Christmas (Shopping) in July

When in comes to rock and roll legends, the business of making books has overtaken the business of making music. Fan books have been around for years, some of them like Dave Marsh’s Born To Run have more depth and readability than a fanzine. But as the megastars reach the mid-century point in their careers, they feel a need to tell all in their own words. This summer’s crop includes:

Elton John’s Love is the Cure: On Life, Loss and the end of Aids

Greg Allman’s My Cross to Bear

Buddy Guy’s When I Left Home: My Story (with David Ritz)

Rodney Crowell’s Chinaberry Sidewalk ( out in paperback)

Other notables include Patti Smith, who made the list of TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in part because of her memoir, Just Kids, about growing up with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe.

Perhaps the most presumptuous title goes to Mitch Ryder, whose book is titled
Devils and Blue Dresses, My Wild Ride as a Rock and Roll Legend.

Often these books are released in conjunction with new CD’s (Patti Smith’s "Banga" got some good reviews) or a concert tour. The publicity tours make for good radio and television interviews because there are plenty of tunes to play and then discuss. Elton John talks about how the first lyrics from Bernie Taupin came by mail, then fax and now email.

And they make for some interesting moments on the air. When Bob Edwards asked Mitch Ryder what happened at a live concert in Detroit when he tried to tell Bruce Sprinsteen how to play “Devil with the Blue Dress,” Mitch pleaded, “But it’s my song!” Edwards: “But he’s The Boss!”
Ryder also had a few choice words for the big business establishment that rock and roll has become: “I’m a fan of rebellion that doesn’t need rules, let alone a museum.”

Some might attribute this spate of memoirs to the success of Keith Richards' Life. The rest of the Rolling Stones will try to play catch up with a coffee table book, The Rolling Stones 50. It is not due out until the early Christmas shopping season starts in October but the band announced it with a splash in London on July 12, the 50th anniversary of their first gig.

Neil Young’s memoir, Waging Heavy Peace, also has an October publication date, and is the third leg of a media trifecta that includes, his latest CD, “Americana” (he covers “This Land is Your Land”), and a new concert movie of his 2011 solo tour directed by Jonathan Demme, “Neil Young’s Journeys.”

Even though I seldom do my Christmas shopping until the week before, you’ve been given a chance to beat the rush.

This land is guitar land

How much is that guitar in the window?

Guitars are in the news in a couple of distant but connected ways that seem to shed light on the myth making that keeps music and history so interesting. The Washington Post used a picture of Woody Guthrie playing on the New York Subway to illustrate a review of a new book from Smithsonian Folkways on the 100th anniversary of his birth this week.

The photo captures Woody’s lifelong commitment to social issues with the hand lettered message on his guitar: This machine kills fascists. It also seems to imbue the guitar as a symbol of freedom…freedom to sing what you want to in protest or in celebration.
Woody also demonstrated how the guitar was the means to hit the road…strap it on your back and stick out your thumb…in search of fame and fortune, a personal dream, or changing the world. Anyone who loves music should take a moment this week and say thanks to Woody for his songs (more than 3,000 so far but still being mined in the family archives) and his commitment to the causes of the downtrodden and oppressed.

One of Woody’s musical progeny is also in the news this week for a mystery about which Fender guitar he played during the paradigm shifting concert at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965 when he went electric. One chapter of the Dylan myth is devoted to what happened that night and this latest round is sure to recharge that episode and prove that the reclusive star now seems to have a Midas touch for publicity (without so much as lifting a finger). Not to worry, the sleuths from the PBS series, History Detectives, are on the case and the full story is part of their season premiere on Tuesday night (check local listings). Here are some details from the Associated Press.

Bob Dylan and historians at PBS are in a dispute over the whereabouts of an electric guitar that the singer plugged in at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, quite possibly the most historic single instrument in rock ‘n’ roll.

The New Jersey daughter of a pilot who flew Dylan to appearances in the 1960s says she has the guitar, which has spent much of the past 47 years in a family attic. But a lawyer for Dylan claims the singer still has the Fender Stratocaster with the sunburst design that he used during one of the most memorable performances of his career.
If the authentic “Dylan goes electric” guitar ever went on the open marketplace, experts say it could fetch as much as a half million dollars.


Reading that this Stratocaster, if authentic, could go for $500,000, revives memories of some recent crazy prices that other guitars have brought at auction and conjures up more images of some famous ones. Willie Nelson has been using the same one for decades so you wonder what that could be possibly be worth…or how it has survived all those years on buses and in honky tonks. I guess they made them to last back then (before it became good hype to smash them on stage). Then there is the question of what Woody do with all that money?

