Book reviews
Jean R. Freedman
University of Illinois Press
978-0-252-04075-7
[by Ken Hunt, London] Peggy Seeger wrote an autobiographical self-portrait in song overnight between Sheffield and London in 1973. In the booklet notes to her CD, The Folkways Years 1955-1982, she clarified: “It was intended to answer those people who come up during the interval or after a concert, those who interview you on radio or want to do write-ups. It is an answer to the question about why a middle-class female from a comfortable background sings about working-class people and revolution.” In one discussion of ours – interviews have evolved into day-long or weekend-long conversations on occasion -, she expanded, “I get sick of it. God, you get sick of it! It’s like they have to hear you say what they have read already. You hear it on the radio in interviews. The interviewer asks a question and then you [did] ‘so and so and so’. The person says, ‘Oh yes, I did that.’ There’s got to be a better way of interviewing people against past events.”
Peggy Seeger: A life of music, love, and politics should help fend off inane lines of question. Jean Freedman “first met Peggy Seeger on an autumn evening in London in 1979” and hers is the first full-length biography of one of the most important, influential and eloquent musicians in folk and politically engaged song to emerge from the American and British folk scenes. A giant of the folk revival, in 1957 Seeger acted both as muse for one of the most popular and successful songs of recent times, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. By 1970 she was composing (the chords and major to minor flips merit the term composition) as well as writing one of the most truly enduring feminist anthems in Gonna Be An Engineer in 1970 (“And typing is a skill that every girl is sure to need / To while away the extra time until the time to breed / And then they had the nerve to ask, what would I like to be? / I says, ‘I’m gonna be an engineer!‘”).
Positioned somewhere between authorized and approved biography, it is all the richer and informative for Seeger’s generous yet hands-off assistance. She granted, for example, access to cached private diaries that illuminate what was running through her head as events unfurled. Without implying that this was a kiss-and-tell tale, she surrendered intimate details like losing her virginity, flings, her sometimes fraught relationship with Ewan MacColl (with whom she had three children but did not marry until 1977), and the circumstances of forming her partnership with Irene Pyper-Scott, with whom she celebrated a civil partnership in 2006. She also allowed freedom to quote from revealing contemporaneous correspondence, notably with her father.
Peggy Seeger is a core member of what became North America’s First Family of Folk Music. The first generation were left-leaning liberals – the musicologist, composer and educationalist Charles Seeger (1886-1979) and his second wife, the musicologist and modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953), nicknamed Dio. Both found their place and blossomed during the New Deal era. The next included Peggy, her older brother Mike, and her still older brother from her father’s first marriage, Pete Seeger. Of Pete, Freedman quotes Peggy as saying, “Other people correct me: ‘Oh, your half-brother’ . . . yeah, but he’s my brother.”
Margaret Seeger, straightaway called Peggy, was born in June 1935, the first daughter following four sons. She was the second child of Charles’s second marriage. (Charles’s oldest son by first wife, Constance, the poet Alan, author of I Have a Rendezvous with Death (about which I knew nothing), had died fighting at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.) Surprisingly, Peggy’s birthplace – Manhattan – goes unmentioned. Her father emerges as, at times, cringeworthily insensitive. She was named “after Margaret Taylor, a rich and beautiful woman he had loved in his youth”. Peggy quips, “As far as I know, my mother thought it was a hoot.” (In early 1955 this Margaret became Charles Seeger’s third wife after Dio’s death.)
The Seegers were a part of a nexus of influential individuals active on the East Coast folk music scene. Her mother taught the “bookish” Peggy to sight-read and transcribe music, skills that equipped her for later roles including arranging and writing parts for accompanists. During the 1940s into the 1950s the home was abuzz with notables including Hanns Eisler, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Alan Lomax and the older brother Pete. Even the housekeeper, Elizabeth ‘Libba’ Cotten, was a culture-changing guitarist, the composer of Freight Train, the chart-topping, copyright-contested skiffle mainstay which Peggy also recorded.
Peggy flourished in this milieu, but the political climate soured and a cold front descended. In late 1955 Peggy sailed for Europe where she enrolled at the University of Leiden. The turn of the year found her in a troupe led by a Flemish Catholic priest, Josef Ernst Vloeberghs, in ruin-strewn West Berlin. Alan Lomax, in self-imposed exile in London from McCarthyite blacklisting, made contact and on March 27, 1956 she arrived at Waterloo Station.
Her greatest life adventure was about to begin. Lomax’s plans included auditioning her for an “English Weavers, junior style” – the Weavers, among whose number was Pete Seeger, were the era’s folk music phenomenon. She passed. Already recruited for the Ramblers – a group on the cusp between skiffle and folk – was the playwright-musician known as Ewan MacColl (1915-1989), born James Henry Miller, then appearing as “the Street Singer in Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera at London’s Strand Theatre”.
Their attraction was mutual, and a “clandestine relationship” ensued. He was still married, with a small son Hamish, to his second wife Jean Newlove (the first was Joan Littlewood, the Stockwell-born theatre director, whose Theatre Workshop revolutionized British theatre). Newlove remains a shadowy figure and could have been fleshed out slightly more to the narrative’s advantage. The encounter with McColl proved the most pivotal and shaping meeting of Peggy’s life. Yet in December ;1956 she crossed the Atlantic again. MacColl kept in touch transatlantic telephone calls were prohibitively expensive but when he phoned on one occasion, she asked for “a short, new love song for an upcoming gig”. MacColl had composed Dirty Old Town to cover a scene change (MacColl Journeyman – An Autobiography 1990, revised 2009, 268) for Theatre Workshop’s Landscape with Chimneys (1951). (Dirty Old Town is missed out under songs in the index.) MacColl had the knack.
