- Not a warning, an invitation to catch his free shows this month:
* Friday Aug 8 - Barnburners, the Pasadena barbecue joint at 1000 S. Fair Oaks, 9 - 11:30 pm. All Ages.
* Sunday Aug 10 - Liquid Kitty, 11780 Pico, Santa Monica, 21 & over. 10 pm - 2 am.
* Thur Aug 28 - Eastside Love, 1835 E. 1st St., 21 & over, 9 pm - midnight
1st Record/1st Concert
1st Concert
I was fifteen in the summer of 1970. I'd just finished my first year at Metro, the Chicago high school without walls, a truly radical (and woefully shortlived) experiment in public education that allowed me and a few hundred other lucky refugees from city high schools to run roughshod throughout Chicago's downtown and near north side in pursuit of what passed, in those heady days, for an alternative high school education. So, naturally, when the city announced they were sponsoring a free Sly and the Family Stone concert in Chicago's downtown Grant Park bandshell that summer, there was no way I was going to miss it.
I wasn't all that big a big fan of Sly's records. But I knew he'd been at Woodstock, and to a white kid who was desperate to immerse himself in hippie culture, that was reason enough to hop the subway over to Grant Park from an office on the UC Circle Campus, where I'd finagled a $1.12/hr. summer job running errands for the educational consultants who'd brainstormed the idea for my experimental high school.
Now, if you know much about Sly and the Family Stone -- or you happened to be a kid in Chicago around that era -- you probably already know what happened the afternoon of the July 27, 1970 Sly and the Family Stone "Grant Park riot, after Sly and his band failed to show up. When it became obvious that the headliner had stood them up, some of the kids in the crowd of 50,000 stormed the stage, trampling a wooden snow fence that the cops had erected to protect the bandshell. Seeing this, the cops grew a little short tempered themselves, and before long started lobbing cannisters of tear gas into the crowd, which brought the day's festivities to an abrupt, if premature, end.
I wish I could describe the mayhem that ensued in greater detail. But I can't, because I didn't actually make it to the park until much later that day. You see, there was this girl...
Karen was a Metro sophomore from Marquette Park who'd also landed a summer job doing a lot of nothing for the education guys in the office they kept on the UI Chicago Circle Campus. Karen wore tight boot cut jeans and cute sleeveless t-shirts that made her look a little like Gidget, (the TV Gidget, not Deborah Walley or any of those other girls who played her in the crappy movies that showed up on late night TV.) So you can imagine how delighted I was when Karen accepted my invitation to play hooky from work and head over to the park for the concert that afternoon.
Of course, once we'd snuck out of the office, it dawned on us that no rock show ever starts on time, and that neither one of us wanted to stand in the hot Grant Park sun any longer than we had to. So, we decided to hang out at work a little while longer. But rather than go back to into the office -- where we might actually be asked to refill the mimeo machine or something equally onerous -- Karen suggested we kill a little time sitting in the stairwell that was down the hall from our office. "I always hide out here," she explained, leaning her back against the cold cinder block wall. "The air conditioning's frigid!" she gushed, chattering her teeth for effect. "And," she added, betraying just the barest hint of a smile. "It's verrrry private. No one ever comes down these stairs." I stole a glance back up the stairwell, and, seeing no one, took my place on the stair just above her.
We dwelled in that air conditioned stairwell for quite some time, and talked about records albums and books and TV shows. She told me how she cried when she read I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, and how marzipan was the best food in all the world; I confessed my secret appreciation for the then culturally suspect Monkees, and how I didn't quite understand what all the fuss was about the iron Butterfly's "Inna Godda Da Vida." We talked right through the afternoon, laughing and exchanging secrets, far away from the riot that was going on without us outside.
As you must've figured out by now, I never heard a single song played at the first rock concert I ever attended, because none was played. By the time Karen and I finally made it to Grant Park that day, it was well after six o'clock. All that remained of that afternoon's festive gathering were a few hundred hastily abandoned picnic blankets, which dotted the vast expanse of grass in front of the bandshell. That, and the oddly sweet scent of the tear gas that still hung in the air, stinging our eyes as we stood staring at the now empty park, our hands touching lightly, my new friend and I.