As for the guitar pictured above in a store in Carmel by the Sea, California, it sells for $1200 and I have no idea if it can be played. Then again, it might come in handy if you are traveling across country in hot cars rather than hitch hiking.

Old Guys Rock: Volume 2 (B Side)

I remember when rock was young.
--Crocodile Rock

Recently my friend John the guitar man tipped me to the music specials running during the PBS fund-raising specials under the My Music banner. This one was called the British Invasion. The format invovles video clips from the kinescopes made of live concerts back in the day intercut with recorded performances of the bands current incarnations along with some background interviews.

These were clearly most of the players who came off the bench to fill the gaps between singles from The Beatles and The Stones (who bookended segments with snippets from the Ed Sullivan Show) and, in most cases they paled in comparison to the the superstars.
Back then, we thirsted for anything with a British accent or a Carnaby cut suit. And it’s hard not to like the smooth sounds of Gerry and The Pacemakers, Chad and Jeremy or Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits.


Some have aged pretty well and can still belt out the hits, like the Zombies whose “Time of the Season” and “She’s Not There” still sound authentic after years of radio overplay. Others, like Eric Burdon don’t have much left and the producers were forced to cut back and forth over a forty-year time warp, making the modern version even more painful to watch.

But it’s interesting how many songs have entered our culture in ways we did not expect. Is there anyone who can watch Manfred Mann reprise “Do Wah Diddy” without seeing Bill Murray leading the troops on a drill field?



And “Wild Thing” occupies space in everyone’s head after it sold five million copies in 1966 with what the RS Encyclopedia called “…a seminal garage-punk hit.” Has there ever been a high school dance without it? I did not remember that among its parodies, according to the RSE, was a version done by two actors: one imitating Everett Dirksen and the other Robert Kennedy.

I also did not know that Chad Stuart and Jeremy Clyde were from upper class backgrounds and attended Eton and the Sorbonne. They performed a forgettable song,
“Yesterday’s Gone” but it reminded me of one my favorite albums, “Of Cabbages and Kings,” their concept album released in 1967.

Denny Laine was there to remind us of what the Moody Blues were before becoming a super group and their hit, “Go Now” seems emblamatic of the British take on blues ballads. As he said, “There’s something about the 60’s music. It’s all coming back, all at once.”

For the most part, that’s a good thing because the music left from the British Invasion has aged better than the performers (with a few exceptions who were on hand to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee.)

John had asked me if watching these old rockers made me feel old. In most cases not, because they bring back youthful memories. What did make me feel old was watching the old duffers in the audiences for the made-for-tv concerts. I guess I just don’t’ like to see graybeards (like myself) waving their hands and clapping for other old graybeards.

That feeling was driven home to me as I watched the wonderful mix of today’s Brits dancing and waving tiny Union Jacks as some giants paid their musical respects to Queen Elizabeth. “Isn’t She Beautiful?” from Stevie Wonder, “Momma Told Me Not To Come” from Tom Jones and Elton John’s “I’m Still Standing” kept folks of all ages on their feet in a state of nostalgic exuberance.

Was there ever an EP four pack like the one that Paul McCartney delivered? “All My Lovin,’” “Let it Be,” “Live and Let Die” and “Obladi Obladah.” What a desert island disc. Life does go on.

One final note. The Queen didn’t let her hair down during the concert but she did take off her hat (her gloves remained on throughout the evening).

Old Guys Still Rock

Bob Dylan comes to Washington a couple of times a year, once to play a concert and once to pick up an award. This latest trip was for a Medal of Freedom award (the nation’s highest civilian honor) and the picture of the occasion stopped me in my tracks when I saw it on the front page of The Wall Street Journal. An African American President of the United States hanging a medal on the quintessential protest singer of the 1960s for his civil rights songs. SPIN magazine called the shot “amazing.” For me, it’s more like: “Never thought I would live to see the day.”

While the peripatetic troubadour continues his victory laps (Did you see the Life Magazine tribute issue in your grocery? Or see this exhibit in Paris? http://www.citedelamusique.fr/minisites/1203_dylan/index.aspx), he is one of many seniors still going strong. Last year was a good one for Paul Simon, Emmy Lou Harris, and Sir Paul McCartney. This year Bonnie Raitt is back with a new CD, as is Neil Young and even Tom Jones looked stellar performing at the Queen’s Jubilee concert.

Someone else going strong after sixty is Grandpa Elliott Small who is a New Orleans street singer catapulted to international fame when Mark Johnson took his cameras and audio recorders to the French Quarter several years ago. “Stand By Me” was first a hit for Ben E. King, then a popular movie and finally this viral video that put You Tube on the map.



