Distractions

Never Be Blue

2013-05-10T10:12:00.001+12:00

In January 1986 in Sydney I interviewed Dinah Lee, the singer of one of the first three songs I can remember hearing (besides ‘Do the Blue Beat’, the other two are the Beatles’ ‘All My Loving’ and Nat King Cole’s ‘Ramblin’ Rose’). The interview was arranged by my friends Maxine and Bronte, who were well connected then and surely still are. It ran verbatim in the March 1986 issue of Cha-Cha, Auckland’s free fashion newspaper edited by the talented Ngila Dickson. Besides all the ads for Workshop and Zambesi, Cha-Cha ran a fascinating series of Q&A interviews that are excellent source material for social history. Among the subjects were pioneering journalist Marcia Russell, radio pirate David Gapes, broadcaster Peter Sinclair and entrepreneur Charley Gray. The two main interviewers were Wayne Washington (aka Russell Brown), and Bryan Staff. Depending on the interviewee, the tone sometimes emulated Interview magazine. After the interview, in central Sydney, I took her picture outside a mass-market boutique called Beatnik Girl. The thing that comes through is Dinah’s determination; 27 years later, she is still regularly performing.

“A chick-a-chick, a chick-a-chick a chang-chang!”

Dinah Lee will always be New Zealand’s Queen of Mod. She was our first pop superstar, wowing audiences with her effervescent personality and exuberant versions of R&B hits – at a time when the Beatles were still playing Hamburg. For many of us, the 60s began with ‘Do the Blue Beat’ at the top of the New Zealand charts, and the sight of girls training their hair with Sellotape, trying to imitate Dinah’s side-curls.

Inevitably, she made the migration to Australia, where she has been based since 1964. In June last year [1985] Dinah returned to New Zealand to appear in television’s 25^th anniversary concert; she will be in Auckland this month [1986] to perform at the Easter Show. “Come-on ba-by! Do-wah yakka way!”

Mmmm I’ve been dying for this. What a good cup of coffee – some places you go and they give you little fiddly cups of cappuccino, and it’s down in a second. I’ve never got used to the heat here in Syudney. I came from Christchurch originally. I was born in Waimate – do you know where Waimate is? You do? A lot of people don’t …

Yes, I’ve been there. Norman Kirk’s buried there.

Is he? In Waimate? … (looks puzzled) … I didn’t know that.

I’ve seen a couple your records in the second-hand stores here in Sydney – Introducing Dinah Lee and The Mod World of Dinah Lee. They’ve got very expensive prices on them.

I know, aren’t they expensive. They say they’re collector’s items now. I have a friend here who’s in a collector’s club and if I can’t find any of my singles, he’ll write all around Australia for them. I’ve got copies that way of songs I haven’t had for years, such as the songs I recorded in England, but they’re re-releases a lot of them.

‘Blue Beat’ wasn’t a big hit over here [in Australia]. No, ‘Don’t You Know Yockomo’ was No 1 and ‘Reet Petite’ was No 1, but ‘blue Beat’ was only on the flipside of ‘Reet Petite’ out here. It got quite a bit of airplay in Queensland, but ‘Don’t You Know …’ is the one. A few people know ‘blue Beat’ but I wouldn’t do it in my show here, but I have to do ‘Yockomo’ and I havae to do ‘Reet Petite’, otherwise people go, “What’s happening?” But if I go to New Zealand as I did not too long ago, it’s gotta be ‘Blue Beat’.

Where did you get your material from? ‘Reet Petite’ and so on …

That was an old Jackie Wilson song, but I found it on some album by … I can’t remember, it was so long ago … it was some girl singer doing it.

‘Don’t You Know Yockomo’ was an early R&B hit as well, by New Orleans’ singer Huey Smith. Were you listening to those R&B records in the early 60s?

Oh yeah – into all that, cos it was sort of the Motown thing, and even before that there were your black singers like Jackie Wilson and Sam Cooke and even Little Richard. There were lots of little coffee clubs in Auckland that people used to go to hear this music. Places like the Beatle Inn, the Shiralee, the Top Twenty … there was a jazz venue near Queen Street there, the Montmartre – I used to go in there and sing pop with a jazz band. Just piano, with slap bass and drums, and I’d sing, oh, Dusty Springfield stuff. So I had all that grounding.

I used to do ‘Yockomo’, ‘Reet Petite’, all those numbers, with Max Merritt and the Meteors and the Invaders even before I recorded them. We did shows all around New Zealand in the 60s with, like, Peter Posa, Lou and Simon – all these people. I don’t know if you hear of them any more … Bill and Boyd, the Howard Morrison Quartet, of course. All those people, all the time. And then I did my own shows, and shows with PJ Proby and Little Millie. [Millie Small is pictured here with Dinah Lee and Max Cryer, from Playdate magazine, 1966.]

She had ‘My Girl Lollipop’ – ‘Blue Beat’ is like an early reggae song too …

Yeah, Jamaican ska.

Where did you pick that up?

The record company [Viking] got that one for me and we just did it as we felt it should be done. Funnily enough in Australia reggae is quite big now, yet this was in the 60s when reggae wasn’t known. It’s quite unusual isn’t ‘it, how we got into reggae. I don’t know who produced that one; I’m just trying to remember … (shakes head). No, it’s just so long ago.

There’s a reggae group here called the All Nighters, and a couple of years ago they did a big show up at the Tivoli and they wanted me to do ‘Blue Beat’ with them. It was great. They all loved it, because they said, “Well, you’re one of the original reggae people we know of.” You know, I never really got into reggae after that.

Where did you get your look from? The mod style, the haircut, the Mary Quant look – you were very early with that.

Oh, yeah – that was mine. There was a girl in Auckland, a model called Jackie Holme – she was an English lady. I used to have a bouffant haircut – the rocker image – and she just got me and cut my hair in the back of a boutique that used to be there. She cut my hair and put on all these clothes, and away I went. The whole image completely changed. Gone was the Diane Jacobs image – Dinah Lee appeared. As soon as I got this new image it was a completely new character that sort of took me over all of a sudden. It was like, “Yes, this is good … I like this … this is me.” [Jackie Holme, a former girlfriend of Max Merritt, moved to Australia and became a top model. This image is a detail from a 1969 photo by David Mist.]

Did you decide to take show business more seriously then?

Oh no. Serious? It was just a hoot! The madder you could look the better. We used to paint freckles on our faces and wear the weirdest clothes and the shortest mini dresses when they came out. Everything. Whatever hit, we got it, and we started the trends.

You went to England in the mid-60s and mixed with the mods there …

I went to America first, in 1965, and then to England. I recorded Shindig, the television show in America, and then I did more TV and recorded some songs in England. I was on thank Your Lucky Stars, not Ready Steady Go because you had to have a hit record, it was like Countdown is here. I lived with Little Millie and her manager in London …

Didn’t Chris Blackwell manage her?

Yes, Chris Blackwell was her manager then, and he’s still got Island records – ‘My Girl Lollipop’ was one of his first records, I think.

Was Blackwell doing some work for you as well?

Yeah, he recorded me on Island. He of course had Little Millie … Jackie Wilson … Stevie Winwood and the Spencer Davis Group. I was in London through that period, meeting people like your Jane Ashers – who was going out with Paul McCartney – your Peter and Gordons and your Stevie Winwoods, Marianne Faithfull … they all used to come to the big parties we used to have. It was all Carnaby Street fashions. And then I used to have parties over here in Australia, and we used to invite all the overseas stars to them like the Byrds and the Yardbirds. Oh, just everybody that we knew back then.

The music industry was quite different then – less sophisticated.

It was completely different. Then, it wasn’t a business – it was like a big party. Because that’s what the 60s were – it was a whole new thing. Because all of a sudden you had the introduction of English sounds and mad things and kookie things, and mod. You were just insane. They get insane now, but it’s all been done. We did it – back then.

I remember you came back to New Zealand for a visit in about 1968: your arrival was covered by the local TV news …

During that period, of course, I did the Vietnam War twice. That was pretty horrific, but we got treated pretty well because we were entertainers. We’d do shows and have to go to hospitals and entertain people that had got blown up. I can tell you what – that was hard. And the first time we went up there we didn’t even have a band, we used backing tapes. The second time, I went up there with the big ABC orchestra, which was fantastic – singing rock’n’roll with a large orchestra was great … this was in the mid-60s.

In 1964 you moved to Australia. I suppose your migration was made easier than most because you’d already had a hit there.

I remember being on a tour in New Zealand with Max Merritt and the Meteors, and all of a sudden I heard ‘Don’t You Know Yockomo’ was No 1 in Australia, and I thought, “Wow! I’ve got a No 1” – I didn’t realise till I came over here what that really meant. I mean, I worked when I came over here. I was lucky, I had a hit, so I didn’t have to start at the bottom. I had hit records, I did all the TV shows, bookings all the time.

I was working 364 days a year type of thing. Okay, the realisation now is I wish I’d known a lot more than. I mean, I was very green – I got ripped off a lot, which most people in the 60s did – really ripped off. I mean, I should be very very rich now – I know in New Zealand alone, ‘Blue Beat’ sold 50-60,000 copies. In New Zealand! I mean, crazy. And I know all my albums … it just boggles my mind to think back at what I didn’t do, because you just didn’t know anything. Nowadays you have a business manager and an accountant and a public relations person – all these people who do all that and work for you, but back then you didn’t – you just trusted who it was that was looking after you.

It wasn’t until, like, 1970 that I realised that – hang on a minute – all these things went wrong. I’ve been making all this money – where is it? I got solicitors onto it, oh (sighs) we had a court case here – but a lot of things couldn’t be proved because it was just so long ago. It was only when I realised what you have to do that I started making money again – you’ve gotta do everything yourself. You’ve gotta learn, and I’ve learnt.

