The 1967 Vox Guitar Organ incorporated a miniature transistorized organ.
During my 1989-2000 tenure at Epic Records/Sony Music, one of the nicer people I worked with was Epic VP of Marketing Al Masocco.
Our offices were on opposite coasts (me in NY, Al in LA) so I didn’t get to know him as well as I might have. But Al always seemed to be throwing himself into one marketing campaign or another, and usually had some complicated, hair-raising tale to tell, whether it was about gaining the co-operation of the Tragnew Park Compton Crips for an MC Eiht video shoot in South Central or negotiating with wary officials of the Cuban government to stage and film an Audioslave concert in Havana.
Al Masocco was (and still is) a completely unpretentious person who never seemed to care if anybody else — Spin, Rolling Stone, some joker at KCRW or MTV — thought his acts were “cool” or “hip.” With his boundless enthusiasm and non-stop chatter, Al struck me as a throwback to the even-older-school record biz guys of the Fifties and early Sixties. He understood implicitly that his job was not to sign, style, or song-doctor his acts but to sell the shit out of them, which is exactly what he did, day in and day out.
After a long stint at Epic/Sony and a shorter one with mega-management company The Firm, Al founded his own marketing venture Pulsebeat. He also established himself as a campus motivational/professional speaker, and I can attest that anyone who pays Al Masocco to talk will get more — much more — than their money’s worth.
The Kawai "Moon Sault," a Japanese rarity from 1984.
I know that Al is a major rock memorabilia collector, especially of Beatles material, although as yet I haven’t had the pleasure of touring his closely guarded holdings. But until we spoke last month, I didn’t know he’d also amassed a collection of 140+ electric guitars, basses, and miscellaneous stringed instruments. It includes some very odd- and/or cool-looking instruments by manufacturers like Wurlitzer, Hayman, Kawai, Supro, Teisco, and Dwight — see sample photos posted on this page.
Al is now renting out these axes for film, TV, video, and still photo shoots. Guitar freaks and even some, er, regular people will enjoy the slide show – complete with a “Super Riff Medley” soundtrack — that he’s created for Pulsebeat Guitars.
On the same week as my visit to the Louis Armstrong House Museum, I spent most of bitter-cold Friday and Saturday nights shuffling around the Bleecker & MacDougal intersection of the Village, taking in eight or ten different sets of this year’s Winter Jazzfest. For $30, roughly the music charge for one set at Jazz Standard or Iridium, I purchased a ticket that enabled me to catch as many sets as I could among the various venues. On Friday, the clubs were (Le) Poisson Rouge, Kenny’s Castaways, and Zinc Bar; on Saturday, WJF added Sullivan Hall and the Bitter End.
This bargain price drew large crowds, including many attendees in town for the annual convention of the Association of Performing Arts Presenters. Seats were almost impossible to come by for most sets, unless you chose to camp out at one club as early as 6:00 p.m. The rooms were often packed tight and some acquaintances told me they were unable even to get into certain shows, a problem I myself did not encounter.
On the up side, most sets started on time or close to it; change-overs were accomplished without undue delays, and the sound systems were good to excellent. Audiences were genuinely attentive and sometimes wildly enthusiastic, and it was a trip to hear actual creative music performed at a Bleecker Street tourist trap/frat bar like Kenny’s Castaways. (Not sure I’d even set foot in that place since the Eighties, when 1967 founder Pat Kenny was still alive and the Smithereens held forth regularly on its small stage.)
Here, in chronological order, are my impressions of the performances I witnesssed:
FRIDAY (1.8.2010)
(1) Jamie Leonhart @ Le Poisson Rouge – A very good young singer, although not one much in (my idea of) the real jazz tradition — more like “alternative” pop/folk with jazz inflections. Jamie sang her own songs, no standards, and fronted a band whose odd instrumentation included two clarinet players. Deidre Rodman of the Lascivious Biddies was a subtle but strong foil, playing melodica and singing harmonies. The emotional peak of the set was the closing “Let The Flower Grow” — a
Deidre Rodman and Jamie Leonhart
pro-humanity/anti-military song, poignant but not sappy, composed by Jamie’s father-in-law, the bassist Jay Leonhart.
(2) Briggan Krauss Trio Coordinate @ Kenny’s Castaways – Krauss has been living and gigging in NYC since ‘94 but somehow I’d never heard of him until tonight. He’s made both jazz and electronic music recordings but here stuck to alto saxophone with bass and drums. Krauss had a floating sound with a lot of air around the notes, while drummer Kenny Wolleson’s playing reminded me a bit of Tony Oxley when I saw the latter duet with Cecil Taylor at the Village Vanguard in 2008. Trio Coordinate played what sounded like genuinely free improvisations of varying length — they definitely were communicating, although exactly what was being communicated is tough to put into words. My wife Leslie Rondin thought they sounded great.
Jeremy Udden + Plainville
(3) Jeremy Udden’s Plainville @ Kenny’s Castaways – Alto/soprano sax man Udden led an instrumental group of five or maybe six guys with a distinct Americana flavor: guitarist Brandon Seabrook doubled on banjo, Pete Rende switched off from electric piano to pump organ. The result sometimes sounded like Lee Konitz jamming with The Band — okay, not on that level, but good stuff nonetheless even if none of the individual tunes stuck in my head.
Like all tonight’s sets at Kenny’s, this one was part of a showcase put together by the youthful eager beavers of SearchAndRestore.com. At their info table, I picked up an entertaining pamphlet, The Jazz Pirate Press, with jottings by Roswell Rudd, Curtis Hasselbring, and Josh Roseman. SearchAndRestore’s mission statement reads, in part: “To build a sustainable jazz community, we need to make great jazz more open to the public…We only book double bills so the shows have a more communal feel. No drink minimum, no emptying out after a set. Standing room and seats. This more casual jazz environment lets people feel like they’re part of something.” Sounds good to me, although so far their Web site looks more like an aggregate of info on the regular NYC club calendar — I didn’t see many S&R-originated or sponsored shows there.
(4) Nicholas Payton SeXXXtet @ Le Poisson Rouge - The trumpeter and his group drew a full house for the last set of the night at this venue. The SeXXXtet included female vocalist Johnaye Kendrix and the wizardly Taylor Eigisti on electric piano; the overall groove reminded of some of Freddie Hubbard’s better Seventies tracks for CTI and Columbia. Payton played with his usual impeccable technique (and also sang a bit) but it was difficult to hear, through the band’s wall of sound, what if anything he was really saying on the horn. After about 20 minutes, I got tired of standing in one spot, there was no room to dance, and we headed home.
SATURDAY (1.9.2010)
(1) Carmen Consoli @ Le Poisson Rouge – Not her first time in NYC but my first exposure to this female singer/songwriter/guitarist (born 1974) who grew up in a village near Catania, Sicily. A successful mainstream pop artist in Italy (seven studio albums, hit singles, slick videos, etc.) who in recent years has turned toward acoustic music, Carmen Consoli was the single most impressive performer I saw at Winter Jazzfest. Ironically, her music had less to do with “jazz” than any just about other act I heard all weekend. She employed the very effective stage strategy of introducing her songs in English, giving details of their story lines and inspirations, then singing them in Italian. She is a powerfully expressive vocalist, a superior melodicist, and a skillful if not virtuoso acoustic guitarist who used altered tunings and finger-picking patterns to give variety to her set.
