Tom Russell: Notes from the Borderland

Light Summer Reading

2012-07-12T05:30:00.000-07:00

Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, of Myanmar, is standing three feet away from Vincent Van Gogh’s painting: “The Church at Auvers,” at the Musee d’ Orsay in Paris. She’s in awe. Prayerful. Her eyes are raised up towards the swirling blue sky above the church. Who is she? I know she received the Nobel Peace Prize. She’d been under house arrest in Myanmar for two decades. She’s called “the opposition leader.” She’s very beautiful. There are flowers in her hair. This photo came in my daily newspaper. Good news for once. Inspired images. I am reminded of a Townes Van Zandt story – how Townes stared at this same painting, in the Van Gogh museum, for hours. Townes moved forward an inch every few minutes. Until he was six inches away, and guards threw him out.

I am mentioning these things because I’m 678 pages into “Van Gogh: The Life,” which was published last year. Light summer reading, eh? There are almost 900 pages in this book. So far Vincent has alienated his teachers, classmates, and relatives; slept with and impregnated bottom-rung whores; contracted syphilis; killed his father; cut off his own ear; and is killing his brother, Theo, who’s been supporting him. Reading this tome I’m beginning to feel like a man carrying a gigantic, aching heart around on my back. It’s getting heavy, ma.

Now as I walk through sunflower fields, under flocks of black crows, here in Switzerland, I think of Vincent, and Townes, and Daw Aung Kyi. It alI worked out for Vincent. 100 years after he died. A truer account of all this might be Artaud’s: “Van Gogh -The Man Suicided by Society.”

Summer! I’m working on a songbook and a Western opera. A horse opera? I’m painting pictures of the rooftops of Emmental. I’m writing essays for a Western magazine. I’m thinking of the fanatics of the Van Gogh heart who have passed through my life in the last few years: Freddy Nock, the great wirewalker – the master of air – and the most extreme athlete in the world. Soon he’ll walk three kilometers across the Lake of Thun, and give money to UNESCO. Chris Koch, born with no arms or legs, who hopped up to me in Calgary and gave me a Mesabi sweatshirt, from a ranch of the same name. Chris is busy travelling the world and filming it. Chris, like Freddy Nock, is an extreme athlete of the finest kind. And finally, George Kimball, who passed away last year, one of the foremost boxing writers of the last century. We did a reading together in Lawrence, Kansas, at the Williams S. Burroughs house. George was on a feeding tube. Unable to eat. But touring his three books. A rock and roller to the end.

These three souls proved to me that there are no limits to life when you believe in the power of your intent and will. These three inspire. Like Vincent. Townes. And the face of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi.

Train Dreams

2011-12-12T08:18:00.000-08:00

Pass me that flask of cognac with the 1950’s Union Pacific Dome-Liner etched on it. I’ll tell you about The Portland Rose. Vintage streamline rail cars, sailing up the western coastline, towards my favorite city. All aboard! Special Music-Art Train coming April 13-18. Los Angeles to Portland and back. Special guests: Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Jon Langford, and Thad Beckman. And yours truly: Tom Russell.

Embark from Union Station, an historic landmark right out of a Raymond Chandler story. Setting for a dozen Film Noir classics. The train hugs the California-Oregon coast - rugged coastline you’ll never see from the highway. Dave Alvin has pointed out that Cecil B. Demille created biblical movie sets along this beach line, which are now buried in the sand. We pass Spanish Land Grant ranches right out of the folk song “South Coast.” There’s a vintage dome car where people fall in and out of love. I’ve seen it. Hitchcock-ian!

The song South Coast brings me to Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, who sings the definitive version. Let’s talk history: Ramblin' Jack busked on the streets of Paris and London in the 1950’s. A young Mick Jagger heard Jack busking on a London subway platform and Mick decided, then and there, to become a singer. Bob Dylan stole a few tricks from Jack. Guitar stylings, singing style, etc. Dig it. Jack’s a living, breathing legend.

Jon Langford was the drummer for The Mekons. He’s originally from Wales. Jon now performs with guitar and is hailed for pioneering a mix of folk, country and punk rock. He’s recorded classic alt-country for Bloodshot Records. Jon’s also a prolific visual artist. His portraits of country music legends like Hank Williams and Johnny Cash grace dozens of record and book covers. Jon is one of the finest “folk” painters in America, and a celebrated alt-country performer.

Thad Beckman, American Guitar Master, will be hosting open mikes and guitar workshops. (Bring your guitar and latest songs.) Late night “hoots’ and non-stop jamming. Thad is a master fingerpicker, blues artist, songwriter, and guitar teacher.

Workshops will also include: song swaps, concerts, and art discussions with Jon Langford, Tom Russell, Charlie Hunter, and Yard Dog Folk Gallery owner Randy Franklin. Our supreme commander, Charlie Hunter is also a master painter. Painters, guitar pickers, music fans, train buffs… welcome aboard.

Tom Russell? Myself? I sing original songs. I paint. I’ve been known, on odd rail midnights, to sing old Irish ballads, or Honky Tonk Women. Spontaneity is the key to great rail journeys. Wine. Good food. Song. International friends. Romance. Mystery.

The stops? L.A.! The City of the Angels! Portland, Oregon! One of my favorite cities. Fine food, and the best used bookstore in the world: Powell’s. Jake’s Famous Crawfish is one of my favorite American food joints. A real American City with soul, beauty, vision, and history. We’ll be there two nights.

Climb onboard. Email Sarah at trains@sover.net or check out the full details: www.rootsontherails.com Payment plans discussed. Phone 802-258-1397. Toll Free.

The Last Mesabi Blog

2011-09-18T15:59:00.000-07:00

Last summer we went to the circus in Switzerland. It was all very boring, until the last act. The extreme artist, Freddy Nock, appeared from behind the curtain. He walked up a diagonal wire, backwards, over the crowd, to the high wire. Without a net. Fifty feet up. Then he danced across the wire and did somersaults. He has since walked up cable car wires into the high Alps, and set seven world records in seven days, walking across lakes and up mountains. He gives the donated money to UNICEF. That night he walked backwards up the wire, I thought to myself, I feel like I’ve been walking up the wire backwards in this music business…

Ah! The new record, Mesabi, is out. I’ve written here about most of the songs, at least the peripheral color. Myself, I’m still that kid listening to vinyl folk music on my Uncle George’s record player. The scene where this record begins. I can smell the furniture polish on the mahogany console of that Phillips machine and see the tubes glowing in the back, as I listen to Joan Baez or Dylan sing “Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right.” It wasn’t another time. It wasn’t even long ago. It was now and tomorrow. The songs. They do that. Stop Time.

Good songs and paintings aren’t locked into a frame or an era. They defy all the odds. They stick in the blood. They change the color of your eyes. They keep the heart pumping a different tango that carries us through all of our eternities. The songs of the masters have kept me going. The only way to end this record – with its so called dark moments, with fragile and famous characters going down hard – was by shining a small light of hope back on the stories. “Love Abides.”

I picked an old guitar up on the Wall of Wave Lab studio, in Tucson, and strummed the dead strings, and layed the last song down just like you hear it. One take. Myself and guitar. A point of light to end the main course. But there are really no “dark songs.”Only hard truths. The only artistic sin is concocting untruthful emotions and clever lies, wrapped in easy rhymes. Welcome to the hit parade.

I’d like to keep walking backwards up that wire. Like our friend Freddy Nock. The Master of Air. You can see what he does at www.freddynock.ch

You can listen to what I do on Mesabi.

Adieu and adios.

**********************

Time now to take the songs out on the highway. The Minstrel Trail. We’re coming into your neighborhood; hitting the front porch with the daily paper. Songs.

The concerts are listed on our web: www.tomrussell.com

The film, Don’t Look Down, is out and also the Art book: Blue Horse/ Red Desert: The Art of Tom Russell. It’s all available at www.villagerecords.com

That’s it for now. All the news from the high wire. See you down the road.