Also I’ve learnt, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got a job or you haven’t, you don’t just go for any job. You’ve still got to keep a reputation, and you don’t let anyone take you down at all. You can’t afford to – because you’ve already done that for a start. I’ve had a good past though, and without a past you can’t have a future. I’ve done a lot – and I aim to do a lot more.

Your popularity in Australia was across the board, wasn’t it – you were a family act.

Yes, that’s because of the different venues. You did the rock venues and then the clubs were coming up, and to make money you did those as well. Ithink, in a way, it was a mistake that I did that – to go into that club scene. I should really have stuck to the mad rock scene. I took the safe way out. Okay, I did television and became a member of the Bandstand team over here – it was great career-wise, because my name was known all around Australia as it was in New Zealand.

By 1969 I came back to Australia after another trip to Britain. I was working around the clubs, interstate venues, pubs, upmarket nightclubs, that sort of thing. And in ’73 I went to Mexico city and did a Las Vegas revue for six months. They billed me as the big Aussie broad – there were all these American girl dancers and I was the girl rock singer in it – that was fun.

Then, back in Australia I joined up with Johnny O’Keefe – the late Johnny O’Keefe, he was to Australians what Elvis was to Americans, he was so big. We did shows all around Australia called ‘the Good Old Days of Rock & Roll’ – we put Johnny Devlin, Lonnie Lee, all these Australian people together. Cleaned up. That was fantastic, people hadn’t seen anything like it in a long time. JOK died in 1978 and I’ve been working since then doing clubs and interstate gigs. But now is the time for me to move. I’ve gotta move.

Doing the club circuit has meant you’ve had a long career …

But it was very safe, and now I’m looking to get out of that safe thing. I want to start all over again and do, like, rock’n’roll. I’ve got together with Johnny Dick, who used to drum for Max Merritt and the Meteors, and we’re now going to put together a band and just do really good rock.

What sort of material will you be doing?

Oh, a couple of old numbers, but mainly contemporary, today stuff. Because here in Australia there are a few groups kicking around that are into the 50s and 60s stuff. I’ve done all that, I want to do something different. I want to do, hey, this is me, now.

I’ve recorded a song which might come out in New Zealand. It’s by an American guy called tom Scott, who was with the LA Express. It’s called ‘He’s Too Young’ – it’s about, naturally, an older woman falling for a younger guy, which is all the rage. It seems alright, I’ll see how it turns out, but I do need a record. That’s a priority.

I’m going to go back to the rock scene, but in a little bit more upmarket way. I mean, Tina Turner did it. She’s come back, but she came out here a few times and did cabaret. And now she’s come back and she can do the Entertainment Centre – a bigger band, a bigger venue, but it’s still Tina Turner. That’s the same with me – I can still do it, but will do it now with a rock band, just fly into it.

Performing is something you’ll never be able to give up, isn’t it?

No. You see, I was a pioneer in the rock industry in Australia and New Zealand. We’re a little bit funny here, they go, “Oh God, is she still around? She’s still alive?” People forget – or they like to think, “Oh, you’ve been up there, I want to get you back down” … you’ve just got to get up there and do it. Not back up there, because I don’t consider myself as ever being down, I’ve just been doing other things.
You see I’m a worker, I love to perform and I know how to entertain people It doesn’t matter if you’re 18 or 80, you’ve still got to entertain people.

We heard news that you won a prize for body building.

Yeah, that’s right. (laughs) Muscles – yeah, yeah (laughs). I got into that when I was about 35. As you roll along through life, you start looking at yourself and you think, now hang on a minute, you’re getting older, all these people are up and coming, you’ve just gotta start taking care. Cos in the 60s you just had fun – parties, booze … no drugs, cos you didn’t really know that much about drugs then. I mean the hippies were smoking pot and all that, but there were no real hard drugs. For us, bourbon and coke was like, “Wow, yeah, let’s get into bourbon and coke! And have a good time!”

But as you get older, you can’t do things like that. You see what happens to everybody, and you think, I don’t want to end up looking like that. I love the business and I want to do things. So I started getting out on the road and did a bit of running. I ran a lamp-post and collapsed at the next one. I was so unfit! But now I’m a gym junkie – that’s it, I’m gone. If I go away for a week, I think, “Oh! What am I going to do? I’m earning all this money, but I’m doing no gym!” But the money’s quite important too.

I ran for a couple of years and then I went to the gym and starting pumping iron, lifting just light weights, and I realised, I like this. I just went into that competition for a bit of fun, see how it went – it went well – and naturally got a lot of publicity out of it, which is great. Doesn’t hurt anybody. But I also wanted to prove that you’re not 40 and fat and forgettable. You can still say, hey, you’re a person, you’re still interesting and can still make it in what people put as a young scene. Because when you look at a lot of the big stars, even TV stars, they’re all getting on.

The win [Australian Women’s Body Building Champion, Over 35] got a lot of TV coverage here – Mike Willesee and the Today show and lots of newspapers and magazines. It’s funny, but there are all these young people, especially young girls of 18, 19, who say, “Oh, you’re the one who won the contest.” They don’t know I’m a singer – so it’s still kept the name there, which is important these days.

You’re very positive about your new direction.

You’ve gotta be, I’ve learnt that. Now I feel the time is right. Okay, I did it back then, but age doesn’t worry me – the people down there don’t care how old you are, as long as it’s good music. Which is great. Now there’s a trend here where they’re bringing back a lot of the older stars of the 60s. I think they’ll do it in New Zealand too, so maybe a tour, or a record – who knows?

How do you feel about the revival of mod fashions?

It’s funny, because we did it and had fun doing it, and the kids of today are exactly what we were like, except it’s harder for them today – the world’s harder. But you’ve gotta have a bit of fun and that’s what we did, and sure, I think it’s fun. I have a good laugh when I see kids in their little pointy-toed shoes and mini-skirts and Wow – it’s just like looking at myself 20 years ago. I think, “Yeah – I’ve done that.”

NZ On Screen has a four-minute Dinah Lee documentary here, which includes footage of her recording ‘Do the Blue Beat’. Meanwhile …

My Back Pages - 1

2013-05-07T17:24:00.001+12:00

“Mike Flaws, guitarist with BLERTA, at Ngaruawahia” – from Affairs, February 1973.

1. The private collector

Hoarding describes someone else, someone who collects Weetbix boxes and Dominion newspapers and has them stacked to the ceiling in the hall. Collecting surely is a different activity, done either with a view to future value or an unspecified research purpose. Whatever the definition, they’re still in the hall, or the ceiling, or the garage, and they’re in the way. The time has come to pass on – to the tip? One hopes not – a large collection of magazines and newspapers, mostly music related, that I’ve either acquired myself or have had passed on to me by collectors of an earlier generation. In particular, there is a major stash of US Rolling Stone magazine from the days when they offered roach clips as subscription bonuses, when Doug Sahm or Captain Beefheart could be featured on the cover, not Miley Cyrus. Most are from the cocaine years, the 1970s. There are also its imitators: Phonograph Record, Georgia Strait, and Bomp from the 1970s; Spin from the 1980s; and the inimitable Creem from its heyday in the early 1970s. Offers welcome.

Alister Taylor attempted a New Zealand Rolling Stone, which lasted about half-a-dozen issues in 1973. Most of the content was culled from the US edition, and they’re good issues. I don’t have those, but among many other things I have issues of Affairs, a short lived cultural affairs newspaper published by “Student Publications Ltd” at what was once Taylor’s address – Sydney Street West, Wellington. There is a photo spread of the Ngaruawahia festival by John Miller, Lauris Edmond on the recently departed James K Baxter, an essay by Baxter “Militancy in the Schools”, and a Jack Body essay that asks “Computers Composing Music?”:

“Why not? In fact there are a good many reasons why not. Nevertheless computers are used for musical composition – a paradox indeed … A computer could never compose as a human composer composes – simply because it is incapable of being irrational, moody, emotional, hard-to-get-on-with …”

2. The public collector

John Roberts discusses the Victoria University of Wellington’s art collection in 1988:

There is no doubt that one painting stands out from all the others on the grounds of cost, size and standing in the artist’s achievement. This is the remarkable Gate 111 by Colin McCahon which, at 305 centimetres by 1071 centimetres, must be among the largest paintings permanently on display in New Zealand. The work is cognate with the famous gift to the Australian National Museum and stands as the supreme statement in McCahon’s preoccupation with this theme. It was of course a very special purchase made with the help of the Queen Elizabeth II Arts Council and its value has probably increased at least twenty fold since. But the important point is that such large works, if they are not acquired by art galleries, are outside the contemplation of the private collector. Only the institutional buyer has the space and the perspective to hang them.

- from “An Institutional Collection: Victoria University of Wellington,” by John Roberts, Art New Zealand 46, Autumn 1988, p71-72

Update: received this from Fane -

Thanks Chris what a weird thing I had no idea the mag existed! I must've been having fun - all those great bands and the only things I remember about that weekend was Mammal, Corben singing bollock naked and everyone laughing at Black Sabbath burning their stupid cross! Wish I'd paid more attention!

Hanging Out with Hank

2013-03-07T12:33:00.001+13:00

In 1988 in New Orleans I met a group of men who had backed Hank Willliams (the first one). The Hackberry Ramblers were all in their late 60s, and dressed like they were going to church on a hot day: white shirts, black trousers, bolo ties, and white cowboy hats.

What was he like? One of them answered, “He was always drunk as a skunk, he could hardly stand up – but when he got up on stage he sang like a hummingbird.”