He wrote The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face for her. This song dared outrageously, for the times, to speak of physical intimacy. It was a song picked up on by the Canadian folksinger Bonnie Dobson. Talking in July 2018, she told me Gordon Lightfoot had admitted to nicking the song from her and teaching it to Harry Belafonte who passed it to Roberta Flack and into history. Many others sang it, including George Michael and Elvis Presley (who copped out, skipping the relationship’s progression to “the first time ever I lay with you” by repeating “the first time ever I kissed your mouth”), and it featured strongly in Clint Eastwood’s film Play Misty for Me (1971). The success it brought transformed their lives and gave them time to get off the treadmill and take time to create in comfort, instead of the standard folk revival approach to making a living by live appearances especially on the nationwide folk club circuit. That one song’s royalties liberated MacColl and Seeger from the grind of touring.
Although their relationship remained tempestuous and trying, their musical bonds tightened, for example, through a series of BBC Home Service radio-ballads of extraordinary vigour broadcast from 1958 through to the 1960s. While stranded on the Continent when the Home Office “refused permission” for her to enter the UK and with a passport only valid for returning to the States, Seeger discovered she was pregnant. In January 1959 she married the Scottish folksinger Alex Campbell in Paris in order to get to London to be with MacColl. It turned out, however, that there would be two new MacColls born in 19599- Neill with Peggy and Kirsty with Newlove, with whom MacColl was still involved.
Three themes – music, love and politics – flow through this book. One facet that this biography also addresses though perhaps not sufficiently, is how Seeger was perceived. The Critics folk collective, co-led by MacColl and Seeger, was composed of MacColl adherents and acolytes, MacCollites for short. They engaged in constructive analysis (and recordings of ;such sessions exist) Marxist-style a former member, Brian Pearson, clarifies that this meant, “In practice, Ewan was more equal than the rest”. It got worse, he continues: “At the time, I felt Peggy to be even more of an ultra-Orthodox MacCollite than Ewan himself. She came across at times as rather severe and dogmatic and was fiercely protective of him and the ‘party line'” The Critics imploded rancorously, with a splinter group driven to “liberating” equipment in 1972.
It has to be said, MacColl and Seeger lived in a bubble of their ;own devising you could say they were blinkered. For many, that perception only really changed with her post-MacColl recordings and concerts. The trilogy of Heading For Home (2003), Love Call Me Home (2005) and Bring Me Home (2008), all covered in fine detail, shine. After MacColl’s death, Freedman quotes an insensitive “agent who seemed unfamiliar with Peggy’s work [.] who referred to her as a “remnant of a dead duo”.” Adversity made her stronger. She wore her erudition more lightly. She wrote a new generation of songs, sometimes with her sons Neill or Calum, often drawing on her life. “Everything Changes’, the last song belonging to that trilogy, lends its name to the biography’s penultimate chapter. She sings,
“That was then
Now it’s now
Everything changes
Somehow.” It takes guts to write something seemingly so simple.
Freedman’s Peggy Seeger – A life of music, love, and politics is an even-handed and exemplary model of thorough research. Faber published Seeger’s autobiography in 2018. While writing it Peggy deadpanned drolly telling me her working title was First Time Ever – Back End of a Horse. She dumped the hind end. For far too long Seeger was perceived as the junior partner in one of the folk revival’s greatest partnerships. Now there are two major accounts of her music, loves and politics.
1. 9. 2018 |
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Scott Barretta (editor)
Scarecrow Press
ISBN 978-0-8108-8308-6
[by Ken Hunt, Berlin] This fascinating gathering of writings from Israel G. Young appeared in 2013. The elder of two sons born to Polish Jewish parents in March 1928 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, he reveals himself as a clear-sighted and sometimes curmudgeonly commentator, catalyst and chronicler of the New York folk scene. (California and Europe barely get walk-on parts.) Izzy Young gravitated to New York’s nascent folk music scene via the square dances of the left-leaning American Dance Group. He attended his first dance during the winter of 1944/45 and soon joined
the American Square Dance Group under the sway of its leader Margot Mayo. In February 1957 he obtained the lease on a property at 110 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village that not long after opened as the Folklore Center. Later it moved to 321 Sixth Avenue.
The accounts here reveal the Folklore Center as a marvellous abode of folk music and deeply flawed finances. Part store and bigger part folk drop-in centre, Bob Dylan’s (unrecorded) Talking Folklore Center (its manuscript looks like it barely survived Gettysburg) described its unique non-selling proposition: “You don’t have to buy anything/Do what everybody else does/Walk in, walk around, walk out.” Soon Izzy Young was putting on gigs there by the likes of local talents Oscar Brand, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee and the New Lost City Ramblers. Later, under the aegis of the Friends of Old Time Music, the Folklore Center put on a welter of blues, bluegrass and folk acts. (One rationed-to-one list might opt for Mississippi Fred McDowell, Bill Monroe and Clarence Ashley.). Still later he put on bubbling-under talents of the calibre of Tim Buckley, Joni Mitchell and Patti Smith. In May 1973 Young relocated to Sweden and founded the Folklore Centrum (“dedicated to Swedish folk music and dance”) in Stockholm – a subject outside this anthology’s orbit.
