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.

 

Eulogy for Tony Soprano: Social Capital and the Ongoing Revolution

No wonder we found ourselves rootless… for we’ve become

                the very roots themselves, -- the lie can never

                take root and there grow under a truth of sun

                and therefrom bear the fruit of truth

                  -- Gregory Corso, from “Elegiac Feelings American”

I was a child of the suburbs, where it was not necessarily easy to find something useful to do. My parents’ home rests on one of the last streets completed before World War II interrupted the rising tide of Cape-Cod style two bedroom homes that had been appearing all across the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. My mom was a nurse at a unionized hospital for forty years; my father a real estate agent who helped start a school for agent certification. Growing up, I shoveled snow from the sidewalks and driveways of the original generation of Ridge Avenue homeowners, those who purchased their home brand new, back when every tree that towered over my childhood had yet to sprout. Much of Aston Township had been apportioned to farms and families in William Penn’s original charter, and through the 1800s, generally remained a rolling, agricultural countryside populated by farmers and mills: sustainably quaint, economically localized, and necessarily social. Detailed in the comprehensive nonfiction work Rockdale, my corner of Delaware County was historic, some of the first organized and sustainable communities in the new continent. In high school, I became only partially aware  of how thick with pavement and history my suburban streets were: the next development over was  built following World War II, specifically as temporary housing for veterans returning home. These cinder-block miniature ranch homes are still intact; each now bears the mark of its inhabitants, past and present: new light fixtures, roofs, landscaping and fencing, and the soft glow of light fixtures from behind thin steel-framed windows. 

While Philadelphia and Chester had larger industrial facilities lining the Delaware River (we would have lost World War II had it not been for the oil produced and refined in Marcus Hook and Chester, PA, an old timer told me), the region that would become my suburban home was, until those suburbs arrived, sustainably quaint, economically localized, and social. The shadow of the city of Chester defined my environment: the petroleum-based economic hub of the 1940s had become far less useful during the 1960s and 70s. Crime rates soared as businesses closed; homes left vacant became liabilities for municipalities, lacking tax revenue like never before. Growing up, I caught only a few glimpses of the row house where my mother was raised; I remember driving down 21st Street in Chester with the car doors locked, as she pointed out the street corner at which she mistakeningly left her clarinet and came back to find it still there hours later. I knew Chester mostly as being the urban array laid out beneath the on-ramp to the Commodore Barry Bridge, and usually saw it only when driving across the bridge, heading east into New Jersey, and probably down to the shore. My mother’s parents left Chester in the early 1960s, as my grandfather’s successful traffic light installation business allowed them to relocate to a split-level mini-mansion, in the still-developing countryside of West Chester: a version of ‘white flight’ that demarcated the growing edge of the suburbs in southeastern Pennsylvania.  In 10^th grade, Civil Disobedience was a principled and inspiring essay, but hard to apply to our lives, of part time jobs and marching band; in 11^th grade, the Advanced Placement English teacher, Joan Skivo, was a Catholic nun on a second career, and had us analyze the lyrics to the Indigo Girls’ “Galileo,” while she beat us over the head for months with the Yeats quote: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.” I will be forever grateful to her for establishing a sense of how to accomplish social change through patient, willful, creative challenge, an aspect of the examined life that would become a lifelong quest. In high school, however, my peers and I had little else but the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind behind which to rally, its cover bearing an image we all understood, and did not, I believe, see as parody: 'here we are now/entertain us.' As adolescents, my friends and I thought we understood the relationship between our pursuit of wealth and the security of a contenting future, one at the very least that would be lived out on the tree-lined streets of our parents, where we would gain our own mortgages, employment, and wallet full of economic obligations. In reflection, it seems that every harbinger of our future-- that one day we might inherent the bustling town of our parents, and in passionate intensity, cram our lives full of luxury, fast food and convenience—was implicit, understood. The film Clerks was important, as it satirized the ethical purgatory that may lie in our futures; lacking all but empathy for the members of our self-sanitizing communities, we quoted Michael Douglas’ character D-FENS in Falling Down, as we wandered around and became young adults. At high school graduation, the mystery of worlds beyond our own—the strange city on the other side of a commuter rail ride, the dense weave of residential and commercial lots along MacDade Boulevard that would morph into South Philly, and the flat stretches of South Jersey—was in sum to be feared as much as it was to be discovered. 