Lucinda Williams’s father, the Arkansas poet and academic Miller Williams, spent time with the man himself (as well as being a friend of Flannery O’Connor). At the Oxford American’s blog, he recently described their meeting:

[In 1952] I was on the faculty of McNeese State College in Lake Charles, Louisiana, when he had a concert there. I stepped onstage when he and his band were putting their instruments away and when he glanced at me I said, "Mr. Williams, my name is Williams and I'd be honored to buy you a beer." To my surprise, he asked me where we could get one. I said there was a gas station about a block away where we could sit and drink a couple. (You may not be aware that gas stations used to have bars.) He asked me to tell his bus driver exactly where it was and then he joined me. When he ordered his beer, I ordered a glass of wine, because this was my first year on a college faculty and it seemed the appropriate thing to do. We sat and chatted for a little over an hour. When he ordered another beer he asked me about my family. I told him that I was married and that we were looking forward to the birth of our first child in about a month.

He asked me what I did with my days and I told him that I taught biology at McNeese and that when I was home I wrote poems. He smiled and told me that he had written lots of poems. When I said, “Hey—you write songs!” he said, “Yeah, but it usually takes me a long time. I might write the words in January and the music six or eight months later; until I do, what I've got is a poem.” Then his driver showed up, and as he stood up to leave he leaned over, put his palm on my shoulder, and said, “You ought to drink beer, Williams, ’cause you got a beer-drinkin’ soul.” He died the first day of the following year. When Lucinda was born I wanted to tell her about our meeting, but I waited until she was onstage herself. Not very long ago, she was asked to set to music words that he had left to themselves when he died. This almost redefines coincidence.

The Nelson-born country star Tex Morton also got to hang out with Hank Williams. So too did the veteran music journalist Ralph J. Gleason, who mostly covered jazz. His classic article about their 1952 meeting has a title I’ve never forgotten: Hank Williams, Roy Acuff, and then God! It opens:

Hank Williams came out of the bathroom carrying a glass of water. He was lean, slightly stooped over and long-jawed. He shook hands quickly, then went over to the top of the bureau, swept off a handfull of pills and deftly dropped them, one at a time, with short, expert slugs from the glass.

Victors and history

2013-02-05T15:12:00.001+13:00

1. You make my heart sing

Farewell, then, Reg Presley, lead singer of the Troggs, a group memorable for ‘Wild Thing’ one of the great dumb songs in rock’n’roll history – a well-stocked subset – and also participant in the scatological bootleg classic, The Troggs Tapes. In this, the eloquent, lubricated group take time out in the studio to discuss how to make a hit record: “Just add some f***in’ fairy dust.”

We can also thank the Troggs for Chris Knox’s mid-80s stint as a music critic. In Rip It Up he covered a late Troggs gig at the Gluepot, circa 1984-85, and described seeing Presley, his hard-working hero – aged a shocking 43, and still rocking – aprés gig in the backstage room, “fat and sweaty in his Scants”. That unforgettable image led to further work.

Update: In the comments, below, Joe W has written with what I’m sure is a more accurate memory of that Knox line. And I’ve changed the first link to go to the Independent’s obit of Presley, which shows how much more there was to him than ‘Wild Thing’. That song was written, of course, by Chip Taylor – Angelina Jolie’s uncle. Another song provided a late-career payday for Presley. I love it when that happens to songwriters.

2. Ascension Day

Angel Eve “guiding Holmes through”

“He’ll be with Eve now” opens an especially memorable story in the vast coverage of the recent death of broadcaster Paul Holmes. And in this morning’s Herald, headlined “Holmes gets haka as body heads to Auckland”, we are told that the funeral is a moveable feast:

The body of Sir Paul Holmes left his Hawkes Bay home this morning in a moving ceremony that included an emotional haka. A convoy of about seven cars is taking his body to Auckland for his funeral.

3. Academic rigour

In the February 4 New Yorker, Thomas Mallon writes an essay on Richard Nixon, and his relationship with his colleagues, competitors and the media. It concentrates especially on the 1952 “Checkers” speech, in which Nixon denied inappropriate funding or gifts – apart from a coat for his wife, and the family dog, neither of which he was giving up. Mallon reviews a recent book about the speech, by Kevin Mattson: Just Plain Dick: Richard Nixon’s Checkers Speech and the ‘Rocking, Socking’ Election of 1952 (Bloomsbury).

In this new work, Professor Mattson seems to believe that he’s again playing fair, summarizing Nixon’s response to the charges as a “bizarre mix of authenticity and performance art,” but the author’s thumb is never long off the side of the scale on which he piles up evidence of Nixon’s political and personal awfulness.

… Mattson makes clear from the first page of Just Plain Dick that he would really rather be writing a novel. “If the brain waves of Richard Nixon,” he begins, “had been read between September 18 and 22, 1952, they might have gone like this.” What follows is a four-page italicized and wholly implausible internal monologue in which Nixon sounds like a cross between Andy Hardy and Bela Lugosi. … When Mattson does consent to work within the normal confines of nonfiction, he operates like an academic with dreams of a mass audience, or, at least, the hope of receiving teaching evaluations that will commend him as an especially with-it prof.

4. Tone Deaf

In Thesis Eleven, May 2007, Australian music writer Clinton Walker – who wrote Buried Country, an excellent history of Aboriginal country music – expressed his problem with academics writing about popular music.

When the academy finally discovered that popular music and culture might be a useful measure of history and society, it was like a dam wall breaking. The problem was that fashionable obscurantist deconstruction became the orthodoxy. That’s why Australian music studies has given us too much information on current local hip-hop, say, because it ticks the correct boxes – post-modernism, globalism, multi-culturalism – at the expense of fast disappearing histories.

As a music professor friend of mine said of this species, “I looked in at one of their conferences, and it was like they weren’t talking about – or had even listened to – music at all.”

Olympian

2012-12-31T08:02:00.003+13:00

James Brown at the Olympia, Paris, 1971 - the complete show, with Bootsy Collins on bass.

Aretha Franklin live in Amsterdam, 1968.

Monitor: Open Culture

From St Kilda to King’s Cross

2012-12-06T15:31:00.001+13:00

Paul Kelly’s “song memoir” How to Make Gravy (Penguin, 2010) is as expansive and rich in gems as Australia itself. This is no conventional autobiography, and all the better for it. Written using an A-Z of his songs as its structure, it is digressive, thoughtful and honest. He is a raconteur with a sense of history and a guitar at hand to illustrate a point.

With maternal grandparents who were Italian opera singers, and an Irish-Australian father who was a Shakespeare-quoting friend of Don Bradman, Kelly’s love of music and story-telling combine to shape his greatest work and perhaps the most substantial and literary musician’s memoir. (Against this, Dylan’s Chronicles is just an aperitif).

He talks of the joys of big families, touring the outback choking on the tales of Slim Dusty, wasting years and wasting relationships while dabbling in heroin, songwriting friends such as Dragon’s Paul Hewson and Cold Chisel’s Don Walker (“the Clint Eastwood of Australian music”), collaborations with Aboriginal musicians, a pro-active commitment to social justice, and endless summers of cricket. As asides, lyrics and lists (great opening lines for songs, a recipe for gravy, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap’s concept album). The best songs keep nagging you, “like a tongue with a loose tooth”. So does this. Two years after reading it I still don’t feel I’ve quite scraped the best bits off the pan.

A long televised interview with Kelly, conducted by the Go-Betweens’ Robert Forster, is recommended. So too is Forster’s thoughtful essay on Kelly’s work, “Thoughts in the Middle of a Career”, written for The Monthly.

Take it to la bridge

2012-11-20T15:51:00.001+13:00

Reading the London Independent’s fascinating obituary of French pretty-boy singer Frank Alamo – the leading exponent of the 1960s yéyé genre – I came across a sentence about his rivals Johnny Hallyday and Claude François. All three recorded French-language adaptations of UK and US hits, occasionally covering the same songs, eg ‘Da Doo Ron Ron’ and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. This is how the obituary described Alamo’s competitors:

Hallyday, in the late 1950s, based his moody persona on Elvis Presley and the US rock’n’rollers, while François drew on James Brown and Motown and surrounded himself with dancing girls – les Clodettes, inspired by Ike and Tina Turner's Ikettes – but the clean-cut Alamo gave them a run for their money …

A French James Brown, go-go-ing Clodettes? I had to see this. The song I found is called ‘Belinda’.

Still, delving into old French pop singers required a nostalgic re-visit to Claude Nougaro’s ‘Anna’.

When the day is dawning

2012-11-06T14:53:00.001+13:00

‘Just a Little Lovin’ is the perfect opening track to the perfect album, Dusty in Memphis. Written by Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, it works like an overture to the 40-minute emotional opera that is Dusty Springfield’s 1969 classic.

Ironically, Dusty never really recorded in Memphis. While the backing tracks were put down in Memphis at the American Studios of Chips Moman, Springfield herself was intimidated by the setting. A tormented perfectionist, she found she couldn’t record with musicians who played by ear, not using charts. Always insecure, she had her headphones turned up extremely high, as if to drown out her own voice. In 1990 Springfield told me (in an interview for Rip It Up) that hearing the producer Jerry Wexler and engineer Tom Dowd tell her, “Stand there – that’s where Aretha stood” just unnerved her. (I’ve since realised of course that Aretha never recorded at Memphis: her two classic Southern tracks, ‘I Never Loved a Man’ and ‘Do Right Woman’ were actually recorded at nearby Muscle Shoals.) So – oddly, like Aretha after her unhappy experience at Muscle Shoals – she bailed out, and recorded the final vocal tracks in New York.

But what a brilliant song, recently revived by Shelby Lynn for her Springfield tribute album, Just a Little Lovin’. Is there a better opening than, “Just a little lovin’, early in the morning / beats a cup of coffee, for starting off the day…”

This is all a preamble to a discovery recently made, of 60s bombshell Elke Sommer performing the song with a charming accent on The Dean Martin Show. Not so charming is the bibulous host, who undercuts any message the song has by donning his tuxedo and fleeing. Martin did have issues.

