didn't know you could do that), with all proceeds going to The America Votes Labor Unity Fund, through SaveWorkers.org.

“Unions are a fundamental component of democracy throughout the free world," said Steve." All eyes are on Wisconsin.” I'll go with that.

In fact, I was thinking about exactly that earlier today - unions and democracy, I mean. I was working with USAID and the State Department when the Communist countries were changing over back in the early nineties. I went to the Silesian mountains in Poland back then to talk to the Solidarity folks about financing a health care plan for the workers. I spent a lot of time in Hungary, Czechoslovakia, even Albania when it was first opened up after forty years as a "garrison state." That was under the first President Bush.

And I was just thinking today how funny it is how some of the people who got so excited about the unions over there are working as hard as they can to destroy the unions over here. You should have seen them: They had Solidarity coffee cups, Solidarity posters in the original Polish ... they had everything material you could acquire that had anything to do with "solidarity."

They just didn't have solidarity, if you know what I mean.

I was in Prague once with a World Bank mission, and on our way home from dinner a group of us saw two young girls playing guitars for spare change. My companions bribed them into letting me play the guitar and sing with them. I don't want to brag, but we made some really good money. They didn't want me to leave. (To be completely honest,, there wasn't a lot of competition on the street that night.)

The only problem with singing for a group of non-musical people from a lot of different countries, like the people on that mission, is that at least back in the nineties you would almost be forced at gunpoint to take a crack at singing "Hotel California" or "Country Roads." On another trip I heard a Hungarian country band play Merle Haggard songs for Mossbacher, Bush's Secretary of Commerce (I forget his first name, although I shook his hand. He was all hair and teeth and tan, like all these guys are.). The event was a "Texas style barbecue" in Mossbacher's honor at an ancient fort overlooking the Danube.

Life throws some weird curves at you sometimes.

Anyway, back to Steve: The songs are from the bluegrass album he did with Del McCoury and his band back in 1999. The whole album's great. Earle's got an uncanny way of writing original songs that sound about 150 years old. (You should hear Levon Helm sing "The Mountain," too. He was born to do it.)

Both songs deal with life as a (union) miner, so you can buy the single for the mineworker in your life.

According to the press release, "The America Votes Labor Unity Fund is the fiscal agent of the AFL-CIO State Unity Fund, a special account of the AFL-CIO and directed by a broad coalition of national labor organizations ... The America Votes Labor Unity Fund united labor organizations, allied progressive groups and individuals to fight for workers -- on the ground and on the airwaves. Contributions help activists campaign in 11 states ..."

You can contribute at saveworkers.org, and you can buy Steve's single on iTunes here. The two actions aren't mutually exclusive, either, so you don't have to make a vexing decision here. Why not do both?

 

Off the Charts: Did Wall Street Kill Rock and Roll?

This chart's been making the rounds lately everywhere, from top political bloggers to financial gadflies to music industry maven Bob Lefsetz. It's gone viral, crossed over, become a smash ... in other words, it's done everything that records don't do anymore. (Except maybe Cee Lo's, which is retro in every good possible way.)

This chart's  got a 'hook' - in this case, a simple and clean presentation that illustrates the rise and fall of the music business. And it has so many overtones: economic, musical, personal ...  

The story's simple:  Vinyl got replaced by tape, then tape started falling off just as revenues from CDs picked up the slack and started skyrocketing. The business kept falling upward, making more and more money as it went.  Until it didn't.

When Things Go Wrong ... It Hurts Me Too

I had it ... I had a deal lined up. I was going to make it. 

In the late seventies rock and roll seemed to be booming.  I had some songs and a five-piece band, and two managers were fighting over me.  One was still struggling, on the way up.  He'd take me out to breakfast once in a while according to then-standard manager/artist protocol: rented limo, Eggs Benedict and champagne, an offer of coke in the back seat on the way back.  He'd managed to scrape up an offer from a second-rate record company that had a lot of hits once, but was struggling to be relevant again.  The other manager couldn't care less about impressing me.  But he had a superstar New Wave client and got me into a couple of major labels, both of which booked studio time for demos. 

