Once Was Blind, But Now? Chris Lee Becker and Company Leave Folk Alliance Shaken

The end of the last Kansas City Folk Alliance, for me, came a little after 11:00 Saturday night at the end of four days of continuous music. To say it served as an exclamation point is to trivialize it.

It was at the start of Chris Lee Becker's set. Becker’s a wonderfully distinctive singer-songwriter who happens to come from my hometown, Bartlesville, Oklahoma. He has this eye for detail and a dark, wry sense of humor which I think of as his trademark. 

Anyway, Folk Alliance private showcases are, at most, about half an hour long. Becker, normally close to a solo act, came out with three extra “singers” (the quotes here because that wasn’t quite their role in this moment)—Beau Roberson, the lead singer-songwriter for Tulsa’s great band Pilgrim; Oklahoma singer-songwriter, Carter Sampson; and Tulsa singer-songwriter Dan Martin. They were backed by a full band.

Sampson squeezed Roberson’s hand before they started. Something was up, but I was too dumb to realize it was actually what they were about to do.

Becker started reading off a list of questions....now I was too shell shocked to remember what the questions were until a video emerged later. I remembered the one that made me struggle to reclaim the shocked laugh from my throat. It was "Is the number of humans killed in a shooting directly related to the number of hours we care about it?" Other questions followed, serious questions about how the fuck we deal with all of this mass murder in our society.

"If you kill twenty five people, do you get fifty hours of coverage, do you get seventy-five, do you get a hundred?
Are there bonus hours for dead children?
How many muscles does it take to pull a trigger?
How many muscles does it take to hug our loved ones?
How many muscles does it take to be a human shield?
To wrap our bodies around someone, envelope them, to surround them?"
Will the bullets lodge in our rib cages?
Or will they fly straight through us?

"The second amendment defines no limitations on the arms we have a right to bear,
But we are human,
Warm hearts beat in our chests,
We are empathetic,
We are members of our villages and citizens of our race--
Is that why no one has created the National Pipe Bomb Association?

"A man says 'Don't Tread on Me,' and we rally behind him;
We have fundraisers, we have parades, we chant his name.
A man says, 'Please don't shoot me,' and we are quiet,
And we listen for the inevitable 'bang!'

"Chinese alchemists discovered gunpowder while seeking a formula for immortality--
Did they find it?"

Then, the three "singers" began reading the names of schools, shopping centers, movie theaters--most of them familiar--the sites of mass murders starting with Columbine. Each person read a name; the second one repeated it; the third one repeated it once again. Becker and the band played a sort of instrumental interlude behind them. 

The list was interminable. The music kept going, Becker picking his mandolin, an arpeggio in a holding pattern. Tulsa's Jesse Aycock and Jared Tyler on steel and resonator, respectively, making some simmering sound that reverberated through the room riding waves of pain. At some point, around the time my eyes blurred, Sampson fell out, momentarily. The readers occasionally touched each other's arms or held hands. And it kept going. The music kept going and the list kept going. It seemed it would never stop before eventually arriving at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

Roberson finished the list declaring, “And many, many, MANY more!” The others repeated what he said.

  

According to a Facebook post by McAlester, Oklahoma singer-songwriter Levi Parham, the list lasted ten minutes. It felt like the eternity it was.

As it ended, the mandolin was playing a more identifiable melody, not that I could place it. The instrumental accompaniment stopped. Tyler threw his head back and launched into an acapella "Amazing Grace," the melody that had been just under the surface. The whole room started to sing along.

It's hard to overstate what an inversion of "hopes and prayers" that moment presented. "Was blind but now I see" became a message of hope. For me, it felt like a middle American—a rural American even—call for rebirth, and it couldn't have sounded much closer to Martin Luther King's 1968 Southern Christian Leadership Conference speech if that speech, in fact, had somehow been recited. In that speech, so close to his death, King called for America to be born again—born again to realize the hopes and dreams, the vision, that has bound this country together in its moments of greatness.