Martin himself recorded a song called ‘Just a Little Lovin’ but it wasn’t the same song. Written by Eddy Arnold, it had the sub-title “Will Go a Long Way”, and was also recorded by Ray Charles. After Springfield released the Mann/Weil classic, though, it was later recorded by Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae. Now there’s a vote of confidence in a song – and a performance.

I Second That, Emotions

2012-11-02T10:02:00.001+13:00

Raiders of a Lost Art

2012-11-01T21:30:00.001+13:00

Brian Kellow's recent biography of Pauline Kael is workmanlike, but for the past couple of weeks any pre-1991 film watched at home is followed by a book coming down from the shelf to wallow in her reaction. Her life was at its richest when watching a film or sitting at a typewriter to release her response, so in lieu of personal information, Kellow leans heavily on précis of her reviews. Her reaction to the impact of the Jaws/Star Wars blockbuster successes in the mid-1970s on the future of the film business - and independent films - was prescient.

Discussing Kael's response to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the George Lucas-Steven Spielberg 1981 tribute to the old movie serials, Kellow's summary encapsulates the disappointment so many feel when watching talented filmmakers waste their time on action-packed but emotionally empty epics. Raiders, writes Kellow,

... appealed to an incredibly wide base, but Pauline regarded it as a perfect symbol of the rise of the marketing executives; in her review of the picture, she pointed out that marketing budgets often surpass total production budgets, a practice that "could become commonplace." She found Raiders didn't allow you "time to breathe - or to enjoy yourself much, either. It's an encyclopedia of high spots from the old serials, run through at top speed and edited like a great trailer - for flash." At last, she could see the direction in which Jaws had led. Its excesses were especially a pity, she thought, because both Lucas and Spielberg were loaded with movie-making talent. She observed that if Lucas "[wasn't] hooked on the crap of his childhood - if he brought his resources to bear on some projects with human beings in them - there's no imagining the result." But it's doubtful that Lucas paid attention to her admonishment - not in the face of the $230 million gross racked up by Raiders.

Brian Kellow, Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark (Viking, 2012), p295.

In response to Disney's purchase this week of the Lucas/Star Wars empire, Richard Brody, the New Yorker's film blogger (is he too geekish to be an actual columnist?), has just written a positive post about US independent filmmaking.

Retreat may be masterly

2012-10-26T15:07:00.001+13:00

The demise of Newsweek was almost inevitable. While it is not complete – the 79-year-old magazine will only be available in digital form from 1 January 2013 – the thinning of the once-powerful newsweeklies has been dismal to watch. To be on the cover of Newsweek – and more especially, its older rival, Time – was to be on a billboard throughout the world.

Even to the late 1960s, when TV news footage of important events such as the moon landing had to travel in film canisters to New Zealand, the newsweeklies could be up to date with a week’s events. For all their regurgitated prose, there was some great writing: Newsweek journalists were awarded bylines first, while at Time, Jay Cocks on film and music, and Robert Hughes on art, were stylists at the height of their game. Newsweek may have had a circulation of 3,130,600 in 2006, falling to 1,524,989 by 2011, but it has been on the ropes for years. Sometime in the 1980s, the Australian and New Zealand edition was subsumed into The Bulletin, itself now dead for five years.

In my archive I have a collection of “pony” Time and Newsweek magazines from the Second World War. They were given to me in 1977 by Bill Alexander, a friend of my father. These are miniature versions of the real thing, just 21cm x 15.5cm, that were available to Allied troops on subscription. As a clever reaction to a changing market, they are not unlike the decision to go digital. (Though whether the subscription model will work is doubtful.) The Newsweek featuring the Allied leaders comes from 13 December 1943, while the Time with Field-Marshal Fritz Von Manstein is dated 10 January 1944. (The cover caption reads, in Time-ese: “Retreat may be masterly, but victory is in the opposite direction.”) Click on the image to see Boris Chaliapin’s great illustration in detail: he turned out one of these most weeks.

Both magazines were slow to cover the pop music revolution of the 1960s. The Beatles didn’t appear on the cover of Time until 1967, although Jay Cocks wrote an excellent cover story on the Band at the time of Stage Fright in 1970, and an influential cover featuring James Taylor would follow in 1971. Both Time and Newsweek famously featured Bruce Springsteen on the cover in the same week in 1975, which must have caused some boardroom teeth-gnashing. My favourite story of pop and the newsweeklies comes from 1969, when a planned cover story on Janis Joplin was bumped from Newsweek when the former President Eisenhower died. Joplin wailed: “Fourteen f----- heart attacks and he had to die in my f------ week. In MY week!” She eventually made the cover two months later, on 26 May 1969.

Town v Country

2012-10-05T08:31:00.001+13:00

Finding this was the original reason for posting about the Barry Crump index the other day: a piece from New Zealand Truth, 13 June 1961.

He is playing his persona to the hilt – getting kicked out by bookshops, giving his dogs away, landlady issues – but gives Kevin Ireland credit for turning him into a writer: “Twenty-five times he made me write my first story and then he published it. That was the start.”

And there is a reference to a comment about his success that was apparently quoted often: “The dough’s got into me blood.”

Fish wrapping

2012-10-03T13:01:00.001+13:00

1. I Read it in a Magazine

Salient – Victoria University’s student magazine – is these days stapled, A4 and 48 pages. It is smartly edited (Asher Emanuel & Ollie Neas) and also elegantly designed (Racheal Reeves), albeit imitative of The Believer. But whereas much of The Believer is unreadable due to its slippery, affected prose, with Salient it’s simply the typography. Grey type on bleached white paper, black type on dark grey paper, and all in 4 point. Don’t they want their writers to be read? A pity, as the content is strong, like much of the student media (see Peter McLennan’s summary of a Craccum campaign about an Auckland University scandal here) – though we are yet to see the effect of the vindictive voluntary student unionism bill. Two items from the October 1st “Power” issue:

2. ‘The Measure of a Manhire’

Rob Kelly interviews Bill Manhire the mild-mannered Superpoet on his departure from VUW. Manhire describes the 1960s at Otago, when – thanks to the university’s Burns fellowship – a few New Zealand writing role models finally entered his sphere (they weren’t part of the English curriculum at the time): Baxter (“behaving badly”), Janet Frame (“scuttling along corridors”), Maurice Gee, Hone Tuwhare. These writers “became very influential, but more as examples of people who had committed their lives to doing the thing that mattered. So it was great to go to the Captain Cook and drink beer with Hone, but also you knew that … I mean, he would arrive with poems and sort of hand them out, and all the local alcoholics would give him advice and he’d go away with a much worse poem than he arrived with. A sort of anti creative writing workshop.”

3. ‘I Moustache You Some Questions’

Chris McIntyre interviews TVNZ’s Mark Sainsbury, just prior to the news that Close Up is closing shop. Is it hard defending his throne against the likes of Hosking and Henry? “It’s one of the top jobs, so people want that job, but they can’t have it … Paul Henry made no secret he wanted that job, he’s now working on breakfast in Australia. I mean, draw what you like out of that.”

4. Must Try Harder

We’ve all made mistakes, rushing to judgement on a new album, film or book, only for it later to be declared a classic. Michael Schmidt is devoting his spare time to collating “Rolling Stone’s 500 Worst Reviews of All Time”.

He actually comiserates rather than scores points as he finds Lenny Kaye dissing Exile on Main Street, Jon Landau underwhelmed by Sticky Fingers, Langdon Winner finding After the Gold Rush rushed (“I can’t listen to it at all”). And Ed Ward, who was often excellent (on the Band, Texan country rock and 1950s rock’n’roll) on Abbey Road:

Side two is a disaster ... The slump begins with ‘Because’, which is a rather nothing song ... the biggest bomb on the album is ‘Sun King’,which overflows with sixth and ninth chords and finally degenerates into a Muzak-sounding thing with Italian lyrics. It is probably the worst thing the Beatles have done since they changed drummers. This leads into the “Suite” which finishes up the side. There are six little songs, each slightly under two minutes long, all of which are so heavily overproduced that they are hard to listen to ...

Ward wasn’t alone of course, in the New York Times Nik Cohn agreed, though not about the “Suite” (“For 15 minutes, tremendous”), and two years earlier Richard Goldstein dissed Sgt Pepper, following it up in the Village Voice with a similarly well-argued piece about the reaction called “I Blew My Cool Through the New York Times.”

Rolling Stone’s response? The managing editor Evie Nagy sniffed: “I say this genuinely without bias, that person's time could have been so much better spent. At least make it funny.”

5. Gambling with Gout

Speaking of the Fabs, I remain to be convinced by Magical Mystery Tour, though the connections with Python are plausible. But just released, by the BBC’s Arena programme, are five minutes of outtakes in which the Beatles buy fish’n’chips while on their bus journey (think Ken Kesey meets Beano).

It reminds me of another fish’n’chip/musician/tour bus story, about Kenny Rogers and the First Edition. When Kenny Rogers couldn’t get arrested, he toured New Zealand often and regularly appeared on NZBC-TV. Circa 1971 Rogers and the First Edition were travelling down the West Coast; it was a Sunday night and dinner time. So the New Zealand promoter got requests from the band and stopped at a local takeaway, somewhere between Karamea and Franz Josef. When he returned with a big cardboard carton, he walked down the bus aisle, saying to Rogers and his band, “Chicken and chips? That’s $1.30. Two fish, a fritter and chips? $1.75. A hot dog and chips? $1.20 …”

There'll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’ is done.

