JOHN MAYALL WAS A BIGGER DEAL THAN I FIRST THOUGHT

 

While scrolling through the headlines one morning, alternating between laughter and grunts at the day's news, I abruptly stopped. A story caught my eye, prominently displaying a flattering photo of the veteran British bluesman, John Mayall. The prominence of Mayall's photo on the news site sent a chill down my spine, prompting me to read on. The article announced the death of John Mayall, the iconic British blues figure, at the age of 90. A giant no longer walks among us.

Born on November 29, 1933, in Macclesfield, Cheshire, England, John Mayall's pioneering work in the early days of the British Blues movement during the sixties marked a historic milestone in England's pop music history. He, along with other pioneers, sparked a revolution, empowering a generation of musicians to experiment with forms and adapt musical styles such as folk, jazz, blues, and classical, integrating them into the Big Beat. Mayall established the influential band John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, which became the launching pad for a host of dynamic guitar legends like Eric Clapton, Peter Green, Mick Taylor, Harvey Mandel, and Coco Montoya.

A steadfast figure in concerts throughout the 60s and 70s, he released around 50 albums with a constantly rotating and evolving group of musicians. These players adapted to Mayall's vision, creating a blues expression that was both traditional and innovative, direct yet introspective, soothing and invigorating. Mayall may not have reached the heights of success as those who came after him, but it's widely believed that British rock would be markedly different without his early influence. Indeed, Mayall is often considered one of the most significant musical figures of that era.

Mayall's influence was profound during my youth. He, along with Butterfield and Charlie Musselwhite, inspired me to pick up the blues harmonica. Sixty years and innumerable harps later, my passion remains strong. Meeting him and other white blues revivalists from America and Britain changed the course of my life. John Mayall and his Blues Breakers were instrumental in the British blues scene, igniting the guitar hero phenomenon that continues today. Mayall shone a light on Eric Clapton, Peter Green, and Mick Taylor. Although he was a competent yet unremarkable harmonica, guitar, and keyboard player, his true genius was in his leadership. Occasionally, his bands reached a level of synergy that seemed truly groundbreaking. Mayall's ensembles broke the mold and exuded energy.

This is evident in the early Blues Breakers records, and later albums that showcased Mayall’s evolving interpretations of blues music, such as The Turning Point and USA Union. His vocal style was remarkable, reminiscent of Mose Allison and J.B. Lenoir—relaxed, high-pitched, and not merely imitating his idols. While he wasn't a virtuoso like Butterfield or Musselwhite, his harmonica playing was charmingly airy, warmly rustic, with rich chords and exquisite slurs and bends that mirrored the emotion in his voice. What he lacked in flamboyance, he compensated with texture, rhythm, brief sequences, and a powerful use of silence between phrases that captivated listeners. No modern blues harmonica player exists who hasn't been influenced by this man's technique.

Mayall was an able and earnest musician, a chilling and eerie vocalist, a punchy songwriter given to pungent social commentary, but his most demonstrable superpower was a genius as a band leader. His penchant for selecting tasty and distinct blues guitarists and other instrumentalists and allowing those players the full expression of their musical personalities kept the blues grooves fresh and crackling. As with jazz maestros he admired, such as Art Blakey and his Jazz Messengers or the ever-morphing Miles Davis, the musicians in his various groups through the decades provided Mayall with new frameworks to continually retool his unique style of presenting his music. I give Mayall full credit for putting together crackerjack bands that have, at times, made it possible for him to release first-rate albums. The albums I listen to especially are USA Union, featuring the sadly underrated Harvey Mandel on guitar, Larry Taylor on bass, and Sugarcane Harris on violin, and, of course, Turning Point, with the splendid, Paul Desmond like  sax work of Johnny Almond and Jon Mark on acoustic guitar.  

Unlike Paul Butterfield, who expanded the expressive capabilities of blues harmonica with his fluid and rapid explorations, John Mayall's approach was distinct. He favored chords over single-note runs, crafting a signature "chugga-chugga" rhythm, notably in his track "Room to Move." Influenced by a vibrant Latin beat akin to the classic "Tequila," the song vibrates with energy as Mayall locks into the groove. The song's simplicity belies the difficulty of mastering its elements, a challenge I've faced for years in attempting to perfect the harmonica parts, yet the quintessential Mayall sound remains elusive to me.

Among his works, there are several I revisit for a surge of inspiration, especially "Television Eye," which features Harvey Mandel's guitar work on the 1971 album "Back to the Roots." In this shuffling tune, Mayall sets the tone with hauntingly high notes on the harmonica, hinting at a polished texture, while Mandel's guitar provides a pulsating, well-phased accompaniment. Mayall's lyrics reflect a man's realization of his addiction to the television, unable to look away from the images in darkened rooms. Mandel's ensuing solo maximizes the space given by Mayall, showcasing why I consider him among the finest blues rock guitarists of his era.

