Tom Waits Hall of Famer

Some of my favorite artists often get lost in the library because their names start at the end of the alphabet and I don’t browse far enough to find them. Something similar is happening on my DVR: music programs get archived and gather digital dust. That’s why the other day I was wondering why I had saved the induction ceremony for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Class of 2012. (It was not for Alice Cooper). Then I came across Tom Waits and a video bio in which a interviewer asks: “How does a guy with a voice like yours decide to be a singer…and succeed?” Cigarette in hand, Tom replies:
“Well it was a choice between entertainment or a career in air conditiong and refrigeration.”

Ever since my friend Tom introduced me to Waits back in the seventies, I have been a fan of his ability as a wordsmith as he rapped, skatted, and poetry slammed his way through some pathbreaking songs and developed his persona as a beat poet, jazz singer and creature of the night that made more from movie roles and sound track credits than album sales.

As a singer, he makes Mr. Dylan sound mellifluous but as a song writer and music maker, he is a true Hall of Famer. And a lot of his contemporaries would toast his induction with thanks for giving them hit songs like “Old 55” (Eagles, Ian Matthews), "Downtown Train" (Rod Stewart), "Blind Love" (Bob Seger) and "Heart of Saturday Night" (Dion).

The video led me back to the vinyl and I was rewarded by his early work. Closing Time seemed to confirm my First Album is The Best Album Theory. But Heart Attack and Vine gave Mr. Springsteen one of his anthems with “Jersey Girl.” Tucked on that side is an amazing organ solo on a cut called “In Shades” and the song “Downtown” offers this quintessential Waits turn of phrase: Drinking Chivas Regal in a four-dollar room, just another dead soldier in a powder blue night.
Here is one more good one from “New Coat of Paint:”
Our love needs a transfusion
So let’s shoot it full of wine
Fishin for a good time starts with throwin in your line.

His send-up of television ads, radio come-ons and the commercial society on “Step Right Up” from Small Change is as laugh out loud funny as it was when he recorded it in 1976.
For the lyrics, he invited you to “send a photo of yourself, two creepie charlies and a self-addresed, stamped envelope to the Tropicana Motor Hotel, Hollywood, California.” Ironically, Waits won a $2.5 million settlement from Frit-o-Lay for using “Step Right Up” as the concept for a radio jingle.

Waits’ signature humor came through in his acceptance speech. “They say that I have no hits and I’m difficult to work with and they say that like it’s a bad thing.” (Cut to a shot of presenter Neil Young laughing.)

He asked if he could get a key chain version of his trophy, “So I could keep it with me just in case I hear someone say, ‘Pete take the cuffs off, I think he’s a Hall of Famer.’”

He touched a chord with his peers in the audience when he noted, “Songs are really just very interesting things to be doing with the air.” And finally, “We all love music, but we really want music to love us.”

Madonna, Cher and Billie H: Women Who Rock

On Capitol Hill last week, the media was reporting how a record number of women had been elected to the new Congress. A few miles down New York Avenue, there was an exhibit dedicated to the women who made records and it was a fascinating catalog of nine decades of music history.

"Women Who Rock" filled the second floor of the National Museum for Women in the Arts as part of its 25th anniversary celebration in a co-production with Cleveland's Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Part fashion show, part tribute and part history lesson it brought back a lot of memories of women who have sung the stories of young love, tangled webs and lost opportunities.

While the exhibit ended with the costumes and instruments of Brittany and Taylor, Madonna other top pop phenoms, it began more touchingly with a tribute to Mother Maybelle Carter with her story and her Gibson L5 guitar. She played it from 1927 until the early 50's when June and Johnny Cash decided it ought to be in a museum so they bought her this replacement. The only guitar that could match it for playing time was Odetta's, circa 1951.

As good keepers of the flame, the Cleveland curators devoted solo exhibits to the early blues and jazz greats. There was a fox fur stole worn by Billie Holiday as well as a poster for two shows in 1948 at Carnegie Hall. Prices started at $1.20 and topped out at $3.60. It was her first appearance after being released from prison and both sold out.

Next was Bessie Smith's case complete with 78 records and session cards for her 1925 hit, "I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate." I learned that the first person to record "C.C. Rider" (See See Rider) was Ma Rainey in 1925.

From there, the exhibit paired women which proved interesting. Wanda Jackson and Ruth Brown, Lavern Baker and Brenda Lee (1964 telegram from Dusty Springfield: "I know you'll be a smash"), Bonnie Raitt and Loretta Lynn, the Ronettes and the Shirelles, Mavis Staples and Odetta.

Laura Nyro was with Joni Mitchell along with their lyrics in notebooks. Laura's "And When I Die" was neatly hand lettered with only two words crossed out. Joni's song ended with this dedication: "For Barry in memory of those bread and butter days. No Gravy, just bread and butter."