The first manager was a nice guy - not always a plus in a manager - and he had the hustle it might've taken to break an unknown act. But I dropped him and went with the guy who had the superstar in his stable.  Everything was going great until I met the superstar at a party and mentioned his name. "I'm sorry I have to walk the same planet as that asshole," she said.  Uh-oh.

Parallel Thirds

The shape of that music industry curve looked awfully familiar.  Where had I seen it before?  Here's a different chart for the same time period: 

 
(from Agoracom)

There's a striking resemblance here.  But could it really mean something?   Did the Dow actually rise and fall in close harmony with the music industry? Here's an overlay of the two lines:

 "Wise man see outlines," William Blake wrote in his diary, "and therefore they are wise."  Are we seeing an overlooked correlation or just a fluke?  How does the economy affect rock and roll - or vice versa, for that matter?

Here's one way:  In 1979 I was being scouted by two record labels.  The bidding war, I was assured, was already heating up.  Then the ayatollahs took over in Iran.  Oil prices soared and people began talking about a "music industry recession."  LPs were a petroleum product.

Suddenly the record labels weren't interested anymore.  Even the offer from the has-been record label was withdrawn.  Around downtown Manhattan I became aware of a lot of guys turning thirty, like I would be in a few years, still scuffling to make it in the rock and roll game.  I was back in California before another winter ended.  

Before another year had passed, oil prices were falling again and the music biz was on its upward trajectory.  But it felt too late for me.   When John Lennon got shot, I was really crying for myself.

Blindsight: Economics, Country Music, Tea Parties, and "Third World America"

Last November, when the Tea Party Express was just building up a head of steam, it seemed worthwhile to stop for a minute and listen to a country song. Why? For one thing it's a really good song, and it had a great hook. "Here in the real world," it says, away from those powerful guys in Washington and New York, "they're shuttin' Detroit down."

That theme was so inclusive and compelling that conservative singer John Rich (John McCain's campaign troubadour) was able to get noted lefty Kris Kristofferson to act in the video, along with Mickey Rourke. That made the song important and interesting. How was John Rich's message able to win over those guys? Because it was simple and true: The people who got us into this mess are doing just fine, and the people who worked hard and played by the rules aren't. What concerned me back then was that this message, while compelling and accurate, could wind up benefiting some of most bank-friendly politicians on Earth. The Republicans who deregulated banking (along with centrist Democrats) could wind up with more power. They'd then be in a better position to carry out their agenda of blocking the modest banking reforms and economic fixes being recommended by the White House and Congress.

Isn't that pretty much what's happening?

Reading Arianna Huffington's new book Third World America made me think of that song again. There's a medical phenomenon called "blindsight," where people who seem to be partially or completely blind are able to respond to visual information under test conditions. The theory is that they're not blind at all, but are unable to consciously process the information they're receiving from their eyes. Isn't that what's happening in the country right now? Most people aren't economists or policy wonks, after all, so they probably haven't "seen" this chart:

(source)

But on some level they know it. And they may not have seen this chart, either (from CBS Moneywatch via Mike Konczal), but you can bet they "know" it too:

People need ways to integrate and process all the information they're receiving. They're struggling with the cognitive dissonance they experience when they're told the economy's doing better, because they know that in their world it's not. Human beings have always used stories and songs to integrate the information they receive, and we need better stories and better hooks than we've been getting lately.

Know what's a good hook for these troubled times? "Third World America." Know what's not? "Recovery Summer." So score one for Arianna before the cover's even cracked. The "recovery summer" theme was bound to ring false for the millions of Americans who still live in a devastated economy. That was destined to reduce the credibility of the very institutions that prevented even greater damage - institutions that could do more to help them.

We've seen the Administration move toward a more coherent narrative in the last week, but will it be enough? "I ran because I felt that we had to have a different economic philosophy in order to grow that middle class and grow our economy over the long term," the President in Friday's press conference. That sounds like a story worth telling.