Vince Waldron has written several books, including “Be My Baby,” the Ronnie Spector bio. He is a shadow figure in the “American Splendor”movie, implicitly blasted for presenting Harvey’s work onstage in Hollywood in a short-running, and wonderful, play called “American Splendor.” His wife Katy, no shirker in the talent department, just wrote and produced a play based on the career of Robert McNamara called “Bright Boy.” It, unlike McNamara, has been greeted with huzzahs.
I missed the 7/25 earthquake. I felt my car rock left and right, but it being a 1986 model I hung a U-turn and headed to my gas station, figuring the engine had sprung from its motor mounts.
In 1994 when I felt a thud at 1:30 am, I was in the long river in Egypt (de Nile), telling my wife it was probably trucks hitting bumps on the freeway. She replied drily, “Then why are our plates crashing to the floor?”
Music Notes
“Cry Baby” is dead on Broadway, but there are no tears in Silver Lake. Dave Alvin’s music was a binding and salutory component of the original movie, so one must deduce that the quick death of the new stage version with entirely new music bespoke its merit. Would it have dragged Dave down too, if his songs had been used? We’ll never know ... When the South By Southwest people told me in 1999 that John Paul Jones was following ‘my’ act, The Legendary Stardust Cowboy, I gushed “How cool! The lead singer of Manfred Mann!” I was off by one name, and a few years. Same thing when my fr Kent said he was coming to L.A. to see “Weller.” I loved Freddy Weller after he left the Raiders and went country. In the song “Perfect Stranger, on a great album produced by genius Billy Sherrill, he sings “She said that in the dark I looked just like Paul McCartney and with a southern drawl I said that’s who I am.” Kinda ‘progressive” for a counry song in 1974 ... It was some other Weller ... Elvis bday cards now sold at drugstores show 1956-57 pics on front, but when you open them an Elvis impersonator says “I’d be nuthin’ but a houn’ dog if I forgot your birthday.” And a hunka hunka burning puke to you, Elvis Presley Enterprises ... Allen Klein, the model for Alan Decline in the Rutles, is very ill and no longer active in ABKCO. I read in Sid Griffin’s book ‘Million Dollar Bash” that in 1966 Klein, then an executive at MGM Records, was the person who decisively balked at signing Bob Dylan for $1 million ...
Blues
A young friend said that Bobby Bland’s “Two Steps From The Blues” was the best blues album ever made. I corrected him, saying that it was the best album ever made, period. (Actually, it’s a bunch of singles.)
But then I got to thinking about Bobby Bland. He sang R&B blues and also smoothe blues: part Otis Redding, part Frank Sinatra. The horn arrangements are akin to postwar big band R&B but his ballads, sometimes touched with plucked violin strings (“Lead Me On” and “I’ll Take Care Of You”), are stirring in a way that defies categorization.
Many young black artists arived on the pop market in the early 1960s - Jerry Butler’s ballads, Jimmy Jones, Dee Clark, the Drifters, Ben E. King, Adam Wade, Sam Cooke, Brook Benton, Gene McDaniels, Jackie Wilson, Lou Rawls - it was a musical blossoming that was beautiful in its first bloom. The fact that it led to today’s music should not be held against it.
Book Talk
Clay Eals has written the wonderful, thorough and thoroughly wonderful biography “Steve Goodman, Face The Music.” How thorough? He got long, loving quotes from Hilary Clinton, a classmate of Steve at Maine Township H.S. Goodman was a glorious writer and performer, and Eals has written a grand tribute with this big little pricey ($30) book.
On July 25, Eals hosted a Goodman lookback/hootenanny at Westwood Music. A packed house watched words and performances from Jessica Baron, Paul Zollo, Mitch Perry, John O’Kennedy, Tom Bocci, Robert Morgan Fisher, Dave Volk, Paul Statman, James Lee Stanley and Richard Wedler.
Clay Eals holds forth at the Goodman party at Westwood Music as
John O’Kennedy (left) accompanies onetime Goodman sideman Mitch Perry.
* When David Allen Coe and Goodman wrote “You Never Even Call Me By My Name,” Goodman said that a good country song had to include motherhood, prison and drinking, so it opened it with “I was drunk the night my mom got out of prison.”