This clip from a live MTV-Europe show gives some of the flavor of Carmen’s performance at WJF:
Here’s Carmen with orchestral backing, live in Taormina, Sicily:
(2) Ben Allison @ Le Poisson Rouge – The bassist led a quintet with Jenny Scheinman (violin), Steve Cardenas (guitar), Shane Endsey (trumpet), and Rudy Royston (drums). The music came across as stiff and overly composed, and the dutiful solos did not move me. This is the third band with which I’ve seen Jenny Scheinman play and I just don’t get what all the critical hoo-hah is about. A list headed “Jazz Violinists I Dig More Than Jenny Scheinman” would include Billy Bang, Charles Burnham, Joe Kennedy, Ray Nance, Sid Page (ex-Dan Hicks’ Hot Licks), Stuff Smith, Eddie South, even Svend Asmussen (age 94, he still gigs occasionally in Copenhagen).
(3) Gretchen Parlato @ Sullivan Hall – A technically accomplished singer with a sensual, breathy tone, rhythmic acuity, and flawless diction whose limitations began to weigh on me over the length of a full set. She benefited greatly from the instrumental support of bassist Alan Hampton, drummer Kendrick Scott, and Taylor Eigisti running enjoyably rampant on electric piano.
(4) JD Allen Trio @ Kenny’s Castaways - Tenor saxophonist Allen played with both muscle and melodic invention in the first half of this set, i.e the part I heard. Rudy Royston’s drumming was livelier and more propulsive in this setting than with Ben Allison the night before.
(5) Dr. Lonnie Smith @ Sullivan Hall – My third live exposure to this veteran organist was the best and hottest set I’ve heard him play to date. Guitarist Jonathan Kriesberg and drummer Jamire Williams, who are maybe half the leader’s age, seemed to propel the 68-year-old Smith to higher heights and funkier funk. The closing “Pilgrimage,” with its step-by-step modulations
The Turban-ator: Dr. Lonnie Smith
rising to an ecstatic climax, conveyed an almost Hendrix-like majesty and drove the crowd wild. (Note: Dr. Lonnie Smith is not the keyboardist Lonnie Liston Smith of Cosmic Echoes fame.)
(6) William Parker Quartet @ Sullivan Hall – Great and I mean great. About Parker’s bass playing, I can’t say it any better than Chris Kelsy at AllMusic.com: “Although he does, to an extent, serve as a harmonic anchor in his groups, his more important role is as a source of energy. Parker drives a band like few other bassists; in combination with a powerful drummer, a Parker-led rhythm section is an inexorable force.”
The Engine Room: Drake and Parker
Here, with Hamid Drake absolutely killing on drums, the effect was like “inexorable” times five and a launching pad for the extended searching solos of altoist Rob Brown and trumpeter Lewis Barnes. Two tunes comprised the entire set: “Criminals in the White House” and “Malachi’s Mood.” Since I lack the technical vocabulary to describe this music, may these classic radical jazz album titles invoke its sound and spirit:
The Way Ahead… Far Cry… Tomorrow Is The Question… Ascension… Universal Consciousness… Destination Out!
![The Cramps on NY Rocker [Photo: Curtis Knapp]](http://www.nyrocker.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/NYR-Cramps.jpg)
On the official blog of the Society of Publication Designers, graphic designer Robert Newman has created a gallery of front cover images from various issues of New York Rocker. These covers, most designed and art directed by the gifted Elizabeth Van Itallie, feature outstanding photographs by Teri Bloom, Deborah Feingold, Laura Levine, Ebet Roberts, and Ann Summa, among others. For the uninitiated among you, a seriously abbreviated version of the New York Rocker story goes something like this:
After publishing the fanzines Jamz and The Rock Marketplace, the late Alan Betrock published the first issue of New York Rocker in the spring of 1976. Through Fall 1977, Alan published ten more issues and ran the magazine pretty much as a one-man show with some business/advertising help from his friend Ken Kristol. After living in Minneapolis for five years, I moved back to NYC in Fall ‘77 and later bought NYR from Alan Betrock, a dear friend of mine until his untimely death in 2000. 
I served as publisher and editor of NYR until the end of 1982: putting the magazine on a monthly schedule, obtaining national distribution, recruiting and directing a small but intensely dedicated NYC staff and a much larger group of freelance contributors in the US and the UK. We worked in a half-floor loft at 166 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan where the floor was never mopped and you never knew who’d be asleep on the sad salvaged office sofa when you came to work in the morning. We saw a million gigs, listened to a million records, and published at least a million words about all of it without the use of a single computer.
A.S. Atop Unsold NY Rocker Issues, 1982 | Photo by Laura Levine
Among those who made crucial contributions to this chronically under-financed but heroically creative effort were Byron Coley, Michael Hill, Ira Kaplan, Annene Kaye, David Keeps, Laura Levine, Glenn Morrow, Chris Nelson, Suzette Rodriguez, Roy Trakin, Elizabeth Van Itallie, Janet Waegel, and Drew Wheeler. It is one of the blessings of my life to have remained friends with nearly all of these individuals.
A total of 55 issues were produced until New York Rocker expired in late 1982. About a year later, the magazine was sold to a new publisher and briefly revived for a few more poorly distributed issues before going out of business for the second and last time. Through a series of contractual twists and turns, all rights to NYR then reverted back to me. I own the domain names nyrocker.com and newyorkrocker.com — I hope this SPD cover gallery will spur me to add more actual content to the site, which has for too long remained simply “under construction.”
Pops and neighborhood kids jam on the steps of his home, now the Louis Armstrong House Museum.
The Louis Armstrong House Museum in Corona, Queens has been open to the public since 1994. But I’d never been there until Saturday (1.9.2010), when Leslie and I drove over in early afternoon for a free event featuring Terry Teachout, the author of Pops: A Life of Louis Armstrong (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, published December 2009). The book is excellent: carefully researched, well paced, written with open ears in a clear and candid style. I’d recommend it to anyone with any interest in Louis Armstrong, jazz, and/or American pop culture.
In taking on this Promethean subject, Teachout had an edge over his several precedecessors in at least two respects. Although presently the drama critic for the Wall Street Journal, he was once a professional bass player and thus the first trained musician to essay an Armstrong biography. Perhaps more importantly, Teachout was the first biographer to have had access to over 650 hours of reel-to-reel tapes recorded by Pops himself. These tapes capture Armstrong in uncensored casual conversations with friends and fellow musicians, playing trumpet along with records (both his own and those of other artists), even trying to coax his wife Lucille into the marital bed for a little pre-dawn action.
We may presume that the Armstrong archives were better organized and more easily accessible to Teachout than to previous researchers, and Louis’ own writings are excerpted often and effectively in Pops. “In between playing three hundred shows a year,” Teachout notes, “he turned out two memoirs, several autobiographical manuscripts, dozens of magazine and newspaper articles, and thousands of personal letters to friends and fans, as well as a number of strikingly frank autobiographical manuscripts that did not see print until long after his death.” The author sheds new light on some long-clouded episodes in the trumpeter’s life including his 1930 marijuana arrest — Armstrong was a lifelong pot smoker — and his entanglements with Chicago mobsters.
