"A Town without Soul" Sets a Caravan on Its Way

 

The Fred Wickham Caravan’s debut album is about many things, but at its core is a loneliness so complete it’s delusional. In that sense, it’s a perfect record for the times we live in, particularly because it offers a way forward. The key here is community, and that means a great band like the Caravan, a diverse group of Kansas City’s best musicians so interwoven it feels wrong to try to parse the contributions.

 

But showing how the diversity adds up seems essential to the point. Wickham’s longstanding bandmate bassist Richard Burgess and drummer Matt Brahl serve up rhythms playful or jaunty or prowling or reflective (as on “One for the Road,” a soft downbeat, brushes and a bowed sustain). Goading the fearful townspeople in the title track, Fred Jr.’s mandolin and Bart Colliver’s keys comprise another ring of interplay that will take various forms again and again, trading piano for accordion and then organ. Marco Pascolini is certainly the heart behind the searching steel on “If We Ever Happened,” but it’s a fool’s game trying to tell whether Wickham or Pascolini’s imaginative guitar play is responsible for any given cry or moan—all surprising, fresh and often painfully sharp. The mix is inclusive by design, so every addition makes natural sense, from Muscle Shoals musicians (guitar and horns) on “Just Because You Can” and “Fatbird” or the Grand Marquis horns on “I Think I Just Fell In Love.”

 

That said, as strong a band album as this is, it is focused around remarkable vocals. Perhaps at its most beautiful, “If We Ever Happened” offers refrains with Colliver’s bold harmonies given an essential aura by Muscle Shoals’ Angela Hacker, a subtle approach she builds upon in the story of a woman lost on “What Happened to Me” (in contrast to the muscle she gives “Just Because You Can”). There’s an audacity to the way Fred Wickham inhabits every foolish breath of “That One Thing” and a seasoned knowingness to the warm quaver he uses to rally the room on “One for the Road.” The first of the album’s deepest gut punches, “Progress,” calls to mind John Prine, heartbreakingly insisting we believe there’s hope in momentary forgetfulness and the ability to hold it together at the sound of children playing.

“A Town without Soul” is a record haunted. It’s yearning for something lost—everything thrown away in “That One Thing,” a relationship shattered in “Breaking Your Heart,” and things the characters aren’t even sure about—“If We Ever Happened at All” or “What Happened to Me.” The town the singer must get shut of sells lies about safety and security when the singers and the band know soul saving is messy, risky, scary as hell, and, importantly, a lot of fun.

 

On this record, those singers offering “the same tired songs” aren’t simply dull, they’re edging toward dangerous. When the band shouts down “Fatbird” with a refrain of “Tweet, tweet,” it’s making a case for the power in numbers. Everyone sings in what the liner notes call the Tweety Bird choir, all by itself a raucous sound that's food for the soul.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two Of Us: You and I Have Memories

Some kind of light by your side.

Well, Kent, this would be about the time we'd stop doing whatever we weren't supposed to be doing and settle down to sleep. That meant music. We listened to everything together, even after we wound up on two sides of a room divider, the green from the stereo the only light. We listened to a little of it all in there--Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Otis Redding, Ozzy/Sabbath, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, The Commodores, Boston, Blondie, Rush, the Clash, Van Halen, Rickie Lee Jones and the Pretenders--everything we knew back then. 

You didn't like some of the old music punk turned me toward, and I didn't follow you far down the jam band road, but we shared embryonic bonds. Though we could never really talk about it (it wouldn't occur to us to talk about that), I think we thought through a lot of our identities in that room. We grew into the odd ducks we were out of that quiet time together. 

That time that would start just about now. I was generally in charge of the stereo (the first one was on my side, lol), and I remember picking things you'd want to hear as we worked on getting sleepy. I knew every time I could go to Ian Hunter's "You're Never Alone with a Schizophrenic" and the Grateful Dead's "Terrapin Station." 

And we would both always go for some Beatles. That started back when we first met, me 11/you 9, and the Beatles were the great inheritance from my older brother we bonded fullest over together. Most nights, I believe that meant "Abbey Road." 

 Last time I saw you I told you to watch the Scorsese Grateful Dead documentary. I don't know if you did. You wouldn't have learned as much from it as I would have anyway. You lived half that story. 

 But this Beatles "Get Back" thing? That would have been something to blow both our minds. (We simply would not have believed such a thing could exist back then in that room at 5809 Meadowcrest.) And though it's a movie about the "Let It Be" sessions, they play at least ten songs that would appear on "Abbey Road." And though many of those songs would be only fragments on "Abbey Road," they're equal to every other fledgling song idea during these sessions. 

