The savage beast in Texan Nanci Griffith? It would’ve risen, now that her home state has betrayed her and all her sisters

Singer songwriter Nanci Griffith was an activist with plenty of strong stances but, unlike a Texan who became president, this Texan did “do nuance” in politics, as her two campaign buttons here suggest. Courtesy The Guardian

Music moves us, as it does the savage beast. Can it move the savage beast within us? I was accused, long ago, of avoiding cliches in my music writing, when I really try to respond in a creative and vivid way to what I hear from musical artists. That approach can allow the music to carry me where the artist has the power to go, and can lead to plenty of metaphors and similies, in an effort to evoke or describe music in words.

Still, I know some cliches have staying power, or can rise Phoenix-like from the past, so the “savage beast” can cut, or bite, in two ways at least (there I go with the charred simile and painful metaphor, but that’s just how it comes out.).

The savage beast or SB (to not belabor the name of the aging, wizened creature) comes to mind today for two reasons, which bite in opposite directions:

1. The SB (8) (can an “o” be aptly inserted between those two consonants?) is Senate Bill 8, the outrageous new Texas law against a woman’s right to choose an abortion, which that the state legislature just passed. “The Texas law, known as Senate Bill 8, amounts to a nearly complete ban on abortion in Texas because 85 to 90 percent of procedures in the state happen after the sixth week of pregnancy, according to lawyers for several clinics.” 1.

In other words, most women are unaware they are even pregnant at six weeks, so their right to chose is effectively revoked.

The ban allows no exemptions for rape or incest.

Even more bizarrely draconian, the bill gives any Texas citizen a $10,000 motive to sue any person they believe might have “committed” an abortion, or even facilitated one, even a cabbie or Uber driver who takes a woman to a clinic. If the suer wins, they also win $10,000. Has any state law ever been more corrupted by the money motive? (The Supreme Court’s notorious 2010 Citizens United case, may still take the cake nationally for money-corrupting politics, contorting the 14th amendment into a weird concept of “corporate personhood”)

2. The SB within Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Nanci Griffith, a true daughter of Texas who died recently, but has made her view on the political subject quite clear. I think the new law would have the SB within her rising again. She made it musically clear when she composed and recorded her song, “Time of Inconvenience,” which protests pro-life activism against Roe v. Wade, and aims her slightly sideways-yet-pointed irony towards those who feel it’s too “inconvenient” to make their voices heard for justice, especially today, to get out from behind our devices, and expose ourselves perhaps to verbal or even physical abuse.

The song, recorded on Flyer in 1994. has been covered by several other artists. And if you listen to the song now, it is startlingly relevant today, even setting the bigger-picture scene of:

We’re living in a time of inconvenience./ Compassion fails me with this meanness in the air./ Our city streets are filled with violence./  So we close the doors to the anger/ and pretend that it’s not there…

Griffith uses the first person plural throughout the lyric, so she included herself among those guilty of feeling that certain activism is inconvenient. But Griffith was clearly not closing her doors at this point. She was out in the streets…”Here I go again…the evil seems to cling to the soles of my feet…”

Here is the song in a YouTube video

The one time I saw her live, in Madison in 2008, I recall a bracing forthrightness about her, a fearlessness about speaking her mind on anything. By then, she’d survived two cancers and looked older than I expected. But clearly wisdom, weary yet heavy-booted, carried her songs and buttressed her being.

She was indeed an activist with largely liberal voice, and “Inconvenience” includes a kicker line: “And if you ain’t got money / You ain’t got nothin’ in this land.” But she also  understood political nuance, unlike fellow Texan George W. Bush, as suggested in the two campaign buttons in the photo at top, one extolling the reasonably moderate Republican administration of Dwight Eisenhower, the other the new breed of Democrat represented by Barack Obama..

And even if in “A Time of Inconvenience” “the right-to-life man has become my enemy,” she’s speaking about more than a woman’s right to choose. She’s singing about “the age of greed and power/ where everyone seems to need someone to shove around./ Our children come to us for answers/ Listening for freedom but they don’t know the sound.”

Part of the freedom she references is the freedom of life denied an innocent man wrongly condemned by the death penalty, which isn’t addressed explicitly in this song and yet in the video you see the brilliantly pointed rejoinder to both Citizens United and the death penalty on a protest sign: “I’ll believe corporations are people the day Texas executes one.

