Leadbelly and Ironhead — from "Does This Road Go To Little Rock? — Blackface Minstrelsy Then & Now, Now & Then" (1992)

"If you would learn from Leadbelly, you should look deeper to find his greatest qualities. In other words, don't just imitate his Southern accent: Learn his straightforward honesty, vigor, and strength."
—Pete Seeger, from "The 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly: An Instruction Manual by Julius Lester and Pete Seeger"; published by Oak Publications

"It is impossible to separate Huddie Ledbetter and his songs from the Negro South."—Julius Lester

"Leadbelly — Huddie Ledbetter — was a man of depth who did not mask his contrasting moods... To me he was a guide and a teacher in country life, in politics, in Jim Crow."
—Moses Asch, Folkways Records owner and entrepreneur

"Because don't forget Because there is a a book riting about my Life and I don't think nothing about that Book . . . Because Lomax did not rite nothing like i told Him."
—Huddie Ledbetter (aka Leadbelly, aka Lead Belly, aka Walter Boyd)

"To which we must still add: if it hadn't been for old John Lomax, we would never have known Leadbelly, his genius, and his songs."
—Pete Seeger and Julius Lester

"Lead Belly drives the Lomax car
And he is never tired;
He's a better man, John Lomax vows,
Than any he ever hired.
He sings at prisons to convict throngs
And helps John Lomax gather songs."
—from a poem by William Rose Benet, The New Yorker, January 19, 1935

He was big, Benet declaimed (of Leadbelly, not Lomax) and he was black, and wondrous were his wrongs (we're still talking Leadbelly here, not Lomax). He was what scholars of the blues would call "a songster," by which they mean any old black guy who sang stuff other than just blues. It was a definition enforced by people perfectly capable of turning their own rectums into telescopes; there may never have been a black guy who only did blues, but ever since white folks first heard the phrase "the blues," they've been damn sure there ought to be.

For all the literary reams on Robert Johnson and his abbreviated recording career, for all the Lucky Strike-wreathed romance of hellhounds and crossroads, Johnson's hokum tunes like "They're Red Hot" ("Hot tamales and they're red hot/Yeah, got 'em for sale..." and pop attempts like "Malted Milk" manage to never much get mentioned. They're an embarassment, an offense against high romance, usually blamed against the insensitivity and/or commercial venalityof a previous generation's white blues entrepreneurs. Almost entirely unrecognized is the fact that the "bluesmen" were dance musicians and street performers who lived and survived and thrived by throwing all manner of change-up pitches. Almost entirely unremarked is the degree to which The Blues were demanded by generation after generation of white people -- first by the early record men who attached the magic word "blues" to anything and everything black folks did, and then generation after generation of field-recording "folk researchers" whose demand for blues has powerfully and effectively distorted what little is understood about the music of rural black Americans. For our purposes here, we can divide these people into two categories: obnoxious pirates and damn fools; curiously, as in the case of the preponderance of "bluesmen" over "songsters," there seem to be far more of the former than the latter.

Songsters were originally books, books full of songs from the minstrel stage, and big-lipped blackface pictures usually too. To be a black American musician has been to be insistently spanked into place, to be hectored by critics whenever you failed to be a "bluesman" or a "songster," when you veered too far from whatever definition of "jazz" somebody was wielding warily in the direction of "rhythm & blues" or in the direction of "strings" with their suggestion of symphonic sensibilities. The initial reviews the Fisk Jubilee Singers received when they went north from Nashville in 1871 were lousy, rotten, stink-o. The rock critics of the day didn't dig 'em, saw stoic black college students in suits and dignified dresses singing concert-style "Negro spirituals," and missed the minstrel man flash, the jigaboo jazz jive, the niggerisms. Once they got hepped, however, to the authenticity of it all (in part, at least by Mark Twain, who was so deeply Southern he pretty much never went home again), the reviews straightened out. When it comes to white critics and black music, they buy "Authentic" every time.

"Along with these in point of service I must place that group of Negro 'boys' who this summer, cheerfully and with such manifest friendliness, gave up for the time their crap and card games, their prayer meetings, their much needed Sunday and evening rest to sing for Alan and me -- that group whose real names we omit for no other reason than to print the substituted picturesque nicknames."
—John Lomax, from "Acknowledgment" in "American Ballads and Folk Songs"

"A folk song belongs to no one in particular - it belongs to everyone. Even though we may know the writer of a song which later became a folksong, we can say that without the people who went before him - to give him the rich background against which to create his song - he could never have written that song."
—Peggy Seeger, from her entirely non-ironically titled "Folksongs of Peggy Seeger," Oak Publications. (Peggy Seeger's husband Ewan MacColl wr0te "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face," and she receives international publishing royalties on that song, which Billboard magazine declared both Song of the Year and Record of the Year in 1972, as well as on numerous compositions of her own and of others.)

Huddie Ledbetter was not poverty's child. His parents owned the land they worked near Caddo Lake at the border between East Texas and Louisiana, a land where white folks were often sharecroppers. He was strong and smart and loud and sexy, all of which have historically been problems for a black man in our country, all of which surely were blessings and a curse for him. He attacked a woman and killed a man, maybe two, maybe more, and did prison time for murder. The legends say he sang his way out, and the legends seem to be right. Between prison terms, he did five years on the street, which, in my experience with ex-cons, ain't bad. He went back to the joint on "assault with intent to murder." These things happen.

"The singer found it difficult to shed the habit of quick anger he had acquired during his years as a roustabout," the New York Times said in his obituary. He did jail time in New York too, for stabbing a man. That part was disturbing to the folk who needed him to be St. Belly of Lead, patron saint of patronization. He had failed to understand how truly, truly different things were up North, here in New York City, where Folkways Records were recorded. "Perhaps he wondered at my earnestness," says Pete Seeger, "trying to learn folkmusic." Perhaps.

Perhaps John Lomax had helped him get loose from prison during his second stretch, but whether he actually did or not, once Ledbetter was free, Lomax found a lot of handy uses for him. "Honorary Consultant in American Folk Song and Curator of the Folk Song Archives of the Library of Congress," Lomax was cobbling a career out of "collecting" other folks' music, and he knew where Negro folks were at their purest: "In the prison camps . . . the conditions were practically ideal." For collectors, anyway. Once Ledbetter was loose, Lomax took him on as chauffeur, as valet, as live bait to be dangled before other prisoners in hope of softening their suspicions. Payment was to be negotiated later, another folk music tradition. They left Marshall Texas, and set off straight Northeast. First stop: Little Rock.

Roustabout
(1964)
Paramount Pictures; starring Elvis Presley, with Barbara Stanwyck, Leif Erickson, and Pat Buttram.
Dynamic singer-guitarist Charlie Rodgers (Elvis Presley) is fired from his gig at a teahouse, wrecks his motorcycle, and has a run-in with the law, so he takes a job with the carnival. With Jack Albertson, Billy Barty, Teri Garr, Raquel Welch, and Sue Ann Langdon as the gypsy fortune teller.Lomax was a pioneering arts-grant racketeer, an Aggie prof who went on to Harvard—no denser brick can be compressed out of red kiln-fired clay. His first book, a collection of cowboy songs, borrowed liberally from a little-known collection by another less scholarly-inclined author, Jack Thorp. Carrying a transcription machine around with him, he established the archetypal field-recording folklorist, more to be feared than wondered at, more to be fled from than sung at. Equipped with all the urges toward authenticity that have always driven white men to blackface, he was doing his pseudo-academic best to establish minstrelsy by machine. Further along, some field-recorders might change his methods—most would not—but the ethical standards he set have remained remarkably consistent.

Once he had his hands on Ledbetter, he knew he'd collected hisself a live one. He dressed Ledbetter in prison stripes, coon stripes, the stripes of minstrelsy, the not far from faux-nigger stripes of what would become Dixieland and of barbershop quartets, and brought him before East Coast audiences. Not much of a liberal himself, he knew how to work bleeding-heart Northerners like a pinball machine. A minstrel show was still a hot ticket up North, even if the white man was no longer weraring blackface, even if he was wearing an entire black man instead.

Huddie Ledbetter learned quick how politically-correct bread was buttered, and on which side. He learned to knock off singing about Brownskin Women and Yaller Gals, to hold back on all the Pigmeat Papa stuff. Prissy young Pete Seeger and his permanently PC Weavers would change the words of "Good Night, Irene" to "I'll see you in my dreams..." from the darker, dirtier, more dangerous "I'll get you in my dreams." Nothing like a fool, Leadbelly learned to fake the party line and commenced singing something he called "The Bourgeois Blues." It was a title that cut on every edge, more edges than the Folkways folk have ever understood.