So, you remember how we loved "Polythene Pam"? Well, instead of one minute woven into a suite, it becomes the whole song we always wanted it to be as kids. 

No, it's no longer. John doesn't play any more of it....

But he doesn't know he won't write it into a full song yet, and, because that's true, we hear it now always wanting to be that unwritten song.

Plotting something together

So I'm writing you in this week of my world remembering the Beatles because I want to sit on the side of the bed with you again and listen together again. I mean, I'm doing it with you in my mind now, just the way you were back then. I'm realizing you've always been there because we shared so much time in that stereo's green light. 

 One of the things I think is truly great about this new Peter Jackson "Get Back" thing is that it gets at that passion of playing music as brothers. And I don't mean because we banged around on some guitars at times. It was really the joy that made us want to do that. It was sitting in the darkness sharing that journey into sound. It was sometimes catching each other's eyes when we heard something really great. Just before we drifted off, in the dark staring at the ceiling, it was that quiet remark, a "that right there" and a "yeah" from the other side of the room. 

 And one reason that focus on the shared experience matters so much is that this movie emphasizes the community in music. Elsewhere, that last part of the Beatles career is torn up by individualistic interpretations, simply because the family was growing up and apart, a natural process. That's one way to look at all our stories, and that's what you and I were doing, playing music together from the ages of 9 to 17.

It was also the time of our greatest bonding. 

Living in this world, we lost touch some over the years, for all kinds of reasons, but we always felt the deepest love when we were together. The kind of bond you see in this band in this movie, it stands out to me as John Lennon bouncing on his toes; George Harrison asking Paul what he thinks of a line; Paul banging drums and climbing rafters, letting himself be the silliest of all; Ringo defending the band's togetherness, saying, "You don't know that; you're surmising because we got grumpy with each other. We've been grumpy for 18 months." 

That part's about grief over Brian Epstein's death. That part, like so many, reminds me of that night after Dad died--you, me and James partying in the kitchen, taking turns deejaying YouTube. Your idea, and it worked--grief made raucous and joyful.

"Get Back" is about grief, certainly, but it's about grief in such a full, round way. It's about the music and the love where I live with you now, my dear brother. I linger more and more over the meaning of those memories that will always be "longer than the road that stretches out ahead." Physically, I'm walking that road without you now, but you've never been more constant in my heart. 

Thank you for everything, Kent, and thank you for sharing all those musical journeys with me. This is the heart of what that movie shows that makes me think of you--music is about "we" and how "we" come together. In a world where "I," "Me" and "Mine" are the most popular brands, it's such a gift to have learned together the importance of that collaborative beat, that dialogue and that harmony.

Oh, and the laughter. There's so much of that here, heartfelt, filling in all the gaps...just as there was, always, with us.... Just as there is in the smiles when I think of you now.

Letting Go, Arms Open: Horror Stories and the Reason for the Season

 "This is not an artistically rounded-off ghost story, and nothing is explained in it, and there seems to be no reason why any of it should have happened. But that is no reason why it should not be told. You must have noticed that all the real ghost stories you have ever come close to, are like this in these respects --no explanation, no logical coherence. Here is the story...."

"The Portent of the Shadow," by E. Nesbit (published 1905)

 Since I turned, say, ten and was too old to trick or treat anymore, and since my best friend Scot and I gave up throwing our own spook houses at….lemme guess….thirteen, I think my favorite Halloween activity has been handing out candy. Nothing else quite gets to the heart of the matter. I have some friends who watch trick or treaters from the window of a local haunt; that’s probably very similar.

Me, a lover of horror movies and fiction of all kinds can’t even pick out a movie. Sure, I roll the classics on the TV, but that’s just background music. Almost every horror movie director since George Romero has “Night of the Living Dead” playing on TVs in their films as a shortcut that captures fragments of a sensibility, a feel.  

At this precise moment each year, no particular story can get at the whole of what brings so many of us together. This contemplation of the thin line between life and death connects the cultures of ancient Celtics, Romans, Persians, Aztecs and Pacific Islanders. It's a sensibility many stories reach for but few maintain for long. It’s about a feeling not far removed from the feeling of Christmas Eve, rooted in ancient winter solstice celebrations. It makes sense that many of our ghost story traditions began on that colder night at the end of the year.

Some aspect of that quiet connection between worlds is what I’ve often chased when I write stories, and it started with the family ghost stories. After all, the first storyteller who had me on the edge of my seat was my grandmother. She was my Charles Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson long before she read them to me.