It wasn’t always his harmonica solos or the blustery verve of his guitarists that made the man’s performances memorable. “Broken Wings”, from Mayall’s 1967 album The Blues Alone . It’s a slow and churning song in a minor key, Mayall filling the spaces with the rounded swells of what sounds like a B3 organ, applying thick, resonating chords over his resigned choked-up vocal. It’s a lament for a lost lover who now must deal with the consequences of the decision they’ve made. The keyboard fills the space with a harrowing sound as the progression descends and the volume lowers, fading into a silence as one would imagine a downcast man would lapse into after the last words have been said. I heard it originally in 1967 and its been one of doleful melodies that come to mind when old heartaches come back for a visit in the lone , late hours.  

It's somewhat tragic that we often only appreciate the full scope of an artist's work—a musician, writer, or artist with a long and evolving career—after they pass away. This is when we truly grasp the depth and breadth of their life's work. I must admit, I hadn't given much thought to Mayall in the last decade and had even been unfairly critical of him at times. However, an unexpected obituary has a way of sharpening one's memory and perspective on history. John Mayall was indeed a necessary figure, an artist who grappled with the stark realities of the blues. He was a straight-talker about the human condition who also strived to keep his music relevant to the era and culture he lived in. He embodied a paradox: a traditionalist but not a formalist, an innovator but not an avant-garde artist. With just a guitar, a harmonica, and a voice of pure sincerity, he sang the blues, delivered the news, and inspired both audiences and fellow musicians to create their own music.

I purchased his albums, acquired a harmonica, and managed to play it quite well, finding a voice that conveys my meaning when words fail me. Thus, I extend my gratitude to John Mayall for this gift, and wish him Godspeed.

(This originally appeared in the San Diego Troubadour. Used with kind permission).

 

 

THE BOYS OF SUMMER

 The Eagles: a band I loathe—a troupe of musicians with obvious talents as songwriters, instrumentalists, and vocalists—who try too hard to secure a significant place in rock and roll history. Despite their apparent charms  and conspicuous skills at being tuneful, you can't shake the burdensome feeling that they're  calculated in nearly everything they attempt. Their rock and roll feels sluggish, their ballads dragged out, more a burden than an expression of pathos. And those strained vocals, reaching for that perfect moment when the voice cracks and then swells dramatically—it’s all a bit much. As for the lyrics, especially the weak variations on the gloom and doom of Nathaniel West's downcast novel Day of the Locust found in “Hotel California,” they appear weepy, whiny, and oddly proud of their own low self-esteem. 

They were a defining band of the 70s , the last hurrah for the country-infused rock that dominated SoCal music, but even a period where narcissistic self-regard left an odious trace in too many lyric sheets, The Eagles capacity to feel sorry for themselves was so pronounced and heavy-handed that it became toxic; it made you feel bad not in an exhilarating way that an artist Elvis Costello could achieve (due, perhaps, to Costello's wisdom in making his rhyming ruing of missed chances more compact, not turning them into speeches), but instead in a way that made one want to take a mallet to the stereo that was broadcasting their songs. Not a good thing, yes?

However, there’s an exception: “Boys of Summer.” This solo effort by Don Henley—a singer I never quite warmed to due to his Rod Stewart/Bob Seger/Willie Nelson affectations—stands out. The song is genuinely good, boasting a well-crafted arrangement of guitar textures and an insistent beat. Henley’s singing here seems to draw from a deeper well of inspiration, beyond the usual manager’s playbook. The lyrics are clipped, terse, and vividly convey the sense of a man haunted by memories of lost love—an Eden he cast himself out of. And then there’s the video: one of the most effective I’ve ever seen in capturing the song’s mood. Black-and-white photography, suitably faded to evoke memories slipping away, blends with home videos superimposed over the stark reality of the present. That scene—the man brooding over his glass-top desk while a Super 8 home film flickers on the wall behind him—is nothing short of brilliant. It encapsulates the stream of regret a man feels when he reflects on the imagined perfection of a past life with the woman of his dreams. 

THE PHILOSOPHY OF CRAP

"Sewage Has It's Say", a poem by Steven Cramer, stinks to the highest reaches of irony, and it's a fine thing too.A monologue in essence, the essence of which is the voice of what we consume processed and reduced to its fouler essences in turn. This is the food we eat and the drinks we imbibe with all the cosmetics of preparation removed, after all the benefits (nutrition, energy) and debits ( obesity, high blood pressure) have been had. Insulted, railed against, invariably used as a pejorative, equated with the foulest intents and deeds a race is capable of, sewage finds it's voice, it talks back to the world that is other wise obliged to consume and make crap and crud an unavoidable consequence; there is hypocrisy here, the fetid mess proclaims, everything winds up in this repulsive stew:

Give me roots prying into the joints

of your main waste line, Charmin

thickening her web first to a nest,

then to a dam, and I'll sluice in reverse,

top the basement tub and spill

into a poem! Damn! I've sunken

to new heights! Will you take

a hint and stomach your disgust?

