Kind of Blue

I have been half-assedly working on a post about work songs, thinking about how music was once used to set the pace of work, to editorialize on that work, and to make it maybe a little less horrible.

Then yesterday happened and (at least) two more unarmed black men were shot by police. For selling CDs, for getting out his ID, for being black.

When you look at the music of the USA, there’s not much of it that’s untouched by the presence of a people stolen from Africa, making the best of the very worst. For the creation of America’s highest unique music form, jazz, we’ve been rewarded by being made the face of violence, the face of criminality, the face of poverty. Made the most disposable of communities.

On a day like this, and all the other days like this, all I can do is listen to Miles.

The Waterboys, “This Is The Sea”

The first time I’d ever heard the Waterboys was a few months ago. When the playlist rolled around to “This Is The Sea,” the title track of their 1985 album, I could only think of one thing: why hasn’t U2 covered this? They’d be perfectly suited. Bono’s voice is in the same range as Mike Scott’s, and he could put the same yearning into his delivery. The Edge and Adam Clayton would know how to make a rolling, grand sound of their own devising.

Turns out that Mike Scott would probably punch me for saying that. He was not interested in having work U2 would cover. He’s always been interested in being better than U2.  This Is The Sea was their claim to that title. While U2 was still futzing around with Eno/Lanois textures on The Unforgettable Fire, producing pieces that were largely simple sing-along anthems (“Pride (In The Name of Love),” “Bad”) or impressionistic canvases (“Elvis Presley and America,” “Promenade”), Scott and his bandmates claimed a sound that was big, bold, textured, and haunting.

“Was there competition between us? Bloody hell, yes,” Scott told Uncut in 2013. “They were the big band in town – we wanted to depose them. I thought we wrote better songs and we could play better and we could make magic on the head of a pin – they needed six artic[ulated] trucks to do it.”

But perhaps this interview in Three Monkeys Online is Scott’s most forceful take on the subject: “I was always much more in a Bob Dylan or Neil Young mould. You’d never have been able to squeeze them into the sort of route that those ’80s bands went, and you couldn’t squeeze me into it either, and anybody who thought that they could isn’t really taking a clear look at it. It was one of the most stupid things that I’ve ever heard, that the Waterboys could have been the next U2 – absolute rubbish! [almost spitting].”

I’m sorry, Mike. You could have fooled me.

Brothers & Summer Music

This weekend, we went up to the Kate Wolf Festival, which is this 21 year-old music festival up in Mendocino County.  Wolf was a singer-songwriter and widely influential in the smallish world of folk music. Lots of performers cover her songs. She toured with Utah Phillips. She died at the age of 44 of leukemia.

The festival is four days of music, with a mix of bands. Some are just known within the folk music community. But there is always one or two headliners. This year it was Neko Case, k.d. lang, and Laura Viers, who are on tour for their new album (gonna review that soon). Harry Belafonte was supposed to be there, but he has pneumonia, so they had Little Anthony and the Imperials instead.

On Friday afternoon, we walked over the the main stage meadow for the show. The meadow is hot, hot, hot by mid-afternoon, but I want to hear Dave and Phil Alvin and their band, The Guilty Ones. I have been listening a lot to the Big Bill Broonzy album the Alvins did together a couple of years ago, Common Ground. It’s all Broonzy’s lazy good-humored blues, songs like “The Stuff They Call Money” sly, rocking, Chicago-style blues. The brothers different voices prowl around each other, Phil’s punchy tenor and Dave’s baritone growl.

It was a great set, but I was getting thirsty. I walked off to find something cold to drink and as I was getting to the back of the meadow, the band started X’s “The Fourth of July.”  I started singing along.

Where the Broonzy song is a playful recitation of broke-ass incidents, X’s song is a short story in just over four minutes. I feel the sadness and hope in the narrator’s voice. It’s so Californian.  And in that dusty moment, it’s absolutely perfect.

I wasn’t ever a Blasters fan, if you weren’t either, just listen to this. You will be.

A Latina Tween Girl Plays The Blues.