Tour de Farce

2012-09-25T11:58:00.001+12:00

1. Dot Comedy of Errors

The D*tc*m saga seems destined to channel surf through the popular culture possibilities, from the Keystone Cops to SWAT. Now, it’s Austin Powers. Scriptwriters would turn away in horror from such a polyglot set up, in which a government (led by Mr Magoo) chases fruitlessly after a baddie who looks like a Teletubby. So perhaps it is time to acknowledge the professionalism of someone who is more used to dealing in this spooky territory. Nicky Hager’s 2011 book Other People’s Wars (Craig Potton Publishing) is remarkably readable, considering the obfuscating jargon beloved by its characters: defence departments and spy agencies. Hager has taken an enormous amount of fresh research and built a compelling case out of unpromising material. Military acronyms and bureaucratic phrasemaking don’t trip up the narrative. Much of the material comes from reluctant, obstructive, leaked or anonymous internal sources, but Hager’s cross-checking and referencing is exemplary. Much of the criticism has been personal or politically driven, dismissing Hager rather than addressing his points. Hager was courageous to take on this topic, not just personally but to achieve some clarity out of the material. His strengths as a researcher are well-known, but his abilities as story teller and scene setter kept me captivated, against the odds. Other People’s Wars addresses issues of lasting importance to the community: how governments treat the truth, how bureaucrats and the military abuse language, and a relationship between the military and its politicians can veer between loyalty and manipulation.

2. Citizen Pope

In just 74 years, Jeremy Pope achieved an enormous amount: for New Zealand, and internationally. A lawyer, he spent much of his life campaigning for human rights and the environment, and against corruption. At Te Ara’s Signposts blog, Jock Phillips has posted a tribute that details much of it: his work on the Save Manapouri campaign, as a legal adviser to the 1975 Maori land march, and editing – with his wife Diana – the hugely successful Mobil travel guides to the North and South Islands, which ran to several updated editions. Pope left New Zealand in about 1981, one of many refugees from the reign of Muldoon (he had been involved with the “Citizens for Rowling” lobby). New Zealand’s temporary loss was the world’s gain: Pope co-founded the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International. A 2009 interview with him can be heard at Radio New Zealand below.

3. Hang on a Minute

I can’t imagine two more different characters stuck in a hut together than bushman-writer Barry Crump, and Alex Fry, an elegant if irascible essayist for the New Zealand Listener for over 30 years. While Crump acknowledged poet Kevin Ireland for encouraging him to start writing, it was Fry who knocked his manuscript into shape. Crump’s debut story collection A Good Keen Man went on to become one of New Zealand’s best-selling books ever. Fry was recruited by Reed’s editor Ray Richards after at least two other publishers had rejected the manuscript, which Richards described as arriving “grubby and single spaced but with a ‘magic’ about it”. After the book’s massive success, Fry was rewarded with a percentage of the royalties – and a punch in the nose from Crump. Victoria University’s Electronic Text Centre has a fascinating annotated index of material about A Good Keen Man’s publishing history. The bibliography reminded me of the cold sweat experienced when reading the chilling 1962 story ‘That Way’ (later published in Crump’s Warm Beer and Other Stories). James K Baxter described it as “a story by Barry Crump far more hard-hitting than anything he has turned out for money”.

4. Publish and Be Damned

An email arrives from Oxford American magazine in Alabama, saying its new editor is a Brooklyn, New York-based ex-editor of Harpers who grew up in Texas. I noted his trimmed beard, and wondered what happened to the founding editor Marc Smirnoff: for over 20 years he was the driving force behind the always troubled, occasionally pretentious, but deep-hearted and lively quarterly. Besides its generous website, the magazine’s award-winning annual music issue features a savvy CD compilation, alongside often inspirational editing, design and writing (except for the pieces that were all about the author rather than the music). Smirnoff could be verbose himself, and had a predilection for too much memoir-as-fiction from creative writing grads; it was also noticeable that the mag seemed to employ lots of interns with good teeth. The Oxford American’s latest rescuer was new to publishing, and his puff pieces read like tone-deaf mission statements from an aspirant Republican candidate. Googling Smirnoff’s name, the computer instantly filled in another word": "Fired". An hour was quickly lost reading the results: sexual harrassment is alleged, and Smirnoff and his life/work partner – the magazine’s managing editor – were both sacked. Smirnoff has responded with a new website which features a massive document responding passionately to his accusers and employers, the OA board. Publishing this was perhaps unwise; calling the site Editors in Love certainly is. Perhaps this was a board waiting for its moment. Still there must be some other opportunities out there for experienced editors who are musically minded.

The Maori-Memphis connection

2012-09-21T16:50:00.000+12:00

The New Zealand Trading Company actually only traded in the United States. The band evolved out of the Maori Hi-Quins and other Maori showbands of the 1960s. The most prominent member was bass guitarist Thomas Kini, who left New Zealand in 1959 aged 16 to play with the Hi-Quins. At the time of his death aged 61 in 2004, he had become a prominent musician based in the Chicago area. (Many Maori showband musicians settled in the US after their cabaret heyday was over.) Kini worked with artists such as Duke Ellington, Stevie Wonder, Donny Hathaway, Minnie Ripperton and Herbie Hancock.

The New Zealand Trading Company released just one album, in 1970, on the Memphis label. Most of the songs are co-written by Thomas Kini, plus two by Alberto Carrion. But the song which keeps getting requested on specialist programmes in New Zealand is their cover of “Hey Jude”.

Update: now I’ve got my copy back again, the sparse credits say that the album was produced by N Rosenberg, and engineered by Steve Stepanian. It doesn’t say where it was recorded but in November 1970 the album was re-mixed at Universal Recording Studios, Memphis TN. Its catalogue number was MS1001, and Memphis Records was part of the Memphis Corporation, at 261 Chelsea Building, Memphis – probably an office up a few flights of stairs.

Please Mr President

2012-09-19T10:18:00.001+12:00

"I'm dreaming of a white president," says the character in Randy Newman's new song, 'I'm Dreaming'. The song name-checks many of the other great presidents in US history whose administrations were malignant on either the intelligence or corruption front. The New Yorker's blog puts the song in context with Newman's 1974 'Rednecks', while at Nonesuch's site, Newman explains:

"No other Western industrialized nation would’ve elected a black president. I’m proud of this country for having elected Obama in 2008. But from the beginning of his term, I noticed a particular heat to conversations that wouldn’t ordinarily generate that kind of passion: The budget, appointments, health care.” He continues, “I think there are a lot of people who find it jarring to have a black man in the White House and they want him out. They just can’t believe that there’s not a more qualified white man. You won’t get anyone, and I do mean anyone, to admit it.

“I often write songs in character. You can’t always trust or believe the narrators in my songs. So why listen? Good question.

“Anyway the guy in this song may exist somewhere. Let’s hope not. Vote in November.”

'I'm Dreaming' is available as a free download at the site of his record label Nonesuch.

Sleepin’ on the Job

2012-09-04T17:00:00.001+12:00

1. Royalty
Sinatra lyricist Sammy Cahn was often asked, Which came first – the words or the lyrics? His answer: “The phone call”. As a listener, for me it’s always the melody, but Paul Hester once pointed out how that’s not so for everyone (particularly women). “There’s a reason lyricists get half the royalties.” With the passing of Hal David late last week, we farewell a certain style of lyricist whose smarts never elbowed out accessibility. The team of Bacharach and David was an anomaly in the so-called Swinging Sixties: Burt Bacharach may have looked ready for the Playboy mansion, while David dressed for the golf club. But on over 700 songs David’s skill with a lyric harked back to Johnny Mercer, yet touched millions unmoved by psychedelics but by pure human emotions. A testimony to David’s breadth is the number of different songs that obit headline writers have used. Every song has a surprise that makes them unforgettable: an everyday image, an unexpected metre or rhyme. ‘I Say a Little Prayer’ sees the female singer rushing to her day job, putting on her makeup, running for the bus; ‘I’ll Never Fall in Love Again’ rhymes pneumonia with phone yer. In ‘Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head’, a casual guy’s feet are too big for his bed; nothing seems to fit. Davis makes a clever segue from “cryin’s not for me” to the internal rhymes of “nothing’s gonna stop the rain by complainin’”, and “the blues he sends to meet me won’t defeat me”. In the middle eight of ‘Do You Know the Way to San Jose’ David seems to take the baton from Roger Miller’s ‘King of the Road’ – “LA is a great big freeway / put a hundred down and buy a car” – and pass it to Guy Clark: “If I get off of this LA freeway / without getting killed or caught.” But ‘Jose’ also shows how teamwork was essential to their craft: where the emphasis falls in “and parking cars and pumping gas” is crucial to making simple imagery profound.
2. Prodigal
Jesus Christ was found last week in Taranaki, after more than 10 years in the wilderness. Jim Allen’s mahogany sculpture of Christ was the centrepiece of John Scott’s 1961 design of the Futuna Chapel in Wellington, which is regarded as one of New Zealand’s architectural masterpieces. A mention on RNZ’s Saturday Morning programme by architect David Mitchell led one listener to recall seeing it in someone’s lounge. This week the Wellington detective who discreetly explored the lead drove up to Taranaki to bring the statue back. In a perfect world, a film crew would follow him on the journey, Christ sitting up in the back of a convertible; the soundtrack playing is from Jim White’s doco Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.
3. Show time
The much-missed Word magazine offered a weekly podcast in which the editors told anecdotes, reflected on music and modern life, and interviewed the occasional guest. It was a great way of connecting with their readers, far more genuine than some gimmick thought up by a marketing department. The Word didn’t have one of those, nor did it have enough paying advertisers. A podcast earlier this year was a gem: their guests were the authors Paul Charles and Stanley Booth. Charles has worked in the UK music business and written a series of mystery novels, but his new bookThe Last Dance (New Island) is different. It’s a novelised history of the 1960s’ Irish showband phenomenon, told as a fictional biography of an invented band, the Playboys of Castlemartin. These showbands are often spoken of with derision by the rock star children whose parents may have met at their dances: I have heard Bono and Bob Geldof almost bust blood vessels describing their naffness and their place in an earlier, oppressed Ireland. We invented hipness is the message, ignoring that without the Irish showbands, there would be no Van Morrison, who served his time in the Monarchs (where he learnt his chops arranging brass). What was intriguing about the podcast was the way Charles’s description suggested connections between the Irish and Maori showbands. Both were prominent simultaneously in the early 1960s, and both shared an eclectic approach to music that emphasised humour, dancing and musicianship over originality. The Last Dance is flawed: for a novel it desperately needs a fact checker, Charles too often places the important clause of a sentence right at the very end, and the plot often veers into soap opera. But in its own naive way it captures a lost world, and is great craic. Pictured are the Vikings from Dundalk.
4. Pop sociology
Pat Long’s History of the NME (Portico) sketches out the roller-coaster tale of what was once the world’s most influential pop paper. Long is no stylist, but his book is more interesting that the solipsistic recent memoir of the paper’s 1970s junkie star, Nick Kent (Apathy for the Devil). From its beginnings championing Vera Lynn through to the troubled post-Britpop digital era, the NME has had many periods of boom, and never quite succumbed to bust. But Long, a recent staff writer, captures well the era in which the paper lost its way: the early 1980s, when NME writers Ian Penman and Paul Morley made up for their ignorance about music, history, earlier rock journalism and satisfying readers by