John Lomax lost all semblance of scholarly objectivity when Leadbelly insisted on doing some collecting of his own: he wanted to collect his pay. More, he wanted out of the jailbird stripes and into a pin-striped suit. John's folk-collecting son Alan Lomax describes the clash: "Two such strong temperaments can seldom collaborate," he wrote. It was a rare and historic instance of a folklorist using the word "collaborate"— even if it was a hilarious malaprop—and should be cherished for its scarcity, then stuffed and placed in a museum, properly labeled, enclosed in a glass case, for public display and the annotated attentions of appropriately-accredited academics. In the Lomax's 1941 book, "Our Singing Country," they laundry-list a blind singer from the Ozarks, dispossessed Texas sharecroppers, a retired cowpuncher, a "Georgy cracker," farmer's wives (if not their daughters), a tomato-canning factory worker, a New England scissors griner, a miner's wife who became a union organizer, a Vermont lumberjack now a car salesman, and that undisguisable dustbowl (and thus dispossessed -- and gritty!) balladmaker, Woody the G. It's practically the entire Popular Front, front and back. It's pathetic and bathetic, Jim. Woe is Us, We The People. Finally, way, way, way down the line, Lomax Pere et Junior get around to naming, folk anonymity or no, ".....the singers who have moved us beyond all others that we have heard between Maine and New Mexico"—and no explanation of why they skipped Arizona and California which I admit pisses me right off —"the Negroes who in our opinion have made the most important and original contributions to American folksong." They name Aunt Harriet McClintock, they name the deadly deathly dull spiritual singers Vera Hall and Dock Read, they name "Dobie Red." They name "Iron Head," but they don't, do not, can not, will not say the cursed name of Lead Belly. They say "Iron Head" instead.

"Iron Head," see, was quite a character—quite a character. By 1947, Lomax had a lot of stories about "Iron Head" for his latest bring-'em-back-alive book, "Adventures of a Ballad Hunter." Lomax had personally gotten "Iron Head" temporarily paroled, see: "Thus, I picked this Negro singer of English ballads, of Ol Hannah, Little John Henry, The Gray Goose, Black Betty, Shorty George, Pick A Bale of Cotton, The Ol' Lady' -- yet this is Leadbelly's repertoire, oddly enough -- and other 'sinful songs,' to be my chauffeur and companion..." Best of all, this time, if 'Iron Head' got biggity, why, right back to prison he goes! But 'Iron Head' is a far more cooperative Negro than that doggone old Lead Belly ever was -- why, he admits that he was guilty of his crimes, for one thing, and when Lomax returns to New York, the place where Lead Belly was corrupted, "Iron Head' "...held on to me in terror." Even so, despite all that Mister Lomax tried to do for him, "Iron Head" eventually lands back in prison, incorrigible, unredeemable. "I should have left him in Sugarland..." to weave horse collars, Cap'n Lomax says, sadder, but much, much wiser.
There may have been, sort of, an "Iron Head." There is a furlough slip, nothing like a pardon, leaving a prisoner named Iron Head in the hands of John Lomax. A man, once upon a time named James Baker, was imprisoned in Texas, and identified only as Ironhead, he recorded some work songs for the Lomax machine. (Those recordings have a half-life that we are only beginning to suspect, by the way, but of course, as a prisoner, as a black man in prison, as a folk artifact, as an object and subject and reject and abject and construct of culture and Folk and of the frighteningly oxymoronic term "field-recording" with its creepy sub-harmonic resonances that reach beyond the slave labor that built the Pharoahs' echo-chamber tombs, well, we can only begin to speculate. Unless, of course, we care to look at the collection of publishing royalties, where reverberations transform themselves mysteriously into revenues.)

But if there was an Iron Head, his identity was swallowed, eaten alive, by Lomax's hunger, by his need to fix Huddie Ledbetter, who was succeeding in surviving in New York City, while he, John Lomax, a once-and-former-Texas banker, a fully graduated Aggie educator, an honored lecturer at Modern Language Association conventions, a guy who could pull out greasy dog-eared letters showing him to be an Honorary Consultant to some goofy governmental boondoggle with a damn official-looking letterhead, was flopping around looking for ways to scrape a living together still. Lomax was doing his dim Aggie damndest to write Leadbelly right out of history. He fucked up, mostly because he'd done to thorough a public relations job folk-pimping him in the first place. All the same, it was a less painful failure than it would have been had he and Alan and Folkways not ended up with their names on Huddie Ledbetter's publishing. That way, songs like "Goodnight, Irene," (the biggest pop music hit of 1950, with it's astonishing resulting effect, and its near-eternal flood of royalty revenues), and "In the Pines," and "House of the Rising Sun," and "Midnight Special," and "Boll Weevil," and "Rock Island Line" would be distinguished by the Lomax name, which in turn would make certain that publishing royalty revenues that might have been squandered on liquor and flashy clothes and such by an ungrateful Negro might go to a better, larger, more important cause.

"So here's to John A. Lomax
And to Orpheus his peer,
With a voice that makes brown ladies swoon,
And a scar from ear to ear..."
—William Rose Benet

"As the half century came to a close Huddie Ledbetter ended his walk through the valley of the shadow and sat down at that welcome table specifically prepared for Scott Joplin, and Dan Emmett, for Black Patti and John Henry, for Buddy Bolden and Blind Lemon. Like the rest of that happy company of American singers, Leadbelly had opened a road for the others who would come after."

—Alan Lomax, from "The Leadbelly Song Book," Oak Publications. (Nearly all copyrights would include either Alan or John Lomax's name or both; only some would include Huddie Ledbetter.)
[Among the happy company Alan Lomax has assembled to greet Leadbelly in that Upper Room's upper balcony, what Carl Van Vechten's novel called "Nigger Heaven," are: Scott Joplin, ragtime composer who died impoverished of syphyllis; the early white blackface minstrel Dan Emmett; the unprecedented "Black Patti," properly named Sissieretta Jones, who triumphed worldwide at the turn of the 20th Century as among the greatest opera singers in all history, though unable to break through the minstrelsy barriers, and who died thieved and penniless; John Henry, the mythic, fantastic, fictional folkloric figure who died with a hammer in his hand; Buddy Bolden, the emblematic New Orleans trumpeter who languished and died in an insane asylum; and Blind Lemon Jefferson, the master blues singer and guitarist and recording artist and street performer whom the young Huddie Ledbetter served journeyman duties alongside, and who died of exposure on a frozen Chicago street.]

"To ballad-makers, long dead and nameless; to the jokey boys whose smiles are dust; to the singers of the lumberwoods, the cattle trail, the chain gang, the kitchen ... and to the horny-handed, hospitable, generous, honest, and inspired folk-artists who carved thse songs out of the rock of their lives, we dedicate this, their own book.
—Dedication of "Folk Song U.S.A.", collected, adapted, and arranged by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax; Alan Lomax, Editor; Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger, Music Editors (piano arrangements by Charles and Ruth Seeger); copyright 1947 by John A. and Alan Lomax.All rights reserved. Permission to reprint material from this book must be obtained in writing, except that brief selections may be quoted in connection with a newspers magazine or radio review. All requests for permission should be addressed to the publishers.

The 12-String Guitar as Played by Leadbelly; Pete Seeger (2 cassette set)
Pete Seeger Sings Leadbelly
Ballads of Black America; Pete Seeger and Revernd Frederick Douglas Kirkpatrick
Washboard Band Country Dance Music; Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee
Pete Seeger and Sonny Terry; Recorded at Their Carnegie Hall Concert
Bantu Choral Fok Songs; Pete Seeger and the Song Swappers
Songs to Grow On; Pete Seeger and Leadbelly
How I Hunted the Little Fellows; by Zhitzov as recited by Pete Seeger
Folksongs of Four Continents; Pete Seeger
The Story of the Nativity; Pete Seeger
Pete Seeger Sings and Answers Questions
—from the Folkways Records catalog, which features 53 Pete Seeger albums and 11 collections including Pete Seeger; 8 Peggy Seeger albums and 10 by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl; 4 by Mike Seeger and 16 by his New Lost City Ramblers. Under SEEGER, PETE: see American Fok, American Folk Collections, African-American Traditions, African-American Traditions Spoken Collections, Blues/R&B, Blues/R&B Collections, Soundtracks-Musicals-Radio, Children's Recordings, Christmas and Holiday, Historical Collections, Music Instruction

"Administered by the Smithsonians's Office of Folklife Programs, Folkways Records is one of the ways the Office supports culture conservations and continuity, integrity, and equity for traditional artists and cultures."
—from "Folkways Recordings; The Asch Legacy" by Anthony Seeger, Curator, The Folkways Collection, April 1991

Currently, the BMI catalog contains 890 compositions with Alan Lomax listed as songwriter or composer; John A. Lomax is listed as the author of 694 titles; in both cases, based on legal issues or royalty revenue stream preferences, other songs are listed with ASCAP, PRS, or other international collection societies.  Since pseudonyms were used by The Weavers to collect Huddie Ledbetter's publishing on their massive pop hits covering his songs, the Lomaxes involvement in that specific royalty stream is obscured.

Aphorism Number 18; (Collect The Whole Series!)

(This one, Number 18, was stated aphoristically and sagely by Patrick last night in Le Dixhuiteme, which I suppose would technically make it en aphorisme.)

"There's no school for losing."

Seventy-Six Inches of Bazoomas - The Chesty Morgan Story

by Bart Bull
"Just minutes away from showtime!” the deejay at Fantasy World announces. “We’re only minutes away from Miss Chesty Morgan and her monstrous 76-inch mountains."

