The Post-Corporate "Country & Western" Heart Still Beats at Nashville's Bluebird Cafe (1/3/14)

Nashville, Tennessee is still home to the American corporate music industry, but has also come to contain its own interesting cultural institutions: besides being the location of many music publishing firms, celebrities' corporate offices, and tourism behemoths (the Grand Ol Opry, the Ryman Auditorium, and the Country Music Hall of Fame), Nashville is one of the few places in the world where one can find a place like The Bluebird Café.

The Bluebird has gained all the press it may ever deserve—and yet, still warrants more description, based here on my observations on a bitterly cold and recent January night, one of the first in a bold new year. The Bluebird Cafe is one of Nashville's smallest music venues, but is the only one that claims on its website to be "one of the world's preeminent listening rooms.”Concieved as a restaurant that would feature musical accompaniment in 1982, the Bluebird Café quickly gained a reputation as a location where rising stars would be discovered, faster than any drawn-out American Idol circus. The Bluebird is located in what appeared to be a nice neighborhood of Nashville, located in what I grew up calling a ‘strip mall’—a row of single-story storefronts. Elsewherein the same shopping complex as the Bluebird is a highbrow womens’ clothing store, and offices. The Bluebird Café reminded me of Soup-N-Greens in Barre, Vermont, or the famous Tom Jones Restaurant (no relation to the singer) on Edgemont Avenue in Brookhaven, Pennsylvania, or even an average Applebee’s, but with a sense of unique, homespun decorum. There were no traces of corporate foodservice culture: the drop ceiling created a wide and low-ceiling’d cavern, beneath which patrons are seated at tall and short tables. The Bluebird Café accommodates 90 people at each show; I'd guess ten percent of any audience at the Bluebird are talent scouts, from labels, studios, and promoters.

Inside, the heritage of the joint is immediately obvious: scores of autographed 8x10 glossy photographs, and larger framed photos, line the walls, having long ago usurped the original décor, painted garden lattice and faux-awnings against the baby blue walls. Kathy Mattea began at the Bluebird as a waitress; Garth Brooks was offered his first contract in the kitchen; the Indigo Girls, Pam Tillis, and Taylor Swift have all been discovered there. Since the early 1980s, songs and souls have been bought and sold at The Bluebird Café. It’s part of the country charm/schtick, I guess, to call the Bluebird a “listening room”— audiences are expected to sit silently during performances, despite that the acoustics are about as great as any given department at a WalMart, and despite the fact that no one person in Bluebird actually has a seat that faces all the performers (seated ‘in the round,’ singer/songwriters take turns performing from the center of the room). But the Bluebird was, and apparently always is, packed, and for good reason: to see people actually strum their instruments while one enjoys sweet potato fries, chicken ceasar wraps, cole slaw and the like.

This night was the first in an annual series of performances to benefit AliveHospice, a Nashville-based charity. In the center of the cafe, the musicians-- Dave Gibson, John Wiggins, Bernie Nelson, Steve Smith, and Larry Gatlin-- gathered, laughed, and tuned their guitars. The collection of performers, and their tales of cassette demos lost during breakups, of songs being recorded eight and nine times without becoming a hit (Dave Gibson’s collaboration with Chris Wallin, called “The Good Drugs”), made me wonder if a similar scene was the same among the Tin Pan Alley songwriters of New York City—at a time when a struggling recording industry was hungry for sure-fire hits. As Gibson’s song about a frog led to quick and humorous tunes about talking dogs, talking seeing-eye dogs, and other humor that was a sidestep from that which may be still found on Hee-Haw. Gatlin noted how performances in-the-round encourage songwriters to “sing all this crap we write for ourselves,” and not the hit(s) they may be better known for.

Gibson’s first choice was a song he wrote, that was made famous by Conway Twitty, “House on Old Lonesome Road.” The song reminded me of Tom Waits’ “House Where Nobody Lives,” in musical structure and lyrical theme. It was all one might love about a country ballad: heart-rendered lyrics and simple guitar accompaniement, until Gibson lost track of his final verse, distracted by a patron’s lavish boots. He and Nelson cracked up about it, and the song regained its composure, but never its intimate and passionate vibe.  Dave Gibson also did “The Frog Song,” and the remarkable “Til’ the Rain Falls On the Scarecrow,” a hauntingly patriotic ballad in a minor key he is co-credited on, that has gained recent acclaim. “Wait until they find out I don’t have a 32-inch waist and wear Wrangler jeans,” he laughed, referring (I assume) to the corporate industry’s image and marketing machine.