Scott Barretta’s selections gather together a body of little-known published materials. This category includes Young’s writings for short-life periodicals such as Caravan, the Folklore Center-Fretted Instruments Newsletter and the Philadelphia and Newport folk festivals. Naturally, his influential Frets and Frails column in Sing Out! figures prominently (Frets and Frails superseded his newsletter Folk Music Guide * USA in 1959 before petering out in 1969). Alongside this material is an assortment of hitherto unpublished writings from diaries, notebooks, interviews and sundry drum-bangings. Some content is newsy, freeze-framing points in time. Some insights and observations about Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, part-hero, part-b©te noire Alan Lomax, Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers might well blow you away. Some targets remain as pertinent today as the day he delivered them. One recurring theme is rights-grabs to do with song copyrights. Try the unpublished 1997 paper, Folk Music and Copyright, Lomax and Leadbelly for size. There are occasions when the absence of a sic or an editorial aside or intervention throws up twitches. Nevertheless, Izzy Young’s writings also nail a number of floating folk quotes that long ago lost their attributions.
A romp of a read, as the lost-for-words reviewers say when reviewing popular fiction.
PS And one he made earlier: Autobiography – The Bronx.
6. 1. 2016 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] More music for a balmy life on the fictional desert island. April’s selections come courtesy of Christy Moore with Declan Sinnott, Madeleine Peyroux, Gangubai Hangal, Janis Joplin, Santana, The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock, Chumbawamba, Sheila Smith, the Grateful Dead and The Animals. Lots of Irish thoughts and thoughts about Ireland ripple through this month’s selections.
Gortatagort – Christy Moore with Declan Sinnott
John Spillane wrote Gortatagort (The Farm) about the place in Bantry, Co. Cork where his mother came from. Christy More imparts a real sense of presence to this song, though it took me seeing him perform it in concert for the song’s fuller magic to be uncorked.
The 6 April 2012 issue of The Irish Times carried Derek Scally’s article ‘Bucolic bliss drives Germany’s Heimat sensation’ and it prompted me to write a letter to the editor that I knew would never be run. Heimat is a concept that Irish people should understand better than many European peoples. It is not synonymous with Vaterland (Fatherland) or any of that trashy totalitarian stuff for a start. As Scally stated, it means ‘homeland’ and more. More particularly, it captures a sense of a place of belonging. When Christy Moore and Declan Sinnott performed Gortatagort at London’s Royal Festival Hall on 4 April 2012, what I also heard was an evocation of Heimat Irish-style.
Spillane recalls touchingly in his blog – at http://www.myspace.com/johnspillane/blog/431058506 – how Moore visited the site and soaked up its vibe.
From Listen (Columbia (Ireland) 88697 480002, 2009)
For more information about Christy Moore and John Spillane visit http://www.christymoore.com/ and http://www.johnspillane.com/ and http://www.johnspillane.com/gortatagort-the-farm
Wild Card In The Hole – Madeleine Peyroux
This is Madeleine Peyroux’ setting of a Woody Guthrie lyric dated to around 1949. It is an especial favourite among the album’s dozen tracks. Peyroux sings. Tony Scherr (guitar), Darren Beckett (drums) and Rob Wasserman (bass) provide the accompaniment. It is a tale about survival, most particularly what people do to survive in a world where it doesn’t matter one iota “who wins office/In that Big house on the hill.”
Talking to me in March 2012 in this outtake from an upcoming article in R2, Madeleine Peyroux said, “A lot of people have to really work hard to understand that something is a political message. I sing jazz songs, torch songs. You think it’s just a love song but it can also be a political statement ’cause anything you say about who you are is part of the community you live in. If you’re a woman saying you are in a relationship that is abusive and you sing about that in the blues, well, now people are aware that that’s a political issue. But back then ‘we’ didn’t think about it. Well, I think Woody and Pete Seeger knew probably more than anybody. Movements that have music and politics at the same time are when people get together.”
From the Woody Guthrie and Rob Wasserman ‘collaboration’ Note of Hope (429 Records FTN17844, 2011)
Raga Adana – Gangubai Hangal
This rendition in the ‘Masterworks from the NCPA Archives’ series – India’s National Centre Performing Arts – from April 1974 illustrates over and over again what a consummate vocalist she was. Here she is accompanied by Sultan Khan on sarangi and Shesh Giri Hangal on tabla. Krishna Hangal adds the second vocal line. This performance gets off to a ropey start in audio terms but the performance far outweighs any initial hesitations about the recording.
You settle into, and luxuriate in sheer vocal distinctiveness. From Ragas Ahir Bhairav, Adana & Yaman (Sony Music 88697 95834-2, 2011)
Get It While You Can – Janis Joplin
The US soul singer and songwriter Howard Tate first recorded this Jerry Ragovoy song in 1966. His recording was picked up on by Janis Joplin (1943-1970) for Pearl, rush-released in its original 10-track form after her death. The song could be construed as an unveiled hymn to hedonism. In her hands – and it is one of the best performances on what turned out to be her finest and final album – she reveals the song’s inner heart as being far more fragile. Over the years, talking to people who knew her and the Full Tilt Boogie Band has prompted how much a tragedy her death was the band. I steer towards the more romantic fragility of her vulnerability of this interpretation. Whooping it up may have been her public face but whooping it up she isn’t here.
There is yet another edition of Pearl but I cannot be arsed to keep chasing the whims of the marketeers. From Pearl (Columbia Legacy COL 515134.2, 2005)
Waves Within – Santana
The album’s opening track Eternal Caravan of Reincarnation begins with cheeping crickets and saxophone musings and functions like a trek across the Thar Desert. Its drums fade and in comes Waves Within, one of the finest instrumental pieces in the early Santana canon. Caravanserai was a marked departure from the Santana of Oye Como Va and Black Magic Woman/Gypsy Queen and on its release it apparently caused some consternation. The group split after this album. One faction, represented by keyboardist Gregg Rolie (who co-composed Waves Within with guitarist Douglas Rauch) and guitarist Neal Schon, formed Journey. Lead guitarist Carlos Santana and drummer Michael Shrieve on the other hand took the music into jazzier realms.