It was great to see song writers honored in addition to Carole King like Cynthia Weil ("Kicks," "On Broadway," "You've Lost That Lovin' Feelin'") and Ellie Greenwich ("River Deep, Mountain High,""Leader of the Pack" "Do Wah Diddy," and "Be My Baby").

As with any compilation...someone has to get short shrift and to cram Heart, Donna Summer, Cher, Joan Jett, Stevie Nicks and Pat Benatar into the same display case seemed a little crazy. On the other side was Cyndi Lauper,Janet Jackson, Madonna, Sheena E, Gwen Stefani, Britany Spears and Shakira. Linda Ronstadt was an afterthought.

Despite those problems it was still fun to see Cher's Indian feather dress and Madonna's get up.

Then there was Queen Latifah's high school year book photo (1987) and a piano that Lady Gaga's grandparents bought her when she was a baby. Do you think they thought it would lead to a meat costume for the MTV awards? That was on display also but it was hard to tell if it had become beef jerky or red leatherette.

Recognition of the roles women play in rock history is long overdue and one hopes this exhibit will be traveling elsewhere. In the Rolling Stone anthology, "The 100 Greatest Artists," there are only six women and two female groups. Only Aretha, Madonna, Janis and Patti Smith cracked the top fifty and the others were Joni Mitchell, Tina Turner, the Shirelles and Diana Ross & The Supremes. Of course of the 55 "Voters", only two were women. Here in Washington, we're familiar with that kind of balloting.

Happy Musical New Year

The turn of the calendar tends to make one reflective and I am no exception. Now seems an appropriate time to note some things for which I am thankful at the end of 2012.

I’m glad Little Richard is still going strong at age 80 and still taking credit (with more than a little justification) for inventing rock and roll.

I’m glad that Keith Richards made it to 69 although as ESPN’s Tony Kornheiser noted, Keith has “looked 69 for the past thirty years.”

I’m amused that my local big box discount store was offering books for Christmas titled, “Bruce,” “Rod,” “Mick Jagger” and “Who Am I?” by Pete Townshend.
Over at Barnes & Noble there was “Kenny Rogers,” “Love is the Cure” by Elton John, “Duran, Duran," coffee table books from The Stones and Led Zeppellin and yet another life story from Willie Nelson: “Roll Me Up & Smoke Me When I’m Gone.”

Just when I think I’ll be spending more on books than on music all sorts of sixty somethings come out with new and interesting work...from Bonnie Raitt to the Beach Boys to Joe Walsh (“Analog Man”), Neil Young, Bob Dylan and the new co-pilot of Air Force One, Senator Springsteen.

I was thankful to find an actual record store alive and well and living in Indianapolis. I happened across Luna (www.lunamusic.net) which has been in business since 1994 and at its present location (52nd and College) for six years. I could not do its collection of vinyl albums or CDs justice before being summoned to dinner but I did purchase an album to suport the cause: Big Star’s “#1 Record.” I loved the fact they recorded my sale in a spiral notebook in pencil (how High Fidelity is that?) and promised myself a return trip.

I came across Big Star and Alex Chilton in the Oxford American’s annual Southern Music Issue a few years ago. I am thankful they have survived embezzlements, bankruptcies and office scandals to deliver their fourteenth music collection on CD. This year’s compilation celebrates the music of Lousiana from Louis Armstrong to Nathan and The Zydeco Cha Chas (www.oxfordamerican.org)

Finally I really want to thank the people who have read my musings over the past two years and commented or encouraged me to continue. You have motivated me to keep listening and learning. Happy New Year!

Led Zeppelin is in the (White) house

Those of you who live outside the Washington Beltway may have missed how all-a-twitter the city's poobahs were on a recent weekend. In this case it had nothing to do with the dalliances of four-star generals or those begging for alms at the base of the fiscal cliff.

No the big event was The Kennedy Center Honors, a made for television event that somehow manages to assemble media stars and politicians to bestow life achievement medals, raise some money for the KenCen and often put on a good show because it is edited down for the broadcast on CBS.

If you thought politics makes for strange bedfellows, this year's list of honorees gives new meaning to how opening the door to musicians and comics makes the term bizarre seem inadequate.

Just listing the designees this year was enough to get the President a laugh at a White House reception. Here they are: Ballerina Natalia Makarova, actor Dustin Hoffman and blues great Buddy Guy, plus late night host David Letterman and Led Zeppelin's John Paul Jones, Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.

Mr. Obama couldn't resist noting this motley crew "had no business being on the same stage together." When he took note of Zeppelin's history of trashing hotel rooms on tour, he concluded, "So it is good we are meeting in a place where the window glass is three inches thick."