 

Besides getting to hear Larry Gatlin perform one of my favorite songs ("All The Gold In California"), his stories reflected his presumably-high standing among popular music circles: a song he wrote and was recorded by Striesand, for A Star is Born, only to have the scene cut from the film. Gatlin also explained how—without his knowledge—Streisand’s recording of the song was being re-released, on a deluxe reissue, which “helped make Christmas a little more joyful,” he laughed. The song, “Try to Win a Friend,” was the first in the set to feature Gatlin’s unique and easy high tenor range. There was much banter and camaraderie about and around the music business; at one point, Gatlin stood up, pretended to produce a business card from his back pocket, and introduced himself to the other musicians: "Hi, I'm Larry Gatlin, I'm new in town..."  

Like other genres, country music is digging around for its roots. The undisputed song of the night came as Bernie Nelson invited AJ Engstrom, a young guy with a backwards baseball cap, into the circle of microphones to perform his song “Cashflow.” Gibson and Nelson welcomed Engstrom warmly: unlike the other seasoned musicians in the group, Engstrom strummed away with a fury uncommon in the night. His song was both a tribute to The Man In Black, as well as scathing attack about the lack of “real country” being published by major labels: “they’re interrupting my cashflow/where’s Haggard, I don’t know.” It was catchy, fast, and was the only riff that appeared to present a challenge to the group’s silent member, Steve Smith, whose acoustic solos and backup were ever-impressive; Engstrom’s riff was too fast, not just to support the melodic licks and background noodling he had been providing all night, but perhaps too fast for the non-millenial crowd. What "Cashflow" demanded—for the genre to return to its roots, of strong, if stoic, personalities (and not, presumably, to promote the glitz and glitter of American Idol winners)-- seemed to be what the crowd was hoping for: Engstrom’s song garnered thunderous applause, while Larry Gatlin nearly fell off his chair during some of the witty verses. After the show, I congratulated AJ on his accomplishment and strong showing; as he’s got “some meetings with some people this week,” the song “Cashflow” is not available on any forms of social media.

AJ Engstrom's latest work is found here: http://ajengstromband.com/

AliveHospice is found here: http://alivehospice.org/

The Bluebird Cafe (including a link to make reservations!) is found here: http://www.bluebirdcafe.com/
 

 

 

An Open Letter to Roger Sublett, Union Institute and University

No response to the email below has been received, as of 12/31/13.

Sent: December 19, 2013 To:  Dr. Roger Sublett  (President, Union Institute and University) Dr. Chris Voparil  (Professor, Humanities Concentration, Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program) Dr. Arlene Sacks  (Dean, Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program) Dr. Nancy Boxill  (Professor, Leadership Concentration, Ph.D. in Interdisciplinary Studies program)        Dear Dr. Sublett, as an alumni of Union's M.Ed. program, as well as a current student completing a dissertation in the Interdisciplinary Studies program, I am thankful for your recent email, of holiday greetings. Towards creating a more "engaging and enlightening" community at our institution, I am writing today to draw your attention to what I must assume is a gross oversight, on the part of the administration at our institution. I have been thankful to have received a number of "From the President's Desk" missives throughout this year, including one sent in commemoration of the anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech at the Lincoln Memorial. However, upon the passing of Nelson Mandela-- the greatest social justice hero of our time-- our institution has been silent. As our institution continues to identify and strengthen lucrative academic curricula, including the development and nurture of a thriving undergraduate program in criminal justice, I believe our school's acknowledgement of Mandela's passing is not only appropriate, but perhaps an essential task, as an institution of higher learning that seeks to better fulfill its mission. In conversations on social media and elsewhere, friends and colleagues have questioned Union's silence regarding Mandela's passing; one colleague of mine suggested Union rename its MLK Studies thread to include formal study of Mandela's work as well. The lack of discussion, or even acknowledgement, by our institution, regarding the passing of Nelson Mandela, is beyond troubling. The administrators responsible for my program's Facebook page have focused their efforts on creating 'buzz' about the upcoming residency; however, these posts sum to create a vision of a program struggling to discern its own identity, without having much of anything of substance to say, to students or a wider public. Other institutions have sought to embrace social media as something other than a vehicle for admissions campaigns; it is difficult for me to believe that our institution, built of a doctoral-level community of learners, has nothing to say about Mandela. While I understand that academic institutions may be, by necessity, focused on self-promotion across social media platforms, the absence of any acknowledgement whatsoever of Mandela's passing, by an institution that professes to foster serious academic study of individuals committed to social justice, is simply inexcusable. I have faith that you will help remedy this egregious error in short order. I look forward to hearing from you, as together we work to make Union Institute and University a place of "engaging and enlightening" learning.

What Will Phish Be For Halloween 2013?

