Biker Trash, Raw Tomatoes and an Axis Bold As Love

"Only two things that money can't buy/That's true love and homegrown tomatoes"--Guy Clark

The foreground of the book's cover features what may be a madman, in a knit cap and goatee--his face exploding in assaultive silliness.  Just over his shoulder, transparent but with color contrasting to the general black and white, another shot of the man's face retreats.  In this one page movie, we see a man's cantankerous humor and the toll it takes on his failing body.  That ghost on his shoulder looks like he's hit a wall, and the wall hit back.  On one level, that's the story of Raw Tomatoes, a new book by photographer Alisha Case.  That's the plot of a story that refuses to be reduced to plot.

Raw Tomatoes is Case's tribute to her stepfather, Roy Allen Wogoman.  The subtitle of the book is "Living and Dying with Amyloidosis," which is the rare and poorly understood condition that took Wogoman's life.  Case shot, compiled and wrote the book to raise awareness about this disease that causes the body to generate toxic levels of proteins, a disease Wogoman may have had for 23 years before he was correctly diagnosed.  Decreasing the chance that such misdiagnosis may happen to others is just the start of the things this book achieves.

More than anything, Raw Tomatoes, makes an impression as a book about love.  The title comes from the story Case tells of Wogoman giving her sixteen tomatoes for her 16th birthday.  He'd just started dating her mother, and this simple act went a long way toward winning the girl's heart (she ate those tomatoes in only three days).

But the stories are one thing; what makes the book unforgettable is the way Case captures love with her camera.  It's in the puppy-eyed happiness when Wogoman cuddles with Case's mother Sharon, and it's in the sad light in his eyes while he watches his wife give him dialysis.  It's also in the way--in more than one shot--he rests his hand on the head of what looks to be the world's most contented lap dog.

The love's also in the way Case captures Wogoman's passions.  One of my favorite pictures glimpses five matchbox-sized Harley-Davidson's Wogoman keeps in a china cabinet next to a toy train.  One gorgeous black and white shows him deep focus working in his garage, a 1940s Ford Coupe in the foreground and a three wheel Harley he dubbed his "trike" in the foreground.  The trike sports a novelty license plate that reads "Biker Trash." Another photo shows Roy and Sharon Wogoman on their wedding day, embracing on the favorite Harley he had to sell when he got sick, both of them looking serenely satisfied in their leathers.

Perhaps the most exquisite series of pictures are also the most painful.  It's a sequence of ten photographs revolving around Roy's daily dialysis treatments.  Sharon's blue-gloved hands fix the I.V. in his weathered, tattooed arm.  Red and blue clasps separate a tube carrying clear liquid from another carrying blood.  In the context of this ritual, the colors of these clasps on this torture device transcend their reality, almost looking like hearts, echoing the love of the man and woman fighting this disease together.

Appropriately, the book's love also extends to other collaborations. Highlights include Sharon Wogoman's beautiful photographs of Roy standing proud with his biker best friend as well as a snowy portrait of the couple's backyard.  Sister Rachel Kimbrough contributes two courageous poems which enhance their accompanying photographs.  As powerful in its way as the dialysis sequence are two pictures of Wogoman working in his shop accompanied by the poem that names the pages "Fighters."

Case pretties nothing up here.  She deals the cards as straight as you can imagine this road-worn fighter would have had her do.  In fact, it's not hard to imagine Roy Wogoman insisting on that face he's making going on that cover.  It also figures he'd let that cover show the toll of the disease.  He certainly opened himself up to a series of unflinching shots inside.

Case's book reveals a humble man struggling to live with dignity in the face of a merciless disease.  Though that disease may have won the final battle, these pages show Wogoman won an all-important war. His spirit speaks from these pages, and, though it has a lot of other things to say (about working class pride, about self reliance, about the very definition of bravery), its boldest message models how to give and receive love.

To order the book:  http://www.blurb.com/bookstore/detail/2920453

Works For Me, Martin Zellar and the Hardways' Roosters Crow

    

       
              “I ain’t thinking clear,” Martin Zellar repeatedly cries through flames of guitar before Kelly Willis’s sweet vocal collars him.  The two sing the song’s title line, “running on pure fear,” back and forth to one another, and the flames seem to die.  The seething darkness of bass and guitar lightens.  By the time the accordion, mandolin and dobro of “Give and Take (All the Love You Can)” kicks in, it seems the song’s advice might just cure the running altogether.  You can almost ignore the jagged edge in the refrain’s, “you gotta hold all the pain you can stand.”  You can almost not wonder what happens when you can’t stand anymore.

