Something To Be
“I heard what he had gone through, and would continue to go through until he came to rest in this earth.” --James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

In his book Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century, Greil Marcus gets as close as anyone has to defining the significance of the late 70s punk rock explosion. Marcus describes the punk response as a “No” to the spectacle of both the political and popular culture of the late ‘70s. To illustrate this, he describes the Sex Pistols’ lead singer Johnny Rotten, as “a medium”—“as he stood on the stage, opened his mouth, and fixed his eyes on the crowd, various people who had never met, some who had met but who had never before been properly introduced, some who had never heard of some of the others, as Johnny Rotten had heard of almost none of them, began to talk to each other and the noise they made was what one heard . . . . because this tradition lacked both cultural sanction and political legitimacy, because this history was comprised of only unfinished, unsatisfied stories, it carried tremendous force.”

And the force of that “no” to the dominant culture led thousands of kids who knew next to nothing about music to pick up instruments for the first time and make the loudest, angriest noise they could possibly make. Beyond the big “no,” the aims were virtually non-existent and self-destructive because, as Marcus puts it, the antidote to crowd spectacle is crowd panic, the tension he felt when he saw the Sex Pistols perform their last concert at San Francisco’s Winterland Ballroom in January 1978.

I grew up a long way from San Francisco, and my memory of the Pistols’ visit to Tulsa’s Cain’s Ballroom--covered on the nightly news like a true threat to Oklahoman youth--was only a puzzle to me. But though I was a rock fan, the music hadn’t yet turned my world upside down.

Music had always been a part of my life, particularly as a connection between me and the older brother whom I idolized. Some of my earliest memories are of Elvis and the Beatles, whose records were always in the air, and the covers of which I would contemplate on the floor of my brother’s room. No adult or even teen (at least without psychedelics) could ever appreciate the light dancing vibrancy of the Magical Mystery Tour album cover the way that a child can. And then there was James Brown’s Cold Sweat, with thrilling and scary album art of a man so drenched in sweat, robing and disrobing in multiple frames, that he looked like the most vibrantly alive person I’d ever seen and somehow near death at the same time.

When I was six, I got my parents to buy me a copy of Eric Burden and War’s “Spill The Wine,” and I remember dancing in my room to that song and the b-side “Magic Mountain.” As my parents’ marriage disintegrated and my brother disappeared from the home into a throng of his cowboy hippie friends, alongside children’s records, I played my first real album, the one my brother gave me for Christmas, The Beatles Again or Hey Jude or whatever it’s called. Later, I would learn Paul wrote “Hey Jude” to console Julian Lennon after his parents’ divorce. Whatever it did for Julian, I got the message and will always be thankful for it.

The summer my parents divorced, the summer of ’74, I would become enamored with my blue ball-shaped (more than a little like a pod out of 2001) transistor radio and Casey Kasem’s Top 40. My soon-to-be-step-sister and I would call in and request such kid-friendly schmaltz as the Heywood’s “Billy Don’t Be a Hero” and Paper Lace’s “The Night Chicago Died,” along with the more mysterious sounds of Steely Dan’s “Rikki, Don’t Lose that Number” and Michael Murphy’s “Wildfire.” I began buying more singles, one of my favorites being the Hues Corporation’s “Don’t Rock the Boat,” which was as soothing and hopeful a dose of soul as any child could hope for. In 1976, Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life became my first favorite album of music outside of the Beatles’ canon.

But 1977 became a sort of turning point for me, when I was fourteen and initiated into the wonderful world of adolescent girls by my cousin Julie and her beautiful best friend Pam. Through them, Fleetwood Mac became my soundtrack. My junior high buddies and I also started going to mobile disco dances at the American Legion Hall where songs like Heat Wave’s “Boogie Nights” excited my imagination, and I lucked into my first slow dance to the Bee Gee’s “How Deep Is Your Love?”

But all of that music was still distant in some way from the shy world where I lived most of my life. 7th Grade marked the beginning of a 4-year crush on a girl named Lisa, whom I couldn’t talk to without a stammer, even though she drew on my back every day during my Spanish class. I just froze when I felt her pencil touch my back, and I thought about the things cool guys would have turned and said.

The summer before high school, I would ride my bike all over town and visit my brother in the trailer park where he lived with his girlfriend. I remember the music we listened to because it left a special imprint on me—various jazz artists including and especially Ornette Coleman and James Blood Ulmer’s Tales of Captain Black, Van Morrison’s Wavelength, Jackson Browne’s Running on Empty, Patti Smith’s Easter, Lou Reed’s Street Hassle and Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town. I was fascinated by all of this music, which wasn’t (aside from Patti’s “Because the Night”) on the radio, but which sounded more immediate and personal to me, maybe simply because it was part of my brother’s refuge.

Darkness on the Edge of Town , in particular, said something to me that most of the superstar music on the radio didn’t say. It was in the rough-hewn texture of it—the chugging intensity of guitar, bass and drum and the almost untrained sound of that wailing voice. I didn’t know what it was, but that sounded like my world. The album art even felt approachable in a unique way—with the smudged, hand-typed lyric sheet and Bruce’s rumpled picture on the jacket. He looked somehow like what I saw in the mirror , and he took that self image that always came up lacking and made it seem cool.

