What’s above is the entry on Jerry Lee Lewis from Greil Marcus’s annotated discography to the collection of essays he edited: Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island.
Music
“Folk Music” (Amplified)
Greil Marcus’s new book on Bob Dylan opens with a Dylan quote—“I can see myself in others.”—from a loose press conference with journalists in Rome in 2001. I recall listening to audio of that same rap session on YouTube and noticing another line that’s not at odds with the one that jumped out at Marcus. Dylan responded to a convoluted question with his own humorous query: “Am I an idiot?” he asked. This wasn’t a mid-60s prickly (Neuwirthy?) tease. While Dylan was playing to the crowd and encouraging them to laugh with him, he wasn’t coming hard at his questioner (who seemed to take his soft goof well). What struck me was that Dylan, even though he was only acting as if he was clueless, seemed entirely alive to how it might feel to be hopelessly at sea mentally. After all, he’s known what it was to be an unworldly Midwesterner at a Village party with an older generation of haute-bohos. (“I was hungry and it was your world.”) And that, in turn, puts him a thousand thought-miles away from heads who act like they’ve been tenured since they were ten.
The Girl Who Fell to Earth
One day, I’ll come out of my shell, I’m sure,” says Aldous Harding. She does not seem to be speaking to anyone in particular; her words seem directed mostly at herself. A few minutes later, she repeats those exact words as if she hasn’t said them before. Aldous Harding—real name Hannah Harding; her stage name is presumably taken from the author of Brave New World and even now produces a brief mental ripple of confusion every time I say it out loud—is from New Zealand, and this is the second time I have seen her. My dear friend Andi is with me; this is the third time she’s seen her. Harding is just that sort of singer, the kind you wish you could see every year.
Get it. Get it. Get it and…Gone. (Jerry Lee Lewis R.I.P)
Click Read More to See a Bigger Picture.
Burnt in the U.S.A.: Arlo McKinley “This Mess We’re In”
Almost all popular culture is dedicated to Denial. Nothing new there.
Arlo in Memphis (& Brooklyn)
Arlo McKinley (AKA Timothy Dairl Carr) made his great new CD, This Mess We’re In, in Memphis and you sense the lights up the river even as he gives it to you straight about the state of the white working class in Ohiopioid. The sound of This Mess is Memphis’s. Perfect weaves of country/soul/gospel with an inner power. Organ-and-fiddle melting into one another with the beat behind it as Arlo rolls on, strong as death, sweet as love.
“You’ve Got to Have Freedom” (Pharoah Sanders, Rest in Power)
Per Eric Lott: “A favorite instance of what Baraka describes in ‘The Screamers’ (1967), a ‘social tract of love,’ ‘the honked note that would be his personal evaluation of the world,’ watching us while he fixed his sky, no head and all head, no predicate, ‘the repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed in its insistence past music . . . hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair,’ spurting ‘out of the diphthong culture, and reinforced the black cults of emotion’ — ‘no compromise, no dreary sophistication, only the elegance of something that is too ugly to be described, and is diluted only at the agent’s peril.'”
May Pharoah wail again soon with John Hicks and Idris M. on the night shift!! B.D.
Banjo (Remix)
Claude McKay’s Banjo is a true life novel about a band of black and tan outsiders living by the sea in mid-20s Marseille.
Poem for July 3rd (& Larkin Poe’s Covers)
hearing larkin poe ‘wade’ before seeing
being with them before knowing them
we was blind as willie johnson
………….(a hundred years ago)
………….(in the arms of Our Mother)
hearing what Studs T wanted me to hear
“ALL her uncles is musicians”
so how could we be [“culturally deprived”]
in the cotton patch…she won’t even say the words
P.A. Way Gone
A good friend lost his brother this week. They grew up in P.A. If only they could still go local together and hear Kurt Vile’s latest. While the video may be too twee even if my buddy wasn’t grieving hard right now, I’m hoping he might find some peace in Vile’s piece someday (soonish)…
A Black Woman Remembers Elvis
News of the new biopic about Elvis, which focuses attention on the nexus of black cultural creativity that fed his talent, moved Marsha Music to suggest your editor repost her remembrance…
Elvis was my first love. I was 5 years old in the 1950s, and I sat in the sun on the living room floor with my legs criss-crossed, album cover on my lap, in a pool of light from the leaded-glass window near the fireplace. Motes of dust bounced and drifted in the beam of sun, fairy-like. The sun shined on Elvis Presley too, on that cover; guitar strapped across his stripe-shirted shoulder, as he gazed upward into a faraway sun, or maybe into the light of Heaven itself.
The Ship of Theseus: Dylan 2022
“You can not prescribe to a symbol what it may be used to express. All that a symbol can express it may express.”
– Ludwig Wittgenstein to Bertrand Russell. 1919.
Keystone Melodies
Long ago and far away in San Francisco, that lovely city by the bay, I maneuvered myself into the food concession at the Keystone Korner, a jazz club in North Beach. It was 1975, and I had many strange and wondrous adventures there.
Trouble in Mind
Monk (68) and Monk in Europe (1968) are streaming at Pioneers Works film site until June 28th. (Click on titles to watch now.)
To Make You Feel His Love
A demo by by the late Eddie Hinton.
Better than Heaven
You could start with “Like Someone in Love” or “You Must Believe in Spring” but I’m pretty sure “Peace Piece” is Bill Evans’ summit. Forget me though. Just listen up now—those thrill-trills in the piano’s higher register might make you forget how hard it is to die.
Ghost in the Celine
Easter cover for Tommy and Charlie and Johnny, with “cat paw riddim.” (H/T Tiana Reid.)
Prince at the P.O.
So, I’m standing twenty-people deep in line at the post office—shout out to Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.”—with heavy-ass boxes that I’ve been meaning to mail since December.