The smash hit launched Playing for Change as a music business (CD’s, DVD’s and a film) a philanthropic foundation (music schools and programs in seven countries) and solo careers and group tours. Opening singer Roger Ridley died in 2005 but Small and others have kept the tradition and the music alive. The latest CD, “PFC #2,” is a blend of young and old voices and classic songs from “Try A Little Tenderness” to “Gimme Shelter” and “Imagine.”




Grandpa Elliott recently toured for PFC, performing along with Clarence Milton Bekker and Jason Tomba. Bekker’s solo album is called “Old Soul” and Grandpa’s is “Sugar Sweet.” One of their songs, called “Music is My Ammunition,“ includes the following lyrics:

Peace and dignity are not very far out of reach
It just comes down (it just comes down) to what I and I choose to teach
Truth and honesty will free our hearts
And free our minds (and free our minds)
So then our children can live together as one
Until the end of time.

Not a bad anthem for a foundation (playingforchange.com) whose motto is “Connecting the world through music.” That is certainly something to which both Bob and Barack can relate. By the way, the original "Stand By Me" video has recorded some 43 million hits and counting.

Memorial Day Memories

This national day of remembrance found me wearing a t-shirt from 1980, promoting a 5K race to raise funds for John Anderson for President in Tucscon, AZ. It was a gift from a friend who died last year. Obituary notices are becoming another phase of our generation whether they are for our high school chums or our musical heroes. There seems to have been a rash of what The Washington Post called, “the boomer icon death flood of recent weeks,” roiling the tweetisphere with expressions of sympathy for Robin Gibb, Donna Summer, Adam Yauch, Chuck Brown and Davey Jones, among others. Each fallen star produces a round of tributes made possible by the visual and audio recordings left from their hey days. The mass media can’t resist jumping on the bandwagon and despite the predictability of the tributes, it is still nice to see remembrances of stars, like Etta James, who struggled for and then with fame while alive. And it is endearing to hear musicians pay tribute to those, like Levon Helm, who influenced their careers and the evolution of rock and roll.

A couple of lesser but influential lights may have passed unnoticed during this recent media flood.

One is bluegrass banjo player Doug Dillard whose family group began as the house band on The Andy Griffith Show. He went on to play with many members of the Flying Burrito Brothers, the Byrds and the Eagles and became one of the key movers in the Southern California rock scene, touching the work of everyone from Linda Ronstadt to Rickey Skaggs.

And one of the early members of The Flying Burrito Brothers, Chris Ethridge died last month of pancreatic cancer. His collaborations with Gram Parsons began in the International Submarine Band and he is credited with co-writing “Hot Burrito # 1 and #2” and “She." He toured for eight years with Willie Nelson and his bass guitar playing is on “Whiskey River” and “Stardust.” Ethridge became one of those quintessential California session men, playing with Ry Cooder, Randy Newman, Leon Russell and Jackson Browne.

In future posts some more upbeat stories about aging rockers still going strong. Today seems a time for nostalgia.

FQF Trois: Sunpie & The Louisiana Sunspots

Reporter: It’s a story about the son of a sharecropper who grows up to play in a zydeco band.

Editor: Same old tale, what else you got?


Reporter: How about the guy gets a football scholarship, earns a degree in marine biology, has a stint playing pro football, becomes a U.S. Park Ranger, learns to play accordion and ends up as the poster boy for French Quarter Fest 2012.

Editor: Now you have my attention. What’s his name?
Reporter: Bruce Barnes, better known as Sunpie.

That was the conversation running through my mind as we sat in the performance studio on Saturday where we ended up during our tour of the U.S. Mint. We had seen the interview with a guy in a dark green National Park Service uniform being broadcast on screens in the hallway and followed the sound to the third floor.

On stage, a man was talking about his father (“Why you want to go play in a juke joint and get killed?”), his uncle who was a mule skinner along the Mississippi River and his Aunt Fannie who dipped snuff and like to give the kids a big sloppy kiss before expectorating.

Between stories, he played some of the seven instruments he has mastered, including piano and acccordion, and recreated the story of his hound dog hunting all kinds of game with his harmonica. Over the course of an hour, he regaled about fifty of us festival goers with stories and music that revealed a southern tale worthy of Faulkner.


One of ten kids (his father was 55 when he was born), he grew up on a truck farm in Arkansas and what free time they had they spent hunting and fishing. He ran track in school but switched to football in hopes of getting a college scholarship ( “Basically I was just trying to figure out how not to pick so many peas.”) Success on the gridiron at Henderson State led to a shot as linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs and he jumped to the USFL when Donald Trump dangled the big bucks. After the league folded, he returned to his first love: the oceans and their habitats. As an NPS Ranger, he ended up back in New Orleans, still playing music with friends and bandmates from college days.