And God Created Border Towns

2011-08-09T03:00:00.001-07:00

The Jai Alai fronton was a grand, arched-top, ivory adobe building which stood in the midst of 1950’s Tijuana. A piece of architectural folk art. An Aztec gaming palace. The building dominated the border scene, at least in my young kid’s eyes. And it continues to drift through my dreams. What in hell went on in there? A Basque game? A gambling sport? Were there whores in the cheap seats? Was Clark Gable in the front row? Sterling Hayden? The world’s fastest game. Jai Alai. Men with baskets on their arms, slinging hard pelota balls against stone walls. It was Mayan. Prehistoric.
I have a menu from the Jai Alai Café. It’s dated Saturday, May 10, 1952. It’s a beautiful, deco-designed cream-colored sheet of French paper, with a dark blue frame. The food list is bordered on four sides by artistic renderings of lobsters and sides of beef. Lobster was the specialty that night, and it came “fresh from the Blue Pacific.” Are there any lobsters left in the blue Pacific? Is the Pacific blue? There’s a small sidebar for the “magic chef broiler,” which produced “savory broiled steak and chops…a gourmet’s delight.”
Let’s look down the menu, past the lobster cocktail supreme, the cream of fresh mushroom soup, the homemade chicken mole (Puebla Style), the roast prime rib and Yorkshire biscuit, the “unjointed capon” with corn fritters and honey, the fried abalone steak, the “young venison steak au garniture,” and the two quails sautéed on toast. Personally I’m thrilled that the capon was unjointed. It probably made fine dining easier. All that twisting and turning of capon legs can be a bother – might interfere with the wine toasts and the placing of Jai Alai bets.
But wait. Let’s not ignore the coup de grace deserts: crème de menthe parfait and the camembert or Leiderkranz cheese. Ah, the hell with it, how about pineapple pie, or Italian Zabaione - an Italian custard desert made from egg yolks and sweet wine (Marsala or Proseco) whipped to perfection and served with figs. Haute Cuisine in Tijuana. The cracking of pelota balls on stone.
Finis. That border era has long vanished into years of blood and dread. Tijuana. Juarez. Nuevo Laredo. The mariachis have disappeared from the tourist market. The photo-man with the donkey painted like a zebra is gone. Gone with the abalone steak and unjointed capon and lobster from the blue Pacific. Gone with the cheapo divorces and thirty five cent margaritas. Dog tracks. Horse Tracks. Jai Alai frontons. History.
As Marlene Dietrich said to Orson Welles in Touch of Evil (the greatest of noir border flicks): “Your future is all used up…”
As world economies tilt, and the malicious carnival jive of partisan politics erodes reason, there’s a new economy of cash, guns and blood bartered for drugs. This economy flourishes. Across the borderline. The world’s fastest game. Bet on it.

(These themes are embodied in 3 new Mesabi songs: And God Created Bordertowns, Goodnight Juarez, Jai Alai…coming soon.)

Heart Within A Heart

2011-07-25T06:24:00.000-07:00

Truth is a pathless land. So sayeth Krishnamurti. Two roads may not diverge in the woods this time around. Suddenly there are no roads. Life isn’t what happens to you, but how you react to what happens. The journey home after we’ve lost our maps or honing devices. Time to re-tool personal philosophies. All gospels become Gnostic.

One month ago I was recovering from an eye operation in a hospital in a medieval Swiss City. Helicopters landed on the roof all night. Sirens wailed in the streets after the bars closed. A roundup of the wounded, broken and half dead. Humanity speaking in tongues of blood, pain, mortality, and sorrow. Maybe hope. When the next breath is all there is, it’s enough. Outside in the hallways nurses were murmuring in Swiss German. I was waking up in a Hemingway war novel set in WW1. One eyed and sedated. I remembered almost dying of dysentery in Nigeria, forty years ago, and every time I’d moan or retch in agony, the Yoruba girls out in the courtyard would wail in primitive harmony with my pain. The healing song. Cante hondo. Their chanting pulled me through. When the land becomes pathless it’s time to reach for the heart within the heart. The place to go when all the trouble starts. When your world spins upside down and falls apart. That song.

Every Tom Russell record should harbor at least one song of hope or simple love. Redemption. Internal rummage sales. A rest stop on a road marked with darker songs about people who’ve been somewhere and left their mark on the cave wall. We’re all climbing our crooked mountains, reimagining our art and philosophies, one song at a time. Touchstones have eroded. We live in a world polluted and broken down by divisive politics, tribal hatreds, religious wars and a corrupt media hacking into personal pain - to display it all on the evening news. We’re revolted by fanatical Muslims chopping off the nose and ears of a woman, and yet have tolerated the silence of the Vatican, covering up priest/predator damage to a half million abused children. Under the banner of God. We have politically corrected our lingo, while our baser instincts grow deadlier. We’ve invented a new mask of false innocence, with a clown’s smiling face. Our arts are phony. The news is tainted. Our children are one dimensional. Their songs are merely soundscapes. Lyrical abstract expressionism, lacking the guts and color of a DeKooning print. Novels are arch. Nobody’s home. Conceptual art devoid of content and wild-hearted thrust. Passion is a dirty word. The lions and elephants have disappeared from the circus and helicopters are landing on the roof. St. Jude has surrendered.

The direction out is into the pathless land where each individual must change their interior being. Good luck on your journey. Carry water, and a belief that there’s a heart within your heart.

(Song #9 coming…on Mesabi) (Rest in peace Bill Morrissey and Amy Winehouse)

Monte Hellman/George Kimball

2011-07-10T02:07:00.000-07:00

Two summers ago I heard director Monte Hellman was trying to reach me. I was familiar with Monte’s Two Lane Blacktop, the ultimate American road movie. James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, drummer of the Beach Boys, race their hopped-up car across the America, against another car driven by actor Warren Oates. Helluva movie. Monte also directed early Jack Nicholson films and produced Reservoir Dogs. He was a fan of my music. Had all the records. Would I like to write the music for his new film (released last month) The Road to Nowhere? Hell yes. He sent me the script. I had a hard time with it. A dense story within a story. Cubist. Sorta. But I worked on a title song and recorded it on a little hand held recorder. He loved it and used the demo and quite a few other songs in the film.

Monte also wanted me to act in it, on location in Rome, but that didn’t end up happening. He also used my song “Roll the Credits,” for the film’s closing credits. Two months ago we attended the premiere at the old Egyptian theater in Hollywood. We’d seen an earlier cut in Monte’s bedroom screening facility; drinking his Xylitol extreme Margaritas. Fine man. Cool movie. A Hollywood homecoming for me. As a kid I’d take a bus from Inglewood to Hollywood and walk up and down Boulevard, reading the Hollywood Stars embedded in the sidewalk.

The songs “Road to Nowhere” and “Roll the Credits” are on the coming record Mesabi.

**************************************

George Kimball died several days ago. One of our finest Sports writers. A friend. A throwback to a time of cigar chewing, scotch drinking characters that cared about the art of sports journalism and the search for the right word or phrase that resonated with hard truth. He wrote like Alexis Arguello boxed. Toughness, laced with finesse, and the occasional eye drop of humor. The dance. He was in the mold of Leibling and Joseph Mitchell. He knew and loved the territory. The gym. The bar. The street. The word. The song.

My friend Steve Bodio told me that George wrote a story on the Boston Marathon once by stopping at every bar along the route. There are a lot of them. I met him in Austin, a few years ago, when he showed up at the gallery opening of my boxing paintings. He bought two and they were used on the cover of his book: The Manly Art. I met him beneath the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree last year and he gave me a whole bag of his books. They got me through the winter. Finally we did a gig together a few months ago at the Williams Burroughs house in Lawrence, Kansas. George had friends among folksingers, beats, boxers and some of the finest writers of our age, like Pete Hamil and Colum McCann. Here’s to you George. An Irish toast to all of our eternities.

Adventures in the Hollywood Skin Trade

2011-06-18T02:03:00.000-07:00

On childhood Sundays Jiminy Cricket crooned “When You Wish Upon A Star,” as Disneyland came on the TV. Chilling. This song was performed by Cliff Edwards, also known as Ukulele Ike. Cliff was a funny little, frog-faced man, born in 1895 in Hannibal, Missouri. He left school to become a vaudeville crooner. Taught himself the ukulele and recorded hits like “California Here I Come,” “I’ll See You in My Dreams, and “Singing’ in the Rain.” Cliff was responsible for millions of ukuleles selling in the 1920’s! My mom played the uke, and it was the perfect axe for campfires and boring car trips. “Aint A Gonna Rain No More,” she’d sing. Indeed. Cliff Edwards went on to star in films, but his personal life was “Hollywood” messy. It began to rain hard on our little crooner.