                That is until you hear the song “Roosters Crow.” The title track begins with Scott Wenum’s tom toms ominously beating under an alternating two chord guitar progression, Nick Ciola’s bass plumbing the lower depths.  The opening sets the tone.  “They say roosters crow to greet the dawn/What a load of shit.”  This song’s in second person, and it could be the other side of “Running on Pure Fear,” calling out a woman who’s choosing an escape all too familiar to the singer.  The darkness seethes again, Kevin McKinney’s guitar spinning black crystal to freeze over the path ahead, cracking and leaving jagged surfaces.

                Soon the singer’s crying out wordlessly, agonizing against washes of that cold black guitar sound.  He’s shouting his voice ragged, crying, “Ah there’s so much love/That you can’t give/So much love and pain/Ah, now they’re both so real.”  The rhythm guitar and tom toms build walls around him, the lead guitar filling in the gaps, ending with a shimmering, lethal squall.

                This is an album about life lasting longer than answers, not that answers don’t matter.  “Where Did the Words Go,” makes the point well, a simple meditation over snared percussion, acoustic guitar, piano and cello.  To this aging father, the song sounds like a husband and father puzzling over the growing distance in his marriage and his other family relationships.  He knows the space is normal, but he thought his relationships would turn out differently.  He wants to change what has happened but settles for a simpler dream— “I just hope you can see/how much I love you.”

                The next song, “Seven Shades of Blue,” dares to dream again.  Lloyd Maines’ supportive, shining-while-crying steel guitar encourages each modest desire for a relationship forged from loneliness.  Similarly, Bukka Allen’s exclamatory Hammond B3 and Kevin McKinney’s sure-footed guitar encourage the singer to “turn to God or pack your bags and run” away from a town where “the skies are always gray.”

  

               

               The album ends on a note that suggests that running always stops somewhere, and something like the first alternative needs to be considered.  “Maybe I stumbled onto something that I can call God,” the singer acknowledges, but he quickly adds, “What it is I won’t say, but…it works for me.”  This time McKinney’s playing both guitar and Hammond B3, so the sound echoes what came before.  That running still tempts, but something new says it might not win.

                Of course, this is a Martin Zellar album (one of his finest at that), and moments of clarity have to hold up against all of the unexpected complications of being human.  “Wore Me Down” is a terrific upbeat acoustic attempt to turn the tables on a relationship which only winds up revealing the singer’s responsibility for the fall.  “I’m That Problem” is a rollicking appeal to a lover that makes it clear it's a mistake to take him back.

                Fittingly then, if you leave your CD player on repeat (as mine always tends to be), like that old Roy Orbison record Springsteen once wrote about, you’ll find the hopeful clarity of “It Works for Me” followed by the great “Poison.”  As the record starts over, the singer’s voice entwines with Willis’s again to say, “I know you’re tired/So tired of me/So am I baby/Who wouldn’t be?” 

                Of course, the real irony is that fans of Martin Zellar never will be tired of him or his characters because his particular brand of self-deprecating blues serves as a balm to the lonesome while forcing us to look the causes straight in the eye.  When we face our own mistakes (our ruts and our degradations), and when we share that confrontation with others, there’s potential for finding a way to move forward, if not with dignity...  maybe with integrity or something like it. The musicianship of Martin Zellar and The Hardways, all of the players, and Pat Manske’s production make it easier. An album like Rooster’s Crow makes it exciting.   

Love's On The Line--"We Take Care of Our Own" and Springsteen's Promised Land

           Tribal drums and a sort of air raid siren start things off—cries of danger soon answered by, oddly enough, a relatively optimistic guitar riff, a bold bass line and glockenspiel twinkling like starlight.  “We Take Care of Our Own” is a pop song struggling to emerge from disaster.  Well, that’s an optimistic take.  While the sound reminds me a little of “The Rising,” that's not the direction I hear because it’s also a rock anthem trapped in a whirlpool.

            Perhaps because he fears the stakes of getting it wrong, perhaps because he intensely feels the paranoia he wants to rail against, Springsteen keeps his voice relatively low from the beginning of the song to the end.  His story is that he can’t find his way where he needs to be, and he’s running out of answers. He sees losses he’s sung about before, but he’s not seeing many wins.  And as “hearts turn to stone” and “good intentions run dry as a bone,” he answers with an ethos any Springsteen fan recognizes, the walk the artist has long walked—“We take care of our own.” If nothing else, Springsteen makes the best albums he knows how to make and the price of a ticket promises the best show he can deliver, both the quintessential rock and roll concert and something somehow bigger than that sounds—“The Greatest Show On Earth” of his character Wild Billy’s circus dreams.  