What does The Thinker look like

he's doing? How come Luther heard

God's thunderclap of justice via faith

whilst sitting on the privy?

Steven Cramer has an especially acute wit to imagine a dark mass taking on a voice one could imagine being intoned by a hammy Shakespearean actor intent on over-emoting the lines, a misunderstood and maligned end product talking shop with a product , Charmin, that's ostensibly dedicated to wiping it out. But wipe as much you can, the stinking sludge maintains, you will become part of this flushed proletariat, these breakdowns of food stuffs, fecal encrusted tissues, diapers, sanitary napkins, condoms, illegal drugs and syringes.

At the heart of the matter is that is we really are what we eat, echoing an otherwise stale counter culture cliché, and regardless of how we gussy up the chambers with spray-can aroma, disinfectants , no matter how much art and artifice we set around our dinner table preparations, regardless to what extreme we pervert language to raise our collective self-image and have our race be at the top of the food chain, we are in the food chain, nonetheless, inseparable, consuming vast amounts of products to keep the mortal body a going concern, producing waste in all varieties, forms.

You know...where love's pitched his mansion, so

don't shower so much. Squeaky clean's

for mice. No soap's got enough tallow

to wash out the mouth mouthing off.

What made you so ... nice? Polite's

kind of like death, isn't it? Okay, not

quite. But consider this, my sweet kin

in excretion: to flies we taste like candy.

Whether it's The Thinker or Theologians considering the feasibility of a personal God, everything resembles the process of taking a dump, a long and ponderous crap, the moment when every idea one has absorbed in passing finally passes through us, if we're lucky enough , leaving only that bit of nutritional purity that has helped us grow, come up with an idea, an invention, a poem that is truly our own. Steven Cramer's personification of an unspeakable and limitless mass of stinking waste as having a voice to raise in it's irony-citing defense is an excellent bit of wit. The literary references are less self-conscious than such citations usually are since his point is to reduce the space between humanity's greatest conceit as an elevated species and the inevitability of it's least appealing biological requirements. Everything is shit, like it or not, all is waste, the finest poems become sludge. One needs to embrace the fact, if not the cistern that contains the messenger.

All reactions:

1Barry Alfonso

My Life and My Music
By Jorma Kaukonen

There's an old joke that goes "If you can remember the Sixties, you weren't there." Those 60 and over go ha-ha, ho-ho, I get it, too many flashbacks, too many bong hits, far too many uppers to balance all those downers, and , too many long drum solos. The conceit was that there was too much experience crammed into too-few years; many of us who thrived and jived on the wide, permissive mores of the Sixties ought to still be overwhelmed, asking ourselves what happened. Who among us might recollect that glorious experiment in living? Jorma Kaukonen, founding member of and lead guitarist for the definitive 60s/San Francisco band Jefferson Airplane, remembers, and brings his recollections together in a new memoir Been So Long: My Life and Music. It's worth noting upfront that the musician, a stalwart figure who preferred to remain in the background, quiet though attentive while fellow JA members Grace Slick and Paul Kanter did the many media interviews admits early on that the book is composed of his recollections of how he remembers events transpired, but that some of what he's recounting might be vague or incomplete in the telling. He offers a disclaimer in the introduction mentioning his imperfect recollection: "...this is my story as I remember it as seen through the prism of my mind's eye. I can do no better than that." 

However reticent Kaukonen was to speak with the press at the peak of his fame with the Airplane (and later with Hot Tuna, his long-term folk and electric blues project with JA bassist Jack Casady), the author’s memory seems to serve him well in these pages. A second generation American of Finnish descent born in Washington DC in 1940, young Kaukonen had already seen much of the world, particularly Philippines and Pakistan courtesy of his father’s diplomatic corps assignments. His early years seemed a case of accidental wanderlust, his family from moving city to city, country to country, with Kaukonen easily making friends in each new home through, it seems, shared interests in music, cars (“gearheads” as they called themselves) and, to be sure, girls. While in Washington he acquired a guitar and began learning traditional folk songs, learned the advantages of keeping his guitar tuned, and made a lifelong friendship with future JA bassist Jack Casady. What Kaukonen realized was that playing music was pretty much what he wanted to do, and muses that music seemed the elixir that made brought a dimension to his life than just merely existing and putting with boring jobs and mean people. Laconically and tersely, he concludes “Music seemed to me to be the reward for being alive.”

