Music

Romanticism in Ogallala

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“You don’t have to die,” Segarra sings, their timbre plaintive and urgent but knowing and confident on “Alibi” – the first track on Hurray for the Riff Raff’s sublime record The Past is Still Alive from last year – open strings ringing on an acoustic guitar over roundy left-hand piano chords. “If you don’t want to die”, the line continues, a lead guitar a little trembly, a pedal-steely organ somewhere back there too, the arrangement solidly Americana but already giving so much more. “You can take it all back / In the nick of time”: the song is giving love by giving time. Giving time by creating it. Creating it for someone. These two have a history – shared secrets, track marks, New York City, “I love you very much / And all that other stuff.”

I started thinking about Keats (after a few dozen listens) in connection to the next line – “Thawing out my heart like meat” – thinking probably, for reasons that didn’t quite make sense at first, about Keats’s “burning forehead” and “parching tongue” in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” where the “cold pastoral” of the vase cannot thaw like “all breathing human passion” can. Segarra: “Baby, help me understand.”

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Railroad Earth

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Norah Jones’ duets with Alynda Segarra on YouTube prompted this comment…

Alynda played a major role in changing my entire life for the better. I was an overworked railroader driving freight trains up and down California when I met her and her band “The Dead Man Street Orchestra” at the time. I had just brought my train into Roseville from Oakland, summer of 2005 I believe. I saw her and 5 bandmates playing their instruments under an old oak tree in a dusty field adjacent to the tracks. Once I got off the train I drove my car back to that field and introduced myself. They were a lovely bunch of folks. We ate together and drank “fancy beers” as they called them. The following morning they were aiming to hop a boxcar heading north and they invited me to ride with them.

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Hurray for the Riff Raff!!!

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I’ve lost my feeling for rock ‘n’ roll plenty of times since, say, Love You Live or The River or Combat Rock — albums by beloveds that seemed like stiffs in the moment. But rock-is-over raps have never deflated me for long. I’ve learned to trust there’s always something coming in the American night. Mathew Borushko steered me to The Past is Still Alive late last year. It’s my favorite CD from 2024. The opener, “Alibi,” got me open but it’s “Hawkmoon” that made me look up and lock in. There’s the melody as well as a signature line: “I’m becoming the kind of girl they warned me about.” Anyone can tell Alynda Segarra is tuned to what it means to do Americana when the country, which you’ve always been ambivalent about, is headed for a fall. But I had no clue about Alive‘s depths until Matthew B. read me into the songs’ back pages. (Bless him and Alynda for hinting sweet Will was the o-riginal rock and roller…

No motion has she now, no force;
…She neither hears nor sees;
…Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course,
…With rocks, and stones, and trees.)

Segarra — that Nuyorican devil in a red dress below — has mucho charm. They’re worthy of their home borough (“New York’s most heterogeneous and alive”), the Bronx. Segarra’s range seems pretty astounding (until I recall how many renaissance cats named Richie Torres roam my city). Segarra has rambled from Rican beach to NOLA and all the good aural country in and around. (They like “Heroes” too.) FWIW, the Motherland guitar at the top of the following pre-The Past is Alive Tiny Desk concert is nice as are Van-the-Man strings that kick in in the middle (where this clip starts)…

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Bob Dylan and the unfairness of genius

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Bob Dylan puts on a song like a suit of clothes. He does it when he plays concerts, sings his old hits as if for the first time, frequently confounding his back up band with his changes. Through the magic of YouTube, we can listen to him in the studio, recording “Positively 4th Street” through 12 takes, each different from the other. You’re relieved when he hits the take that’s used on the record, but changing his approach, his tone, the attitude of his singing, doesn’t reveal any more about him than changing from a cashmere sweater into a plaid lumberjack shirt.

You can hear the deliberateness of the different takes. He is, and was, a professional musician, after all. He appeared to be trying to find himself inside the songs he wrote and sang, but maybe that was a put-on, like so much else he said for public consumption. In an interview for Newsweek done in February of 1968, Dylan said, “I used to think that myself and my songs were the same thing. But I don’t believe that anymore. There’s myself and there’s my song.”