The calendars and stars have aligned once again: Phish will be dropping by the Atlantic City Convention Center next week, for a string of late October shows, including one on Halloween night. It’s Phish tradition to perform a complete cover of another band’s classic work, and it’s time for some exceptional speculation. In late August, Rolling Stone played up the hype in an article that confirmed Trey and Genesis frontman Peter Gabriel had exchanged words about joining forces in covering the classic 1974 cosmo-rock The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway; RS confirmed, however, in their final paragraph, that Gabriel was on European tour until 10/26, and was a “notorious perfectionist,” implying that he probably couldn’t handle the unsteady ‘calm’ that is onstage at a Phish show. As we slog headlong into the deepening autumn tour of 2013, setlists reflect a variety of interesting choices of cover material, beyond the typical “Roses are Free” (Ween)  and “Bold as Love” (Hendrix): “Takin’ Care of Business” (BTO), “Crosseyed and Painless” (Talking Heads), “Rock and Roll” (Zeppelin), and, last night in Glens Falls, a double shot of Beatles (“Back in the USSR” and “While My Guitar Gently Weeps”). None of this is new musical territory for Phish; their Halloween ‘costumes’ in the past have consisted of:

1994. The Beatles' White Album.
1995. The Who's Quadrophenia.
1996. The Talking Heads' Remain in Light.
1999. The Velvet Underground's Loaded.
2009. The Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St. 

Prior to the last Phish Halloween show (in 2010, again the climactic third night of a run at the AC Convention Center), my best guesses were Zeppelin’s “Physical Graffiti,” or Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.” They chose Little Feat’s Waiting for Columbus, complemented by additional percussion. Either of my 2010 picks shouldn’t be ruled out, but the 1970 Bowie classic probably isn’t as technically complicated as Phish may desire. Other great yet flawed ideas: Workingman’s Dead (too archetypical; the world has lost its ability, even at rock concerts, to achieve that mellow vibe), Live Rust or After the Gold Rush (Trey dwindling register couldn’t sustain for the rest of the night, were he to sing even one Neil Young song), Led Zeppelin I, II, III,  or IV (simply too predictable). Pleasant and do-able surprises would be a sparkling cover of Zappa’s One Size Fits All, but would require as much diligent practice as Trey learning all the passages to “Reba” 100 times over.

 

 Guess #1: Chicago?

The 1969 Chicago Transit Authority album is a remarkable two-LP debut, full of Southern California Purples and impassioned existentialism (“Does Anybody Really Know What Time It Is/Does Anyone Really Care?”). While the endeavor would require a small horn section, nothing sounds impossible: from the six minute instrumental “Introduction,” to the “Free Form Guitar” (6:47 on the original album), to the fifteen-minute closing cheer “Liberation.” There’s a smoothness and funky vibe to that album that Phish would handle nicely, and give everybody something to feel good about (“Beginnings”). Fishman sings “I’m A Man;” Mike drops the synth pedal in “Questions 67 and 68.” This material is extremely jammable—when Chicago wanted to release recordings of its own performances in the 1970s, the endless/priceless noodling took up six LPs.

Guess #2: The Bruce?

A “Tenth-Avenue Freeze Out” funk in the bitter Atlantic winds of the Boardwalk in late October? After global tours earlier in the year, The Bruce and his band have been off the road since late July, with an 11/6 gig coming right up at MSG in NYC. In 1999, when Springsteen decided to pull the E Street Band back together, The Bruce and his crew took up residence at Atlantic City Convention Hall, for a string of ‘rehearsal’ gigs; bootleg recordings of these shows are choice E Street moments. If Phish chooses to cover an album by The Bruce, the audience should be prepared to welcome more than just one epic lone frontman. My educated guess from the Boss’ catalog would be The River (1980), as it’s a two-LP set—the size of Phish’s previous Halloween undertakings-- and would allow for a creshendo in live performance, from chanting the sublime and familiar anthem “Hungry Heart,” to perhaps Fishman crooning “I Want to Marry You.” I would like best to hear how Phish would handle “Jackson Cage” and “Independence Day,” a fine study of contrast in defining pop styles: outright and barely meaningful, versus expressive and downtempo. The River would end with a giant singalong, featuring the whole huddled masses of South Jersey muttering along to the album’s namesake song: “But lately there ain't been much work on account of the economy/Now all them things that seemed so important/Well mister they vanished right into the air/Now I just act like I don't remember/Mary acts like she don't care […]We'd go down to the river/And into the river we'd dive/Oh down to the river we'd ride”

 

 

#3: Sir Paul?

There had been a time when the top-grossing tours were consistently jam bands: who could compete with the profit margin, of another Grateful lineup, filling another stadium or venue with an ‘always-already’ audience? In late August, however, the Huffington Post detailed the Pollstar data that declared Sir Paul as king of performance profit: with individual tickets retailing at around $130/each, the Last Silver Beatle has been jetting around the contiguous US, appearing not just onstage, but in interviews (including a recent and tragically-brief appearance on the Howard Stern Show). Could McCartney materialize, for a second-set romp with Phish, perhaps wading in the disco-velvet sea that is Band on the Run?

