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Lou Reed comes into sharp perspective in new Jim Higgins book

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Courtesy Trouser Press

Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground,

By Jim Higgins, 250 pages, paperback and e-book, Trouser Press, $20 *

Lou Reed (1924-2013) was the musical bard of New York as the quintessential East Coast big city. He’s worth comparing to Bob Dylan, the great musical poet from the Heartland – who’s certainly America’s greatest poet-musician. Still, it’s worth pondering such a comparison (Brian Wilson might be a West Coast comparable).

In his new book Sweet, Wild and Vicious: Listening to Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, Jim Higgins assesses Lou Reed in depth and, for me, even invites such comparisons. Thus, he provides a deepening sense of a major artist’s experience and interpretation of his part of America, the oldest and most diverse part, no less.

Higgins is well known in Milwaukee as the book page editor and an arts writer for The Milwaukee-Journal Sentinel. He previously authored Wisconsin Literary Luminaries: From Laura Ingalls Wilder to Ayad Akhtar.  

I am a Lou Reed fan but didn’t fully appreciate him until I read this book. Now I’ll continue to explore more fully his oeuvre. I’ve discovered a couple fabulous Reed albums I should’ve known about, The Bells, with the great jazz trumpeter/world-musician Don Cherry and The Blue Mask.

Higgins is a consistently insightful and skilled writer. For example, regarding The Blue Mask, he comments on Reed and Robert Quine on the first two songs: Hear “how gently and beautifully those two famously noisy guitarists are playing. It’s like their making lace out of quarter notes.”

Though a supreme wordsmith Reed invariably realized how important the music was to a song’s success.  His singing, sometimes stentorian, had a surprising range of expression, and his guitar was nearly comparable to, say, Neil Young’s as a singer-songwriter’s adjunct. 1

Lou Reed’s guitar was an important adjunct voice to his art. Courtesy Billboard

So, hats off to Higgins. However, with such a labor-intensive, inclusive survey of a long music career — 50 albums! — the author at times becomes rather workman-like, amid the weeds. He understandably spends a lot of time with specific songs, separating the wheat from the chaff and commenting on the chaff, perhaps fearing he’ll otherwise come off as too hagiographic?

He needn’t worry. His praise and criticism read largely as astute and he often qualifies by saying it’s his opinion or taste choice. And he dutifully acknowledges his predecessors: especially Reed biographer Anthony DeCurtis, and “dean-of-critics” Robert Christgau. So, he’s a knowledgeable and humbly likeable guide who educated me in the substantial depths of Reed’s extensive catalog. His appreciation of the ground-breaking Velvet Underground as a musical band is especially enlightening.

However, I wanted a bit more courage of convictions. He says the title song of Street Hassle “was Reed’s most deliberate attempt at a masterpiece to that point.” His detailed description almost amounts to an argument for “masterpiece.” Along with his comments, I’d call “Hassle” a masterpiece. The extended cello motif beautifully weaves together an 11-minute, three-movement suite, an urban tragedy: the first movement “Waltzing Matilda,” is romantic, the second, “Street Hassle,” cold-eyed about fatal “bad luck,” the third, “Slipaway,” a wrenchingly authentic cry over lost love. Using (uncredited) Bruce Springsteen’s husky voice to extend the chilling second movement feels brilliant, as a contrasting sort of monotone witness, which allows Reed’s voice the drama of spilling his heart in the last movement. Plus, Reed’s use of the phrase “slip away” takes on three very different meanings in each segment. Yeah, masterpiece, worth rehearing repeatedly.

Lou Reed and “The Banana Album” that made him famous as a cult figure, at least. Courtesy Newsweek

Higgins does fine justice to the career-launching “Heroin” from 1967’s The Velvet Underground & Nico, the album that secured the band’s fame. Rock music never had (nor has since) a more laceratingly honest and audaciously immersive evocation of drug addiction. And delusional: “and I feel just like Jesus’ son.” Higgins narrates the song’s tell-tale form: “ ‘Heroin’ begins as gently as a folk song, but speeds up four times in imitation of the rush the addict feels, ebbing each time to a doubled statement of defeat. (John) Cale’s electric viola drones throughout, until it shatters into shrieks during the final rush.” For me, a stone masterpiece, revealing early Reed’s courageous genius.

At times Higgins does go out on interesting limbs, asserting that Mott the Hoople’s take on “Sweet Jane” on All The Young Dudes is the best version of a signature Reed song. However, he then extolls The Cowboy Junkies’ far more tender rendition of “Jane,” so you have your pick of several recommended interpretations, another valuable critic’s task of digging through the music catalog. One provocatively bouncing limb he hits too timidly: He could’ve praised the potency of the song “Sex with Your Parents (Motherfucker), Part II” on Set the Twilight Reeling, which is a laugh-out-loud skewering of hypocritical right-wing holier-than-thous. More controversy over it would’ve been something to see.

As DeCurtis reported, Laurie Anderson’s tribute to her spouse in Rolling Stone for the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame is extraordinary, eloquent and fascinating though she says “he was kind, he was hilarious, he was never cynical.”

She must’ve cured him of that unless he was way misunderstood at times. And it’s amazing that Anderson apparently, in his eyes, was a woman “of a thousand faces,” whom he wanted to marry, as referenced in “Trade In” on Twilight. Given that desire’s impossibility she must’ve been a miracle soul mate. Over years before, Reed did unforgivable things to people he loved and treated sweetly just as quickly.

Anderson knew his badness, or of it, but their love lasted for 21 years until his death.

Also, I think the title song of Twilight hardly “strains for profundity,” as Higgins says. In a simple arrangement, it’s about learning to let go of regrets, accept himself “as the new found man” and “set the twilight reeling.” It may be too poetical for some but it takes plenty for anyone, especially this complex and troubled, to accept himself.