Cliff paid alimony to three former wives, went through bankruptcy four times, and suffered from alcoholism and drug addiction. He hung out at the old Tam O’ Shanter, near the L.A River, trying to get voice-over gigs. He ended up in a home for indigent actors, and died in a charity hospital. The body was unclaimed, until Disney bought a burial plot. Yikes, Ike.

Couple this American vignette with my earlier story of Bobby Driscoll…the voice of Peter Pan…dying in a vacant lot in New York…further adventures in the Hollywood skin trade. You might say: why dwell on the dark side? I say, what happened to my childhood dreams? Where’s the star we’re supposed to be wishing on? Mommy never told me Jiminy Cricket could bleed…etc. Farewell Never Never Land.

Now Consider Sterling Hayden. Actor: The Asphalt Jungle, The Killing, Johnny Guitar, The Godfather. Dozens of great flicks. He stood six feet five and sailed round the globe with his children in a three-masted schooner. The author of two great sea books. One of the most popular character actors to appear on TV talk shows - he sat there with cigarette smoke whirling up into his Captain Ahab beard and told it like it was. I saw him on the Johnny Carson show, declaring: “Just give me a cheap room overlooking the Hudson, a mattress, and a typewriter, and I’ll write you one hell of a novel.” Last seen on a barge in Paris - bottle of Johnny Walker between his legs, declaring how it made him feel to fink during the McCarthy hearings.

And… Liz Taylor, who resided, briefly, a few miles from us, in the penthouse of the Plaza Hotel in El Paso. I imagine her looking out at Juarez, Mexico, with a salty Margarita in her hands. Liz chased furious love through her furious seasons. Her ghost stands looking out the penthouse window…day-dreaming of James Dean dying ‘neath the Tree of Heaven, near the old Jack Ranch Café in California. She begins to sing: “Oh, his Porsche car was burning, as the hawks took to the air”…..fade to oblivion.

(A few little stories behind the songs on Mesabi.)

Hard Rain

2011-05-22T11:45:00.000-07:00

I was the kid playin’ football, in a Catholic school

Deep down in Mexican town…

(Listening to)… “Don’t Think Twice Its All Right”

From the wild Mesabi Holy Ground….

Mesabi

Coming soon: Bob Dylan’s 70^th Birthday. The magazines are trotting out the tribute writers and the cover issues. The complex fascination with The Bard has been building, ebbing, and building again for over fifty years. And the booing. The critics are lining up, on either side, to do combat. Maureen Dowd (N.Y Times), and others, say Dylan shouldn’t have played recently in China, where his “set list,” might have been censored. Did her sell out? Why didn’t he do the so-called “protest songs?” Why would he appear in a commercial for Victoria’s Secret and few years back? The Wall Street Journal said he should quit the stage. It’s Shakespearean.

The criticism is meaningless against the depth of the Dylan’s catalogue, and his un-impeachable influence on modern song. But we’re lost here, Bob. Everybody expected you (and Leonard Cohen & Paul Simon) to be GONE by now…and we ain’t had much luck replacing you… and it’s irritating to some folk in the media, and to all young writers who ache to be…artistically relevant.

I’m looking back at my childhood. On the coming record. The institutions which forged my youth: Church, Hollywood, Mexican Border Towns, and Bob Dylan. Back then it was folk music, for me, and 6 o’clock mass, and beat poetry, and Jai Alai and horse racing. The 60’s! Dylan exploded the folksong – and when the pieces came down, they fell all over me. Symphonies, fugues, and foxtrots loaded with resonant folk-roots melodies and lyrics which expanded our notion of “the word,” by cooking up new potions distilled from folklore, beat poetry, French mystical verse, and blues wisdom. And much more. Rimbaud meets Ramblin’ Jack. It sounds as fresh today as did forty years back.

The Mexican Border? Gone to hell. Hollywood? Who cares? And the 6 O’clock mass? The Catholic Church has finally gone morally under. 200,000 sexually abused altar boys (I’m unscathed, folks) can now feel a little better – the Holy Fathers came out with a million dollar study last week, which stated that there was no pedophilia plague inherent within the Church; it was all due to the permissiveness of the 60’s! It was Woodstock, and all those nude bodies and wild songs that drove these predators in priest’s collars over the line. Hell, maybe Bob Dylan was to blame. Again.

The new record, Mesabi, opens with a kid (myself) absorbing early Dylan while attending a Catholic school “deep down in Mexican town,” Los Angeles. The album ends with a version of Dylan’s “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” with guest artists Lucinda Williams and Calexico. Dylan bookends the deal.

This is a birthday salute to Bob. Long may you run, sir. The songs will live long after the legends, and the boo’s, and the diseased and antiquated liturgies fade, like the border-mariachi horns echoing in my blood.

William Burroughs' Backyard

2011-04-09T15:02:00.000-07:00

“This is the fish pond,” said Tom. Our guide. Tom now lived in the William S. Burroughs house in Lawrence, Kansas. “William would tap his cane on the stone. The fish would come to the surface. Then he’d feed them. After Burroughs died the fish were left alone for four years. They didn’t perish. They survived. Carp are carnivores, you know. They ate their minnows. Two snapping turtles come out of Burroughs creek every summer and stay in the pond. They cull some of the carp.”

It sounded like a Burroughs story. Or perhaps: “The Man Who Shot Snapping Turtles,” by Edmund Wilson. We walked further into the back thicket of overgrown, untended plum and pear trees. Snake terrain. Burroughs placed targets on the trees, or hung up spray paint cans in front of canvases, and shot at them. Shotgun art. Further into the grove his fans had planted a line of trees in the shape of phallic symbol.

“Didn’t the neighbor’s mind?” I asked. “Gunshots? Snapping turtles? Cock and balls?”

“Someone built William a giant gun silencer,” said Tom. “You could only hear a slight pop pop pop when he fired at the trees.”

We moved on. There was a rusted car in the weeds. “That was his Datsun,” Tom said. “Bill didn’t drive his whole life. So he decided to learn. At age 80. He couldn’t see over the wheel and kept hitting things. Disaster. His friends drove it out here into the weeds and abandoned it. We have to drain the oil and gas out one of these days.”

We walked back towards Burroughs’ cottage. On the right hand side of the house were the cat graves. “William would sit in his room and write, looking out over the graves. Russky was his favorite.” It reminded me of Hemingway’s Finca Vigia in Cuba and the line of cat graves by the swimming pool.

We went inside and ate homemade pizza. We’d appeared at a concert and seminar with the great boxing writer, George Kimball, and George was staying in the Burroughs house. His medications were lined up on the bedside table. George has been diagnosed with a virulent form of disease that was eating him up, but he’s still out there writing books and doing gigs. He’s published at least four books in the last few years. Chain smoking Lucky Strikes and very much alive. If George was “going out” he was certainly going out on his feet, throwing jabs and hooks for a furious fifteen rounds. He was damn sure a serious writer. As was Mr. Burroughs, who tapped his cane, bringing the goldfish to surface.

It was the raw hangdog end of a Kansas winter. Two fine writers: Burroughs and Kimball. Outside the wind hissed gently through the row of trees pocked with bullet holes. We drank a few glasses. Toasting great writers, carp, cats, and snapping turtles. And the art of George Kimball. And Burroughs’ cane. Still tap-tapping in my dreams.

Farewell Never Never Land - Song #3

2011-03-19T10:55:00.000-07:00

When I was sixteen, or thereabouts, my father rented a five acre ranch in Topanga Canyon. Near Malibu. One day at the racetrack he bought me a broke-down stakes horse named My Chief. We paid one silver dollar (a gelding worthless for breeding) and took him back to the little hobby ranch. Next, my father bought a herd of black-faced sheep. He built a barn, and bought more horses at the L.A. horse and mule auction. Then, at the racetrack and in the card rooms, he proceeded to gamble his way into bankruptcy. He went to jail. The paint peeled off the barn. The race horse strangled to death in barbed wire, and mountain lions ate the sheep. If we’d had an old grey goose I’m sure it would have died at the bottom of the well, standing on its head, because our Nursery Rhyme childhood was turning mighty Brothers Grimm. Know what I mean? But wait.