Odds of McCartney appearing—let alone collaborating—with Phish are pretty long; chances of a withered and unrehearsed Peter Gabriel showing up in AC are still better than any odds offered by the chiming Mr. Cashman video slots at the Showboat. But Sir Paul is on a break, for another few weeks, and I’m sure Page and Mike could/have make/made wonderful sense of “Jet,” “Let Me Roll It,” and much else. Maybe Sir Paul looks on from sidestage, and joins the show for a “Live and Let Die” encore. With or without the presence of McCartney, Phish would do well to cover a Sir Paul album, if only to get closer to understanding the music-theory mysteries of pop bass and banal lyrical bombast  Paul is known for (if I really thought they’d be covering RAM next week, I’d be packing my bags, and checking on my room comps at the Tropicana).

 

 

Wishing you all well!

The New Economy Comes to Granite Run Mall?

The Granite Run Mall in Media, Pennsylvania was completed in 1974. A massive, million-square-foot facility spanning across two levels, the mall was the epicenter of my childhood: the site of my seventh birthday party (at Aladdin's Castle); the venue for annual Cub Scout/Boy Scout expositions and Pinewood Derby races; the source for Atari, Nintendo, and Sega games and gear as they emerged; the place where family would gather and wander, and buy each other gifts; the destination for so much of our teenage lives. It always seemed like the cool kids spent their time at the mall. 

The mall was completely renovated in 1992: the decor that featured wooden handrails and three areas with ornate fountain displays were removed, to reside now only in memory. The center court featured a large and circular metal sculpture, around which fountains sprayed and lights danced. The two postcards below are the few representations of the mall's original interior found on the Internet. Note the globe light posts, the painted skylight edges, and the towering palm trees! 

The year after I graduated from Sun Valley High School in Aston (1998), Granite Run changed hands, purchased by the firms Macerich and Simon Property Group-- both property investment firms, each with existing assets in the billions, and histories of suburban and urban shopping plaza development that stretched back into the early 1960s. Macerich and Simon teamed up to buy Granite Run, hoping the mammoth cavern would perform similarly to the rest of their extensive portfolio. 

By February of 2011, Simon and Macerich let payments on the property's multimillion-dollar mortgage lapse. By April of that year, the property was sold to Madison Marquette, another property management corporation, with tens of millions of square feet of holdings. Despite initiatives to renovate the parking lot, the interior, and to curb the increasing vacancies taking place, Madison Marquette sold the property to BET Investments in the fall of 2013; the property will continue to be managed by Madison Marquette, while BET-- a Delaware-County-based firm managed and owned by Bruce Toll-- contemplates potential uses for the massive property.

In general, the fate of the mall is uncertain: is small-scale retail still an effective model? To sell candles, cell phones, compact discs, or pretzels? All of these items were still available at various stores, on a 10/16/13 visit to Granite Run, with my parents. Though the Delaware County Daily Times reported the occupancy to be at 88% at the time of the 2013 sale, I'd reverse that: one in ten storefronts seemed to have someone, or something, going on. The place was, sadly, a ghost town. 

 Madison Marquette promotional material, on an illuminated sign. 

 View from the elevator, in the center court. 

Intersectionalism: An Interdisciplinary Art Show!

Jennie Harriman and Christopher Smith are excited to invite the public to the opening of their first collaborative art show! Truly mixed-media affair, this show compiles drawings, prints, paintings, sculpture, works of graphic design and childrens' literature, pastels and charcoals-- as well as a unique participatory art activity!

The show will be on display at the Tunbridge Library through the month of November-- but please consider attending the opening gala on Friday, November 1st, for an evening of fun, laughs, refreshments, live music, and much more. Selected works will be available for purchase, with proceeds going in part to benefit the Tunbridge Library.

Friday, November 1

7:00-9:00 PM

Tunbridge Library

Route 110; Tunbridge VT

Mr. Putin, Exceptionalize This! -- by C. Smith and J. Ross

A few weeks back, Russian President Vladimir Putin told Americans it was wrong to claim we are “exceptional.”  Not only does that go against Creator-endowed equality, Mr. Putin said, but Exceptionalism is “dangerous.”  

Perhaps Putin envies America’s place in the world. However, if the brinksmanship and stalemate in Washington, with Texas’ Ted Cruz at the helm, play out as it looks they might, Putin will soon have much to envy about “Exceptionalist” America.

Who else but the United States would dare default on its debt and drive the entire global economic machine into meltdown?  Russia? Nyet!   France?  Zut alors!  Germany?  Nein.  China?  No way.  Only the Great and Powerful U-S-A.