This is all on my mind because, recently, I’ve been seriously trying to sell one of my novels to a publisher. Agents ask interesting questions. I’m learning how the business works. But what I want to sell doesn’t have a whole lot to do with business, and when I’m asked what genre I write none of the answers seem adequate.

Here’s the honest truth: when I’m asked to pick a genre for my fiction, and the pull-down tab says “literary” or “commercial” or “horror” or “magic realism” or “offbeat/quirky” or “contemporary” or “multicultural” or “fantasy” or “mystery” or “thriller” or “speculative,” I want to say “all of the above.” None of it seems adequate. I spend most of my time writing about multicultural and contemporary social and political issues, and those dialogues are filled with fantasy, mystery, speculation, suspense, and horror. All of that’s in my fiction and most fiction that interests me. I would love to reach a large audience (i.e. commercial), but my aims are no lesser than whatever anyone regards as “literary.” 

I’ve never stuck to one genre in my reading or my writing, but I do know my default reading for pleasure comes under the banner “horror.” Now, if only anyone agreed what that meant.... Here’s my crack at a definition for what I mean, strongly suggested by the Edith Nesbit quote above. 

My childhood play

Ghost story is my favorite term for horror, but to the extent that it’s about real-life horror, it’s also fantasy. It is a magic realism, a surrealism. I remember H.G. Wells (who gave us "The Invisible Man" and "War of the Worlds") once writing that fantasy was 98% reality. That makes sense to me. We must believe in the "real" world of the story to be awe-struck by the fantastic in that world, to feel the thin line between the worlds in the fiction and the thin line between those worlds and ours. 

That said, the unreality is crucial. Horror strives for the unreal to strike us deeper. It's unreal in a way I think allows it to engage us precisely at the subconscious levels where we might otherwise defend ourselves. If the monster tried to be real, we'd fight, explain it away or say it's unconvincing. This unreality is part of why I think horror prose is more unsettling than any movie—the realistic pretense relies entirely on the reader working with the writer to create worlds. The writer and the reader are playing make believe together. 

Many of my favorite artists are sensitive to their audience (arguably, to a fault) because they care so much about the art being more than a spectacle, instead being a dance with the audience. In the case of horror, that dance attacks your reason, your certainty, your security.

It's asking you to let go of a framework of thinking, hoping you'll find another, but meanwhile it leaves you teetering at the precipice, open, unsure. 

Personally, I think that open, unsure pause is a good way to approach whatever you do—whether it’s writing about music or listening to your loved ones. That’s a piece of what my grandma taught me when she told those old stories, and it’s a torch I carry. Halloween night, when I see kids running and jumping and screaming from house to house in anonymity compounded by darkness, they remind me of what made the night so thrilling when I was their age. I get a sort of contact high. 

Of course, there’s a thrill just opening that door. You never really know who or what’s waiting on the other side.

The beautiful grands

Erica, Steve and The Saints of Lost Causes

11 years. The days fell the same this weekend.

You reached out that Friday afternoon to tell me you were sorry about abandoning our friendship, and you wished my new family well.

I saw Steve Earle this Friday, what a strange, oddly perfect connection. He played songs from "Ghosts of West Virginia," about the 29 miners killed the spring before you died, the worst mine disaster in 40 years. He made the audience sing along to "Union, God and Country," warning us if we didn't sing people were liable to think we were scabs.

This would have made you laugh. I remember how you cheered him on when he shared his politics before "Devil's Right Hand," "Billy Austin," or even "The Revolution Starts Now."

Then he sang "Far Away In Another Town," "The Saint of Lost Causes" and "Harlem River Blues" from his "J.T." album. That brought everything home. "The Saint of Lost Causes" seemed to me the highlight of one of the best shows I've seen from him ever, a show that never let up to its closing cover of "Rag Mama Rag."

But the band sounded bigger than ever on "The Saint of Lost Causes," full and haunting and ominous. Steve never sounded better either. Nothing felt tossed off. He sang every note like he meant it.

And that thing about wolves and shepherds and who's killed more sheep. You and I would have talked about that, better now than in the past.

I guess we are now, the only way we can.

Sunday, Monday and today were all more tough anniversaries from that same terrible weekend. It felt like it was all falling this way for a reason, or at least I'm going to make reason of it. That's my job. In many ways, you taught me just how important that job is. Whether or not our conversation could have shifted to one with a little more hope now only matters in the way I deal better with others going forward.