I understand the new found man as the man in the historical “new found land” ie: America. Like his image of Anderson, it’s a bit self-mythologizing but also humblingly honest. It’s also self-absolution, but saying as much to us. That’s all very Lou Reed, to me. The album’s most telling, acidic and profound song is “NYC Man,” with Oliver Lake’s lovely horn arrangement. It’s much more confessional than the title song, so Reed’s not really hiding behind his poetry, even if its dense, literary text is Dylanesque.

Among the book’s distinctive features is “Children of The Velvet Underground,” persuasively surveying the many artists influenced by Reed’s path-forging group, such as David Bowie, Jonathan Richman, Sonic Youth, Nick Cave, Yo La Tengo, and Milwaukee’s Violent Femmes.

Another group of valuable features (especially for iPod users) involves Higgins combing through the repertoire to come up with “One Hour with Lou Reed” in the 1960s (The Velvet Underground era) and likewise through the ‘90s, by choosing exemplary songs of each decade.

Three of his selected songs for “The ‘90s and beyond” are from Magic and Loss, an album serving as a nakedly poetic elegy to the agonizing cancer death of singer-songwriter Doc Pomus, seemingly the father figure in Reed’s life. Among the album’s numerous luminous moments Reed likens radiation treatment to “The Sword of Damocles hanging over your heard,” giving the man’s death mythical resonance. Higgins however, asserts that Magic and Loss is merely one half of a great album. Hmm. I just know when I first heard it, Reed carried me right through and, by its end, I was stunned into silent reverie, a bit like hearing “A Day in the Life” for the first time. Deeply shaded with superb writing, this underappreciated album is a chiaroscuro masterpiece. Or perhaps “classic” is better if “masterpiece” seems too exalted a term for such a muted work.

Lou Reed and spouse Laurie Anderson. Courtesy Medium

Reed’s best songs and albums feel as real and poetically moving as any American sing-songwriter of his generation, in that sense comparable to Townes Van Zandt, or more recently the more storytelling James McMurtry, very different stylistic geniuses of yet another fecund American region of singer-songwriters, Texas.

Being married to an atmospherically avant musician-artist like Laurie Anderson helped Reed understand himself as a kind of literary musician-artist of substantial merit. He was unafraid to do a somewhat over-reaching album-length interpretation of Edgar Allan Poe (The Raven, 2003), choked with notable actor-reciters and guest artists. To be sure, this was Lou Reed’s Poe, nobody else’s. As Melville said, “It is better to fail at originality than to succeed at imitation.”

Higgins’s valuable book expands the lens of perspective in our experience of our best songwriters portraying and illuminating America.

____________

* The Higgins book is available at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave., in Milwaukee and directly from Trouser Press. Here’s a link to the author’s May reading from Sweet, Wild and Vicious, at Boswell, with a live interview with Journal-Sentinel music writer Piet Levy:

https://youtu.be/kUdP2I-f7K4?si=Uje371AqePKLh0N0

  1. Higgins delves into the underappreciated significance of Reed’s guitar playing. One of his nifty sidebar features is “One Hour with Lou Reed and his guitar,” listing ten songs that showcase his guitar work. The list includes the live version of “Heroin” from 1969: The Velvet Underground Live, which Higgins suggests is his second favorite VU album after their debut album (known colloquially as “The Banana Album”).

Culture Currents nabs a 2023 award for “best critical review” from Milwaukee Press Club

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A Culture Currents review of saxophonist Miguel Zenon and pianist Luis Perdomo (above) won a 2023 Milwaukee Press Club award for “best critical review.”

The Milwaukee Press Club is the oldest extant press club in the world, it claims, so there’s baked-in gravitas to the annual journalism awards it gives out. All judges are out-of state to maintain integrity in this state-wide cemptition.

Culture Currents won it’s third award from the press club for best critical review, after two previous first-place gold awards. This time it received a silver, which is second place.

Culture Current’s Kevernacular (Kevin Lynch) displays his 2023 silver award for “best critical review” from The Milwaukee Press Club. Photo by Ann K. Peterson

I happened to read the three finalist entries for “best critical review” and I would concur with the judges on the top prize for best review. It went to coverage of a remake of Edward Albee’s laceratingly acerbic play “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” staged by the Milwaukee Chamber Theater. The review was written for Urban Milwaukee by Dominique Noth, coincidentally my editor many years ago, at the old pre-merger Milwaukee Journal. Features editor at the time, Dom was always a highly accomplished theater and film critic, and proved it once again. His review commented comparatively with his memory of seeing the play on Broadway in the early 1960s.

The bronze award for criticism went to another former colleague of mine, Rob Thomas, long-time pop music and film critic for The Cap Times in Madison, for his excellent review of Bruce Springsteen live in Milwaukee.

Culture Currents received the silver award for its review “Miguel Zenon builds a bridge from his Puerto Rican soul to the world.” The subject was a sublimely affecting and lyrical duo concert by MacArthur “Genius” Award-Winner saxophonist Miguel Zenon and his longtime mate  pianist Luis Perdomo at The Art + Lit Lab for the 2023 the Madison Jazz Festival. In a program titled “El Arte del Bolero,” they interpreted popular songs they grew up with in their native Puerto Rico and it was a pan-cultural revelation. Here’s the review:

https://kevernacular.com/?p=15647

The awards were presented at the annual Gridiron Awards Dinner at the Pfister Hotel, always a highlight of the year in Wisconsin journalism. The event always features two “newsmaker award” winners, one of whom was ex-Packer Hall of Famer Leroy Butler.

Leroy, one of the most popular and celebrated athletes in Wisconsin,  was charmingly humble and funny in his acceptance speech.

Green Bay Packer Hall of Famer Leroy Butler (right, with a local news reporter) received a “Newsmaker” award at the 2024 Milwaukee Press Club Gridiron Awards Dinner.

The event “climaxes” with a speech by a nationally known figure in journalism. In this case that was James Bennet, former editor-in-chief at The Atlantic magazine, and former Editorial Page Editor at The New York Times, when the page won two Pulitzers. He’s currently a columnist at The Economist.