I’d met this girl at a high school football game where her friends were talking to my friends. Kristi Hall was wearing a pink satin jacket and chewing gum, and she was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen. A few weeks later in school, a mutual friend told me that Kristi liked me and gave me her phone number.

The night that everything changed, I sat staring at her number with the phone in my hand, and I kept trying to think of what to say. I put on my favorite record, and the urgency of the opening song said “Wait a second there, bud.” “I got a head on collision smashing in my guts man,” Bruce sang, and I knew the feeling. The entirety of the song that followed—particularly that bridge that said “it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive"-- told me that I had to go back in that room, pick up that phone and dial that number.

And I did, and rock and roll never again meant to me the same things that it had before.

The entirety of Darkness raged against my sense of helplessness. I heard my secret self, in a family where I’d always played the role of the good child, in “Adam Raised a Cain.” “Something in the Night” placed me in a mythical nightmare where I might have been defeated. But the determination of the drum and the jangling of the guitar that answered it said there was still a chance. “Candy’s Room” whispered to me of my fantasy of being seen and appreciated, and “Racing in the Street” paid tribute to the nobility of refusing to surrender one’s soul to a world bent on beating it down.

Around the same time, my favorite writer would become Dave Marsh, whose biography of Springsteen I all but inhaled. It helped me get a handle on what I was experiencing. Of the lyrics to “Racing in the Street,” Marsh wrote, “There’s love in those words, and understanding, for precisely those people who are ordinarily shut out of American life: commonplace, anonymous Americans, undistinguished by ethnicity or other cultural memory. These are the sort of people who are romanticized, depicted as the backbone of democracy, but almost never allowed to speak for themselves. Darkness on the Edge of Town is an album about such people. It’s not an accident that the end of “Racing in the Streets,” where Danny Federici’s organ blends with Roy Bittan’s piano in a fugue like cry, is the warmest, most affectionate moment on this stark album.”


This may seem like heady stuff for a 15-year-old to get out of that moment when he first called a girl up on the phone, but I think that’s why adolescence haunts most of us all of our lives. One of the most pervasive fiction archetypes—the tale of initiation—deals with this precise moment in our lives when we are robbed of our childhood’s self-centered vision of the universe, that sense we have that our existence and our ideals really matter to others. James Joyce’s “Araby” offers one of the most beautiful examples of such a tale, in which an Irish boy realizes the girl of his dreams has her sites set on an exotic world beyond his own. When he gives up on this girl, he looks up into the dark, and the older narrator describes it this way-- “I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger.”

As we move from childhood to adulthood, we are confronted with demons we never knew before, and we don’t know their names, and we sure as hell don’t know how to fight them. Darkness on the Edge of Town sketched the crucial outlines for me and gave me a role I knew how to play—myself, unapologetically.

Particularly on the second side of that album, I saw my environment drawn more clearly in music than I’d ever seen it before. The small-town characters that believe in “The Promised Land,” being beat down each day by the “Factory,” walking alone through “Streets of Fire” and determined to “Prove It All Night” lived in a bleak, hopeless landscape like the one that surrounded me. I would get my driver’s license about that time, and most of my high school experience is laced through with my experience prowling the streets of my small Oklahoma hometown with that music on my 8-Track.

In that era of rock superstardom, there’s no coincidence that the sounds of unemployed and disillusioned youth in England and the sounds of unemployed and considerably more visionary black youth in the South Bronx and Philadelphia would give birth to two currents of music that still inspire today’s hits. In an extraordinarily segregated period for popular music, after so many walls seemed to have been torn down only a decade before, white youth and black youth built guerilla movements out of music that countered the spectacle of the Top 40 by speaking more immediately for them.

It’s important to me to point out that I heard Darkness on the Edge of Town as a piece with these new things that were happening in music, particularly punk. But Bruce’s “no” to the slick, mainstream culture that had become so remote from its listeners carried with it something more than a “no.” It said “yes” to me. It told me that who I was and where I lived and when I lived were all something to be. For the first time in my life, my sense of self was not tinged by nostalgia and yearning but was defiantly present tense and hopeful. And like so many of that era, I started playing guitar and writing songs, encouraged by a new spirit that wanted to kick down the walls that had grown up between the rock star world and the world that inspired it.

Against the mantras of insignificance most of us have beaten into us by adulthood--that our hopes and dreams really don’t matter in the great scheme of things; that we, individually, don’t matter either and that we really can’t change the way the world works--rock and its kin have repeatedly insisted just the opposite. The music says you matter and you can change the world.

A song like “Johnny B. Goode,” became the signature song of the rock and roll era because it encapsulated such dreams, not incidentally for someone American society would just as soon never hear from, an uneducated kid from a log cabin in the backwoods of Louisiana. While the fact that this kid plays guitar “just like a ringin’ a bell” makes it pretty plain that this is thinly veiled autobiography, the “Go, Johnny, go” chorus casts Chuck Berry and his audience as this would-be star’s cheerleaders. Berry then serves as his own champion, urging himself to play the guitar and throw in a duck walk or two—fulfill the dream by putting that name in lights and keeping it there. Similarly, two years earlier “Roll Over Beethoven” finds Berry tackling the behemoths of Western European classical tradition by celebrating the kids at the jukebox and a teenage girl’s dance moves while he supplies the arsenal of riffs to mount the siege.