I fled, without a drivers’ license, to a small-town college in Vermont, hitching rides with friends back to South Jersey and finally Aston, where I worked at a car wash, wearing a blue jumpsuit and working alongside the recently-incarcerated. I learned, inside of a liberal arts curriculum, some of the reasons behind environmental activism; a writing major, I wrote an experimental novel, trying to describe and understand my own flight, from the suburbs and into the mountains.  When I moved away in 1997, I never returned to the same street again. With every trip home, more new and youthful families had moved in, as the elderly were dying off and the homes were each going on to the market and off again. New owners came and replaced the original asbestos siding with vinyl, cut down some of the trees that had started to reach over the roofs of the houses; they planted new trees and shrubs and hedges and added porches in the front yard or back, dormers in the roof where there had not been before, and redecorated postage-stamp half-acre plots, with profits made by keeping busy in the bustling, near-city world. A friend who stayed behind and ended up working at a community college information technology department coined a phrase to describe his hours at work, beneath desks repairing and replacing computers: times “when the man has his foot on your neck." Like the bank protestor in Falling Down, in June 2001 myself and three friends moved into a house together in rural Vermont, seeking any and all work. We found roles, but none were as useful to the economy as we had hoped to be: not economically viable. After graduation I found a job at a camera store that was to close within two years, where I developed some of the last rolls of film some of us ever bought,. During the holiday rush of 2001-- a time when everyone, it seemed, was interested in capturing and preserving their present-tense moments-- I sold digital cameras to young families, newlyweds, and grandparents. Jobs and people have and do drift, in and out of usefulness: some of my fellow college graduates have gone on since, to administrative assistant positions, gas station cashiers, teachers, farmers, spouses, nurses, summer camp employees, and award-winning Bank of America call center representatives. 

Except for one house, my parents’ suburban street has almost completely turned over, and a new generation mows the same lawns. The last original owner, Virginia “Ginny” Garrison, has recently had a security system installed; everyone else on the street are the relocated children, or the children’s children, of some initial suburban generation, and who may bear a different expectation of safety and community than those who had come before. A few homes on my parent’s street are vacant; one is bank-owned, abandoned by its underwater owners. My grandfather, forever seeking to understand new technologies, did not live long enough to install a red-light traffic camera, or any other surveillance equipment on any public utility pole; my grandmother passed away before the class-action lawsuit was presented in court, that found the makers of her blood pressure medication guilty, of rushing to market a product without proper clinical testing. As camera sales and the film processing business quickly dried up during the spring of 2002, I sought new work, as a night desk clerk at a condominium rental complex in Killington. The admonition that comes at the close of Kenneth Patchen’s poem “Street Corner College” rang through my head, as no one checked in, and no one checked out once the snow melted: “we have nothing to do/nowhere to go/nobody.” My fellow graduates dissipated, into a world that was and remains in transition, increasingly post-industrial. The down-and-out condition of intellectual, if not spiritual and economic, poverty that gripped us then came alongside legislation that whittled down our exacting freedoms: following the passage of the Patriot Act, new limitations on our abilities to express our passionate intensity may be, in the name of security, necessarily curbed. As the Starr Report tried to debunk the moral character of the President of the United States, the post-9/11 world has had at its core an even more stinging critique for Generations X, Y, and Z: even if we were to pursue economic success from infancy to adulthood, we shall likely be drowned by the pursuit alone. The temporary government housing-turned-permanent is not success; the hull of a celebrated grocery store shopping plaza not twenty years old now sits vacant, replaced by another across town, victim to fickle public interest, now an unaffordable and empty relic of a fleeting capitalist moment. Part of the down-and-out condition of the twenty-first century may be the inherent bravery necessary to endure our shifting economy—to acknowledge and better recognize the psychic and psychological change that comes as our bodies outlive million-dollar facilities, and perhaps to see our communities’ economic viability with a better clarity than is available to the global institutions of power. Maybe we are in the process of discovering along our streets, and within ourselves and each other, a repurposing and retooling. My love for my hometown is accompanied by my hope for it to be most useful, beyond previous generations’ aspirations of privilege and luxury, beyond any ‘flight’ response, but to promote individuals' direct confrontation with the unfamiliar. 