All that said, I’m not sure Teachout’s book is so vastly superior to its immediate predecessor, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life by Laurence Bergreen (Broadway Books, 1997). This was the first Armstrong bio I ever read, not counting the great man’s own Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans, and it greatly enhanced my knowledge and perception of its subject. Until the arrival of Pops, Bergreen’s was the most comprehensive book on its subject but it seems to have gotten rather short shrift from both jazz and book critics, perhaps because Bergreen had never written about jazz or jazz musicians before. In his New York Times review of Teachout’s book, David Margolick referenced earlier biographies by Gary Giddins and James Lincoln Collier but not Extravagant Life; nor is it among the half-dozen books sold in the gift shop of the Armstrong House Museum. Witty, elegant, and warmly appreciative of its subject, An Extravagant Life moved me to pick up two more of Bergreen’s non-fiction works, Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe (also excellent) and Capone: The Man and the Era (bought but not read yet).
Armstrong on the cover of TIME in 1949, the year he was crowned king of the Zulu Krewe at Mardi Gras in his home town of New Orleans.
Meanwhile, back at the shack… After perusing the gift shop and helping ourselves to a bowl of complimentary gumbo, we joined the crowd seated on folding chairs in the low-ceilinged basement of the house. Following some opening remarks, Terry Teachout read excerpts from the first and last portions of his book, then screened a high-quality B&W clip taken from a 1958 TV appearance by Louis Armstrong and the All Stars. Pops sounded both vigorous and completely at ease singing “On The Sunny Side of the Street,” but the sweat dripping from his brow reminded me of the physical effort he put into his live performances. His trumpet solo, although described by Teachout as a “set piece” that varied only slightly from show to show, was a soaring work of sonic architecture — the musical equivalent of watching a ten-story building erected in elapsed-time motion before your eyes. Teachout then took questions and comments from the audience. Among the speakers were trumpeter Jon Faddis, who recalled being transfixed by Armstrong’s mid-Sixties appearances on “The Ed Sullivan Show”; and vocalist Melba Joyce, who recounted her guest appearance with Louis and the All Stars on a show in Dallas in 1961.
We then joined a small group for an abbreviated version of the standard house tour. Louis and his wife Lucille purchased the modest two-story dwelling at 34-56 107th Street in 1943. It was the first and only home Armstrong ever owned, and to him a treasured symbol of his rise from the dire poverty of his New Orleans boyhood. After her husband’s death in 1971, Lucille Armstrong lived on in the house until her own passing twelve years later. By that time, the property had been deeded first to the City of New York, then entrusted to Queens College which today administers the Museum and the Louis Armstrong Educational Foundation.
Among the many intact period features of the house are Lucille’s custom-built kitchen cabinets, with their nifty jet-age design and turquoise enamel finish; Pops’ upstairs den, with LPs from his personal collection and his reel-to-reel tape decks; original Sixties oil paintings of both Armstrongs, and the bed in which Louis died on 7/6/1971. As we stood in the den, our guide clicked on a wall switch and the room filled with the sound of Armstrong’s inimitable voice on segments from his private tape stash. Pops was right there with us, in the home he loved.
Louis Armstrong – “I Can’t Give You Anything But Love” (1943, with the Luis Russell Orchestra). “Even on the simplest of the big-band sides, his playing is charged with an expressive depth that seizes the ear…There is an underlying seriousness in his light-hearted art that recalls a remark made by the film director Howard Hawks, who claimed that ‘the only difference between comedy and tragedy is the point of view.’” (Teachout, page 146)
One bright morning in July 2008, on a stroll through my East Village neighborhood, I stopped at the corner of Second Avenue and East Sixth Street. Lying on on the sidewalk next to a municipal trash can, I found a collection of hand-painted metal signs advertising various jazz soloists and groups. The signs were (are) of uniform size (30″ x 6″) with a small hole punch in each end so they can be hung for display. There are eighteen different signs, including ones for groups led by alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, bassist Mickey Bass, and trumpeter Cecil Bridgewater. I took the signs home, added them to our ever-growing collection of musical detritus, and have tried sporadically to determine their age (probably late Seventies) and provenance. Here are my photos of some of the signs along with explanatory notes:
(1) Al Grey & Jimmy Forrest Quintet – AllMusic.com states that trombonist Al Grey (b. 6/6/1925) spent his first professional decade in big bands including those of Jimmie Lunceford, Lucky Millinder, Benny Carter and Lionel Hampton. Grey and another big band veteran, saxophonist Billy Mitchell, formed a co-op band in 1962. I have a copy of their Argo LP Night Song (recorded November ‘62 and issued under Grey’s name), on which the group is joined by vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson. Al Grey served three separate stints in the Count Basie band; when the last one ended in 1977, the trombonist formed a group with saxophonist Jimmy Forrest (b. 1/24/1920). This was 25 years after Forrest had a Number One R&B hit with his immortal “Night Train,” but I’ll bet he still played it a lot. According to The New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Al Grey and Jimmy Forrest were still playing together when the latter died 8/26/1980; Grey lived another 20 years and died of diabetes-related illness on 5/24/2000.
(2) Vera Auer – The Austrian-born vocalist (b. 4/20/1919), who also played vibes and accordion, was the grand-niece of the noted Hungarian classical musician Leopold Auer. In Vienna circa 1949, she formed the Vera Auer Combo, a trio with guitarist Attila Zoller that for a short time included pianist Joe Zawinul, later a founding member of Weather Report. In 1954, Vera moved to Frankfurt, Germany, where she worked with trumpeter Donald Byrd and drummer Art Taylor. In 1959, Auer married an obscure American musician named Brian Boucher, and the couple moved to the US the following year. In her Stateside career, she “was associated not only with boppers such as trombonist J.J. Johnson and tenor saxophonist Zoot Sims, but with a modern breed of blower including trumpeters Cal Massey and Ted Curson,” wrote Eugene Chadbourne for AllMusic.com. “In the late Seventies she co-led a group with yet another trumpet player, Richard Williams, resulting in in an album release with the cheerful title of Positive Vibes.” Vera Auer died 8/2/1996.
(3) Chuck Wayne/Joe Puma – I would’ve enjoyed hearing these two fine though little-remembered guitarists as a duo. Chuck Wayne (born Charles Jagelka, 2/27/1923) started out as a teenage mandolin player and switched to guitar in the Forties when he began to make the 52nd Street scene. An early exponent of bop, he recorded seminal sides with Dizzy Gillespie and Little Benny Harris; worked with the Woody Herman band in 1946-47, and joined pianist George Shearing’s quintet for three years, 1949-1952. Wayne toured with Tony Bennett from 1954-57, then came off the road to concentrate on Broadway, studio, and TV gigs. He released a half-dozen albums as a leader, and later taught at Westchester Conservatory in White Plains, NY. Chuck Wayne died 7/29/1997; his recording of “My Baby Just Cares For Me” was including on the 2005 Sony Legacy box set Progressions: 100 Years of Jazz Guitar.
Born into a family of guitarists, Joe Puma (born 8/13/1927) was a professional musician by 1949. He played with more “name” musicians than I can list here, ranging from Artie Shaw to Gary Burton, and also recorded as a leader for the Bethlehem, Dawn, Jubilee, and Columbia labels. The New Grove Dictionary states: “Puma formed a duo with Chuck Wayne in 1972, which appeared at the Newport Jazz Festival in New York in 1973; when the duo broke up after five years, Puma led his own trio.” Joe Puma died 5/31/2000; sadly, he was left off that Sony Legacy box set.