Now, that's me speaking, of course, but the moment showed something devastating and deep about the power of music. The room was shaken. I went out in the hall, and I heard (I think) Tulsa's Jacob Tovar telling my friend Jeff Freling about it. There was a spooky quiet all around.

I had to leave because my daughter needed to be picked up, but I remember wondering how in hell Becker was going to follow that.

I heard a lot of wonderful music this Folk Alliance, as usual. I heard some great music. But that moment struck such a raw hard chord, I'm not sure I've ever experienced anything quite like it.

(Thank you Mike, for having a better memory than the guy sitting next to you.)

Newly added video here. It took me almost a week, but I revised the above accordingly. Embedded below and linked--https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivmKSFFMR0k

"Don't Forget How Valuable You Are," Mary J. Blige and Her Fans

For Lauren, one of the strongest women I'll ever imagine much less believe I've known:

This was a tough one for me. I’m coming out of a 16 year relationship and marriage; Mary J. Blige is coming out of the same length marriage, and she's brought a whole album hard-focused on the process. “Thick of It” was the first single because that’s precisely what it’s about.

Sure, sounds helpful, and it is, but it's also every bit as hard. It would be easy if Mary simply got your anger out and cheered you forward. That’s what a lot of critics seem to hear. But what I hear is the push pull of the keys and bass at the center of “Thick of It." This album is about being pushed one way and pulled another because the separation of two human beings cannot be done without unfathomable pain.

Blige does express that pain, and an anger fingering fantasies of revenge, but the brilliance of MJB is that she’s too honest an artist not to turn the questions over in her head. “Love ain’t just black and white,” she announces from the start. Or the thorny undercurrents of the relatively soothing soul of “U & Me (Love Lesson),” a record about how much we don’t know about our most basic motivations.

Despite the two nods to The London Sessions, the spare ballad “Smile” or the raver “Find the Love,” most of this album is firmly anchored in the rich blend of utterly contemporary American hip hop Blige has come to sling like gut bucket blues. And if that doesn’t sound like the highest compliment, you’re not hearing me.

The album starts, over a building but halting piano, with the singer asking how she reached this hellish precipice in her life and answering herself, “I got here with love.” Each time she answers herself, the paradox becomes clearer. Love can be hell, fire and brimstone hell, but this woman knows (and her fans know) everything good came from that same source.

Of course, Blige is making a career statement. Since her first crossover hit, “Real Love,” she’s been about where love takes her. Her empathy has been her guide, and it’s kept her rooted to her audience in a way celebrity divas simply can’t replicate. One might cast Ms. Blige in a VH1 special with that name, but “celebrity” or “diva” just doesn’t quite fit.

Blige carefully maintains that connection to her audience because that is how she sees herself--as one of her fans who's made it to the mainstage. She can write inspirational lyrics, but she respects herself too much to skip the confusion and the pain. At the end of a decade of wrestling with the vagaries of love in marriage, Blige has made her most explicit navigational album to get the hell out—using “love” as the north star and “truth” as the random variable that must be figured into the equation. 

Funny thing, on my Target exclusive, the two extra songs are “The Naked Truth” (which is about the most exposed, romantic yearning on the record) and “Love in the Middle” (which is explaining just how the singer keeps her balance on this love question). In other words, the bonus tracks underscore the need to square the “love” and “truth” that troubles this entire record.

Does it square the circle? Of course not, but it circles the square, and that brings everyone listening into the problem asking the right questions. Title track “Strength of a Woman” does something more, too. It celebrates the singularity of womanhood as well as the many feminine roles ignored by manhood and often under siege to men’s virility. Of course, the main key here is also “love,” all you really need.

She delivers that message without idealism or irony. It’s something sky-is-blue knowable. Love is how she got here, and it’s how we got here. If you wanna keep your eye on the ball, you gotta keep an eye on love.

In reality, easier said than done doesn’t begin to explain the problems that lie ahead, but it’s why people make music. And it’s why we play it, and it’s one way we hang on.

