A version of this previously unpublished non-fiction article was incorporated into the author’s novel, “The Death of Frank Sinatra” (1996).
Music
Side by Side
Bobby Keys and Jim Price put some horns on the end of “Honky Tonk Women” mixed down so low you can only hear them in the very last second and half on the fade. Chuck Berry had a saxophone just for the very end of “Roll Over Beethoven.” We loved that idea of another instrument coming in just for the last second. Keith Richards, Life
Roots Moves II
Part 2 of an essay that begins here.
It is absolutely false to imagine that there is some providential mechanism by which what is best in any given period is transmitted to the memory of posterity. By the very nature of things, it is false greatness which is transmitted. There is, indeed, a providential mechanism, but it only works in such a way as to mix a little genuine greatness with a lot of spurious greatness; leaving us to pick out which is which. Without it we should be lost.—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”
Roots Moves
“Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose… We owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.”—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”
Simone Weil once lived in a building around the corner from Tiemann Place in West Harlem where we held our 29th annual “Anti-Gentrification Street Fair” in October.
Happy Birthday, Mister Frank
The date was November 19, 1995. The place was the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, California. It was there that a two-hour television special was being taped—yes, taped—celebrating the oncoming eightieth birthday, December 15, to be exact, of the preeminent singer of the twentieth century: Francis Albert Sinatra. Broadcast on December 17 by ABC, the program Frank Sinatra: 80 Years My Way featured a hodgepodge of acts from Salt-n-Pepa to Vic Damone to Steve & Eydie to Bruce Springsteen performing songs Ol’ Blue Eyes had made famous. Seated at an elevated table facing stage right, surrounded by family, a tuxedoed Sinatra appeared to take in the parade of performers with a respectful, ruminative restraint. He dutifully applauded each rendition—even joined the star-laden audience in a couple of standing ovations for Patti Labelle and Ray Charles—but maintained a sense of emotional remove. Age and frail health be damned, the Chairman of the Board was holding court in public and he was determined to maintain his legendary cool.
Then Bob Dylan appeared onstage.
Fathers and Sons
First is reposting this piece in honor of the great jazz pianist Don Pullen who died 20 years ago today.
James Brown (Stay on the Scene)
Get On Up, the James Brown bio-pic, has moved your editor to re-up on First‘s 2007 tribute to JB, which includes contributions from Amiri Baraka, Chuck D., Anne Danielsen, John Leland, W.T. Lhamon Jr. Michael Lydon, Charles O’Brien, Robert Farris Thompson, Richard Torres, Casey Wasserman, & Mel Watkins.
IMMA LET YOU FINISH
“Shake It Off,” director Mark Romanek’s recent clip for Taylor Swift, depicts bad new trends in beautiful old ways. It works the same way as the best ‘80s-‘90s music videos—using semiotics to express up-to-the-minute changes in pop culture, producing the sort of imagery commentators and marketers now glibly call “iconic.”
Bobby Blue Bland
I owe Bobby Bland a real debt of gratitude.
Not just for the time he always graciously gave me (Bobby was the definition of “gracious”), particularly when I was working on the profile of him that appeared in Lost Highway.
Not just for the music he gave the world, which, like Sam Cooke’s, was an extraordinary blend of silky-smooth and deliberately rough. In Bobby’s case—and I guess he was like Sam in this, too, and, obviously, an entire generation of gospel-based soul singers—he took his inspiration from Perry Como, Tony Bennett, and Nat “King” Cole on the pop side and from the gospel shouters on the “rough” side. Particularly Archie Brownlee of the Five Blind Boys and, of course, the Reverend C.L. Frankin, Aretha’s father, from whom he always said he got his patented squall. (Listen to Rev. Franklin’s “The Eagle Stirreth Her Nest” if you don’t believe me.)
But I said that I owed him something more—and I do.
Bobby “Blue” Bland gave me my vocation.
Love Song for Lou Reed
Dead, you’re the critics’ darling. When I was a teen, you were mine. Each morning I lifted The Velvet Underground and Nico from its sleeve, watched it spin, waited for Sunday Morning’s opening notes to warm me like a junk rush.
Big Man & Sisters Under the Skin
“I won’t change my mind…Keep your hand on my thigh tonight!” That’s a line from the chorus of the echt Springsteen track of the past decade. But it’s not by Bruce.
Bringing It All Back Home
Robert Duncan, one of the key figures of the San Francisco poetry renaissance of the 1950s in which the Beat Generation surfaced, once said that he didn’t believe there was any such thing as a poet. What happened, Duncan said, was that every so often this or that man or woman became, in the process of composing a particular work, the poet. And when the work was done, so was the designation. In other words, the poet was a process one entered, not a title — not a noun but a verb. If one were to give Duncan’s idea historical application, one might say that whoever became the poet might come to stand for the particular time in which the designation fell to him or her. In the case of Allen Ginsberg, for instance, who first read “Howl” at the Gallery Six in San Francisco in the mid-fifties, the period would date from that reading into the early sixties, when he published “Kaddish,” a work of comparable power. Then, according to my personal chronology, a sort of hand-off took place, and the laurel wreath was passed to Bob Dylan, with Ginsberg’s personal blessing.
R.E.S.P.E.C.T.: “Low Country Blues” & “The Artist”
In 1965, three friends and I walked into a Chicago bar dressed in jeans and work shirts, sporting the hairdos of the time — the kind you had to pat into place because no comb can make its way through. We were going to a legendary blues bar at 47th and Indiana, in a solidly African-American section of the city; it was late and the street was mostly shuttered for the night — maybe a check-cashing place and a chicken shack were open, besides our destination, Theresa’s, the dimly-lit club where Junior Wells and Buddy Guy were appearing.
B-Side
What follows is not a review of the new collection of the late Ellen Willis’s rock criticism,Out of the Vinyl Deeps[1], but a sort of answer record remixed from old and new episodes in my own pop life. Hope it reads half as well as, say, Mouse and the Traps’ “Public Execution” sounded after “Like A Rolling Stone.” (Or did that Dylan imitation follow “Positively 4th Street”? Ellen—Mother of all Dylan critics—would’ve known!)
Far From Fantasy
Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is good enough to deserve a better title. I wish he’d just called it Twisted: meaning strange or perverted, but also, in vernacular usage, confused or misunderstood (as in “don’t get it twisted”). Isolating this double meaning illuminates the double consciousness at work throughout the album, which dropped late last year into a media landscape so hostile to personal expression that misunderstanding was to be expected as well as feared.
Lost Soul
Your editor got to Drive-By Truckers’ last album Go Go Boots late but first time through I fell hard for “Everybody Needs Love.” It took me South to a forever young place. And the journey’s just started because “Everybody Needs Love” is a cover of a song by the great lost soul singer/songwriter/guitar player Eddie Hinton. I recalled that name from credits on the back of beloved Percy Sledge records from the 60s, but I really didn’t have a clue. Patterson Hood schooled me in Go Go Boots’ liner notes. Thanks to him for allowing First to reprint his Boots‘ tribute to Eddie Hinton here. (Now if he’ll just dub me a copy of Hinton’s Letters From Mississippi.)