The first half of the book is full of reminisces about his family, his two sets of grandparents from Europe in the quest for the opportunities migrations to America promised, and he speaks fondly, lovingly of his parents, aunts and uncles and shares what he recalls of their expectations of a new life in the promised land. Most tellingly, though, was Kaukonen’s seemingly slow but eventual immersion into music. We see in negotiation with his father for a guitar, his playing DC clubs with Casady, with fake IDs, when Casady was playing lead guitar and Kaukonen played rhythm. And we see his growing interest in folk music styles that would become the defining essence of what would become his electric guitar style with Jefferson Airplane. Developing into a fine finger picker and with an affinity for the simple and elegantly articulated patterns of folk-blues, Kaukonen incorporated these techniques into his eventual electric work for the Airplane, giving them a rattling guitar sound unique in an era where every other guitarists fashioned Clapton impersonations. Kaukonen’s style slid and slithered, his leads full of peculiar tunings, odd emphasis on blues bends, and a jarring vibrato that made teeth chatter and nerve endings fire up. It was a style that informed the Airplane’s best songs— “Lather”, “White Rabbit”, “Greasy Heart”—and which was a sound that was an essential part of the complex and wonderful weave that characterized this band’s best albums, from Jefferson Airplane Takes Off through Volunteers.

At a point, Jefferson Airplane were among the top bands of the era, one of the top bands in the world, originating in the counter cultural environs of San Francisco and adventuring beyond those city blocks to perform historical rock gigs such as the Monterey Pop Festival and Woodstock. It was something of a charmed life, Kaukonen was earning a a good amount of money. He was, he admits, willing to start spending it, buying homes, new cars, new equipment. The band was at the top of their game, and on a Dick Cavett, Show following the last night of the Woodstock Art and Music Festival, a myriad of performers—David Crosby, Joni Mitchell, the Airplane, Steve Stills among them—sat around a rather casual set for the program and bantered breathlessly about the monumental experience they’d all just been through. In the afterglow, at that moment, it seemed as though Ralph Gleason’s mid Sixties prediction in Rolling Stone that the Sixties Youth, spearheaded by the music, musicians, troubadours and poets of the time, would change America profoundly, enact a revolution without bloodshed or bombs. The music would set you free. Believe me, I was there, watching the Cavett show at least on my parent’s basement TV, as well as reading the newspaper and 6pm news reports on the massive concert. For a few minutes, just a few, it all seemed possible, especially when watching the beautiful and brilliant Grace Slick and the Teutonically authoritative Paul Kanter lay it out what many took to be a forecast of the American future. Kaukonen was on the set as well, in the background, sitting with his guitar. He was happy to let Slick and Kanter do the talking; as reiterates through the narrative that he was happy to play his guitar and let others be the prophets.

There is much ground Kaukonen tries to cover in Been So Long, but there is a lack of urgency on the author’s part to offer detail, specifics, characteristics or insights connected to the material progression of his story. He is an able writer that conveys a personality that’s sufficiently humble after the long, strange trip he’s been on. He has a gratitude for the gift that have been bestowed upon him and humble in the face of the hard times and deviltries he’s survived.  But there is a kind of cracker barrel philosophy in tone, a succession of incidents, occasions, fetes, celebrations and disappointments in his life, told in sketchy detail summarized with a cornball summation, a reworked cliche, a platitude passing as hindsight. He mentions family, wives, children, famous musicians in a continual flow of circumstances, but does not actually say much beyond the convenient sentiment when you expect him to give a hard-won perspective of his adventures before and after the Rock and Roll Life.Despite having a life’s story that might otherwise seem impossible to tell in a dull manner, Kaukonen seems intent on doing just that.

He does not tell tales out of school, he doesn’t reveal the quirks of his friends.  what he might consider the essence of their genius; structurally the book reads as if it were compiled from note cards and handwritten journals, arranged in order (more or less), assembled for a rapid walk- through rather a revelation of what drew an artistic temperament to this kind of life at all. Kaukonen’s reticence to write more deeply prevents a fascinating and unique tale on the face of it from being more compelling.  It’s as if he’s talking about things he would rather not disclose; the half-measured commitment shows up when he mentions his increasing reliance upon and addiction to alcohol through the book’s chapters. Using phrases from the principle writings of Alcoholics Anonymous as well and peppering his text with 12 step mottoes, it’s apparent from those in recovery where the musician got help for this alcoholism. A large part of the A.A. program is for members to find a God of their understanding, a power greater than oneself which can help them with their problem. For those who have a “God Problem”, the fellowship also refers generically to “a power greater than oneself”. A god of one’s own understanding?

