[Video: one of the best cinematic commentaries on ignoring (and paying attention to) the wrong things turned 71 the other day. Above, its trailer -- complete with telephone commentary not actually in the film... and not showing its title character for even a single second.]
On a gray day, when the sun
has been abducted, and it’s chill
end-of-the-world weather,
I must be the sun.
I must be the one
to encourage the young
sidetracked physicist
working his father’s cash register
to come up with a law of nature
that says brain waves can change
the dismal sky. I must be the one
to remind the ginger plant
not to rest on the reputation
of its pungent roots, but to unveil
those buttery tendrils from the other world.
When the sky is an iron lid
I must be the one to simmer
in the piquant juices of possibility,
though the ingredients are unknown
and the day begins with a yawn.
I must issue forth a warmth
without discrimination, and any guarantee
it will come back to me.
On a dark day I must be willing
to keep my disposition light,
I have to be at the very least
one stray intact ray
of local energy, one small
but critical fraction
of illumination. Even on a day
that doesn’t look gray
but still lacks comfort or sense,
I have to be the sun,
I have to shine as if
sorry life itself depended on it.
I have to make all the difference.
Your problem is how you are going to spend this one and precious life you have been issued. Whether you’re going to spend it trying to look good and creating the illusion that you have power over circumstances, or whether you are going to taste it, enjoy it and find out the truth about who you are.
[Image(s): Water Liars. You'd never imagine that a couple of guys who look like this would
write, play, and sing so sweetly, would you?]
I don’t know how the duo who call themselves Water Liars came up with that name. I do know, however, that it’s the title of the first story in a collection by the late Mississippi writer Barry Hannah, 1978′s Airships. You can read the story here or here; briefly, it’s a first-person narrative of a man who’s come to the sudden awareness that he was not his wife’s, y’know, first. (In short order, he remembers that she wasn’t his, either — but he seems to dismiss this little dissonant factoid with ease, not to say convenience.)
Before coming together as Water Liars, the two guys – Justin Kinkel-Schuster and Andrew Bryant — had been performing alone or with other bands. For their first album, Phantom Limb, they just sort of shut themselves away in a room in a small Mississippi town, with a single microphone, their instruments, and a handful of songs. Among them, the lovely, haunting “Dog Eaten”:
Lyrics (if anyone can fill in the gap for me, I’d be grateful!):
Dog Eaten (by Water Liars)
The smallest hours of the morning,
When I was busy dreaming
Of tender-hearted girls
And the world without end
Forever and ever amen
My father was quietly takin’
The money I was makin’
From the dog-eaten wallet
He gave me that year
Our blood is our own but it does what it pleases and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrival and that’s no way to live this life
We lay on a Mexican blanket [...inaudible...] by a carillon and some roses
And I was an owl’s ghost
And died on the side of the road
She laid her head on my shoulder
She nibbled on my ear lobe
And that was about all
My blood was my own, it done what it pleased to, and there
Ain’t much more to say
I’m alive on the highway
Dead on arrivin’ and that’s no way to live this life
Whether or not Water Liars intended the connection, it’s not hard to trace a dotted line from Hannah’s story of broken, childish illusions to the sorry tale told by this song’s protagonist.
____________________________
P.S. From a good interview at No Depression (the speaker is Andrew Bryant):
Lately, my biggest influences have been writers. We all love music of all kinds. That’s should go without saying. But I’ve been really into stories and poetry lately. My favorite writer at the moment is a Mississippi writer named Barry Hannah. He wrote this book called Airships and it really shook me. He did his own thing, and he did from his gut. I’d never read anything like it.
I guess the connection between the band’s name and Hannah’s story isn’t so coincidental!
Update 2012-05-05: I’ve received a genial email from one of the members of Water Liars to “de-mystify a couple areas you touched on.” First up was a clarification of the lyrics (I’ve made that correction above). Second, no need to wonder further about the band’s name:
…we did in fact name ourselves after Barry Hannah’s “Water Liars”. It’s one of the best book-opening stories of all time, not to mention one of our favorite stories in one of our favorite books by one of our favorite writers of all time.
We got back last night from a blitz of a trip to Miami, having driven down there, stayed two fast nights, and then driven back (the latter by way of Sarosota, which made the return a twelve-hour marathon). So I’m still reeling a little.*
This caps off a crazy month-long period of household repairs and retrofitting and entertaining guests and… And we’re not quite out of the woods yet — another trip (the annual New Orleans jaunt) comes up in a few weeks. But for now I also look forward to getting back into the swing of things (such as it is, and such as they are) online. Expect a few sputters and coughs from the old engine here while I engage in virile (albeit 100% metaphorical) activities like replacing the plugs and points, cleaning out the carburetor, adjusting the timing chain, flushing the radiator, wiping axle grease from my hands, cussing at the old alternator (which hasn’t worked reliably since I bought the goddam thing at eBay), swilling Budweiser while framed in the sunset light streaming in from the mouth of the garage, and wolf-whistling female passersby.
