Thanks to the script and Edward Norton—a real actor with a larger palette than Timothée el blanco—Pete Seeger is a central player in the new Dylan movie. Part of being a so-phisticated 9-year-old in 1965 (rather than a winsome seven-year-old sing-a-longer con hammer) was to lean away from Pete Seeger. Down the line, when I got all clear about the history of America’s Fellow Travelers, my aversion to him went beyond his/my square past. Every time some Oliver Stoney/Nationist upholds some update of Stalinist/Putinist nonsense, I want to curse all the fuckers who polluted the American radical imagination with agitprop about humanism of totalitarians. Seeger was tuned to their channel for way too long. Unlike so many of his comrades, though, he got free (if not loose)…
Music
Play Fuckin’ Loud
First published in First in 2005. Right on time all over again in the wake of “Like a Complete Unknown.”
Start Us Up
Back in 2005, a number of writers responded in First of the Month to No Direction Home — Martin Scorcese’s documentary about Bob Dylan’s early years. Here’s John Leland’s thoughtful commentary which, in the wake of A Complete Unknown, seems punctual again.
Let’s ‘ave a Larf (“In which I introduce the Beatles to both Bob Dylan and the evil weed…”)
Before (the late) Al Aronowitz brought Dylan and pot to the Beatles, he introduced Billie Holiday to the Beats. You can read his sweet tale about that encounter here. I’m reminded just now that I met Aronowitz one evening in the aughts at Amiri Baraka’s house where a tiny group had turned out for a poetry reading by an ex-member of The Last Poets. The odd few included the current mayor of Newark, who chowed down with me in the kitchen as someone’s (Amina’s?) beans moved his dad to get rhapsodic. Wish I’d taken Baraka’s words down. His offhand ode to beans was as tasty as Seven Guitars‘ melody of greens. Thankfully, though, I recall what happened after the reading when the Last Poet let on he’d become a Muslim. Baraka’s response was to pour the Courvoisier and ask: “Is God a tease? How come this is so mellow if He doesn’t want us to have a taste?”
On to Aronowitz’s (conflicted) case for natural highs…
It’s my experience that to smoke marijuana for the first time is to explore the limits of hilarity only to find that there are no limits. You laugh so hard that you get addicted to it. You want to laugh that hard again, so you smoke marijuana again. And again and again and again and again. I’m told that few ever really succeed in laughing that hard a second time, but I did. The two biggest laughs of my life were the first time I smoked marijuana and the first time the Beatles smoked it.
The latter occasion was at the Hotel Delmonico on Manhattan’s Park Avenue on August 28, 1964. The Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein, had just finished eating their room service dinner when Bob Dylan and I pulled up in Bob’s blue Ford station wagon driven by Victor Maymudes, Dylan’s tall, slender-and wiry Sephardic-looking roadie. Victor carried the stash in his pocket as we made our way through the mob of teenyboppers on the sidewalk and into the hotel.
Bob Dylan: On A Couch & Fifty Cents A Day
Peter McKenzie’s parents welcomed Bob Dylan into their life and New York City apartment where he slept on the couch for a couple seasons in 1961. Mac and Eve McKenzie helped introduce Dylan to Greenwich Village’s politics of culture. Peter was in high school (on his way to Harvard) when Dylan came to stay for a stretch. He hero-worshipped Dylan who acted big brotherly toward him.
Bob Dylan: the Man; the Moment; the Italian Meats Sandwich[1]
Chickie Pomerantz was lit.
Opening night of the 1963 Brandeis Folk Festival had been lame. All those green bookbags and black turtlenecks. All those skanks and pears. Then this skinny guy with this scratchy voice came on singing about some farmer starving to death in South Dakota. Chickie and Kevin Cahill and Frannie St. Exupery and a couple other jocks tossed beer cans at the stage.[2] “You shoulda seen the assholes run,” he said, coming back to the dorm.
I went the second night.
A Feminist Dylanist Remembers
It always seemed to me — and I could be wrong but this is my memory — that in the 1960s, boys sat around, stoned or not, like rabbis doing talmudic interpretations of Dylan lyrics. Not girls. My intro to him came in 1966 in 10th grade “AP” (advanced placement) English, where this kind of hidden-bohemian woman teacher (this was a time in my totally and still de jure segregated public HS when the boys where still being kicked out for a day and sent home, if they wore sandals to school with no socks, or if their sideburns got too long, or their hair past their ears, and girls still had to do the spaghetti-strap bend-over test for the old lady assistant principal, to see if their breasts were even slightly visible and if so also remove to home and change). So this bohemian teacher, Ann Sherill, played us The Times They are A’Changing. I remember it was a hot day and the big fan was on, and we girls were stuck on the backs of our thighs (we had to wear dresses then) to our desk seats. I remember being absolutely electrified, probably not just by the title song but also by Hattie Carroll.