I provide this personal history in part to explain the impact of James Gandolfini, the actor who portrayed Tony Soprano in the HBO series The Sopranos: because his hometown looks a lot like mine, and maybe yours. The elongated city-burb that now stretches from New York to Baltimore might as well be North Jersey, and my old stomping ground—the last exit in Pennsylvania on I-95—has faced many of the same social, economic, racial, ethical and criminal challenges depicted in the show. Sociologists and scholars—if there are such roles in the future-- will likely be studying episodes of The Sopranos in years hence, to better understand the effect of individuals’ good and bad choices, during a period of transition, from industrial to post-industrial within a capitalist society. With ethical precedents established by the atrocities of the twentieth century, the setting of the Sopranos was not unlike Delaware County, and the Tri-State area (or, for example, the Tri-State Mall, just over the line in tax-free Delaware): a place where the falcon cannot necessarily hear the falconer, where attempts at organizing systems of control and power that challenge the status quo are not typically successful, and, despite a seemingly-limitless reserve of the inherent bravery and moral sense  necessary to confront economic and social conditions, most characters seek to define a comfortable level of resignation. The fictionalized account of a organized crime boss illustrated for many the compassion and self-love required by our hardened and hardening world: as the mob boss wades in his backyard pool, able finally to realize true compassion for a family of migrating ducks, all of us were delivered an example of a universal lust for meaningful resonance with the non-human, natural world, something no amount of money or power could buy. Outside of the swimming pool, the character of Tony Soprano may have epitomized a certain kind of response to the psychological climate that still characterizes my suburb, giving life to the down-and-out condition and strain of constantly having to look over one’s own shoulder, forever guarded against the passionate intensity of the idle and underemployed, and working for the best possible outcome for his neighbors and friends. In Tony’s world, one’s own decisions and active choices were likely to contribute to one’s future conditions of economic viability; meanwhile, the entropic and often cruel world was likely to continue its haphazard pattern of interconnectivity between individuals, many of whom faced insurmountable internal and external challenges, and thus struggle with self control. Across six seasons, no one was spared from the grip of circumstance: not his compassionless mother, his educated yet professionally aloof shrink Dr. Melfi, his wife or his children, or any of his business associates, friends, or lovers (with still ten episodes left, my father said he looked forward to the show being ‘put out of its misery’). The dementia and paranoia that scrambles the motives of his uncle, Junior Soprano, become part of Tony’s heroism: the father survives a questionably-accidental shooting by a family member, living on to console his son, following his attempted suicide. He lives to see his daughter, Meadow, pursue a career in law, asserting and defending a set of ethics regarding fair and equitable housing—working within established systems and institutions, unlike her father. 

  

The news of the sudden death of James Gandolfini came among other news that spoke of cries for social justice in many corners of the world: the headline interrupted the continued search for a former government contractor, following his revelation to the United Kingdom’s Guardian newspaper, of a massive domestic surveillance program run by the United States Government; anti-government protests raged on in Spain, Turkey, Egypt and elsewhere; hunger strikes amongst detainees at the United States’ facility at Guantanamo Bay were getting scant media attention; that morning, a network of domestic surveillance drones had come to light. That evening, with all hopes of a Sopranos feature film gone, I realized the extent to which the actions of the characters in the show would become ridiculous, given the newly-revealed magnitude of our digital security state. Many of the scenes in The Sopranos (or the Godfather films, for that matter) may be inherently different, based on our passive and collective participation in willing and unbeknownst-to-us networks of information. Gandolfini had been on vacation in Italy; it was following a meal of fried shrimp, when the actor retired to his six-hundred-dollars-a-night hotel room, that his heart simply gave out, at age fifty-one.  Recognizing that the final moments of the last episode of The Sopranos—his last look over his shoulder, as a familiar and hopeful rock anthem played—would be the last time I ‘saw’ Tony is itself a challenge: in this relatively-heroless post-industrial society, what power might the strongest of us come to ascertain? The psychological torment of being ‘always on call’ in order to protect and provide for his family become as much a part of Tony Soprano’s downfall as the external forces at work in his environment. It hasn’t mattered for a long time, whether my theory that the long-forgotten and unresolved plot line involving the Russian mob in season four is actually what comes through the door of the diner, at the abruptly-truncated ending of the show. Underwater and under surveillance as much as Tony ever was, we are capable of swimming because we have to be, in order to provide the best conditions possible for those we love and care about-- always bearing the hope that the valuable possession we mistakeningly left behind on the street corner is still there upon our return, and that conditions will prevail, and simultaneously, that we will survive the walk down that street today. 