We’ve been just minutes away from Miss Chesty Morgan for about two hours now, but this time the deejay happens to be telling the truth. In the meantime, he’s got a question he wants to ask. “Is thisapartyheretonightorwhat?”
Her first appearance is from the floor by the side of the stage. She’s wearing a green-and-silver-spangled gown and an immense matching sunhat, and she strolls the audience slowly, silently, her face set in ethereal abstraction. “Tits!” screams a fan. “Show us your tits!” She strolls on, silent all the while, then goes to the stage. Stepping lightly forward, stepping lightly back, stepping stage left to stage right and back again, she walks with the concentration of someone balancing a beer bottle on her head. When she takes off a piece of her gown and reveals an even more generous portion of herself, the nightclub crowd goes wild.

“Can you believe those bazoomas?”asks the deejay. “TITS!” screams a fan.

She steps forward, she steps back. She holds a beer bottle between them and shakes, then does the same with a pitcher. She squeezes them together between her forearms, releases, then squeezes them again. She steps forward and back, steps back and forward. She says nothing, nothing at all, not a thing.

When it’s over, the emcee brings her back to speak with the audience. “Hi, everybody,” she says. Her accent is broad and surprisingly thick. “It’s so difficult for me chust to carry my boobs, I dun’t have time really to do anyt’ink else.”

“You know, fel-lows, do we have any leg men in the audience? No leg men?”

“Pussy!” yells a fan.

“I kind off like dose leg men to get to see more,” she says, bending a knee, “because I usual get the wat-er-mel-on men come up to see my show, I would say so. Fel-lows, I feel my boobs belong to the public, they’re only ehtteched-uh to me. If I could, I would like for you to touched them but it’s ehgainst the law to touch et, really — that’s the Ar-izona law, you know.

“By the way, you know, fel-lows, I just got a divorce. The reason was we could not get to-gether because of my big boobs. Thet’s why I gotta divorce, huh. My husbend did try to drown me but no chence-uh. I took cold shower lest night, you know, but my feet still kept warm, believe it or no. Yes. I stay at the Hilton Hotel.  Goink into the olovator, believe it or no, I kept the olovator from closink. Yes.”

The crowd is restless. They’re here for tits, not talk. “I can’t understand a fuckin’ word she’s saying,” complains a fan. Somebody is hollering at her from the back of the room.

“Who is dot big mout’ — do you heve any question, you big mout’? Chust a minute, honey, get you hands out of you pockets — no self-entertainment. Thenk you. Appreciate. Yes. What is you question, honey?”

The deejay holds the microphone for the fan. “Does anybody ever give you a hard time about the size of your chest when you go anywhere?”

“What, what?! I din’t hear you?”

“Does anybody ever give you, you know, a rough time about the size of your tits — in other words, do people get freaked out about the size of your tits when you go out in public?”

“Honey, I chust knock them down.” She gets a laugh from the crowd. “Sweetheart, I chust knock them down.”

“You just kind of take those boogers and slap ‘em in their head, huh?" says the deejay.

“Thet’s right, honey. If I fall down, I bounce op wit’ no prob-lem.”

Another question from the audience. “Can you see your feet?”

“No honey. I don’t wanna see my feet-uh — I let the men see et, honey. I love my legs, and I love men and therefore I want them to see my legs. It’s so difficult for me just to car-ry my boobs, I don’t have time really to do anyt’ink else. That’s heavy weight really, you know. Very very difficult, you know. Appreciate you very much, very much. I would love for you to touch them, honey, but it’s ehgainst the law. I wish fellows that you could see it that they’re real. Thenk you very much for comink tonight — do appreciate you comink tonight, thank you very much.”

“The lovely Miss Chesty Morgan, ladies and gentlemen. Miss Chesty Morgan. Let’s put your hands together for seventy-six inches of incredible, amazing bazoomas! Insured by Lloyds of London! For one million dollars! Put your hands together for the lovely Chesty Morgan! Two more shows tonight, ladies and gentlemen, he sure to stick around! We are going to party!”

As You Do

As you do, I'd forgotten this. As you do.

Until the other day. I got a call from my brother and friend, V, from County Meath.
(I'm tempted, sore and sorely tempted, to say "a ring-jingle from my pal Val...")

And since he's wont to rhyme at you and inclined to recite and declaim, say, much more than merely speak small and sensibly (many another friend of his will attest and affirm to this fact, and that's why we're all his friends, so don't dismiss this as a dis, dear Miss... ) well, now, anyway, as you do, I'd forgotten that of an afternoon this last midsummer, in Paris, in le Jardin Communite', unable to do my Proper Work for some damn reason, after days and nights and nights and days and middays and midnights and dawns meeting me rolling and strolling around in Eire for the first time in donkey's ears' years, after gladly receiving the gift of sight and sleep and sense and salmon from Donla, and the full Irish in the morning as well, after, as ever, being received by Onrai in his own sacred home as the very incarnation of the burr under his saddle that starts and stirs the itch that forces him to stay up scratching late into the night (he needs an excuse akin to myself, does Onrai, as we all know) after being ushered into tents in Kilkenny that resembled tents in Tibet, and into other tents in Kilkenny that resembled Boy Scout outings in Glastonbury, and into still other tents where wine glasses and glasses of stout were urged upon me, and other tents, tents from Japan, perhaps, or Thailand, paper flying sky tents, were lit and sent glowing, squadrons of light, into the sky... whilst a session of serious saints piped and fiddled and accordionated, and I changed reeds like a harried hurried Hessian sent to Pennsylvania on extra-curricular musical reconnaissance....and I think it was it that point that The Grey Guy came tumbling down the hillside and down the stairs and through the door and if I'd only been quicker of mind and intent, I could have swung the front door open and let him roll off toward the millpond or the monastery...


Well after this, this long but short weekend wedding au Kilkenny, and days of Dublin, and County Meath, it was my intention and my duty and my concern that I get right straight back to work on That Dumb Book that all and sundry, those that know me well, and those strangers et etrangers who repeatedly encountered me muttering along the green-broomed gutters of Paris uniformly all advised: Shut up for once and take the damn money, and, above all, quit calling it a stupid book. Or, as the Sufis and the saints and the sensible and the sane and the seanos singers and all the visiting Irish lasses and those in shouting distance of sanity, and several other sage counselors said, in short, and repeatedly, like a dang mantra:
Be Grateful
Accept.
Oh, and shut the fuck up, ok?

Ok, so anyway, I was supposed to get back to work on what I was ungrateful for, and of, and about, and because of, and besides, and, well, I wasn't working and I wasn't grateful. I may, you'll be surprised to know, have been grumpy.

Instead, though, to my credit, I went to the garden, le jardin, the community garden in Le Dixhuiteme, and played steel guitar or accordion or something. I smelled that the artichokes were still early yet and unripe, and the rose-colored roses weren't quite ready, even though we'd had a better, warmer, sunnier, artichoke-ier summer this summer, than last summer's nearly- rose-free grey-nosity. I could hear the bees, tending to business better, far better, than, say, moi. They had deadlines to meet.

V, a Meath man set loose among the bulls he was meant to herd, had turned me on to John Boyle Reilly, yet another astonishing man of Meath, a man among men, a man among men in a large and ever-growing world of ever-lesser men, a poet, a journalist, a Fenien, a transport, a trouble-maker, an adventurer, a prisoner, an escapee, an Irishman and an Australian and an American, a man who dared dig deep and then deeper, and reading him, I got given, "out the blue," as we'd say in New Orleans, this one, lo these many years away from having written poetry, and lo these many centuries away from lyric rhyme.

I'd be inclined to call it doggerel and be done, but I know that the ladder I was climbing was far too sturdy and too special to be dismissed so. And thus it wasn't mine that I climbed.

Val, I never ever write poetry any more, and certainly never lyric poetry.
That's for damn sure. Yet the day I got back, with lots of
work to do and deadlines to meet, life kept
interferring with my
life.

I went down the street to the  community garden, which lies alongside some
deceased train tracks in what might as well be a riverbed.

I had the book on John Boyle O'Reilly there, and lo
and behold, I scratched this one out.

Life is long
And far too short
A game played loose
On a shifting court
A pitch, a swing
A bell, a ring
An echo, a cry
We wake, we die.

Life is short
And far too long
The graveyards fill
With the names of songs
We sing, we cry
We laugh and sigh
We cannot see
The other eye.

Life is quick
Yet life lives long
We lose ourselves
Amidst the throng
We dream, we wake
We wake, we dream
We cannot see
Our own clear scheme.

Aphorism Number 17; (Collect the Whole Series!)

Always a parade, rarely the rodeo.

I actually reviewed The Breakfast Club! Swear to God! It sucked too, boy....probably still does...

(Ok, for almost an exact year, I worked -- well, they gave me a paycheck, anyway -- as the movie critic for the Arizona Republic's City Life section. It almost pretty much entirely ruined my ability to sit still in a movie theater for, gee, at least a decade. Or two. Three, maybe. I'm still counting.)

As I believe I’ve already mentioned, movie reviewing is exactly the easiest job in the world. But just like everybody else, movie reviewers like to think they got it rough — otherwise how could they come home and bitch about work?

The really, really tough part about being a movie reviewer, the really rotten, awful, painful, muscle-creaking, undignified part about being a reviewer of movies is that you’ve got to go see lots and lots and lots of movies that are, at least ostensibly, “geared for younger audiences.” Which is way, way, way below your dignity. You’re an intellectual, a critic, a big drinker of espresso. You’ve got a whole wardrobe’s worth of grey sweaters, some of them with leather elbow patches.