Third World America is direct and clear in its message: Decades of aggressive corporate lobbying, driven by bankers and other large corporations, have led to a series of policy decisions that are eroding the American standard of living. The details are all there: The financial industry's gone from 2.5% of our GDP in 1947 to 8.3% right before the meltdown. Financial profits went from a maximum of 16% between 1973 and 1985 to 41% right before the crisis hit. And rather than being chastened by their failure, or disciplined by taxpayers in return for being bailed out, bankers have embraced their old ways with enthusiasm. Meanwhile the American households that rescued them lost $13 trillion in wealth between mid-2007 and March 2009.

There has been, in economist Simon Johnson's words, a "quiet coup" led by a classic "oligarchy." Bankers now exert enormous control over both the economy and the political process. People see that, and they're angry. Anyone who wants to discuss the current state of affairs better be prepared to speak plainly - "third world America," "quiet coup," "oligarchy" - or they'll be ignored.

Some of us are actually old enough to remember when the American dream was at its peak. Even if you were just a kid, you knew certain things: If you worked hard, you could retire in financial security. You lived in a country that led the world in science research, education, and social mobility. We designed things, built things. We were creating the future. Many of us later traveled into Third World countries for work or pleasure. We were saddened by the crumbling roads, unsafe bridges, and unregulated companies poisoning the air and water. The income inequities seemed so unjust, and the people's inability to heal their country through a free political process was tragic.

Little did we suspect we might be looking into our own future.

But Arianna's not just crying in her beer. The final section of the book details a series of fixes, which include: Campaign financing. Citizen activism, with less reliance on politicians as saviors and more on ourselves as the agents of change. Spending on infrastructure and education. Bank reform with teeth. Homeowner relief. Service to others. Moving your money away from predatory financial institutions.

I'd add another to that fine list: Stop judging the tea party radicals around you. Sure, some may be extremists and racists, but lots of them are just frightened and angry. They're trying to reconcile what they "see" with what they're being told. Right now they believe a false story, but it hangs together and makes them feel sane in a seemingly insane world. Demogogues have always used these kinds of stories to exploit human fear. You can't blame people for believing a false story if they haven't heard the real one.

So don't blame the individuals, blame the story. Tell them a better one. The truth is a helluva story. But even the truth works better if it has a good hook.

(originally written for The Huffington Post)

bob seger: retro-rocker or master of japanese poetic form?

 Consider these words by Bob Seger:

Woke last night to the sound of thunder. 

How far off?  I sat and wondered. 

Started hummin' a song from 1962. 

Ain't it funny how the night moves

With Autumn closin' in … ?

Haiku or not?  In the strictest definition, clearly not.  It's not even close to the 7-5-7 syllable structure that makes the haiku form so compact and elegant.  (I think people sometimes admire haiku for the same reason they admire microchip design:  Look how much you can put it such a little space!)  

Seger's lyric is closer to the five-line tanka form.  Since tanka are generally concerned with love or mortality, the Seger lyric is a good candidate (except for the syllable counts, which are way off).  And the entire lyric to the song from which this comes, "Night Moves," would be a chōka , if anything.  It's way too long for any other Japanese form.  (The reader will presumably remember the song, with its "I used her, she used me, and neither one cared/we were getting our share" challenge to feminist critiques of male exploitation.) 

That said, a seasonal reference is customary in the haiku form, and Seeger delivers.  It might be argued that he also provides a kireji, or "word which cuts."  Kireji often express wonder, and he uses that word explicitly.  Kireji can also be in the form of a question, like a Jeopardy answer.

Parts of this lyric could almost qualify as a Zen death poem, or as a premonition of death:

Woke last night to the sound of thunder. 

How far off?  I sat and wondered. 

That could be a meditation on the nature of mortal existence.

Ain't it funny how the night moves

With Autumn closin' in … ?

That really does sound like a death poem.  Would Bob Seger write something like that?  He put out a pro-Vietnam-War (and anti-peacenik) song called "Ballad of the Yellow Berets" when he was a kid. But we all mellow with time. 