She does directly address the death penalty in a later song, “Not Innocent Enough,” inspired by a conversation she had in a car with Phillip Workman, who was later executed in Tennessee for allegedly murdering a police officer, based on false witness testimony and evidence that was withheld or manufactured, the county district attorney at the time admitted. The state Supreme Court refused to hear Workman’s final appeal.

Philip Workman in 2002, executed May 9, 2007. Wikipedia.

“I wanted to tell him, ‘You know you didn’t do this, hang in there.'” Griffith recounted in an interview with masslive.com 2 “But I didn’t. It’s overwhelming. I started writing that song not long after that conversation with Phillip, but I didn’t finish it until after he was executed.”

Q. What kind of reaction have you gotten to the song?
A. “Everyone’s amazed that they didn’t know about this case, just like The Lovings Vs. the State of Virginia (which inspired the title song of her 2009 album The Loving Kind). Just as they are amazed with the case in Texas where the guy was executed and then exonerated after the execution. I’m a total abolitionist when it comes to the death penalty but these cases make me feel stronger about that than ever.”

Though she always excelled at vivid, character-driven storytelling songs and those of failed love, she clearly became more activist over the course of her career, with an increasing array of politically-charged songs, including “Cotton’s All We’ve Got,” “It’s a Hard Life,” “The Loving Kind” (about interracial marriage) and “Hell No (I’m Not Alright)”

 The latter song became an unexpected anthem in 2012 for protesters during the Occupy Wall Street movement.

That same year she told an interviewer that she was “too radical” for contemporary US politics. “I was angry about something,” she said about “Hell No (I’m Not Alright).”. “Apparently everybody else was angry about the same thing.”

In her book, Nanci Griffith’s Other Voices: A Personal History of Folk Music, She comments about “Time of Inconvenience.”: “It says, ‘I would go to war to protect a woman’s right to choose.’ In other words, I’m saying if you take the law away from me, that gives me the right, in America, to make my own choices, that would be the only thing I would pick up a gun to defend.”

Would Nanci kill in those circumstances?
“I would go to war to defend that law, and if a woman’s right to choose, and to do with her own body what she sees fit, were taken away from me, I would go to war, I definitely would fight for my constitutional right to keep the boys in Washington out of my bedroom. As a say in that song, ‘The right-to-life man has become my enemy.’

“When I do voters for choice shows for Gloria Steinem, there are always people outside with their placards and signs and shaking those rubber fetuses in the air and all that horrible stuff. So I would hope that by writing about these concerns and similar subjects I’m carrying on that great tradition in folk music.” 3.

Those tempted to begin messing with the stance of a woman protecting her right to chose, remember she’s considering lethal protection in self defense. This recent meme addresses the duplicity of being “pro-life”: New Rule: If you ban abortion before you ban military-style assault rifles that massacre children in school, you’ve lost your right to be called “pro-life.” 

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  1. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/01/us/supreme-court-texas-abortion.html

2. Interview with Griffith: https://www.masslive.com/entertainment/2009/10/nanci_griffith_talks_about_mus.html

3. Nanci Griffith and Joe Jackson, Nanci Griffith’s Other Voices: A Personal History of Folk Music, Three Rivers, 1998, 72

 

I remember “Dirty” Jack Covert, a man who could sell you any record and you’d almost always be thankful

 

Jack Covert, in 2017,  when he retired from his successful career in the book business, after a memorable start as a small Milwaukee record store owner. Courtesy onmilwaukee.com.

Dirty Jack hit the dirt hard, for the last time. It may be the last time, but I don’t know a music fan who dug deeper into music as a record buyer, and into album warehouses and personal collections, as an eager buyer-seller. Dan Burr’s Crumb-esque cartoon strip (below) illustrates that Jack Covert well, (taken from the linked obit by Dave Luhrssen of The Shepherd Express:)

Jack Covert obit

I’m a bit late in acknowledging Jack, but last week I was distracted by writing about the death of Nanci Griffith, another great person who fit into the popular music world in her own slightly square-peg-in-a-round-hole way.

Dirty Jack’s Record Rack, on Farwell and Irving, was my favorite record store in my youth, even though I ended up becoming an album buyer at Radio Doctor’s Soul Shop and Peaches Records. 1

But in the early ‘70s, Jack’s Rack was closer to my Downer Avenue family home during college at UWM, even during my early years working at Radio Doctors. And Jack’s always had plenty of jazz in stock as well as rock, as Jack’s tastes leaned jazz-wise, as did mine. Plus, his hole-in-the-wall shop was THE PLACE for hole-in-the-corner “cut-out” LPs, a dream for a collection builder’s on a budget. 2.