But now a movie like The Breakfast Club, hey, we’re talking a whole different thing here. You bet! — this is bonafide intellectual fare this time, boy. Here’s one teen movie without an eye-stabbing maniac, without rude sex, without car crashes, with literary quotes (or David Bowie song lyric quotes, anyway) and only one tiny video-style dance routine. And not even any nudity or crudity in that... A movie about real teen life today, with lots of touching real teen life traumas and everything. If only all those darned other unruly teen movies would just behave like this!

So maybe you can’t blame all the movie reviewing whores for matching their copy to precisely fit the film’s publicity, but it doesn’t mean you're obligated to buy in on the project. The Breakfast Club is a stagey little movie, five high school characters sentenced to a Saturday in library detention and thus spending most of the movie in one room. There’s such a thing as a good stagey movie but the immutable laws of drama are a lot tougher to evade when you can’t crash the General Lee though the library window for to rescue Bo 'n' Luke Duke. In other words, if it’s a weak play, it s going to be a crummy movie. The Breakfast Club is a crummy movie.

All the acting in the movie is uniformly just fine, and the little ensemble group of young talents is uniformly young and talented. Director producer writer John Hughes, who’s currently being lionized as “the kind of adult who understands the way kids are today” has provided all the uniform young talented actors and actresses with what is uniformly the sloppiest, dopiest material imaginable

If Hughes is the kind of adult who understands the way kids are today, then kids today are: poor-but-intelligent teen hardguys who play air-guitar to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida; student-council socialites who eat sushi from lacquered enamel lunchboxes but nonetheless are really caring individuals underneath; muscle-bound lunkhead jocks who are deeply disturbed by their own brutal treatment of smaller classmates; near-catatonic manic-depressive punk bag-girls who need only brush the hair from their eyes to bloom into a glowing teen normalcy; skinny little straight-A dorks who break up fights between guys who are twice their size.

Kids today, according to Hughes, are also in trouble because they have bad mean parents and bad mean teachers, and because all those bad mean adults keep forcing them to see one another as stereotypes — stereotypes like student socialites and lunkhead jocks and skinny little straight-A dorks. (Not Hughes, however; Hughes only has them be lunkhead and socialite and hardguy stereotypes in the beginning so that we’ll eventually be able to see that deep inside they’re all just one big warm sensitive soulful stereotype.)

And if you take five typical stereotypically untypical kids of today and make them all do detention in the school library together, well, they nearly bust a gut racing to bare their souls to one another, and falling into deeply traumatic psycho-dramatic states, and offering one another deeply revelatory personal thoughts on life and sex and then leaping up to dance on their desk. You know, real contemporary teen life stuff.

Now it’s entirely likely that some teen-agers are going to fall for this puerile garbage (nobody but nobody can feel as sorry for themselves as a teen-ager, and there’s no better balm than the Clearasil-creamy concept of bad, bad adults being to blame for everything) but I’d bet that most high school kids will recognize The Breakfast Club for the transparent shuck that it is. Teen-agers know just exactly how sensitive the student council socialites are, which is why they pack the theaters for the teen-slasher movies, and why they cheer uproariously when the bitchy glamour queen and the muscle-bound lunkhead and creepy gothy punk-rocker and all the rest of the stereotypes who make high school miserable finally get their bloody just desserts.

On the other hand, if The Breakfast Club does pay off, just wait until the plague of imitators begins later this year. We’ll have any number of knock-offs featuring sensitive young teens spreading their traumas across library tables before leaping up to dance all over them, beginning the movie as potential ax murderers and ending as tearful-but-reformed healthy and adjusted and productive teen members of society. We’ll be bombarded with the teen sensitivity formula as a substitute for the slash-a-teen violence formula and the horny teen virginity formula, and it will be twice as phony as Halloween At Porky’s VII, but you can’t say that movie reviewers won’t deserve it, even if you don’t.

Aphorism Sixteen: (One of a Series; Collect The Whole Set!)

Grammar and syntax and vocabulary skills take time, but clothes are something you can shop for next Saturday morning.

Aphorism 15; (One of a Series; Collect 'em All)

If only accuracy were art.

Ian Dury Encounters the Blazing All-American Sun, And As He Experiences Nearly All the Delights of Arizona, It Tans His Wee Li'l Gimpy-Ass Hide

I believe, if I remember correctly, that I arranged to interview Ian Dury just ever so slightly before I'd bailed on the music magazine I'd been running for what was—

(Dang! Damn! At that age, at 22 or 23 or so, it was like a quarter or a fifth of my life, or something similar. Because I'd been doing it since I was like nineteen or something. Jesus! I mean, I dropped out of high school, so probably you better do the math.)

But all the same, I was inclined to go ahead on, to go ahead and interview Ian Dury because . . . well, because he was Ian Dury. And because I actually kinda got what he was up to, sort of, somewhat. And because it was possible or likely or probably way beyond probable that I might well be the only currently subscribing human species member within like two or three hundred miles of Phoenix F. Arizona who had the faintest fuckin' clue.

Me, I had the faintest fuckin' clue. Maybe only just faintly, maybe. But still it was a clue, Sherlock.

Because what he was doin' was in English, much of it. A whole lot of it, actually. And having been raised in Arizona, English was not my natural ouevre, mon metier, my language, my thang. But his work was, however, in a spectacularly gloriously fucked-up English, in Cockney rhyming slang and vernacular vulgate vulgarisms, and some sheerly poetic rudeness, and this, this cant I could and can do, in many a language, chingadero. I can call you inappropriate names in Dutch, dude, and I can certainly speak to you in Arizona-isms, in an argot d'Arizona that will make you feel like a Dutch, uh, Balzac.

(And plus, hey, I'd attended the occasional English class and everything before I dropped out. Some of which where they read Shakespeare at you, or at least had your fellow classmates stutter through it, and others where you were played records of some English-accented English ac-tor reciting "Paradise Lost," as written by some English guy. So it wasn't like I couldn't talk the stuff if necessary. Although I lived in fuckin' Arizona, dude, so English, let's face it, wasn't ever necessary.)

So I did what you did in those days, and still do today. I went to the desk and called the tour manager. (Though in those days, the tour manager was called the road manager, and it wasn’t until long years later that I truly understood the distinctions.) The road manager was named Kosmo. Kosmo Vinyl. It was early days still for punk rock names, but I’d been immersed from the earliest, so I was less off-balanced than I might have been, but still . . . it’s a tad bit of a challenge to go to the sparkly turquoise formica desk of the tasteful tan TraveLodge of Tempe, Arizona in 1978 and then get them to follow through on ringing Mr. Vinyl’s room, Mr. Kosmo Vinyl. Could you please spell that last name for me again?

Mr. Vinyl appeared after not too many minutes, the ceremonial three-beat delay, hand-operating the tour protocol that involved showing up, saying hello, then disappearing to go appropriately gather the Rock Star. It was, and is, The Way. You wouldn't, for example, have the front desk-tender of the Tempe TraveLodge pick up his tan-toned telephone and ring directly to the room of, say, Her Royal Highness Queen Elizabeth, now would you? No. First, you'd ring Mr. Vinyl's room. De rigeur, dude.

Mr. Vinyl had an almost nearly perfect – no, it wasn’t almost, nor nearly; it was entirely, utterly, precisely perfectly Perfect – punk rock brush-cut hedgehog hairdo, short on the sides, spikey-bushy on the top, but his bush spikes were trimmed as symmetrically as the finest Midlands suburban hedge. It was red, his hair, flame red, fiery red, hot coal red, but Red, RED, a Red not found in nature but mostly in crayon boxes. (Marked "Red.") And this was years and years before this kind of hair-coloration could be located in all the finer hepster hair salons. Certainly in Arizona, that's for certain.

Anyway, Mr. Vinyl was a sight to cause sore eyes, quite likely black ones. In addition to his Woody Woodpecker plumage, he sported one of those sleeveless limey t-shirts, the kind that were known, upon their rare and infrequent sightings in Arizona, as "ladies' blouses," and suggested — no, demanded— a severe and serious ass-whipping when worn on a street by a man. I'd been interviewing the touring musical English for years by then, and invarably somewhere in their entourage, since at least about '75 or so, was a guy, a bloke, a geezer, wearing a t-shirt with no damn sleeves, and he invariably wanted to come with us to the bar where we were going to sit and talk, and when he did, a big ol' Arizona-style whup-ass fight was gonna break out, on account of him shamelessly wearing a ladies' blouse while talking in an English accent like a damn faggot, and thus absolutely enraging the dudes with the elaborately-detailed feathered-plumed cockades arranged precisely just above and across and around the brim of their cowboy hats. Some things is manly, some ain't.

Oh, and Mr. Vinyl's t-shirt-blouse thing was pink.

Meantime, as I did the ritualized heel-cooling in what the Tempe TraveLodge had in place of a lobby, which was a couch and a coffee table and a two chairs and a Coke machine, with candy and cigarettes vending available just down the hall for discretion, two sleepy tousled Blockheads wandered by, confused, as musicians usually are, and as great ones ever are, by their surroundings. The Blockheads, by the way, were Ian Dury's band, his assemblage of astonishingly ass-kicking musos. My memory tells me it was Mickey Gallagher and Norman Watt-Roy, but I've learned, in all the years since, that if you associate with the muddled musician mind of a morning (which for them, fairly enough, is post-noon-ish or better, much later) then your own razor-sharp organ of ratiocination begins to tilt gyroscopically. Soon, should you not be on your guardiest of guards, you'll be helping them find McDonald's in Pisa, or Boomer bass strings (but only the flat-wound ones, not the round-wound ones, the ones that are widely available) in Dunedin, New Zealand, on Sunday, around 6:15 in the evening, when the shops have been closed for 32 hours already.