Meanwhile, I continue to grieve, but I'm determined to do it differently. My dad and I went to Santa Fe, New Mexico to hear a man named Stephen Jenkinson talk about death when my father knew he was in his last year. I went looking for a quote from Jenkinson that I carry with me often, one about grief being the love for that which has passed from view.

I found another one by accident, and it speaks to how I'm looking at this anniversary. “Grief is not a feeling; it is a capacity. It is not something that disables you. We are not on the receiving end of grief; we are on the practising end of grief.”

When I was facing disability twenty years ago, you helped me fight my way forward. Maybe I did something like this a time or two for you. I hope so. Either way, your memory shows me what you always showed me--possibility, a way to rise, a way to be more fully me, and a way to fight.

That was a fine band the other night. You should have heard fiddler Eleanor Whitmore sing "If I Could See Your Face Again." I can see yours--watching her, listening, loving music in a way very particular to you.

It was a concert made for you. And it was a concert made for me, BC and Ben, all the more grateful we still have one another after all these years . . . me all the more grateful for you.

Twelve Years Ago and Today, Knox Family's "In These Streets"

Knox Family's 2009 EP

Twelve years ago, I wrote this about a single as vital today as it was then.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74D_TC1tthk

Single-Minded, “In These Streets”  

                Maybe it’s because the percolating bass and percussive claps at the beginning of this record call to mind the funk that would prefigure hip hop, but it’s not a hip hop record I first think of when the Knox Family’s “In These Streets” comes on. It’s not a funk record either, although the band I’m thinking of was certainly influenced by both funk and early hip hop. The Clash’s “Somebody Got Murdered” wells up out of my subconscious the moment MC Jerm raps “Yo man, I don’t think they heard you” and a voice cries out in the dark, “a murder!”

                And that makes sense. A big part of the Clash’s appeal was a bracing honesty that confronted the walls that keep us apart. Seattle’s The Knox Family takes us from behind any four walls we might like to think protect us and out into the darkness to confront reality. Toni Hill’s beautiful vocal is key to the intimacy of that journey as she reminds us, “Somebody’s praying in these streets/somebody’s dying in these streets/somebody’s hustling in these streets” and then takes it all in her immediate embrace with, “Somebody’s singing for you and me.”  

Toni Hill's 2008 "Only Love"

                The rest of the record goes further into the muck and mire that’s the current human condition.  Most important?  The light it shines.

                In verse one, Julie C’s sassy and knowing rhymestyle catalogues a mind-numbing list of offensives in the “all out war against poor populations,” including intimidation tactics carried out by everyone from the FCC to the beat cop,  gang legislation, privatized prisons and deaths caused by “non-lethal” weapons.  This verse and the second are rapped against sirens that spiral between the left and right channels of the speakers and another voice in the night, making an unclear sound but plainly in distress….  Somebody hustling or somebody dying.

                And then Hill sings again, backed by a 5 note key progression that mines the same territory Timbaland’s been working lately but suggests a bigger, explicit dream— hope for every voice that currently goes unheard and faith in those voices to change the world.

  

Julie C's 2011 "Sliding Scale"

              Julie C’s second verse starts at the heights of Wall Street  and follows the “global economic collapse.”  She somehow hits on all of it, from the political stakes that lead to bank bailouts to the foreclosure of the homes of those small enough to fail. Before she’s finished, Julie C describes a globalized war between the rich and the poor.

                With the stakes this high, Hill begins to tic off more of what “singing for you and me” means—“we gotta get together/’cause we need/ to heal the sick and hopeless/yes, indeed/to strive for peace and justice/equality/love for you and me.” With keys washing in behind her, Hill’s voice grows more reassuring and inspiring as she touches on each key to the future. 

    The third and final verse starts after the record’s turned the corner toward a fade out. Julie C raps a sign off and then, like James Brown throwing off his cape, she launches into, “Yo, violence is a symptom not the disease.” The dissonant sirens are gone now, replaced by flute-like keys and more percussion including high hat and snappy wood block beats. Something’s different about this last highly charged verse, though the signs stay grim, “Why is the city of Seattle dropping another 110 million to open a new jail we don’t need, while the district can’t even find a measly 3.6 to keep our schools from closing?”

                And this cape-dropping allows for a new intimacy. This last verse feels like an urgent whisper being passed on a streetcorner.  “Want to know what’s really going on?” Julie C asks.  “Just follow the paper trail to downtown Olympia, Wall Street, D.C./As long as poverty pimps keep profiting from our problems/We can’t wait for change/We gotta create our own solutions/Straight from the peoples’ movement.”