What could be more Exceptional, more unprecedented, individualistic, and American than to stall for the cameras, Green-Eggs-and-Ham style, while the stock market and global economy wait as prey?  While 1/100th of the World’s Greatest Deliberative Body publicly dreamt of stuffing himself with White Castle sliders while sipping from the tarnished cup of the Tea Party, we have slid toward the abyss of political impotence and financial destruction.

To “low-information” voters who admire Senator Cruz for stalling his own party’s legislation, crippling the Constitutional requirement that our government back its financial obligations is apparently no big deal.  “Full Faith and Credit” could be a way to fund a megachurch, for all they care.  To Cruz, the point of a 21-hour soliloquy was not legislative success or truth-telling; his goal may have been the propagation of his own myth – and collecting signatures on useless petitions, ready to transpose those names to checks for his inevitable train wreck of a presidential campaign.

For more than 200 years, the United States has built itself into an Indisputably Indispensable Power - the “Shining City on a Hill.”  The current yip-and-yap may foretell the swagger with which the US will walk soon when it deposits its Exceptionalism in the bank (or debtor’s prison).  If the Treasury is right, October 17 is the last day we may borrow to pay off Congressionally-mandated spending, making the countdown to the most exceptional proof of our Exceptionalism a ticking bomb.  Even the most hawkish neoconservatives and Cold Warriors never imagined the Domino Effect this unprecedented American influence may have:  to bring to their collective knees the world's financial markets and economy in a crumbling catatonic heap.

Only the United States, in its truly unique and Exceptionalist fashion, may risk pulling the proverbial plug on the catatonic patient, the global economy.  The phrase "fiddling while Rome burns" might be apt, if only it acknowledged the cacophonous scratching of Cruz’s violin.  Who will pull the plug, inducing global chaos?  Will it be the silver-tongued Nobel Laureate, he of Obamacare?  Will it be the lost-shepherd, Speaker Boehner?  No.  It must be, it can be, the Grinch Who Stole Washington, the Texan who has proven he will talk all day, in the rain, on a plane, on a boat, or with a goat (as long as the goat writes a check), livestreaming his rhetoric to drive the news cycle.

Senator Cruz’s “I do not like the Obama-plan, I do not like it, Ted-I-am” bluster plays to the Far Right, but is fodder for the ever-self-proclaimed Always Right, whose puppeteered control of the GOP appreciates daily (regardless of pushback by Karl Rove and other Republicans In Name Only – the McCains, Grahams, and Corkers).  To both the Far Right and the Always Right, this week may be historic for unveiling another rhetorical superhero:  a cartoonish ideologue in a suit and imagined cape, as Exceptional a demagogue as we’ve ever seen.  Though Cruz’s marathon bombast won recognition, the forthcoming default might leave little capital for his roadshow to take to the international circuit.

***

Cruz’s all-night non-filibuster was anything but heroic.  It was, however, cartoonish.  Ronald Reagan, the conservative superhero who raised the debt ceiling on average every six months during a Presidency in which he tripled the deficit, knew how to compromise and see the big picture.  “I’m not worried about the deficit.  It is big enough to take care of itself,” he famously said, even as he castigated Democrats for delaying more than one of those 18 debt-ceiling increases while working out deals to keep the government running.

If only Mr. Cruz – like the Patron Saint of Conservatism Reagan – knew the difference between an exceptional clown and an Exceptionalist superhero.

Mr. Christopher Smith and Mr. Jon Ross are college instructors and writers in Vermont and Illinois respectively.

The United States of Stalemate, in Song: The Capitol Steps at Cramwell, August 2013

I am only two years older than the Capitol Steps, the much-lauded political/comedic/musical satire group that began as an act at a Christmas party for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1981. Producer and writer Elaina Newport is the last remaining member of the troupe who was a part of the group's initial, impromptu holiday performance, the one that would spawn their acclaimed and public debut run at the Shoreham Hotel, as well as establish their fame within, and beyond, the Washington Beltway. While cofounder Bill Strauss passed away in 2007, and longtime collaborator Jim Aidala appears to have left the Steps in 1994 after taking a high-level position within the Environmental Protection Agency (his LinkedIn currently describes him as a “Senior Government Consultant,” working through Bergeson & Campbell, P.C.), Elaina Newport has continued for over three decades to not only keep the Steps’ satirical repitiorie fresh, but to develop a steadily lucrative economic engine within an artistic and satirical enterprise. All of my life, the Capitol Steps have had plenty of fodder for their repurposed pop songs, with lyrics retooled to lampoon the scandal of the day: from “Thank God I’m a Contra Boy” (1986) and “Workin’ 9 to 10” (1987) during the Reagan administration to “Papa’s Got a Brand New Baghdad” (2004) and “I’m So Indicted” (2006) during the Bush years (their most recent recording is titled “Fiscal Shades of Gray”).  