            “We Take Care of Our Own” quickly becomes a song about dreams turned to lies (and some things worse) as the singer begins to name the places where America hasn’t taken care of its own—“from the shotgun shack to the Superdome.” Slamming industrial door percussion punctuates each example, and as it declares “the cavalry stayed home,” cinematic strings suggest all those movies that made us believe in another kind of America.  This sets up a musical interlude which leads to the crucial bridge, a series of questions searching for the right way to respond—for help and for direction.  

The lyric ends searching for that “brotherhood” we all know from Katharine Lee Bates’ lyric to “America, the Beautiful.” Springsteen asks, “Where’s the promise/from sea to shining sea/wherever this flag is flown?”  It reminds me of the way Marvin Gaye once sang the national anthem, turning it into a question about the country under which that flag waves.

            As an artist whose most iconic images are tied up with the American flag, whose career has repeatedly pushed for America to live up to its own promises, to truly be a land of hopes and dreams, it’s safe to say Bruce Springsteen’s asking a very personal question.  The song swells at this point with exuberant hoots and anguished cries of “our own” and almost whimsical “la la las”—the near cacophony sounds a little like every record this Jersey boy’s ever made playing at once, revolving around that question.  The only answer in evidence is the music itself, but even that seems to be in jeopardy.  Perhaps that’s why, aside from those backing vocals deep in the mix, the main vocal in this song never shouts out—Springsteen pushes hard on each line, but he keeps his voice down.

            Bruce Springsteen has never sounded more isolated.  As Backstreets’ Chris Phillips points out, “we take care of our own,” was a slogan tossed around by whites shooting blacks in the wake of Katrina.  “We take care of our own” is, on one hand, a mobster’s creed.  And, on another, “we take care of our own” means bailing out Wall Street. Meanwhile, the continued trend toward shipping jobs overseas, the shabby treatment of our troops and the movement toward privatization of virtually every governmental responsibility—from clean air, to clean water, to the postal service, sanitation, social security, education and even the preservation of the national parks—shows “we take care of our own” is anything but a Washington priority. Only naiveté would make us think it would be a motto for Wall Street.  

            So, I hear Springsteen’s song as both desperate and intentionally ambiguous because he knows enough to know he can’t even name the flag he’s singing about, the flag he dreams of. He has always said that his belief in America is rooted in a big-hearted ideal of America, a vision of America not everyone shares.  In that context, and in this moment more than ever before—the One Percent distracting us all from what really matters with insane amounts of campaign spending—the question of American identity is up for grabs. Springsteen’s entire career says his “our own” means brothers and sisters around the globe, but the job starts at home.  Toward that end, to my ears, “We Take Care of Our Own” puts the meaning of America—of government "of the people, by the people and for the people”— on the line.

Walking Their Own Walks--Mary J. Blige and Rihanna

The fact that the great Somali rapper K'naan released a new EP today tells me I got to get off the stick.  My stack of singles I want to write about is getting so deep I can't focus on any of them and all my other work's picking up.  Meanwhile, the CDs I'm playing most (alongside both of Ariana Gillis's records) came out at the end of 2011 but missed my year end list.

The sad truth is I knew Mary J. Blige's My Life II would be a beautiful and important record, but the very nature of it (a sequel to 1994's My Life) made it feel like something I could get to in time.  Mary J. has such a classic quality that her new one didn't feel urgent to me right away...

(Does anyone else have such idiotic rationalizations for inaction?)

And I know this is going to seem like the strangest pairing I could have dreamed up, short of going with Hot Chelle Rae or something, but it was Rihanna who shamed me into a mad dash to the store a couple of weeks ago to bring home both of these women's new records. The 875th time I heard "We Found Love" and realized I was liking it better than ever--that if I didn't watch it I was going to lose it over this club candy--I felt ashamed that I'd turned my back on Rihanna (yes, I've been a fan since "Pon de Replay").  Once at the store, I couldn't buy her new record without also picking up the past two decades' queen of soul, Mary J. Blige.

I call it "club candy," but it's ridiculously intense what Rihanna does with Calvin Harris's "We Found Love."  I soon learned she does similar things throughout Talk That Talk. Rihanna overmatches everything cold about techno gimmickry--the kind of record you think you would only really appreciate in a club for its sonic equivalents to D-Lysergic 3D Surround--with the warmth of her vocal.  The arrangement is like a keyboard-driven videogame soundtrack escalating out of control, but she makes those "yellow diamonds in the light" shine and darkens the songs shadows enough to feel their chill.  I think the heart of it for me is the way her voice lilts through "The way I'm feeling I just can't deny," and then barely avoids freefall with "but I've got to let it go."  That's resolve and vulnerability tightly wound, and if you really hear her, that "hopeless place" not only clutches the throat, it shuts out the lights.  Her voice offers the only way out.  When I had to go to the store, I heard this single as core to what matters to me about music.