* Goodman wrote “The Twentieth Century Is Almost Over” in 1977, when it still had a ways to go. I figured it would be played on radio stations nationwide on Dec 31, 1999, but by then there were no radio stations.
* Goodman’s original version of “City Of New Orleans” features an octave jump at “gone five/hundred miles.” Arlo changed it. Both solo singers at the tribute at Westwood Music sang the Guthrie version.
* Probably not noted in the book is that, also, Guthrie mispronounced Kankakee, whose first syllable is Kank, like tank. On sheet music it was probably separated Kan - kakee. (Boy, if Steve read this he’d probably get pissed off at me again. See p. 490 in Eals’s book.)
No Fun
Rock writing was started 40 years ago by people in their early 20s.
Today same-aged kids are writing stuff, but are twisted up in knots of anger and confusion. The music scene is not uniform and understandable as it once was, and has not penetrated society like it once did. As a result they lash out at their predecessors.
Wiggy Ann Powers of the L.A. Times declared that a new trend of emotionality “angers” baby-boomers, who think they have a lock on narcissism (...?). Angry why? In her fevered, fervid, fertile, fertilizer-filled head they resent that kids “drop their names, not acid.” This is seriously clumsy, and cracked. Also, in an assay of Liz Phair she says that Phair’s 1993 album was “a milestone of third-wave feminism.” Well what the heck wave are they on now?
Crits see everyone marching in tight idealogical ranks, like themselves. The Coachella Festival each year invokes a flood of chin-stroking about “Will the indie audience accept Madonna/Kanye West/Sting?” or Hanna Montana. People don’t listen to music politically! It’s a rock festival! My neighbor took her young teen kids. They never heard of “indie rock.”
If you ever NEED a critic (there’s a first for everything!), just look around a concert for a puzzled person sitting through the standing ovation.
Grrrrls Talk
In the L.A. Times “Tell” section, people are encouraged to reveal secret longings and feelings. Woman-people, I mean.
In the 12-13-07 installment, T.L. 1 Stanley says New York 2 chef Tom Collochio’s cuisinemakes her go “weak in the knees, and it has nothing to do with his loins.” Ha ha, loins, tenderloins; weak-kneed, awestruck or round-heeled. She recounts how her lusty girlfriends tell “what they’d like to do to the bald, barrelchested chef.” Bald guys are sexy, they say.
Imagine a male writer suggesting that a new female chef is a hot number. Guys lick their lips (about her cuisine) and stiffen (with attention to her technique) when she bends over the stove. And when she licks the spoon ... I dasn’t go there! “He’d be fired by any newspaper” said a friend, “and probably be brought up on charges.”
And why can women writers freely use ‘testosterone’ 4 to describe bad male behavior? A male writer could not smear women with their secretions - he’d be strung up. It’s why no guy writer ever called the Lilith Fair a ‘menstrual show.’
1 If the writer uses initials, 9 out of 10 it’s a woman.
2 Coming from New York he is of course fulsomely welcomed by the press, each and every one of whom genuflect to Gotham. The shameful S. Irene Virbila, a couple months earlier, anticipated the chrome-domed sex object’s arrival by saying that a gale was coming from the east, tittering “the high-powered professional restaurant operations are moving in and maybe they’re going to show our more laid-back restauranteurs how it’s done.” 3 “You got a problem with dat sauce? Well fuggedaboudit!”
3 Many years ago I saw a drama in which some foppish frenchmen in 1938 expressed delight at the Nazis coming into Paris “with their shiny black boots.” This is the way I portray all L.A. media people, wishing brawny New Yorkers would kiss them with their heels. Very few media people are L.A.centric. They all have their eyes on New York.
4 I first encountered this a dozen years ago when scary Patt Morrison railed against a post-basketball game riot by calling for “a ban on testosterone.” Outrageously insulting then, as now.
Moral Equivalency
A guy in an LA Times ‘Meet the writer” ad bragged that as a young journalist he go into an event by using someone else’s ID badge.
“This was morally edgy” he said. Edgy? No, dishonest.
But ain’t we all. When I had an expense account I’d throw in a receipt or two from other meals just to play ‘catch-up.” After all, the company compensated me for the meal but not the drive 5 - it’s only fair. Or edgy.