“… attempting to write in a way that was alternately brave and baffling, employing punctuation like a weapon, conjuring images that were abstract and evocative and occasionally downright meaningless. It was gloriously provocative but at times very long-winded and egocentric writing, inspired by French philosophers Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida and the work of the Frankfurt School of dissident Marxist social theoreticians. Whether this approach had any place in a weekly music paper is a moot point, but suddenly the pages of NME assumed something of the atmosphere of the staff common room of the philosophy department of a small provincial university.”

5. Warped
Part of the NME’s success - especially in the mid to late 1970s - was that it covered more than music. This undoubtedly influenced The Word, whose editor Mark Ellen and co-founder David Hepworth both worked the NME under the editorships of Nick Logan and Neil Spencer. Perhaps the only positive to come from the demise of The Word is that David Hepworth is finding more time to update his reflective blog, which covers not just music but sport, literature, history, media, publishing and parenting (from the perspective of someone who came of age in the era of Harold Wilson). Here are his Ten Laws of Record Collecting.

A One-Track Mind

2012-08-17T17:27:00.001+12:00

Down the Road Apiece

2012-08-08T16:07:00.001+12:00

THE TRUE ADVENTURES OF THE ROLLING STONES, by Stanley Booth (Canongate).

Stanley Booth was the Zelig of rock’n’roll writing. A Southern hipster determined to become a serious writer, he was present in the Memphis studio when Otis Redding wrote ‘Dock of the Bay’, and he witnessed the Rolling Stones record ‘Brown Sugar’ in Alabama. He penned the liner notes to Dusty in Memphis, was a confidante of revered record producers Jerry Wexler and Jim Dickinson, and a friend and patron of street-sweeping Memphis bluesman Furry Lewis. That Booth came from the same small town in Georgia as Gram Parsons just confirms his knack of being in the right place at the right time.

It must have seemed that way when, after writing prescient, lyrical pieces on BB King and Elvis Presley for Esquire and Playboy in the 1960s, he was commissioned to write a book about going on the road with the Rolling Stones on their 1969 US tour.

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones took Booth 15 years and almost cost him his life. The book became a critics’ favourite but was a box-office disappointment. It didn’t enable him to get on with his real ambition – to become a streetwise successor to William Faulkner – but aficionados of music writing consider it to be the one book in an over-published, undisciplined genre that approaches literature.

Booth was originally disdainful of white musicians trying to perform R&B; in a 1968 article he was scathing of a chaotic Janis Joplin performing alongside dignified Memphis soul legends. But he became fascinated by the Stones after attending the drugs trial in England of the group’s doomed founder, guitarist Brian Jones. He was invited into the group’s inner circle: he was a writer, not a journalist. Best of all, he was an actual Southerner whose immersion in a cultural and musical milieu they could only envy and emulate. Keith Richards with Stanley Booth, 1969

The Stones’ 1969 tour is notorious for climaxing with Altamont, a free concert that became an apocalyptic nightmare. The tour also produced the live album Get Yer Ya Ya’s Out and the classic cinema verite documentary Gimme Shelter. The winter of 1969was one of discontent, of bad dope and bad vibes, with Nixon in th e White House, troops stuck in Vietnam, students protesting and generations clashing.

Booth’s book weaves through several stories simultaneously. There is the tour itself, with the writer having an access-all-areas pass and a rapport with Keith Richards that has professional benefits and lifestyle drawbacks. Almost subliminally, the Stones’ history is compellingly related using anecdotes from the participants. Booth describes the unlovable Brian Jones, his decline and inevitable demise. And he also tells his own story: a swift ascent to become a writer who then tumbles, like Icarus, from flying too close to the sun. The Altamont festival provides a chilling climax to the strands of his narrative. On stage beside the band, he stands transfixed but impotent as several Hell’s Angels viciously beat members of the crowd with pool cues.

The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones is written like a non-fiction novel. In Cold Blood was an influence, though Truman Capote’s own attempt at writing about the band’s 1972 tour stalled from writer’s block and a cultural disconnect. Booth was immediately on the Stones’ wavelength. His Southern accent, upbringing and contacts provided an entree: he could act as their regional interpreter. By appropriating R&B, rock’n’roll and country music, and adding their own Dartford Delta seasoning, the Rolling Stones produced their finest albums Let It Bleed, Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street, inventing a trans-Atlantic music steeped in popular culture and hedonism.

With an introduction by Greil Marcus and an afterword by the author, this handsome reissue by Canongate coincides with the Rolling Stones’ 50th anniversary. But it conveys their story far more evocatively than any sanctioned coffee-table book. To Booth’s annoyance, the 1984 US edition was melodramatically renamed Dance With the Devil. His own title – The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones – hints of James Fennimore Cooper. Booth had aspirations towards Raymond Chandler, and affectations to William Faulkner. But the one thing his original publisher did right was see the link to Edgar Allen Poe.

First published at Beattie’s Book Blog

Waiting On a Friend

2012-08-03T23:22:00.001+12:00

1. Making Baby Float

With minutes to spare, the IIML twitter alerts me to a concert taking place nearby at the grandly named New Zealand School of Music. The Spaces In Between is another collaboration between pianist and composer Norman Meehan, poet Bill Manhire and singer Hannah Griffin. It’s been a couple of years since I saw them at St Andrews on the Terrace, and in that time the careful treatments have gelled into compelling art songs, and Griffin’s performance has an added depth and assuredness. The poems given musical settings include David Mitchell’s witty ‘Aesthetics’ (I last saw Wellington’s leading Beat down the road nearby in John Street), Baxter’s ‘High Country Weather’ (appropriately spare), Manhire’s ‘Buddhist Rain’ and – with a gospel vocal trio - David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’. Meehan introduced Hone Tuwhare’s ‘To Elespie, Ian & their Holy Whanau’ as “curiously named”, which would be news to the peace-loving Prior family. But he has a lovely touch on the Steinway, his arrangements having a gentle humour, and at one point guest Colin Hemmingsen’s clarinet provides an oxymoron: a joyful lament. Keith Hill’s recent documentary on this troupe is called Persuading the Baby to Float.

2. Laus Tibi Domine

Art, Keith Richards once said, is just short for Arthur. Turning poetry into songs is a risky endeavour, the results are often so arch. Denis Glover apparently grumbled at Douglas Lilburn’s 1954 settings of his ‘Sings Harry’ poems, and it has to be said something more earthy would have been more suitable. Meehan’s success reminded me of Dave Dobbyn’s deeply moving treatment of James K Baxter’s ‘Song of the Years’, which opens, “When from my mother’s womb I came / Disputandum was my name …” It was a match made in heaven, so perhaps Dobbyn should look to updating ‘Sings Harry’: like Baxter, Glover is a kindred spirit. Charlotte Yates, who commissioned Dobbyn’s song for the Baxter album, wrote that his use of repetition “turned the somewhat lad-least-likely last line of the poem ‘Laus tibi, Domine!’ into an utterly joyful and triumphant outro.”

3. True Adventures

After a gap of 27 years, I’ve been re-reading the one book about rock music that approaches literature: Stanley Booth’s classic The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, about the 1969 US tour and so much more. First published in 1984, and recently reissued by Canongate, and I’m looking forward to reviewing it soon. It’s meant a revisit to the canon, especially Let it Bleed and Sticky Fingers (Exile got a workover at the time of its reissue in 2010). One of the standout moments is his observation, “There were no grownups among us.” I wish I could find the actual line again, but at a time when books fight to justify their space, this one has returned like a prodigal son.

4. Someone to protect

Which makes me think of a new earworm for the day, written circa 1973, released in 1981. Sax solo by Sonny Rollins.

5. Diversions

The IIML twitter also provides “A website that some folk might find handy.”

50 Ways to Leave an Industry

2012-06-08T11:35:00.001+12:00

In 2008, I suggested that June rather than May would be a better month to celebrate New Zealand music. Although lacking the alliteration, that was the month in 1977 that Murray Cammick and Alastair Dougal began a rebirth in the industry by launching Rip It Up. This month Rip It Up – now owned by Satellite Media, with Murray as a columnist – celebrates its 35th year. To mark the occasion, special edition T-shirts of old covers are available. Last week, while looking in the June/July 2003 RIU to re-visit Murray’s obituary of the influential retailer Dave Perkins, I came across this feature and thought it epitomises how the music business has changed in nine years. The shift has been bigger than vinyl to CD, or 78 to vinyl. You expect pop stars and politicians to fade away, shops to close and media buyouts, but here it’s not so much a case of movers and shakers leaving the industry, as the industry leaving its movers and shakers.