                And with that, the Knox Family’s debut Ep is out. It’s the end of a rich record, though only 7 full tracks long. From the opening “Make Love,” DJ B-Girl has produced a great party record with a laid back, minimalist style that always manages to use its playful, frenetic beats in fresh, surprising ways— part West Coast gangsta, part crunk and part old school hip hop.  But it’s also, consistently, a series of statements of strength, unity and solidarity. “In These Streets” is the perfect ending, justifying all the bold claims that come before.

                But it’s more than that.  It’s a singular piece of revolutionary art unlike anything else.  It’s the blues of “The Message” wedded to a concrete basis for political unity.  And it’s a spiritual, with Toni Hill’s refrains insisting that the human spirit was made to fulfill our dreams.  It’s a song to suggest a new genre—not protest music so much as revolution rock—good for dancing, crying, shouting and even (especially?) blueprinting our dreams into reality.

For more information:   http://bgirlmedia.com/   

The Poor People's Army, present in this video as the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, is currently suing the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), HUD secretary Marcia Fudge, the Philadelphia Housing Authority, HSBC Bank, Serrano Acquisitions LLC, the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania and the City of Philadelphia. The suit declares Housing as a Human Right and actively protects 30 families occupying abandoned HUD properties, publicly owned housing, with an aim to not only occupy but improve those properties.

Learn more about the effort here: https://poorpeoplesarmy.com/

 

Remembering Prince: "I Want to Be in the New Breed--Stand Up, Organize!"

My Mary J. Blige book had just come out, and Prince died. I suppose that's why I never turned this into anything beyond a Facebook post. The third in a series of such "found eulogies," I feel it needs to go here alongside John Prine and Lou Reed. I don't know why I'm running across all of these reflections at this moment, but I'm finding it valuable. Rallying to move forward--

April 21st, 2016

One night in 1995, working on my book about Soul Asylum, I stood for hours, under-dressed and alone, in Prince's downtown Minneapolis club Glam Slam. Someone would come out on stage at midnight, and there was always a chance it would be him. It was a fine band (though I forget who), but it didn't matter much; I was in Prince's club. I was in Prince's world....as I had been when I first heard 1999 at my brother's place, when I saw Purple Rain debut in Tulsa, when I used to drive around listening to Dirty Mind grappling with the crazy pull of my not-quite-single years in early college, and as I was when I saw Sign of the Times with my buddy BC, both of us at some points standing, and even dancing, in the art-house theater seats.

Now that he's gone, it's easy to see that, in many ways, Prince was the artist of my generation. Just four years older than me, he synthesized everything that was happening to my people in our formative years--from the legacy of rock and soul to disco, punk and funk--and he built a home for us out of the braided textures.

From the punk-ish New Breed, to the Utopian Uptown to the Revolution and the New Power Generation, he built worlds for us to be our whole selves--where love and sex became sanctifying metaphors for how life might become an unending act of creation.

I know all kinds of people are going to say very smart things about Prince tonight and tomorrow and over the following days, and my first reaction was to say nothing. Hell, for the first couple of hours after I heard the news, I was too shook to even think about reading anyone else's thoughts or sharing my own. But I can't go to bed tonight, I can't sleep tonight, without saying a little something.

We'll never be able to plumb the depths of the music Prince created over 40 years of non-stop, frenetic, activity....and that's a good thing. But we will miss living in a world where there is a Prince, where there is that one human being who might emerge from behind the curtain at midnight and, without question, deliver us to some kind of promised land, one that we never envisioned. There was no finer singer, no finer guitarist (no finer multi-instrumentalist), no finer dancer and no finer performer. Someone may have had him somewhere on technique, but he did everything with such vision and such effortlessness.

The last time I saw him play live, I wondered, absolutely wondered, about this. How did someone combine so much craft into something that seemed so elementally natural? But that wasn't really the important part. The enormity of his talent was always secondary. What I never will get over are the many ways he found to reach out to my lonesome self and assure me....my soul could be set free....and my ass would follow. If that isn't the most fundamental lesson any artist could teach, I don't know what it might be.

Off to listen to "Sexuality," a manifesto for resistance and liberation if there ever was such a thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mZO5HLRk7KE

Sensitive Boys, Turn Your Amps Up Loud

Yesterday, I had a dream my friend Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen and I were walking the halls of my high school (in truth, our high schools were 700 miles apart). Eric was singing the Lou Reed song "Stupid Man" from the 1979 album, The Bells. I said, "That's the best song," waking up with it in my head. This led me to a day spent, among other things, reconnecting with my intense relationship to Lou's music, particularly between the ages of 15 and, say, 23, really just before I started writing about music.