When I was 11 years old my father died.  He died in our living room at 38 years of age. he collapsed from an enlarged heart and died as his children watched including myself.  I learned a few months later that the cause of death was cardiomyopathy.  How he developed this condition unbeknownst to him and his entire family, including me, is still a mystery.  During that year after his death, I was isolated, sad and alone and I watched way too much TV.  My mother was in a haze while I laid on the couch way too much for my own good.  She let me, there wasn’t much else she could do.

Somehow through my endless channel surfing, I came upon Vh1.  These were the days in the late 80s when music videos were still very much in rotation on cable.  Vh1 at that time was the adult contemporary music video station.  It was also the mellow classic rock and baby boomer nostalgia music video station. In the late 80s Bonnie Raitt was making a comeback and Vh1 played her music videos in heavy rotation. I remember watching her video for A Thing Called Love for the first time and falling absolutely in love with her slide guitar playing.  I watched Vh1 Some more and stumbled upon The Allman Brothers, they must’ve had some nostalgic music special on at some point.  That tone, that deep soul cry of sadness and suffering that I later found out to be the blues grabbed me. Sometimes there was an inner sense of fun amid all that sadness too, not every blues song was sad but most of them I found knew a thing or two about life – this knowledge comforted me.  Somewhere in there I ended up listening to Stevie Ray Vaughn and I don’t even remember now how I discovered him but I did. My heart broke when he died.  I was only 13 when he passed

During my biggest years of tween girl blues fandom, I was knee deep into my grief from my father’s death and also stuck in my alienation as the derided fat girl at middle school.  It was the blues that understood my pain and suffering and somehow gave meaning to my life.  At the time I did not know the history of the blues. I did not know it’s history rooted in the African-American community of the deep south, pre-civil rights era especially.  I later learned about the theft of this music by white musicians. I eventually learned about black blues musicians working in obscurity while white people like Led Zeppelin reveled in copying the blues and made millions.     At the time though, in my little girl innocence, It just felt so good to listen to this deep knowing, the wisdom of living through unbearable difficulties.  I can’t even say how it grabbed me.  My soul just knew that this was my music.

As I grew older I ventured into all types of music genres and went to many concerts and loved music. As I explored other genres and eventually stopped listening to so much blues.  But it never completely left me. Even though I don’t listen to much blues music these days but I am honored to live during the time when I came listen to contemporary blues-based artists like The Black Keys, Alabama Shakes and Gary Clark Jr.  – the influence of the blues speaks through their music and it still speaks to me.

Dad’s Album

It’s June. (Is it still June?) Father’s Day is on the horizon or in the rear view mirror. There are years when I don’t think about it because, well because my dad died in 1998. It’s not that I’m altogether used to his being gone, but it’s a fact now, not an active grief. I miss him still, but not every day, probably not even every month now.

Aside from all the other good things that a dad can be in your life, my father is the reason that I love music so much and why I listen to a lot of different music. Where he got it, I have no idea. My grandmother was never much for music that I noticed. He grew up an only child, the only boy, in NYC for a lot of the time and in what was then farm country, Pauling, NY, for a while when my grandmother worked as a cook for a family up there. I remember two stories about the time in Pauling. Once that he was late for a birthday party because there was a snake in the road and the snake didn’t move for a couple of hours and neither did my dad. The second story was about swapping a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for a possum sandwich. (Dad felt he got the worst part of the deal.)

He was mainly a city boy though. He and my mom met at a dance in the late forties when jazz was still mainly a dance genre, though bop was boiling away there in the background. Jazz was probably the music I associate most with him, especially the cool jazz of the late fifties and early sixties. Music like Ahmad Jamal’s version of Poiciana, like Gerry Mulligan’s Festive Minor, and of course all things Brubeck.

He also liked silly things like Louis Jordan’s Caldonia and he bought Belafonte’s albums which introduced us to calypso and to South African music via Miriam Makeba. I think he got introduced to a lot of things at work, Bell Labs. That’s likely how he discovered Gilbert and Sullivan, but we had all the D’Oyly Carte recordings. The D’Oyly Carte were just wrapping up their massive monaural recording in the late 1950s and rolled out stereo recordings (with all the dialog) at the end of the decade, through the 1960s. My sister and I sang along to all of that silly, clever (sometimes racist) music.