Hey, am I kidding about all this?  Sure.  But that lyric from "Night Moves" really is beautiful and well-written (as opposed to, say, that other line about the young woman in question having "points of her own/way up firm and high."  That's just icky, especially coming from a thirty-something rocker reminiscing about teen sex.)  

Still, Seger's a hell of a songwriter - "Get Out of Denver" is terrific, for example, and so's "Turn the Page."  He doesn't get enough respect for his craft, and it's possible he never will.

Maybe he could write a haiku about that ...

the music of the sun

The Telegraph reports that the sun's magnetic field produces harmonies and frequencies which behave a lot like sound waves - or, more specifically, like music.  In some cases these magnetic waves, called "coronal loops," vibrate like stringed instruments.  In other cases they act in a way that resembles breath traveling through a flute-like instrument.  As the Telegraph explains:

Using satellite images of these loops, which can be over 60,000 miles long, the scientists were able to recreate the sound by turning the visible vibrations into noises and speeding up the frequency so it is audible to the human ear.

The result is beautiful and very much like music. We can now add to the list of nonhuman entities that make music: birds, whales, sand dunes, and now the sun itself.

All Geared Up: Elvis the Transhumanist

Occasionally an idea will come to mind that's claimed quickly and eloquently by someone else before you have a chance to execute it.  When Michael Jackson died I began dabbling with the subject of Jackson as Transhumanist, but my piece was only half-written when RU Sirius pretty much nailed the topic.  Nick Gillespie at Reason found the key lines from Sirius:  "Michael Jackson is obviously not an example of transhumanism to be followed.  But he is a signpost on the road to post-humanity. I believe the future will study him from that perspective, and in some odd way, it will learn from his many mistakes."

Well said, and lesson learned:  When it comes to the world of ideas, if you snooze you lose.  (Unless you enhance your work capabilities with Provigil, of course, in which case you won't do as much snoozing.)  But although the Michael Jackson moment has come and gone, a new event was commemorated this week:  the 75th birthday of Elvis Presley. Elvis was the primogenitor, the Omo I of rock and roll culture.  He didn't just "ship a lot of units," as they used to say in the record biz (back when there was a record biz.)  He changed everything. 

Elvis was certainly considered different.   From his early days on he was an agent of radical transformation in sexuality, culture, and appearance.  At nineteen, he and his musicians seemed so unusual to the announcer at the Louisiana Hayride that he was asked, on the air, "You all geared up with your band there?"

"I'm all geared up!"  Elvis answered.

But suspicious minds require proof for Elvis as transhumanist.  Let's define transhumanism as a rejection of traditional human biology and its limits, an assertion of the right to remake yourself radically (what Max More called "morphological freedom"), and an embrace of technology as the instrument of both self-expression and self-transformation.

Let's consider the evidence:

Elvis was not willing to accept traditional gender boundaries.  Even as a teenager in Tupelo, Mississippi, Elvis dyed his hair and enhanced the beauty of his eyes with eyeliner.  He wore a pink sport coat, in violation of gender norms, complemented by black peg leg slacks.  Yet he contrasted the seeming feminity of these gestures with hypermasculine body movements and abnormally large sideburns (facial hair being an evolutionary cue for male dominance.)

His voice - a startingly clear and expressive instrument - was electronically enhanced in his earliest recordings.  Producer Sam Phillips used slapback echo on Elvis, exaggerating the effect to a degree that was unprecedented at the time. Slapback was a form of human extension in which a singer's voice was recorded on tiny tape loops and replayed while the the vocalist kept on singing, creating an almost spectral effect.  What sounded like echo was really multiplication.

Bill Monroe's "Blue Moon of Kentucky" was a heartbroken lament built around nature imagery.  It was agrarian in both content and style. Elvis' version added electric guitar and swapped the song's traditional waltz tempo for a factory-ready 4/4 beat.  A cyborg was created, half electronic and half rural, and they called it rockabilly.

