"Slack Power" (1969/2006) from UNBRANDED
Last Saturday (6/6/2010), Leslie and I hopped the No. 7 train from Grand Central to MoMA PS1 in Long Island City. This semi-autonomous branch of the Museum of Modern Art is described on its Web site as “one of the oldest and largest non-profit contemporary art institutions in the United States. An exhibition space rather than a collecting institution, MoMA PS1 devotes its energy and resources to displaying the most experimental art in the world…MoMA PS1 actively pursues emerging artists, new genres, and adventurous new work by recognized artists in an effort to support innovation in contemporary art.”
On this particular day, the Oberlin College Alumni Association was offering a free guided tour to Oberlin grads (Leslie graduated with the class of ‘77). I had not visited PS1 in years and was very impressed by the scope and diversity of the current “Greater New York” show, encompassing painting, sculpture, video, photography, mixed media, and two exotic koi goldfish (in a sort of living diorama by Tommy Hartung entitled B Roll). But my favorite among all the various galleries was the first complete NYC installation of the pictorial series Unbranded by the African-American artist Hank Willis Thomas.
Hank was born 3/17/1976 in Plainfield, New Jersey (the original stomping grounds of George Clinton and the nascent Parliament-Funkadelic, BTW) and holds degrees from California College of the Arts and NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Father Hank Thomas was/is a jazz musician turned film producer, property developer, and stockbroker; mother Deborah Willis (Ph.D.) is an accomplished photographer, widely published author, NYU professor and current chair of the Tisch School’s Department of Photography. Hank the Younger has been showing his work since student days in the mid-Nineties, but PS1 was my first encounter and he knocked me out.
The starting point for Unbranded is 40 years of selected magazine and newspaper advertisements created by Corporate America and aimed at Black America from 1968. Hank has computer-imaged the ads to eliminate all the original text and brand identifications, so that what we’re left with are remarkably revealing and absorbing portraits of black people (occasionally
"The Mandingo of Sandwiches" (1977/2007) from UNBRANDED
in the company of white people) over four decades of American life, with each year represented by two different images. In place of the ad copy, Hank has created his own captions outside the frames, and these are sometimes poignant, sometimes hilarious, and sometimes…something else.
"The Oft Forgotten Flower Children of Harlem" (1969/2006) from UNBRANDED
On his Web site, Hank Willis Thomas says of Unbranded:
“I believe that in part, advertising’s success rests on its ability to reinforce generalizations about race, gender, and ethnicity which can be entertaining, sometimes true, and sometimes horrifying, but which at a core level are a reflection of the way a culture views itself or its aspirations.
“By ‘unbranding’ advertisements I can literally expose what Roland Barthes refers to as ‘what-goes-without-saying’ in ads, and hopefully encourage viewers to look harder and think deeper about the empire of signs that have become second nature to our experience of life in the modern world.”
Hank Willis Thomas with "Petey Wheatstraw, The Devil's Son-In-Law" (2000/2005)
I should give props also to Hank’s fellow artist William Cordova (born 1971 in Lima, Peru) who shares this particular PS1 gallery with HWT. In the center of the floor, Cordova has constructed a maze from old LP covers, mostly r&b and disco — I believe the title is Laberintos (Labyrinths). This work demanded a little more attention than I was able to give it at the time: The tour group was moving on, and I was still buzzing from Unbranded.
As part of the “Greater New York” show, Hank’s masterful work is up through 10/18/2010. It’s rich in meaning, it looks great, and you really should see it for yourself.
All photos by ZAK SHELBY-SZYSZKO for Zeal Images unless credited otherwise.
It was early May, the gig was two weeks away, and things weren’t looking good for the star of the show, Jerry Williams Jr. a/k/a Swamp Dogg.
The iconoclastic r&b singer/songwriter/producer had not played New York City in over a decade. (His last local appearance had taken place at Coney Island High, an East Village rock club that closed in July 1999.) The upcoming show was booked at City Winery, an upscale venue more closely associated with the music of Amy Mann, Steve Earle, or Suzanne Vega than with old-school, hard-core rhythm & blues. Advance publicity was light, advance ticket sales were lighter.
Swamp Dogg was “coming off” his 2009 album Give ‘Em As Little As You Can…As Often As You Have To… Or, A Tribute To Rock ‘N’ Roll — a collection of songs written and/or made famous by the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jimmy Reed, Jerry Lee Lewis, and Bruce Springsteen, among others. The CD was released by S-Curve Records through EMI — the first Swamp Dogg disc in decades to receive major-label distribution. Despite the best efforts of the S-Curve staff and myself (as his belatedly hired indie publicist), Give ‘Em As Little As You Can… soon went down in musical history as what S-Curve founder/label head Steve Greenberg ruefully described as “possibly the worst-selling album of both Swamp Dogg’s career and mine.” Although marred by its “canned” drum sound, Give ‘Em As Little As You Can… was nonetheless an audacious attempt to reclaim rock & roll as Black Music, a sui generis creation unlike any other album made by an African-American artist since I-don’t-know-when.
All in all, the stage at City Winery seemed set for deep disappointment if not outright disaster. Guess what?
Swamp Dogg killed. His set was a triumph.