I wasn't wrong.  And Rihanna's and Mary J. Blige's most recent releases set a high bar for whatever comes next in 2012.  In some ways, they're opposite of course--Rihanna, the maybe 24 bratty sass who embraces celebrity like the Black Carribean version of Madonna she seems to want to be, and Mary J. Blige, the first hip hop R&B singer who really mattered, who was Rihanna's age when she made the first My Life (out-of the-box an old soul in the midst of an infantile pop culture).  Even the concepts behind these two albums are polar opposites. Rihanna's record is an orgy of DJ wizardry--house, techno and electro-whatchamacalitpalooza.  Mary J.'s statement of purpose with this album focuses on returning to live instrumentation and a return of "the real."

Comparing these two albums shows just how "real" music can be whether its made with the latest studio gadgets or acoustic, old school flavor (despite how Mary J. portrays the album, I wouldn't call much of it genuinely retro--it's 1974 soul with an ever-present hip hop eclecticism and 2012 production values).

Rihanna's album is the more obviously experimental--kaleidoscopic shards of beats swirling and exploding, while Rihanna's intensely present (and often raunchy) vocals bounce from bass thump to synth pump, always finding the warmth in the most cerebral and even conceptually cold sonic effects.  But the stand out moments come when the songs lock into the vulnerability lingering behind the singer's bravado--particularly in the middle movement from "We All Want Love" to "Drunk on Love" to "Roc Me Out" (the bravado regaining strength in this last only to confess, "I'll let you in on a little secret/I just want to be loved"). "We All Want Love," in particular, is the album's grand gesture.  An anthem about loneliness with the singer
fronting a chorus of her own backing vocals, this song comes close to being the "All You Need Is Love" for the perpetually lonesome.

When I started writing this, I wondered whether I should mention that I hesitated to pair Mary J. Blige with Rihanna because I feel protective of Mary J., her vulnerability (and, oh yes, that awesome strength) is so palpable. But, the truth occured to me, and is underscored by writing about these two records here, that I feel equally protective of Rihanna, a young artist whose relationship abuse has already partially defined her career.  She talks tough, but she genuinely seems more isolated than Mary J.

Mary J. starts her album by calling up My Life's producer, Puff Combs, and asking for his blessing, which he enthusiastically gives.  Her collaborations with Nas, Busta Rhymes and Beyonce sound more than inspired...they seem joyous, but that real kind of joy, that forged from pain. When she moves from the heart beat groove of "Feel Inside" to "Midnight Drive," she actually does something like Rihanna, singing
with herself, her alter ego, Brook-Lynn.  But the effect is different.  She seems to be confiding her passion to a girlfriend, and later, on "Next Level," when she says "I'm gonna tell my girls to go out tonight," it feels right.  When this girl wants to be alone with her man, she has people who understand her and give her space. She has people.

I can't remember the last R&B record I heard with this level of warmth and community present in
every performance.  Like Rihanna's record, this is a record about throwing one's self into relationships and tough situations (you know, living) no one else understands completely.  But Mary J's openness invites a sense of communal intimacy, the kind born from musicians fighting forward together.  The cover of Rufus and Chaka Khan's "Ain't Nobody" perfectly embodies that vibe.

A review by my friend Lee Ballinger beautifully captures the beauty of the last three songs here, particularly the breathtaking acoustic guitar, piano and voice on what may also be my personal favorite, the heartbreaker, "Need Someone." (Review soon in RRC.) But the song I can't get out of my head tonight, "No Condition," comes at the midpoint.  Cast upon waves of layered percussion amidst washes of keyboard and strings, Mary J. resolves, "I've made my decision/Loving you's been a mission/I'm in no condition to love you." Backing vocals shift from descending counterpoints to something like an African tribal chant, reassuring her this loss does not have to be a defeat.  And anyone who's found liberation by accepting the inevitable can't help but be shaken by the beauty (even the hope, certainly the affirmation) in the pain.

In the end, I suppose it still feels I'm matching a heavyweight with an underweight upstart.  But they've both had me happily cornered in a conversation I very much need to have.  For one thing, they're both musically pushing in directions my instincts would have cautioned them against, and they're proving how much you miss when you try to limit an artist to your expectations. Rihanna's challenging me to open myself to experimentation that I might dismiss as superficial and gimmicky in the hands of an artist I trust less.  Mary J.'s reminding me that looking back to what's been left behind in today's music does not mean rewriting history or embracing nostalgia.  Most importantly, a kid half my age and a woman I could call my sister are both reminding me not to beat myself up over my isolating failures.  Our loneliness connects, and in that connection, we remember we may not be alone after all.