One day, before it all went down, I was hanging out at The Topanga Canyon market. I saw a nervous little guy standing by a garbage bin. It was the former child actor, Bobby Driscoll. Grown up. Haggard. Sullen. Maybe strung out. He’d been the voice of Peter Pan, and played the cabin boy in Treasure Island. An icon for us kids. I walked over and told him that I’d really liked his work in Treasure Island. He was the best actor Disney ever had. He turned slowly and said, “Go away, kid, and leave me alone.” Jeeze. Mommy never told me Peter Pan could turn mean. And bleed.

It was a two-second coming of age. The race horse in the barbed wire. Peter Pan strung out. Dead sheep in the meadow. Cows in the corn. Fast forward to two years ago. I picked up a book called The Semina Culture, about a Beat-Art movement which transpired around Venice Beach California in the 1950’s. Jazz, hard drugs, and collage art. Actors and musicians and junkies. Most of them died young. A few, like Dennis Hopper, moved on to success. There’s a page or two on Bobby Driscoll. How his acting career bottomed out, then he made art. He was a good artist, but the junkie yen took its toll. His downward slide was Promethean.

The conclusion to this tale, children, is this: some kids playing in a vacant lot in New York City, in the early 60’s, found a body in the weeds. No one identified the corpse, so it’s buried in an unmarked pauper’s grave in Potter’s Field. A perch for migrant crows. Years later they realize it’s Bobby Driscoll. I think he’s still there, in Potter’s Field, near Riker’s Island.

But cheer up! And as the credits roll, your troubadour begins to sing: “Second star to the right, straight on ‘til morning, my little friends. There’s an island called Neverland, where childhood dreams never end….Farewell Never Never land….Goodnight Bobby.”

(This is the third song on the coming record.)

When the Legends Die (Song #2)

2011-02-25T14:10:00.000-08:00

When I was a child my grandmother took me to her weekly painting lessons. A dozen old women with their easels in a hothouse room crowded with ferns, cactuses, and little dogs. Classical music seeped out a red Bakelite Zenith radio. The women hummed and threw paint on the canvas. They had runs in their stockings and splotches of paint on their aprons. Cigarettes. Black coffee. Ancient Bohemian spirits. The aroma of oil paint and kerosene mixed with preludes and waltzes and coughing dogs. A few years later my grandmother painted me pictures of Muhammad Ali and Jim Taylor. We were buddies. She gave me her mandolin, bought me a banjo, and cooked me prime rib and apple pies. Americana.

I was the kid in the room with heroes tacked up over my head. Pictures ripped from magazines. Grandma’s paintings. At first the walls were covered with athletes. As I became a teenager, the athletes were given over to folksingers. First the Kingston Trio, then the real stuff: Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, Ian and Sylvia, Tim Hardin, Peter LaFarge, Fred Neil and Ramblin’ Jack Elliot. Oh, those lived-in faces. Beautiful beat-up guitars. Brazilian rosewood with scratches and wounds; cigarette burns; bullet holes. Guitars absorb every situation they work in. These dream photos depicted my legends and heroes. Icons of the Minstrel Trade. I wanted that life, but didn’t have the guts and heart for it, until I’d been to West Africa and seen war, and also the miseries of life in an academic setting.

In a pawn shop in San Luis Obispo I picked up a 1946 Martin D-18 guitar and went search of the folk crusade, not knowing it would take forty years and a lifetime to arrive at a watering hole where you could sit down and rest your camel, re-string your guitar, and contemplate whether you were a troubadour.

I woke up one day In Switzerland, recently, and realized I’d gotten too familiar with some of my heroes; too cranked up on the legends. You have to accept the song, and give up on getting to know the singer. You could get hurt. Don’t get too close to the stage, kid, don’t mess with the mystery. Heroes are human. They could hurt you. And hurt themselves. I had this vision (I’d been there) of a songwriter alone in a kitchen on Christmas Day. Drunk. His children didn’t call, and love was a half-remembered bottle of vintage wine. Between the idea of a hero, and the reality of human struggle, lies a shadow that might cripple you. Art can go there. But watch out. Beware the kickback of alchemy. The line between mystery and self destruction is a tight rope where heroes fall, like old Karl Wallenda. The parking lot below is mighty hard. Even wire walkers can’t fly.

It all started with my grandmother painting bohemian dreams. I’m sure it did. And the song “When the Legend’s Die,” will be the second song on the new album.

Mesabi - series of dreams #13

2011-01-28T14:00:00.000-08:00

The Mesabi iron range runs across the top of Minnesota. Biggest iron ore pit in the world up there. Bob Dylan was born nearby, in Duluth. In the dead of winter Duluth is a bastion of weird old immigrant America. Freezing waves pounding the shoreline. Rusted freighters sulking out on the black ice. Raw, hard country. Beer tastes different in winter. Like yellow blood tingling with Slavic iron shards. It’s a long way from New York City, Los Angeles, Nashville and the rest of it. Dylan’s family later moved up to Hibbing. Hibbing, today, is a 1940’ movie set. Intact. Dylan worked in his old man’s hardware store; pounded rock and roll on an upright piano in the high school auditorium. He ran away to Minneapolis, and then to Greenwich Village. You know the rest. Fifty years ago.

I was the kid listening to Dylan’s early vinyl on my Uncle George’s record player. The kid in the room with heroes tacked up over my head. As The great vinyl wheel spun round with its holy prayer… The records keep revolving around in my soul. Nostalgia? If that’s a holy and bygone house of art and music, then I’ll live there. Art time is frozen and has no clock value. No expiration date. All the great classical composers: Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Wagner, Brahms, Verdi … lived (mostly) during the 1800’s. What the hell happened? What’s happening now? Armageddon or the great Aquarian shift?

We are rowing through the doldrums, far out at sea. No wind to touch our sails. No movement. Jon Parales wrote a recent piece in the Herald Tribune about the “dumbing down” of the modern lyric. So can someone tell me why, on Dec. 3, The Wall Street Journal devoted two pages ,with irreverent cartoons, to a rant of why Bob Dylan should quit the stage? It was a cruel piece, and I can only guess why the paper, carried around in the computer bags of international bank and marketing types, would deem it necessary to spend two full pages contemplating the question.

I would say that: drunk, crippled, half dead, or 200 years old, Bob Dylan should be left alone. You don’t have to attend the show, folks. He’s been attacked since 1963, it never seemed to bother him, as he constantly reinvented himself and redesigned the modern lyric. Better that the Wall Street Journal had covered Leonard Cohen’s recent triumphant concerts at age 75. If age is the question. The truth is Dylan’s very presence, whatever shape he’s in, scares the hell out of a current generation of writers who will never measure up. There is nothing significant for music journalists to write about, so… attack the maestro. Sigh…Babe Ruth will not leave the stadium, and the little leaguers want inside.

My song Mesabi begins the next release. It speaks of my childhood; and Dylan’s. The spark. Coming this fall.

(The next series will deal with the new songs. Amen.)

Auld Lang Syne

2010-12-30T01:03:00.000-08:00

Walking through a snow storm in a Swiss Village. Singing about the girl from Ponchatrain; dark hair falling in jet black ringlets across her lovely shoulders. Raise a flowing glass to her memory! Then I’m humming Auld Lang Syne, wondering what it means. Or what we want it to mean. Old acquaintances. Olde Thymes. Olde love. Days of long ago. Another year. A goodwill drink. Songs imbedded in seasonal cheer. Buried in soul and bone. The spark of memory. Childhood recollections. Melodies ringing through the family house. Tradition. Or a French horn in a rescue mission, played by a soldier in the Salvation Army Band. Auld Lang Syne! Times past, yet remembered. Bad times. Better times. Should ole times be forgotten?

Now, blocking the snowy road - an apparition in a black hat. A sheepherder. Italian? He walked with a herder’s staff. Basque? Dignified. Biblical. Behind him a flock of sheep, turning the corner of a farm pasture. At least one thousand sheep. One pack burro. Four Border Collies, nipping and keeping the herd in line. On they went, until they disappeared down a side road, up into the low snowy hills. The last row of sheep drifted by, with a woman herder guarding the rear. Humming a song. An old herding song. Was it the melody to Auld Lang Syne? A chilling, warm coincidence on a winter’s road. Or maybe I’d just imagined the melodies were similar. This might be how Bobby Burns found the melody and the verse, two hundred years ago.

