I gave the following talk and reading from my brother Tom’s prose at his Memorial after we screened Thanksgiving—our sister Joel’s movie (unsynched but fully in the flow) of a DeMott family celebration ca. 1970. I jumped off from the rapturous sequence in the movie where Jo used a great Motown track “Truly Yours” to soundtrack images of little sister Megan dancing and Tom listening/looking like a rock dream—saved (barely) from male model fineness by his broken nose…
Music
Dreams Fade Into the Everblue: Lori McKenna’s Bygone Humanism
“Here is what I know” is the first line of “A Mother Never Rests,” the opening track off country singer Lori McKenna’s latest LP. “Even when she’s sleeping she’s still dreaming about you”–her voice is weary yet sure of wisdoms both received and earned. McKenna dives into the laundry-list of domestic chores and anxieties expected of a mother in red-state America.
Isiah Thomas, Smokey Robinson & Jesse Jackson at Aretha Franklin’s Homegoing Service
Sisters who sang at Aretha’s funeral are getting much respect, per the # of YouTube views, but there were men there who were worthy too…
Isiah Thomas’s moving eulogy comprehended Aretha’s messages to the grassroots (and to Detroit, capital of the 20th Century) even as he took in her universality.
Aretha (& “the blacks”)
Aretha’s “Tree of Life” (see below) has a new poignancy since her death. No need for me to break down her funky, Pan-African, pantheist promesse de bonne heure, just press play (please).
Aretha’s Tree of Life (“Sharing the sunshine for the last time…”)
“There ain’t gonna be no last time!!…”
Home Truths: David Ritz’s Essential Aretha Biography
Originally published in 2015…
Bitter Geezer (Tale of Tubb)
Proto-punk Richard Meltzer was ready for country before most rock critics of his generation. This 1973 review of an Ernest Tubb album was more than a hoot.
Merrill Garbus & The Wokeness Unto Death
For being an “outside artist,” Merrill Garbus of Tune-Yards has never lacked in critical applause. The lo-fi Afrobeat of her 2009 debut Birdbrains immediately established her as a singular voice in the freak-folk music world. The gigantic production and stylistic leap of Whokill, her 2011 sophomore effort, landed her on many year-end best-of lists. More recently she was commissioned to create the theme music for the New Yorker Radio Hour. As a fan, I’ve worried with each new release she’d morph her authentic weirdness into easily digestible hipster marketability. But she’s resisted that impulse. Unlike the manufactured weirdness of a Lady Gaga, her introspection and restlessness have kept her music from becoming self-help dance muzak. Her defiant neuroticism resists any easy boxing-in.
“Sidewalks, Fences and Walls”
Solomon Burke cut “Sidewalks, Fences and Walls” long after he sang songs that made him “King of Rock and Soul” in the 60s. There’s a good cover by Bob Dylan (on a bootleg) which steered your editor to the original. Other Firsters had already heard and loved it. More from one of them below…
“What man isn’t a Solomon to some missing-Mary in his life?
I can’t fucking believe she married Billy. Billy!”
Eminen and Trump: Fratricide in the White Imagination
The figure of Slim Shady haunts the moldering corridors of the Midwest. In every town you’ll meet them–tall, pale young men in hoodies on the margins of the mainstream economy. They roam the busted landscape of blue-collar America, enacting private sagas of self-destruction in search of some lost myth of unsullied masculinity.
Hey Ho, Let’s Go
One critic said that British punks sang anger, Americans, pain. But punk was more than emotion, more than the sense of humor the Ramones brought to the mix, more than the adrenaline rush of a live show, more than the aura of sex around everything.
Eminent Domain
It was a raw winter night in Greenwich Village in 1978. I was tending bar at Bradley’s, a now long gone, legendary saloon on University Place that featured the best piano jazz on the planet. The supremely gifted veteran, Jimmy Rowles, was at the keyboard, Sam Jones was playing bass, and all was right with the world. I loved my job because I loved the music.
Canciones Para Puerto Rico
Chatter about “Almost Like Praying”–the song Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote and recorded to benefit hurricane relief efforts in Puerto Rico–reminded your editor of this performance by the brothers Palmieri and salsero Ismael Quintana…
Grown-Up Hip Hop
Jay-Z & his mother Gloria Carter rap about her coming out in “Smile”–an exemplary track on 4:44.