Anyway, it led me through my email sends to find a eulogy I wrote upon his death in 2013, something I assumed had been lost. It was written the night after the news to the early hours of the next day.

h/t Alejandro

                Lou Reed’s death is a shock. It’s the loss of a very dear old friend, a close friend. Of course, I never met him, and the one time I wrote a short feature about him (for KC’s Pitchweekly, on the eve of his New York tour stop), his press packet convinced me the world didn’t need one more Lou Reed interview. I had a gut-deep sense of what motivated Lester Bangs to famously (and lovingly) antagonize him. With the press at least, Reed’s ego always seemed to get in the way.

On record, he was something else altogether. At fifteen, I was hooked by 1978’s Street Hassle, and got to know Reed’s solo work first, virtually all of the Velvet Underground records out of print until several crucial years later. Hassle drew this adolescent in, at first, because it sounded so cool, and it went to such dark places—from the unconscionable cover up of a drug overdose to the kind of racialized fantasies that got those kids shot at the beginning of Pulp Fiction. Of course, what held me was not only that droning palisade of sound that kept the record cutting forward but also that chin-out tough-talking voice, at once close to violence and close to tears.

Trying to describe the sound of that voice, I jump forward two years to one of Lou’s most emotionally naked songs, “My Old Man.” He has a quaver from the start as he recalls being lined up on the public school playground—“Regan, Reed and Russo, I still remember the names.” It’s a song about a boy who grows to hate his father for his abusiveness, and throughout the song, the singer sounds like the boy he once was, wiping tears from his eyes and bracing for a fight. That song is followed by “Growing Up in Public,” a meditation on manhood over a comic bass line. He calls himself “a Prince Hamlet caught in the middle between reason and instinct…with [his] pants down again.”  That tortured boy from the schoolyard is never far out of view.

When I think of the vulnerability Lou Reed laced through walls of fuzz guitar, the only fitting corollary that comes to mind is John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band. You couldn’t be fooled by the distanced cool of “Walk on the Wild Side”—a primal scream side-winded and coiled just out of sight. If a hostile offense was his best defense, Reed’s gift to fans was music that allowed us both sources of refuge.  

But Reed didn’t build strongholds so much as vantage points, like that guy standing on the corner thinking about Jack and Jane, he most often contemplated what went unobserved—a little girl, an amputee (figuratively or literally) dancing to the A.M. radio in her room, a father wondering over the bed where his wife cut her wrists, and that junkie answering “the dead bodies piled up in mounds” with the only thing that makes him feel like a man. Along with the other Velvets, later guitarists Robert Hunter, Dick Wagner, Robert Quine and Mike Rathke, and longtime bassist Fernando Saunders, Reed found musical hooks that both reminded us of the artifice and pulled us in close to everyday hopes and everyday tragedy. And, sometimes, he took us to moments of peace, on the set of a night shoot for a cola commercial in “Tell It to Your Heart,” in a genial country restaurant on “New Sensations” or in his late night conversation with a beloved ghost on “My House.”

But I have to go back to the album Growing Up in Public for the moment that, for me, best illustrates how the vulnerable boy Lou Reed fights his way forward. It’s the album opener, “How Do You Speak to an Angel,” in its own way as weird (and somehow also plainspoken) a record as he ever made. Over Ellard “Moose” Boles’ bass glissandos and Michael Fonfara’s faux harpsichord keys, the singer describes a boy who has no clue how to talk to a girl he likes—a childhood commonplace delivered as a matter for serious consideration. By the second verse, he’s talking about an adult with the same concerns, and when he sings “how do ya/speak to a,” the bass doubles down, Michael Suchorsky’s drums rage at the problem, the keys escalate, Stuart Heinrich kicks in with metal guitar and everything builds to a break—“How do ya/Speak to a,” voice and handclaps, part opera, part gospel. This is no longer simply a serious matter; it’s THE serious matter.

The band roars forward with some punk metal version of a full tilt boogie, Reed continuing to ask the same question. Over the course of the song, his voice has moved from a kind of gentle lilt to, now, a bellowing, grunting, growling call to charge. He finally shouts, his voice a roar—“You say ‘hello, Baby!” It’s a Hail Mary.  

“Baby! Angel” he shouts as the band plays on, and as the backing vocals swell and the band rages, he says, “Aaaanggell, Aaaaanngggelll,” and the roar is primal. When I played this record on Sunday, that cry brought tears to my eyes. It still does now. I’m already missing this man who found that boy’s voice. They both helped me find mine.