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My 115th Dream & An American Family

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WTF? Waking with an aching toe…left foot or right? The one I broke in the Bronx? Has the cold cut to the bone? Hope so. Huh? Well, IF it’s just this I.C.E. age, sleepy/creepy me will hibernate…

Then again, I might be at the mercy (all over again) of my own damn head. I’ve been getting worked over lately by a long manuscript. Upshot of a bad habit—call it “diligent indolence”? Years ago, I found I could cheat when I got stuck on an essay. Instead of hard-slogging through, if I’d been truly working—I could fade-to-bed and my brain would dream a solution to whatever was holding me back. All I had to do was trace the meander of the last dream I had after a natural wake-up. With piece-work, my mind wakes me up with the Answer after four or five hours. Lately, though, things done changed. I’ve been chasing a big bear of a book (?) and once I’m hunting, my head only lets me sleep for a couple hours and KEEPS waking me on the regular until I think I’ve taken my last shot.

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All Gone: Garth Hudson R.I.P.

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A homiletic organ part from Garth opens “Daniel and the Sacred Harp,” frames the song right away with weight, seriousness, the melody hinting at mortality with funerary allusions, surely, though Garth’s playing here takes me somewhere else, back to mass as kid, to those brief, well, I don’t have the technical terms for them, but those brief intros and outros to the segments of mass, intros and outros played on the organ, the pieces serving, I recall, as signals of transitions, this organ with just utterly massive pipes in rows that fascinated me as a kid, dozens of pipes in various sizes, many running all the way up to the high vaulted ceiling (maybe 75 feet), an entire wall of pipes behind the altar and sanctuary, so much bigger and, as I picture it now, seemingly out of proportion with the celebrant down there, to whom my brother and I were supposed to be paying attention, my own memory though being really specific now: warm and slow organ chords that somehow combined light and darkness in one, the overwhelming wall of pipes with no pattern or symmetry that I could ever discern, the organist not, I recall, ever visible from the pews, though you’d maybe catch a glimpse of her, stage left, depending on which line you were in for communion, so small-seeming, almost hiding there within the mountains of sound.

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“Bob on Bob”…

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is a brilliant collection of essays, short pieces, reminiscences, Rabelaisian lists, and so much more.[1] All devoted to (“The”) Bob Levin’s love for, and obsession with, Bob Dylan. I was struck by the book’s design. It reminded me of the early releases of Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Books. Levin’s style is a smorgasbord of pithy observations and freewheeling narrative that makes reading him a pleasure. Every page is tasty.

Levin has attended more than a dozen live performances of Dylan’s, beginning in 1963 at Brandeis University, which in Levin’s telling was close to the center of one version of high American culture—a culture that Dylan would transform. It helped that Dylan was an outlier, hailing from Minnesota and born on the less than urbane side of the tracks—“Like Ginsberg, Corso and Kerouac/ Like Louis and Jimmy and Buddy and all the rest…” He belonged among the un-jocked and un-classical—the artful strivers not the upwardly mobile conformists. Levin credits Dylan with making rock ‘n’ roll respectable to the culture’s next generation of cool rulers when he chose to go electric.

Per Levin, Dylan beats Hemingway (and every other artist of the last century) as a creator and character-shaper. It was Dylan’s shape-shifting that instantiated the counterculture’s previously unimaginable range of possible selves/worlds.

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The Pete Seeger Story

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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)…

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Start Us Up

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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.

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Let’s ‘ave a Larf (“In which I introduce the Beatles to both Bob Dylan and the evil weed…”)

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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.

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Bob Dylan: On A Couch & Fifty Cents A Day

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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.

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Bob Dylan: the Man; the Moment; the Italian Meats Sandwich[1]

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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.

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A Feminist Dylanist Remembers

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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.

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An icy night of snow and blues

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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?

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Joy And Pain x 2

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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…

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