So much of rock history—from Eddie Floyd’s “Raise Your Hand” and Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” to Salt-N-Pepa’s “Shake Your Thing” and Prince’s “Cream”-- is in this stance of the star celebrating the power of the fan and, ultimately, fueling his or her own thunder. It’s the same anarchic salvo that connects Little Richard’s working man Friday night on “Rip It Up” to Detroit rockers the MC5’s psychedelically ambitious “Kick Out the Jams.” And it’s this same sense of identification with one another against established power that fuels every variant on the Who’s “My Generation” as well as the more explicitly political vision of a song like Sly and the Family Stone’s “Stand.” It’s also the tie that binds the relationship politics of Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” to the larger demands of the Civil Rights Movement and, more particularly in a song like James Brown’s “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud,” the Black Power Movement.

But at least as significant as the political anthems are the songs that reach down to individual insecurities that would be all but untouchable in any other forum. As only such pillow talk will, the lovers’ conversation in “We’ve Gotta Get Out of This Place” says volumes--with a line like “Watch my daddy in bed and tired”--about what goes unsaid between working class fathers and sons. This no doubt descends from Muddy Waters’ roar, “I’m a Man,” in “Mannish Boy,” voicing black male rage against 400 years of slavery and cultural emasculation in a way that also gives a voice to those same working class kids of all races who didn’t want to follow their daddy’s down an early path of despair.

And music is arguably unique in its reach to give voice and story to those private places where we often lose our largest battles. Madonna’s “Live to Tell” may be the clearest example for the way it plainly speaks the hopes and fears of an abuse victim, probably a child being abused, who never feels certain that she will live long enough to tell her story, and even if she does, that the story will save her life (or anyone else’s). With that #1 single in 1986, the sort of unheard voice writer John Edgar Wideman gave surreal form to in his short story “newborn thrown in trash and dies,” the kind of voice Woody Guthrie feared would go unheard 50 years before, whispered in millions of ears worldwide, and millions whispered the lyrics back, offering that kind of reassurance against insurmountable odds only a song can offer.

That’s the heart of the beauty in a love song like Guns ‘N’ Roses “Sweet Child O’ Mine” or Peter Gabriel and Kate Bush’s “Don’t Give Up.” And it’s the secular gospel extension of such lovers’ dreams that sounds so triumphant in a song like Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough.” And that’s the same gospel that a son uses as a balm for his former--“crack fiend”/always--“Black Queen” mother on Tupac Shakur’s “Keep Ya Head Up.”

The nature of rock itself is to shout and scream and bang drums and power chords and thump bass and make a loud noise with old records and keyboards and synthesizers, a loud noise that borrows heavily from the Pentecostal gospel tradition to shout on high that I matter, you matter, we matter, and none of us plan to go down quietly.

What has especially come to speak the most profoundly to me in my adult years has been the space created in music that Mary A. Bulwack and Robert K. Oermann tackle in Finding Her Voice: The Saga of Women in Country Music, the voice women have found in the music. Bulwack and Oermann write, “The story of women in country music is a window into the world of the majority of American women. It describes poverty, hardship, economic exploitation, sexual subjugation, and limited opportunities. Sometimes it is self-defeating and reactionary, painful and despairing. But it also contains outspoken protest and joyful rebellion, shouts of exaltation and bugle calls for freedom.” And this truth is nowhere more apparent than in the music made by black women in the rock era. It’s a truth Black Noise author Tricia Rose tackles focusing on women rappers:

“They are integral and resistant voices in rap music and in popular music in general who sustain an ongoing dialogue with their audiences and with male rappers about sexual promiscuity, emotional commitment, infidelity, the drug trade, racial politics, and black cultural history.”

Two moments come to mind most vividly in the better part of two decades I have spent writing about music, a period in which I have written about women’s voices, particularly black women’s voices, more than those of any other particular group.

The first of those two moments was what some might have seen as nothing more than a moment of filler in a Salt-N-Pepa concert from the late ‘80s. Midway through the show, Salt-N-Pepa’s deejay threw on the “We’re All in the Same Gang” record, which was made in response to the era’s increase in gang violence. The b-girls dropped down off the stage and danced on low risers and at crowd level to align themselves with the crowd. As the entire arena rocked along with the record on the turntable, the unity the music professed felt heart-warmingly real.

Years later, I reviewed an outdoor concert that featured a half a dozen or so teeny-bopper groups. I was old enough to be the father of most of the young girls that made up the majority of the crowd. When the Orange County ska band, No Doubt took the stage, a song I found likeable enough, “I’m Just A Girl,” took on proportions I’d never imagined. Watching a sea of young women declare along with Gwen Stefani, “I’m just a girl, just a girl in this world,” it was very clear that being a young girl in this world was a sublimely beautiful thing to be, and in that moment it held all the promise of the biggest dreams in rock and roll. No one could be more surprised than me that most of those five minutes I watched the bobbing crowd through tears in my eyes.

from Monsters, Marx and Music

Two Hearts

(pictured left, Ron Casanova's
No Housing, No Peace 1999; right Lauren Alexander's Homeless)

This month’s People’s Tribune features the work of two of my favorite Kansas City teachers, both artists who have shaped my political and aesthetic vision in countless ways.