Elvis transcended racial boundaries, too, adopting a singing style so African-American that when he was interviewed on Memphis radio for the first time the DJ asked him which high school he attended.  Why?  Because Elvis went to an all-white school in those segregated days, and the answer (Humes High, for trivia buffs) told surprised listeners he had slipped from bonds that his white peers assumed were genetically sealed.

Elvis' physical relationship to the equipment he used - guitar and mike stand - was unusually sexual and intimate, too.  It's as if he was trying to fuse with them.  While he didn't play electric guitar publicly until his 1968 television special, he banged the hell out of that old acoustic.  When a guitar is played passionately the player and the instrument become a human/machine hybrid.  (Watch some Hendrix footage and see for yourself.)  Elvis was technically crude, but nobody could doubt his commitment.

This was a man who obsessively bought fancy cars, the 20th Century male's ultimate mechanical extender.  He shot televisions, too, when he didn't like what he saw.  That makes him a pioneer in the world of media interactivity, if a slightly more violent one than those that would follow.

Another trivia item:  What career was Elvis planning to pursue before he made it big?  Electrician.

Then there's late-period Elvis.  While rockabilly purists dismiss that fat guy in the sequin suit, flashes of Elvis' brilliance - and his nascent transhumanism - always lingered.  Ever the experimenter, Elvis took performance-enhancing drugs to amplify his abilities until the end of his life.  (Since medicine was more primitive then and Elvis appears to have been an addict, they may have caused the end of his life.)

Consider his late-period performances in Las Vegas, where sleep is outlawed and Leni Riefenstahl-like architecture proclaims the human desire to dominate nature.  Watch the videos:  Those on-stage karate moves?  Projections of individual power through nearby space.  The cape?  A superhero trope.  The rhinestones?  Synthetic stars for the man who would be a galaxy.  And the song that by then had become his theme song, "If I Can Dream," could be a transhumanist anthem:

There must be lights burning brighter somewhere
Got to be birds flying higher in a sky more blue
If I can dream of a better land Where all my brothers walk hand in hand
Tell me why, oh why, oh why can't my dream come true

As long as a man
Has the strength to dream
He can redeem his soul and fly

Elvis Presley was a man so convinced of his own powers that late in his life, fueled to excess by pills and ambition, he insisted to his companions that he could move clouds with his mind.  And what song was always played over the loudspeakers as late-period Elvis took the stage?  "Also sprach Zarathustra."

I rest my case.

That ends our discussion of popstar transhumanism, at least until we complete our disquisition on Keith Richards. Meanwhile the world waits for the first openly transhumanist pop star, the one who will tell the world in transformational ways that she or he is in love.  And, of course, all geared up.

(originally written for 3 Quarks Daily)

Grateful for the Dead

A number of beautiful lives ended during the past twelve months, and it's only natural to feel the pain of their loss. If life is bright and brief, the last twelve months have been a cascade of sparks that flared and fell from the sky like a meteor shower. Their deaths were sometimes hard to bear, but their lives are an occasion for giving thanks.

Any "gratitude list" for those that left us is bound to be highly personal. Mine includes the brilliant writer J. G. Ballard, who used science fiction as a platform to carve his own provocative (and sometimes disturbing) writing style. And "dystopic" doesn't begin to convey the bleak landscapes he could conjure - landscapes that reflected the hollowness of the civilization we've built.

Put it this way: Whenever I see a cracked and empty swimming pool overgrown with vines, I will always think of Ballard.

Then there's Mitch Mitchell, drummer for the Jimi Hendrix Experience. His playing on their first album seemed like a proclamation, a manifesto for the drummer as primary voice. He was almost as much of a lead player as Hendrix himself. I always think first of the intro to "Fire" when I think of Mitch Mitchell. That was his call to arms, as if he was saying "forget keeping the beat and just adding a few fills. This is how we play drums now!"

A few paved the way before him, including jazz drummer Louis Bellson. Bellson, who also died this year, pioneered the use of two bass drums. Keith Moon also explored the lead-drummer universe, as did Ginger Baker (who adopted Bellson's two-bass-drum approach). But nothing will ever match the ringing declaration of Mitchell's whiplike snare.

