Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Words Blues."

Cover of American Primitive, Vol. 2

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Geeshie Wiley, "Last Kind Words Blues," from American Primitive, Vol. 2: Pre-war Revenants 1897-1939. Download from archive.org.

A very good friend had saved an article from Harper's (for subscribers only--go to the library and dig through the old issues for free) that dealt with old sound recordings of traditional song and the people who collect them, focusing on the late John Fahey, his Revenant Records, and in particular the second volume of "American Primitive." By and large the article was good, though it possibly inevitably left one with the impression that Fahey was completely unmanageable as a person, and a total freak. Who knows who he or anyone else really was, but regardless it is clear that some people take their interest in traditional song beyond a mere love for the music into an obsession.

Those of us who just love the music obviously owe a lot to these peoples' obsession. This isn't a record review, more, like everything I write on this blog or on my other, a response, but the collection referenced above, which I ordered directly from Revenant immediately after reading that Harper's article, is fantastic, if a bit slanted toward oddities. Fahey himself certainly seemed on the surface to relish his own role as an oddity, and I have to confess that I've never had too much of an ear for his own music--too self-consciously off-kilter for my taste. I prefer in my avant-gardists more of a Welles or a Monk, someone who is indeed completely off-kilter but is so so naturally that their work makes the "norm" seem off, rather than the other way around. I never get that feeling with Fahey's own stuff.

Fahey the archivist, however slanted his tastes may be, without question has impeccable taste. I suppose the most obvious point of comparison would be Harry Smith and the volumes of his Anthology Of American Folk Music, released, famously, on Folkways. The difference really is that where Harry Smith went for the best performances he could find while leaning when given a choice to the more unorthodox, Fahey goes for the most unorthodox and then given a choice takes the best. The Smith Anthology is therefore the more essential, but Fahey had the undoubtably great sense to know that the world did not need another attempt at the Folkways Anthology. As such, this two-disc collection is one of the more worthy things I've bought in the last couple years. I'll admit that it takes a lot for me these days to put down hard-earned money on a physical CD, but this is absolutely worth it. The packaging is as handsome as for any disc I own, and the notes, consisting of essays and commentary on the songs, are profuse and worth reading.

As I noted above, the collection as a whole is worthwhile--again, buy it, directly from Revenant Records as it gets a greater proportion of the sale directly to a company that's as much service- as profit-oriented. That said, everything on it is an oddity in some sort of way. This isn't a bad thing. We all know that a lot of what passes for folk, particularly after the folk revival of the 1950's, is really trite crap. In reality, before sound recordings more-or-less homogenized not only the marketplace for music but the cultural production of it--yes, that's a link to Horkheimer and Adorno, worth a slow read--local production, local relationships, and local traditions carried within themselves as much diversity as the national, mainstream marketplace carries within it today. So when you put a bunch of people who fit on the fringes of those local scenes onto one record, it's almost shocking to hear when one expects a certain type of "folk."

This is the thing with Geeshie Wiley that is so striking to me. I've never heard anything quite like this, but it is so solid and whole, and of the highest quality, that I don't know where I can fit her. She is still a very obscure artist, and I have a feeling that this was the initial appeal to Fahey, and I had never heard of her before I read this Harper's article, though her work was by no means entirely unknown to people more in the loop than me. She only recorded six sides. "Last Kind Words" seems to be the consensus pick for her best tune, but the others are by no means cut from a lesser cloth. I think of Skip James when I hear this, above all for the absolute artistry involved but also for the structure and tonality, but Wiley is entirely her own player--quite a guitarist, too, though subtle enough that one might not notice it unless one sits and pays attention to how elegantly she syncopates her guitar part while keeping a steady rhythm and singing all the while on top of it.

I suppose this is the kind of stuff I am drawn to. Geeshie Wiley is not well-known, and was therefore new to me at 39--I actually ordered the disc as a present to myself for my 40th birthday but heard the mp3 version above from archive.org about a week before it happened. She is by no means, however, odd. She is rather in a class by herself. I appreciate the Faheys of the world who consciously seek out the strange as the strange, because they dig up a lot of great stuff, but strangeness by itself is not enough for me.