One is an article by Ron Casanova, who founded the Kansas City Union of the Homeless in the early 90s. Cas brought together many local visual artists, musicians and specific issue activists for the very first time and taught us new ways of interaction and perceiving our relationship to the city and world around us. I, for one, can never repay him for all I learned in his presence.

His interview for the paper’s regular column “Spirit of the Revolution”:

http://peoplestribune.org/PT.2006.08/PT.2006.08.3.html

A recent article on his art on exhibit in New York:

http://www.nycny.com/columns/lamb/lamb11-05-04b.html

My other teacher/artist hero featured in this month's People's Tribune is Lauren Alexander. Her painting, Homeless, and Dreaming of a Home graces an important “Vision for a New America” column by the Tribune’s Bob Lee—

http://peoplestribune.org/PT.2006.08/PT.2006.08.6.html

Maybe You're Crazy, Just Like Me

“Always, no sometimes, think it’s me/But you know I know
when it’s a dream
--“Strawberry Fields Forever”

At least since rock and roll’s beginnings, many have feared the mental health consequences of popular music. In the 50s, Southern ministers raged against the frenzied demands of “the beat,” while the Alabama White Citizens Council warned that the music would drive white children “down to the level of the Negro.” (We might like to think this is behind us, but I can assure you, as an English teacher in the 21st century, I still read student essays that try to build a causal link between syncopated rhythms and behavioral problems, and the source articles my students still manage to find show that the ideas of groups like the Alabama White Citizens Council are alive and well.)

In the 1980s and 90s, many tried to laugh off the alarm the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) first sounded over the dangers of masturbation in Prince lyrics, but it forecast Tipper Gore’s appointment as Bill Clinton’s Mental Health Advisor. And the truly scary reality should not be overlooked that Tipper Gore reached that position in the Clinton administration through nearly a decade of building alliances with the likes of my neighboring state’s Missouri Project Rock, a group with links to neo-Nazis and record burners nationwide. While the overt racism of record burners tends to be kept in the closet today, the hysteria continues to smolder and our society, to some significant degree, condones it.

After all, the psychological dangers of rock music received academic and New York Times bestseller list approval with the success of Professor Allan Bloom’s 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind. In an oft-anthologized chapter from that book, “Music,” Bloom writes, “Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.” In an essay chock full of hysterical reverie, Bloom asks, “And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music.” Considering the similarity of these fears expressed by an academically credentialed and bestselling author in the 1990s to the most repugnant racial fears expressed in the past, it is hard to see that we’ve made much progress.

The truth is far more complex than rock and rap haters want it to be. Any fan of popular music knows the music indulges the irrational, even the unhinged. That’s part of what we love about it. Perhaps more than any other art form, music manages to capture altered states of mind and allow us to indulge in them, wallow in them, be energized by them and be cleansed by them.

So many of what Paul McCartney famously called “silly love songs” are about various stages of madness. A song like “She Drives Me Crazy,” by the 80s British pop group Fine Young Cannibals almost makes sexual frustration sound fun, while songs like Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces” and “Crazy” get at just how fragile our minds can be in the throes of love. Anyone whose been through heartbreak knows it’s no euphemism to call it a kind of madness, and the stalker mentality of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” or the Beatles’ “Run for Your Life” captures a dangerous frame of mind we might not ever openly admit to, but we sing along.

Movies have repeatedly made use of this unhinged quality in obsessive love songs suggesting dimensions of insanity lurking beneath the surface of normal social relations—particularly memorable examples including the taunting horns and manic laughter of Screamin’s Jay Hawkins’ “I Put a Spell on You,” which continuously rang from Eva’s boombox in Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, or the more unsettling Dean Stockwell lip sync of Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams” in Blue Velvet. What these songs and our love of them acknowledge is the fine, fine line between love and psychosis.

And that psychosis can be as sensual and exciting as Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” or as bleak as his “Manic Depression” or as deadly as “Hey Joe.” Psychedelic textures can offer a sort of child-like comfort food in songs like the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” or they can be as agitated and unhinged as Paul McCartney sounds in “I’m Down” or “Helter Skelter” or as downright creepy (or is it just goofy? another fine line…) as Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.”

Often, the individual psyche is linked to some sort of larger unease as in Jackson Browne’s attempts to name the resignation of the post-60s era with “The Pretender” or its cost in “Running on Empty.” The train, the very symbol of the community’s ride to the Promised Land born out of the Great Migration and evoked again and again in songs like The Impressions “People Get Ready” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Land of Hope and Dreams,” could also tell the stories of what happens when no one’s (or at least no one benevolent) is at the controls in songs like Soul Asylum’s “Runaway Train” or Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train.”