Bennet was a trenchant political and journalistic commentator and impressed us by explaining he’d read a certain sampling of our entries — not anything he was requested to do — and felt heartened by the quality of our work. He even mentioned Dominique’s review of the Albee play. Such recognition is something for Wisconsin journalists to build on in an uncertain future for the profession.

_____________

Milwaukee radio music icon Bob Reitman is retiring but remains unforgotten

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Bob Reitman and his WUWM-FM co-host, son Bob Reitman III, celebrating his 49th anniversary on radio. He retired recently after 57 years as a radio host. Courtesy Shepherd Express

Bob Reitman was always too hip to be avuncular, and yet there was always a knowing and deeply-informed manner about his music presentation over the decades. We heard and felt the easy warmth of his delivery and his concise commentary, as if you were listening to someone you could relate to even if he wasn’t related.

So what was he? it’s not too much to call him the Oracle of Alternate Milwaukee Radio, arisen in the 1960s, the man of music and poetry which shaped my generation and so music of music that ensued.

So Reitman live on the air is gone, his vibrations, sagely crafted and often transporting, now swallowed into the sounds of silence and perhaps time’s regain, imprinted on our memories.

There should be recordings of his show online. And there are intimations of more things to come on the Facebook Page of his WUWM show, titled “It’s Allright Ma (It’s Only Music)”.

I listened to him not enough in his final years co-hosting on Thursdays with his son, Bob Reitman III, on WUWM-FM, the last music program the station allowed as it moved to a talk and news radio format. He commanded that much respect. Like others, I probably assumed subconsciously he’d go on forever. At least he’s still alive, unlike too many of his important cultural contemporaries.

After all, radio was the medium in which we first experienced the explosions and sublime adventures of a generation of musicians who seemed fearless, wild and charismatic in their creative fire. And the new culture was driven by a new power of mind and spirit-expanded possibility and of protest. Through those historic decades of transformation we always had Reitman on our side. He persisted on Milwaukee radio for more than a half century.

Reitman also co-founded Milwaukee’s original alternative “underground” newspaper Kaleidoscope, as a central figure in the citiy’s alternative culture. I don’t know how much actual writing he did for the newspaper, but I do see an interview he did with rock “genius” Frank Zappa in an online PDF of an early issue.

But if there was a music journalist with the sensibility closely akin to Reitman’s it was probably Rich Mangelsdorff. So I will let him, in a Kaleidoscope essay, define a bit of the music that both he and Reitman were exploring and promoting back in the day:

“Serious rock is a constant pushing forward of the shores of awareness, expanding the frontiers of sound and, as the liner notes to Jimi Hendrix’ album state: “put(ting) the heads of . . . listeners into some novel positions,” i.e. consciousness expansion. . . 

Bob Dylan’s decision to merge Woody Guthrie/Cisco Houston materials and sentiments with a rock sound (aided by blues-group musicians such as Mike Bloomfield and Al Kooper) gave rise to the multi-level lyric style which is universally employed in serious rock. More tunes are direct referents to the psychedelic experience than anyone but an initiate could realize. Most can be interpreted two or three ways, easily. The best are like multi-faceted jewels allowing the mind limitless play with associations and meanings.” 

— Courtesy Mike Zetteler’s blog Zonyx Report 

So what Mangelsdorff dubbed “serious rock” or even “high rock” was Reitman’s bag, in spades, as much as poetic singer-songwriters. Spurred by the perhaps unprecedented spirit of cultural liberation the burgeoning Boomer generation had fed, the new rock drew on a rich array of American indigenous musics of African-Americans, as did jazz, the more self-consciously “serious” American music that I latched onto as a young aficionado and then as a music journalist.

For this reason I was personally somewhat closer to a man who paralleled Reitman’s career for a long time as a jazz disc jockey, Ron Cuzner (He later gave me a chance to succeed him when he departed from WLUM-FM). Both started at WUWM-FM  and Cuzner’s late-night program followed Reitman’s nine-to-midnight slot on WZMF and several other stations they both migrated to when their fairly pure artistic standards wore out their welcome, typically with a bottom line-minded change of station management.

And yet Reitman was who I listened to probably as much as Cuzner in those early years for being on at more amenable hours and for the rich diversity of his programming. For a while he hosted at both WUWM, on “It’s All Right, Ma (It’s Only Music),” a titular takeoff of a Bob Dylan song, and at WZMF, on “The Eleventh House.” He honed his craft on the former, a public radio show, then reached a wider audience on the commercial-but-alternative ZMF and ensuing stations, with listenership following him faithfully in his migration across the dial.

A seminal event for this listener was Reitman playing “East-West,” the transporting 13-minute-plus instrumental merging Eastern classical raga, John Coltrane and blues-rock, written by guitarist Mike Bloomfield and performed by the Butterfield Blues Band. I began to understand the broader and deeper implications of the new blues-rock, and its impulse to jam, but here with a marvelous sense of form, a relationship to jazz which I was concurrently delving deeper into. This was 1966, when the Butterfield album East-West was released, a year before the music from San Francisco emerged as “the summer of love” blossomed in a psychedelic array of colors and passion.

Of course, Reitman was also Milwaukee’s first public “Dylanologist” before the term was ever coined. Who knew Bob Dylan’s music better, or presented its most politically charged music, and the inner workings of his esoterically poetical lyrics?

This combination of qualities made Reitman must-listening in an era long before the Internet and relatively easy access to recordings online. We were blessed to have the music curated by someone so gifted and insightful.

By the late 1980s, however, perhaps in the spirit of that decade, Reitman set aside his easy self-seriousness for a hidden inner performer, and did a two-man comic banter show on WKTI with Gene Mueller. The duo gained unprecedented visibility for Reitman, “pulling ridiculous stunts, hosting unhinged television specials, and even appearing on an episode of Cheers.” as Milwaukee Record recently noted.