Gordon Lightfoot, "Carefree Highway"

Cover of Sundown

Cover of Sundown

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Gordon Lightfoot, "Carefree Highway," from Sundown (download until 10/16/09)

I'm very aware that this is far from a creative choice when it comes to Gordon Lightfoot's music, but as much as I'd love to be hipper to things than I am, I'm not. My exposure to Lightfoot came as a kid, with my father's copy of Sundown. I know the big, popular tunes of his, and that's it.

So I'm as guilty as anyone else when I say that Gordon Lightfoot deserves a lot more attention than he gets. I've occasionally posted to my Facebook status something mentioning that I've just listened to one of his tunes, and everytime I have a bunch of people commenting or liking my status than if I'd made a brilliant observation of some sort. Clearly, people have very positive associations with his music, and positive associations are really the most important thing there is in music.

I have something of a feeling why he's mentioned less often than his work merits--it sounds on the surface very mid-'70's, and those of us who were kids at the time have mixed feelings, or ought to, about the period. The music industry really started its downhill slide in the era, as recording technology became increasingly sophisticated, refining the process away from the playing of music to the producing of it. Lightfoot's stuff sounds "produced," for sure. Note the guitar solo, which repeats more than once, basically note for note. I don't go for this kind of thing, generally, as someone ought to be able to improvise a guitar solo properly: it's just correct in my book.

Yet, I'm amazed. Something in me actually likes hearing the same guitar solo twice. Dylan flirted with a more "produced" sound here and there, and even with the best of those efforts, Infidels, even based solely on the best tunes, it really doesn't work. There's an unnaturalness to those Dylan records that's like a stain, wrecking a good shirt. This, on the other hand, is totally natural, in a way that's almost bizarre for someone like Lightfoot with such serious folkie/singer-songwriter credentials.

The thing that Gordon Lightfoot had and I'm very sure still has though I'm ashamed to say I didn't pick up his most recent record, Harmony, is an approach to song that conforms simultaneously to folkie and pop conventions. Of course he's capable of a more typically folk structure, as "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald" amply demonstrates, but here his song is song-y in a pop way without being a pop song and nothing more. Significantly, "Carefree Highway" is light on actual narrative. One can glean some sort of story from it, but to do so requires itself a creative imagination. Take this:

Picking up the pieces of my sweet, shattered dream
I wonder where the old folks are tonight

It's a great start to a tune, but there's absolutely no causal link between the two lines. I wouldn't suggest that you can't find a couplet in the piece that's linked by more than just rhyme, but I would assert that the ideas of the tune are only loosely and thematically linked, rather than held together in a tight, narrative structure. At the same time, the entire piece is incredibly evocative of a sort of melancholic regret at roads not taken combined with a genuine sense of ease borne of a lack of attachments. Free and easy wandering, as Chuang Tzu wrote. Lightfoot keeps both emotions in balance, perfectly, I'd say, throughout, and this requires an absolute focus and grasp of the craft.

There are certainly much more writerly songwriters than Gordon Lightfoot, but I'd caution that it does violence to a form to apply another form's criteria. It's wrong to say that a sculptor lacks a painterly touch, wrong not as in incorrect, but wrong as there ought to be a law against it. Indeed, one should watch out for songwriting that boasts literary merit, because generally talk of the literary merit of a songwriter is inversely proportional to the quality of the writer's melody. While the best song lyrics stand with any written verse as art--please witness my piece on Skip James--there needs to be a reason that the writer chooses song as her or his medium rather than the printed page. That reason must be because the writer has an ear for a tune. It would be wrong to say that Lightfoot is all about melody, but everything with Lightfoot supports the melody, and it's his melodies that really put him among the top writers of song. His words give his melody a place to be, and in turn the melody ties the words together more tightly, as I noted above, than any narrative would, in this form.

The Turtle and the Flightless Bird

Cover of Lonely People of the World, Unite!

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Devin Davis, "The Turtle and the Flightless Bird," from Lonely People of the World, Unite!(download from Davis' website).

I heard about Devin Davis from George Zahora, editor of the late and lamented Splendid E-zine, who had and certainly still has one of the finest musical palates around. I had missed the review on the website, but it came up in an email I received from him. Here was, he said, the Splendid pick of the year. Everyone was buzzing about it: the record, Lonely People of the World Unite!, was one of those few things put out in the CD era that held together as an album. As an aside, it’s interesting how much of a bust the CD was as far as the effect of the physical form of the product on the music is concerned. I’ve never been a vinyl fetishist in terms of sound, largely because I’ve never had enough of a hi-fi to notice whatever difference I might, but having two sides of 18 to 25 minutes in length sets some constraints that clearly facilitated better music than 80 uninterrupted minutes has.