A community going mad can be a joyous sound, as in Prince’s “Let’s Go Crazy” or it can be reflected by that voice from the streets in Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s groundbreaking rap “The Message”—“Don’t push me ‘cause I’m close to the edge/I’m trying not to lose me head.” Or, perhaps the most chilling of all, it can be heard in the very real voice of President Ronald Reagan, thinking he’s off mic, making a joke that the Soviet Union was now illegal and the bombs were on the way—a tape looped, stretched, compressed and remixed into perhaps the most chilling dance single of all time, Bonzo Goes to Bitburg’s “Five Minutes.”

To admit that music finds inspiration in the crazier aspects of what it is to be human, on one level, simply draws connections with other art, like that of Edgar Allan Poe and Vincent Van Gogh. More importantly, in the case of all of these art forms, the willingness to take our fears head on, to the point of empathizing with what scares us, is one of art’s greatest strengths. Perhaps the most significant point to be made here though is that the irrational in music has everything to do with characteristics that make this particular form of art uniquely magical. Maybe that’s the power we most fear.

Shaman since prehistory have made use of music’s mind/body connection to heal and cure the sick. In the middle ages, the tarantella folk song developed as a dance cure for spider venom. In 1619, physician Robert Fludd wrote History of the Macrocosm and Microcosm theorizing that music’s healing qualities came from a link music forges between the universe and the individual. After World War II, the first music therapy programs developed, in part, because of breakthroughs reaching veterans who responded to no other treatment.

In this context, it’s all the more significant to note that rock and roll itself shares its roots with another 20th Century phenomena, the charismatic movement that originated in the Pentecostal church. Both originated in and first appealed to the poor across racial lines, and rock and roll’s taboo dance moves have more than a glancing connection to charismatic behavior--yielding to the Holy Spirit, speaking in tongues, waving, jumping, swooning, laughing, crying and rolling on the floor. Not incidentally, these very behaviors associated with being hit by the Holy Spirit are also linked, both psychologically and spiritually, with healing. And, like myself, I assume most music fans have anecdotal evidence of sickness that has been staved and pain that has dissipated, at least temporarily, because of music.

The majority of anecdotes I have with music’s healing powers are so banal they would hardly be worth mentioning, if there weren’t so many of them. On more occasions than I’ve even thought about counting, I’ve been determined to stay the night in bed on cold medicine to shake off some illness that’s been draining me at work, and friends or obligations that come with being a music journalist have pulled me out of the house and down to a club until 1 or 2:00 a.m.. Now the effects depended a great deal on how exciting a band I heard, but if I got caught up in the music and really enjoyed a set, chances are my symptoms (despite the smoky bar among other things) would all but disappear during the evening and be lessened the next day.

But the personal experience I find most relevant here speaks to the specifics of both the psychological therapy offered by music as well as the reasons for at least one musical genre. One night, the farthest down I’d ever been, broke and suffering that old back pain as well as the heartbreak of a failed marriage and two subsequent relationships, in a state of mind where all I wanted to do was sit on my porch swing and wait for sunrise because I couldn’t think of what else to do with myself, in this lowest of low states, music was the one thing that reached me.

I had spent months in a state of mind where a romantic subplot (I mean, literally, something like the mostly-cooled embers that glowed between Ed Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in The Abyss) would drive me to change the channel, and then one night a persistent (downright annoying) friend dragged me out to a blues club, and I learned something extraordinarily valuable about music in general and the blues in particular. As I listened to this middle-aged musician named Kool Aid play guitar and sing with only nine good fingers, I realized his was the first talk of love in months that I hadn’t found physically painful. Early in the evening, not more than a drink under my belt, I was up and dancing with a woman in the club.

I realized then crucial piece of the truth Craig Werner voices when he defines the blues impulse in A Change is Gonna Come. He writes, “The process consists of (1) fingering the jagged grain of your brutal experience; (2) finding a near-tragic, near-comic voice to express that experience; and (3) reaffirming your existence.” He concludes, “You sing the blues so you can live to sing the blues again. A lot of times the blues are mostly about finding the energy to keep moving. That’s why they’re such great party music and that’s why you hear them echoing through rock and through rap.”

This is everyday American spiritual and physical therapy. That blues club was the kind of club that exists in black neighborhoods throughout America—with more older patrons than younger, engaging in a weekly ritual of community bonding and revitalization. Kool-Aid and his band knew the blues not as some definition in a textbook but as a part of the fabric of their lives, and so their blues play list moved easily from the work of such canonical blues greats as B.B. King to down-home staples by Z.Z. Hill and radio hits by the likes of Bobby Brown and Prince. And the only reason I found myself dancing that night was the encouragement of one of those great women who bus stop and electric slide at those shows week in and week out, as much a part of the ritual as the musicians on stage. She pulled me up out of my chair, saying “Now, Danny, you are going to dance,” because she knew that’s what I (perhaps we) needed to do.

What we were practicing is what professor Christopher Small calls “musicking” in his book Music for the Common Tongue. Small argues that the making of music is a social action, involving both the artist and the audience, and that the process makes healing connections within the community involved in that act of “musicking” and between that community and the world around it. That woman lay hands on me and healed me that night by drawing me more deeply into the musicking. It’s easy to imagine the music called on her to take that action just as it called on me to respond.