YouTube: “Bernie’s Tune” – Mike Morreale Quartet featuring Chuck Wayne (date/location n/a)
(4) Bob Cunningham/Kenny Barron/Scoby Stroman – Considering the hazards and rigors of the jazz life, I’m pleased to report that two out of three members of this group are alive and still gigging regularly.
Born 12/23/1934 in Cleveland, bassist/composer Bob Cunningham moved to NYC in 1960. On his Web site, Bob says he played with Dizzy Gillespie, Art Blakey, Abbey Lincoln, and Sun Ra; with Yusef Lateef, he traveled the world and appeared on Seventies Lateef LPs like Gentle Giant. Among other Bob Cunningham credits, AllMusic.com lists Ken McIntyre’s Way Way Out (’63), Walt Dickerson’s Impressions of ‘A Patch of Blue’ (’64, with Sun Ra on piano), Freddie Hubbard’s Backlash (’66), and Sam Rivers‘ Crystals (’74). The bassist may still be leading Monday night jam sessions at the headquarters of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) on West 48th Street in Manhattan.
Bob Cunningham, still swinging
Pianist Kenny Barron played Jazz Standard just last week (January 7-10, 2010) but unfortunately I missed the gig. Born 6/9/1943 in Philadelphia and a professional musician since his teens, the nine–time Grammy Award nominee — it seems he’s never actually won the damn thing — has a six-page list of album credits posted at AllMusic.com. The discography includes sessions with Dizzy Gillespie (1962-1966), Freddie Hubbard (1966-1970), Yusef Lateef (1970-1975), and Stan Getz (late Eighties) as well as five discs under the leadership of his much older brother, saxophonist Bill Barron (1927-1989). Kenny Barron served on the music faculty of Rutgers University from 1973 to 2000; was an original member of the Thelonious Monk tribute group Sphere, founded in 1982; and more recently co-founded (with Joanne Klein) an independent label called Joken Records.
YouTube: “People Time” by Kenny Barron and Stan Getz (live in Munich, 1990 – Getz’s final concert performance)
Drummer C. Scoby Stroman’s NY Times obit noted that he was tap dancing at age five: “As an adult he became known as a master sand dancer and an innovative leading performer of scat dancing, a softshoe rhythm-dance that involves the upper body as well as the feet and legs and draws on American popular dancing and African and Brazilian ethnic styles.”
So far, pretty mainstream…but if AllMusic.com has it right, Scoby also played drums on at least two Sun Ra LPs (Secrets of the Sun and Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy) and also on College Tour, the second ESP-Disk album by the pre-Diamanda Galas gonzo vocalist Patty Waters. (“Contorted shrieks and wails that could be downright blood-curdling…Waters has to be acknowledged as a vocalist who has tested the limits of what the human voice is capable of…” Thus sayeth Richie Unterberger of AllMusic.com) Scoby Stroman must have been quite a showman and character, one of the many artists I caught up with too late. He died 3/28/1996 from complications of a stroke.
YouTube: “Scoby” by the Rick Stone Trio (live at Bar Next Door, NYC, 1/15/2009)
Flyer courtesy of Paul Sanders Jr.
Paul Sanders Jr. and Henry (Hank) Neuberger are two old and dear friends of mine who, like me, grew up in the New York City suburbs of Westchester County. I attended Mamaroneck High School and didn’t meet Paul or Hank until our college years, but the two were close friends in the Class of 1969 at White Plains High School (WPHS) in White Plains NY. This is the story of how, in early 1969, Paul and Hank came to promote a memorable and groundbreaking show by Chicago blues legend Buddy Guy at WPHS — or “Buddy Guy High,” as the two teenage impresarios hyped it to anyone and everyone in the weeks leading up to the gig.
George “Buddy” Guy was born 7/30/1936 in Lettsworth, LA and moved to Chicago in 1957; the following year, he released his first two singles on the Cobra label (Otis Rush and Magic Sam also recorded memorably for Cobra). Beginning in 1960, Buddy recorded a string of fine singles for Chess Records, with “Stone Crazy” becoming his only Billboard R&B chart hit (#12 in ‘62). Buddy’s breakthrough to the white audience began in 1968 with his Vanguard debut LP, A Man and The Blues, produced by Sam Charters and abetted by Otis Spann’s peerless piano playing. Unless Chess, Vanguard was well-entrenched in the progressive folk/rock market (with Joan Baez, Country Joe & the Fish, et al), and the success of A Man and The Blues led to Buddy appearing in East Coast clubs and on rock ballroom bills such as the Jefferson Airplane show I saw at Fillmore East in November 1968.
In 1969, WPHS was a three-year school with an enrollment of over 2000 students. By tradition, its annual Senior Prom was free to all students, with all costs covered by various fund-raising events created by members of the class throughout their graduation year.
Paul Sanders: “In 1966, the WPHS senior class raised so much money that they were able to book Smokey Robinson & the Miracles for the prom. In ‘67, the class said ‘okay, we’re getting the Temptations‘ — which they did — and the class of ‘68 followed with the Four Tops…The Buddy Guy show was part of the fund-raising effort for our prom.”
Hank Neuberger: “This was Paul and Hank educating our peers about the blues.”
Paul: “We had A Man and The Blues but that was it. We hadn’t gotten hold of any of the Chess singles yet…We became aware of the blues and of artists like Buddy Guy–”
Hank: “–the same way Mick and Keith did!”
Paul: “I’d already seen B.B. King with Big Brother & the Holding Company in ‘68, and Albert King at the Village Gate on a bill with King Curtis & the Kingpins.”
Hank: “We were hipper than the room, so to speak. We were ‘the music guys,’ we were setting the tone. The fact that we were gonna promote a Buddy Guy show meant that it was a happening thing and that the kids should come — and to our amazement, they actually did! For the whole month leading up to the show, WPHS was ‘Buddy Guy High.’”
Hank and Paul booked the show through Buddy’s manager Dick Waterman, whose Avalon Productions also represented Skip James, Son House, and Junior Wells (and shortly Bonnie Raitt). Buddy’s fee was probably about $2500; his band likely included bassist Jack Myers, saxophonist A.C. Reed, and his brother Philip Guy on rhythm guitar. The show also included an opening act, the Cream-inspired Fluid (more like a Cream cover band, really), most of whom were classmates of mine at Mamaroneck HS. (Two members of this band, bassist/guitarist Steve Love and drummer Bryan Madey, later found some measure of fame if not fortune in the group Stories, whose “Brother Louie” became an out-of-nowhere Number One hit in 1973.)
Hank: “The WPHS auditorium was jammed to capacity, which was about 1200. Fluid played their Cream numbers for 30-40 minutes through their Marshall stacks. No one in the audience other than Paul and I had any idea who Buddy Guy was or what his music would sound like.”
Paul: “These were 15-16-17 year-old white suburban kids and this was their first encounter with the blues. To call his appearance ‘a shock to the system’ would be an understatement.
“The curtain goes up, Buddy comes out, he plugs in, opens up — maybe it was ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ [from A Man and The Blues] — and immediately goes into his second song. And after about two minutes, this big puff of white smoke started to rise from his amp. I think it was a Fender Super Reverb–in any case, it started making all kinds of noises and then just quit cold.”
Hank: “Buddy’s hittin’ it hard, kids are standing on their chairs — and when that amp blew, all the excitement just drained right out of the room. It went from screaming excitement to nothing.”