Love Yourself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLO5gdSqY7Y&list=PLnnYeXOMNKeqJrJXJhP5BvxoMfqCqTLFR

Talking Musical Revolutions

The world’s changing rapidly, and so is this business of writing about music. It’s not what it was when my first musical mentor, James McGraw, introduced this Oklahoma kid to underground music and Rolling Stone, and it’s not what it was when my first music writing mentor, Dave Marsh, started schooling me with record reviews and American Grandstand. It’s not what it was when I first discovered Trouser Press, Maximum Rock & Roll, Guitar Player, Musician, The Source and Vibe. It’s not what it was when my friends and I started our first rock & politics newsletter.

In some of its academic tendencies, it’s certainly become more thoroughly informed, and it’s probably more broadly populist than ever. So there’s an upside. 

But what I don’t see vividly enough is rock and rap writing as a completion of the circuit of the music itself. When I started, I saw it as an art form that played a role in the culture—as breaking was to graffiti was to hip hop. I never got very good at that guitar, but I wanted to make my own kind of answer records with words.

In 2018, of course words are more prevalent than ever, but they don’t seem to be read, enough. This has something to do with why Marsh’s greatest critical output the past ten years has been through his SiriusXM radio show Kick out the Jams. And it’s why my brother, Lee Ballinger, has so inspired me with his Love and War podcast. It’s also why I’m inspired by Daniel Wolff’s continuous community conversations in the wake of Grown-Up Anger.

And it’s why I feel I have to take three paragraphs to even begin to give context to what journalist/poet Gavin Martin’s new album, Talking Musical Revolutions, means to me.

Born out of a series of musical/spoken word events, Martin’s album is cultural criticism as music. It teaches its lessons phrase-by-phrase with each listen, it sweetens those lessons with driving bass and drums, shimmering guitar and keys.

Many of Martin’s songs are poetic essays on musical icons—Wilko Johnson, David Bowie, Rory Gallagher, The Sex Pistols and Marvin Gaye—while others deal with the seedy relationship between DJ and pedophile Jimmy Savile and Margaret Thatcher and a fantasy derived from an environmentally damaged seagull that overturns Irish Protestant delusion. Perhaps my favorite, for all kinds of personal and musical reasons, is album closer, “Time Spills,” the tale of the destruction of a beloved friend. All of it is urgently about why music matters.

The accompaniment is remarkable throughout. This is poetic rock in the tradition of The Last Poets, Patti Smith, Jim Carroll and John Trudell. By that I mean the music doesn’t just add atmosphere, it carries things home.

Often, it works as a sort of juxtaposition. While “The Pistols of Sex” has a wall of guitars that calls to mind the band, the epic tribute to David Bowie, “Talking David Bowie” has a hip hop sensibility and the tale of Marvin Gaye, “Long Hard Road to Be Free (For Marvin)” takes the form of gothic rock, though the guitar is indeed soulful. These mixed sensibilities broaden the tent in ways words in a magazine once promised.

I’ve learned to listen to all of these artists with different ears, Gallagher and Johnson, essentially, for the first time. I’ve gained a deepened sense of the political dimensions of everything at play here, even the most personal aspects of our lives. As much as anything I’ve gained a sense of possibility, and it starts at a dead end.  Here's the opener: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwi7lwrRnUc

The quasi-Martin character that starts the album with “I Want to Tell You Something” is the danger all around—the drunken old-timer at the bar, telling you what it all meant when it really meant something, reminding you of your inadequacy having never been from a certain place and time. He speaks directly for the 16 year old me in the 55 year old body. 

But Martin shifts point of view to cast doubt on the old punk. He's doesn't want to believe it's all over. He sees the danger (and the delusion) there.  (In an added verse on the lyric sheet, Martin makes it plain.) The past wasn’t everything we think it was any more than the present is everything we think it isn’t. The truth is we gotta roll with where we are, and there’s no time to waste. The world is changing so fast we constantly need to be rethinking our jobs.