An icy night of snow and blues
It was bitterly cold on a late December night, and snow was starting to blow when I went out to listen to Slim Harpo at Steve Paul’s Scene, a club on West 46th Street and 8th Avenue in New York City that was one of the hippest rock and roll joints the city has ever seen. Hendrix played there in ’67, it was the first place the Doors ever played in New York, and it was a home-away-from-home for touring British acts like Traffic and Jeff Beck. Most of all, it was the premier blues venue in the city.
On this night, with the wind howling and the temperature hovering somewhere in single digits and Slim Harpo playing, I went early. He was supposed to go on at 10:00, and me, I’m thinking it’s fucking Slim Harpo and the place is going to be packed, so I arrived around 8:00. Steve sat me down right in front of the stage at this little table about the size of a dinner plate. There was a one-drink minimum, and I figured I could afford one beer. That was it. I was determined to nurse it through the entire show.
Well, I waited and waited, and I was nursing my beer and checking the door for the crowds I thought would show up any minute, but nobody did. Around 9:30, Steve opened the door and stepped outside, checking up and down the street. Snow was blowing through the open door, and finally Steve came back inside and sat down across from me at the table and introduced himself. Other than the bartender and a couple of waitresses, we were the only two people in the place.
“I guess the blizzard kept everyone at home,” Steve said. “You’re my only customer. I’m sorry, but I don’t think we’re going to have a show tonight. Let me get you another beer. I’m going to go and talk to Slim.”
He came back about five minutes later, followed by Slim and a guy who played a snare drum and a guy who played an old Fender Telecaster. Steve sat down next to me and said, “Slim told me if there’s a paying customer out there, we’re putting on a show.”
Did they ever! They played all of his hits, like “I’m a King Bee,” “Baby Scratch My Back,” “Rainin’ in My Heart,” and “I Got Love If You Want it,” plus covering half the blues canon of the time. All three of them were sitting on stools. They were in their 40s, but to me they looked like Moses coming down from the Mount. Slim wasn’t well, health-wise — he would die two years later — but he wailed on that harmonica and barked out his songs, and between songs, they chatted with Steve and me from the bandstand, which was about a foot high and two feet away. An hour or so later they were still playing when Steve said, “Let’s call it a night.”
We stood there talking while Slim and his guys packed up their instruments — no roadies needed for one electric guitar case, the smallest Fender amp you ever saw, and one snare drum case and a stand. Slim stuck his harmonicas in his pockets and we all headed out the door. Outside, more than a foot of snow had fallen. Steve said good night and tromped off into the blowing snow. Slim turned to me and asked, “You got any plans?” I said no. “Why don’t you come on along with us?” Why not?
Table Music (Charlie Rich, Bob Dylan, Vincent Neil Emerson, Townes Van Zandt, Drive-By Truckers, Fuerza Regido x Grupo Frontera, Larkin Poe, Rolling Stones, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters)
A few songs for omni-Americans hanging on in there this holiday…
RIP The Voice and the Vibe (James Earl Jones & Frankie Beverly)
Two African Americans who represented the dreams of their community made their transition this week, and I’m taking a moment to celebrate how they embody the apex, diversity, and massive creativity of blackness.
Joy And Pain x 2
Donna Allen’s cover came through to me before Maze’s original. I dug how she seems to hold something back even as she doubles-down–wailing, crying, moaning for her life. Allen’s version gets all of “Joy and Pain’s” deep bluesy amor fati. She’s performing for adults. This isn’t kid’s stuff…
“La Guerre” n’est pas finie
Pet Shop Boys have always soundtracked our times, from the AIDs era (try “King’s Cross”) to Obamatime (“More than a Dream“). Earlier this season their prophetic “Bullet for Narcissus” was tuned to a Secret Service officer on guard as Trump ranted at a rally…
Counterlife
Green Border, which is showing until Thursday in NYC, is my idea of counterprogramming to the RNC. You won’t get out of the flic without tears, but it’s not for goodies only. While the movie leaves the implication that human beings may be “cured by altruism” (per Stanley Corngold’s First review), it also implies that such cures are not matters of opinion. What’s “good for body and soul” is “to risk your well-being in caring for others.”