The unknowing and unsuspecting among us were converted for life and sent forth into the night, frothing at the mouth and babbling in tongues of ecstasy. The true believers, your faithful scribe among them, were lifted to Soul Heaven on a pair of golden fried chicken wings (with choice of grits, black-eyed peas, or collard greens).
Swamp Dogg (lead vocals and electric piano) was backed
capably and sympathetically by The Revelations of Brooklyn NY. I believe the personnel for this gig was Wes Mingus (guitar), Borahm Lee (keyboards), Josh Werner (bass) and Gintas Janusonis (drums) plus a three-man horn section. The set list went as follows:
1. “The Mind Does The Dancing While The Body Pulls The Strings” from Have You Heard This Story?? (Island, 1974)
We’ve waited with growing impatience through a solid hour of the opening Tomas Doncker Band (jammy and bluesy, with some good playing, weaker singing, forgettable songs) and another 15 minutes of changeover. Swamp enters from stage left, sits down at his keyboard, and gets things off to a rousing start: He’s in strong voice and looking resplendent in lime-green suit with matching hat, belt, tie, socks, shoes — hell, his drawers probably match. The audience, which fills a respectable two-thirds of this rather cavernous room, breathes a collective sigh of relief.
2. “Since I Fell For You” from Resurrection (S.D.E.G., 2007, with a cover shot of Swamp Dogg crucified)
Buddy Johnson’s greatest hit, first recorded circa 1945, has been covered by everyone from Barbra Streisand to Tom Waits to the Sonics. Swamp got around to cutting the song in ‘07 and sings the hell out of it at City Winery: The one-word description in my notebook says “Stratospheric!” Steve Greenberg turns to me and asks: “Why didn’t he put this on his S-Curve album?!”
3. “Synthetic World” from Total Destruction To Your Mind (Canyon Records, 1970)
The Revelations work up a nice MGs-type groove behind the Dogg’s impassioned vocal on this mid-tempo classic with its almost Dylanesque lines like “Friendship is like acid/It burns as it slides away…” Halfway through, Swamp Dogg launches into a semi-improvised rap — complete with Xanax reference — about suffering panic attacks while driving on Los Angeles freeways. Genius.
Photo by Kees Tabak
4. “Sam Stone” from Cuffed, Collared, Tagged & Gassed (Cream Records, 1972 — also includes “Lady Madonna” and Joe South’s “Don’t It Make You Want to Go Home”)
The Viet Nam War was still raging in 1971 when John Prine released this heartbreaking ballad of a heroin-addicted Army veteran on his self-titled Atlantic debut. Swamp Dogg covered it the next year and over time the song became a cornerstone of his live shows. Tonight at City Winery, Swamp brings “Sam Stone” sharply up to date: “Nowadays, those GIs ain’t comin’ home with dope habits,” he intones mournfully. “They’re comin’ home in coffins, from Iraq and Afghanistan…”
5. “Born Blue” from Total Destruction To Your Mind – Another great performance, with Swamp Dogg stretching and scatting on the title phrase.
6. “In My Résumé” from Finally Caught Up With Myself (Springboard International, 1977 — also includes “Slow Slow Disco,” sampled by Kid Rock on “I Got One For Ya” from Devil Without A Cause)
At this point, the show has transcended the conventions of r&b live performance. It’s now a combination of Baptist tent revival, therapeutic encounter session, and after-hours blue mood, imbued with a profound sense of personal truth-telling courtesy of The Dogg. What more can I add but mindless superlatives: “great,” “awesome,” “wow,” etc.
7. “Total Destruction To Your Mind” Swamp Dogg takes us home with a rocking version of his personal anthem, re-cut for Give ‘Em As Little As You Can… (and nicely covered by roots-rocker Eric “Roscoe” Ambel on Roscoe’s Gang in 1988).
The 45-minute set has passed all too quickly; Swamp Dogg and the Revelations have played all of their rehearsed material — but the crowd won’t let them go. After some hemming and hawing and one false start, Swamp and the band launch into an impromptu but devastating rendition of Big Joe Turner’s “Crawdad Hole” that is the best piece of flat-feet-on-the-floor, stand-up blues singing I’ve heard since Howard Tate’s NYC comeback at Village Underground in July 2001.
A.S. and Swamp Dogg bond over my copy of his 1989 LP "I Called For A Rope And They Threw Me A Rock." (Photo by Howard B. Leibowitz)
Aaron Fuchs was still floating on the high of this show days later when he wrote:
“It was a rare occasion when a show so greatly exceeded my expectations. Aside from doing everything you’d expect from Swamp Dogg — all the songs you really wanted to hear, with stream-of-consciousness interludes — it was his entirely undiminished piercing tenor combined with his nods to the ages that made the show incredible. I have never, ever heard anyone cover Big Joe Turner’s ‘Crawdad Hole.’ And he ripped it.“
ADDENDUM: The unfortunate task of following this revelatory performance fell to the Revelations and their regular lead singer Tre Williams. I’d seen this group three times previously as headliners and always enjoyed them; I can recommend the debut CD The Bleeding Edge without reservation. For whatever reason, Tre’s vocal partner Rell Gaddis was AWOL from City Winery and their particular interplay — a neo-soul variation on hip-hop’s MC/hype man combination — was very much missed. Matters were not improved by the fact that perhaps three-fourths of the audience had left the venue immediately following Swamp Dogg’s performance.
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.
![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)