In this case, I was handily able to help the poor sun-blinded dears learn the arcane ways and names and means and brands and shapes and filters of the cigarette machine, and all its knobby bits, and then as lagniappe, to help them sort through the candy machine nuances as well. All in a day's work, anything for a chum, though perhaps more than my job'sworth, mate. (This is me practicing up, don't you know, for the British-ism and witticism to come, once Herr Dury finally makes his appearance in this thang. And soon come!


(TO BE CONTINUED!!! Hold on to the edge of your seats, kids!)

In The Ring: Muhammed Ali Meets Leon Spinks y Tony y Ernesto

Maybe it was all because we couldn't hear Howard Cosell. The bar was packed -- jam-packed to the point that getting a place meant you'd better have friends already there who were willing to shove aside, packed to the point that everyone was making queer jokes. In a Chicano bar, when someone gets off a good one, an appreciative audience gives a grito, a special sort of falsetto yelp --- the pachuco equivalent of a redneck holler. Anyway, the place was so full it made getting in and getting out of your seat a real challenge and the air was full of yips and yelps and gritos and laughter and the roaring boast of a bar on a championship fight Friday night.

So you couldn't hear Cosell for shit. And maybe that's why everyone I talked to for the next day or two told me what a joke fight it was, what a bore it was, how it was never really in doubt. Maybe that's what comes of hearing that stork of a voice intone its opinions at you for fifteen rounds. Maybe it damages your ability to get excitede to react the way you would react without it.

Then again, maybe it was the alcohol. Both screens were set over the bar, after all, and it was undoubtedly one of the barmaid's biggest nights ever The screen directly in front of most of us was a big fuzzy large-screen number; off to the side was another, a small and bright standard-sized model. When you wanted the grand picture, wanted to feel the force, it was the big one you watched. . . but when you wanted detail, when you wanted to know precisely where the punches were landing, you watched the little one.

Tony was just about the only one in Leon Spinks' corner. Tony's a truck driver where I used to be a truck driver. He doesn't speak English particularly well, but neither does Leon. Tony's pretty young still, fifteen or twenty years younger than Julian, and I think there must have been something about the idea of this young and illiterate guy climbing into the ring with Muhammed Ali and winning . . .winning! He's the new champion now! . . . that attracted him. Julian and Ernesto, the guys we started arguing and laughing with, they were both 45 or so, thereabouts. They both had those smooth black sweep-from-the-sideburns Big Daddy beards that so many Mexican guys their age have and they both had a firm and considerable but not really oversized gut. Jusian works in the production department of the same factory where Tony works; Ernesto, like Tony, had blue pachuco tattoos on his knuckles.

Ernesto was an Ali man all the way. About the only time the place ever quieted down was weh, just before the final bout, they showed the chronological clips of Ali's fight. Ernesto knew them all. The place was near-silent and you could hear Cosell's voice now but even before he could announce who Ali had been fighting, Ernesto would be telling you who it was and what round it ended. "Brian London" he chanted. "Down in three. Henry Cooper, stopped in five, TKO...." The man knew his fighter. Half the time, he remembered what punch it had been. "The day after the Spinks fight, my wife says to me, "I know what your trouble is -- Ali lost that fight." He laughed. "I saw this one in a dream. Spinks will go down in nine. Man, I saw it. It's a right in the ninth."

Only that historical film clip that led to the fight shook something loose in me. There was the young and clean-cut Negro boy of the post-Olympic press conferences, talking mildly and politely to reporters, trying to be a responsible citizen in a white on white world. And then, just before the first Liston fight, he appeared. Big ol' moon-wide eyes, howlin' and jowlin' and telling a moderately amused world that he was gonna take that big ugly bear of a man OUT! And then doing it. He was like the wild yuoung soul of the people nobody knew ever existed standing over the canvassed boy of Liston at the second match and demanding that he get up and get it on. There were howls of delight all over the bar as they showed those scenes, like memories of the best moments of your childhood coming back fresh and clean.

And for the first few rounds it looked like Ali was in trouble, or at least potential trouble. Many not to Howard it but it looked that way to us.. Tony scored the first three rounds for his boy Leon on his napkin and I think Ernesto remained calm only because he knew for certain that Spinks must go down in the ninth. I found myself concentrating on the little screen and not the big one.

I think it was the fourth round, though, or maybe the fifth, that really shook us up. Ali looked like he hade used himself upalready and was gong to be haning on weakly for the rest of the way, while Spinks looked like he was beginning to figure out how he was gong to win this thing. Ernie looked over at me and said, "I don'k know, sometimes when you think about things all day, you dream about them at night. You know?"

And then there was relief. You could feel it lift the entire bar. Ali started making it clear that the situation was easily in hand, that it always had been. He was not about to lose this fight, even if Tony's napkin had it scored 6-1-3 in favor of Spinks. "Gimme that piece of paper!" yelled Julian and Tony had to laugh as he snatched it away. He had wanted to see Spinks take it away for good, but he'd been smart enough not to put any money on it.

Ali didn't take Spinks out with a right in the ninth -- I'd told Ernesto I'd start going to Mass again if his dream came true, so I was especially relieved about that -- but no one lost interest in the fight at all, even as the closing rounds came along to make it clear. Maybe in homes across the country, people switched off the set, convinced it was just another boring fight . . . but when the official decision was announced, the place went silent again and then, when it was final, men jumped around and hugged each other and there were no thoughts of queer jokes I even saw a couple of guys cry. Maybe it was the alcohol.

(for Pat Murphy)

Joe Ely; Lubbock Calling

The West Texas plains have produced a lot of honkytonk heroes. Joe Ely fits in just fine.
(published in SPIN)

Sitting around of a late Sunday afternoon at Joe Ely’s place, the talk turns back to Lubbock one more time. Maybe it always will. The creek has settled down after this last week’s rain flooded it out against the field, the road between Austin and the ranch is open again, and Jimmie Gilmore’s here to bring back the microphones he borrowed for his show last night at the Broken Spoke. Butch Hancock came along for the ride and they’re both sitting over close by the fire where it’s good and warm.

Another reason they’re here is this theater guy from San Francisco wants the whole bunch of them, all the notorious Lubbock expatriates –– Joe and Sharon Ely, Butch and Jimmie and Jo Carol Pierce, Terry and Jo Harvey Allen and all –– to write and act in this play he’s planning on producing if he can come up with some funding. Which is an interesting concept and everything –– maybe a little loose in the joints, but that’s about right too. It sounds like maybe he’s figuring on getting his funding by busting into some art council’s secret hidden vault–– something about "accurate determinations of currently outstanding grant-in-aid-assessments" –– but that’s okay. If it happens to fall together, that’s just fine. If it doesn’t, nobody’ll hold it against him. They’ve already gone back to telling Lubbock stories again anyway, starting with the Lubbock Lights.

Now the Lubbock Lights were famous UFOs that swung low over the Hub City back in 1957, back when flying saucer fever was pitched way up high. “I have kind of like a little theory, you know? Sharon Ely says. “One of the things that was happenign during that time was there was a lot of of honkytonks up in West Texas, and country music on the weekends, and everybody up there dances in a circle. I mean, I danced in a circle at the Cotton Club, and it causes a frenzy of heat and energy, and I think these Lubbock Light things that were flying over West Texas have this way of detecting heat energy, you know? And ‘cause it’s so fun, they probably went down and saw all these circles of heat rising from all these honkytonks and they probably wondered ‘What the hell is goin’ on?’”

Good question. If it was country music and Texas two-stepping that put Lubbock on the interstellar roadmap, it must have been the Cotton Club that kept the saucers hovering overhead in a low circle. The Cotton Club had been the last stop in West Texas for the big touring Western Swing bands like Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys before they headed out for the coast, and it served the likes of Ernest Tubb and Hank Williams too. The original club burned down in what unquestionably was a burst of heat energy, but it was resurrected with futurific slumpblock architecture just in time for Elvis Presley and the flying saucer jockeys to show up. And through it all, spaceships or not, the Lubbock locals kept up their West Texas waltz, their enduring shuffle around the dance floor, counter-clockwise.

“Joe and I was talking about that particular time,” says Sharon. “The cotton was doin’ great, there was gamblers, there was railroads runnin’ –– there was a lot of energy coming though Lubbock. I mean, farmers were drivin’ Cadillacs! There were more Cadillacs sold in West Texas than in any place in the whole United States. It was a high-energy place.”

And that’s not even to mention Buddy Holly, Lubbocks’ most notable export besides Phillips 66 gasoline. And higher octane too. Holly had him a Cadillac of his own, pink with blue Naugahyde upholstery, and Joe Ely used to own one just exactly like it until the guy who was repainting it went crazy from too many paint fumes and wound up in a mental hospital and the Caddy just plain disappeared. Now Joe’s got a Honda station wagon he’s thinking of getting rid of. And a three-year-old daughter Marie Elena, named after Buddy Holly’s wife. Seems like there’s a trade-off for everything in life.