One Brit critic had caveats and I’ll allow Green Border might not be a work of art that will work a century from now. Director Agnieszka Holland hasn’t come up with a genius metaphor for Fortress Europa. (There’s no cinematic equivalent to the hi-tech marijuana factory run by gangsters in the Dardennes’ immigration saga, Tori and Lokita.) But right here, right now — as I flash on the charmer Nur (a Syrian boy who drowns in a Polish swamp) — Holland’s humanism without borders is undeniable.
What follows is the soulful song that soundtracks a minute of joy in Green Border. A couple Polish teenagers nod their heads with three African refugees who rap along to Youssoupha’s testament…
Ode to Joy
Originally posted here seven years ago…
The other week, deep summer, we went to see David Johansen in his persona as Buster Poindexter. For many years now, Johansen, former New York Dolls lead singer and front flounce, has in his cabaret act been one of the great American songbook curators (Jonathan Schwartz wishes), lurking in the brilliant corners of U.S. pop. (Without Johansen I’d never have heard Katie Lee’s late-1950s pop-Freudian homage, Songs of Couch and Consultation, lead song “Shrinker Man.”) At the end of this particular set at City Winery, he called to the stage his wife Mara Hennessey, who announced that she had a particular favorite she’d like David to sing, whereupon she started to intone the line, “that summer feeling, that summer feeling, that summer feeling,” and Johansen took off into the lyrics. It was so haunting! I knew that song! What was it again? When I got home I looked it up and of course: Jonathan Richman’s “That Summer Feeling.” Astonishing song.
Into the Tradition
I perked up when “Taxi Brousse,” which sounded like a kora-cized version of “Can’t Buy Me Love,” came on Spotify’s Oumou Sangaré Radio. This 1 plus 1/2 minute song was put down a few years ago by 3MA — an Afropop supergroup made up of three players of different string instruments: Ballaké Sissoko from Mali on kora, Driss El Maloumi from Morocco on oud and Rajery from Madagascar on valiha. The band takes its name from the first two letters of each member’s country of origin in French: Madagascar, Mali, and Maroc.
One song led to another…
In and OUT
Pullen’s tribute to Monk (and Powell), which comes with his own perfect swirls, is echt modern jazz, like Monk plays Ellington.
Head for the Mountains
Catch Eddie Palmieri’s smile (@ at 4:24) as his brother keeps firing…
Homie
I hadn’t seen my musician-friend for a bit, but we met up by the 125th St. pier one evening before the heat wave hit. I headed down to the same spot the next night, hopped the fence and sat closer to the river. He’d sent me a link to “Unwind” after I got home the day before. It was in my ear as I unwound with the breeze and a corona, though the song is more exacting than relaxing…
Hope you feel the precise ache in the singing/playing, and don’t pass over the lovely wordless outro. Like the singer, you may feel like you’re waiting on someone, but I wonder if it’ll turn out better than this song’s ender…B.D.
A Poem on John Koerner’s Passing
xxx
“Rap is Clear, So Write Clear” (Redux)
Iranian rapper Toomaj Salehi was sentenced to death on April 24 for lyrics that excoriated the Islamic Republic’s rulers and enablers. His uncle tweeted a message for the Iranian diaspora that should be heard by every believer in free speech…
The uncle of imprisoned Iranian rapper #ToomajSalehi has a message for Iran. pic.twitter.com/fi2XUrnAaO
— Chelsea Hart چلسی هارت (@chelseahartisme) April 26, 2024
xxx
The following First dispatch was originally posted in January, 2023…
Toomaj Salehi has been imprisoned and tortured by Iran’s regime scum who hate how his lucid rap exposes “the filth behind the clouds.” You can find out more about his music and the international campaign on his behalf here. Toomaj should be free as a bird, free as the Iranian woman he images, sans hijab, “…liberty’s mane blowing in the wind.”
Afropean Fraternity
https://youtu.be/pXx7bT282dk?si=xdzhI2A0ZEAPKtHF
Headie One and Koba LaD are brothers under the Channel. Their rap song, “Link In the Ends,” establishes a connection between French Banlieue and English council estate.