The music on Caravanserai was quite unlike the Santana that I had listened to perform in an inhospitable concrete shell, sorry, concert hall in Hamburg in 1971. It had a depth of intensity that was heartening. From Caravanserai (Columbia Legacy 511128 2, 2003)
The Brutal Here And Now (Part I) – The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock
Barney McKenna’s death on 5 April 2012 at the age 72 must have awakened many thoughts in many people’s minds. The last of the original Dubliners, his group ranks as an omnipresent force in Irish roots music and their influence ripples outwards through Planxty, the Pogues and Mozaic to The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock – and many points between – in the grand tradition of non-harmless noise.
The Spook of the Thirteenth Lock is a four-piece band. On The Brutal Here and Now, the album from which this track comes, Enda Bates plays bass, sings, adds electronics, acoustic and electric guitars, banjo and accordion. Allen Blighe, their lyricist, sings and plays banjo, electric guitar and esraj. Donnchadh Hoey plays guitars and piano, toots tin whistle and sings. Brian O’Higgins drums and plays percussion.
The Brutal Here And Now (Part I) captures the fieriness of the Dubliners and recontextualises that fieriness. Hear it if you get the chance. From The Brutal Here and Now (Transduction TDR012, 2012)
http://thirteenthlock.net/
Add Me – Chumbawamba
A tale about the sort of friend that you really don’t want on social media. “Would you like to add me as a friend? Add me. Add me.” The album that this cut comes from is one of their most thought-provoking works. Jo Freya makes a guest appearance on saxophone.
“I don’t like people but I think I could pretend…” Great warped line. From The Boy Bands Have Won (No Masters NMCD28, 2008)
Dear Father, Pray Build Me A Boat – Sheila Smith
Sheila Smith was seven when Peter Kennedy recorded her in Laughton, not far from Lewes in the southern English county of Sussex in November 1952. Her singing is infused with Gypsy spirit and marvellously nuanced. She has a confidence and surefootedness to her delivery that is astounding in someone so young.
Shirley Collins, the compiler of this volume, observes, “This is a real gem, surely one of the most delightful field recordings of all time.” At her talk at the launch of the four new Voice of the People volumes at the EFDSS’s Cecil Sharp House on 15 March 2012, she played Sheila Smith’s Dear Father, Pray Build Me A Boat and it was as if there were ripples running through the room. From the various artists’ I’m A Romany Rai (Topic Records TSCD672D, 2012)
Morning Dew – Grateful Dead
Bonnie Dobson’s song featured as a core repertoire item over the Dead’s lifetime (1965-1995). There are any number of interpretations that have emerged in the form of archival recordings over the years. This version appeals to me strongly. The band is bang on the money. It’s one of those recordings where you can pick an element to concentrate on.
Thinking about this song of dark times in another period of dark times, I sat in the Prince’s Head on Richmond Green in Surrey on St. Patrick’s Day – 17 March 2012 – and, writing, listened intently to Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann drumming in the service of the song. My focus was occasionally marred by particularly choice passages of Phil Lesh’s electric bass. From Live At The Cow Palace – New Year’s Eve 1976 (Rhino R2 74816, 2007)
We’ve Gotta Get Out Of This Place – The Animals
Disaffection, frustration and welling rage bottled into a far from ordinary pop song from the 1960s, but then the Animals were far from ordinary.
Listening again to this track was brought upon by hearing that there was a new edition – “Updated And Expanded” in banner headlines of the trade – of Sean Egan’s biography of the group Animal Tracks: The Story of The Animals, Newcastle’s Rising Sons.
A whole series of thoughts about the brooding atmosphere of this track – and It’s My Life in particular – flowed into my head. This is one of the finest working-class songs hymning migration. The leave-taking in this case tells a grittier story than most. From The Complete Animals (EMI CDS 79 46132, 1990)
The images of Christy Moore are © Santosh Sidhu/Swing 51 Archives. The copyright of all other images lies with the respective photographers, companies and image-makers.
23. 4. 2012 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Now, it’s only personal opinion. Still, hear out my theory. Every movement has its share of before-and-after benchmarks or epiphanies. They divide people who experienced them first-hand from those who got the experience passed down. On 1 June 1980, a date that shall forever remain hallowed in the annals of what we laughingly call England’s Folk Revival, Topic Records released a twelve-inch, nine-track masterwork known as 12TS411 in the trade and as Penguin Eggs to the punters that snaffled it up. It is no exaggeration to say that it took the folk scene by storm, much as Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth did the following year. The auteur of this cinematic masterpiece – certainly the songs he sang ran movies in my skull – was a 33-year-old guitarist and folksong interpreter called Nic Jones.
A since-defunct weekly music magazine called Melody Maker voted Penguin Eggs its 1980 Folk Album of the Year. In February 1982 Jones sustained near-fatal injuries in a car crash. Anyone who saw him play before the accident – and I did – is forever divided from those who never saw him perform in his heyday. No elitism intended: that is the simple nature of things. There are many people I would have loved to have witnessed perform first-hand and/or interviewed to capture the stories they could tell. That’s life.