No Ordinary Blue--Thoughts on John Prine Revisited

April 9, 2020

These are just some late night thoughts as I get my first moment to think in the past 30.

Stephen King once described finding stories like digging up gems, excavating, finding the solid center underneath. Funny thing (though I love him for reasons that overlap with Prine), I don't really think of his sprawling stories the way I think of Prine's songs, those gems, that rock underneath.

I think it's because, when you hear the epic sounds of something like "Lake Marie," you hear the little moment that makes a connection to a tale, an epiphany at its heart. As my friend Steve Messick stuck in my head without even saying it, in "Hello in There," you hear an epic sweep in that refrain about rivers growing wilder every day. "Hello in There" is a song that seems so sentimental and small you can hold it in your hand, but you hit that refrain, and you realize this song's about all of life, but particularly the whole of a certain couple's lonely life, and how that life is shoved aside in our society, where we put people away when they no longer turn a dollar, when they may be fading (or, let's be frank, when we're hit by something like Katrina or COVID-19) and if so, they need to go--"23 skidoo," "skedaadle," "beat it, old man."

It's what it's like to feel less powerful, and since that's the trajectory of life, it's as big as Lake Marie. And I mean musically; it's just, in this case, the infinity between two plucked notes and a little steel instead of "Lake Marie's" blasting outward.

And then there's that "Jesus, The Missing Years," a song about storytelling that so hilariously and precisely begins with the bar talk about "no one knew where he was?....Nobody!"

Since "Bethlehem's no place for a 12-year-old," the protagonist of this movie strikes out on his own only to find himself in a series of Chaplin-esque traps. Then he finds his way to fortune and fame and Beatles and Stones and even George Jones.

But like all such tales, it takes its dark turn, when the kid's vision gets the best of him, maybe he begins to talk about who's left out, and society shuts him down. This is what happens when the yarn hits reality, and Jesus went to heaven "awful quick."

It's a big old goofy world we live in for sure, but that fascination for the song and the story and how it gets across gave John Prine a way of snatching it up and collecting it in a ball of wonder--right down to the plucks of guitar, the playfulness of a note, the humor or pain at the edge of his voice. He found this zen that made you listen and think about whatever he was talking about, even if you didn't know what he was talking about, in a way you never thought about it before.

Of course, generally, his main ideas were clear enough, if especially in tone and timbre behind the words. He was such an easy friend to keep. I don't think any of us ever thought about what it would mean to lose him. Friends like that don't come around every day.

Never mind anyone who would start his recorded career with a goof as the best ending to a song ever--"I'm just trying to have me some fun!

Well done!

Hot dog bun!

[Bump bump]

My sister's a nun!"

Thank you for that fun, and a lifetime of gems that continue to do their work, giving us light in the darkness, illuminating our way forward.

Sarah Langan's Good Neighbors: My Novel on Replay

Almost at its dead center, not for the first or last time but decidedly, Good Neighbors grabs me by the throat.

A terrible thing has happened, and the easy scapegoat is the family that doesn't quite fit into the society of the Maple Street cul-de-sac, the main stage of the story.

The words come out of a nice enough woman, a progressive even, but in this moment she couldn't be more reactionary. She's explaining why she knows something is dangerous about the new family--the musician in the family has shown his hand. 

"Look at what they come from," she explains to her child. "That song about heroin and cartoons. That's a true story Julia's dad sang, about his own life. That kind of history leaves scars, Charlie. It damages a person. Victims turn into predators . . . I know this from experience . . ."

Near the end of the book, another character has a revelation: "It felt so wonderful, for the briefest of moments, to be known. To be seen for the monster she was, and nonetheless accepted. It was the truest moment of her life."

That moment sustains a feeling that's built over one of the best chapters I've ever read, a chapter filled with physical and emotional risk, physical and emotional pain. Horror and dark beauty builds something like real community out of division and betrayal.

I cannot write about this objectively, yet the book begins and ends with the objective truths that ask us to think about one another and our relationship to each other. The book deals with climate change, a yawning sinkhole threatening to rob all of its characters of everything they have, and it's a book about economic decline, that sinkhole merely the physical manifestation of the block-busting threat when the Wilde family moves in. 

I'm not objective because I grew up as a "victim" who knew, if the world knew my secret, I might be feared as a "predator." This is the part of abuse no one talks about much--the fear of the stigma of being abused. I don't regret it; it's made me who I am, but it's also shaped every relationship in my life and every contribution I make in this life as well.