The Scottish bard Robert Burns is credited with Auld Lang Syne, though he admitted he’d collected the words from “an old man.” The melody is believed to come from an older traditional Scots song. Auld Lang Sine issues from “the folk.” The herders. Tinsmiths. Minstrels. Old men. Celebrants of the road. Folk. The eternal evolution of traditional song.

A drinking song. Ale or whiskey. Wine or tea. Water. What matter? A song of raising glasses in reverent toast to old friends and reminiscences –for old time’s sake. Lifting a cup of kindness. We have crossed the rivers of time, and the seas between us broad have roared…but yet…

We remember the jet black ringlets falling on naked shoulders. Death. Love. Loss. Recollections staining the bottom of the glass. Dregs melting into memory. Feelings of kindness, humility, and forgiveness. Forgiving ourselves. Years. The longer we endure the less we know. We are circling back, year to year, into the womb of the haunted earth. Earth which resonates with songs of the season. Songs passed down from old man to young man. From Robert Burns to Guy Lombardo. Back to this village road covered with snow. A melody and a memory, handed down from the folk, hummed to the beat of an old drummer on a Scottish road, on down to the jazz drummer in a New Year’s bar in New York... or measured out to the snowy muffled feet of two sheepherders and their biblical herd.

Cheers!

True East/Beat Reflections

2010-12-11T01:22:00.000-08:00

We flew east from Pie Town, Magdelena, and El Paso. Taking Poppi back to the Swiss country. Stopped in New York City and met with George Kimball, who used my songs in his new boxing book: “The Fighter Still Remains,” a collection of songs and poems about boxing. The book also includes Paul Simon, Colum McCann, Jack Kerouac, Tom Paxton, Muhammad Ali, and more… George has another book coming soon called “Manly Art.” I painted the cover. There also his great collection of American writers on boxing titled: “At the Fights.”

The night we arrived we wandered down to the old village to my wife’s favorite pizza joint, Arturo’s on Houston Street. Arturo’s could be a chapter out of Kerouac’s “Desolation Angels.” There was a one-armed trumpet player blowing wild; with a jazz trio of bass, snare and piano. A chanteuse named Joni Paladin nailed a hip version of “Moonlight in Vermont.” The pizza arrived from the coal oven; the white wine was poured in carafes; and the naïve paintings on the wall rattled against the beat of the snare. The regulars at the bar sipped martinis, brandy, and red wine. The waiters looked as if they were born there, sixty years ago. In fact the whole joint was born in another time of muted jazz and cool and cocktails. I thought of Kerouac reciting “October in the Railroad Earth,” and Allen Ginsberg, twenty five years ago, signing his book of photos for me in a loft in Soho; taking the time to draw an alligator, because I told him I was into alligators. Gone, man. Gone.

I’m leading a little beat tour into San Francisco as part of our next train experience and hoping to touch base again with one of the last true Beat poets, my amigo Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He’s 92. One morning in San Francisco Lawrence and I were having breakfast with NPR radio host Maria Gilhardin, in a café in Japan Town, across from the Fillmore West. Lawrence loved the record, “The Man From God Knows Where." He was sketching me with a felt tip pen on the paper place mat. He dipped his finger in ice tea and made the picture run, like a water color. The little breakfast painting is framed next to my Ginsburg drawing. We have film footage of Lawrence reciting my song, “The Pugilist at 59,” in our upcoming documentary “Don’t Look Down.” And I can’t forget Lew Welch reciting “Ring of Bone,” in Santa Barbara forty years ago, before he left a note and walked off into the wilderness, never to be seen again. “I saw myself a ring of bone, floating in the clear stream of it all….” Our first recording, in ’76, was called Ring of Bone. Ah, the Beats!

On our train tour we plan to visit City Light Books and walk down Jack Kerouac Alley and commute with the Beat spirits…check the train experience out: www.rootsontherails.com or email us at trains@sover.net

Dispatches….On The Road.

True West

2010-11-27T13:01:00.000-08:00

We left El Paso at sunup. My wife, guitarist Thad Beckman, and “Poppi,” my father-in-law. Poppi doesn’t speak English, except for the phrase: “F*** You, cowboy.” We were hoping he wouldn’t employ it in the wrong situation. We rolled down Highway 9 into the desert and Columbus, New Mexico, where Pancho Villa attacked the U.S. in 1916. Black Jack Pershing, with George Patton in toe, was sent after Pancho –never caught him. On through Hachita and Animas; past the monument where Geronimo surrendered; ate crackers and cut meat near Skull Valley; arrived in Douglas, Arizona. I showed them the Gadsden Hotel lobby, where Villa rode his horse up the stairway. There’s a stuffed puma, a cowboy watering hole – The Saddle and Spur Bar - and an old café. Next stop Bisbee. Show for Bill Carter, who wrote fine books on salmon fishing in Alaska and the war in Bosnia. On to Sahuarita: a church with a giant cross made of saguaro ribs and copper wire. Ross Knox, the last cowboy-muleteer, was in attendance. Ross is “the man who rode the mule around the world.” True west.

On to Flagstaff and the Orpheum theater. Snow on the road going out. A night off in Scottsdale. Visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert retreat. Frank Lloyd Wright, Georgia O’Keefe, Fritz Scholder, Ross Knox, and Geronimo color the true, raw West. Outsiders. Aboriginals. I bought a pawn shop Kachina in Scottsdale and wondered about its journey. Hawked for five dollars by a Navajo in 1969? Monday night show at the Rhythm Room in Phoenix. Then we gave Poppi the Western ride of his life – across the middle of Arizona and New Mexico. Through towns like Payson, Show Low, and Pie Town; stopped for the obligatory slice of Apple, Blueberry, and Boysenberry. One codger, around 90, ate a cafe dinner of cream of mushroom soup with two dozen crackers crushed inside; for bulk. He was “western” to the beard and bone.

After seven hours we hit old Magdalena and the adobe home of Steve Bodio and his wife Libby. In the front room were seven Russian coursing hounds, called “Tazi’s” from the old Turkin territory, and one Peregrine Falcon, which Steven fed from his hand. Frozen quail. Steve has many fine books out, including one on hunting with Eagles in Mongolia: Eagle Dreams. We ate Libby’s homemade posole and drank Mongol vodka; imbibing in a few bottles of God’s grape juice. Bukowski once wrote me: the Greeks didn’t call wine the blood of the gods for no reason at all. In the morning we drove home down the Jornado del Muerto, the long “journey of death” the Spanish rode five hundred years back.

There is still a west. It exists on desert back roads and in odd, fragmented glimpses: Saguaros against Sonoran sunsets; pawn shop Kachinas; crosses made of Saguaro ribs and copper; the lingo of the muleteer, a blueberry pie slice in Pie Town; frozen quail on the hand of the Falconer. God’s footnotes.

The Ballad of Little Dougie

2010-11-13T13:49:00.000-08:00

He’s sitting on stage somewhere in the night. Clutching a Bajo Sexto. One of those deep throated Mexican instruments; a sonic cross between a 12 string guitar and a broken steel cable whacking beats against a wooden thunder drum. A tuba with strings. Doug Sahm is poised. Historically posed. Leather jacket, black cowboy hat, pointy toe black boots. Long Hair and shades. The real/true beat king of Americana long before it was deadened into a recycle bin for old rockers and hat acts and tired folkies. My friend Peter from England gave me this picture. Doug is probably one of the only gabacho/gringos who could play the bajo sexto; he also played guitar, steel guitar, bass, drums, and all of it. They say he played once with Hank Williams. He used to call me in the middle of the night and whisper arcane warnings: “Man you gonna get fat on Mexican food down in El Paso. Watch out.” He said he’d drive out to see me, but “them Mexican banditos out there would steal my Cadillac.” He called me “St Olav’s,” because he loved that song of mine. He even recorded it once. Doug wanted us to tour Norway together and take it all back. The fame, the glory, the Norwegian Kroners. It never transpired.

He was called “Little Dougie,” in those 1950’s photos. A ten year old kid behind a steel guitar. Then he was the young dude with Beatle bangs and flamenco boots who hit ‘em hard with “Mendocino” and “She’s About a Mover.” He sang with Dylan. He was American music in the raw/real sense; music drawn from the border, Mexico, accordions, steel guitars, East Texas blues, girls tight red dresses, white boy rock, and British Invasion boomerang POP. Doug Sahm. Crooning, moaning, and wailing his way through his own Great American Songbook.