Perhaps an as-told-to memoir like Keith Richard’s memoir Life would have eased more nuance and insight and crucial detail from the hesitant Kaukonen. Richards, speaking at length and on-the-record with collaborator James Fox , the Rolling Stones guitarist speaks frankly and at length about the highlights and low spots of his life in music; free to speak as he pleased to Fox’s probing questions and not having to worry about censoring himself while at the typewriter or with pen -in-hand, Life is a witty, harrowing, bristling account of one remarkable musician’s life. On the surface, Kaukonen’s tale is as full and intriguing as a rock and roll biography requires— worldly as a young man, ROTC, a lover of music and cars, a founding member of one of the most significant bands of the Sixties in the midst of a major cultural revolution, drugs, money, fame, glory, flaming out, regrouping—the outline is here, yet Kaukonen does little to flesh it out or reveal the sex, sizzle and drama under the facts and their note-card descriptions. Richard’s work with a collaborator allowed his mouth to run as long as it needed to tell the best story he had, his own, the final pay off being an engrossing read blessed with Richard’s hard-won and refreshingly off hand wisdom. The Jefferson Airplane guitarist is not so garrulous, is reflectively taciturn and terse, in fact. One needs to respect his right to tell his story as he sees appropriate; the shame is that what is likely a great story doesn’t so much get told as it gets mentioned in passing. Mentioned in passing.Been So Long remains an fascinating read and is an interesting addition of first hand accounts of the psychedelic revolution in the 60s from a key player. The irony here is that Kaukonen does indeed remember the decade—he just doesn’t see the need to get into the weeds , dig in the dirt and relate something fuller, an account of a life fully lived.

MAN OF WEALTH AND TASTE

 A  recent piece in the Washington Post has writer Jason Schwartzman puzzling out the reason why The Rolling Stones have seemingly stopped using the "Who killed the Kennedys" line from Sympathy for the Devil  in their most recent live concerts. A lifelong Stones fan, hearing a song that he's memorized each note, grunt and quasi-lurid lyric absent that reputed "payoff" line  was too much and set the author off on a mini investigation, as such , to find out the why of  the line's elimination. My guess is that the line has worn out its shock value and is, at best, not suitable in an historical moment where Americans seem poised to choose between democracy and totalitarianism in the upcoming Presidential election. Being men of wealth and taste and properly British to the DNA, it didn't seem a proper thing to announce given the current climate . 

It was heavily rumored that the Stones, stricken by unusual levels of concern and moral determination, had  dropped 'Sympathy" from their set list after the 1969 fiasco at Altamont where the Hells Angels murdered Meredith Hunter. It became part of the general mythology of the band, a musical force that wrote a song so cursed with malevolent spirit that they simply had to leave it alone. This was a wide spread belief, but it turns out after all this time to not true, an urban legend, maybe a rumor turned lose by the Stones themselves to distance themselves from the evil the song might have inspired. Mick Jagger did say, to paraphrase, that something to the effect that weird things happen when they play the song. But they never dropped the song from their live performances because, I suppose, commerce is king. After initially loving the song when it first came out, I quickly tired of it. A song created for shock value and maximum impact loses power and relevance with repeated listening. I think it's one of their weakest songs from their richest period. Even when I loved the song back when, I thought the "who killed the Kennedy's " line and the answer "After all , it was you and me" was nothing short of a cop out, another example of Jagger ducking behind theatrical ambivalence . 

Laying the blame on "you and me" for the Kennedy assassinations was a chief device . Mailer in Rolling Stone didn't buy the resolution either and called the song , essentially, a case of all build up with no pay off. Jagger evidently tried to sell the audience on the idea that he might be a Satanist but wanted some plausible deniability. On the matter of songwriters dealing with the assassinations of saints and political heroes, nothing has surpassed Phil Och's masterpiece "The Crucifixion

A QUICK TAKE ON EVE BABITZ AND A NOTE ON POETRY HATRED

 

SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY:The World, The Flesh and L.A.
by Eve Babitz

Any reader who has finished the amazing set of novels, essays, and journalism left to us by the late and truly great Joan Didion who have need to read another smart woman writer blessed with quick wit, a fast and telling eye for detail, and who can use what they put across as the frailties of their personality as a brilliant means to get a handle on the cultural chaos that surrounds them in the SoCal sunlight, I would recommend...the late and truly great Eve Babitz.

Active as a writer in the 70s and 80s, Babitz was a feature writer for Rolling Stone, Village Voice, Vogue and Esquire, with a good portion of her journalism and essay writing covering Los Angeles in its most chaotic , boundary pushing years. Slow Days, Fast Company is a collection of magazine pieces, reissued a few years ago by NYRB Books , the terrain being California, the place where it seemed everyone had come from everyone else to make a last stand to be something bigger than normal before resigning themselves to their fate.

These are wonderful pieces , with Batitz maintaining a beautifully modulated tone in her first person narration of non fiction events: she is skeptical while being sympathetic, bracingly honest but hardly heartless, full of wit but seldom cruel. What comes across through the scattered subjects here is how well she presents her lack of experience or her presumptions about locations and relationships she's about to enter and credibly reveal how much she'd learn. Her piece on the city Bakersfield is a revelation of serene sympathy for a people and the community they live in, and a stand-out article is a recollection of the heroine death epidemic that seemed to be everywhere in the bad old days; Babitz recollects on her relationship with Janis Joplin , who, Babitz writes, seemed to have everything after much struggle as a woman and an artist, but resorting to heroin to fill a void her material success couldn't heal. More moving is the memory of an actress friend named Terry , a delicate creature who flitted about the edges of acting success in Hollywood, who couldn't refrain from a drug that was killing her by the noticeable inch. I recommend this to anyone who yearns for more brilliant writing about the middle part of the 20th century. With Didion, Wolf, Mailer, Babitz, I think, is essential reading for the curious.