The San Francisco fellow has a theory abut the Lubbock Lights that dovetails neatly with Sharon’s. Oddly, maybe, but neatly. He reckons that it had a lot to do with the circular mounds the Plains Indians buil, and the fact that they too danced in a circle.

“And Stonehenge was a dance hall,” Butch adds helpfully. Butch has been showing his notebook around, cartoons and photographs and words all woven together into one lumpy life. Butch writes songs too; a lot of them have made real fine appearances on Joe Ely records, and he also has a real nicely evolved theory of his own about the wild winds that blow all the way down from the North Pole with no interruption at all until they hit Yellow House Canyon and dump raw unadulterated oddball energy right over top of Lubbock –– the wind’s own dominion, home of the dusty hurricane, the original wide open space. “Plus, it was Tornado Alley, so there was already this elemental cirucular thing going on.”

“Counter-clockwise,” Jimmy Gilmore notes. He can afford to be quiet. He sang at the Broken Spoke last night. The Broken Spoke is probably the closest thing to the Cotton Club that’s left in Austin and, well, let’s put it this way: if heaven looks a lot like Texas, the saints will spend Saturday night dancing at the Broken Spoke. In a circle, counter-clockwise. Jimmie’s songs have showed up on Joe Ely’s records too, including one that starts out “Did you ever see Dallas from a DC-9 at night?,” a line that cansing itself. He can afford to be quiet. “Counter-clockwise in the Northern Hemisphere.”

“Like drains,” says Butch. “Dervishes dance counter-clockwise too.” So do West Texans. Always.

“I remember watching toilets before I went to Australia,” Joe says, stretching back, “made sure and flushed ‘em and remembered which way they went. And I got to Australia and the first thing I did was flush a commode. But their holes are square....”

Somebody or other starts speculating about the Lubbock Lights again, and how maybe what they were up to was they were out scouting around for Buddy Holly and maybe he didn’t actually die in that plane crash but got picked up by space folks. Of course that would mean that the outer space fellas got Ritchie Valens and the Big Bopper as pure gravy. Anyway, somehow or other, this reminds Joe of a a little story about this cousin of his back in Lubbock who grew onions one year.

He didn’t know anything about onions, never grew any before this, but he went on ahead and planted onions. Got so all you could smell was onions. Since he hadn’t ever raised any onions before, he didn’t know where to sell ‘em when it came harvest time, so he picked and loaded ‘em all up and went to a Furr’s Supermarket in Lubbock. Maybe it was garlic and not onions –– anyway, he went to the manager, and the manager said, Sure, we’ll take a gallon or two. Well, he had a whole truckload of these garlics or onions, whichever, and after he’d drove around to supermarkets all over town and they each one took a gallon or two, he could see he wasn’t getting nowhere. Finally, he got so mad he just took it all home and dumped the whole load out in the middle of his field. They just set there and rotted and his neighbors got mad because it smelled so bad and he had to hire someone to come out and dig a hole to bury all these onions. Cost him five hundred bucks.

“Needless to say, there were no werewolves in Lubbock County that year,” Butch adds.

Fin de Seccion Numero Uno

Space Is His Place; or, The Toga Party of the Spheres

It's easy to be weird when you're an ancient Egyptian from Saturn but nobody's ever accused Sun Ra of not giving it his absolute best shot. A lot of your Afro-Saturnians take a somewhat low-profile approach to life on this dull orb, dressing as the rest of us dress (more or less), speaking as we speak, sticking mostly to the sidewalk, crossing on the green. After all, when in Rome, join the toga party. Not Sun Ra, though; never a believer in shining his light 'neath a bushel basket, for at least the last 25 years he's let his Supra-CosmoPsychic origins speak for themselves. Say it now and say it loud: I am heliocentric ectoplanetary form made flesh, and I AM PROUD!

As you can well imagine, keeping an Intergalactic Arkestra together for two and a half decades is no small task. Consider the difficulties of assembling such an outfit in the '50s, when the big bands were withering away and the roster of those bands playing Basie-derived sub-atomic squonk was even smaller than it is today; when the majority of Afro-Saturnians were still passing, and thus rather loath to assemble themselves on the bandstand wearing fish-scale gold skullcaps and beam-reflective silver capes, especially when the bandstand haberdashery of the day called for something sharp in a dark Continental suit and a one-stripe tie, with maybe an off-the-stand addition of a sports-car cap set a jaunty angle for class,dash, and panache.

This time, though, Sun Ra and the Arkestra were playing Berkeley Square. That the nightclub is considered primarily as a new pave/wunk rock outlet makes no diff to Sun Ra; the Anglo-Plutonians who occupy such places dress in a manner that clashes wonderfully with the Arkestra's raiment, and besides, Sun Ra's always considered himself something of a teen idol anyway. "When we was playin' over in Portugal, the place we was playin' at wasn't that full up and the teenagers come in over the fence. 'Cause they didn't have no money anyway. Over there if they don't like you, they th'ow corncobs at you. Didn't th'ow any at us." He's talking to this guy from a radio station wearing a white leather motorcycle jacket named Uncle Mark — the guy, not the jacket— and Sun Ra's road manager and some guy with a notebook and another guy with a knit cap jammed full of dreadlocks are all in the dressing-room with them, all of them listening as Sun Ra runs it down. There's a little boy with a shirt that says he's Superman curled up asleep inn the corner on a ledge. "That's why musicians should be on TV more," Sun Ra says, "the ones that are doing something, 'cause in Mexico every Sunday they got all types of music on TV, got musicians from all the different places there, all the sections of the country, I guess, and jazz — they don't play too much good jazz in Mexico, the musicians."

Popular as he is the world over — and he is; most of Europe greets the Arkestra with the sort of welcome that America's cultural commissars reserve for visiting ballet troupes or noted French filmmaker/philosophers — Sun Ra refuses to restrict himself. After a recent swing through England and Scotland, some promoter apparently approached him with an exclusive offer that would have set the Arkestra to touring the length and breadth of the British Isles indefinitely. "Can't do that, 'cause we dealin' on a psycho-spiritual plane . . . can't be signin' up with one nation." And while he's on that plane, and before the No Smoking signs come on, there are some other things he'd like to accomplish. "I suppose there's such things as spiritual criminals," he tells Uncle Mark. "I'm trying to get them to let me be their lawyer, so I can talk to God for them."

Sun Ra is a pretty steady extemporizer, rolling right along, steady as a river with none of the rush. He takes his time, lets the pauses have their places, but the only thing that stops him dead full is when the fellow in the blue blazer and sandals comes in. He comes in on a glide — none too easy in so small a room, and he sweeps over to Sun Ra and gives hime a big wide hug. "You're lookin' good!" he says. "Lookin' good!"
Sun Ra nods and smiles, accepting his due. The fellow in the blazer has those hipster moves, those Love You Madly hipster moves you don't see much any more, graceful and direct. Smooth, like a knife slicing soft margarine on TV. He's telling Sun Ra about some woman they both know (or that he thinks Sun Ra knows, at least; if Sun Ra does know her, he doesn't seem too very interested in hearing about her) and about where the hipster is living. "I was living in the Village," he tells Sun Ra. "But now I'm out here."

"It can be nice here," says Sun Ra. "You got—"

"I don't think I'd want to live back there again. Oh, to visit, sure. To visit. But to live there again? Uh-uh."

Sun Ra is determined. "I'd like to live in Greece, there along the Adriatic, the Mediterranean. It's nice there, lots of sun—"

"Oh, the sun in Italy is just—"

"With them old temples and columns and—"

Superman stirs in the corner a little and goes back to sleep. The hipster in the blazer and the sandals shares a few more memories with Sun Ra, then he gets up to go. "Been wonderful seein' you again," he says. "You're lookin' great!"

Sun Ra gives him a benificent smile and a parting nod and gets back to his interview. He gets around to the suppression of creativity. "I saw a man with roller skates had a motor on 'em and the po-lice came over and made him stretch out and said 'You can't do that 'round here — you operatin' a motor vehicle . . .'"

My Separation From Cindy Crawford

from Vogue

My relationship with Cindy Crawford was not a long one, but while it lasted, we were very close. Maybe it wasn't the deepest of relationships — Cindy is deep, I'm not — but it was close. Perhaps too close. Maybe we meant too much to each other. You know how these things are.

I was staying at a friend's place and Cindy — I call her Cindy — lived in the same building. As it happened, I spent a terrific amount of time in the elevator that week. No sooner would I get to the ground floor and through the lobby than I'd remember something I'd forgotten upstairs and have to get back in the elevator and go get it and come back down again. Sometimes I'd remember something else I had to go back and get. I had a lot on my mind at the time.

It was tropical in Manhattan than month, and only the brave dared venture out before the sun was on the wane. My friend Theresa and I cabbed over from her place late Sunday afternoon, stopping off at the deli for some beer and juice and some of that potato salad you ladle into those plastic containers. And Cindy was there, radiant, over by the cracker and cookie section. It would be ungentlemanly of me to to speak of her purchases; let it suffice to say that nothing she bought had the least bit of a percentage of butterfat. That figure and that complexion may be God-given, but she attends to a healthy diet just the same. I find that so admirable.