50 Most Important People in New Zealand Music (2003)

50. James Reid – the Feelers

49. 8 Foot Sativa

48. King Kapisi

47. Brent Eccles – promoter

46. Murray Cammick – Wildside, Rip It Up co-founder

45. Teina Herzer and Aaron Dustin – founders, nzmusic.com

44. Terence O’Neill Joyce – RIANZ

43. Mike Chunn – APRA

42. Tyson Kennedy – Steriogram

41. Campbell Smith – artist manager

40. Bridgit Darby

39. Adrien De Croy – York St Studios owner

38. Chris Hocquard – lawyer, Amplifier founder, Bfm chair

37. P. Money

36. Bernie Griffin – chair IMNZ, owner Global Routes

35. Cath Anderson – NZ Music Commission

34. Sean Coleman and Shaun Joyce – Sounds

33. Terry Anderson – music buyer, The Warehouse

32. Daniel Wrightson – Juice TV

31. John Pilley – National Radio music manager

30. David Rose – MD, Satellite Media Group

29. Damian Alexander – Blindspott

28. Bic Runga

27. Pete Rainey and Glenn Common – Rockquest

26. Nesian Mystik

25. Helen Clark

24. YDNZ and Brother D – Dawn Raid

23. Kog Transmissions

22. Ian Fraser – TVNZ

21. Michael Bradshaw – BMG

20. James Southgate – Warners

19. Chris Caddick – EMI

18. Mark Ashbridge – FMR

17. Michael Glading – Sony, RIANZ chair

16. Adam Holt – Universal

15. BNET

14. David Brice – PD, ZM Network, Classic Hits

13. Leon Wratt – PD, The Edge

12. Brad King – PD, The Rock

11. Andrew Szusterman – PD, Channel Z

10. Rodger Clamp – programmer, More FM etc

9. Judith Tizard – politician

8 and 7. Dion and Jimmy – the D4

6. Dolf De Datsun – the Datsuns

5. Brent Impey, CanWest

4. Drinks: Coke, Pepsi, Red Bull, DB Export etc

3. Che Fu

2. Brendan Smythe – NZ On Air

1. Neil & Tim Finn

“Must Mentions” – Arthur Baysting – NZ Music Commission; Dave Dobbyn; DJ Presha – Subtronix label; Mai FM; Jasper Edwards, Fabric Club, London; DJ Sir Vere; Stephen McCarthy – bands.co.nz; Venue Owners: King’s Arms, the Temple, Bar Bodega.

The Limited Express

2012-04-26T09:54:00.001+12:00

So often a disappointment, it seems there are still some clever sub-editors left at the Dominion-Post. Yesterday, in contrast to all the Anzac reportage inside the paper, an historic moment made the billboard. The Overlander no longer stops at Taumarunui. Once, the Limited used to have 13-15 carriages each day and deliver 300-500 passengers to the refreshments room for a quick cuppa tea and pie before getting back on board.

Highway 61 Blues

2012-04-25T15:25:00.002+12:00

Levon Helm’s death has inspired some excellent writing, and some hyperbole, which shows how much his music – and his persona – meant to people. Links to many of these pieces are here, and recommended are those from the Atlantic, the Village Voice, and also from two musicians deeply influenced by Helm and the Band, Elvis Costello (‘Blame It On Cain’) and Bernie Taupin (‘Levon’, of course, and also Tumbleweed Connection). Twenty years ago I visited Coahoma County, Mississippi, where so many blues and R&B artists were born. I crossed the bridge to West Helena, Arkansas, and found myself in Levon territory, where Sonny Boy Williamson broadcast King Biscuit Time, and Helm had seen travelling minstrel shows. Just up the road was his birthplace, Marvell, and the place where his father farmed, Turkey Scratch. A few months later I got to talk to Tony Joe White about this; he rued the fact that gaudy casinos had changed much of this area irrevocably.

From Rip It Up, November 1993.

AS YOU DRIVE south out of Memphis down Highway 61, the trees and houses stop at the edge of the city limits. On either side of the narrow two-lane road, the horizon is almost bare, as far as the eye can see. This is the Delta, the land where the blues began.

Somehow this vast expanse of nothingness didn’t just produce cotton but an extraordinary number of blues singers, guitar players and songwriters. It feels timeless, and cut off from civilisation. But the music from this dirt table-top has had an effect all around the world.

Soon the small town of Tunica flashes by, a few gas pumps and motel signs. It was immortalised last year in ‘Tunica Motel’ by the great Southern songwriter Tony Joe White on his comeback album Closer to the Truth. “That was my fishin’ place, man,” he says, on the phone from Arkansas, west of the Mississippi. His deep drawl is so slow you could drive a tractor through his pauses.

“I went there and fished all the time with Duck Dunn, Booker T and the MGs’ bassplayer. It was a real laidback little place and still looks the same as it did years ago. But now, they’ve moved a gamblin’ riverboat into Tunica. There’s thousands of people coming into Tunica, gamblin’. It’s like the whole town is explodin’, so mah fishin’ hole is gone.”

As the recent [1993] floods showed, the Mississippi is wont to break its banks occasionally. For centuries, before the levees were built and land cleared of its forests, swamps and bayous, the floods happened every year. And that made the topsoil of the Delta luxuriant, just right for cotton growing.

Writes Alan Lomax in The Land Where the Blues Began (Methuen, 1993):

“This treasure made its white owners not only rich but arrogant, although their main achievement had been to enslave and exploit the black labourers who actually cleared and tilled the land. The blacks had not only applied their inherited African agricultural skills to the development of the Delta, but had transformed remembered West African music into a new style, called the blues.”

In 1942 Alan Lomax, a white folklorist, made a remarkable trip to the Delta that he’s just recalled in his equally remarkable memoir (all but unmentioned is John Work III, the black researcher who accompanied him). Ten years earlier, with his father, Lomax had discovered Leadbelly in a Louisiana prison. On this trip, recording blues singers on crude acetates for the Library of Congress, he met Robert Johnson’s mentor Son House and many others. Lomax’s memoir is not just an eloquent music history but a sensational tale of heartbreaking hardship, rollicking good humour and outrageous racism.

“You say we’ve got some talented niggers here in Tunica?” the sheriff asked Lomax in 1942.

“You’ve got the finest blues combination I’ve heard.”

“That so. Well, we’ll have to get um on the radio down in Clarksdale. What’re their names?”

“Well, Mister Son House is the...” I knew I’d made a mistake before the words were out of my mouth. The sheriff’s red face turned a beet colour.

“You called a nigger mister?!” he snapped. (Lomax)

“I was raised on a cotton farm in Goodwill, Loosiana,” drawls Tony Joe White. “Goodwill was nothin’ but a church, a cotton gin and a pool hall. So every Saturday night everyone would go into Oak Grove, which is a little bigger. It had maybe 10 stores and a gas station and a Dairy Queen. So it was like going to a big town for us. We’d just go in and circle the Dairy Queen and wave at the girls and have a few cokes. It was laid back times.

“Most of the time we played at people’s houses. It was no band, it was just me and a rhythm guitar player. I used my foot on a coke box for something to drum. And people used to dance to it. At the time we was doin’ a lot of Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Elvis Presley. This was before I started writing.”

In 1969, White had his biggest hit with ‘Polk Salad Annie’. He mixed country, blues, rock’n’roll and fishing to create swamp rock. His songs are shaggy dog stories about backwoods preachers, granny-eating gators, nasty sheriffs and their “volupchuss” underage daughters. On his new album Path of a Decent Groove, he tells the story of ‘Mojo Dollar’. “It’s about a guy we used to call Wild Man Swamps. And that guy, he went crazy and went down to live in the swamps of Loosiana.

“That song came pretty quick. Some of ‘em take a long time. I don’t just sit down and try to write. I have to wait until my guitar comes to me, or a word or a line. It’s like, I haven’t wrote a song for eight months. A lot of people just get up every day and say, today I’m gonna write for three hours...for me, that seems like impossible.

“Most of the time it’ll start with a guitar thing in mah mind. I’ll be fishin’ or playin’ golf and a little guitar will keep goin’ through my head. I’ll sit down with it and say, hey, I’m here. Show me what you’ve got. And once they get started I’ll put in hard hours with ‘em. I’ll build a little campfire outside my house, get me an acoustic guitar and sit out there with a few beers at night and work with it. But until that happens, I don’t mess with it.”

It’s as though there’s something in the water that produces so many songwriters in the area. Great regional radio helped too, the black-run WDIA out of Memphis with DJs like BB King and Rufus Thomas, and out of Nashville, the legendary R&B show of John R. “That’s all I ever listened to,” says White, “except Elvis.”

Here’s Muddy Waters, in Creem, 1977:

“All the great bluesmen lived near each other. No one was more than 25 miles apart all along the Delta. Robert Johnson wasn’t more than just 10 miles from me to the east and I still never met him – just seen him at a distance. I listened to them all down the road – Skip James, Charlie Patton, Bukka White, Kokomo Arnold. But Son House was my number one man, when he played slide he was the greatest.”

Last year [1992] I had a spare day in Memphis, so I drove south in a rental car with Tennessee plates. Nothing but bland country stations and classic rock on the dial, but plenty of meaningful road signs on the way. About two hours south on 61 is Clarksdale, a quiet town of rundown brick buildings about the size of Levin. It seems about as exciting, but the small museum testifies to the town’s musical significance. Among those born in the area are Muddy Waters, Sam Cooke, Aretha’s father, John Lee Hooker, Ike Turner, Junior Parker, Bo Diddley...