And there were others:

Patrick McGoohan, who I considered the epitome of cool on Secret Agent when I was thirteen. (And it had not one, but two brilliant theme songs: the harpsichord piece and the Johnny Rivers tune.) McGoohan captured the spirit of the times perfectly with his series The Prisoner. I hear they're doing a remake of it, but without McGoohan I have no interest.

The immortal Eddie Bo, New Orleans pianist, singer, songwriter, and record producer. We saw him play a year or two ago in a little restaurant in downtown LA. A good local soul band backed him up, but he was best when it was just him and the drummer. Eddie's left hand and the drummer became a single entity, and it tore the house down.

Mercedes Sosa, the Latin American singer with the enormous voice and soul to match. She was the rage when I traveled through Latin America in the 1970's - the voice of political resistance and of hope for a better future.

Jim Carroll, with whose ghost I struggled at times. (I wrote about that here.)

The great and soulful singer WIlly De Ville.

The fluid and expressive instrumentalist Johnny Almond.

Eartha Kitt. Need I say more?

Harold Pinter.

Gospel singer Claude Jeter of the Swan Silvertones, who is standing in the safety zone now.

Country great Hank Locklin, who did "Send Me the Pillow That You Dream On" and "Don't Let the Stars Get in Your Eyes."

Sci-fi immortal Philip Jose Farmer.

Rockabilly legend Billy Lee Riley.

Ernie Ashworth, whose one country/western hit ("Talk Back Trembling Lips") became a classic.

Jim Dickinson, the great record producer.

Blues singer Koko Taylor, who rode Willie Dixon's Iceberg Slim-like lyrics to immortality.

Blues musician John Cephas of Cephas and Wiggins (I did a few folk festivals with them.)

Then there was Sy Syms, who founded the New York City clothing stores that carried his name. Without him I wouldn't have been able to afford business clothes for my first two or three jobs.

On a more personal level, Forrest Church passed away this year as well. He was the Unitarian Universalist minister who led All Souls Church in Manhattan for many years.  He was considered by many the leading voice for non-dogmatic, nondenominational religion in this country. He also performed the wedding ceremony when I married Janet.

And lastly, my uncle, Jerry Eskow. Words finally fail me.

An American Christmas Playlist

American music gives us more than enough to provide a great list of songs to play this Christmas. Since I was unable to finish my own Christmas single - maybe I'll have the time and money next year - I dug up twelve songs from a variety of styles to inspire you on the holiday. One for each day of Christmas ...