Yet there’s another major aspect of the Godfather of Milwaukee Rock. The music experience on the radio made a quantum leap when the music became a live performance with both local groups and touring groups hitting the city.. And here again was Reitman at the fore, as the emcee for the most important and compelling of rock shows.

Fans have doubtless many memories of Reitman at the stage microphone making introductions. “My name is Reitman…” — a tall. slender figure adorned in black jeans and T-shirt, and signature black leather vest. He was really never quite a hippie “flower child” sort. He was more, a la Lou Reed, an East Coast hipster. Reed’s bracingly naked confessional song “Heroin” recorded by The Velvet Underground was also a trademark Reitman offering, helping to define and challenge the sensibilities of the time. Reitman had something of Reed’s taut poetic sensibility, without the songwriter’s irritating personal foibles. He always sounded more like an older brother, whose record collection you loved to rifle through and play.

***

Reitman also served as the figurehead host for two of the most pivotal music events in  Milwaukee rock music history, which I attended. First was the three-day Midwest Rock Fest at State Fair Park in July of 1969, less than a month before Woodstock, with paper flyers promoting the forthcoming rural New York event wafting through the crowd like weed smoke.

Reitman oversaw and introduced all three days of a powerhouse lineup that may still be unequalled in the city’s history, including the freshly-minted supergroup Blind Faith, with Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Stevie Winwood, playing one of their first live gigs; Led Zeppelin; Joe Cocker; Jeff Beck; Johnny Winter; Jethro Tull; Bob Seeger; Kenny Rogers and the Fifth Edition; Delaney and Bonnie & Friends; Buffy Sainte-Marie; John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers; Taste, with Irish guitar virtuoso Rory Gallagher; the proto-punk band the MC5, and others, including Milwaukee’s Ox, a derivative of Clapton’s previous supergroup Cream.

Future pop superstar Kenny Rogers, far right, leads the First Edition at Milwaukee’s  Midwest Rock Fest in August 1969.

Clapton, Zepplin’s Jimmy Page, and Beck constituted the triumvirate of British blues rock guitar heroes at the time, a coup not even Woodstock could claim. Add emerging virtuoso Johnny Winter and Irish guitarist Rory Gallagher (see below) and the guitar ante is upped further. However, Blind Faith frankly seemed to be feeling their their way through their new repertoire. Still, Winwood’s effortlessly soulful singing shone. And Led Zeppelin — with Robert Plant’s overgrown trellis of blond hair and primal-scream voice rising from Hades, and Jimmy Page’s searing, ridiculously low-slug Gibson Les Paul blues guitar, sometimes played with a violin bow, amid John Bonham’s thunder ‘n’ lightning drums — made the most lasting group impression.

Drummer Ginger Baker of Blind Faith (left) talks with journalists at the Midwest Rock Fest at State Fair Park. Photo by Marc Dulberger

Oh yes, Ginger Baker’s exploding red hair mop and four whirling limbs delivered the most virtuosic rhythms of the fest. Yet the fest’s dark-horse winner was definitely the nearly unknown Irish power trio Taste, with Gallagher’s raucous singing and blistering guitar work. I’d rank him up with the triumvirate.

The fast-rising power trio Taste, led by Rory Gallagher (right) was the dark-horse winner among the many talented acts at Midwest Rock Fest in 1969.

This summer of ’69 was the brief, shining moment of the short-lived Golden Era of Rock Fests, with the dark clouds of Altamont in December looming on the horizon.

Reitman emceed another historic concert I saw: Bruce Springsteen, in 1975, when he was young and still relatively unknown enough to play a venue as small as Milwaukee’s Uptown, mainly a movie theater in the middle of Milwaukee. This was shortly after Springsteen’s album The Wild, The Innocent and the E-Street Shuffle and before the release of Born to Run.

Emcee Bob Reitman, right, with Bruce Springsteen and Stevie Van Zandt (center) on Oct. 2, 1975, at Milwaukee’s Uptown Theater. Springsteen speaks to the crowd after a bomb threat was called in, forcing an evacuation and temporary suspension of the show. Photo courtesy Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

About a half hour into the show, Reitman had to come back onstage — to stop Bruce and his Street Band flying in fourth gear (how often did that ever happen?) — and announce that a bomb scare had been reported. We looked at each other, uncomprehending the impossible. We felt suspended in a heavy, humid atmosphere of collective bodily energy permeating the packed theater. But everyone had to evacuate it. Still, Reitman said, if everything proved safe and secure, the concert would continue at midnight. Springsteen promised a full show. We all dispersed to various locales and waited with a mix of horrified angst and itchy anticipation.

Who knows how the word of “all clear” got out (maybe on Reitman’s radio station) but most of us returned with, well, only blind faith.

By midnight, the place was completely packed again, and Springsteen, with a huge “where-ya-all-been” grin, and a “one-two-three-four!” relit his band’s own fiery fuse. With big saxophone honker Clarence Clemons riding shotgun, Bruce and the boys rolled down Thunder Road for at least another 190 minutes, into the wee small hours of the morning! Springsteen had hit another crest in the breaking dawn of legend. I doubt very many of his concert-goers slept much that night.

Bruce Springsteen (by then rather intoxicated according to a bandmember) performing after midnight at the Uptown when the bomb threat had been cleared. Photo by Robert Cavallo 

That seems a long time ago, but the weird and then exultant vibes of that night remain etched in my memory. And Reitman was our cultural conduit, as he has remained, though increasingly as a sort of Boomer nostalgia act, to be honest. Yet, there’s still power and value in that deep, vibrating thread of American history.

Thanks, Bob.