I never saw The Halliard – Nic Jones, Dave Moran and Nigel Paterson – perform live. They preceded his time as a solo artist. The songs that this group worked up however, travelled ahead of them. They “began to have a life of their own,” as Dave Moran recalls in this songbook’s main historical essay, snappily entitled A Short Historie of The Halliard. At one gig, he recalls, though printed words, like email emoticons, lack the ability to communicate miffed properly, the residents devoted their first set to Halliard material. The Halliard recovered to deliver a different set, only to have the club organiser tell them to “include the songs just sung by our residents in your second set after the break as they are club favourites.” Robbed of your own repertoire! The club favourites and beyond that you get to here include British Man of War, Billy Don’t You Cry For Me, Stow Brow, Calico Printer’s Clerk and Going For A Soldier, Jenny.
Judging by this book and the music currently available on CD, I wish I had had the chance to see The Halliard between 1964 and 1968 when, as Nigel Paterson explains they were touring “almost nonstop…as full-time professionals.”
Nic Jones, Dave Moran & Nigel Paterson – Broadside Songs of the Halliard Mollie Music MMSB-1 (2005, reissued without CD 2006)
For more information visit, http://www.nicjones.net/ and http://nigelpatersonmusic.com/
26. 9. 2011 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] “The painting is from a 1984 album I did for Line Records in Germany called “Lose It Tonight”. A song I performed – the first and only time I ever lip-synched a TV show – on Germany’s #1 Pop music program of the 80’s called “MusicLaden”. It was great I met Pat Boone and showed him the way out.” – George Frayne’s lateral thoughts emanating from the Lose It Tonight cover.
Long before he grew pianistic wings with Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen, George Frayne had what looked like a promising life ahead of him as a painter including, like Alton Kelley, a sideline in car art, sculptor and, heavens forbloodyfend (tmesis rears not only its ugly head but shows off its potty mouth), even a Teaching Fellow in Fine Art at the University of Michigan (1966-68). How he might have stuck and survived academe does not bear thinking about. Or, similarly, what he might have got stuck into, and welded onto academe. Musically speaking, things kicked off properly in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1969 but artistically for George Frayne it began in Michigan.
“I had never even seen a real mountain before my trip west, let alone a city built on one, San Francisco. The Berkeley Hills were larger than the biggest mound on Long Island.” – George Frayne.
The overwhelming majority of people would have first encountered George Frayne during his first flush of musical success during his time with his band, Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen. Their debut album had cover artwork by his brother, Chris Frayne and the band’s newsletters and suchlike used his brother’s art as an extension, manifestation or representation of the band’s early image. Chris Frayne’s cover art of the geezer with the gnashers for the group’s debut album Lost In The Ozone (1971) now looks like a portent of the rabbit-botherin’ baddie in Wallace & Gromit’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005).
CC & His LPA played strange songs in standard country formats about life seen from the gutter angle of the great American country highway. They sang tales about getting wasted (Daddy’s Drinking Up Our Christmas and (Down To) Seeds And Stems Again), the repercussions and consequences of driving on the ‘wrong side’ of the road (Hot Rod Lincoln and Mama Hated Diesels), the unadorned pleasures of music and life (Beat Me Daddy Eight To The Bar) and little white pills and driving (Looking at the World Through a Windshield). Rippling through their repertoire was a lavish portion of deadpan humour.
Though the text doesn’t really bring it out properly, this book contains a fair few of his brother’s images. It is an omission in the text that George Frayne doesn’t write more about his brother or illuminate the way they and their joint interests cross-fertilised each other’s imaginations. Examples from Art Music & Life make it plain that Chris Frayne’s Jet Truck (1972) – the cover for the Airmen’s second LP in 1973 Cold Steel, Hot Licks And Truckers’ Favorites (the one with It Should’ve Been Me, Kevin Lookin’ at the World Through a Windshield and ‘Blackie’ Farrell’s Mama Hated Diesels on it) – is not so stylistically distant from brother George’s T Bird (1973).
By the time the Good Commander and I first met – in November 1979 in London – he had revealed himself as a man well able to wield a paint brush. He had painted album covers and inevitably we talked about his painterly skills. I seem to remember him telling me about projecting images on canvasses or walls and reconfiguring them with paint, blocking colour and losing detail or tweaking the projected image. By the time of the second album (with Chris Frayne-painted rig straight out of Lowell George’s song Willin’), it was already manifest that there was a family thing about machinery going on. Cars, planes and mechanical gubbins were in the family psyche. George, it turns out, had a really big thing about Hollywood, machinery and cars. (Art Music & Life includes an appendix of his cars and their fates.)
The next time we met he talked about a film for a song, an animated film for the next band on, the Commander Cody Band’s song 2 Triple Cheese, Side Order of Fries. This was 1980, before MTV and promotional videos as standard. It sounded fascinating. George talked about an era of juke boxes in which the music had a musical short, too. Only in America could such foolish rumours circulate, comrade citizen. It turned out that he had not been speaking with a forked tongue or bullshittin’ me, merelt shootin’ the breeze. 2 Triple Cheese, Side Order of Fries wasa reality.
Yet, it’s really only with Art Music & Life that Frayne’s wide-eyed wonderment and grasp of visual Americana have properly come across. Images of Miss Reingold Beer 1951 – later the cover artwork of Drunks Dopers and Everyday Losers (2009) -, a Greyhound bus, Ming the Merciless, World War Two flying aces and aircrew, Jerry Garcia, Bill Graham, Louis Armstrong, Columbo (the TV detective series with Peter Falk in the starring role), Tony Bennett and Miles Davis bear witness to his artistic, graphic and musical fixations.