1. "Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto," James Brown - "... and tell 'em James Brown sent you." A solid funk groove creates the foundation for the Godfather of Soul's exhortation to the airborne saint.
2. "While Shepherds Watched Their Flocks," Louvin Brothers - The harmonizing, songwriting Alabama antecedents of the Everly Brothers tackle a classic hymn. If you like it (and their brother harmonies are among the richest ever) you can dive deeper into their Fundamentalist songbook: "Satan's Jeweled Crown," "The Angels Rejoic'd," or even "Don't Let Them Take the Bible Out of the Schoolroom." (When it comes to politics, music is a demilitarized zone.)
3. "Christmas Done Finally Came," Jerome Alexander - A New Orleans acapella doo-wop Christmas party song. Exactly what the doctor ordered to lift spirits after a rough few weeks in politics.
4. "Nothing But a Child," Steve Earle - Emmylou Harris provides harmony for this tune's evocation of the Nativity story, childhood innocence, and the long road back to redemption. Gets to me every time.
5. "Away in a Manger," Emmylou Harris - Speaking of Emmylou, nobody can breathe new life into an overly familiar song like Emmylou can. This should prove it.
6. "American Jesus," Bad Religion - For the atheists among us, this song's worth a spin any time of the year. And despite my past political differences with a couple of the New Atheists, there are other great atheist anthems where this one came from. (Anybody heard "No Voices in the Sky" by Motorhead?)
7. "He's Alive," Dolly Parton - If Dolly had been a man, she'd have been recognized as one of the greatest songwriters and singers country music has ever had. Instead she had to become more glittery and over-the-top every year. This retelling of the Crucifixion is pretty over the top, too, and maybe she could have dialed her reading down a notch or two. But melodrama and all, it can make your hair stand on end. Which was the real point of the original story ...
8. "Mary," Patti Griffin - The Christmas story retold with the mother - in fact, the eternal Mother - as the protagonist. A lyrical, feminist, mystical recasting.
9. "Hymn to Her," the Pretenders - While not specifically about Christmas, Chrissie Hynde nails this song, also about the feminine principle. And for a straight-up Christmas song there's always the Pretenders' "2,000 Years."
10. "What Do the Lonely Do at Christmas," the Emotions - A soul ballad for wistful Yule moments.
11. "The Rebel Jesus," Jackson Browne - JB joins the Chieftains to sing praises for a Middle Eastern insurrectionist, from "a pagan who stands with the rebel Jesus." We could do with a little driving the moneylenders from the Temple these days, don't you think? (In fact, let's give an honorable mention to "When the Dollar Rules the Pulpit" by the Dixie Hummingbirds.)
12. "Merry Xmas/War Is Over," John and Yoko - Yeah, I know you're sick of it. Too bad. Their unique genius in this tune was to make it sing-songy so that it can live forever (just like "Give Peace a Chance.) There's also Yoko's beautiful snowbound ballad, "Listen the Snow Is Falling," with John's graceful Reggie Young riffs in the background. And in this interview with my friend Denise Sullivan, I love the way 77-year-old Yoko explains that she's too busy to write a memoir. Maybe later, she says. That's what I call a role model. (And don't tell me they're British or Japanese. They're New Yorkers, and that's still America, no matter what Sarah Palin says.)

That's our twelve. Oh, but how could I forget this one? "Would They Love Him Up In Shreveport" by George Jones, written by the great Bobby Braddock. "If they knew He was a Jew/and a Palestinian, too ..." So let's make it thirteen, if that's all right with you.

I know that others, like David Wild, have taken up the habit of creating blogger playlists. They've done a great job. But as an early adapter of the genre (for a defense contractor's lavish party and Valentine's Day, for example) I felt I had stayed away for far too long.

So this was my Christmas present to myself. Hope you like it, too. Happy holiday, haloday, Christmas, Hanukah, Festivus, solstice (soulstice?), or Friday (pick one).

Jim Carroll's Death Poem ... and Mine

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(written for 3 Quarks Daily.com)