I’ve got a lot — a lot – of catching up to do at your places, too.
_____________________
* After each of the last few times we’ve taken long road trips, I’ve spent the next day or so unconsciously certain that some sort of heavy machinery is operating, without ceasing, in our neighborhood, down here at the end of our quiet suburban cul-de-sac, if not actually in our house. The floors and walls vibrate, you know; they thrum with industry. And then I realize that the vibrations are those of a six-cylinder rental car with good steel-belted tires, running for hours over unbroken stretches of limited-access-highway pavement. I previously wrote about the so-called Hroom Effect™ about three years ago.
Not a few, but everyone, makes art. There is no art beyond the sensibility of the people confronting it: art is an interaction between object and beholder. The idea of a human being forced to concede the superiority of a work of art without in fact being able to participate in judging that quality is a surrealistic idea. In my area, the coyotes are still the best poets.
In a dream I meet
my dead friend. He has,
I know, gone long and far,
and yet he is the same
for the dead are changeless.
They grow no older.
It is I who have changed,
grown strange to what I was.
Yet I, the changed one,
ask: “How you been?”
He grins and looks at me.
“I been eating peaches
off some mighty fine trees.”
[The Band (circa 1969), left to right: Richard Manuel, Levon Helm, Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Robbie Robertson]
I‘ve posted about The Band exactly once, and barely then — tacking “All La Glory” onto the end of a whiskey river Friday post in December, 2008. I’ve not been ignoring them offline; in fact, as with (to take one example from a whole ‘nother musical universe) Madeleine Peyroux, I sometimes go for weeks listening to no one else. Artists like these (whatever “like these” means!) just sort of tingle in resonant sympathy with something inside me. But personal taste isn’t always something you can expect others to share, and I try hard not to overplay them here.
The death last week of Levon Helm, The Band’s drummer and probably its signature vocalist, gave a lot of casual (and otherwise) listeners an excuse to dust off the group’s albums for a listen. And this does seem like a good occasion to mention The Band again.
Whether the work of the moment is writing, editing, Web work, or software, I’ve always found their music difficult to work to; its drive and its characteristic electrified-hillbilly sound make it push to the forefront of my conscious mind — especially in rollicking favorites like “Rag Mama Rag” and “Time to Kill.” (Helm’s voice in particular punches through, very hard not to attend to.) So when I’m working, you won’t usually find those numbers in rotation. What you’ll find instead is the quieter ballads, for which the lead singer was often Richard Manuel or Rick Danko. “All La Glory,” from that long-ago post here, was one such. Right up there with it is today’s choice, “Rockin’ Chair.”
The title apparently name-checks both a Hoagy Carmichael tune from 1929 and — more of a stretch if you ask me — the (common but unofficial) title of a 1962 blues album by Howlin’ Wolf. The Band’s song (written, like most of their music, by Robbie Robertson) is deceptively simple: an old-timer looks back, wistfully, on his life. Apparently a sailor, he drifts back and forth between being at sea and wishing he were home, and being at home and wishing he were aboard again.
But the confusion between where the narrator is and where he wants to be masks a deep subtlety — a shifting chiaroscuro of metaphor overlaid on statements of apparent fact. The old sailor (with his companion “Ragtime” Willie Boy) is gripped by confusion himself, fading in and out between past and present; he seems almost to trail off into frightened, hallucinatory dementia, as though babbling I’m dying! I’m not ready to die! I’m so ready to die! Willie! Willie!, the Flying Dutchman, Willie!…
Levon Helm didn’t sing lead on this song, simply providing harmony (with the others) for Richard Manuel’s voice at its most wistful. Even in photos in which he’s smiling (like the one on this page), Manuel seemed to me to bear a mantle of sadness on his shoulders. In the photo which tops this post, that’s him on the left — the only one not dressed in dark clothing, but that doesn’t make him “lighter”; his demeanor appears almost fearful. This is just 20-20 hindsight conjecture, though: he spent much of his offstage life plagued by depression and substance-abuse problems, especially with alcohol. (His drink of choice: Grand Marnier. Wikipedia says that he maxed out at an average of about eight bottles a day. And reportedly, when he left one residence in 1976 the people who cleaned up afterwards had two thousand empty Grand Marnier bottles to dispose of. One doubts that these were the 50-ml “minis.”) By the time The Band filmed their farewell concert for Martin Scorsese’s The Last Waltz, in 1978, Manuel could barely sustain his sweet but heartbreaking voice through more than a few songs. He committed suicide in 1986. He was then on tour with The Band, reunited (without Robertson), and had just left Levon Helm’s motel room; indeed, Helm and Danko had to lift him down from the bathtub shower rod where he’d hanged himself (I can’t even imagine the horror).