Of course, neither the promoters nor Buddy had a spare amp on hand. (”Maybe he had some extra guitar strings,” Hank recalls. “He definitely didn’t have another amp.”) But Fluid guitarist Jon Lehr stepped into the breach and graciously offered the loan of his Marshall amp for the remainder of the set.
Paul: “It may have been the first time Buddy Guy had ever plugged into a Marshall — and he made good use of it, I can assure you! Combined with his use of a 300-foot guitar cord, he had those kids in the palm of his hand.”
Hank: “The auditorium had three sections of seats. He ran up one aisle, out the right rear door, back in the left rear door, down the other aisle, and back up onto the stage — and he never stopped playing.”
Buddy Guy Today
Paul and Hank’s Buddy Guy show was a resounding success. It raised enough money for the WPHS senior prom committee to book not one but two national acts: The Tymes, a smooth-voiced Black vocal group who had three Top 20 Pop hits in ‘63-’64 including the #1 “So Much In Love”; and the Elektra Records quasi-supergroup Rhinoceros, of “Apricot Brandy” fame. [Paul Sanders: "These acts were chosen by a vote of the whole class from a list of available acts, including Jethro Tull."]
Two decades later, Hank Neuberger was chief engineer and studio manager at Chicago Recording Company when Buddy Guy arrived at CRC to cut some tracks. “He came in, I introduced myself, and I said: ‘Buddy, I just wanted to tell you that I promoted a show with you way back when — and I’ll never forget it, because your amp blew up five minutes into the show.’
“He looked at me and said: ‘White Plains High School?’
“And I said, ‘Well, yeah — but why would you remember that gig, more than 20 years later?’
“And Buddy said: ‘Because when your amp blows up on the second song, you’ll remember the show.”
BUDDY GUY – “MARY HAD A LITTLE LAMB” [Live, 1969]
With Jack Bruce (bass), Buddy Miles (drums), Dick Heckstall-Smith (saxophone)
Fare Forward, Voyager: RIP Jack Rose
Whatever it is we call “our culture” has suffered a notable loss with the sad and sudden departure of Jack Rose, the “American primitive” guitarist and composer who died 12/5/2009 at at the much too early age of 38 in Philadelphia.
I was privileged to have seen Jack perform on two occasions, both times in the company of my good friend Josh Rosenthal: on 3/11/2004 at a concert at Washington Square Church in NYC (Matt Valentine also played) and at an artists’ loft show in Philly perhaps a year or two later (with Harris Newman on the bill].
I spoke briefly with Jack after these gigs, but Josh got to know him much better over time and offers his personal tribute to Jack on the Tompkins Square site. Friends and fans at ARTHUR Magazine have posted two MP3s and multiple video clips here.
Jack Rose will be interred at Merion Memorial Park in Philadelphia — also the final resting place of country-blues legend Nehemiah “Skip” James (1902-1969), who just had to be one of Jack’s musical heroes and inspirations.
From the New York Times (12.9.2009):
JACK ROSE, VERSATILE MASTER OF THE GUITAR, IS DEAD AT 38
By Peter Keepnews
Jack Rose, whose complex improvisations on 6-string, 12-string and lap steel guitar earned him a devoted cult following, died Saturday in Philadelphia. He was 38.
His death, apparently of a heart attack, was announced by Three Lobed Recordings, which released Mr. Rose’s album The Black Dirt Sessions this year.
Mr. Rose began his career in the early 1990s with Pelt, a rock band whose sound was loud and cacophonous and whose repertory consisted largely of long, dronelike improvisations. But he was best known for his solo acoustic work, which was quieter, more delicate and informed by the aesthetic of an earlier era.
In a 2007 interview that appeared on the Web site Foxy Digitalis (digitalisindustries.com/foxyd), Mr. Rose said much of his inspiration came from music of the pre-World War II era — “anything that’s pre-1942: Cajun, country, blues, jazz, all that stuff.” But, he added, he was also influenced by Minimalist composers like Terry Riley and La Monte Young.
In using the finger-picking techniques of an earlier time to create ethereal improvisations that belonged to no particular style or era, Mr. Rose also acknowledged his debt to John Fahey and other experimental guitarists who came to prominence in the 1960s.
Mr. Rose released close to a dozen albums on various labels, many of them in limited pressings. He had recently signed with the prominent independent rock label Thrill Jockey.
Survivors include his wife, Laurie.
Dr. Albert C. Barnes by Giorgio de Chirico (1926)
On Thursday 11/26/09, Leslie and I along with my parents, Howard & Phyllis Schwartz, drove down to Philadelphia for the Thanksgiving weekend. We’d made a reservation for 12 noon Saturday to tour The Barnes Foundation in the Main Line suburb of Merion, PA. My folks had visited this unique museum many years before but Leslie and I were seeing it for the first time.
I’m neither an artist nor an art critic, and my museum-going résumé doesn’t include visits to the Louvre in Paris, the Museo del Prado in Madrid, or the State Hermitage in St. Petersburg, to name a few notable omissions. But in the span of my own experience, the Barnes was a unique and utterly distinctive way to experience art, specifically the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
And there’s a hell of a lot of it to look at: In the 40-plus years before his death in a 1951 car accident Dr. Albert C. Barnes (born 1/2/1872 in Philadelphia to a poor working-class family) amassed the greatest private art collection in North America. In the 2003 edition of his book Art Held Hostage: The Battle Over the Barnes Collection, investigative journalist John Anderson wrote that the collection “is valued at more than $6 billion [This is not a typo -- A.S.] … including some 69 Cezannes (more than in all the museums in Paris), 60 Matisses, 44 Picassos, 18 Rousseaus, 14 Modiglianis, and no fewer than 180 Renoirs…”
Barnes made a fortune circa 1900 with a silver nitrate-based antiseptic called Argyrol, which was widely administered to infants in eyedrop form; he began collecting art around 1910, and is alleged to have paid $100 for his first painting by Picasso. In 1925, construction of the building that houses the Barnes Foundation galleries (as well as the founder’s private residence) was completed on a 12-acre estate in Merion, PA; four years later, Dr. Barnes sold his company and devoted the rest of his life to collecting and to the Foundation. In his will, the childless Barnes dedicated the bulk of his fortune to the perpetuation of the Foundation along with a long list of explicit, ironclad instructions. Foremost among these was that none of the works would ever be sold or incorporated in touring exhibitions; that admission to the grounds would be strictly limited (it was by invitation only during Barnes’ lifetime); and that the collection would be displayed, in perpetuity, exactly as the good doctor himself had placed the paintings, furniture, light fixtures, etc. within the galleries.
Barnes’ eccentric and very personal arrangements of his works have the effect of turning Great Art into something more intimate and human, less entombed and intimidating in their Overwhelming Greatness. Compared to, say, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, his displays are very crowded (see photo at right); the paintings are not organized chronologically and there are no title plaques on the walls (viewers use laminated identification sheets instead). Barnes’ singular and stoutly-defended interpretation of what he considered the key elements in any
A Gallery at the Barnes Foundation
given work of art led him to add metal wall-hangings, inspired by/akin to certain lines and shapes within the paintings; and to place antique chairs, chests, and candelabra beneath certain canvases. These objects bear what I’d call a quasi-mystical relationship to the paintings, except that for Albert Barnes there was nothing “mystical” about it. Speaking to students, scholars, and artists, he would explain — in concise and almost clinical terms, very different from the language of art criticism then or now — the specific visual ways in which these objects, their lines and planes, related to and mirrored each other. (Excerpts from Barnes’ monologues are preserved on the present-day audio tour of the collection.)