Two days after Gandolfini’s passing, I was at a critical pedagogy conference hosted by Manhattanville College, where the keynote speaker was 1960s radical-turned-educator Bill Ayers. While the institution did not especially tout or publicize the controversial figure’s appearance on its website, the Masters of Fine Arts program hosted a two-day gathering that focused remarkably on writing, as a means of establishing a more clear understanding of one’s effective work and role in the world. In his talk, Ayers—the 1997 Chicago Citizen of the Year, and a recently-retired professor at the University of Chicago—spoke generally, about discovering the motivation within oneself, to change the world. Much of the language used by Bill Ayers sounds like it could be taken from the New Jersey Star Ledger’s top ten Tony Soprano quotes (the Star Ledger was the paper Tony retrieved each morning from his driveway, until he stops the practice early in season six, due to constant interactions with the government surveillance truck parked on the street): 

 

“you can’t act ethically if you don’t open your eyes”—“fight to change yourself as you fight to change the world”—a “blizzard of labels frames our thinking”—the “clichés with which we communicate”—“act on the world, in order to learn”—“the dogma of common sense”—“privilege anaesthetizes you”-- “being conventional is not the same thing as being ethical”—“whenever you settle, you know you’re wrong.” 

Aside from making jokes about drones outside the window that nobody laughed at, Ayers challenged the few dozen writers and teachers in attendance, to follow rules established by Mary Oliver, in a terse list-of-advice poem: pay attention, be astonished, tell others about it, and, Ayers added, doubt and question what is discovered. One key adversity to be better recognized, according to Ayers, is our use of language; without providing much specific comment on the media (interestingly, as Ayers’ comment on Obama deserving to be brought up on “war crimes” had gained the attention of the Drudge Report earlier in the week), Ayers described the language of power and influence as being suspended between poetry and narrative, relatively inaccessible to many sectors of society. While nobody at the conference spoke of George Orwell, Bill Ayers drew the crowd’s attention to the importance and legacy of the1964 Freedom School Curriculum, calling for its use in public classrooms, as a means of confronting both the “questions and contradictions” that continue to pervade our communities. Both the “questions and contradictions”—about where we came from, and where we are going—will save us, said Ayers. “The contradictions will save us.” In one small example of new ethics of social responsibility, he praised then-governor Mike Huckabee’s initiative, to print every public school student’s Body Mass Index on their report cards; when challenged by a difficult question from the crowd to speak more about how this initiative would promote community, Ayers drew connections to Michelle Obama’s nutrition programs in schools, but also noted the important question, of “who owns the foodservice contract?” Asking critical questions to existing structures of class and power is a skill many of us may seek to hone. To what extent may any individual resign to a selective blindness, to ignore the challenges of connection and community in society—as Tony was able to accomplish, in his relationship with his mother, his wife, his business associates, and the public at large?