What the blues and musicking illustrate here is the way music helps us to overcome our subjective sickness. By confronting madness head on, music massages what Stephen King calls our “phobic pressure points” and helps us to feel what we might not want to feel and gain objective distance on what we might not be able to otherwise see. Without making great unsupportable claims, perhaps it is enough to say that music helps us see that our subjective horrors are not simply our own but part of the human experience.

As a society, the madness expressed in raps like “The Message” or even the Geto Boyz “Mind of a Lunatic” help us to identify larger symptoms of our shared sickness. Hearing ourselves in the songs, we begin to gain an objective picture of the private fault lines that run just under the veneer of an ordered society. Through what Howard Zinn calls a “plurality of subjectivities” we reach for the sanest vision imaginable--one that reconciles our secret selves with our public selves, our weaknesses with our strengths and our subjective limitations with an objective grasp of possibility. And all of this can happen with a lean back and snap of the fingers—the mind and body connected in healing exercise, the community together on the dance floor in some semblance of what a free and open society might some day mean.

(from Monsters, Marx and Music)

More Ghosts

Anyone who hung in for my last ghosts post might find something of interest here. I hope so. An excerpt from a little thing I'm working on called Monsters, Marx and Music--

“I saw my little girl again and felt Isabel’s tears again, and I felt my own tears begin to rise.”
--James Baldwin, “Sonny’s Blues”

Near the end of James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” the narrator has an epiphany hearing his little brother play piano in a jazz club. What comes next does as much as any writing I know to capture the power and promise of music, and that passage starts with a line that troubles me, in part, because I fear it.

Baldwin’s narrator states, “All I know about music is that not many people ever really hear it.” What Baldwin is really talking about is the difference in the way a musician hears music and the way the audience hears it. While he admits that we sometimes make personal connections to what we hear, he insists that the musician hears something more, a “roar rising from the void” that he is channeling into something others can, potentially, hear. The depth and breadth of the magic taking place in that act of making music is precisely what we miss.

To some extent, music works its magic whether or not it is heard in this way. Music has an absolute power that enriches our lives, and that power does not depend on any formal understanding. In fact, one of music’s greatest characteristics is its ability to leap past barriers of education, literacy and class bias to unite fans from diverse backgrounds. As a music writer myself, I take some comfort in that because much music criticism serves only to reinforce barriers. While music criticism tends to assume a patronizing and even contemptuous attitude toward the very working class people that created music the critics say they love, the music continues to speak most forcefully for itself.

But that’s our society. The prejudice of critics simply reflects (maybe magnifies) larger social prejudices against this or that form of culture, all of it steeped in ignorance. Although these prejudices seem to be eroding, it is still commonplace for rock fans to hate country music and rap; many country fans don’t like most rock and rap, and most rap fans couldn’t care less about rock and country. Rock critics have tended to celebrate forms of rock viewed as “alternative” while disdaining that which is “popular,” unless it either has some kind of credentials stemming from its one time underground popularity among the college rock audience (U2 and REM come to mind) or unless it has some sort of undeniable “classic” imprint (as with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones). Among “classic rock” fans, celebrated music is almost always made by white artists, the majority male, with the notable exceptions of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Santana or maybe even Otis Redding, who stand as icons of an era when the rigid social lines that increasingly defined the rock era were still in flux.

Since rock and roll was born from a coming together of cultures in conflict, the irony of these divisions boggles the mind. From about 1954 until the late 60s, the era of the Civil Rights Movement, rock and roll was born and nurtured out of an extraordinary process of cultural miscegenation. Even dating back to the 1930s, white and black fans in the North and South listened to hillbilly and race records, and the teen culture that emerged after World War II embraced the synthesis of these sounds.

Elvis became the first king of rock and roll because of his unique way with the country, blues, gospel and pop styles that fueled his imagination as a poor kid growing up in Memphis, Tennessee. The Beatles became the new rock royalty in the 1960s doing covers of Chuck Berry, Little Richard, the Isley Brothers, Carl Perkins, Buck Owens, Barrett Strong and the Marvelettes. And the Rolling Stones would be the most famous of a long line of British groups—from the Yardbirds, to the Animals and Led Zeppelin—who built their sound adding heaps of feedback, attitude and studio technology on songs and ideas from old blues records.

As evidenced by the synthesis in music today by artists as divergent as OutKast, Kid Rock, the Dave Matthews Band and Ozomatli, the sound that rises from the void continuously seeks to converge. But our society’s entrenched, mostly subjective, social divisions strain to keep it divided—just consider the all too familiar dividing line in music stores between the “Pop/Rock” section and the “R&B/Rap” section. After a decade of R&B and Rap dominating Contemporary Hits Radio, it’s hard to imagine how such Jim Crow lines can persist. Still, my heart warms when I get out of my car in a rural parking lot and hear Rage Against the Machine or Ludacris thumping from the car speakers of some white kid with a crew cut. At least in terms of cultural segregation, these kids seem all right (particularly next to the apartheid generation I came out of).