I took an unmarked road west and found myself accidentally on purpose on Stovall’s Road, which runs through Stovall’s plantation. I saw a tiny log cabin flash by, stopped, turned around, and there it was. Sitting without fanfare beside a back country road was the little shack in which Muddy Waters lived with his grandmother in the ‘30s. Here, in 1942, Waters took a break from ploughing cottonfields to play for Alan Lomax; this picture of Waters with Son Sims dates from around that time. Those Lomax recordings (recently reissued) lead to Waters’s career in Chicago. Follow the genealogical line through the Rolling Stones and it leads to Guns N’ Roses, and all that other big hair overblown blues on MTV.

Another conversation Lomax had in 1942:

“Little Robert [Johnson] learnt to play quicker than anybody we ever saw round this section,” said Son House. “He learnt from me and I learnt from an old fellow they call Lemon down in Clarksdale, and he was called Lemon because he had learnt all Blind Lemon’s pieces off the phonograph.”

I felt like shouting. Son House had laid out one of the mainlines in the royal lineage of America’s great guitar players – Blind Lemon Jefferson of Dallas to his double in Clarksdale to Son House to Robert Johnson.

“But isn’t there anybody alive who plays this style?” I asked.

“An old boy called Muddy Waters round Clarksdale, he learnt from me and Little Robert, and they say he getting to be a pretty fair player.”

The little shack was like a large, broken-down shoebox. In the 1990s it seemed so isolated it could have been in the Gobi desert. So imagine how exotic-Memphis, let alone Chicago, felt to Muddy Waters in the ‘30s. A few years ago, ZZ Top turned one of the shack’s wooden boards into a guitar to raise money for the Clarksdale blues museum. Now, a little sign asked that visitors didn’t take any toothpick sized bits as souvenirs. You sensed an international contingent of reverential fans had already made the pilgrimage: camera-happy Japanese, pedantic German scholars, list-making Brits, awe-struck New Zealanders. And all because they were moved by the same 12-bar magic.

Robert Plant, from Q in 1990:

“On tour in Memphis, I rented a car and drove down to Mississippi, to Friars Point, as in the song. Very strange place, very African, very other-worldly. Sleepy, woodsmoke fires, big trees all around, burnt-out motels, deserted gas stations...”

“I headed down another narrow lane towards the levee. At a T-intersection was an old general store, its windows boarded up. Some black children played on the road outside three or four wooden houses. Above them loomed a water tower that said Friars Point. This was the place Robert Johnson sang about in ‘Travelling Riverside Blues’? “Just come on back to Friars Point, mama, and barrelhouse all night long.”

I couldn’t stop the engine, let alone get out of the car; the vehicle wasn’t just a goldfish bowl with central locking, but a way out. Not everyone was so lucky.

“Yessuh, I’s Mary Johnson. And Robert, he my baby son. But Little Robert, he’s dead.”

Alan Lomax was just four years too late. Robert Plant and so many others, over 50. I headed across the Mississippi to West Helena, Arkansas, the home of Sonny Boy Williamson. In the little record store, the only albums that weren’t blues were by local hero Levon Helm of the Band.

“I love ole Levon’s music, man,” says Tony Joe. “But you know, I haven’t heard nothin’ from him in a long time. Since ole Clinton got to be president it’s like, Arkansas now, people talk about it all the time. I hope too many tourists don’t start coming up here. It’s a pretty quiet little place but I’m seein’ more and more campers nowadays. I’m so far back you almost need a four-wheel drive to get to my house. This ole farmhouse up in the Ozark mountains is about four hours from Memphis. There’s no television or anything, I’ve got a wood heater and a good fire going and I’ve got a front porch and a river – and that’s all you need.”

From such a backwater Tony Joe White and so many others have touched people of all cultures around the world. “My first hit was in Paris, France, before ‘Polk Salad Annie’,” he says. “It’d seem odd to me. I’d be sittin’ up there on stage, talkin’ just like I’m talkin’ to you. ‘Some of y’all never bin down South. I’m gonna tell you a little bit about it.’ I knew that they didn’t know what I was sayin’! But then, it was the feel of the music.”

Take it to the bridge

2012-04-24T15:26:00.001+12:00

TUNESMITH: Inside the Art of Songwriting, by Jimmy Webb (Hyperion)

Someone once asked the great songwriter Sammy Cahn – his name sits below titles on countless Sinatra records – the perennial question of his profession.

What came first? The music or they lyrics?

“The phone call,” he replied.

Song writing is hard graft. Only amateurs think its easy, the ones who have their eye on the quick money. They’re all over the radio, but few of their efforts will make it onto classic hits playlists. “Hack writers don’t get writer’s block and paradoxically, neither do hungry ones.”

That’s a line from Jimmy Webb’s book Tunesmith. It’s a primer about song writing. Most bookshops have them in their “making it in the music business” section. Strangely, they’re always written by unknowns. if they were that smart, or that hot, how did they get time to write about it? It seems, those that can, do; those that can’t, write “how to” books.

Sure to rise: Webb (right) with Richard Harris, c1967.

But Jimmy’s different. He’s the man who left the cake out in the rain, lost the recipe, and somehow made that dreadful image into a million seller, an unforgettable baroque pop epic. But I’ll forgive him ‘MacArthur Park’ and even his overblown performance in Auckland recently [1999]. To coin a phrase (and probably get sued), he’s a man who’s made the whole world sing.

My definition of a great song is something others want to sing, in the bath, at football, in the playground; one that nags you all day; one that continues to intrigue through an odd chord change, a crystal-clear image, a catchphrase that enters the language – or a cliché that finally gains substance when put to a melody: “your guess as good as mine”, “you always take the weather with you” …

The world has enough great singers, but not nearly enough great songwriters. Jimmy Webb’s Tunesmith wants to change that (and save us from those dire efforts that should stay inside notebooks). It’s an eccentric scramble of a book, given focus by the intensity of Webb’s purpose. The beauty is that it can be read on a technical or anecdotal level, and either way the result for the reader is inspiration (the hardest motivator to ignite).

Tunesmith reflects a lifetime’s obsession with song writing. It’s a big-hearted book that wants to share not just the lessons he’s learnt, but his passion for the art form. The advice ranges from pithy aphorisms and cautionary tales, to textbook talk about rhyme, narrative sense, collaboration, melodic rules and risks, plus cosmic stuff about creativity and even keeping your sanity. There’s also legal advice, about avoiding plagiarism and looking after your publishing. Somehow, he manages to both demystify the process and keep the magic alive.

But then there’s always a story to keep your head from going up, up and away. Like the executor of Cole Porter’s estate who licensed on of his songs for advertising use. He knew he’d blown it when he saw a TV ad for toilet cleaner, and heard the jingle: “I’ve got you … under my rim.”

Written for Aprap, the magazine of the Australasian Performing Right Association, 1999. Shortly before this, Webb performed in Auckland’s intimate Concert Chamber in a double bill with Dan Penn and Spooner Oldham. Song writing heaven, attended by every old music hand in town, though I didn’t hear this favourite:

The Man from Turkey Scratch

2012-04-20T10:03:00.001+12:00

And so Levon Helm passes from this mortal coil. The journey from Turkey Scratch, Arkansas, to the stages of the world – from seeing minstrel shows and Elvis in a tent, to being booed in stadiums – was like several lifetimes.

The Band always brought out the best in some music writers, and many had their obits waiting for Levon’s death a few hours ago from cancer, after a couple of days’ warning from his family. NPR has a swag of audio: archive programmes and past interviews. Rolling Stone has put some classic pieces on-line, including their 1969 cover story, and the great piece “A Portrait of the Band as Young Hawks” by Robert Palmer in 1978 (as a teenage saxophonist, he had played many of the same juke joints with the Hawks in the early 1960s). In it, Palmer evocatively describes Helm showing a teenage Robbie Robertson around his territory, the tiny town of West Helena on the banks of the Mississippi:

Levon Helm, the intense, wiry drummer who was to initiate him into its mysteries, met him at the Helena bus station and took him out to the Helm farmhouse, which was built on stilts to keep it dry during spring floods when the Big Muddy overran its banks. Levon's dad, a cotton farmer, told tales that made them split their sides laughing, and his mother cooked food that made them split their sides eating. Later, with Levon at the wheel, Robbie had a look at the town. There were black folks everywhere — he could remember seeing only a few in his entire life — and even the white folks talked like them, in a thick, rolling Afro-English that came out as heavy and sweet as molasses but could turn as acrid as turpentine if your accent or behavior were strange.

More on Levon soon. The photo above shows him at the drums, jamming near Woodstock with Robertson; it’s from the gatefold of The Band. Meanwhile, below is an 18-minute clip of the Band playing near their peak, live in Pittsburgh, November 1970, just after the release of Stage Fright. (Monitor: QUQ)

In other news, Leonard Cohen has been in court, confronting his former manager, who not only stole US $9.5m from him, but has been harrassing and threatening him for years via emails and texts. The New York Times reports that at the hearing Cohen said to her …

it gave him “no pleasure to see my one-time friend shackled to a chair in a court of law, her considerable gifts bent to the service of darkness, deceit and revenge,” and thanked Ms. Lynch “for insisting on a jury trial, thus exposing to the light of day her massive depletion of my retirement savings and yearly earnings, and allowing the court to observe her profoundly unwholesome, obscene and relentless strategies to escape the consequences of her wrongdoing.”

Even so, Mr. Cohen said he hoped that “a spirit of understanding will convert her heart from hatred to remorse, from anger to kindness, from the deadly intoxication of revenge to the lowly practices of self-reform.”