For a fine, concise biographic sketch of Reitman, check out Shepherd Express‘s Dave Luhrssen: https://shepherdexpress.com/news/community-news/bob-reitman-retires-from-milwaukee-radio/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=What+was+Bob+Reitman+s+influence+on+Milwaukee+radio%3F&utm_campaign=Daily+News+Friday+April+19%2C+2024

“Once Were Brothers” traces the mythical saga of The Band, through Robbie Robertson’s lens

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“We few, we proud, we band of brothers.” — Shakespeare, Henry V

Once Were Brothers: Robbie Robertson and The Band, a documentary film by Daniel Roher, plays at 4:15 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, at the Oriental Theater, 2230 N. Farwell Ave, Milwaukee, WI 53202 (414) 276-5140

__________

This story needed to be told again, on Robbie Robertson’s terms, even as it needs telling from all five. Three are gone, so Robbie the wordsmith stands best to speak here, anew and anon. And The Band started with him; it’s roots arose when he converged with Levon Helm and Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. But this needed to be told because the Band lasted too short a time for the America it embraced and re-imagined, the nation that needed a band like this, to remind us who and what America was, and is, and might be.

For perhaps no other American vernacular band compressed more talent into one entity, like pages of a tattered book filled with dried and pressed leaves, shadows and light, and music of American spheres. It was a great North American band, comprising four Canadians and one Arkansan, who embodied “Canadian driftwood, gypsy tailwind,” as they regaled us on one of their late, great saga-songs.

We need this story because, well, as the venerable roots purveyor Taj Mahal asserts here, they are the closest we have to the American Beatles. Daniel Roher’s film provides classic and never-published photos and film footage of their life in Woodstock. N.Y. and at the house called Big Pink, on the road, and reflections from most band members, but mainly Robertson’s and those of his wife Dominique, their road manager and some celebrated others.

But Mahal’s claim begs examination, because the band’s peak years lasted less than the Beatles. Both bands emerged from, and remained rooted in, rhythm and blues, and rockabilly, blues, and country. Like their counterparts, the North Americans drew from British Isle folk sources as well. Stylistically where they diverged was when the Beatles embraced psychedelia. The Band arrived right about that time, but driven by older forces, and enamored of the rustic weirdness, oily charm, verve, wit and tragedy that would come to be called Americana, a genre they forged as much as anyone. As Robertson points out, “The rock generation revolted against their parents but we loved our parents.” They had a sprawling family portrait taken during the Basement Tapes sessions.

And yet their extraordinary quintet synergy also made for some of the bitterness that would ultimately arise, perhaps justified (more on that later).

“It was such a beautiful thing. It was so beautiful that it went up in flames,” Robertson reflects.

More on the Beatles comparison. Both had magnificent and glorious songwriting, though the Beatles were more diverse with three gifted writers, which may be their greatest claim, aside from the phenomenal impact they had on our culture. The Band had primarily Robertson writing songs, but they had that three-part harmony, probably the most fulsome and profoundly textured of any popular group, because these were also “three of the greatest white rhythm-and-blues singers in the world at the time,” as Eric Clapton comments.

“They have voices that you’d never heard before, and yet they sound like they’ve always been there,” rhapsodizes Bruce Springsteen.

Here, The Band has a leg up on the more famous British band, whose third and fourth singers were only serviceable, though George and Ringo had their moments.

The Band was also instrumentally superior, again, to almost almost any rock ’n’ roll band, especially in ensemble, given their kaleidoscopic versatility. Bassist-singer Rick Danko was capable with several horns and string instruments. Classically-trained Garth Hudson played organ, synthesizer, accordion, saxophones, brass, and piccolo. Drummer-singer Hudson also played mandolin.

Guitarist Robertson developed a style that startled and even intimidated many guitarists, even if he wasn’t the typical virtuoso pealing off chorus after dazzling chorus. Few pickers had a sharper rhythmic flair, or could make a guitar bite, sear, and jump for joy, almost at once. Richard Manuel played piano, clavinet and drums, and sang with the most soul-haunting voice of any of them. I’m probably forgetting a few axes. Clapton was so moved — “they changed my life” — that he forsook his two fellows of the psychedelic-blues-rock trio Cream at its peak, in hopes he could join The Band. “Maybe they’d need a rhythm guitar,” he says.

The band performs in the concert film “The Last Waltz.” (Left to right) Richard Manuel, piano and vocals; Garth Hudson, accordion, keyboards and saxes; Rick Danko, bass and vocals; Robbie Robertson, guitar; Levon Helm, drums; Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, vocals.

As for style, their playing and singing blended looseness and precision, defiant resolve and abandon, high humor and pooling sadness. They fully inhabited the characters dwelling in Robertson’s songs of American archetypes — dirt farmers, varmints, vagabonds, drunkards, Dixie fighters. “Virgil Cain is my name and I worked on the Danville train,” Helm sings on the forlorn, feisty epic “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” “They reminded me of 19th century American literature, of Melville’s stories of searchers,” film director Martin Scorsese ponders.

Barney Hoskyns, biographer of The Band, has a similar reflection, by way of quoting the great American critic Greil Marcus: “…their music gave us a sure sense that the country was richer than we had guessed.’” Hoskyns adds: “If there was any band that could get to the heart of the mystery that pervaded rural life in America, then The Band was it. Nathaniel Hawthorne may have been right when he wrote of Americans that ‘we have so much country that we have really no country at all’,’ but The Band managed to create a sense of its adopted land that was at once precise and mythical.” 1

Courtesy Nebraska Furniture Mart

The Band’s first two albums, Music from Big Pink and The Band, as well as Northern Lights-Southern Cross compare well to any Beatles album, as does, in its rough, eccentric ways The Basement Tapes with Bob Dylan. Stage Fright and Cahoots are right in the ballpark. Rock of Ages is a masterful live recording achievement, and Scorsese’s The Last Waltz remains arguably the finest concert documentary ever made, studded with stars, and The Band’s last-ever live performance at Winterland in San Francisco, in its original incarnation, here sweaty and transcendent.

I saw them once, at Summerfest, on their last 1974 tour, and the power and glory remained, though the poisons that killed it all festered beneath the surface.