For a number of years, the Steps have been operating multiple touring companies, allowing for the troupe to perform—literally—in more than one place at a time. During most of the calendar year, the Steps operate a touring company that, not unlike the traveling versions of Broadway musicals, fills medium-size venues from coast to coast; in summer, however, in addition to the gaggle of former Congressional staffers-turned-amateur Vaudevillians that take the stage at the Reagan Building amphitheater in Washington, DC on Friday and Saturday nights, a separate, revolving subset of the cast performs almost nightly through August at Cramwell Resort, Spa & Golf Club in Lenox, Massachusetts: this perennial gig/residency seems to be the Steps’ incubator for new bits, there among the Guilded Age mansions of the former elite, now tucked neatly between golf courses in the Berkshires (“contemporary comfort with the experience of a luxurious bygone era,” reads Cramwell’s ad copy).

Neil Diamond titled his live-from-the-mid-1970s album "Hot August Night." This evening with the Steps was the opposite: torrential rain drove the golfers from their courses, streamed across the parking lots and winding driveways, and soaked the manicured lawn of Cramwell. The basement of the Olmsted Building resembled the recreation room of a posh assisted living facility, where its tanned, pastel polo-shirt’d crowd smelled of nothing but money. A crowd of maybe 150 filled the 200 chairs arranged in the room, where an Electro-Voice PA and four mics on stands sat before the Steps’ banner, beside which sat pianist Dr. Marc Irwin, ready for his cues. Earlier on that Friday afternoon in August, Tiger Woods, having risen like a phoenix from scandal, had come in 9 under par at Bridgestone—big news to the idle rich. Even bigger news: there was only 1,001 days left in the Obama presidency. It would have been a reasonable guess, that somebody in the room would play a heavy role, in picking the next head of state.

I was surprised to see The Steps’ show at Cramwell was more of a ‘recent greatest hits’ compilation than a breeding ground for new material; the Battle Hymn of the Republic(ans), the medley from the musical Grease reworked to represent the broke country in Europe (“Hopelessly Devalued to You”), and a predictable tribute to the NSA, featuring the clever lyric “I know your new pin/I know every sin.” The crowd was least emphatic about the version of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” that recounted the IRS’ intentional targeting and auditing of political opponents; the only song that forced some to leave the show parodied gas guzzling SUVs, using Lee Greenwood’s “Proud to be an American.” And a few songs were clunkers, if only because time had not been kind to the subjects of the satire: a jovial actor with an explicit faux accent pretended to be from Afghanistan, before dancing merrily while singing “On the Sunni Side of the Street.” Though the Steps’ lyrics to the pop classic included one great line (“our state bird is the… DUCK!”), the laughs were hard-earned: all week, news of continued rocket attacks curdled the humor, making it nearly unpalatable. An Obama impersonator sang a soliloquy based on the Sam Cooke hit “Wonderful World,” but I couldn’t buy it, the portrait of a naïve, media-obsessed Barack crooning “don’t know much about agencies […] I only know what I see on TV.” This, alongside full skits pretending that Chris Christie saved the Hostess Twinkie, a monologue-in-progress featuring a detective sent to track down Edward Snowden, a hypothetical meeting between the two female Supreme Court justices in the restroom (they end up singing the praises of Antonin Scalia, to the tune of Roger and Hammerstein’s “Maria”), and a nearly-toothless send-up of the Rolling Stones’ recent tour  (no jokes about the ticket prices!) summed to create a wonderous, if generally impotent, ninety minutes of theater. Biggest (and inadvertently, the most cruel) laugh from the crowd? A casual joke from the detective mentioned above, about having ‘less work than a West Virginia tooth fairy.’ The hardest truth for the crowd may have come in the skit about the President of Mexico wanting to “immigrate to Casa Blanca […] to do twice the work for half the pay.” Do the golf caddies and groundskeepers, servers and barkeeps of Lenox, Massachusetts, get paid what they themselves would consider livable wage?