It has been my experience that not all models are as fabulous-looking in person as they appear in photos. In person, Cindy is a goddess. I think I can speak objectively here, because this was before Cindy and I were truly close. Unequivocally, she is a goddess. She takes a lousy photograph comparatively. She looks a lot better in real life.

At last, with a heavy heart and a cold six-pack, I left the deli. Theresa, not always as good a friend as she might be, was sort of dragging me by the elbow. Trudging down the block toward the apartment, a block that seemed a thousand miles, fumbling and fumbling with keys to a doorway to happiness that could never be mine, I wept silently, inwardly, tearlessly. "Takes you forever just to open a simple door, doesn't it?" inquired Theresa.

Then it happened. Cindy was there. She had followed me! I held the door; she held the elevator for me. Theresa got in too. At first, none of us said a word. The silence was eminent, profound. It was bosky.

No one in all the rest of our species looks as good in a gray t-shirt as Cindy Crawford. Cindy Crawford was who those t-shirt inventor guys had in mind when they invented the t-shirt. She was sweating. I was sweating. We were both sweating. I guess Theresa was probably sweating, too. I didn't notice.

We didn't have much to say to one another then, Cindy and I. How could we? What is there to say at such times, arms full of groceries? "Would you push the button for the fifth floor for me?" Words only interfere with life, force powerful feelings into tiny categories. What Cindy and I had to say to each other was larger than words, and quieter too.

That little mole thing, by the way, is as cute as can be.

Selling Postcards of the Hanging

Al Green — Amazing Grace

After a dozen years of walking the road to heaven,
the Reverend Al Green raises a little hell.
by Bart Bull
(photography by Anton Corbijn)
published in SPIN

White. White teeth — white, white teeth — white tie, white shoes, white pants, white jacket. And in the buttonhole, a red, red rose. Yes, and Al Green is smiling, smiling. Smiling, grinning, glowing — white, white teeth — gleaming and beaming with joy and gold jewelry, glowing with love and happiness.

And Al Green is always beaming, always, even now. Even now. Even now, just a few slim moments before he'll be out on a Northern California concert stage and the seats will be filled with devout churchified ladies from Oakland and Richmond and San Francisco, big broad-boned black ladies and little black ladies with bones like birds, and yes, they well remember all those worldly songs Al Green used to sing back ten or fifteen years ago, "Let's Stay Together" and "Tired of Being Alone" and I'm Still In Love With You," all of those and all of the others. Yes, they remember. But no, they didn't come here tonight, not one of them, to hear Al Green sing those songs. Tonight they came to hear the man who left all that talk of worldly love behind him when he finally took up his calling, when he stopped fighting and surrendered his life and his music to the Lord. Tonight they are ready to hear the Reverend Al Green.

And tonight the Reverend Green is beaming and gleaming backstage, talking with old friends, laughing, laughing. And if the ladies of the audience had been here this afternoon to see the Reverend rehearse his band, they’d have seen him relaxed and laughing, beaming and gleaming and giggling and just having himself a wonderful time working the band through the evergreen glory of “Let’s Stay Together.” Wearing those glasses of his for the scholarly effect, the clear ones with the tiny, tiny pink roses embedded in the frames, and adjusting the singers’ harmonies, squeezing the horns down tighter, teaching the drummer that unbeatable trot, and preparing to sing, tonight, for the first time in all the nine years since he came to Jesus once and all, one of his old songs, his secular songs, his love songs. Yes, and singing, just for a quick little moment, “Let’s . . . let’s stay to-geth-er . . . loving you whether . . . whether . . . times are good or bad, happy or—” before he cut it short, and burst out laughing. Laughing.

And he’s laughing backstage now, just moments to go, slapping his knees and howling high and maybe even looking out of the corner of his eye just a little to see if everyone is appreciating him appreciating the joke. And they should, truly they should, because tonight is like some moment fallen loose from a history book, a page falling across time. Tonight Al Green will step back across a line he has crossed just once before, a line that won’t be crossed too many times.

Sam Cooke crossed this line one time, going the other way. He left the Soul Stirrers, left the mightiest gospel quartet of all , left it to become a big pop star. And he did too, became the biggest of black pop stars, became a manly black symbol of style and sophistication. Yes, but something was missing, something was wrong that he could not right. Didn’t matter how well his worldly career was going, didn’t matter what he did, and so he tried to come back over the line. He went onstage with the Soul Stirrers in Chicago, and first the good gospel folks were silent as the dead and after that they catcalled him right off the stage. Yes, and it wasn’t too many months later that Sam Cooke was shot dead in a Los Angeles auto court. What does it profit a man to gain the world if he loses his soul?

And from the instant the Reverend Green bounces up the steps to this Northern California stage, something is wrong, something isn’t working, some presence, some spirit, is missing. The ladies of the audience are patient but they’re ready too, waiting to be moved, to be shaken and stirred. Yes, and still something is missing, something is empty. Maybe Al Green’s mind is elsewhere, maybe deep in his heart Al Green knows he’s not supposed to mess with those old songs. He hasn’t touched one yet—not yet—but they’re so near at hand. All he has to do right now is call for “Let’s Stay Together” and he’ll have stepped back over that line again.

Those songs are so near at hand, and so are those good gospel-drenched ladies, the ones who have been with him in these years since he came to his calling. “You know,” he tells them, “there are two different kinds of love.” Smiling shyly, slyly, he’s scratching the back of his head and looking up at the lights. “Let’s not ever forget that. Let’s not ever forget that there are two kinds of love, that there’s God’s love and then there’s man’s love, the love of a man for his wife, the love of a wife for her husband. And that’s a righteous love too, because that’s why man and woman was created by God, for love and happiness, so that they would stay together.” And the band has just so very, very sweetly and so very, very softly eased on into a familiar little trot, has slipped into “Let’s Stay Together,” and even the sternest of the ladies can’t help but start to rock in the pews.

Yes, and even though it’s all falling in place for the Reverend Green to lean right back into the open arms of “Let’s Stay Together,” he carries on, he commences, he loosens his tie and continues to testify. A man’s love for a woman, a woman’s love for a man can be a righteous thing, but we all know that God knows when it is and when it is not. Can anyone out there tonight ever say that they have gone and fooled God? No, and it’s only a fool who thinks he can fool God, who thinks he can do any old thing he wants to do, who thinks he can escape from what’s right, from what’s righteous. Does anyone here know what I’m talking about here tonight?

Yes, and the band is still vamping on “Let’s Stay Together,” and before too many minutes the Reverend does grab that song up, goes ahead on and sings the thing but he can’t seem to find the spirit in it. It’s beautiful, it’s sleek as a cat, no one in the world can sing a song like Al Green, no one in all the world, but not this song, not tonight. No.

And it doesn’t matter what he does now, doesn’t matter if he stops and takes off his shoes to get a little more comfortable — he does — and it doesn’t matter if he throws those shoes, throws them deep into the cheap seats — he does—and it doesn’t matter if he sets himself down on the edge of the stage and dangles his stocking feet and lays back on the stage and starts to singing again. No, it doesn’t matter what he does, doesn’t matter that he goes on to sing “Precious Lord” or “He Is the Light,” doesn’t matter that he is Al Green, the Reverend Al Green, the sweetest, finest, greatest singer on God’s green earth, because tonight he isn’t moved, isn’t stirred. Because tonight he can’t find the spirit. And tonight the ladies are going home early.

On the following day, he’s scheduled for a morning taping of Soul Train, though by the time he arrives it’s late afternoon. He and Don Cornelius, the slowest-speaking host in show business, clasp all their hands together like old friends. There was a time when every Al Green song was a hit and every appearance he made on Soul Train was a gift. He sold 20 million records in the early ‘70s, with ten Top 10 hits. But it’s been more than 12 years since the last of those now, and there’s fair reason to believe Cornelius is simply offering an old friend a favor.

Still, if those hits linger in the memory of Don Cornelius, how much respect can be expected of the kids on this afternoon’s Soul Train? The Reverend Green has elected to wear the most conservative of navy blue suits today, in contrast to all the jangling spangled costumes around him; the only things the least bit flashy about him are his gold rings and perhaps the quiet pink roses of his boxy eyeglasses.

The kids dance to his lip-synched version of “You Brought the Sunshine,” — he may be the least interested lip-synch artist in pop music — but they dance to everything once the cameras are on. Everyone, the Reverend Green included, is standing in place so Don Cornelius can muff a few interview lines when out of nowhere a young guy, 17 or so, starts to sing. He sings the contagious little intro to “Let’s Stay Together,” Al Green’s very first No. 1 hit, and in the next instant everyone is singing too, swaying and clapping and urging the Reverend to join in. These kids were all looking forward to kindergarten when “Let’s Stay Together” was a hit, and there’s no telling how they know it but they all do, every word, every note. The Reverend doesn’t sing at all but simply soaks up the graceful sound of his own song. “I hope the tape’s rollin’,” he says, all smiles.