Band members and others always insisted it had to have been an accident, or maybe a bad joke gone wrong. (According to People Magazine, Helm told police, “I don’t know what got crosswise in his mind between leaving the foot of my bed and going into his own bathroom.”) But it’s hard for an outsider, at least, not to picture him asea and drifting, pushin’ age forty-three, suddenly dashed on some reef rearing up out of the fog.
Here’s “Rockin’ Chair”:
[Below, click Play button to begin Rockin' Chair. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:45 long.]
Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Addendum: I just learned of a BBC documentary, an hour-plus in length, about the making of The Band, the album on which “Rockin’ Chair” first appeared. The entire documentary (first released in the UK on VHS in 1997) is available at YouTube in a single clip; here it is, set up to start playing at the moment about 34-1/2 minutes in, where they start discussing this song. Speakers include Levon Helm, John Simon (one of the album’s producers), Robbie Robertson, and Rick Danko:
The documentary is still available in the US on DVD.
____________________________________
Minor gripe: the only thing marring this song, I believe, is the way it ends. Others (including many other fans) have commented that The Band’s songs often don’t conclude, so much as plain-old stop; and this is particularly egregious in “Rockin’ Chair.” Compounding the weird abruptness of the close is the mandolin (wielded by Helm, I think), which plucks out something very much like a playful Shave-and-a-haircut, two bits! rhythm completely at odds with the elegiac melody and loose, ropy lyrics which preceded it. (At the end of that segment of the video clip I added above, Helm asks producer John Simon, How’d we come up with that Chinese ending?!? Simon replies, I don’t know. Makes at least three of us then!
Most of us stand poised at the edge of brilliance, haunted by the knowledge of our proximity, yet still demonstrably on the wrong side of the line, our dealings with reality undermined by a range of minor yet critical psychological flaws (a little too much optimism, an unprocessed rebelliousness, a fatal impatience or sentimentality). We are like an exquisite high-speed aircraft which for lack of a tiny part is left stranded beside the runway, rendered slower than a tractor or a bicycle.
A man is walking in a field
and everywhere at his feet
in the short grass of April
the small purple violets
are in bloom. As the man walks
the ground drops away,
the sunlight of day becomes
a sort of darkness in which
the lights of the flowers rise
up around him like
fireflies or stars in a sort
of sky through which he walks.
I first encountered the name Derek Trucks within a few years after I’d moved down here. Some kid was doing a show at a club in town — an amazing blues guitarist, said the newspaper preview, and only a teenager: 14 years old or so. How amazing? He’d toured with Buddy Guy. He’d performed with the Allman Brothers. The kid was hot.
[Aside: I've got something like a third- or fourth-order connection to him, too. His uncle, Butch Trucks, is the drummer for the Allmans. When Butch was in elementary school, he attended a dance with my Missus-to-Be on his arm -- his very first date.]
Susan Tedeschi has had some kind of career of her own, dating back to her childhood. She grew up listening to blues and gospel music, and eventually played Austin City Limits and Lilith Fair. (Her voice, says Wikipedia, has been described as a blend of Bonnie Raitt and Janis Joplin. I don’t believe even that does it justice.) She also toured with the Rolling Stones, B.B. King, Bob Dylan, and, well, the Allman Brothers.
Trucks and Tedeschi married in 2001, and continued their separate careers. Recently, wanting to minimize their kids’ exposure a typical touring-musician family’s lifestyle, they set up a studio in Jacksonville, FL, and formed their own band, the Tedeschi Trucks Band. Their first album, Revelator, came out last June; it’s a killer, and I’d intended with this post to cover a couple of tracks from it for you.
But in doing a little research about it I stumbled on the above recent performance on the PBS special In Performance at the White House: Red, White, and Blues. Tedeschi and Warren Haynes share the vocals while Trucks’s slide guitar tears up the instrumental lead, on “I’d Rather Go Blind.”
The song itself, co-written and first recorded by Etta James in 1968, holds legendary status as one of the best, most successful B-side recordings in pop-music history. The A side was an even bigger hit, “Tell Mama.” In her autobiography, Rage to Survive, James says that she never liked “Tell Mama.” (“I didn’t like being cast in the role of the Great Earth Mother, the one you come to for comfort and easy sex.”) But about “I’d Rather Go Blind,” she relates this story of label executive Leonard Chess:
When Leonard heard the song the first time, he got up and left the room ’cause he started crying. That touched my heart. Other cats I know would have wanted me to see them cry, just to show me how soulful they were. I liked that Leonard did his weeping in private. [...] When he came back in the room, he said, “Etta, it’s a mother… it’s a mother.”