I like to think his love for Gould’s Bach piano recordings was all his own. The intricacy, the order, even the coolness, that’s all my dad. I caught the bug and “borrowed” his copy of The Well-Tempered Clavier when I went off to college. Gould is considered eccentric now (he was) and no longer the standard for Bach performance. His slightly swung, clearly voiced fugues, building these icy ziggurats, that’s Bach for me.

Thanks, Dad.

for Ehrman William Perry

Why Disco

The first post I was going to write was about how everybody, I mean everybody, loves Motown and examine what that meant for a music and style emerging right in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement. But the events in Orlando changed that.

When people talk about disco now, it’s often as this weird period of huge bell bottoms, cropped tops, mirror balls, and music that was a irresistible blend of soul, funk, salsa, and pop. They think about John Travolta and that white suit. They think disco died sometime in the 1980s.

Disco never died. It morphed into House Music and became the progenitor of every EDM form that’s sprouted, flowered, and died ever since.But I want to write about disco right now because it was the music of gay bars in the 1970s.

In 1974, I’d moved to San Francisco with a good friend. She got a job as a cook and I got a job as a nanny. We were both live-in servants for rich families in Pacific Heights. It was about as bad as you can expect, imperious kids, absent parents, ridiculous hours (basically from 6 in the morning until 10 at night). After ten though, we’d go out and we’d go out to The City. The City was a huge dance club, at Montgomery and Broadway. It was about 99% gay men, with a sprinkling of women who came to dance. And we danced and danced and danced until the club closed and we had to drag ourselves home to grab maybe four hours sleep before the day started.

Dancing to disco at The City was all about sex. It was about heat and sweat and a world without limits, at least for the time you were on the dance floor. It was about living your desires openly, at a time when being gay was only safe in a couple of places, even in San Francisco.

No one gave better voice to that than Sylvester.

A member of the wildly improvisational and uneven Cockettes, Sylvester sang about lust, funk, and.realness. So in memory of the people shot in Orlando and in celebration of queerness in all its forms, let’s funk.

Disco, Punk, Orlando, and Us

In the years when disco first flourished in New York and Miami, I was a high-school punk and I hated disco in the same unreasoning way I hated the Grateful Dead. For me, punk was the music of rebellion and refusal, the music for angry girls who didn’t want to put on high heels and glittery makeup, who weren’t going to smile as we whirled around in graceful unison. It was the music for me. If I had been paying attention, I might have noticed that the jocks, deadheads, stoners and preppies for whom I had so much disdain hated disco too. In fact, lots of white people hated disco. They organized boycotts of radio stations that played disco music as part of their Top 40 programming. They wore their Disco Sucks teeshirts proudly. They gathered in their thousands and tens of thousands to burn disco records in Boston, Chicago, and smaller cities; one disco bonfire in July 1979 damaged Cominsky Park’s field so badly that a Cubs game had to be cancelled.

In my home town, our punk scene was tiny and fragile. Like disco, punk styles enraged the kinds of people who could be enraged by gender nonconformity. We kept a wary eye on who walked in to the one club we had made our own, and we learned not to walk back from the bars alone. We made friends with the sex workers and junkies – most of them drag queens – who shared the club’s bathrooms and the sidewalks with us. And, because there were so few of us, we embraced a do-it-yourself ethos in which everyone contributed to the scene, one way or another.

For example, there was Forrest, who was a little older than the high-school punk crowd and so seemed like an adult to me. He sang songs he wrote for anyone who would listen but he supported himself by making and selling buttons – you know, the kinds of pins you added to your leather jacket, with slogans and pictures. For years afterward, I wore a Patti Smith button that Forrest had made. (Truthfully, I bought it long before I ever heard her music. It was her style that counted.) Forrest sold his wares most afternoons on a corner halfway between the bar where the music was and my father’s apartment where I stayed most nights, and my sister and our friends and I hung out with him there sometimes.