Not that we should waste time second guessing every glimpse of the truth. The appeal of "I Want to Tell You Something" is that the character is talking about real salvation. Everything was, in fact, there in the past, but it only means what it could if we reconcile it with today. With Talking Musical Revolutions, Gavin Martin finds a way forward. The clear call to the rest of us is to find ours.

Woodyfest #3, It's Up to Us

July's Woody Guthrie Folk Festival presentation on Daniel Wolff's book, Grown-Up Anger: The Connected Mysteries of Bob Dylan, Woody Guthrie, and the Calumet Massacre of 1913, took place on the front porch of the replica Guthrie family home in the Okemah Historical Society. The setting was entirely appropriate. For an hour, Wolff, Pastures of Plenty editor Dave Marsh and musicians Chris Buhalis and Michael Fracasso discussed what Marsh called the focus of Wolff’s book, “How do all these people fit inside that one question that animates ‘Like a Rolling Stone,” ‘how does it feel’? The answers came from somewhere near that front porch, Guthrie only being a year old when the events behind his “1913 Massacre” took place. The answers also came from each individual history in Wolff’s book, on that porch and in that room.                         

               Wolff started the talk the way the book starts, considering why his 13-year old self responded to the anger he heard in “Like a Rolling Stone.” He knew the world wasn’t fair, it wasn’t just, and he heard the appropriate response in that song. His book recalls the inadequate answers adults would give him to the questions of the day, “’Sure the present system is messed up,’ some grown-up would say in a sympathetic voice, ‘but it’s still the best that . . . .’ And so on, and so on, til I just wanted to change the channel.”

                Marsh’s talk began with the contrast between his background and Wolff’s, which in some ways paralleled the distinctions between Guthrie’s Oklahoman ‘middle class’ roots in the early decades of the century and Dylan’s more comfortable background in the middle of the century. Wolff’s father was a commuter who took the train into the city, and Marsh’s father was a conductor who carried commuters. What they shared, and what Guthrie and Dylan shared, was a sense of loneliness, even though Guthrie had a sense of community that sprung from the labor movements still alive in his day, and Dylan struggled to find community in the post-McCarthy era of his career.

                Once, when Marsh asked his mother about his grandfather’s politics (he lived on the other side of the Upper Peninsula from Calumet), she replied, “A lot like yours.” She then helped him piece together a story from his youth when he first met his Uncle Elgin on his grandparents’ farm. Elgin showed up one day looking for his grandfather, and Marsh remembered his grandmother dropping whatever was in her hands. She told her grandson, “Those two haven’t talked to each other in forty years.”   

During a railroad strike that would help ignite the anticommunist Palmer raids of the 1920s, Marsh’s great uncle crossed the picket. His grandfather painted his brother’s name on the side of a boxcar, calling him a scab, and rolled it down a hill so that the whole town would know. With this, Marsh underscored the importance of all that seemingly small stuff that people do because they don’t have control, want control and feel isolated.

               

This set up Michael Fracasso singing “1913 Massacre,” but he didn’t just start singing. He also began with his roots. Fracasso explained that this song always hit home because his father was a steelworker in Ohio, and Christmas time was always a special childhood memory for him. The workers would have a big Christmas party and all of the kids would get “a bag of candy with maybe a toy inside.” This is the setting for the song, described so eloquently in Wolff’s book, about just such a happy moment destroyed by “copper boss thugs” who shout fire into Calumet’s Italian Hall during the party and then hold the doors shut while seventy three partygoers suffocated and were trampled in the panic that followed. Listening to Fracasso’s sweet, heartrending vocals, it’s hard to imagine anyone speaking more forcefully for the fifty-nine children in that number killed on what should be one of the happiest nights of their young lives.