While the Capitol Steps’ final number—a spastic review of their history of parody, through keen use of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”—did end with a sign that read “don’t blame  us—you voted for them!,” I was still left feeling that the spirit of the show could have challenged the audience more effectively: there are individuals and organizations that, were they to satirize, would get them effectively banned from the erudite Cramwell. Yet The Steps’ are somehow aware of these unspoken taboos (not even their opening number, a full intellectual assault on the stalwart Congressional Republicans, made mention of John Boehner), and are able to play it as safely as possible, in order to maintain their own reputation—were social justice or political mobilization their game, but alas, bringing an audience to the very brink of revolt, and no further, is more lucrative than poignant. While I understand that there was more than one troupe of the Capitol Steps operating on the night that I saw them perform, these individuals and groups earned no mention whatsoever in The Steps’ August 2013 shows at Cramwell: Rand or Ron Paul, Ben Bernanke, the National Rifle Association, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Roger Ailes, Michelle Bachmann, the Occupy Movement, Twitter, Mitt Romney, George W Bush, Donald Trump, Rick Perry, the Koch brothers, Alec Baldwin, the “1%”, Michael Bloomberg, Jon Stewart, Facebook, Wolf Blitzer, Anderson Cooper, Bill O’Reilly. There is a club, and through the lens of national media, it’s unclear who was in it, has been, and is not still a member—the hefty ticket price (ten more bucks would’ve gotten one onto the lawn, to see Phish at SPAC) allows The Steps’ to safely assume their audience at Cramwell was seeking a specific brand of political satire. Perhaps my idealism had left me hoping to witness how a group of former Congressional staffers in an off-Broadway venue, having lived through some of the virtual and rhetorical wars of our nation’s capitol, would feel compelled to use the end of their show to challenge: of participation, a call-to-action, over a sardonic ‘told-you-so.’

Reinventing Pop Nostalgia with The James Hunter Six

America is the birthplace—the one true home— of rock and roll and this will remain true, no matter how it is rendered or forged, rushed or slogged, fusioned or funked. When the first 45rpm singles of blues and ‘rock’ were shipped overseas in the 1950s, the world was exposed irreparably and irrevocably to some madness, mayhem derived from heartbeats of many ethnicities, traditions, and practices.

In 1974, perhaps to wash clean his soul following his stint of activism and bed-ins, John Lennon assembled his own nostalgia outfit, seeking to rekindle his earliest rock and roll passions. With sessions taking place in Hollywood and New York under the direction of Phil Spector, Lennon’s penultimate album—the 1975 release Rock and Roll­-- astounded critics, as it contained no original material, but rather a collection of reworked antique pop, from Fats Domino to Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me.” Growing up on the imported recordings of American popular music in the 1950s, Lennon (and a band that included Leon Russell, Steve Cropper, and Klaus Voorman) may have been seeking to challenge and succeed in conquering his earliest musical memories, what he knew of backbeat-driven pop long before any of Sir Paul’s carefully melodic bass lines reinvented the pop song form (it’s worth noting McCartney released his own moldy-oldie tribute record, Run Devil Run, in 2004).

Lennon’s Rock and Roll album has been called a critical failure; to many, it was a step in reverse, as the former Beatle drifted from the simplistic punctuality of rallying cries like “Instant Karma” and “Power to the People,” and into the banality of tired 1-4-5 chord structures. Despite the flawed recording sessions and legal entanglements that plagued the album’s creation, Lennon’s mid-1970s effort is important—perhaps critical—in understanding the relationship between the soul of American pop and the unique pop instilled in British soul. While Lennon orchestrated complex studio efforts on both coasts in America, Van Morrison’s live album It’s Too Late to Stop Now was released, and served then as it does today, as a touchstone of power-pop, the sound of someone who was born on the other side of The Pond from Chuck Berry, yet could sing the blues as if having had the opportunity to know far more than any one Brown-Eyed Girl. While Morrison would mature through his successful career into a renowned pop-rock-folk guru, Lennon retreated after the release of Rock and Roll, to relative seclusion: he reunited with Yoko and raised his son, while the films Grease and American Graffiti repopulated mainstream culture with well-worn and cherished melodies. The fascination and idolization of that era of American music has yet to end, despite our countless endeavors into new forms of electronic music, rock’s fusion with jazz, and much else. Everything old is new again; in the United States, everything old seems to at least bear repeating, in new iterations across generations.

In the mid-1990s, Van Morrison discovered James Hunter: the guitarist and singer was performing in a club, and Morrison befriended him. Hunter ended up as part of Morrison’s band (including on the live release A Night in San Francisco), and as his opening act as well. While Hunter’s solo releases in 2006 and 2008 garnered the typical attention and faint praise of late-night television, Rolling Stone, USA Today, and rhythm and blues communities on both sides of the pond, this endeavor—a six-piece power outfit—seems to be not only a good fit for the not-humble now-fifty front man, but totally ripe for the day and age into which the group enters: our brave and repetitious world of 21^st century American culture. The James Hunter Six is the band Lennon sought to assemble, to perform Rock and Roll; it is a patriotic, percussive sound, pulled together by someone on the outside looking in, from across The Pond.