One of the most resonant episodes of The Sopranos involves a brutal portrait of ‘vulture’ capitalism: a degenerate gambler insists on his inclusion in Tony’s high stakes, private game (at which Frank Sinatra, Jr. makes a cameo), and, extended a line of credit far beyond his means by one of Tony’s crew, the guy loses not only his daughter’s college fund, but ownership of his successful ‘big-box’ sporting goods store franchise. By the end of the episode, the business’ lines of credit have been far overextended (Paulie Walnuts grins as he carries cases of imported wine, delivered to the store), the inventory liquidated, and the hulking shell of the store left empty. The guy leaves his wife and child, heading to Las Vegas. Across all seasons of The Sopranos, no character extends a line of credit ('points') that even comes close to being as much as many credit card companies and private lenders are willing and able to charge: by direct mail, some organizations located on native reservations located within the United States have started advertising lines of credit and immediate loans at percentage rates of 200% or more. Separate arguments in favor of capitalist, corporate responsibility, and in recognition and full scrutiny of a global system of economic inequality, are needed, to be refined, challenged, and revised; also, individuals must assert themselves, their beliefs and ethics, through making choices that will sustain them, as they act on their own behalf, and, at times, on behalf of their community. We must all commit to living beyond our mere achievement of maintaining a quiet desperation or ‘passionate intensity.’ But we must also honor those generations before us, and understand that the power dynamics established by the Bill of Rights may not yet have been distributed equally, and that we—through our action of residency alone—are individually and collectively integral to helping define the next manifestation of this democracy, more perfect or not. Like James Gandolfini’s character Tony Soprano, we to learn to stop teetering between humility and heroics, lest our fear and panic cripple us, but to be bold, as we seek better understanding how our actions affect and impact those around us, and our neighbors, and characterize the legacy that will be the paths we trod on now. Despite foreclosures, insolvency, and economic viability, it will be our children, and their children, that will be each other’s neighbors, in total the next group to transition into, and live out long days beneath, the roofs of these little pink, blue, green, black, white, and yellow houses. And they, and we, will probably live as well within webs and networks we have yet to imagine.

The Superhero Sandbox!

 

The Superhero Sandbox is a weekly radio program hosted by Chris Smith, and available for streaming live at royaltonradio.org. In addition to drawing from his volumous library of vinyl, Chris will feature local and self-produced recordings, choral singing, a few moments from a choice jam band, and much more.

Royalton Community Radio is a non-profit community organization that provides central Vermont (and the world) with commercial-free programming and music. For more information-- and to access the free, live stream-- visit royaltonradio.org

To follow the live Twitter stream of album art and media images during the Superhero Sandbox program, follow @SuperheroRadio.

 

Rest In Peace Richie Havens

Amidst tragedies both foreign and domestic, April has continued its mean streak of cultural cruelty, claiming in its wake Jonathan Winters, the rightful heir to not only Robin Williams’ manic spasms, but much of modern comedy; both Phil Ramone and Andy Johns, two gentlemen responsible for the production of most of what we call rock and roll; and on Earth Day, musical/spiritual guru Richie Havens, whose eternal touring began long before his endearing and raucous performance at Woodstock, in the coffee houses of Greenwich Village, among the likes of Bob Zimmerman and Joan Baez. 

I was an awkward fifteen years old when my Boy Scout Troop’s Assistant Scoutmaster Randall Sampson—who had been to Woodstock, before settling down with a wife and children in suburban Delaware County, PA--  offered to take me to a concert at West Chester University, where he was serving as fire marshal, and had scored free tickets. I hadn’t had many concert experiences, but was excited to see someone who performed on stage at Woodstock: the man who, decades prior, needed a matchbook to strum furiously about “Freedom,” and whose voice and style was a rhythmic blur. Appearing on the small stage at WCU, Richie Havens was larger than life, a towering figure draped in cloth and beads, bearded. If he looked to me then as some shaman from the 1960s, as I have grown he has become a celebrity of cultural and political validity and sustainability: a singer and songwriter who, through forty-five years of relentless touring and promotion, changed minds and promoted peace through music, without selling out (a few commercial jingles in the early 1980s can't count, compared to the corporate endeavors of his contemporaries). At that show, at fifteen years old, I marveled at his ability to make heavy percussive use of the acoustic guitar, chopping away with fury and ease. He was keenly aware of his audience, their reactions, and a performer’s necessary skill, in establishing a personal connection—as people, former children, still seeking answers, and still interested in the ability to daydream. He sang from the catalog of his generation: Dylan, James Taylor, Joni Mitchell, The Beatles, and his own compositions, with transitions built of fables and lore, ever one step away from Kerouac-style interpersonal rambles, but morality tales from a time and place more revolutionary than my own, it seemed. At the set break, Randall and I encountered him the hall, just as he was about to go back onstage: he hurriedly signed my ticket, ‘a friend forever.’ As an encore that night, Havens took a musical risk I will forever admire and never forget: he emerged without his accompanying guitarist and without his own acoustic, but held to the microphone a small box, emitting a monotone feedback tone. To this drone he chanted, nearly monk-like, the Pink Floyd anthem “On The Turning Away.” From that moment on, Richie Havens established for me a level of performance, and means by which one might establish a connection between music and its listener, unlike  any I had previously known.