“The sculpture – Horsepower II – executed during the winter of 2007, is my most successful piece of art to date. It was painted on a white plastic life size male horse for the ‘Horses Saratoga Style’ event put on by the Saratoga Arts Council every five years.” – Frayne
Mostly his sculptures in this book don’t thrill me to the marrow. That’s my problem. First, I am not one bit mechanistic. (Chrome Totem #2 (1966) “was sold to a Pratt and Whitney exec”.) Second, sculpture is there to be touched or stroked and, if off-bounds, to be felt physically and walked around as much as security guards and electric fencing permit. There is one major exception to the sculpture business, not to the rules of vigilance. His witty painted sculptures Horsepower I (2002), with its bones, cogs and flywheels, and still more outré Horsepower II (2007) are straight out of the Cowparade ve zlaté praze/Cowparade in Golden Prague. Those painted cattle adorned Prague in 2004 and some are still there. (One is still on a spit if you look down from the right place from Prague Castle.) These painted beasts have become a separate artistic tradition in Europe raising funds for good causes. In a similar vein there have been painted bears in Berlin and decorated elephants in Antwerp and London.
This book is the other side of George Frayne’s life and art, though. What should pique your interest here are the tales, many tall, that accompany the images. Plenty of the anecdotes are is music-related. But don’t let that stop you. And, if this review is rather discursive, well, it’s in the spirit of the Great Man and this book.
All quotes are courtesy of George Frayne and Q Book Press.
George Frayne AKA Commander Cody – Art Music & Life Q Book Press, ISBN 978-0-9842650-0-8 (2010)
www.qualibreinc.com
Further reading to look out for: Geoffrey Stokes – Starmaking Machinery – Inside The Business of Rock and Roll First Vintage, ISBN 0-394-72432-1 (1977, out of print)
14. 10. 2010 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The German protest movement, in which song was a mightily important element, first truly broached my consciousness in 1971. Formative experiences included attending anti-nuclear protests of the ring-around-the-plant kind and sitting at trestle tables with beer, bread and Bockwurst and with old (well, they looked old to me) comrades singing Kampflieder (‘songs of struggle’) and spouting Kampfsprüche (‘jingles’) at rallies that seemed to last for days. But all that was politics and protesting often in almost a carnival atmosphere, despite the constant presence of the camera-wallahs busily snapping away. Next steps, log car registration plates, match face to identity card and so on – quite enough to take you out of the paradoxical.
More important, if shallower (in a consumerist sense), was listening to Wolf Biermann’s messages from the East, like Chausseestrasse 131 and internalising writings such as his play Der Dra-Dra (only later did I discover Hedy West’s role in popularising his work in Sing Out!) and listening to the West German man-of-letters Franz-Josef Degenhardt laying out fresh tables. Still more important in their role of providing a balanced, daily musical diet was discussing and discussing those songs, winkling out their flesh from their shells and, sober or stoned, analysing what came out. Only Dylan came close. That was what whetted my appetite for German-language song with political messages. And to be honest that is what continues to feed my imagination with any song form. That weighing up of musical and linguistic grammars, lyrical twists and wordplays, open and concealed meaning, the past meeting the present, will remain at the heart of my musical experience until my dying day.
Things plodded along until the Wall fell in 1989. That was when I went on a crash course, albeit a privileged one, courtesy of my job, because my job granted me access to East German musicians in a way that hitherto only talking in Plattdütsch had. In English it is called ‘Low German’ and is generally downgraded to a dialect of Hochdeutsch or ‘High German’. No, it is a cognate language with many dialects of its own. It is also an intergrade language, linguistically speaking. Westwards it goes into Dutch. Head northwards, as in my case from Schleswig-Holstein, it goes into Danish. And in its very otherness, it was and is the unifying language of the two Germanys’ seacoasts. The first time I met Jo Meyer of JAMS and we slipped from High into Low German during a BBC radio recording we knew we had other ways to communicate.
Until recently, most commissioning editors considering an English-language account of German-language protest song would have winced, whinged and baulked at the very suggestion of a book by the name of Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s stretching from 1848 revolutionary songs via punks and Liedermacher (‘song-makers’) to Berlin Love Parade. It is, however, long overdue. Robin Denselow’s When The Music’s Over – The Story of Political Pop (1989), a milestone contribution to the understanding of political or protest song within mainstream music, had its eye on other prizes. Denselow sidesteps Europe in the main. Yet German protest song is universality in a microcosm, as perhaps only Francophone or English-language song have ever been in the context of the wider European scheme of things. Reading this book at times becomes frustrating. The story cries out for parallels between Biermann’s Ausbürgerung – his stripping of citizenship -and de facto excommunication from East Germany and, say, the migration of the Czechoslovakian songwriter Karel Kryl (and not because of our website’s Czechness). Including Kryl would have set up a bigger screen on which to project the ‘transnationality’ of this book’s story.
The various essays in Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s regale the reader with illuminating accounts. They include chapters about early revolutionary song (in David Robb’s ‘The Reception of Vormärz and 1848 Revolutionary Song in West Germany and the GDR’ and ‘Mühsam, Brecht, Eisler, and the Twentieth Century Revolutionary Heritage’), West Germany’s Folk and Liedermacher scene (in Eckard Holler’s ‘The Folk and Liedermacher Scene in the Federal Republic in the 1970s and 1980s’ and Robb’s ‘Political Song in the GDR: The Cat-and-Mouse Game with Censorship and Institutions’), performers such as Konstantin Wecker (in Annette Blühdorn’s chapter ‘Konstantin Wecker: Political Songs between Anarchy and Humanity’ – a performer I only ‘got’ many decades later) and Biermann (‘Wolf Biermann: Die Heimat ist weit’) and more recent drives (Robb’s concluding ‘The Demise of Political Song and a New Discourse of Techno in the Berlin Republic’).
Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s is simply peerless. So, why do I have misgivings about it? Well, I want more people to know more about what came out of the two Germanys. At its most basic, it excludes. If you are unsure of your German or speak none, blocks of text are positioned like dragon’s teeth. At one point in Eckhard Holler’s Burg Waldeck festival chapter, it goes from “the artists were all asked to answer four questions about the politically engaged song and their own artistic commitment.” into repeating those questions in German without translation or footnote. So, sentences or phrases in English run into German and material that moves the narrative marvellously forwards (in German) become exclusion zones (in English). In the case of lyrics, a synopsis or a contextual commentary of, say, Wenzel’s faux-surreal masterpiece Das Berlin-Lied would have assisted immeasurably. Similarly, expressions such as Vormärz (something to do with an early or premature March?), Jugendbewegung (which youth movement?) and Liedertheater (song theatre?) are neither translated on their first occurrence, nor translated in the index, nor in the non-existent glossary.
The inclusion of a chapter laying out earlier, historical antecedents pre-Vormärz (roughly a period leading from 1815 up till 1848), and 1848 would have improved this excellent work enormously. Creativity in times of censorship – protest literature, if you will – is an ever-recurring and enormously fascinating area. Coded material, that is, material that allows the author or performer to speak or sing plainly without, as it were, moving their lips was not a new invention. The Hapsburg-era, Austrian playwright-actor and songwriter Johann Nestroy was a past master of saying one thing and delivering and detonating another. From personal discussions with Hans-Eckhardt Wenzel, the figure on the book’s cover, I know he was both aware of Nestroy and being part of a continuum. Robb clearly knows Wenzel’s work and is insightful about it, yet misses out on that little extra insight that might have explained so much.
Though Holler writes in his excellent chapter entitled ‘The Burg Waldeck Festivals, 1964-1969’ concerning one of West Germany’s most important song gatherings, there were moves “geared toward a critical re-evaluation of the recent German past” (in its simplicity as true as it is profound), peculiarly, overall, race relations get little coverage, get short shrift. This is not to typecast a people. The two Germanys engaged in decades of self-examination. (Famously, unlike Austria.) In the German Democratic Republic (GDR), as elsewhere, racism and racialism fouled the socialist nest. (It happened in most places.) Most signally in the GDR, it occurred when it came to interracial relationships – typically involving a black African or Arab student – resulting in a child. It was commonplace for GDR citizenship to be refused. In the West, in the FRG (Federal Republic of Germany) German-Turkish race relations were a massive issue.
Surely, rap is a form of protest song and rapper Erci E. has brilliantly captured stereotyping in his Weil ich ‘n Türke bin (‘Because I’m a Turk..’). Similarly, one of Christof Stählin’s most insightful songs, Deutschland nicht mehr (the comma is unprinted but it varies between ‘Germany no more’ and ‘Nothing more/higher than Germany’) acts as a vignette of integration. The girl in the baker’s shop may be of Turkish descent but she speaks Swabian and Stählin’s song overturns cliché. The pussyfooting around race – now not then – is a profound weakness. The whole multicultural debate and dimension barely gets a look in this book, a major omission.
For all that, Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s is indisputably the best account on the subject in English. It a reminder of what the sages and soothsayers say about receiving what you hoped for. It is a wonderful book but only if you are bilingual in English and German. But I will say this: while I couldn’t have written this book I wish I could have fed into its writing in an editorial role.
David Robb (editor) – Protest Song in East and West Germany since the 1960s Camden House, ISBN 13: 978-1-57113-281-9 and ISBN 10: 978-1-57113-281-3 (2007)
27. 5. 2008 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] In a hoary old quote that pops up in Patrick Humphries’ The Many Lives of Tom Waits, Waits, that lovable whey-faced geezer in black with a pork-pie hat, quips, “Marcel Marceau gets more airplay than I do!” Things may have improved marginally in the meantime – Marceau dying in 2007 will have given Waits a chance to cut in – but Waits has proved tenacious when it comes to avoiding anything so vulgar as a whiffette of becoming a popular singing star. Waits is a man of many threads. He has regaled us with many mythologies, mostly hand-woven and threadbare enough for the unwary dupe to be taken in and buy him that figurative drink out of pity.
Suckers! To call Waits a singer-songwriter would be like damning him with faint praise. Buying into that singer-songwriter job description might be likened to buying eau de cologne or Viagra on the strength of a spam message. Or similarly responding to that plaintively lonely Russian lass or that Nigerian pet-lover-in-distress. Truth is, Waits is a fabulist. Verisimilitude is his stock in trade. That applies to his music and to his secondary career as a fellow who pops up in such films as The Two Jakes, The Fisher King and Bearskin: An Urban Fairytale.
Improbably, though in a nice way, The Many Lives of Tom Waits is his first major biography of the man. The London-based writer, Patrick Humphries is an old hand too, an established music writer whose subjects include Dylan, Hitchcock, Elton John, Pink Floyd, Paul Simon and Bruce Springsteen. Amongst his string of fine books, two are seminal – as in standard works. His Nick Drake (1997) and Richard Thompson: Strange Affair (1996) are true E.M.D. works. The expression is the title of one of the American mandolinist David Grisman’s finest, early breakthrough compositions. It stands for ‘Eat My Dust’. And every writer who writes about Nick Drake and Richard Thompson – and now Tom Waits – will ever have occasion to acknowledge – or avoid acknowledging – Humphries’ groundbreaking achievements.