And so on a sultry Friday night in July--four days before the US release of their back-to-retro album-- the James Hunter Six [JHS] swaggered and sweated through an hour-and-twenty minute set at the Tupelo Music Hall in White River Junction (7/5/13). Like Elvis, his short black hair reminded me of Tony Curtis; like Elvis, Hunter needed a sweat towel after the completion of the first song. Unlike Elvis, James Hunter sought unsuccessfully to establish a relationship with the aging, balding baby-boomer audience; unlike Elvis, Hunter needed to dry off the fret board of his Stratocaster between songs, as he moved around the same five-or-so bar chords rapidly, in almost every tune. Balding heads simply bobbed and toes tapped until they wore themselves out; one guy, who looked like Bob Weir, kept time with both feet, gently clapping along in sixteenth note patterns when he was really enjoying himself. Moments of true musicianship and musicality were highlighted, as they often forced a Canadian woman to stop talking, mid-sentence at times, to her partner, a bald man in a white dress shirt. Unlike Elvis, Bob Weir, or Tony Curtis, James Hunter had and took the opportunity to be fifty years old and to work as hard for an audience of less than one-hundred  as he would have treated a crowd of thousands.  

The band consisted of a tenor sax, baritone sax, drum kit, stand-up bass (played through an amplifier), and a keyboardist. The only instrument that kept the show in this century, and from being totally analog, was the Hammond XK-3, a digital-oscillator-based replica of a single manual B-3. Though played extraordinarily well by fill-in keyboardist Dave Slocum, the board’s stoic and digital drones sliced through the tight grooves like an electric knife through butter: unnecessarily powerful and lacking the mechanical nuance of a true tonewheel instrument. Its simulated drawbars (and lack of Leslie) seemed to keep its player mostly bored, save for his handful of ornate solos. The sax players stood on the opposite side of the stage, ever aware of and ready for their next cues, whether they were introducing a smattering of percussive accents, dotted rhythms, or punctuated, sustained tones. At their best, the sax players took lavish and jazzy solos that rivaled any licks being played this summer on Phish tour (a three-night run at SPAC was initializing during the JHS show, less than one hundred miles west of the Tupelo); at his best, Hunter duplicated his own guitar riffs with his voice, a difficult technique. Hunter himself was not in fine voice; many of his songs, constructed around falsetto vocal moments, seemed to present a not-insurmountable challenge. His style of strumming was more akin to the Rastafarian shuffling of Bradley Nowell, and contained far less trickery than one might have anticipated (“Hail Hail Rock and Roll” may be Hunter’s Chuck Berry track-of-choice). His guitar solos did not involve effects or pedal boards, and the one Townsend-like arm-windmill move he did looked out of place and strange; he did comedically use the microphone stand as a slide at times, and thrashed oh-so-briefly, as to always leave the crowd wanting more. Perhaps the true rock star, however, was the JHS drummer Jonathan Lee: from beneath his fedora, and his consistently calm—almost vacant—facial expression, Lee propelled the group ahead in every song (his only fault may have come in speeding up a couple of already-too-fast rockabilly-inflected numbers). With the double-bass player by his side, Lee covered the gamut of rock beats, circa 1955-1965, always looking as cool as late October, on a Friday night in July. While some of Hunter’s original material may cross from emulation and tribute and into replication and forgery, Lee was a joy to watch: it was from the drum beat, and not the hints of the unmistakable instrumental riff, that I recognized the original source of Hunter’s song “The Gypsy” (The Champs’ 1958 hit “Tequila”). When teamed with double bass player Jason Wilson, whose tone may have been some of the finest amplified stand-up bass I’ve heard, the rhythm section of JHS allowed all others to rest easily on the backbeat, and to show no concern for their timing within the congruent and angular structure of the sound.  

There’s a reason why the JHS sound in concert like a Sam and Dave cover band, and at times resonated with the crowd like a Blues Brothers routine tapped of humor and mystique: under the direction of producer Gabriel Roth (who won a Grammy for his work on Amy Winehouse’s first album), the JHS completed a remarkable—and mono—recording at Daptone Studios in Brooklyn, thus entering themselves in the high-stakes race to claim the future of reproducible pop music. Prior to her diagnosis of cancer, Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings had planned to have JHS serve as their opening act, on a coast-to-coast American summer tour. So, one may wonder how the JHS album would sound different, if it had been produced by Jack White, at Third Man Studios, another retro-analog facility that seeks to question and redefine the production of recorded music? What would Rick Rubin do, with a British blues-rocker seeking to cover nothing, but to record “new” material that sounds like The Five Royals, the Cadillacs, the Duprees, and the Imperials, to such an extent as to be interchangeable? What we buy to spin on our record players at home offers these valid challenges, in musicology and production; in live performance, the James Hunter Six helps define American pop music, its constant revolution and resurrection of recurring forms.