THE FACTORY by Vincent Van Gogh (1887)
Some of my own favorite works on display at the Barnes included Van Gogh’s The Factory and one of his seven portraits of The Postman Joseph Roulin; Cezanne’s epic Card Players (1890-92); Renoir’s large-scale painting of his family including his infant son, the future film director Jean Renoir; and various works by Modigliani including Young Redhead In An Evening Dress (1918) and Portrait of Leopold Zborowski (1919). The Barnes collection also includes several cabinets filled with African sculptures and masks; and a set of Native American blankets from the Southwest, unusually large pieces that are gorgeously woven and in impeccable condition.
I consider myself very fortunate to have seen the Barnes collection as Albert Barnes intended it to be seen, because that opportunity soon will be lost to future generations. This 12/7/09 article on the Web site of the Los Angeles Times reports that on January 2, 2010, five second-floor galleries will be closed and turned into a conservation suite so that their contents may be dismantled and prepared for eventual transportation to the Foundation’s controversial new $150-million building on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in central Philadelphia, now under construction and slated for completion in 2012.
The reasons why and how this turn of events has come to pass are far too complex to discuss here; interested readers should turn, for starters, to John Watson’s Art Held Hostage. In his remarks at the 11/13/09 groundbreaking ceremony for the new museum, Barnes Foundation chairman Bernard Watson said:
“The final decade of the 20th century had seen the foundation incurring annual deficits and depleted financial resources, resulting, in large part, from an endless series of expensive and acrimonious lawsuits, going back as early as the 1950s. The foundation’s ability to prosper, or indeed survive, in its Merion location was exacerbated by local regulations limiting visitation to the galleries…Philanthropists and foundations were simply not giving money to an organization that had a legacy of expensive and distracting litigation, no credible business plan, or a governance structure that would make implementation of such a plan possible. None of the people who continue to raise their voices in angry objection to moving the collection to the Parkway reached into their pockets to support us in any meaningful way in Merion.”
YOUNG REDHEAD IN AN EVENING DRESS by Amedeo Modigliani (1918)
In his L.A. Times post, on the other hand, Christopher Knight noted:
“Most every art and cultural critic who has written on the subject has opposed the plan, which will shutter the astounding Post-Impressionist and early Modern art collection in suburban Merion, dismantle what ranks as the greatest American cultural monument of the first half of the 20th century and relocate the art five short miles to a hoped-for tourist venue downtown.”
Finally, my good friend Jay Schwartz, lifelong Philadelphia resident and dedicated preservationist of the city’s cultural and architectural treasures, wrote me in an 11/30/09 email:
“I do NOT think it makes more sense for the collection to be in Center City. The decision calls into question the validity of all wills. I do not think it was effectively demonstrated that there was no other good option. One…would have been to sell off some paintings to get [the Foundation] back on [its] feet. While this [sale] is also forbidden by the will, I think Dr. Barnes would have preferred this option.
“I also think the current location is perfect, beautiful, and NOT so difficult to find or get to. The collection is more accessible than ever before, and that if someone cannot make the small effort that you just made (’small’ once you are in Philadelphia, that is), they probably don’t need to see it.
“Of course, another solution would be for the various parties that saw the opportunity to hijack the collection to have donated a tiny fraction of what the move will cost [in order] to keep things as they were — that would have fixed everything. They had no interest in that, though, only in doing things their way and to benefit what they wanted to benefit.
“While I have not read [John Anderson's] book, I feel I am familiar enough with the events to make these judgement calls. It was a freakish chain of events that made all of this happen, and there were no good guys in the ugly story, except for the hapless Friends of the Barnes (former students), whom the last judge decided had no legal standing.”
Jerry Wexler died August 14, 2008 at his home in Sarasota, Florida, age 91. This was the site of my only in-person encounter with the fabled Atlantic Records executive and producer, in January 2001, when Leslie and I had dinner with Jerry and his wife Jean Arnold. But as he did with so many others, Wex and I sustained a long-distance relationship by phone and fax, UPS and USPS. (In 2005, I was surprised and honored to receive a gift of the Ray Charles box set, Pure Genius: The Complete Atlantic Recordings 1952-1959, from the guy who produced nearly every track on its seven CDs.) In my case, these communications continued until about nine months before his death, after Jean suffered a stroke and Jerry went into terminal decline. It wasn’t dark yet, but it was getting there.
Godfather of Soul (the Jewish one)
On Friday, October 30, 2009 at the Directors Guild Theater on West 57th Street in Manhattan, Jerry Wexler finally got the send-off he deserved. I’m not sure why it took over a year to happen, but the memorial was timed to coincide with two all-star Madison Square Garden concerts benefiting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (JW was inducted in 1987 in the Non-Performer category). There may have been some overlap in attendance between the two events, but with the notable exception of Bonnie Raitt, none of the featured MSG performers showed up to honor Wex — including Aretha Franklin and Sam Moore of Sam & Dave, the two whose careers were most closely entwined with his own.
Sam’s wife Joyce Moore appeared and explained that Sam was exhausted from his on-stage exertions of the previous night but sent his love and respect nonetheless. Aretha didn’t even send a message to be read in her absence — pretty cold, if you ask me, since it was Jerry Wexler who transformed ‘Re into the Queen of Soul through his production, his song selection, his choice of studio musicians and arrangers, and his relentless promotional campaigning.
Jerry and Aretha in the studio, late Sixties
The proceedings began with welcoming remarks from Jerry’s surviving children, Paul Wexler and Lisa Wexler; Paul acknowledged that “most of what I am today, I owe to my father…I wouldn’t change a lick, not even a note.” (Their older sister Anita, Jerry’s third child with his first wife Shirley, died in 1989 of AIDS-related illness before the age of 40.) We watched a pair of stunning video clips, culled from a PBS-type live-in-studio telecast circa 1972, in which the original Meters backed up first Professor Longhair and then Mac Rebbenack a/k/a Dr. John, with Allen Toussaint sitting in on piano. (’Fess recorded brilliantly for Atlantic in 1949 and again in ‘53; and despite his contentious relationship with Wexler, Rebbenack reached a career commercial peak during his Atlantic years, 1971-1974.)
The next video segment was no less compelling: Aretha Franklin performing in an unidentified church (possibly New Temple Missionary Baptist Church in L.A., the site of her live recording Amazing Grace in January 1972), accompanied by a band and choir led, I think, by James Cleveland (also not identified). As the camera panned over the ecstatic congregation, we could see a slim long-haired white man rise from a rear seat, clapping in time: Mick Jagger.
“Peace in the Valley,” beautifully sung a capella by Vaneese Thomas, was the first live performance of the event. JW was a friend and admirer of her late father Rufus Thomas (1917-2001), and the 1960 Rufus & Carla Thomas duet “‘Cause I Love You” marked the start of the Stax/Atlantic partnership. Jerry then appeared in an undated interview to offer up a few well-polished anecdotes from his early years at Atlantic. At under five minutes, this segment was too brief: I would’ve liked to hear more from the man himself.