And Jack knew how to buy and sell. I remember Jack several times almost physically escorting me to the cash register with an album I was unsure about. He also wasn’t shy about letting his crankiness show right in the store and, with that Snidely Whiplash mustache, you shoulda been a bit suspicious of this guy (see the snapshot photo in Dave’s obit piece). Yet I almost always was thankful he sold me.

Dan Burr’s affectionate cartoon history of Dirty Jack’s Record Rack. The store staff members in the last panel, below Jack, are (L-R) Ed Heinzelman,* album buyer Terry Wachsmuth, Mark Schneider and Chris Ballone. Courtesy Dan Burr and Shepherd Express.

Take a look at the smile in the photo at top, taken when he retired. Back in the day, Jack would jump on you, then flash that I’m-your-pal-with-three aces smile, whenever he and you needed it.

And how many record stores in the 1970s had custom marketing matches, with the owner’s beaming mug on them, proclaiming it “Cut-Out Capital of the World!” ?

 

Courtesy ebay.com

His second-in-command at the Rack was a slightly-built long-hair named Terry, who had a bit of Jack’s crankiness, in a more skittish way. But Terry really knew his stuff, as did Mark Schneider, the friendliest Jack’s employee, in my memory. Mark wore his erudition gracefully. Today the San Francisco-based Schneider —  married to my former Milwaukee Journal colleague, rock critic Divina Infusino – comes to mind when I see Steve Earle’s guitarist Chris Masterson, who’s grown into a killer axe wielder since I last heard him live. Masterson, like Mark, has an affable personality and the same sort of long, ultra-blonde hair, and glasses. 1

I digress partly because I know Jack was a smart businessman who really valued and knew how to use his best employees. I think Mark would agree.

I also admit my comparisons of record store personnel to pop music artists may seem a bit over-the-top. But it’s something that I think Rob Fleming might nod his head to. He’s the slightly grandiose fictional owner of the record store in Nick Hornby’s wonderful novel High Fidelity, a comparison to Dirty Jack’s which Dave Luhrssen also makes aptly. I don’t think Jack or any of his guys floated through the sort of confused romanticism as does Rob (played by John Cusack in the hit film version). They knew how to channel their romantic impulses into music passions.

I had moved to Madison by the time Jack was hired at Schwartz Booksellers so I didn’t see him succeed as founder and president of 800-CEO-READ, a company that steered through the challenge from big box bookstores like Borders and Barnes & Noble and the rise of amazon.com “with ingenuity and a commitment to superior customer service for authors, customers, and the publishing houses themselves,” as the company’s press release on Covert’s death explains.

Jack Covert is also the co-author of 100 Best Business Books of All Time: What They Say, Why They Matter, and How They Can Help You (Link). The 100 Best has been translated into over 10 languages and the hardcover sold over 40,000 copies.

I’m still an “any-day-now-it-shall-be-released” author, but maybe Jack and I connected a bit because he also turned out to be something of a journalist. He wrote more than 600 monthly Jack Covert Selects business book recommendations that run in newspapers and business journals across the country, and has been featured on CNN and NPR, in Inc. magazine, Fortune, the Harvard Business ReviewWashington PostNew York PostBusinessWeek, and more.

That’s dealing in the big time. Not everyone in “big” business is a crooked wheeler-dealer. At this point, I’ll make no more personality comparisons to famous people.

Yes, Jack Covert had the smarts and personality, and always knew how to sell his stuff. I’m sure that mustachioed smile and those crafty ways are serving him well with Saint Pete at The Pearly Gates.

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  • Thanks to Dirty Jack’s staffer Ed Heinzelman for background information.

1 Unlike Mark Schneider, Masterson may actually be albino, like his fellow guitar gunslinger Johnny Winter. But Masterson was tearing up “Hey Joe,” with Steve Earle at an even nastier pitch than on a 2017 video available on YouTube. I saw Earle and Masterson do that great murder ballad as an encore recently at Big Top Chautauqua in Bayfield, Wisconsin.

2. Cut-outs are out-of-print records, typically with a hole punched in the corner of an LP, or a mark obscuring the normal USBN scan bar. I suspect Jack Covert would later know very well how to find and market out-of-print books in a similar fashion.