Jim Carroll's recent death inspired as many eulogies and elegies as might be expected from the passing of a poet, rocker, and memorist, especially one whose reputation is so bound to a specific place (New York City) and time (the late 1970's and early 1980's).  My friend Michael Lally, also an urban Catholic poet of major repute, drew some online flak for using Carroll's death as an opportunity for reflection - on Jim, himself, and his life in comparison to Jim's (they were both working-class Catholic boys who stormed the hipster-poetry barricades). Michael spoke honestly of his sense of competition with Jim, and I defended him in the "comments" section of his post, writing:  "... for those who prefer to be true to a fallen writer's memory at the moment of his death, I would answer: What could be truer than that?"   I then went on to tell my own story in relation to Jim's (who I didn't know):  "I, too, felt a lot of envy toward Jim Carroll. I had a manager and was trying to get a rock n roll record deal in NYC when he switched from spoken word to music and was signed in a heartbeat. He had the looks, the magnetism, the hipness ... and then, all of a sudden, he had the deal with Rolling Stones Records. (I think it was Stones ...)  The truth is, my feelings had no more to do with Jim Carroll than perhaps yours did. He was a placeholder for some things inside of me that needed to get out. That's not his fault - but it's my story, which is ultimately the only one I'm qualified to write." I was young, immature, and ambitious - a toxic combination.  Things seemed to come too easily for Jim Carroll, and the truth is he did have an extraordinary gift with language - and with physical presence.  It was only later in life that I learned that all brilliant writers work enormously hard, and that the post-Beat "spontaneous writing" pose was more often than not a well-crafted deceit.  (Recent explorations of Jack Kerouac's On The Road rewrites demonstrate that.)  And it was only after his death that I learned how painfully shy Jim was, how difficult it was sometimes for him to speak and to perform, and how directly he faced his own issues through the process of recovering from drug addiction (he had 30 years clean and sober through Narcotics Anonymous).  Some of this information can be found in Alex Williams' touching New York Times piece about his final days, which includes this email to a friend: “My self-sabotaging tendencies in all aspects of my life, along with the validation needs you referenced, go without saying.  There are deep seeded reasons for both, but the latter is also an outcome of the way you are spoiled and coddled by managers, women and media et al when you are on top, and the quickness with which everyone scatters when you recede a moment.” Jim Carroll, who wrote so well and looked so perfect for the role, had the same self-sabotaging tendencies I struggled with for so many years?  Who knew?  And "the quickness with which everyone scatters" was something I knew too well.  For a brief period in the late 1970s I was being courted by top rock managers, taken for limousine rides, plied with fine champagne brunches and other things, and enjoying a tiny (and I mean tiny) fraction of what Jim Carroll experienced.  When the demos didn't turn out well - damaged, perhaps, by my own desire to please - it all disappeared overnight.  I knew how much it had hurt me, but never would have imagined that this kind of pain could be experienced by Jim Carroll - the fortunate one, the blessed one, the winner of the game. I never connected as strongly to the Jim Carroll Band as I did to Jim Carroll the writer, though.  I felt the musicians backing him were too good at rock and roll.  They had all the moves down pat, without any of the minor self-mutilations needed to adequately convey his words.  They got the tone right sometimes, as in the song Three Sisters, and it all came together in People Who Died.  But overall I thought he would have been better served by a more electronic and experimental band (i.e. pre-hip hip, Public Image or Big Audio Dynamite), or a rawer band fronted by one of the Jones Boys (Steve of the Sex Pistols or Mick of the Clash).  Or Jack Nitszche as producer, recreating the Wall of Sound.  A good example of this is the song Day and Night (seen here on YouTube).  It's a really good song, and my future friend Amy Kanter tears it up on backing vocals, but it falls short of greatness.  It doesn't live up musically to his devotion to craft, a devotion he saw in Kurt Cobain and described as "a young artist's remorseless passion/which starts out as a kiss/and follows like a curse." I picked up a book of Japanese death poems on a recent trip to Hawaii and was musing about them not long before Jim Carroll's death.  Most of the death poems are too self-consciously Zen for me, but several are beautiful.  'This then," one reads, "is the day the melting snowman/becomes a real man."  It' not all that different from the closing page of Jim Carroll's final work, a loosely autobiographical novel.  I winced slightly when I read that the lead character has a raven for a companion, but - as with all balancing acts - he seems to pull it off in the end when the protagonist dies: Finally, a last sigh of consciousness rocked him gently on the deck of an old schooner ship. Billy’s body, dark blue like the storm clouds preceding the storm, shuttered and his eyes closed dull and loosely. Sensing young Wolfram had given up the ghost, the raven glided back down aside the dead artist, whispering a last demand. “It’s time your eyes remain shut, Billy Wolfram. Now is the time, so get on with it. Take that single step and fly.” Was this designed to be Jim Carroll's death poem?  It doesn't really matter. He had the nerve to write a paragraph in the 21st Century that includes a totem animal.  Does the idea work?  Does the paragraph?  The answer is:  He tried. He kept on storming the barricades.  That's some kind of death poetry, isn't it? And it didn't come easily at all. Another one of those Japanese poems goes like this:  "I wake and find / the colored iris / I saw in my dreams."  Me, I've never intended to write a death poem.  And I don't know anything about what happens after we die.  But it's an image to consider:  a snowman holding an iris.

in your face, nashville 2009 AD!

Now, THIS is what I call country music!  I'd rather hear Webb Pierce sing flat notes that listen to those autotuned new-country androids deliver their 'product' in synthetic pitch-perfect tones.