I hung out with him in a New York deli once. He spent twenty minutes telling the waitress how to make real corn beef hash. Then we went back to his hotel room where he chastised me for tossing my cowboy hat on the bed: “No hat on the bed, dude, its bad luck!” Then he showed me his bag of vitamins, mineral water, and the special coffee machine he travelled with. The road warrior in his final season; with medicines for the ritual.

A year later he died, in a Motel, in Taos, New Mexico. Gone, but never gone. Little Dougie.

The other night I watched the Texas Tornados. Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez and Doug’s son, Sean. On fire. Doug looked down and whispered to “Boogie,” (which is what he called Augie) – “Heh, Boogie, keep your eye on St. Olav’s, don’t let him get fat on that El Paso Mexican food. And don’t let him throw his hat on the bed, boogie.”

Roll on, Little Dougie, roll on.

(I’ll send this one out to the regulars in “Bar Mendocino,” Helsinki, Finland.)

Bob Dylan in America

2010-10-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

Half way through Sean Willentz’s wise and complex, Bob Dylan in America, I thought of Simon Rodia and the Watts Towers. Rodia was an Italian immigrant from Naples who created folk art towers in the Watts area of Los Angles in the 1930’s. The towers are tall iron cones: ornamented with soda bottle glass, tile, shells, and other found fragments. Yesterday I was in the yard, hands deep in tile and concrete; hoping to make an old Mexican fountain echo the feel of the Watts Towers, or at least summon the mosaic work of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona. I was thinking of Sean Willentz’s Dylan book, which details how Dylan fashioned his complex song catalogue out of the bits and pieces of American musical history: minstrel shows, vaudeville, blues, jazz, gospel, folk, early rock, sacred harp shape-note singing…inventing, reinventing, borrowing, and stealing, now and then. Building his unique, masterful folk-art towers from poetic fragments. The Watts Towers of Song.

Willentz begins with a link between Dylan and Aaron Copland (composer of the opera Billy the Kid ), then discusses Brecht and Weill, the Beat generation, Blind Willie McTell, Shape Note singing, Bing Crosby, Blonde of Blonde and onward….Willentz doesn’t adopt the usual tact of over-interpreting Dylan. Impossible. He places Dylan’s work into the larger, ever-evolving context of American music. He’s a history professor at Princeton, and the research and footnoted-detail is sometimes tough slogging. But worth the journey. Bring water, wine, and a walking stick. You’ll know more about our musical tradition when you arrive at the end.

In the final chapter Willentz discusses the issue of whether Dylan stole or plagiarized lyrics and melodies throughout the long ride. Willentz alludes to the unspoken rules of the folk process and the working methods of TS Eliot, Woody Guthrie and others. He backs up Dylan. People have been trying to dissect, heave charges, boo, criticize, condemn and lob cheap shots at Dylan and his work since 1962. Current detractors should choke on the toxic fumes of the search engines they’ve employed to prove plagiarism. When I was a kid, the City of L.A. wanted to tear down the Watts Towers as unsafe. They brought in army helicopters to try and lift the towers. The towers wouldn’t move. They stand. So too… Dylan’s towering catalogue.

Today we stare into the musico-cultural abyss of what is now call “singer-songwriting;” or the the catch-all swamp referred to as Americana music. Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and a few others, soar like endangered eagles above the polluted waters. Sean Willentz has fashioned an important book which provides a key to young writers, as well as all of us who might wish to learn what “homework” the Bard, Dylan, might have done as he moved through his changes and absorbed the wonders of our diverse musical heritage.

Ondale! Back to work on my own Watts Towers. Praise the Lord and pass me a shard of glass, a sea shell, a splinter of tile… a broken rhyme.

Cante Moderna

2010-09-20T12:09:00.000-07:00

Now the music divides us into tribes.

Arcade Fire

My horse “Modern Song” came in 20 to 1 at Del Mar. I had sixty bucks to spend back on art and song. In a West Coast coffee joint I bought three records: Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs;” then a re-mastered version of the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and finally, Jimmy Webb’s new one: “Just Across the River.” Three explorations into modern song. Arcade Fire, an indie band from Canada, sings up life and death in suburbia. The songs are decent. There’s the usual wispy, indie vocal sound – and the hand-printed lyric book which implies “ah, gee whiz, here’s our poetry.” That’s ok. It works as a soundtrack for this “indie age.” Tolerable good.

Then I put on Sergeant Peppers’. Luckily I put it on second. My God. Have not listened to this in 20 years. I assumed it would sound like a dated psychedelic artifact. Naw. This is a record about loneliness, depression, age, death, suicide…masked in a circus-musico format. The end of the world at Coney Island, with raunch guitars, superb vocal arrangements, and gut wrenching singing. It’s the Beatles, of course. Unfair to compare them with anyone else. This was like finding a forgotten Van Gogh in the closet. The record was recorded on a four track tape machine 33 years ago. Where has our technology taken us? I would borrow from William S. Burroughs in inferring that modern digital technology may be leading us toward boredom and oblivion… much like the Burroughs’ character who taught his anus to talk as a circus trick. Pretty soon the anus talked by itself and the man’s mouth and brain atrophied. But, ah, this Peppers record! Bob Dylan is pictured on the cover next to Simon Rodia, the man who built the Watts Towers. It’s modern carny folk art. Dig.

Then I put on Jimmy Webb. Only Webb could have written pop standards about a Wichita telephone Lineman; a lovesick guy cleaning his gun and dreaming of Galveston (recorded here with Lucinda Williams), and a man who leaves his girl on the West Coast and drives across the Southwest, singing up the lonely landscape - like songline-walking aboriginals. Webb is able to compose short odes to the common man; with a “pop” feel. His songs manifest the lyrical and melodic qualities of intelligent, hip Broadway show songs. It’s hard to pull off. They’re built to last forever. Like 1959 Cadillacs.

The three records rotated around the truck radio. Finally, to clean the palette, I put in an old record by flamenco singer Camaron de La Isla. Camaron was junkie who died twenty years ago in Spain. 100,000 people attended the funeral. He is sainted.This is guttural, throat bleeding gypsy soul, to the rhythm of hand claps and hammer on anvil. Primal. Not for the faint of heart. Subterranean. Moorish. Ole! Cante hondo! Modern Song.

(Jimmy Webb and Jesse Winchester will be on our January train: see: www.rootsontherails.com)

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

2010-08-31T14:42:00.000-07:00

On the fourth of July we went to the Swiss circus. The lions and tigers were gone. The elephants are next. Animal rights. Nobody took time to ask the animals how they wished to vote. The final act was the wire walker Freddy Knock. We were slapped in the heart by the performance. We were pulled into it; lifted up. Federico Garcia Lorca called it Duende: “dancing on the rim of the well.” Freddy Knock danced on the rim of the ancient well and he took the crowd with him. Freddy Knock walked up the diagonal wire, from the ground to the high wire; backwards. Over the crowd. Lorca sat up in his grave. Lorca declared Duende is experienced only in music, dance, spoken poetry, and bullfighting. Those were his original words. The word “bullfighting” has now been expunged from his internet profile. Our world is being edited down and out by and political correctors and terrorists of the modern soul. Guardians in the watch tower. The truth has gone the way of elephants and tigers. Gone south with the side shows. My summer vacation in the box. Stifling tho' it was becoming.

Dear Teacher: My summer reading included “Furious Love” about Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. The tale is one long passionate song of the Welsh coal miner’s kid and a grown up child actress, drinking their way across the Shakespearean stages of modern history. Ah! Virginia Wolf! This ain’t Brad and Angelina, kids. This ain’t no paper moon under a cardboard sky. Burton drank because: “life is big and it blinds you.” Taylor drank because she could. They married twice; the flunkies at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London had to keep moving the Burton’s wax figures in and out of the display to follow the romantic changes. Two art lives. Burning. Blood in the water.