[my ticket stub, from my first Richie Havens show]

Of those on my See-Before-They-Die-Appeared-At-Woodstock roster (that includes Cocker, Melanie, Phil Lesh, and John Sebastian), only one started their own record label following their immense success onstage: Richie Havens departed from Verve and started his own label, Stormy Forest. He would release almost two dozen original albums during his career, as well as appear in a number of films. His potent political opinions delivered onstage appeared to be not part of his act, but rather the very reason for it: I remember once hearing his introduction to “Here Comes the Sun” include striking speculation about the dawning of a new peace in the middle east, a peace derived from means other than the military actions that were taking place in Iraq and Afghanistan. Like the troubadours of old, Havens’ legacy might be best described by those who attended his live performances, during which his strumming and songs sandwiched his soft-spoken recollections and narratives, as he wove his own history and the history of his generation into a hopeful present tense, if not a blissful and present-day idealism. Drawing from the common musical memories of that Woodstock generation—the Dylan, Baez, and Joplin references, as well as allusions to a whole host of forgotten characters from the founding generation of popular singer-songwriters—Havens serenaded crowds worldwide, consistently, for forty-five years before retiring from the road.

[photo found via Google]

Over the past dozen years, I have tracked down many of his original vinyl releases (and played his version of “Strawberry Fields Forever” last Thursday on my radio program), and in 2003 scored a ¼” reel-to-reel transcription of his Richie Havens on Stage album, from a college radio station’s discarded library. But none of these recordings may ever match the expressive, musical majesty and commanding presence Havens brought with him to the stage: I was lucky enough to see him at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the Paramount Theater in Rutland, Vermont, and the Barre Opera House in Barre, Vermont, in 2009, one of his final tours. I met him a final time then, became tongue-tied as I shook his massive and calloused hand, thanked him for the heartfelt show. If I had the chance now, I would thank Richie Havens not only for devoting his life to the promotion of music, but for pursuing a craft so heartedly and so vigorously as to set a new example and expectation of the creative and popular artist: that if your voice is as sweet as Tupelo Honey, an expectation or even obligation exists, that one needs to forever relish in the sharing of their gift, with the world at large.

How Do You Spell AWP?

The AWP Conference took downtown Boston by storm, and during one: the largest gathering ever of its kind took place at the Hynes Convention Center over the later half of a week in early March, 2013. In Chicago the year prior, and booked for Seattle in 2014, the Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ annual gathering was a carnival of meditative poets, nonfiction essayists who gazed longingly onto the snowy streets of Boston, and book publishers, both large and small. Mostly, however, the critical mass of attendees were MFA in Creative Writing programs, their students and devotees.

Being “pre-MFA” was not, in my circles, a common social or academic moniker, while I earned my Masters of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Goddard College (’04). Competition for perspective creative writers, childrens’ book authors, and  only the most rarefied online nonfiction bloggers was relegated to the ad space available in Poets and Writers magazine. Now, nearly ten years after my adventure in the low-residency study of creative written expression, almost every major sponsor of this conference bore those esteemed initials—including the University of Florida at Tampa, whose admissions strategy consists (in part) of sponsoring the conference name badge lanyards, that everyone had a chance to be a walking advertisement for a specific degree program.

Not to be mistaken for an academic conference, the AWP seeks an audience built of individuals from every side of the higher ed fence: professors, administrators, and educators are welcome, as are undergraduate and graduate students, however undeclared, unrequited, or undecided. Those who dwell far outside of any canonizing academy are warmly welcome as well: from publishers to small press operators, from purveyors of representative creative objects to the purposeless and the poetic. The primary audience of the AWP is intended to be “writers”—those who profess to record, through acts of written (or maybe not) expression their own, or others’, experiences. This conception of audience is diluted by the lack of that actual action: when I saw someone putting words in a sequence, they were usually doing it virtually, digitally, upon a handheld device. I saw few people jotting notes, even during the hour-and-a-half sessions; those that were writing by hand were doing so with their own supplies (attendees received no notebook—not even a pen—in canvas tote bags upon arrival). Just about all of those that used mobile devices chose Apple—be it for immediate credit card transactions, or for checking Facebook during sluggish moments.