A succession of speakers offered their tributes. Jazz critic and Bing Crosby biographer Gary Giddins compared Wex to Bob Dylan in his “genius for absorbing everything in American music and giving back in a new way.” Giddins noted that at their first meeting, JW only wanted to talk about Adrian Rollini (a gifted if little-remembered white jazz player of the Twenties and Thirties) and that there was barely a song in Bing Crosby’s vast discography that Jerry could not sing from memory. In passing, Gary remarked that Nesuhi Ertegun, the younger brother of JW’s partner Ahmet Ertegun, “was referred to by jazz musicians as ‘the good Ertegun.’” Even if true, it was a cheap shot we could have done without, particularly since Ahmet’s widow Mica Ertegun was in the audience.
I’m a faithful listener to Bob Porter on “Saturday Morning Function” (WBGO-Newark NJ) while other readers may recognize his name from the production credits of numerous Prestige soul-jazz albums and assorted Atlantic reissues. Porter noted that it was Wexler who brought in some of the best R&B musicians of the period, people like [saxophonist] Sam “The Man” Taylor and [guitarist] Mickey Baker to form the first Atlantic studio band; who recruited the arranger Ray Ellis and who, in 1955, signed Jerry Leiber & Mike Stoller to the industry’s first formal independent production deal. “Make no mistake about it,” declared Porter, “it was Jerry Wexler and no other who was most responsible for bringing soul music to America.” (Full text of Bob’s remarks is posted here.)
Paul Wexler read a message from guitarist Steve Cropper of Booker T. & the MGs, and we watched a video tribute from West Coast music executive Jerry Greenberg, who began his 18-year Atlantic career in 1967 as Wexler’s gofer. Greenberg likened this formative period to boot camp in the Marine Corps, with JW as DI: “Either you made it through or they found your body in a swamp somewhere, six months later.” When Greenberg moved up the Atlantic ladder, another eager A&R aspirant, Mark Meyerson, arrived in 1969 to take his place. Meyerson remembered Wexler delineating the difference between the 12-bar and 16-bar blues for him on the piano, and summed up his ex-boss’s professional credo as “if you were awake, then you were working.”
The author David Ritz met Wexler while co-writing Ray Charles’ autobiography Brother Ray in the mid-Eighties. He later co-authored Jerry’s own memoir, Rhythm and the Blues: A Life In American Music (published 1993), and the two men remained fast friends until the end. Ritz conveyed deep feelings of both love and loss as he hailed “a ferocious wit, a a super-funky storyteller.” (David’s speech is posted on YouTube — click here.) Engineer/producer Jimmy Douglass talked rather more about his own career than the occasion warranted: Forty years on, it seemed he still held a grudge towards Jerry for initially offering eager young Jimmy a job in the Atlantic warehouse instead of in the Atlantic studio (”I hated that job”). Eventually, Douglass made it to the control room and worked with acts ranging from Slave and Stanley Turrentine to Foreigner and the Gang of Four.
The last word, on a more appreciative note, came from Zelma Redding, Otis’ widow, who fondly remembered the man who delivered the eulogy at her husband’s funeral in December 1967. Of this heartbreaking moment in Macon, GA, JW later wrote: “I could barely compose myself. My voice cracked, my eyes filled with tears.” Four years later, he would return to Macon to deliver another eulogy, this time for guitarist Duane Allman of the Allman Brothers Band.
And now it was showtime.
Guitarist Jon Tiven led the backing band onstage, including bassist Jerry Jemmott (a veteran of countless JW-produced sessions), drummer Anton Fig, organist Mike Finnigan, and the members of The Uptown Horns. First up was New Orleans’ own Allen Toussaint — Wexler produced his 1978 album Motion – who played piano and sang on the winsome ballad “With You In Mind.”
Big Sister: "Are You Lonely For Me Baby?" (w/Lenny Kaye)
For nearly 20 years, Lisa Wexler has played drums for (and booked, and managed) the Woodstock-based all-female band Big Sister. This group was an unknown quantity to me but their two songs were excellent. Lisa and bassist Desiree Williams locked into a push-and-pull rhythmic groove behind singer/guitarist Lara Parks on the Big Sister original “Talk Down to Me” and a stirring cover of Freddie Scott’s 1967 soul classic “Are You Lonely For Me Baby,” with Lenny Kaye of the Patti Smith Group adding a third guitar to the churn. William Bell, a class act still in warmly expressive voice after 50 years on stage, sang “You Don’t Miss Your Water” (his Stax debut single, from ‘61) joined by original Muscle Shoals sessioneers Spooner Oldham (piano) and Jimmy Johnson (guitar) along with master drummer Bernard “Pretty” Purdie.
More surprising was the appearance of actress Ronee Blakeley (Nashville, A Nightmare On Elm Street) — Wexler produced her 1975 album Welcome in Muscle Shoals — in a heartfelt if vocally uncertain duet with Lenny Kaye on “I Can’t Make It Alone.” This Gerry Goffin/Carole King song is the closing track on the original LP version of Dusty in Memphis by Dusty Springfield (1969), which stands as JW’s greatest production for any white artist.
If I was surprised to see Ronee Blakeley, I was frankly amazed to see Joe South make his unsteady way to center stage — all the way from Atlanta GA with his big Gretsch hollow-body guitar in hand, maybe the same one he played on Aretha Arrives and Blonde On Blonde. To the best of my recollection, the creator of “Games People Play,” “Hush,” and “Down In the Boondocks” had not appeared in NYC since 1994, when
Joe South: "Walk A Mile In My Shoes" with Anton Fig (drums), Jerry. Jemmott (bass), Jon Tiven (guitar). Photo by Phillip Rauls
he’d joined Pete Seeger, Roger McGuinn, and the late great Ted Hawkins for one of those singer/songwriter in-the-round shows at The Bottom Line. Overweight, unkempt, and moving slow (possibly due to diabetes, which can cause loss of feeling in the extremities), Joe nonetheless hit all his marks on “Walk A Mile In My Shoes.” He sounded just like Joe South (i.e. great) and Jerry Jemmott played his butt off on the tune.
Another old Muscle Shoals hand, Donnie Fritts, sang and played piano on “We Had It All” — a favorite of Wexler’s from Donnie’s 1974 Atlantic album Prone To Lean. Lou Ann Barton ably represented the Austin music community with her rendition of Irma Thomas’ “It’s Raining,” a song from her JW-produced album Old Enough (1982); she looked and sounded terrific.
In 1963, at age seventeen, Bettye LaVette scored her only Top Ten R&B hit with the Atlantic single “My Man – He’s A Lovin’ Man.” Bettye told us that a year later, when she announced to a nonplussed Jerry Wexler that she was leaving the label, “he took out his personal checkbook and wrote me a check for $500. ‘Bettye,’ he said, ‘if you’re really leaving, you’re gonna need this’ — and he was right!” The Detroit soul survivor then offered a deep-blue “Drown In My Own Tears” — a #1 R&B hit for Ray Charles in 1956 and one of Wex’s all-time classics. Bettye LaVette can really bring the pain like few other singers working today.
Bettye was a tough act to follow but the blue-eyed soul brother Steve Bassett proved up to the task with his rousing closer (closing rouser?) of “Shake, Rattle and Roll.” Signed by Wex’s dear friend John Hammond (1910-1987) in 1980, Steve made his lone Columbia album in Muscle Shoals with co-producers Jerry Wexler and Barry Beckett. It didn’t sell beans, but gradually Bassett built up a solid career as an in-demand jingle and session singer, later self-releasing a slew of his own CDs from home base in Richmond, VA. Steve’s unpretentious, joyful delivery of the Big Joe Turner flag-waver sent us out onto West 57th Street on an uplifting cloud of good feeling, grateful to have been part of the occasion.