Robertson recounts his prodigious rise when, at 15, he wrote two songs recorded by Canadian rock ‘n’ roll star Ronnie Hawkins and the Hawks. “That band was my own personal Big Bang,” Robertson says. He soon joined the Hawks, and they reformed as Levon Helm and the Hawks.

Aside from his musical and literary genius, Bob Dylan is an astute aficionado and observer of American musical talent. When he heard The Band he knew they had to be his. He approached them and they invited to their basement studios in their communal Woodstock home “Big Pink.” Dylan was dubious at first of recording there, as they only had a small reel-to-reel, but once they got down to it, things began flowing. Dylan clacked away song lyrics on his typewriter and they rehearsed.

The Basement Tapes is among the most mythical informal recordings in pop music history, largely Dylan songs, immensely enhanced by The Band. Before long they were touring, yet this was early in Dylan’s plugged-in phase. His still-faithful-to-folk-roots fans consistently booed the electric music, for all its quality. This rejection eventually wore on Helm, who was beginning to sink into drugs and alcohol, as were several others, especially Manuel, a sensitive soul, who struggled with depression, and would soon self-destruct. In time, disillusioned Helm quit the group to become an oil rigger in the Gulf of Mexico.

Robertson soldiered on with the group though somewhat devastated by the loss of his soul brother and best friend. He addresses the nature of creativity, saying it’s often a matter of “trying to surprise yourself. For example, if you look inside the sounding hole of a Martin guitar you see imprinted” made in Nazareth, PA.” One day I saw that and thought, ‘I pulled into Nazareth, was a feeling about half-past dead.’ Then I heard these voices, ‘Take a load off Fanny,’” and “The Weight” was born.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjCw3-YTffo

The Band performs “The Weight” with The Staple Singers, in “The Last Waltz.” YouTube

The Band’s Robbie Robertson (right) is interviewed about the new film “Once Were Brothers.” Courtesy The Toronto Star. 

Enter producer entrepreneur extraordinaire David Geffen. He convinced Robertson to move to Malibu, CA, and a oceanfront property, and before long he’d lured the band members out there which replenished them. The result was the 1976 album Northern Lights-Southern Cross considered by many their best album since their second. It included three classic new songs “Acadian Driftwood,” “It Makes No Difference,” and “Ophelia” and no clunkers.

Robertson treads too lightly on the feud that developed between him and Helm. “Bitterness was setting in with Levon.” he muses. It had to do with the band members beginning to indulge in heroin. Robertson fortunately did not have an addictive makeup and was not chemically affected. But he does gloss Helms point of view which deeply resented all the royalties that Robertson received for their original music. Although Robertson wrote the majority of the songs, few bands could better fit the adage: The sum is greater than their parts. So there was a strong argument for all members sharing in some royalties.

Nor does Robertson address Richard Manuel’s devastating suicide in the film. So, it’s worth referring to Barney Hoskyns book Across the Great Divide: The Band in America, to give the subject some due. “The band had played capacity crowds for two shows which went well, despite the fact that Rick had complained to Richard about his drink. ‘We played a good show for good intelligent people,’ Rick said. ‘Talk was of the next show. That’s what we were all living for.’

 

After leaving the club, Richard headed back to the nearby Quality Inn and stopped by Levon’s room en route to his own. To Levon, he did not seem especially depressed. “I don’t know what got crosswise in his mind between leaving the foot of my bed and going into his bathroom.” Once in the room Richard finished off a bottle of Grand Marnier and his last scrapings of coke. Sometime between 3 and 3:30 AM on Tuesday 4, March, he went into the bathroom…

Richard Manuel. Courtesy Live for Live Music

Rick Danko was in shock, and denial. “I cannot believe in a million years that wasn’t a goddamn silly accident,” he said

“It seems much more likely that loneliness and a profound sense of failure combined to convince him of the futility of life,” Hoskyns writes.

The opening words of his prologue also address the fated artist. “Richard Manuel’s is the first voice you hear in the the first Band album Music from Big Pink (1968)…His aching baritone launches into the first reproachful line of “Tears of Rage.” As it arches over ‘arms,’ you can’t help thinking of Ray Charles, the singer who more than any other shaped this unlikely white soul voice from Stratford, Ontario… A month shy of his 43rd birthday, he could see nothing ahead but these depressing one-nighters, rehashing ‘the old magic’ in a continuing, fruitless struggle to moderate his intake of alcohol and cocaine.”

On that Tuesday morning in 1986, “he tied one end of a plain black belt around her neck, the other end around the shower curtain and hanged himself. The distance between ‘Tears of Rage’ and Richard Manuel’s lonely death at the Winter Park Quality Inn was the journey The Band traveled in their rise and fall as one of the greatest rock bands in America.” 2

Levon Helm drums and sings, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in “The Last Waltz.”

Once Were Brothers — an engrossing, touching and well-crafted film — understandably climaxes with two generous clips from The Last Waltz. The Band’s radiant final hurrah was on Thanksgiving Day, 1976, and includes Dylan, Clapton, Muddy Waters, Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Neil Young, Dr. John, The Staple Singers, Emmylou Harris, Ringo Starr, Paul Butterfield, Neil Diamond, Ronnie Hawkins, and a brass ensemble.

“Time is the most mysterious word of all,” Norman Mailer once wrote. The Band somehow traversed and encapsulated the mysteries of our time, Because “Life is a Carnival.” and because of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.”

____________

1 Barney Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide: The Band in America, Hyperion, 1993 Quote of Greil Marcus from his book Mystery Train, 3-4 .

2 Hoskyns, Across the Great Divide, 384-85

 

James McMurtry’s “Game” reveals more of himself, and of a vividly evoked America

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James McMurtry’s first CD of new material since 2007, “Complicated Game” reveals much more of the man inside the great songwriter than just his dusty boots.

James McMurtry is back and attention must be paid. He should be playing larger venues than he does, as a great American songwriter, as good as we have South of Bob Dylan. He’s also an ace guitarist who can play solos as concisely and tellingly textured as his brilliantly compressed short-story songs.