I kept thinking about the circus. And our moral watchdogs. Left Wing. Right Wing. Up Wing. Down Wing. We live in a box, and point fingers at the other box. We are protected by flimsy bullet proof vests of moral and political superiority. We save animals and recycle our wine bottles; or we praise our white God as we curse Obama as a Muslim. We watch MSNBC or Fox News, we take sides. The fake spit of outrage runs down the pancake-painted chins of our puppet-faced talk show hosts and newscasters. We create new forms of faux-concern at floods, earthquakes and cartel wars. We are good, and our goodness is slipped into an envelope addressed to a benefit funding. Tax deductible. But we can’t find our pulse or heartbeat, and soul is something that died with James Brown and Otis Redding. We can no longer paint or write songs or novels. The emotions of our artists and writers are cartoonish; fleeting. Politically corrected. We whine; therefore we are. Our blood is kool aid.

And Freddy Knock, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton danced up the diagonal wire. Backwards. On my summer vacation.

Where Is Holden Caulfield When We Need Him?

2010-06-30T09:27:00.000-07:00

An airport. Somewhere. Leafing through an April 29 copy of Rolling Stone, which is bleating about “40 Reasons to be Excited About Music.” “The future is here and it rocks.” Spare me. The present is here and it limps. Their reason #9 was the only cool one: “You can still see Chuck Berry play once a month.” This is all we have left for a music mag, whilst England, with 1/6^th the population of the U.S., swings with about ten major and well writ music publications; plus the BBC programming of shows designed to seek out the wide history and world fronts of great music: rock, jazz, classical, blues, folk, world… what have you. But wait, next time I pick up a "Rolling Stone" they’re featuring the 500 best rock songs ever written. Desperate now. The lists roll out with there’s nothing else to write about. I might agree with some of their song choices…here’s the kicker. Over 90% of their 500 best songs ever written were written before 1970. The summation is there ain’t been much to be excited about in the last forty years - with all our bleating, digital gadgetry, conferences, alliances, SXSW, “how to write songs” cartoon books, posturing circus rap, and lack of human artistic character. The chaos has led us, with our little IPOD head phones on, into the death throes of popular song. We’ve pulled the carpet out from under the original voice. We’ve lost our ability to speak in passionate musical tongue. Mostly. Sorta. Is it waxing nostalgic to go back and re- dig “Exile on Main Street,” or “Highway 61 Revisited?” It’s raw necessity. Nostalgia you say? Is there anything nostalgic about digging some of those Van Gogh paintings? They look like they were painted this morning. They drip blood. Like Highway 61 and Exile. We are a bloodless nation now. Where are the painters, writers, songwriters, novelists and good plumbers? Why don’t dentists use laughing gas anymore? Huh? My job is to shut up and write a song. I know that. I shall try, amigos. Every morning. Meanwhile “Rolling Stone,” struggling for something to write about, centers less on real music and more on throwing spitballs, sliders, curves and head dusters at the current president, whom they helped elect - and the were the first to turn against. We’ve got “freelance” journalists sucker punching American Generals over free drinks in Paris whiskey bars in the name of cheap shot, rummy journalism and sensationalism. And, aw, those interminable lists they throw out. Ah, hell. Where is Holden Caulfield when we need him? Old Holden would tell us what’s phony and what ain’t. It’s Barnum and Bailey time. There’s a paper moon hanging over a cardboard sea. But its happy hour, friends. I promise to write that song in the morning. I’ll open up and vein and see what drips down on paper then I’ll go paint something while blasting “Exile on Main Street (the re-issue) from my ghetto blaster.

Zarzyski

2010-05-23T13:05:00.000-07:00

We come face to hard face with something
preserved here in ice, something familiar
we left for dead decades ago – our reflection
warm, alive, rousing, wild.
"The Make-Up of Ice"
Paul Zarzyski

He came out of Northern Wisconsin. Polish-Italian. Blue collar-blooded. A boy who’d memorized the names of trees, fish, fish hooks, birds, rocks, and the varieties of Polish and Italian stews. This Zarzyski kid loves stews: posole or ciappino. And pies! Pumpkin, Dutch Apple, Huckleberry. James Joyce said there’s the sound of words; the sound of words hitting against words, and the sound between words. Zarzyski knows this rattle dance. He loves the idea of concoction; food or words. He gives reverence to the names. They roll of his lips, down onto the page, and then back off his recitation tongue. Poetry can be holy; if you know the weight of the word. Zarzo knows. Hosanna.
Gary Snyder, in “What You Need to Know to be a Poet,” says a poet should know: “The names of trees and flowers and weeds, the names of stars, and the movements of the planets and the moon…real danger, gamble, and the edge of death…at least one kind of traditional magic.” Zarzyski grasps this; he knows the make-up of ice. This Polish kid, Zarzo, moved West and became a bronc rider. Then he wrote about THAT. Hanging off a bareback bronc; face-bound for a fence pole or a six inch square of bovine night-soil, he found out about “gamble and the edge of death” and how to create poetry out of raw-nerve experience. He got his Lit degree. Studied under Richard Hugo. Hid out in Great Falls, Montana, in a motel bar that has a shark tank behind it. Zarzyski. Rhymes with bar-whiskey. Means “bard” in Polish.
Forty years ago, a college professor said Bob Dylan killed off the need for American poetry; forever. Dylan created a transcendent mix of music and poetic-verse that made page-poetry a less important form; and there was no going backwards. Damn true. Mostly. There is a short list of great poets left in America. They are as scarce as good songwriters, painters and classical composers. Zarzyski is in that handful. He is our much needed Poet-Laureate. He climbed the mountain, saw the elephant, rode the bronc, and came back down to tell us about it - with fish hooks in his cowboy hat; posole and tequila dribbling down his Polack-Dago chin. Words growing wild.
And finally….his friend Joe Lear died in a bull riding - Zarzyski wrote one of the finest American poems of the last 100 years: “All This Way For the Short Ride:”

“It’s impossible, when dust
settling to the backs of large animals
makes a racket you can’t think in,
impossible to conceive that pure fear,
whether measured in degrees of cold
or heat, can both freeze
and incinerate so much
in mere seconds…”

Amen, Zarzo, amen.

Check out: www. http://www.paulzarzyski.com/
(Zarzyski rides the train with the Flatlanders and TR in September, see: www.rootsontherails.com or write trains@sover.net)

Lean On Pete

2010-05-10T09:54:00.000-07:00

It was in the midst of a phone interview in Dublin or Belfast and the writer asked me if I’d heard of Willy Vlautin. Willy’s the leader of a band called Richmond Fontaine. I’d heard good things about the band, I said. “Well,” says the interviewer, “you ought to check out his novels. You’d appreciate his writing.” I winced. I’ve given up on current fiction. Most of it. Regardless of what the “New York Times” or “The New Yorker” may be laying on us, I don’t have time for the pretentious, vacuous cooing of the step-children of Joyce Carol Oates and Paul Auster. I usually give up after one page if I get the impression novelists are “writing At me,” with prose meant to impress with arch-style and form, rather than heartfelt content and well drawn believable characters. I don’t want to be constantly jerked out of the story in boredom and disgust. If there even IS a story. If I don’t care what the hell happens to the main characters or characters in a story I usually lay the book down or turn off the movie. I’d rather paint. You get the picture. Ditto songs and records.

But I got in touch with Willy Vlautin and he sent me his three novels. I’ve read “The Motel Life;” a damn good saga about the backside of Reno and two brothers living in seedy motels. I just finished Willy’s most recent book, “Lean on Pete,” about a kid who steals a broke-down race horse. Willy writes as if he’s the bastard child of Raymond Carver, with a little Salinger thrown into the mix. Other critics have mentioned Steinbeck. (Literary comparisons are a cheap shot. Sorry…they’re easy to toss around to make a quick point.) Willy Vlautin’s “voice” carries on the tone of the kid in Raymond Carver’s story: “Nobody Said Anything;” the voice of an American “kid” who’s telling us about his journey. Honest. Simple. It’s difficult to pull this off if you’re cute or insincere. Salinger slam-dunked the approach with “The Catcher in the Rye.” Holden Caulfield has our attention from the git-go with: “If you really want to hear about it….etc.” And then Holden’s breakdown spills out.

Willy told me he writes at the old Portland Meadows Race Track. Perfect. I believe the kid telling the tale in “Lean on Pete.” I grew up on the backside of Hollywood Park Race Track, and I’ve seen the hot walker and groom routine; and the junkies and winos and all the dirt of horse racing. I even owned a broke down race horse named “My Chief.” If our moral watchdogs think bullfighting is cruel, they ought to spend a season on the backside of a racetrack. And Willy Vlautin nails it.