Then I talked to a guy at a record company 6. He complained that his predecessor in the reissue dept walked off with master tapes of some obscure old records and then those cuts turned up on bootlegs overseas. I chimed in.
“You KNOW, record companies didn’t respect their catalog then. Some of them threw out tapes they considered worthless, to cut back on storage costs. Only because of heroes like the tape thief did that music get to the people who appreciated it.”
“Without the artist being paid?”
“Your company pays on old records? Don’t they have a lengthy list of fees that those cuts accrued over the years so they’ll never be in the black ?”
“The songwriters are deprived of income.”
“How many copies did the bootlegs sell? Two thousand? The spiritual value they transmitted to people like me outweighs the loss.”
“But they aren’t issued by the company who made them.”
“I can assure you that thousands of people now dead had better lives because they got to hear that precious music. The company lost dimes, but many souls were lifted.
“Well, you have your moral standards and I have mine.”
“Works for me!”
5 The actuarial consideration for car use then was 22 cents a mile. That was for gasoline at $1.25 a gallon, tires at $50 a pair and a new car costing $4000. Gadzooks, what’s the rate today?
6 This may be too identifiable; so few people work at record companies.
Pipple
Do you know someone you’ve failed to meet and when you see them you both recognize each other but say nothing? One girl used to come to my rockabilly nights at Club Lingerie in the 80s and we never met. Recently I saw her at a booksigning and we resumed our non-relationship. Shouldn’t I’ve said something? ... I saw a musician at a show and didn’t recognize him. He had always been on the hefty side, tho not enormous, but has recently, apparently, lost 30 or 40 pounds. It dumfounded me. In his 50s, the guy looks so much better, seems to have more character, seems so elegant and cool that I’m loath to blubber my compliments for fear it would imply I thought less of him before. But I did: it’s good to defat ...
Billy Sheets and band on Art Fein’s Poker Party 6-26-08
Skip Heller, Phil Alvin outside Safari Sam’s Hollywood, 7-24-08.
Blasters onstage, two girls’ backs. Phil Alvin’s voice was shot that night, making listening excruciating.
But most people stayed like loyal troupers.
Singer/songwriter Bob Moss and magician/musician Charles Schneider bid L.A. adieu as
Moss returns to Utah and Schneider decamps to Nevada City, California.
Todd Everett is bussed by lawyer Jackie (Fox) Fuchs.
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Holistic Shopping News
I like one Peter DeVries book (I like all Peter Devries books) about rivalry among jam-makers in a small Iowa town, where old ladies in bonnets carry guns and hijack their rivals’ goods.
Comes to mind the healthy food movement. Trader Joeses (YOU pluralize it) are individually run like chain gas stations, 7-11s. Last year the one in Toluca Lake (then, soon, Hyperion) began awarding a weekly $25 gift certificate, drawn from a box containing stubs from people who brought their own bag. I thought for the money they were saving it would be a DAILY drawing (there are hundreds in the ‘pot’), with the slight loss ($25 merch = $15 wholesale) offset by goodwill, but still I bring in bags, spend hundreds of dollars and win no contests.
Comes now the Hollywood TJ’s, on Santa Monica. Long a holdout, they offered no reward for shopper goodheartedness, no surprise since they also forgo the all-day coffee shots the other two offer. Recently I went there and found they had finally instituted a weekly drawing too - for a $10 prize! (As bad as Ralphs’ new “Spend $500 Get Back $5” pot-o-gold.)
It struck me ... unseemly to offer so paltry a prize so I mentioned this in guarded words to a store manager. He said “We don’t have to offer it at all.” He had no bonnet, tho maybe a gun.
On a like cosmic level, the fact that Whole Foods is now a Fortune 500 company fills me with consternation. I’m glad people are getting healthy (purchasing habits), but Whole Foods isn’t rich bec there so many outlets, like Starbuckses. Their path to fortune is maximum markup.
In the 1950s a home permanent kit died at 59 cents then flew off the shelves at $2 because women didn’t respect a product that sold cheap. Whole Foods customers thrill to pay the most they can. If they choose to fork over til it hurts is Whole Foods wrong accepting it?