I was told to buy the record without hesitation, and, ever the skeptic begging to be disproved when it came to new music, I downloaded the pair—or was it a trio? Memory fades—of free downloads from Davis’ website. They were great, this was one of them and, yes, I paid to download the album, back in the proverbial day of DRM-“protected” iTunes downloads.

The record did not and still does not disappoint. What is disappointing about the album is that so many musicians making such transparently inferior music make so much more money than Devin Davis. I don’t mean the popsters, either: I mean the indie flavors of the week whose pictures pop up briefly on the hip websites but who in that week sell more music and generate more “buzz” than Devin Davis has in his entire career, which, unfortunately, consists to date of this single album, though a second is apparently on its way at some point. I imagine that two things stand in the way of the record gaining wider acceptance. Davis’ vocals, great as far as I’m concerned, don’t fit the mold of either someone with real pipes (always a pleasure, to be sure) or hipster, “I can’t sing but I’m too cool to care” singing. He is genuinely earnest, in the best of ways, and this is for some people always a deal-breaker. Second, he packs a lot of musical information into what by 21st century US standards is a small amount of musical space. That is, he asks, or really demands, that people actually pay attention to the record. That was fine in 1966 or 1967, but it kills sales these days.

So—the point: I can’t recall a record made by someone more or less my age that more ably references the music we grew up with, transparently no less, is a truly authorly way that is, like a writer references others’ texts, A lot of people do it, and it gets labeled “post-modern,” a so, so-unfortunate term, full of sound and fury, and signifying, as they say, nothing. Questions of authenticity are always, inherently, problematic, but as there was something of a misunderstanding in a prior post in which I called Tom Waits inauthentic and a couple readers—thanks for engaging to be sure: the error is mine for my lack of clarity—thought I was saying he wasn’t any good. Probably it would be good to offer a working definition of authentic. Authentic is, for our purposes, being who you are, and not pretending to be anybody else. It doesn’t mean you don’t or can’t borrow or steal from others. It doesn’t mean you don’t mimic your elders, in this case musical. It just means that when you do it, it’s because there’s some of them in you.

Davis pulls it off for a couple reasons. First, when he straight-up references another, older artists like Bowie or Pink Floyd, you know it immediately, at least if you know “Suffragette City” or “Dark Side of the Moon.” He doesn’t hide it, or hope that his audience is too young to know from whom he’s stealing. On the contrary, the goal is to bring a smile of recognition to the listener’s face. A goal accomplished is the sign of a successful artist. A lot of people try to pull off some sleight of hand with their models, so they stay behind the proverbial curtain. Davis respects us enough not to do that.

“The Turtle and the Flightless Bird” is a case in point of the second reason Devin Davis pulls it off: he’s as good as his models. This tune, while surely not feeling old, whatever that means, most definitely is built on a set of musical assumptions more from the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s than the nonsense people buy when they try to make it, popularly defined, in the music biz today. It moves through related but distinct sections, seamlessly, and maintains a sense of coherence all the while. Davis is the equal, as a melodist, of anyone from that earlier era outside of Stevie Wonder, Paul McCartney, or Brian Wilson, and as a musician and writer broadly put he’s by all means on that level.

It’s simple in some basic way, but his secret is to sound precisely like himself. That, he does. I don’t want to wade too deeply into the authenticity question, and I probably am very un-hip to even bring it up. We know that authenticity as a concept has come under some kinds of attack, for good reasons. Let’s say, though, for our purposes here, that authenticity in people is being who you are, and nobody else. There’s a palpable level of self-consciousness in from whom Tom Waits chooses to steal. None with Devin Davis. And, no, it’s not about race, though like anything in this country you can’t disaggregate race from it. Davis is just Davis. When you hear him, others echo, but it’s still him. That’s the secret.

Season Two on its way.