What redeems the selection process (and the show) is the artists who show up to do the honors. Morgan Freeman introduced Guy and performers Tracy Chapman, Jeff Beck, Beth Hart and Bonnie Raitt.

For Letterman, it was Tina Fey, Alec Baldwin and Jimmy Kimmel. Hoffman's career was presented by Robert DeNiro and for the big finish, Jack Black came on to praise the Zeppelin. Musical tributes followed from the Foo Fighters, Kid Rock and, finally, Heart, doing the classic, "Stairway to Heaven" (backed, according to The Washington Post,by "a giant choir wearing bowler hats.")

The Post also reported the Guy tribute ended with an audience sing-a-long of the Prez'go-to theme song, "Sweet Home Chicago."

Set your DVRs for CBS on December 26 so you can check out whose rubbing elbows on the red carpet in D.C. (Meryl Streep & Hillary Clinton?)

A couple of other programming notes. We caught an edition of Austin City Limits the other night featuring Bonnie Raitt and Mavis Staples. Talk about music history! When the announcer said this was ACL's 38th season, I realized how much we music lovers owe to public television.

And for those (HBO) paying customers, they got their monthly subscription's worth in November with "Crossfire Hurricane." This combination of Rolling Stones' history and concert performances was, as they say in the UK, "brilliant." It did not rotate as most HBO films do but I suspect it will resurface again. If not, drop on by because I am looking for an excuse to watch it again.

Kurt Vonnegut: Four Score & Ten

Last month marked the 90th anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut’s birth in Indianapolis. On a recent trip I discovered that Kurt’s spirit and legacy were alive and well and being celebrated in a small building that resembled the hardware stores that bore his family name and where he worked summers.

Although I never met him, we shared some common experiences and family friends. He wrote for The Shortridge Daily Echo (our high school’s classic building was designed by his family firm of architects…he was there with my aunt) where I was the sports editor my senior year.

He had such respect for my father’s infantry service that he wrote a wonderful blurb for Wendell Phillippi’s military history, Dear Ike: "It is the best, authoritative, personalized book on World War II I have read." This from the man who brought you Slaughterhouse Five. In a sense that was typical of Vonnegut, playing down his accomplishments and playing up the life and work of his fellow Hoosiers.

Watching videos of his friends in the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library you get a sense of what growing up Indiana meant to him. Morley Safer talks about a New Yorker who never lost a sense of where his roots were. My family friend Maije Alford Failey whose new memoir recalls her days at Shortridge High with Kurt, We Never Danced Check to Cheek, tells how he loved the irony of visiting Crown Hill Cemetery, not to visit his family burial plots, but to note the proximity of Hoosiers John Dillinger and James Whitcomb Riley (the children’s poet). The subtitle of Slaughterhouse Five was “The Children’s Crusade.” Indeed, my skinny father in 1940 looked like a teenager.

The point of this post (without a musical connection except Vonnegut was a bard of the boomer-rock generation) is to encourage your support of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library (www.vonnegutlibrary.org.)and his ongoing campaigns against war, book banning and hypocrisy.

His public legacy is housed in a small brick building in the shadow of the Indiana State Capitol and memorials to the Civil War (the Soldiers and Sailors Monument on the Circle is now the world’s largest Christmas tree), World War I & II and the national headquarters of the American Legion. Of these memorials, his is the smallest and most underfunded but (with no disrespect to those have served their country in uniform), the one with passionate followers and perhaps the most important message.

On a Friday after Thanksgiving, it was heartening to find people from around the country comparing favorite Vonnegut novels…he was amazingly prolific…and watching others enjoy his artwork, Army insignia and a manual typewriter in the two-room tribute to him.

It seemed inadequate (his papers are at the Lilly Library at Indiana University) and unassuming...which he would appreciate...a footnote to history and a portal to his amazing work and insights.

Vonnegut fans come in many genres…science fiction, politics and Indiana characters in the middle of the twentieth century. While I enjoy all his work my favorites are the stories he based in my hometown, my high school, my friends’ lives. In those he displayed his journalistic skills, his empathy and his ability to capture reality that Sherwood Anderson, Mark Twain and others have used to preserve the American way of life.

Paul Simon hit a nerve when he wrote: “Nothing but the dead and dying back in my little town.”
Kurt Vonnegut told their stories.

Morley Safer's Farewell Sketch: "And so he went."

Talkin' Bout Our Generation

The Rolling Stones, along with some feedback from friends, got me thinking about the way rock and roll has become interwoven into the fabric of our lives. The Stones’ started things off Sunday morning at Starbucks (where The Who was piped over the sound system). There was Mick staring at me from The New York Times Arts section in a vintage 70’s costume. When I got home, he and Keith and Ron and Charlie were smiling at me (sort of) from the cover of The Post’s TV guide. They had been dialing up folks from Paris to promote their documentary, “Crossfire Hurricane,” opening on HBO November 15 (as well as their book, new CD and arena concerts). Fiftieth anniversaries are golden and the “boys” in the band are still raking it in.