That very evening the Reverend Green is playing L.A.’s heavenly Wiltern Theater, a green-tiled monument to art deco architecture, a cathedral dedicated to man’s amusement, a glorious ornament. The Reverend James Cleveland, gospel music’s stout patriarch, is in the audience and with him are members of the Hawkins family, Oakland’s famed gospel household. In the audience too is Michael Jackson, surgically masked for secrecy, with the little surgically masked Emmanuel Lewis next to him. Alongside the stars and lesser music business scene-makers are the folks who fill the pews every Sunday, an audience with such very different matters on their minds. The Wiltern is lovely beyond compare, and the sound is marvelously bad, and neither matters a small bit when the Reverend Green walks into the light. Tonight when he reaches his right hand up into the air the Holy Ghost is there, lifts him up, raises him up. lifts him, and will not let him down.

And tonight he brings forth “Let’s Stay Together,” brings it forth in front of just as many church folks as were on hand last night, and he says all those same things he said last night, and tonight there is a glory in it. Yes, and tonight he goes past the glory of his old songs, mighty as they are, and he sings “Amazing Grace.” Just “Amazing Grace,” that simple old song that’s been done all to death and back again. Yes, and he is so filled with the spirit, and so much on fire, and so graceful, so grace-filled. Yes, and this is why people who don’t even faintly believe in Jesus find themselves with tears streaming when they stand back and watch gospel music, find their souls moving in step with their feet, find themselves stirred. Stirred.

And tonight the Reverend Al Green isn’t throwing out any shoes. No, tonight the Reverend is coming forth, is climbing down into the seats, is out among the flock. “It’s alright,” he tells the security ushers, “Ain’t no one gonna hurt me here,” and he laughs as he sings. He’s taken “Amazing Grace” and brought it down so very quiet, so very soft, and brought the audience along to higher ground. Any hand not clapping is raised high in the air, and all over the church — this is church now — the ladies have raised the holy shout, have found the sanctified bounce, have commenced to fall out, shivering, rattling, stiffening. And the Reverend passes through the crowd unmolested, hugging and shaking hands as he sings and delivering the spirit with every sound, every motion, every moment. “Was grace that brought me safe so far,” he sings, and the clapping is so many times louder than the band, “...and grace will lead me on.”

And on the day that follows, on Sunday afternoon, at a time when he would usually be finished with the morning services back home in Memphis and not yet ready to start the early evening Bible study, Reverend Green is quiet in his hotel room, quiet and still. A Bible is at hand and a guitar is in his lap. A little soft pass at the strings, a little soft smile. The sound stays and lingers like the last ripple in a small pond after a rock has skipped the surface and settled to the bottom. It sounds like The Belle Album.

Yes, but nothing else sounds like The Belle Album, not in the ten years since it came out, not ever. You could hear a man’s soul tearing itself in two, then knitting together again, larger and far finer. To make the record, Al Green had to part with his producer, his record company, his audience. He produced the album himself and played guitar, tart and crisp and clean guitar, guitar licks just like the ones he’s messing with this afternoon in his hotel, guitar licks that squeeze time and take you home. ‘Belle was Mary,” he says, watching his fingers where they rest on the strings.

And Mary, Mary Woodson, was a woman who was so very taken with the man Al Green was, she believed she couldn’t live without him. She was already married, although Al has always said that he really never knew it. She proposed marriage to him one night, to the man who sang “Let’s Stay Together,” who sang “Let’s Get Married” and “God Blessed Our Love” and so many songs, and after he turned her down he went and took a bath, She took a pot of boiling water—”lt wasn’t grits like they always say in all the stories, it was water boiling to fix grits”—and she threw it at him, scalded and burned and scarred him with it. Then she took her .38 pistol into the next room and there she died.

The water scarred his back but it may have saved his soul. “Belle,” he sings, “It’s you that I want but Him that I need..." and the guitar is a reflection, the words a calm confession. If the Lord is at the front of his life and at the back too, if Jesus is his All in All, his All and All, if He, if He, He, He . . . And words fail him, and the Spirit moves him, and his voice is triumphant. The storm has stilled, peace reigns. “It was Mary who told me first that I was going to be called,” he says, “that l would have a ministry of my own.” He pauses for a tiny sweet lick on his guitar, sweet and slim and pretty. “I laughed at her. She said I was called and I laughed at her and said ‘Who, me?’ “He laughs again just thinking about it a dozen years later. “She told me.”

In an airplane on the way home to Memphis, the Reverend Green claps his hands at the sight of the California coastline falling away beneath his window, gives the Lord a round of applause for some fine truly wonderful work. Smiling and thoughtful, the Reverend Green is reminded again of The Belle Album, of that same line from that same song, and of how much it meant. “That is the pivotal point right there. ‘It’s you that I want but it’s Him that I need.’ That was a statement that was given because it was given.”

Reverend Green is a man given to mild ways of amusing himself in moments of leisure — holding his red rayon scarf over his face and flicking its tassles across his nose, chewing mints, gum, and peppermint Life Savers, elbow-nudging a fellow passenger when a good conversational point is delivered. He has a tendency to view his own past as someone else’s, to see Al Green as though he were someone removed and remote from himself. “I don’t know why he cut that record,” he will say; “I don’t understand why, as much money as he had, I don’t know why he didn’t go to any studio he wanted. I don’t know what he was doin’, I really don’t understand. I think he did it out of the fact they told him it couldn’t he done, and they told him that if he did do it, they told him the album wasn’t gonna come out in the first place. I think it was a challenge for him more than anything else, and he did it in defiance. I think this is why he did it. I’m not sure. He did a lot of things I’m not sure why he did. I don’t know why. Just brought a 8-track studio down, just rolled it in there on some wheels and plugged it in—I don’t know why he done that. I don’t understand. But it does not go without Mary.”

Picking up an advance cassette of Soul Survivor, his newest album, he turns it over and over, admires the typed titles. “Now, this album relates to vintage Al Green because I don’t hear nothin’ else but Al Green, and him chankin’ on a guitar. If that ain’t Al Green, I don’t want to see it. That’s him for real, without all the make up and the glamour and the beauty. That’s him right there.” He raps on the cassette’s blank cover with his finger. “That is the very Al Green. Without all the cookies and candy. This is the very Al Green, right here in the overalls and bomber jacket, sittin’ here playin’ guitar on the floor.” Asked if he can find any hits inside this cassette, he smiles deeply and points to one and another and another after that. He points to every song but one, and then he includes that one too.

The music that Al Green made in the years before The Belle Album shows no sign of aging, no sign that a time will ever come when it won’t feel perfectly right, It’s pastoral music, always cool and sweet. Al was raised up in the country, on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi, the son of a preacher. There is country in his music, there are Hank Williams and Willie Nelson songs on his old albums, but there isn’t one of his songs, not one of the hits that filled the dance floors through the first half of the ‘70s, that doesn’t somehow suggest just a trace of mud between the toes.

Reverend Green can’t help but laugh and laugh when he considers the wonder of his songwriting. “Cause if you start with ‘Call Me,’ for instance, you start with ‘What a beautiful time we had together.’ He spreads it out flat and simple. “ ‘Now it’s gettin’ late, and we must leave each other. But remember the times we had. And how right I tried to be. It’s all in a day’s work. Call me.’ “ And then he giggles and giggles like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

By Sunday, the Reverend Green is back in church, back at Full Gospel Tabernacle, just a mile or so down Elvis Presley Boulevard from Graceland. There is nothing monumental or magnificent about Full Gospel, although like everything else in Memphis, it has a portable Rent-a-Sign marquee out front, yellow, with black plastic letters listing the hours of worship services. There is a scroll painted on one of the walls behind the altar that says “Let God Be Magnified.” A painting in back shows lily-pure souls rising to Jesus from out of graveyards, from office buildings, from cars crashed on a freeway and driven into the water, and from a Volkswagen van that has been crushed in a collision with an 18-wheel tractor-trailer rig.
It’s gathering dark outside and windy cold when the six o’clock prayer meeting and Bible study class is close to commencing. The Reverend Green is sitting just off the altar with his guitar player’s Fender in his lap and the amp cranked up, and if this wasn’t Sunday evening in Full Gospel Tabernacle, you’d swear those were blues he was playing. He fingers a few of those mean, mean little obbligatos, those rippling arpeggios, laughs, and goes off to mess with the organ.

When all the ladies are in the pews, there can’t be more than 20 in attendance What is it that would make a man lay down a singing career that showed no sign of stopping, or even slowing down, a man who had thousands of women battling to grab the red roses he threw them from the stage—what would make a man lay it all down to pick up a Bible and preach a Sunday night meeting that is hard-pressed to total two dozen?

The Lord’s Prayer starts the meeting, and a hymn is lifted. Things are settling in—this will be a long night—when one of the ladies asks her pastor if maybe they can sing one more, one she needs to hear. Her mama’s health is failing, she feels like her mama may pass, and she’s worried and troubled in mind.

“Will you lead us?” the Reverend asks her.

The song’s motion is slow and it rolls along deep. She starts it and he joins it and the other ladies are there too, slow and deep. It’s graceful and mighty and the ladies lean on one another’s voices the way tall trees lean in the wind. Two choruses, three choruses, and then the Holy Spirit is joined, the Holy Ghost stirs the hymn, and the song grows too tall to go over, grows too low to get under. It speaks all language and the woman who called for it is sobbing, screaming, praising God, wiping her eyes with a yellow tissue. Another woman stands, so close to falling out, so close, and thanks her Jesus, thanks her Jesus. The Reverend is with them, and in this moment his voice, his wonderful voice, is one of many.