And like Dylan, his voice is only serviceable, by conventional standards. It conveys a droll incisiveness, and yet can surprise with its expressiveness. But he works from the realm of understatement rather than the over-singing that “sells” a lot of music  — even for some good performers — a tendency the “American Idol” syndrome of pop culture has facilitated.

McMurtry’s grainy voice comfortably wears his vivid and real American writing like a tough, shabby jacket, collar turned up against the wind.

He’s arguably America’s greatest living songwriter who’s more storyteller than poet (comparably great Lucinda Williams, daughter of a famous poet, seems to balance story and poetry*). On Complicated Game he looks inward more than usual, right from the album opener, “Copper Canteen,” a strained relationship song that feels like the echoing chill of countless American marriages. The wife tries to improve a church-avoiding deer hunter-ice fishman who has recurring dark nights of the soul:

When I wake up at night/in the grip of a fright/and you hold me so tight to your chest/And your breath on my skin/still pulls me back/until I’m weightless and then I can rest. It’s a great evocation of the alone-together syndrome, and the existential compression of a lifetime suddenly rushing way too fast into the rearview mirror. 1

Here’s a solo rendition of “Copper Canteen,” with McMurtry on 12-string guitar:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IM_BjzDCDXs

Then there’s the romantic refrains, as in “You Got to Me” and “She Loves Me,” the latter about a man who shares his woman with a parking lot attendant, but holds onto the conviction that she loves him despite the “complicated game” that life on the road makes of love. It’s a story of brave-to-the-point-of-foolish amour, of hope against against the odds. Between the lines, love is dribbling between his fingers onto his boots, like a woman’s heart seemingly turned to sand. Sequenced as the fourth song — after “You Got Me” and the stiff-upper-lip bounce of “I Ain’t Got a Place in This World” — this would seem to be the same woman who held him to her chest, in the grip of the midnight fright, and made him believe in love.

The game is signified right in the stark, black-and-white album cover photograph: Two electrical cords extending from McMurtry’s feet intersect, like two human pathways, just as they disappear into the border’s white void, as if swallowed up by the inscrutably horrifying “whiteness of the whale” which Melville famously meditated on. So electricity, which fuels McMurtry’s artistic power of communication onstage, may have betrayed him, because the symbolic intersection of human hearts is now out of his reach, and control. Though “it was part of our agreement” he never saw the innocuous parking ticket-taker coming. You hear the vulnerability in the self-defensive shell of his voice. It sounds autobiographical.     james m   James McMurtry. Courtesy youtube.com

So we see more into McMurtry — as a human being, as a man — through his extraordinary powers as a songwriter. That quality makes this recording special, a more deeply radiating beacon in his increasingly impressive recording catalog, and authentic at several levels. Perhaps he’s short-changed in love, but McMurtry’s strongest calling is inevitably to that long, winding road, a gravitational force, which a woman must accept or reject.

He unflinchingly gazes across the blighted American horizon. With superb literary skill, he fashions composites of people he’s known or met who haul heavy hearts. With largely unadorned, perfectly-pitched accompaniment, “South Dakota” speaks intimately of raising cows: It was barely even fall/ but that blizzard got them all/Left them sprawled across the pasture stiff as boards.

The song is inhabited by a returning war veteran who reflects: “There ain’t much between the Pole and South Dakota/ and barbed wire won’t stop the wind/ You won’t  get nothing here but broke and older. I might as well re-up again.” The song is dedicated to the songwriter’s family and father, the renowned novelist Larry McMurtry, and anyone “who has ever had responsibility for the health and welfare of a cow.”

Larry’s son typically offers a dead-insect windshield view — but which retains the land and the people’s indomitable spirit. “Carlisle’s Haul” frames such harsh magnificence in terms of a crab-fishing job: “It’s hard not to cry and cuss/ when this old world is bigger than us/ and all we got is pride and trust in our kind.” McMurtry’s observational story-telling powers have been compared to his father’s, which produced The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove and the screenplay to Brokeback Mountain, among other indelible works.

But the younger McMurtry also recalls Charles Dickens in the way his gritty details and array of eccentric characters serve a broader critique of society and industrialization. His 2005 protest anthem “We Can’t Make It Here” still defines our economic times as well as anything.

Complicated Game begins to feel like a great artist’s most mature statement to date, and also a recording that ought to resonate across the nation’s political spectrum for its invocations of American freedom, and of its discontents. Both seem to flow through his veins by now. But McMurtry’s holding steady.

“Deaver’s Cross” is a righteous bluegrass song and the first of two remarkably magnanimous pieces for a guy stereotyped as a grumpy pessimist: So when you’re fishing that March brown hatch/Won’t you share your morning’s catch/with those whose ground you walk across/May their memory be not lost. 

A song that follows, after a few of the tough-minded ones, reminds us that, though unmistakeably a bleach-boned Texas troubadour, McMurtry has clearly traversed America, gigging and searching for dusty companionship. And hell if he can’t celebrate, even as he stares down reality, in the lovely, Uilleann-piping ode to “Long Island Sound.” Riding a gentle, rolling melodic wave evoking that long, lapping coast, he sings: These are the best days, these are the best days, boys put your money away, I got the round. Here’s to all you strangers, the Mets and the Rangers, long may we thrive on the Long Island Sound.

It’s the understated peak of the record and it catches the setting sun on a horizon of rooftops, because McMurtry has climbed this high to see what a magnificent place the great old island is. And then, the two closing lines are poetic strokes; he turns and spies New Mexico and Carolina — by way of Austin — from that metaphoric peak. He might be looking at Anywhere, U.S.A.

scan0586 Liner photo from James McMurtry’s “Complicated Game.” Photo by Shane McCauley

And yet, McMurtry remains too much of a cold-eyed critic of easy social conventions to leave us with only comforting thoughts. The album closes with its strangest song “Cutter,” about a sorry soul who physically mutilates himself with a knife, for reasons ostensibly sociological and psychological, yet ambiguous: “I miss my dog from years ago/ Where he went, I still don’t know./whiskey and coffee while I burn my toast, and build a cage for all my ghosts.” He could be one of countless desperate military veterans, or other American survivors. McMurtry’s under-appreciated vocal vibrato nails the man’s unsteady, just-hanging-on societal mask.