Waits doesn’t peddle autobiographical or confessional stories-in-song in an L.A. Confidential manner. Like Waits, The Many Lives of Tom Waits does, however, allow Humphries to don the Chandleresque cap (alliteration wins out over fedora) when telling the tale. Waits is no Joni Mitchell, Jackson Browne or James Taylor. With Waits, you don’t get, in Humphries’ turn of phrase, “the open-heart surgery of Joni Mitchell or James Taylor”. Waits sends reports, sometimes Californian Chinese whispers, back from the Old Weird America. Or the Old Weird America in Waits’ Mind. Waits delivers fables. He tells tall tales. And, though everybody lies, Waits lies splendidly. His snappy one-liners are notable for their fragrance of insect repellent. Try, “I’ve always maintained that reality is for people who can’t face drugs.” (Did he filch the quip? Much like the lobotomy preference option one, does it matter? Allow Waits a few populist tendencies too.) He also protects his privacy, keeps his wife and partner-in-song Kathleen (née Brennan) and their family pretty well hid. He knows a thing or two about mystique. And did I mention meretriciousness? Humphries has wisely not set himself the task of unpicking verity from verisimilitude. That task would be messy. Like picking out just the red ones from a jar of M&Ms or Smarties while blindfold and allowed to use only your sense of taste. See? That’s how reading about Waits tinkers with a writer chap’s keying fingers.
The best part of the deal is that his songs and, heigh ho-ho, extraordinary renditions are like nobody else’s. Try, Waits’ dark-as-a-dungeon reappraisal of the 1938 Disney ditty Heigh Ho (The Dwarfs Marching Song) on Stay Awake and regurgitated on Orphans as evidence. Sure, you get a bit of this and a bit of that in his songs. Perhaps a glancing allusion to the dimly familiar or a bookworm’s regurgitation of something from some dog-eared almanac, like Waits’ spoken-word Army Ants with its Hammer House of Horror vibe on Orphans. A bit of banter, a prehensile-eared eavesdropping here, a lifted musical phrase or breaker’s yard metal-on-metal scream there. The stone-cold fact remains: his songs and attitudes are like nobody else’s. Surely, that’s why Iva Bittová from fair Brno town picked him for her wish-list concert. http://bittova.com/img/press/0704a.jpg (To be candid, I made it plain that we wanted a pair of complimentary tickets.)
The only disappointments with The Many Lives of. are bibliographical. The endnote references for each chapter have no cross-references in the bibliography. Mind you, what get at chapter’s end is the worst form of shorthand. To give random examples, how useless are “Brian Case, Melody Maker“, “Observer Music Maker” and “Timothy White”? Despite that inordinate irritation factor if you wish to get your head around the warped wonders that are Waits’, now you have two essential books to consult.
The first is Innocent When You Dream (2005). Edited by Mac Montandon, it is a gathering of collected journalism about, and interviews with Waits from the earliest days. The best stuff in it is like being locked in a Hall of Mirrors overnight and coming out with your imagination turned around, engaged and enslaved. The second book is Patrick Humphries’ The Many Lives of Tom Waits. Eat His Dust.
Patrick Humphries, The Many Lives of Tom Waits Omnibus Press ISBN 13:978-1-84449-585-6
27. 11. 2007 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] There can be little doubt about the impact the Indian subcontinent’s music has had abroad. Indeed, the tale is too big for one book, even Peter Lavezzoli’s remarkable Dawn of Indian Music in the West – Bhairavi. He names the usual, vital suspects like Ravi Shankar, Ali Akbar Khan, John Coltrane, John McLaughlin, Trilok Gurtu, Yehudi Mehuhin, David Crosby, Roger McGuinn, George Harrison, Mickey Hart and Zakir Hussain.
Wisely, the author steers well clear of the far-from-plain tales of Raj-era India and its influences on the Western mind through music and philosophy, as illustrated by certain compositions by, say, John Foulds and Gustav Holst in Britain. In any case that part of the story is covered by Gerry Farrell’s Indian Music And The West (1997) – a book that The Dawn of Indian Music in the West complements well. Lavezzoli’s focus is on how the subcontinent’s two classical music systems affected jazz and rock in the United States after the 1950s. And how they hybridised.
Original interviews, coupled with some astute analysis, provide the foundation of Lavezzoli’s tale. To give a flavour, the drummer and percussionist Mickey Hart comments incisively, if slightly mystically for anyone unfamiliar with the maestro, “…when I listen to Ali Akbar Khan, when he disappears, and the music disappears, I’m there. When I’m not listening to the ‘great guru,’ then I know he’s done his job. No disrespect to Khansahib, but when Khansahib disappears, that’s when he’s Khansahib.”
Without reviewing what isn’t in the book – as opposed to what is – certain things must be stated. To generalise, the book concentrates on Indian – as opposed to Indo-Pakistani influences – so no Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan into Massive Attack or Fun^da^Mental. It covers Indian classical music’s energising of the Beatles and Byrds and touches on Traffic, yet its treatment of the music’s wider impact outside the USA is perfunctory. Omitting the raga rock of New Zealand’s 40 Watt Banana or the enthusiastic reception Indian musicians received in Japan is understandable, but surely excluding the impact of Indian film music – India’s greatest musical export – on the global mind is curious.
One thing that needs improvement is the patchy, less-than-diligent index. You will find Charlie Mariano, Steve Winwood and David Harrington but not Embryo (or Dissidenten), Traffic or the Kronos Quartet. It weakens the book’s usefulness. That aside, The Dawn of Indian Music in the West joins the required reading list for anybody moved by, or interested in the subject. And between it and Farrell’s Indian Music And The West the ground is well covered.
Peter Lavezzoli – The Dawn of Indian Music in the West – Bhairavi Continuum, ISBN 0-8264-1815-5
21. 10. 2007 |
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