But saving money is good for the environment, too.
They’re recycling truckloads of it at Whole Paycheck in Austin.
Run-Ins
Ran into Chuck E. Weiss one Sunday at Victor’s restaurant on Bronson Avenue. At his table was Eddie Gordetsky and a passle of other people. They’ve been holding Sunday breakfasts there for 18 years ... Saw Eddie Munoz at Trader Joe’s in Toluca Lake. Toney ‘hood. He says he’s moving back to Austin, maybe ... Saw Glen D. Hardin at Mayfair Market on Franklin Aug 3rd, but I didn’t say anything. Sometimes I’m shy ... A week before I ran into Smog Vomit (Greg Boaz: Tex & The Horseheads, Candye Kane) at Mayfair. He’s with Dave Alvin’s band now. Nothing profound about seeing him except I got to write “I ran into Smog Vomit.”
YOUTUBE CONNECTOR
"Black Slacks," the Rockabilly Trio: James Intveld, Randy Gornell and Russell Scott
team up on the Sparkletones hit. 3-15-89, Rockabilly Bandstand
TV
Wide-size tv’s at stores show images stretched as if Nutty Putty had been pressed on film and pulled wide (to provide an obese nation with comforting images?). Recently I saw a movie that had been scrunched for tv reproduced in stretch-face. I howled and sobbed as the wide-faced person at the left spoke across an empty table, then the Moviola editor panned to the right to get the other’s response: they were both in the original shot, then one lopped off to fit onto old tv screens. Now that there’s a screen to accomodate the original image they still use the butchered movie and so deliver a picture twice distorted.
What happened to colorizing? One day it vanished. Not that it’s missed. Once in a while a colorized movie pops up on tv. Another thing that disappeared was razor-cuts. Someone with a laser-razor removed every other frame from nonessential footage such as a person walking, shaving seconds so more ads could be sold. The resultant herky-jerkiness may have prompted seizures in some viewers, but if that weakened their resistance to commercials it was a success.
Life Irritates Art
When someone says they’re ‘weighing in’ on something or they’re gving me a ‘heads up’ or a ‘shout out’ or cite a ‘backstory’ or ‘shortlist’ or ‘endgame’ or that something is ‘ramping up” I despair. None of these words add anything to to the language they’re just distractions blocking good neologisms.
At a May 5 rally in L.A., tv microphone-holder Ana Garcia speculated “The mayor is not here. Word on the street is that he didn’t want to be seen with his ex-girlfriend, who is a reporter.” “Word on the street” means some otherbody near her suggested it. Then she turned the screen over to Kim McDonald who was “on the ground at the rally.” On the ground! Military talk, like they should get battle pay.
Throw them under a bus.
They’re a train wreck.
Am I stuck in the classic past? I go numb when I hear numbskulls on tv: they are empty, reading. But the writers who are peppering their empty gab do it to sound .... groovy? ginchy” jiggy? Oh, I know - hip.
Dull old things are looking better though. Listening to Willie’s Place on XM I heard 70s country songs by people I never listened to then - say, Tommy Overstreet - and thought “this isn’t bad at all.” Compared to current country I mean. Many American cars which looked awful when they were sold look pretty good now -- a 1968 Rambler with horrible lines and ridiculous chrome is refreshing because it’s ... different.
Ancient Secret Revealed
At a recent dinner with The World’s Greatest Record Producer, an old friend asked about the arrangement of “Santa Claus Is Coming To Town” on the Xmas album. The Jackson 5 and Springsteen both copied his (Crystals) version with the galloping drum-stop, and now nearly all ‘rock’ versions use it. (You can’t copyright an arrangement. Just ask Nelson Riddle, or Sam Butera.)
“What’s that break based on?” asked the wizened old head.
“I wanted it to sound like Da Doo Ron Ron” he replied.
Time Shifts
Headline promoting mountain-climbing on a 1960 Boys Life magazine cover: “Rapelling Is Better Than Rumbling.” I GUESS!
My daughter just got an enormous boom-box to house her iPod.
Don’t Ask Don’t Tell
Looking at a twisted-meat dog-treat at Trader Joe’s, I checked the contents, which said “Steer pizzle.”
That’s worse than the contents of a hot dog. And it was a footlong.