In the sea of commerce and promotion that was the three halls’ worth of Book Fair, one traditional creative writing journal championed its release of a digital edition and mobile app device, exclusively for the iOS; I had a good-natured exchange with the press’ representative about the ethics of open-source programming, rallying for the Android operating system as a less-nefarious alternative than supporting Apple’s technological monarchy.

My MFA was my last degree completed via a dial-up Internet connection: transferring data, and mere ‘browsing’ was a premeditated, intentional condition in my writing process, one that could be turned off, in every traditional sense. Today, such analog isolation is a rare condition, treatable: there were, among the hundreds of booths at the Book Fair, representations of literal basement printing presses and their products, including limited-edition chapbooks, bookmarks, and printing techniques unavailable on any common laser printer. In a few conversations, I found supporters of the New Analog Aesthetic: what drives our need for physical, printed writing may be all too close to what is driving the new popularity for vinyl records. I saw no one wearing Google Glass at the AWP Conference, though its debut was a scant few weeks away, at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas; perhaps more remarkable was that the AWP either could not afford or did not consider creating a mobile device application to accommodate the volumes of scheduling information and registration materials. Instead, a glossy book contained as many flashy ads featuring introspective writer-candidates happily pursuing an advanced degree.

Across over twelve thousand participants, a spectrum of attention-grabbing and attention-delivering will no doubt develop: given Boston’s erudite urbanite climate, there were no doubt as many events, readings, and conversations happening outside of the Hynes as within. Presses—including Dave Eggers’ McSweeny’s, the New York-based outfit that has somehow won control of the throttle that steers the ultra-creative, ultra-cool publishing world—hosted off-site readings; in the evenings, MFA programs hosted cash-bar receptions inside and outside of the Hynes. While it’s worth wondering if there is a growing technological solidarity developing across different populations of writing conference attendees, it’s also worth noting that a number of individuals roamed the halls and presentations, clearly outside of any virtual blizzard of tweets, posts, and other time-wasters. Two members of this latter category were Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney, superstars from a generation long-removed from the hip and the young at the AWP. It was majestic to see over ten thousand make it back from dinner and fill a chasm of an auditorium, in time to hear two poets speak of the noble truths they’ve discovered, a conversation that, at its best, included Walcott’s dismissal of monetary gain through pursuit of his craft (“career was an obscene word I hesitate to use even now”), and at worst, left Heaney describing himself as more of a classical antique than one might have imagined (Gerard Manley Hopkins over Eliot; Robert Lowell’s nickname was Cal, short for ‘Caligula’). I couldn’t help but wonder if there were literary ‘darlings’ driving the conversation writ large at AWP; this came through finding not only the stark difference of ego between Richard Russo and Amy Bloom on Friday night, but through the near-total dismissal of some of my favorite authors: while my experience was not comprehensive, I saw no mention in any panel or Book Fair booth, of Ginsberg, Baraka, Williams, Brautigan, Vonnegut, Irving, Patchen, Whitman, Paley, or Dos Passos. I bought Ferlinghetti’s latest, telling the New Directions representative “this crowd should be at this man’s feet,” not just for his poetic accomplishments, but his forging a place for poetry as useful and lawful political speech. Other terms not overheard at AWP include: interdisciplinary, gun control, bipartisanship, brinksmanship, environmentalism, song lyrics, economic rights, 50 Shades of Grey, the closing of Borders Books and Music. Next month’s New York-based ASJA is one of the AWP’s main competitors, and has only two sponsors: Barnes and Noble and Google, two corporations that seek to unseat Amazon’s grip on the throttle of word-based web commerce. Apple was not a sponsor of the AWP, but they should have been, or at least should have sent a photographer: I saw caught more than a few glimpses of aspiring youthful hipsters locating themselves in specific dramatic  poses, silhouetted by the raging wind and snow beyond massive windows, looking deeply and with great contemplation, into either their twelve-pound conference directory or into their high definition touch screens, to read their email, each other’s blogs, the news, Facebook, or to book their next flight or ticket to their next non-virtual destination, be it a secluded residency, meeting of hipster egos, or collaborative poetic geocache (Kenneth Calhoun: in the future, “programming and storytelling are going to become inseparable”).