_____

THE HATRED OF POETRY by Ben Lerner

A lucid and at times even lyric essay, poet Ben Lerner addresses the love/hate relationship everyone else besides poets themselves have with what's been gratingly called "the highest art". Taking his cue from Plato, who distrusted poetry because it presented worlds that are false and meant to seduce impressionable minds that need a hard understanding of how reality operates, Lerner quickly sketches that distrust of what poets have to say as things that are meaningless, garbled, wishy-washy, utterly unmasculine and prone to "feminine" emotionalism and yet....he also conveys the idea that great portions of a distrustful readership cannot leave the form alone, who keep returning to it to for solace , assurance, spiritual connection of a sort that they can't achieve from the worship of money, sex, and success. Lerner doesn't have any answers I detect, and his examples are at times wholly anecdotal. This essay, in fact comes off in the end as a bit of a wallow, an attempt at ironic distance against a despairing that poets can do nothing except deem to confirm the worst sentiments of a perpetually discontented audience. But in all, an enjoyable examination of the problem , if ultimately fatalistic.

POETS WHO DON'T DISCOVER THE WORLD BEYOND THEMSELVES

 

Interesting things afoot in discussions about the precious craft of writing poetry, an endeavor fraught with personal assessments of what-poetry-must-be . It’s an intense crossfire of what seems like irreconcilable views for some and suffice to say that nearly any side you might take on an issue of trying to “express the inexpressible in terms of the unforgettable”, your bound to offend someone,  be called a fool, dismissed as a philistine, labeled a reactionary kook. It’s a minefield. But lately it’s been intriguing that partisans of different schools of thought about the Highest Art have agreed on one thing in particular, a general feeling of being fed up with poets drowning their poems with first person pronouns. “I, me, mine, my”, an excess of author presence, the feeling of someone talking at you , not with you. No names of offenders or the critics involved, but in a general way I’d like to offer my perhaps fence sitting take on this general complaint.  

It's a matter of "having an ear", a musical ear.
I prefer the ‘I’ of the poem to be a narrator engaged with a world fully outside their senses. It’s composing, no less than composing music. I accept the first-person pronouns as legitimate starting points or anchors, but what satisfies is if the poet concentrates on the perception of things in the world around them and does not use those perceptions for trivial finger exercises in autobiography.. The biggest sin against the art of poetry is the rise of ‘Poetry-About-Poetry’ and, worse, ‘Poems About Being a Poet.’ This is a symptom of someone who has nothing interesting to say.  

I would agree in principle that a contemporary poet is most effective when the language is pared down to the right words for the right image. Prose is the big picture and poetry x-ray, some would have it. But to have poems be hard, solid things, literally objects on par with paintings or sculpture, which was the over all mission of the Imagists movement, is at best a fool's errand. Poetry seems to me the most subjective of the writing arts, one that has inspired unlimited numbers of "schools", manifestos, rules, and regulations and demands that have tried to remake the idea of all poetic expression . Poets are individuals , though, and given a hyper awareness of themselves in the world with minds that work too hard to make connections of people, places, things, ideas, philosophies , morality that wouldn't normally be connected, the need for a writer to access their feelings, their sense of how the world appears and the qualities particular things seem to have --comparing one thing to another and the result being an unexpected third meaning, a new perception--seems to me inevitable.  

Both Steve Kowit and Paul Dresman, my two mentors in my early attempts to write honest poems, insisted that what makes for an effective and resilient poem is craft and having an ear for the right phrase and the right number of words for that phrase, an "ear" as Paul called it. And Steve in particular insisted that half the art of writing poems is in the rewriting. Even if one didn't like Steve Kowit's work, he worked on each poem relentlessly until there wasn't a false note in the piece he was about to publish and / or read.

"Younger than Yesterday" by the Byrds .