Nevertheless, as he told recently told Rolling Stone, he sees his characters as “enduring, not fading away. Standing against the current that wants to wash you away but can’t, yet.” 2

Despite his prodigious gifts as a wordsmith, McMurtry has a justified reputation for being tight-lipped with journalists, and he turned me down once when I asked for a brief interview, after a show in Milwaukee. McMurtry live James McMurtry live at The High Noon Saloon in Madison with guitarist Tim Holt. Photo by Marc Eisen.

However, after his recent show at the High Noon Saloon in Madison, with no journalistic intentions, I meandered up to his merchandise table, before he got to it. Then suddenly I heard James talking to me, chatting about how he had to jettison his former band name, The Heartless Bastards, “because a more popular band had taken the name.” I’d been eyeing the LP version of Live in Aught-Three, with the formerly named Bastards.

The moment almost felt like his story about the woman who’d never leave him because “she loves me” and he was there first, with his bastards. In the next few moments his nominal loss took on a full human embodiment.

He still works with the same trusty band mates he had in “aught three” — guitarist-accordionist Tim Holt, bassist-harmony vocalist Ronnie Johnson, and drummer Darren Hess. But for his 2007 Just Us Kids record and 2008’s Live in Europe tour and CD/DVD, the great British rock ‘n’ roll keyboardist Ian McLagan had joined the band, and McLagan subsequently moved to Austin, McMurtry’s home base. I’d previously seen McMurtry solo, so I’d hoped to hear McLagan. I asked James if he still played with Ian. “Oh, well, he died,” he said. And then he quickly turned away from me, as if fleeing into the protective shell of the crusty artful observer.

Had he stayed to chat a bit longer I’d probably have told him that two hours before I drove to Madison from Milwaukee — with tickets to his show pre-purchased — my sister Betty called me. Our sister Maureen had died that morning, of a heart attack, at age 60. In a daze of shock, I drove to Madison, because I know Maureen — a music lover and especially a lover of the film musical of Dickens’ Oliver! — would’ve wanted me to. She would’ve appreciated McMurtry’s flinty yet humane tale-spinning. Had I planned a formal concert review, or had not Maureen suddenly died, I might’ve had wits enough to find out that Ian McLagan died in December, in Austin, Texas. 3

Though this moment of revelation seemed painful for McMurtry, he gathered himself gracefully. His fleeting openness with this fan disarmed the journalist in me. I purchased one of the small, inexpensive poster paintings of McMurtry his assistant was hawking. He signed it, while situating himself right at the exit of the saloon, autographing an array of CDs and LPs from fans filing out. Rather than letting them come to the table, he’d come right to his loyal listeners, those who hear and feel his songs.

For some things in this tough road hombre’s life, it is not a complicated game, and he seems grateful for that.

________

  • Among living songwriters, Dylan, of course, is a self-proclaimed poet. Bruce Springsteen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, John Prine, Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon are right there, among songwriters, as well. But unlike those great artists, McMurtry, 53, seems to be entering the prime that Lucinda Williams, 63, is in. Also in the discussion is Steve Earle, 61, and up-and-coming Gillian Welch, 48. And anyone who tells a story as concisely, powerfully and beautifully as can James and Lucinda has much of the poet in them. Lucinda, for sure, is the better performer than James. Please discuss if you care to.

1 “Copper Canteen” was reportedly inspired by a McMurtry trip to Wisconsin and to The Steel Bridge Song Fest, in Sturgeon Bay, a wonderful annual event billed as “the world’s only collaborative songwriting festival,” This year’s festival is June 11-14 http://www.steelbridgesongfest.org/

The opening stanza of the song — McMurtry’s knowing description of a man cleaning his hunting gun and hoping for an opportunity to “kill one more doe” — goes against my “Bambi-loving” grain. But I accept the song as an honest characterization of life in rural Wisconsin. Turns out, McMurtry’s a gun owner and gun lover, as is evident by his blog. As I would’ve expected, McMurtry is an extremely thoughtful, reasonable and responsible gun owner.

He addresses the sea change of public opinion on gun regulation prompted by the Newtown massacre. He’s one of many gun owers who disagree with the extreme scare tactics of The National Rifle Association, which he says he quit when Charlton Heston was president, saying he was “just sick of the rhetoric.” McMurtry also offers a take on the broader culture wars of guns, which he sees as being perpetrated mainly for profit by the gun industry. Then he makes this observation, which fits right into Culture Currents:

“Of course, the gun industry is not the only industry contributing to our cultural divisions. Entertainment is all over it. And we seem to be mimicking the entertainment industry, evolving into a nation of stereotypes, one big reality show with a country/hip-hop soundtrack, scripted and sculpted to resemble some Hollywood dream of every white man’s America, where rednecks are proud of the moniker, though their cotton-farming great grandparents are spinning in their graves at the very notion, because they worked like hell to elevate their descendents from the mere suggestion of the term ‘redneck.'” http://www.jamesmcmurtry.com/blog.html

2. http://www.jamesmcmurtry.com/

3. Ian McLagen was a member of the original British invasion band The Small Faces. He went on to a stellar solo and session-sideman career, performing with The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Chuck Berry, Bruce Springsteen, Green Day and countless big names who play large theaters, or auditoriums or arenas. Which begs the question: Why doesn’t James McMurtry have a larger following?

This review was originally published in a shorter form in The Shepherd Express: http://shepherdexpress.com/article-25797-james-mcmurtry-complicated-game-%2528complicated-game%2529.html