The anecdotes from friends included stories of a summer job in California and nights on the beach listening to Dick Dale and The Del-Tones and of breaking an embargo to play the latest single from the Young Rascals at WERK radio in Muncie, Indiana. Both stories had been prompted by an email or post and I realized how often old friends and I used music to reconnect, share old times and participate (again) in a common experience. This seems more prominent this year as we mark the half century point for the Beatles and Beach Boys as well as the Stones and others (The Who is in town this week on its Quadraphenia Tour, Pete Townshend has his autobiography on bookshelves and Roger Daltrey spoke at the National Press Club.)

Music fans love to debate cosmic questions (is it art?) and make endless lists (desert island discs) but seldom do we step back to see how large the forest has become from all the music trees that have developed since the early 1960’s. For our parents, the common cultural experience was World War II. For the post-war baby boomers, the predominant cultural experience was the influence of rock and roll music. Far more than television or individual historical events, it has been the common thread that so many of us now share.

How else to explain the longevity of the super groups? Or a governor who prides himself on the number of Springsteen concerts he’s been to? Madison Avenue figured this out years ago which is why rock anthems drive television commercials (“Like a rock!”), why movies have used CD collections to replace dialogue, and why you can’t go to a Home Depot or a Safeway without listening to a string of favorite oldies.

In Jon Pareles’ excellent NYT story, Keith sums up the phenomenon of the band in what could be an explanation of the impact of rock and roll on our lives.
“Once we get behind our instruments, there’s something bigger. The sum is greater than the parts. There’s just a feeling that we were meant to do this, we have to do this, and we’re just following the trail.”

So the next time you are debating whether to buy the boxed set of Paul Simon’s 25th anniversary of "Graceland" or the boxed set of 14 classic Beatles albums on vinyl (with 252-page hardbound book) ask yourself this question: What would Margaret Mead do?

A Rascals Review: Forever Young

A brief mention of a Young Rascals reunion concert on an XM radio program sent me deep into my archives and back down memory lane. As a summer intern for The Hartford Times, I got a backstage pass for their concert August 24, 1967 and a byline for one of my first music reviews:

Young Rascals Thrill Fans

All they see are lights—red, blue, green, yellow—changing constantly. Their fortune producing magic runs through a wire. They are the Young Rascals.

Twenty-four hundred people could see them, under the flashing lights, and twenty-four hundred people were turned on by their electronic New Jersey soul music Wednesday night in the Bushnell.

With girls shouting their names whenever the din diminished slightly, the four cats from New Jersey kept Hartford girls in 42 minutes of ecstasy with a medley of their hits.

Sustained by the driving Hammond organ which Felix Cavaliere dances across with both hands and feet, they opened with their first hit “Good Lovin” and followed it with “Grovin” and their current hit, “Girl Like You.”

(On the “lilting, dreamy Grovin”) Felix …leaned over the organ and sang gently into the mike. At several points he raised his arms over his head in a mannerism that looks like a cross between a signal and a religious ritual.

The review goes onto to describe how a groupie had thrown herself at Eddie Brigati backstage, how much drummer Dino Danelli was a dead ringer for Paul McCartney and how Gene Cornish demonstrated his guitar “virtuosity” on the group’s finale, “Kooks.”

This…opened with Felix’s organ at ear-splitting levels and went up from there. The 30-minute piece moved quickly into a jazz form (with each taking solo runs)…The long and beautiful improvisation proved tedious to much of the audience but its originality demonstrated while their singing was at times weak, they will be around for a long time as musicians. The crowd applauded wildly, however, when it was over. The Rascals are still theirs.

The callow reviewer, clearly infatuated by his chance to be backstage, was only partly correct in his forecast. The Rascals broke up in 1970, but their music does live on via classic rock radio. "Groovin" still evokes a wistful, warm summer of ’67 vibe, as does their hit from the next year, “A Beautiful Morning.” And their role in bringing a form of “blue-eyed soul” into the mainstream earned them a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1997.

A couple of interesting trivia notes: The original foursome first played together as members of Joey Dee & The Starliters of Peppermint Twist fame. In 1982 Dino Danelli joined Steve Van Zandt’s Little Steven and the Disciples of Soul.

It was Little Steven who brought about the reunion concert with a Kickstarter campaign that raised $123,000. Once Upon A Dream, described as combination rock concert and Broadway show, is scheduled for December 13, 14 and 15 at the historic Capitol Theatre in Port Chester, New York. It will be their first appearance together in 40 years.