One afternoon, hanging out on the corner, I asked Forrest if he would make a Disco Sucks button for me. And Forrest – sweet, spacey, gentle Forrest – yelled at me. WHY WOULD I DO THAT? he said. ARE YOU A GODDAMN RACIST? ONLY RACISTS HATE DISCO!
I don’t remember how I responded. Probably I was all blustery and defensive. Probably I was a big jerk about it. You know how white people get. I was a fifteen-year-old white girl and I was as ignorant as a fifteen-year-old white girl could be.

But within a year, I was taking my first tentative steps into the only gay bar in my home town. And of course the music in that bar was the same as the music in  every gay bar everywhere: disco. I wasn’t yet ready to listen to it thoughtfully. Years later I could notice how disco inverted the rock instrumentation I was accustomed to. The high-pitched strum of the electric guitar carrying the rhythm while the bass guitar and low-pitched horns conveyed the melody, and women’s voices sang out their desires (“It’s raining men, hallelujah!”) while male singers positioned themselves as desirable objects (“You make me feel mighty real”):  truly queer music to a rock fan’s ears. But thanks to Forrest the Button Man’s willingness to engage with my racism, I was at least able to enter that bar with Chic and Sylvester on the jukebox; I couldn’t use my disdain for others’ tastes and styles to paper over my fear and self-loathing; I was able to imagine returning.

Long before there were sitcoms and community centers for us queers – as long ago as the early nineteenth century, as many historians have documented* – we gathered in bars and nightclubs, dance halls and discotheques. Those were, of course, spaces for sex, friendship, and romance. Often they were places where we could engage with each other across lines of class, generation, and race. And they were, simultaneously, spaces where we built our communities and defined our identities. I am going to go out to a solemn candlelight vigil tonight in honor of my sisters and brothers who died in Orlando last night. But you know what we should be doing? We should be dancing.

*ask me for a reading list. Go on, ask me.

Introducing Blue Thumb Music Collective

Blue Thumb Music Collective is five friends writing about the experience of being a music fan.

serenadingwords, or Sarah, is trying to figure out how all the music connects to all the other music and likes having companions on this journey. Her two largest playlists are ever-changing and are titled “New Stuff To Listen To” and “Old Stuff I Should Already Know.” Her favorite song is “Ultraviolet” by U2, with “Nightswimming” by REM a close second. She is a sucker for new Americana, pure electric guitar and synth timbres, pop songs in waltz time signatures, and joyous melodies. An editor by trade, Sarah will talk your ear off about all the different ways to use en dashes; her semicolons are frequent, but always properly placed.

lolaraincoat, or Anne, is the world’s only expert on the history of Mexican comic book censorship. It’s a living. A historian by training, a feminist by inclination, she believes that subtext is powerful, that putting facts in chronological order is magic, and that gossip is the best weapon of the weak. The Raincoats are her all-time favorites. Lately she’s been listening to the Julliard Quartet’s versions of late Shostakovich string quartets and a lot of old Mighty Clouds of Joy records. Like everyone who lives in Toronto, she has mixed feelings about Drake.

reneespins, or Renée, has been told that she has eclectic taste in music, which used to sound like a compliment, but now she’s not so sure. Her dad (you’ll probably hear more about her dad) bet her that she’d stop liking rock music by the time she was 25. He lost that bet (never paid up either). She hasn’t found a genre that she completely hates, though routinely gives the side-eye to a lot of singer-songwriters.  Renée is always amazed the emotional power of music and how people happily steal/borrow from each other’s cultures to amazing effect.

Eileen Ybarra is a thinker, writer, dreamer, meditation and dharma instructor, librarian, Chicana, Buddhist, feminist and a woman.  She’s from Los Angeles and is also a rabidly passionate music lover. She is partial to old soul music and old punk music but she also loves a lot of other musical genres too.

Laura is an international woman of mystery and punk rock notary who will be joining us soon. Watch this space.