In 1989, he went into serious debt ($1250) to buy his first accordion. The next day, a friend told him about open auditions for a TV Commercial and said, “Bring your accordion.” One problem: Bruce didn’t know how to play an accordion. “I stayed up all night with that thing, until at last I could play one little song.” As luck would have it, the casting director asked him to play, he did, and beat out hundreds of others to star in a Sprite commercial. The fee for that paid off the accordion.

Several months later, frustrated with his progress, he went to see a music teacher in hopes of lessons. The teacher’s response was, “You are playing that upside down and backwards!” Bruce, who is left handed, had been able to pull it off; but he turned things around (unlike Rockin Doopsie who always played it in reverse, according to Bruce).

Sunpie got his nickname from Aunt Fannie because he used to follow his Uncle (the original Sunpie, a Crow Indian name) around as a little tyke. He became Little Sunpie.

Nothing little about Sunpie now, who stands about six feet four inches tall. Nothing small about his musical sound either as the group revved up the dancers at the Cajun Zydeco stage on Sunday afternoon. He and The Louisiana Sunspots (guitar, bass, two rubboard players who double on trumpets, drums and saxophone) can cover the musical waterfront: Domini, Money Bread, Choo Choo The Boogie, Luanne, Going Back to Big Mamou and more. They kept the dance floor full and brought the rest of us to our feet with some hot jams that went from blues to jazz to rockabilly. Sunpie's show was every bit as good as his back story.

French Quarter Fest Part Deux

Saturday morning we decided to do some museum exhibits which led us to the old U.S. Mint on the east end of the Quarter. It houses an exhibit on the early days of ore smelting/coin making and a jazz museum. We did a quick spin through a photo exhibit commemorating 50 years of Preservation Hall (Traditional Requests $1, Others, $2, The Saints $5) and then wandered into a third floor performance studio for a musical bit of lagniappe (something extra) that deserves its own post.

In the afternoon, we rendezvoused with friends on Bourbon Street for traditional New Orleans music with Jimmy LaRocca’s Original Dixieland Jazz Band. It merits the “original” title because it was founded in 1917 by Jimmy’s father Nick LaRocca, the tumpeter and composer of “Tiger Rag.” The original ODJB is reputed to have made the first jazz recording in 1917 and its version of “Darktown Strutters Ball” earned a slot in the Grammy Hall of Fame.

On this afternoon, they were as hot as sun on a sidewalk with “Momma’s In The Kitchen” and “War Cloud” then slowed down for a take on “It’s A Wonderful World.”

Around the corner in the courtyard of the Historic New Orleans Collection we came across another find: Andrew Duhon and The Lonesome Crows. He writes like a young Jackson Browne and has a voice reminiscent of Jim Croce. His ballads are about endless decisions on leaving or staying (I think it’s time to fit my life in my backseat/Got a girl I know that I can’t take with me) and the cover of his new CD has an open suitcase with a rope made of clothes with two hands hanging on.
His canvas is New Orleans but his characters are universal. “Coming Down Over Here”
captures the weather and a lover’s dilemma. (Babe, it’s been storming, at least it has so far. I seen the clouds forming but I didn’t think it'd be this hard.)

We stayed around for a set by Kristin Diable, a dead ringer for a young Joni Mitchell, but our group gave her mixed reviews; interesting songwriter but not much variety in her singing and playing.

After refueling at the Gumbo Shop, we caught the tail end of the Battle of the Bands on the steps of the old Courthouse, three traditional jazz bands who combined for a rousing version of “The Saints Go Marching In.” Among those dancing in front were two of the stars of FX’s Justified, Joelle Carter and Walter Goggins…two of those Crowders.

Then it was back to the waterfront for a final round of Zydeco with Donna Agnelle & the Zydeco Posse (“Aint no party like a Donna Party”) and Roddie Romero & The Hub City All Stars with a hot cover of a Fats Domino tune.

French Quarter Fest bills itself as the “ World’s Biggest Jazz Brunch,” with164 menu options from the Quarter's finest restaurants. We tried crawfish pies, shrimp cakes, lamb sliders, fish tacos seafood crepes and sweet potato fries, washed down with Abita Amber and Abita Jocamo (didn't try Purple Haze). We avoided Hurricanes and those college-kid drinks from Tropical Isle: The Hand Grenade, Skinny Hand Grenade, Tropical Itch and Happy Gator. Our restaurant tips include Acme Oyster House (barbecued oysters), Upperline (fried green oysters with shrimp remoulade), Mena’s Palace (best grits) Broussards (grilled red fish) and the Stage Door Canteen at the WWII museum (gumbo).

Next: The Sunpie Story