 

Released in 1967, the fourth Byrds album Younger than Yesterday saw the band saw the band having to commit itself to release a record after the recent loss of their principle and prolific songwriter and lead singer Gene Clark. To be sure , Clark's departure is said to have been caused by a money dispute ; he received more royalties than other band members because of his songwriting contributions. Admirably, Roger (née Jim) McGuinn. Chris Hillman and David Crosby took up the loss and contributed high caliber material to fill in the void left by Clark, the result being Younger than Yesterday, which I would argue is their best and most important record and certainly, one of the best and most important studio albums by an American rock band in the Sixties. Clark's absence forced the other members to draw on their own musical passions and, taking their cue boldly from what the Beatles were doing with their experiments, handily expanded their sound far beyond the jangling-folk rock that initially launched them . The harmonies remain without peer, and we saw the very early integration of jazz, Indian raga, country and western , psychedelia and electronics into their musical weave. Smart, disciplined production by Gary Usher keeps this record form becoming a swamp of overcooked pretensions--he was the man who had the job of saying "that's enough". "So You Want to Be a Rock and Roll Star", "Everybody's Been Burned", “Renaissance Fair”, ""Time Between"-- the songs are first-rate and the confidence these fellows confront all the alien influence and make part of their sound and legacy is outstanding. It sounds fresh, alive, 53 years after its release. The only downside on this disc is the last track on the last side (from the original release) , "Mind Garden"", an unnavigable mind-blown miasma from David Crosby . It was the day, I suppose, when drugs were exciting, most of us working day jobs after school to have cash to buy records from major corporations believed a Revolution was pending, waiting in the winds , and that many musicians and producers, always marketers, thought they needed a song about altered consciousness to appeal to the gullible teen and the witless rock critic. I assume Crosby was sincere in his attempt to get the experience of having a blown mind in song form, but its a mess. I even thought that in 1967, when I was still in junior high.

THE LAST OF THE MC5 IS GONE

Grande Ballroom photo by Charlie Auringer

John Sinclair, a Motor City hippie activist, founder of the awkwardly named White Panther Party and manager of Detroit band or two in the mid to late 60s, wrote in the liner notes of Kick Out the Jams, the MC5's debut album on Elektra, that the goal of the band 's high-energy rock was drive us out into the streets and drive people "out of their separate shells and into each other's arms." Summarizing his notes for the band and the disc, he ended with what should have become their ultimate slogan, "STAY ALIVE WITH THE MC5". Stay alive we Detroit teens did, infused with jazz, rhythm and blues and the rawboned wail of guitars and hard hammering drums, and here we are today, guided by politics, a memory of raging youth, an understanding that being an adult is more than getting your way when you want it, blessed or cursed with the knowledge that there are more days behind us than ahead of us. And now the last surviving member of the embattled, legendary and indispensable MC5 , drummer Dennis Thompson, has passed on. There is much I can say about the MC5 specifically and in Thompson's drum work in particular, as I was (I think) lucky, blessed , privileged to have seen the band a half dozen times in Detroit teen venues, dances and , of course, at the Grande, before I moved to California in 1969 as the part of the white flight trying to out run the smoke, broken glass and anger that lit up a previous summer's nightscape. In short order, the MC5 , the Stooges and New York's Velvet Underground invented what we understand as both punk and credibly street savvy art rock (not “progressive”, thank you). The MC5 were a “whole thing”, as Sinclair said in his notes, and the indeed they were, a loud phenomenon, a disrupting Event that made rock and roll a dangerous and challenging enterprise again after the West Coast bands and the frippery from the Brits threatened to make the music a tame and predictable tea party, a safe space of sorts. Dennis Thompson managed the impossible, it seems, pushing an ensemble where all the musicians seemed to start and stop in different places, full of feedback and guitar squalling, attacking an audience with the accelerating, weighted inevitability of an avalanche. He was a definitive if under acclaimed rock and roll drummer, a more minimalist Keith Moon if only because Thompson had the soul band emphasis on keeping the throb, the rhythm, the vibe , persistent and insistent, pushing the MC5 into deeper and further out atonal hysterics while keeping it focused on the prize at hand. Dennis Thompson was part of a whole thing. rip

Sublime Joe Henderson Tribute from the Lori Bell Quartet

 Recorda Me: Remembering Joe Henderson -- Lori Bell Quartet

It’s more a case of slipping into a comfy, loose-fitting garment than it is studying Lori Bell’s latest release, Recorda Me: Rememb ering Joe Henderson. Kicking off with the late jazz saxophone great’s composition ‘Isotope,’” Bell nimbly states the spry signature theme, and one finds oneself unexpectedly wholly immersed in a delightful exchange between the flutist and pianist Josh Nelson. She and the keyboardist weave a delicate and swinging set of variations on it. Nelson’s touch on the keys is light, deft, and swinging, surely over the subdued but percolating tempo provided by bassist David Robaire and drummer Dan Schnelle. Bell is, as she has always been in her distinguished effort, a flutist with unlimited resources who brings her nuanced lines to the fabric that the others have created for her on the opening track. Her playing soars, bringing a different assortment of tonal color to her speedy bop-informed lines and the lyrical blues coloration she often provides in her slower passages.

The album continues in this pleasurable vein, a sagacious offering of deceptively easy grooves and meters. The Lori Bell Quartet has an odd combination in that the allure in this album’s worth of interpretation of Joe Henderson’s compositions lies in the kind of classical precision, yet full of the intricate twists and shifting chord voices that elevate the improvisational acumen of all the players. It’s apparent halfway through the disc that this does not come across as a routine “tribute” to a departed jazz giant as well as projects that—in spite of good intentions—too often seem lifeless or at least absent the grace and luxuriant finesse of whomever the tribute is geared toward.