Go get ‘em Willy. You’re a stretch runner.

(Also recommended: “The Circus at the Edge of the Earth” by Charles Wilkins. A non-fiction book on the Circus Wallenda.)

Blood on the Saddle

2010-04-20T14:39:00.000-07:00

I was painting an adobe wall in my cantina; blood red; found a stack of long playing albums. Tex Ritter’s “Blood on the Saddle” leaning on Marty Robbins’ “Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs.” If God made two better cowboy records (to paraphrase W.S. Burroughs) he kept them to his glorious self. Tex Ritter sang with the hang-dog snarl of a gravedigger with a thorn stuck in his craw. Bloody. Raw. His voice crawled up your backbone; the whisper of a hired killer pointing a gun at your back in a dark alley. “Barbara Allen,” “Streets of Laredo,” “Sam Hall,” “Sam Bass,” “Billy the Kid.” Deep Folklore from an authentico. Marty Robbins was the Pavarotti of Western song and was a helluva writer. Contemporary cowboy poetry and song pales by comparison. Non-dairy creamer. (Except for Ian Tyson and Pablo Zarzyski.) Ah, but Tex Ritter! Otis Blackwell, who wrote many of Elvis Presley’s early hits, told me once that Tex was his favorite singer. The Tex Ritter cowboy attitude, imbued within the rolling rhythms of Blackwell’s “All Shook Up” and “Don’t Be Cruel,” created the tone of some of the finest early rock.

Here’s a brief Tex Ritter anecdote: we were up in the French alps one dark night; visiting the widow of the famous painter Count Balthus - Countess Setsuko - a beautiful Japanese lady whom Balthus had often painted. We were invited to tea in the ancient chalet. A spectacular, five storey ornate structure on the side of forested mountain. Spooky. The countess received us in a formal manner; dressed in a kimono and wooden slippers. She began asking us questions about our lives. Picasso and Balthus paintings stared down from the wall. The conversation rattled safely and stiffly along; until I told her I wrote and sang songs. “What sort of songs?” she asked. “All sorts,” I said. Then she squinted and looked me in the eye: “Do you ever sing cowboy songs?” “Yes,” I said. “The dark ones?” she asked. “Dark? You mean like Tex Ritter?” I asked. Her eyes widened and she clapped her hands together and almost jumped out of her antique chair. “Ah, yes! Tex Ritta! Tex Ritta! I love Tex Ritta!” She called the house boy to bring the whiskey decanter and I sang a little of “High Noon.” I closed my eyes and somewhere a pisterlero was galloping his horse along a high ridge as a gunfighter was riding in on a train to kill Gary Cooper. Grace Kelly was catching the next stage out. “Do not forsake me, oh my darling, on this our wedding day…..”Tex Ritter’s voice castes a long shadow across our minstrel history. It resonates with the true grit and gen of the noir folklore stuff we’re looking for in cowboy and gunfighter ballads. Out on the eternal frontier. Go ask Countess Setsuko.

“There was blood on the saddle, and blood all around, and a great big puddle, of blood on the ground…a cowboy lay in it…”

Old Harmonica Boxes

2010-03-14T13:17:00.000-07:00

We were kids. Aged 12 or 14 or so, with and older friend named Eddie who was 16 and could drive a car. We were in the park lot, back of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium, maybe 1962, talking to Bob Dylan. Dylan had just finished a concert to a half-filled auditorium; he’d recorded two LP records and was in his Charlie Chaplin phase of performing. Funny. Off the wall. Forming the early chapters of a deep catalogue. Hell, we were kids who grew up listening to our parents Harry Belafonte “Calypso” records. This Bob Dylan was our James-Joycean dream-ticket out of the suburbs. I didn’t tell the other kids that I’d decided that’s what I wanted to be. What this guy did with words and music. THAT thing.
There he was, sitting in a Ford station wagon, waiting for his road manager to come back with the money. Our friend Eddie had an empty harmonica box and he handed it to Dylan to sign. Then Bob Dylan looked at me and said: “Heh, kid, where’s the nearest liquor store?” I told Bob Dylan I was too young to drink. I didn’t know where the nearest liquor store was, or where the chicks hung out, or where the weed was stashed, or any of that good stuff. I was a Catholic school kid with braces and bad eyes. A day-dreamer; sand castle-builder. But maybe Bob was speaking in code and inviting me along on his song journey. “Heh, you…kid! Let’s go…”
The road manager appeared and they took off down the road. We took off after them; Eddie had the pedal to the metal. Following Bob Dylan into history. Or something. They saw we were behind them and pulled over. We pulled over too. Dylan jumped out, laughing and dancing around our car; like a drunken Whirling Dervish. Then he jumped back in his car and they vanished into the Big Time. I thought it was all a dream; but I guess it happened. Hell, I shook hands with Jack Kennedy once and saw the Dali Lama; but this was better. Dylan travelled his high road; I struggled on, until I had the guts to begin writing songs. And the seasons whirled round and round; the circles closed.
Almost fifty years later somebody handed me the new Clarence Clemmons book (Springsteen’s Sax Player) called “Big Man.” Clarence mentions a song I wrote with with Dave Alvin, “Haley’s Comet;” Springsteen says: “Man I wished I’d written that…” Deeper into the book there’s a dream sequence where Bob Dylan is telling Kinky Freidman: “Joe (Ely) did a hell of a song tonight about a rooster…a Tom Russell song…it’s good. It’s called ‘Gallo del Cielo,’…and I’m hard to impress.” I don’t know if that transpired. It’s in there, though. It takes me back to when he asked me where that liquor store was…that secret code urging me to get started. Songwriting…and now I’m wondering if Eddie still has that old harmonica box.

Knife Thrower's Sonata

2010-02-22T16:48:00.000-08:00

The Knife Thrower’s Sonata

“Hemingway did his work, and he’ll last. Any biographer who gives him less than this, granting the chaos of his public and personal life, might just as well as write the biography of an anonymous grocer, or a wooly mammoth. Hemingway, the writer – he’s still the hero of the story, however it unfolds.” Raymond Carver

My mother taught me: never leave the house without a book. You might get stuck in a line out there. The waiting room of a dentist’s office. Freeway. Runway. I left for Europe with a bag of heavy books, which included: “The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink;” with fine essays by Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Leibling. Also books about two Raymonds: Chandler and Carver. The Chandler bio by Hinney, and the new Raymond Carver bio by Carol Skelenicka. Chandler was a maestro of hard-boiled detective literature – and Carver brought suburban noir-realism to the American short story. Both writers mastered American lingo, character and the backwater emotional landscapes of the Promised Land. Both men pretty much drank themselves into the graves. Writers. Sagas of two Americans who traversed the nether land of fame and publishing world. Critics – Hollywood – fortune – loss – redemption. Marriage ups and downs. Drink. The carny wheel spins round: Drunk. Sober. Drying Out. Off the wagon. Under the wagon. They wrote their way through all of it. Chandler (after he was dead of course) was slagged by some fellow writers, including popular novelist Joyce Carol Oates – who declared Chandler and his detective Marlowe: “racist and misogynist.” Oh, Christ, please. New York critics deemed Carver’s work dreary and depressing. Welcome to the world of high brow, arch-political correctness and snobbery. Look out, folks; here comes the “new fiction!” The children of Joyce Carol Oates. Boring me to tears. But ah, Chandler and Carver…it’s a reminder of the work; then the later criticism of Hemingway –Hem’s work may seem dated to some; overly macho to others; out of date and style. But much of it will last because it was made with an artist’s honesty and passion; an accurate ear, a proven B.S. detector; and a whittled character that is lacking in much of today’s fiction. Style. But, oh mama, the morally-toned snobs love to kick the old lions when they’re down or dead. Ah, the hyenas and knife throwers…enough!...some final words from Chandler:

“Apparently Hemingway was very sick when he wrote the book (“Across the River and Into The Trees”) and he put down in a rather cursory way how that made him feel…I suppose those primping second guessers who call themselves critics think he shouldn’t have written the book at all. Most men wouldn’t have…that’s the difference between a champ and a knife thrower, the champ may have lost his stuff temporarily or permanently, he can’t be sure. But when he can no longer throw the high hard one, he throws his heart instead. He throws something. He doesn’t just walk off the mound and weep.”