Jokers
* I called “Todd” to suggest he watch a tv food show to see a whole camel roasted. “Luckies are toasted” he replied.
* At the Blasters show, someone handed lead singer Phil Alvin a beer to help soothe his ragged throat. “No, no, that’s got gas in it” he said.
“Must be expensive” said a Texas gal.
- 57 -
Mark On The Move
I attended two days of The 12th Annual California WorldFest at the Nevada County Fairgrounds. With eight stages and 150 performers over four 12-hour days there was no way to hear everyone. (KVMR-FM broadcast as much of the festival as they could, so I heard some of the music at home on the days I didn’t attend.) Despite hazy skies due to the fires in Northern California, the weather was pleasant, especially in the shade of redwoods and roof-tarps on the outside stages.
The Masanga Marimba Ensemble is a large group run by a professor of World Music from Cal State Northridge, and they played African tunes and songs from other lands, including “La Bamba” and “Guantanamera.” The instruments ranged from small soprano marimbas to big, stomach-rumbling bass marimbas, and the singers were enthusiastic. I also liked Moira Smiley & Voco, a mostly a cappella four voice female group from L.A. doing Appalachian and Eastern European traditional songs and some originals. Their harmonies were precise and very beautiful.
The main members of Moshav were raised on a communal settlement in Israel and exposed to the music and religious fervor of Rabbi Schlomo Carlebach (who composed melodies for ancient prayers), as well as the records of Van Morrison, Neil Young, Dylan etc. In 2000 these childhood friends came to L.A. where they’ve built a strong following that combines jam-band kids, religious Jews and folkies.They did so well at last year’s WorldFest they were brought back on the main stage; additionally they held a workshop on combining rock and roots music. I dug their combination of Hebrew religious psalms, prayers, and reggae. They really had the crowd dancing.
There were acrobats from Kenya, a feminist band from Australia, the Robert Fripp disciples California Guitar Trio (whose repertoire included Beethoven, The Ventures and Pink Floyd), a successful mesh of African and Celtic music from U.K. group Baka Beyond (which featured two beautiful & talented singers & dancers, one a perky Geordie redhead named Su Hart and the other a stunning Jamaican Denise Rowe), plus I heard singers from Cape Verde (Tcheka), Haiti (Emeline Michel) and Winnepeg (Chic Gamine).
My favorite sets were two one Sunday with David Lindley and guest multi-instrumentalist Joe Craven, a ubiquitious character on the Sacramento music scene whom I’d recently seen at the High Sierra Music Festival. Lindley shared the stage with Craven, turning him loose for solos on mandolin, fiddle, and an array of handmade percussion instruments. Two different versions of Warren Zevon’s “Seminole Bingo” were wry and driving, and Lindley delivered an impassioned vocal on Greg Copeland’s “Revenge Will Come.” At one point during Lindley's performance of a funny, not very linear tune called “Meth Lab Boyfriend,” Craven used an electric power drill for punctuation. “Ooh, I like that” said Lindley.
-- Mark Leviton
(Mark’s sixties-themed radio show Pet Sounds can be heard alternate Mondays 10pm-Midnight PST on KVMR-FM 89.5 in the Sacramento area and streaming at www.kvmr.org )
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Hey @:
In the February Mess you suggested that the lack of audience reaction to Tennessee Ernie Ford was because the editors chose not to plug in the canned response. But wasn't "I Love Lucy" actually filmed before a live audience? If you hear the same whoop all the time, it may be like that annoying loudmouth writer/producer who was constantly whooping during the live filming of the "Mary Tyler Moore" show. I have no doubt that they tweaked the laughs, but the most likely explanation is that somebody like Ernie Ford just didn't excite a 50's audience as much as huge movie stars like John Wayne and William Holden.
Cousin Minnie Pearl
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AF Letter to Lucy expert Paul Grein:
I commented in "print" recently that certain voices can be discerned
laughing identically in many Lucy shows, indicating canned laughter. My friend corrected me saying it was filmed in front of a live audience.
Paul’s Response
You are entirely correct. They layed in identical laughs to signal to the audience what to expect--"oh, there she goes again." It wasn't just sweetening, it was purposeful.