Bell avoids stifling perfectionism that mars such efforts and lets Joe Henderson’s compositions breathe in a way; the ensemble allows itself to be playful with the music in front of them, undulating with a steady yet continually evolving succession of rhythmic invention. Henderson’s saxophone playing was rich and expressive, versatile and harmonically complex. He had at his disposal an armada of voices that would be brackish and groove, smooth and lyrical, excitingly precise as his compositions required. Deeply rooted in the blues, Henderson’s songwriting used Latin and Afro references, elements creating an insistent and flexible rhythmic basis that made his inventive use of unexpected chord progressions more provocative. His music was one of dynamic but unassuming brilliance.

Recorda Me: Remembering Joe Henderson is stellar work, with the collective readings of Henderson’s “Inner Urge,” “A Shade of Jade,” and the tour de force workout on the title track, with its ascending and descending themes and shifting melody contrasts. It is a wondrous effort toward a breathtaking whole: Bell negotiates Henderson’s galloping changes with quicksilver improvisations over Nelson’s sympathetic chordings and counter melodies. His solo outing here in turn is a keen master class in uncluttered elegance. A shout out as well for the very fine work by drummer Schnelle and bassist Robaire, a rhythm section pursuing a dialogue of their own as meters swerve and sway and swing. Recorda Me does exactly what Bell and her superlative quartet intended, reintroducing listeners to a resourceful and exciting musician and composer. This music moves fast on the uptake, is light on its feet, and is memorable and compelling, rendered with a fervent wholeheartedness by a superlative ensemble.    

(originally prublished in the San Diego Troubadour).

The failure of "Nowhere Man"

There continues to this  day, since it's release as a single in 1965, a debate, sometimes hot and other times merely a simmer, as to how successful the Beatles the "Nowhere Man" was in its day and how effectively its travelled through the decades since our first hearing. Not well say some and famously so say others. I’d agree that Nowhere Man is a failure at saying something poetic and relevant. The lyrics are banal and obvious in the straw man sort of it’s making fun of, and the moral of the story (“making all your nowhere plans for nobody…”) is insipid. This is the one time I remember that the Beatles were following a trend instead of setting one.Dylan creates an entire world of surreal and distorted characters that greet the Thin Man as he arrives , suitcase in hand, in a terrain that seems more as if he’s entering the first ring of Hell where he is confronted by every selfish choice he ever made. Dylan wanted to stop writing “finger pointing songs” (as he called his protest work) and explore the possibilities of what he could do with his word slinging. 

He accomplished much, as we all know, and it got him a Nobel Prize.I believe songs should be discussed as a whole as well, but what makes some reviewers and critics more dependable**,** intriguing and provocative is to write in earnest about what it is they regard as most germane within a particular song or larger piece of music. Criticism**,** no matter how one cares to address or define it or create proper protocols, is a subjective matter, and the reviewers who’ve I’ve kept reading over many years are the ones who can make compelling and reasoned arguments to make their case. You don’t have to be convinced, but it helps if one listens to and understands the argument being made. In this, I think the intent of Lennon writing Nowhere Man was to deliver a message ala Dylan, Phil Ochs and other folkies and folk-rockers about the superficiality of contemporary life, straw manning the squares of the Establishment with terms and phrases that we would now call “virtue signaling”. Even at age 14, when this song had come out, I thought it sounded false; I had already glommed onto Eliot’s Wasteland , Howl through my interest in Dylan at the time and pretty much had a standard set for me for lyrics that try to tell me about the sterility of Modern Life and the people who refuse to do anything to change it. 

Dylan, Ginsberg, Ochs, and others did more than describe the evils of capitalist leisure, they gave listeners vivid portraits buttressed by real, tangible anger but which was mitigated by craft. You can feel the foul wind blowing in Eliot’s wasteland, you were in the cold water flats with Ginsberg’s marginalized miscreants listening to the terror through the wall, you get a real sense of what a hell of one’s making might be like through the arrival of Mister Jones and his suitcase in a purely alienated space. Lennon is a brilliant man and there is much to discuss the abundance of his great work, but this effort, early in the days when the Beatles were showing the influences of other bands creating new and innovative work, is not one that holds up . It is perhaps the least interesting song in their catalog. But back to my point, if I had one, which is that the issue I found with this tune was Lennon’s intent to write a song that would drop knowledge , and the discussion, for me , was how well his attempt succeeded. I don’t think it did. But he did improve vastly. As did Paul Simon , who recovered from the stilted poetics of Sounds of Silence and all the unearned defeatism that particular meditation on alienation wallowed in and who became a songwriting powerhouse , perhaps the best of his generation.