Title page inscribed "To Andy, truly one of us" from my copy of JW's autobiography
In attendance: Danny Fields, Aaron Fuchs (Tuff City Records, wearing a vintage Cash Box Magazine satin baseball jacket), A&R man/producer Mitch Miller (99 years young on July 4, 2010), music producer/filmmaker Leo Sacks, Paul Shaffer, Seymour Stein (Sire Records), Jeremy Tepper (Sirius/XM), attorney Judy Tint (Rhythm & Blues Foundation), photographer Dick Waterman, Harry Weinger (Motown/Universal); Atlantic veterans Jim Delehant, Barbara Harris, and Phillip Rauls; scribes Jim Bessman, Stanley Booth, Kandia Crazy Horse, Deborah Frost, and Holly George-Warren; and musicians Ben E. King, Bonnie Raitt, G.E. Smith, and Peter Wolf (J. Geils Band).
JW postcard with thanks for a Ravens CD: "Clearly, you know."
GIMME SOMETHING BETTER: The Profound, Progressive, and Occasionally Pointless History of Bay Area Punk from Dead Kennedys to Green Day by Jack Boulware & Silke Tudor (Penguin p/b, 2009)
In his introduction to Gimme Something Better, punk musician Jesse Michaels (ex-Operation Ivy) gives the thumbs-up to the book’s oral history format, in which quotes from dozens of interviewees have been cut up and assembled in roughly chronological order. “The oral history format,” he writes, “has the great advantage of eliminating The Rock Writer. The Rock Writer writing about punk generally has one aim: to arrogate intellectual ownership of something he or she knows absolutely nothing about. That bullet is dodged here…The stories that follow are the real thing.”
One bullet may have been dodged, but a few others have left noticeable holes in the pierced and tattooed corpus of Gimme Something Better. For example, specific dates are included only when someone remembers to mention them. Thus, we learn that The Nuns first played the Mabuhay Gardens in “November or December 1976″ (per photographer James Stark) but not when either The Ramones and Patti Smith played their eye-opening San Francisco debuts, the shows that led directly to the formation of bands like The Nuns.
Many independent records are cited by various speakers, sometimes with extravagant praise: Fang’s Landshark, declares Fat Mike of the band NOFX, “is, behind the Operation Ivy record, the second or third best record out of the East Bay.” Extrapolating from the chapter ["Berkeley Heathen Scum"] in which Mike’s quote appears, Landshark would seem to have been released in 1984. But the current Amazon.com listing (for a twofer CD of Landshark and Fang’s follow-up Where The Wild Things Are) says 1982 and there’s no accompanying discography in GSB to clarify this or any other details of release dates, labels, in-print/out-of-print status, etc. (And Fat Mike’s crew are no slackers in the disc-production department themselves: AllMusic.com credits NOFX with sixteen full-length albums over 20 years, right up to 2009’s Coaster.)
The last section of the book is a “Who’s Who” of interviewees arranged in alphabetical order by first names. In some instances, the subjects seem to have provided their own capsule descriptions, so details vary in quantity and quality. Anna Brown is a “Berkeley native. What she does is secret.” Dirk Dirksen’s role as “booker of Mabuhay Gardens” is noted but not his death in November 2006. And there’s no index.
![The Mutants (S.F.) live at Hurrah - NYC, 1979 [Photo: Eugene Merinov]](http://www.nyrocker.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/mutantshurrahs1979-300x201.jpg "mutantshurrahs1979")
The Mutants live in NYC, 1979 - Photo: Eugene Merinov
Despite these shortcomings, Gimme Something Better manages to effectively portray the scene’s divergent personalities, notable venues, and shifting tides of social history. The feeling is there even if many facts are omitted. (The 478-page paperback was reduced, say the authors, from an 800-page manuscript; supplementary bonus material is posted on their web site.)
We see the art-student bands (Mutants, Avengers, Crime) give way to satirical proto-hardcore (Dead Kenndys), then to younger and angrier hardcore (Millions of Dead Cops, Christ On Parade), then to chartbound pop-punk (Green Day, who I’m sure I’d rather listen to over MDC or COP). There are multi-faceted portraits of little-remembered venues like Ruthie’s Inn, a black-owned nightclub that hosted the likes of Lowell Fulson and Jimmy McCracklin before giving way to early Metallica and Slayer; and The Farm, a rundown but still-working farm where gigs were “cold sweat and dirt and manure dripping down on you. When you got home, you were covered in dirt” (Zeke Jak, p. 229). Gimme Something Better also tells the story of two Bay Area punk institutions still hanging on after nearly a quarter-century: 924 Gilman Street, the all-volunteer co-op venue (first show New Year’s Eve 1986); and America’s premier punk-rock fanzine, Maximum RocknRoll (first issue published 1982, as an LP insert), and its intriguing founder, the late Tim Yohannon (1945-1998).
["If you got rich from an East Bay punk band, you owe everything to Tim Yohannon. He wa making a world-renowned magazine. If you had a bumfuck band in Milwaukee, only some people in Milwaukee knew about it. If you had a bumfuck band in the East Bay, everyone all over the world knew it...They should have a fuckin' permanent memorial to the guy." -- Blag Jesus, p. 467]
Never a habitue of the hardcore scene on either coast, I admit to being taken aback, even repulsed by some of the incidents of violence recounted in Gimme Something Better. During an Elite Club set in ‘82, Misfits guitarist Doyle brings down his instrument and splits open the head of a fan, Tim Sutliff. Jello Biafra of the Dead Kennedys calls it “the worst thing I’d ever seen at a show in my life, by far” (p. 207-209). At a show by L.A. band 45 Grave, one Bob Noxious “got really drunk and…I vowed to kick anyone’s ass who came from an out-of-town band.” His chosen target was 45 Grave’s diminutive female singer, Dinah Cancer: “Bob came running across the fucking stage and she went flying out into the crowd. She was unconscious, lying on the dance floor” (Bill Halen, p. 180-182). In 1989, Sam McBride a/k/a Sammytown, the badly strung-out lead singer of Fang, strangled his girlfriend Dixie Lee Carney. Convicted of manslaughter, McBride served seven years in San Quentin and Soledad; upon release, he formed a new Fang that toured as recently as 2008. (Green Day covered Fang’s “I Want to Be On TV” on their 2002 album Shenanigans.)
NOFX live in 1986 at "some Armenian bar in Detroit."
But something else, something better if you will, stays with me after reading Gimme Something Better: a sense of wonder that the Bay Area punk-rockers were able to create as much music and related culture as they did while struggling with poverty, homelessness, addiction, police harassment, and myriad intra-group conflicts. For better and worse, they made their own world, and the best of their efforts, their idealism and determination, remain a source of inspiration to this day, flowing through international youth culture like a subterranean stream below the concrete.
“We have a certain way of seeing the world. You can travel the world as a punk and people come to see you and you go to see them. That’s what you have in common and that’s actually a lot. It’s radically transformative. I am grateful. True ’til death! Just not death at 25.” (Anna Brown, p. 462)