Just a note: Broadcasting from Crocker-Amazon has been on quite a long hiatus, as the gap between posting dates will show. Season Two, so to speak, is on its way. It's been a long summer of job hunting--ultimately unnecessary as my pink slip was rescinded--and, better still, producing my own music, but I'm compiling the next mix I'll listen to on the train, which will form the next set of blog posts.

Have fun, and keep an eye out in the next week for the next post.

B.I.A.

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Floyd Westerman, "B.I.A. (alternate version) (download until 2/28/09), from "Custer Died for Your Sins/The Land Is Your Mother."

Great political music has to be completely authentic, whatever that means, or else it loses its effect and in fact becomes counter-productive. You can tell in a song if the writer said to herself or himself, "gee, I want to make a statement about this issue." When political music reflects the real course of a musician's life, it takes on a completely different power, because it is itself the issue.

I wouldn't want to suggest that it's not possible for a writer to do real justice to a subject that she or he hasn't exactly lived, because one's mental existence, one's ability to step, so to speak, in another's shoes, is as real in its way as the physicality of going to the supermarket or to work. At the same time, anyone who is serious about political music, who, while perfectly happy to make a lot of money, wants to take a musical gift and try to help people with it, treads very cautiously when writing outside of one's direct or, possibly semi-tangential experience. One needn't have lived a precise experience, the stuff of which constitutes the political song, but it helps to have lived next door to it or at least in the same neighborhood.

So having finished the preface, we can look at Floyd Westerman, whom I only came across in the last year--last six or seven months actually, not to my credit--and who made some of the best political music of the 20th century. The politics of his music are on the surface pretty easy to explain. He was involved in AIM--American Indian Movement--and made songs as part of that movement. He didn't release a ton of music, and got into acting which is, it's pretty clear to me, where he actually made most of his money. His first record took its title from Vine Deloria's "Custer Died for Your Sins," often referred to as the AIM manifesto, not without reason.

So all of this, for anyone who's not Indian, or in AIM, could very easily be misunderstood or misused. I don't purport to be an expert on AIM, and I don't want to do the hip white guy "I'm not an insider but I'm aware that I'm not an insider so I can judge other white people as if I were an insider" thing, but what got me to buy Westerman's music was a number of things I read and a couple podcasts I heard in which people in the movement responded to his death. Really, the affection with which people wrote or spoke about him and the sense people communicated that "he was really ours" gave the impression that this was a musician to check out. Indeed he was.

However, what is--this is more from a socio-political angle than a musical one--so fantastic about Floyd Westerman is that he was/is a Johnny Cash fanatic, and has a brilliant bass voice to boot. He doesn't make "Indian sounding" music in any way that one would expect from the stereotypes one gets out of Hollywood or run-of-the-mill U.S. history books, though he did record more traditional music as well. Rather, he played music like he liked, and it's worth noting that Vine Deloria, too, was a country music buff.

People are, each in their own way, completely authentic. Making music as you hear it is really the way to go, especially if you want to be political. Country music, in its appeal to the bulk of its audience, has--this is more of an industry issue than about any individual musicians--taken some pretty foul political stands in the past, and makes an appeal to whiteness that has been and continues to be totally retrograde. It doesn't fit the white hipster liberal assumption to have the great Native political musician be not only a country music buff but a veritable country music master, with his own very real voice. But this just shows that there is more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy, or politics as the case may be.

Wear Clean Draws

Cover of Party Music

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The Coup, "Wear Clean Draws" (download until 2/23/09), from "Party Music."

So I'd heard of the Coup for some time, but never listened to them. A very good friend of ours, one weekend we were staying with them on a visit, played them for us and bam!, I was hooked. This particular song my wife latched on to, and her fantastic taste in music is of course spot on.

This, to me, is hip-hop, and it's worth stressing that this is Bay Area hip-hop. There was a little hip-hop boutique run by a kid in Daly City that we'd go to, that we actually patronized--bought a number of very cool t-shirts there, and even a painting that now hangs in my classroom. In any event, we would talk, to this really cool kid--really, a young man in his early 20's. We'd just moved up here, and I'd been teaching a bit, and had only just started to get a sense of the whole Hyphy thing. As in, student sitting in the middle of class bouncing up and down shaking his head insisting he was "going dumb" and not "going spastic." I wasn't, nor am I now, impressed.