But the divisions persist, and serious fans of music tend to disdain the melting pot of the Top 40 in favor of extremely narrow radio formats that feature almost all rap and R&B, or almost all screaming white guys with very loud guitars, or almost all white women with gentler arrangements or my favorite oxymoron of all, “college rock.” And, for my own part, I’ll never forget a series of blows in the 1980s that made me wonder how a kid who had first been turned on by War, Stevie Wonder, and cultural magpies like the Beatles ever found himself with a record collection that featured almost exclusively white guys with guitars making remarkably similar kinds of records.

Central to what happens that breaks music down into so many warring sects has to do with this very gap that Baldwin addresses in “Sonny’s Blues.” For most people, the source of the music they love remains mysterious. For many, the music they don’t understand seems threatening. Even for the most passionate fans, the truth of music’s history gets obscured by the many destructive myths that surround and define the story.

At the beginning of his book The Heart of Rock & Soul: The 1001 Greatest Singles Ever Made, Dave Marsh explains how this singles-based history of rock challenges many such myths dominant in rock criticism. One such myth holds that the period between Buddy Holly’s plane crash and the arrival of the Beatles was some sort of period of stasis for music, ignoring the significance of what Marsh calls the “doo-wop revival” as well as the emergence of girl groups, Motown, Chicago and Memphis soul, Roy Orbison and James Brown. Marsh also argues against the stereotypes “that rock and roll music is essentially youth-oriented, and most of all, that the message of the music is (to borrow a slogan off the radio), all rebellion, all the time.” The book also helps Marsh explore the prominence of women ignored in most histories and the lie behind the notion “of female performers as nothing but so many producer’s puppets.”

Add to this list the commonplace notions that great music isn’t popular or shouldn’t be [someone please notify Chopin, James Brown and Smokey Robinson], and the notion that great artists must be self-contained songwriters and performers [take that straight to Elvis] or the many racist assumptions about the sophistication of “white” music compared to “black” music, or the idea that “white” and “black” music are even truly separate entities, and you have begun to describe the mess that hides the forest from the trees.

The essence of what I think gets obscured are the deep cultural roots of the rock era. Rock and roll music crystallized out of musical currents that extend backwards hundreds of years—to folksongs, work songs, spirituals and field hollers with roots in both the British Isles and West Africa. The vitality of this music is the spirit of those who have struggled hardest to survive in a country that has not often acknowledged their rights or even their humanity. The rock and roll revolution infused the mainstream of American music with the pain, the anger and the indomitable spirit of the coal mines, the cotton fields, the textile mills and the rural church. In potentially the happiest of ghost story scenarios, the new American superpower of the 1950s was immediately haunted by a blossoming popular culture that gave voice to America’s long denied underclass and insisted on a future that acknowledged the sins of the past.

As with the ghost story, the interchange between the past and the present manifested itself in ambiguous ways that still managed to reveal truth. Sam Phillips certainly had both selfish and idealized reasons for wanting to find a white singer who sang like a black man, but when he found Elvis, he also discovered a man who could help America come to terms with the gulf between its classes, white and black. By secularizing gospel music, Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Aretha Franklin and so many others began to make explicit connections between everyday struggles and eternal questions. Buddy Holly no doubt robbed Chuck Berry’s “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” of its racial significance when he covered it, but he said something else about the universality of Berry’s music—as did the Beach Boys and the Beatles later. By interweaving 17th century murder ballads, Delta blues, and rock, and internalizing Woody Guthrie enough to align himself with the Civil Rights Movement, Bob Dylan fostered a political consciousness that helped inspire, among other things, the Beatles’ rapid evolution from unassuming rock and roll band to self-reflective cultural explorers.

But at the risk of oversimplifying things, it helps to look at the essence of the spirits that gave birth to rock and roll and continue to rudder the best of its kin. That essence is what Woody Guthrie called his “voice” (meaning society’s unheard voice) in a 1940s poem of the same name, a quality found missing from “the stages, screens, radios, records, juke boxes/In magazines . . . newspapers, seldom in courtrooms/And more seldom when students and policemen study the faces/Behind the voices.” It’s what Dave Marsh described in a 1983 column dedicated to Florence Thompson, the “Migrant Mother,” made famous by Dorothea Lange’s so-named dust bowl portrait.

Marsh writes:
“I’ve always felt that one of the secret strengths of rock and roll was that it provided a voice and a face for the forgotten and disenfranchised. In a way, Florence Thompson’s serves for all the others. At least in its beginnings, rock was one of the few ways that poor people, country people, black people and Southerners had of making themselves visible in a country whose media increasingly depict it as solely urban, affluent, white and northern.”

And when we talk about the ghosts of America’s past haunting America to do right, we're talking about this voice, a voice that shaped itself over centuries in the hills of Appalachia with folk songs of unrequited loves, tragedies and triumphs transported from the old world. And it’s a voice that’s mettle was tested and galvanized in America’s cotton fields for over three hundred years through the back breaking toil of men, women and children not even considered fully human as they provided the free labor that built the South and fueled the shipbuilding and Industrial revolution that eventually made the North its sovereign leader.