                Buhalis then sang Dylan’s version of the same tune, “Song to Woody.” With a nod to Fracasso, he also recalled the stockings of candy at the Christmas parties he went to as the son of a Detroit ironworker. As Fracasso had done with “1913 Massacre,” Buhalis personalized his tribute to Guthrie as well as “Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly, too, all the good people who traveled with you.” The intensity of his voice told of the struggle to find a place to stand in a world that “seems like it’s dying but it’s hardly been born.” 

                After some discussion of Dylan’s question—what do we do today as opposed to what made sense in the past—Buhalis sang Alfred Hayes and Earl Robinson’s “Joe Hill,” the tribute to the great folksinger martyred in 1915, a song that insists Joe Hill isn’t dead. It’s hard to imagine a sound more convincing than Buhalis’s plainspoken baritone, but after the song ended, he admitted he struggled with the “ridiculous optimism” over those sorts of labor songs, those ones about winning in the face of one hard loss after another. Buhalis added, “I know it’s metaphorical—“

                To which Marsh responded, “It’s musical too….I mean, you’re only about 3/4ths from putting Jimmy LaFave in the room.”

                “No,” Chris nodded, “Jimmy LaFave’s in the room.”

                For those who might not know (and unfortunately, that’s most of the world), Jimmy LaFave was a great Texas-born/Oklahoma-formed songwriter who was unrivaled as an interpreter of just about anyone he set out to interpret, but for our purposes, it’s easy to say he was unmatched for the way he made Guthrie and Dylan his own. He was a dear friend to the members of this discussion, performing with Buhalis and Fracasso many times, and he'd only just died two months before Woodyfest.

                Marsh continued, “I was thinking about that as you sang the song today. I never heard Joe Hill that way . . . the understanding that there are people that this will happen to in any person’s lifetime, and it isn’t because Joe Hill was a hero (although he WAS a hero), it’s because….Martin Luther King said that the problem with communism was that it forgot that life is individual and….”

                At this moment, Marsh choked up a little, thinking of LaFave. “Shouldn’t have brought up Jimmy,” he said.

                He went on. “The problem of capitalism is that it forgets that life is collective . . . . and everything my brothers have been saying today, and everything this festival’s about, that’s what it says”—Life is collective.

                Fracasso then delivered a gorgeous reading of Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine.” The inescapably vivid lyrics being “No martyrs among you now whom you can call your own. Go on your way accordingly, but know you’re not alone.” Wolff called it an answer to Joe Hill, reading his book’s opening John Berger quote, “How do the living live with the dead.”

                Wolff emphasized the point. “We continue to live with them. How do we do that? How do we honor them? How does this what I call ‘line of anger’ that goes back in time continue? And it was never easy. [He pointed at Buhalis.] As you say, Joe Hill didn’t have an easy route and neither did Woody Guthrie or a whole bunch of other people.”

                In that room, at that moment last July, Jimmy LaFave was, in fact, present, as was Joe Hill, as was Woody Guthrie, as were the seventy three whose Christmastime deaths inspired this particular cry. Dylan was there, too, as was every one of us who found our way down to Woody Guthrie’s hometown to celebrate the great collective fight for justice Guthrie’s career represents.

                The question how the living carry on that fight was indeed the question at the heart of it all. What worked for Guthrie, in the end, couldn’t work for Dylan, and Dylan’s lonesome search for meaningful community presaged the isolation that today threatens to swallow us whole even in the midst of intense political uproar. Talks like this are groundwork for further discussion on what to do with our anger and our desire for justice when the world doesn’t look like it did in the past. The strategies and tactics are no easy prescription because they’re as individual and ever-changing as the lives we lead, but at least one point made that day is inescapable and, if we can grab hold of our own strength, inspiring.

                Recalling the moment the memory of Jimmy LaFave halted his speech, Marsh said, “You know, what I got so weepy about is the fact that it’s up to us.”

                Spurred on by Jimmy, Joe, Woody, Bob and all the others “who come with the dust and are gone with the wind,” no one left the room without feeling that call.

P.S. The video is on YouTube and well worth watching, here--
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpJWP1Jo70Q