Anyway, this cool kid with the boutique lamented Bay Area hip-hop and praised L.A. L.A. had a more diverse hip-hop scene, he said, with more room for "positive" and political music. I knew this, despite appearances, because I had some students years ago (Speak, for one) who made beautiful hip-hop and who would go in from Riverside County to L.A. and became participants in that whole process. They'd clue me in to things, and I paid them back with encouragement.

I was really surprised and very disappointed in Bay Area hip-hop. I suppose teaching high school gave and gives me a perspective that more or less necessitates that I oppose Hyphy. Yes, we love localism, but "going dumb on the yellow bus" is not going to help anyone. I should add that because of various circumstances I ended up, my first year teaching up here, taking a Special Ed position because there were literally no history jobs to be had. Talk about the "yellow bus" does nothing to help kids in Special Ed actually use the considerable intellectual abilities they all have. Remember--most Special Ed kids have perfectly normal IQs but have some learning disability. Like I was a history ace who blew math problems. But because I was a white kid, I was "idiosyncratic" rather than "Special."

While it's true that lots of people pronounce Hyphy dead, and have for years, I can attest that the kids still go on about it, though not as often as a couple years ago, and that there hasn't been a massive movement in Bay Area hip-hop toward real positivity, back to real hip-hop. One must always look, though, to the antithetical examples to look forward to a more positive synthesis, and the Coup, simply by being the Coup, points the way forward.

Just some quick praise: I don't think I know of a more straightforward, loving piece of music than this one. Che pointed out the fact--not "made the argument," but "pointed out the fact"--that revolutionaries are motivated by love. No love, no revolution. This is an excellent case-in-point.

Gravity Rides Everything

Cover of The Moon & Antarctica

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Modest Mouse, "Gravity Rides Everything" (download until 2/23/09), from "The Moon and Antarctica."

I was told once by a good friend to check out Modest Mouse, as he said their writing and singing reminded him of me. I bought this record. Truth be told, I wasn't insulted by the comparison and I appreciated a number of the tunes on it. Unfortunately, it was a small number. That said, there certainly are some tunes on it that I still, after some years now, come back to, and this is one.

I have a long pattern of actively avoiding the indie flavor of the month, going all the way back to when R.E.M. broke to the extent they did. I think I first read about R.E.M. in Rolling Stone around the time of "Reckoning," so it should be said that I was paying attention but I wasn't so cool as to get into them around "Murmur" time. What I can say, though, is that one of my good enough friends in high school--or was it middle school?--was into R.E.M. enough, and she was going on and on about how cool they were, and so I avoided them like the plague, even though she was cool and we thought at the time that Rolling Stone actually had valid points to make. I didn't end up getting into R.E.M. at all until "Lifes Rich Pageant," when they got so popular I couldn't avoid them.

Now, Modest Mouse are, like basically all indie flavors of the month, overrated. The question in this case is, "how overrated." R.E.M. is the most overrated band of all time, as far as I can tell. Even U2, seriously, seriously overrated, or Radiohead--wow...now there's an overrated band--has more to offer than R.E.M. The thing with R.E.M. is that there's not really anything they're great at. Certainly not lyrics. That crap might have impressed people in the high school lit mag, but putting them to the public takes some serious chutzpah, or plain idiocy. Likely both. Musically, they're fair, at best. It comes together for them in a moderately original way, about as original as you can be while remaining fundamentally derivative. That's really the indie flavor of the month formula: derive the music from a particular combination of sources that the hipsters already know. The particular combination is what's new, not the sources.

So if you mixed this track a little differently, you'd have an outtake from My Bloody Valentine, something left on the floor while they were recording "Loveless." Drop the vocals way down so you can't make out the words--not a bad idea in this case--add a log drum, overdub the guitar swoops so that there are a number of tracks playing close to the same thing so that the slight variations in performance, slightly out of sync with each other, have that beautiful feeling of comfortable, vague disorientation you get with Kevin Shields, and there you go. The structure of the song itself is much more conventional than anything MBV would do, but that doesn't mean it's not good.

I wonder if someday we'll go back to the point where popular music is great and great music is popular. Maybe, if only on a microscopic level. Each producer of great music will be able to reach the small social network she or he has through Myspace, Facebook, or whatever, and we'll each have our own little click. Not a bad world, but a world without the Beatles, for sure.