It’s hard to find a founder of country, rhythm and blues (or their baby rock and roll), white or black, who does not have some experience with sharecropping, the even more feudal continuation of the economic injustice founded by slavery. And almost every one of those founders points not only back to the healing powers of church on Sunday morning as an influence on his or her music, but they also point back to the cotton fields themselves.

B.B. King recalls a story as ancient as slavery itself:
“No matter where you went, walking behind the plow or picking cotton, you’d be hearing beautiful voices, singing about the sun high in the sky or the gathering storm clouds or the long, hard day or how good the food would taste once work was done. Seems like the songs were made up by the heart, nothing written or rehearsed, music meant to take the ache out of our backs and the burden off our brains.”

Similarly, the woman whose success led Atlantic records to call itself, for a time, “The House that Ruth Built,” Ruth Brown writes:

“Outside of church my musical diet in North Carolina consisted of spontaneous whoopin’, shoutin’ and hollerin’ in the fields. Great uncle Scott would usually be the one to start, just when we were flagging, then Willie would join in, providing little sketches of the blues as they plowed up and down the rows with their single blades. There was as much plain hummin’ as there was singin’, and they had instruments, like jew’s harps, simple comb and paper and penny-whistle flutes that didn’t even cost a penny, they were nothing but lengths of sugar cane with holes punched through. The blues don’t have to come from anywhere but the heart and soul of man, they don’t require fancy orchestration, and they sure didn’t get any from us as the sounds traveled from field to field, apart maybe from the counterpoint fellow toilers contributed. I remember Willie’s stammer magically disappearing as he sang anything that came to mind. One minute it was:
I miss my baby
Wonder do my baby miss me?
The next he’d be singin’ about his ole mule:
Come on Bessie, walk a little fast,
Got to git up to the house,
I’se gittin’ huuuuuunnggry!

“Many times it made no sense; Scott and Willie were simply entertaining themselves, along with the rest of us, in that blazing hot sun. But the music they made was soaking in just as surely as the sweat was pouring out.”

We see the magic of the human spirit in these memories—a spirit that survived the brutality of the Middle Passage and the systematic attempt to eradicate a people’s identity, humanity and familial bonds. The isolated slave working the field, sun-baked and suffering unimaginable aches and pains, simply had to keep going, and to do this, he or she would sing to themselves and inspire others. Bobbie Ann Mason describes the sounds this way, “sung to make unbearable work bearable . . . gut-pulling primal screams [were] crafted into beautiful cadences and rhythms.”

Other voices would answer and inspire. And in this way, both individual and the group would work together to survive another day. And over the course of those days, the stamina bolstered, the play that emerged and the sense of community that gave hope all nurtured what A Change is Gonna Come author Craig Werner eloquently defines (with more than a nod to Ralph Ellison) as the blues, jazz and gospel impulses in today’s American music.

One of the ghosts of slavery is the powerful spirit that imbues our greatest music. It’s the spirit of the SNCC Freedom Singers and Mahalia Jackson, and it’s the music that prompted white America to hear a call for rioting in Martha and the Vandella’s “Dancing in the Street.” Racist maniacs have their insights, and the rabid calls of groups like the record burning Alabama White Citizens Council correctly feared a very real threat to the world they knew, a new world where whites and blacks would be united in the call and response of the modern day version of the field holler.

Tellingly, in the documentary, “The Ultimate Song” [see www.rockamole.com] the organizers of today’s burgeoning Poor People’s Economic Human Rights Campaign--a movement that’s led by and for the poor, families thrown out of the workforce and off of the welfare rolls-- celebrate the way music fuels their marches to protest U.S. violations of the United Nation’s 1947 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The spirit that has survived slavery and the worst grievances of a dog-eat-dog economic system continues to push for a world where men and women can live together with equality, peace and dignity.

Restless spirits still walk the earth, and those who answer their call make up an enormous family tree. The geneology that links a family of 17th Century murder ballads speaking for executed women who murdered their husbands, for instance, and a contemporary country song like the Dixie Chicks’ “Goodbye Earl” would be enormously difficult to trace explicitly. But when the Dixie Chicks used images of the Civil Rights Movement and record burning in their 2002 World Tour, they acknowledged their connection to this vast continuum.

It doesn't cheapen things to note this either--in an increasingly automated society where people do sedentary jobs with short breaks for fast food and obesity has become one of the leading killers of America’s working class, the dance music that fuels work out routines is largely defined by not only the propulsive rhythmic intensity rooted in rock and roll but also the sounds of voices that shout and wail in a dizzying dance with the lightning paced beats. After all, house rhythms have their roots in the underground working class cultures of Detroit, Chicago and Brixton, England, as well as the Ragamuffin style born in the economic disparity of Jamaica.

As processed and packaged as it may be, our most powerful popular music stems from a centuries long struggle for survival. Through music, the ghosts of that history nurture us and give us strength. They freely offer a kind of atonement. As grateful beneficiaries of that gift, it’s up to us to seek a reckoning for that long line of spirits that moves us, and a new vision of possibility for the future. After all, it’s in our interest.

As Baldwin also wrote only a few of the most beautiful lines in American prose later, “Freedom lurked around us and I understood, at last, that he could help us to be free if we would listen, that he would never be free until we did.”