(I hasten to add that I wasn't abused by my parents....They didn't know. Way more often than not, parents don't know. If you don't think being a parent is terrifying, try doing the job with that perspective.)

It's certainly why I write about the kind of music Arlo Wilde makes, songs of heroin and cartoons and secrets cried out loud. My shorthand for that is "rock," but every music of the cultural explosion that's taken place in America has some element of what I call "rock" in it.

That's also why I write, and have written about, something I call "horror," a form ill-defined and even worse understood.

Monsters and music have long been my beat, and Good Neighbors gets at the why and the how of both of those things. The truest moments of our life come from our darkest secrets, and the acceptance of those dark truths in one another is the only way we find and build anything like real community, the sort of community that might survive a collapsing world. 

For that reason and many more, I love this book. I believe in these people, and I like spending time with them, especially the children, and that only happens when a story gets kids right and knows what it takes for the kids to be all right. Like all my favorite art, this book roots itself in an unflinching observation of truths that haunt us but also offers us a means to an open heart, a way forward. 

When I finish books, I often use that afterglow to pick up another, hoping the new book will sustain the thrill of the community and discovery I just left. This time, I simply went back to page one. It feels like a record I just want to play over and over and over, for all the reasons above.

The Place of No Words: Love in the Face of Death

  

Midway through The Place of No Words, the movie's 5-year-old protagonist, Bodhi asks his dying father why people have to die.

His father responds, "It's part of life."

Bodhi replies, "Then I don't like life. I don't like life."

It's a perfectly logical response. 

At almost the same age, I stared at my bedspread and contemplated the implications of all I knew about death. Everyone I knew was going to die, and I was too. I remember that moment like I'd been let in on a cruel joke. In Bodhi, I can feel the hurt I felt that first time. It wasn't the last time I felt that way, and I assume I'm not alone in having such thoughts. That's one reason this movie is so important.

Very little culture and very few movies focus on that part of life we call dying, the actual process, and The Place of No Words would be remarkable if only for keeping that process in focus over the entirety of its 94 minutes. 

It's a movie about quiet moments, a movie about being, and that's the perfect fit for Webber's lingering mise-en-scene direction. We have quiet moments with Bodhi and his parents, when he breaks into tears over their laughter at something he said; when they struggle to make him feel better, explaining why they laughed. 

In such moments, in virtually every scene, the film captures love. The particulars may change. The father grows sad while cherishing the final moments he has with his son. The mother grieves silently and stoically, admitting to a friend that she is only pretending to accept what's going on. Both parents engage with the child's imagination, following angelic guides through otherworldly adventures and fighting robots from outer space. The movie commits to that child's-eye-view, unconcerned with the difference in the fantastic and the realistic bits. These are the things that Bodhi sees, and Bodhi's vision is why life matters.

He may not like life at times, but that's only because he loves it enough to engage in it with every aspect of his being. His parents, loving him, play along. Life would be dreadful if it were only defined by death, and this movie repeatedly illustrates just how enormously the fact of death is counterbalanced with rich possibility, an infinity in each moment.

40-year-old Webber has acted in about 50 movies, including The Laramie Project, Broken Flowers and Scott Pilgrim vs the World, but the 5 films he's directed deserve distinct recognition. His previous movies (Explicit Ills, The End of Love, The Ever After and Flesh and Blood) blend pieces of memoir with fictional storytelling in ways that defy separation. The magic realism of Bodhi's perspective--making up adventures with his family even as they gather around his father's death bed--perfectly suits Webber's approach. It allows the magic of life to bounce up against its finality, and it lets the little eternities every child knows (and parents glimpse in their best moments) fill and hold the screen. 

For all of these reasons, including the quiet pain in the performance by Teresa (Palmer, star of Warm Bodies and A Discovery of Witches), The Place of No Worlds is an inspiring film about why (despite it's cruelty) life is worth living. Little Bodhi gives and receives love, growing through the process. 

In the final scenes, Paul Kelly's "I'm Not Afraid of the Dark Anymore" speaks for the light just ahead of little Bodhi and everyone else watching the movie, the process of dying teaching us all how to better live. Paul Kelly, "I'm Not Afraid of the Dark Anymore" 

Teresa Palmer and Mark Webber 

Note: Mark Webber's clear-eyed vision comes in some large part from his childhood growing up battling homelessness with his mother Cheri Honkala. A wonderful way to honor this movie is to give to her organization, the Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign. Donate here to the Poor People's Army