It does no disservice to James’s memory — she died shortly before the above video was recorded — nor to the talents of Tedeschi, Trucks, and Haynes, to say that this performance lives up to the song.
Just for completeness, here’s the reference version — Etta James’s mother of a performance:
[Below, click Play button to begin I'd Rather Go Blind. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:33 long.]
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Note: Hat tip (and a deep bow) to my little brother for introducing me to Revelator.
Wow. Amazing how quickly TheGoogle turns its back on you when you just, like, step away from the blog for a few days…
(Well, to be fair, I’d stopped thinking about TheGoogle during that time, too. Chicken, meet egg.)
Regular broadcasting to be resumed tomorrow. In the meantime, I’ll just be tidying up a bit. Shaking out the already dusty sheets draped over the furniture. Resetting the thermostat. Putting the kettle on. And revisiting you, whoever you are.
[Video: scene from The Princess Bride -- the Man in Black faces off against his cleverest adversary, Vizzini the nearly-inconceivable Sicilian. You can find a transcript (among other Vizzini-isms) at this IMDB page.]
To get through this life and see it realistically poses a problem. There is a dark, evil, hopeless side to life that includes suffering, death, and ultimate oblivion as our earth falls into a dying sun. Nothing really matters.
On the other hand, the best side of our humanity finds us determined to make life as meaningful as possible NOW; to defy our fate. Everything matters. Everything.
It is easy to become immobilized between these two points of view — to see them both so clearly that one cannot decide what to do or be.
Laughter is what gives me forward motion at such intersections.
We are the only creatures that both laugh and weep. I think it’s because we are the only creatures that see the difference between the way things are and the way they might be. Tears bring relief. Laughter brings release.
Some years ago I came across a phrase in Greek — asbestos gelos — unquenchable laughter. I traced it to Homer’s Iliad, where it was used to describe the laughter of the gods. That’s my kind of laughter. And he who laughs, lasts.
I lounge on the grass, that’s all. So
simple. Then I lie back until I am
inside the cloud that is just above me
but very high, and shaped like a fish.
Or, perhaps not. Then I enter the place
of not-thinking, not-remembering, not-
wanting. When the blue jay cries out his
riddle, in his carping voice, I return.
But I go back, the threshold is always
near. Over and back, over and back. Then
I rise. Maybe I rub my face as though I
have been asleep. But I have not been
asleep. I have been, as I say, inside
the cloud, or, perhaps, the lily floating
on the water. Then I go back to town,
to my own house, my own life, which has
now become brighter and simpler, some-
where I have never been before.
[Image: Ramsey Lewis, by Kagan McLeod. (Original here, at McLeod's blog of "music-themed ink drawings" called Oooh, and I Like It.) McLeod says in the comments there that he drew this "straight to ink," without benefit of pencil sketch; both this technique and the drawing per se, I think, parallel the experience of listening to Lewis himself.]
When we hear people refer to the 1960s, we think of upheaval: the remaking of music and politics, the overturning of what we thought we knew about family and art. But the ’60s had another side, and it’s one of the reasons why (I think) the TV show Mad Men has been such a hit: under the surface of frothing water swam small schools of fast, sleek, and, well, non-splashy fish, making their way through the culture without apparent effort…
Reportedly, it was a coffee-shop waitress who suggested that the Ramsey Lewis Trio add to their repertoire a tune called “The ‘In’ Crowd.” (It had been a recent hit for singer Dobie Gray.) The song’s chorus pretty much summed up its theme:
I’m in with the in crowd (Do-do-do)
I go where the in crowd goes (Do-do-do)
I’m in with the in crowd (Do-do-do)
And I know what the in crowd knows
Lewis and his group did an instrumental take on the song while recording an album at Washington DC’s Bohemian Caverns nightclub in 1965. (None of the trio sang, really. But I understand that you can hear bassist Eldee Young vocalizing here and there as he’s transported by the music and rhythm. Can’t hear it myself, but you may be able to pick it up.) That recording, nearly six minutes long, became Lewis’s first gold record:
[Below, click Play button to begin The 'In' Crowd. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 5:50 long.]
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With the same personnel, he followed up with another pair of gold records a year later. The first covered The McCoys’ 1965 hit, “Hang On Sloopy.” The second took the spiritual classic “Wade in the Water” and turned it inside out — from an assertion of the blessings of baptism, to one of the blessings of moving through water in general: the blessings of cool:
[Below, click Play button to begin Wade in the Water. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left -- a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 3:48 long.]
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Note: You can find another cool-jazz take on “Wade in the Water” in a whiskey river Friday post a few years ago, in a video by “Barefoot Contessa” singer-organist Rhoda Scott.
