Remembering Richie Havens: down to earth

Richie Havens ended his tour of Planet Earth yesterday, passing away at age 72 in New Jersey.

As news outlets from the New York Times to Rolling Stone remind us, Havens was the opening act at Woodstock in 1969, though he was slated to play sixth on the schedule. Traffic and other travel delays scotched those plans, and Havens ended up playing a marathon three-hour session, improvising when he ran out of material he'd planned to play for the gig.



From David Browne at Rolling Stone:

Havens wasn't supposed to be the first act to open the festival; that slot originally was intended for the band Sweetwater, but that band wound up being stuck in traffic. Backstage, co-organizer Michael Lang approached Havens and practically begged him to go on instead. "It had to be Richie – I knew he could handle it," Lang later wrote. 

After performing a half-dozen songs, Havens ran out of material – until, he later said, he remembered "that word I kept hearing while I looked over the crowd in my first moments onstage. The word was: freedom." Havens began chanting that word over and over, backed by his second guitarist and conga player, and eventually segued into the gospel song "Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child," which he had heard in church as a child. The combined, surging medley wasn't just a crowd-pleaser; it later became a highlight of the Woodstock movie, which also immortalized Havens' orange dashiki.

I was too young for Woodstock, which is not true of some of the very many remembering him fondly in the comments to Ed Tracey's newsbreaking diary on Daily Kos. But one of the unanticipated benefits of organizing against apartheid on the UC Berkeley campus in the mid-1980s was that Woodstock-era artists and activists alongside we young'uns had the connections to invite fellow travelers like Havens to to lend fierce and righteous inspiration to our little corner of an international struggle.

In Richie Havens' case, the Woodstock-era connection was a woman I first met at Berkeley's 1985 anti-apartheid sit in on Sproul Plaza, and who became a very dear friend: Hannah Ziegelaub, an artist, intellectual, ardent activist, and subject of a documentary by Allie Light made some years after I met her, Dialogues with Madwomen (1994). Hannah passed away in 2006.

Hannah invited Richie Havens to perform at a pivotal moment in our campus movement, in the Spring of 1986 when it it was clear we had the moral wind at our backs, the support of campuses and communities across the U.S. and the world, but the governing Regents were standing firm against demands to divest the University's massive investment portfolio of companies with ties to South Africa's apartheid regime.

Havens agreed to come west to fuel our fire, and that's exactly what he did.

Soweto to Berkeley is a documentary about the anti-apartheid movement of the mid-1980s at Cal, made by Richard Bock and released in 1988. (I had a hand in writing the screenplay.) One of the clips from the film that Richard posted on YouTube is driven by a soundtrack of Havens on Sproul Plaza in that spring of 1986.

The clip interleaves the performer's inspired singing and playing (Going Back To My Roots) with construction of a sprawling shantytown to blockade California Hall, the campus building where UC Berkeley's Office of the Chancellor is housed. Click on the still to watch the video on YouTube (sorry, embedding is disabled).

[For the record, the 50 min. documentary is an hour well-spent, if I'm permitted to say so myself ... contact Richard Bock at the e-mail given at the end of the YouTube clip if you're interested, or rent it for a classroom showing from the Cinema Guild.]

That afternoon on Sproul Plaza was the only time I had the privilege to watch and hear Richie Havens live. I count myself lucky. The man was a bright star in a great firmament.




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Should technology shape art?

Is it coy to title a blog post with the wrong question? Mea culpa.

The question is not whether technology ought to shape art. The fact is that it does, and always has.

• We read books, not scrolls: the codex was a technological development, first described in writings still known to us about two thousand years ago ... and overcoming an older text-recording technology, the scroll, a few hundred years later.
• We generally read printed books, not hand-copied books; the printing press as we know the technology here in the west was invented in the fifteenth century.
• Musical arts? Beyond the human voice, music is produced with mouth harps, violins, oboes, zithers, trumpets, drum kits, synthesizers, and so on -- that is, with technologies at all levels of complexity.
• The art of cinema? A nineteenth-century technology.

Drawing on cave walls with charred sticks, painting in oils, cast bronze sculpture, splitting dead cows in half and mounting them in tanks of formaldehyde? Okay, maybe never mind that last, no need to get ridiculous. The point is, technology has had a major role in the ways art could be created and experienced for a long time ... arguably for as long as we've had art.

I remember hanging out with my BFF, a student at the San Francisco Art Institute in the early eighties, and rolling my eyes at the bazillions of 'pieces' being produced by John, by his teachers, and by fellow-students that consisted of videotaped 'scenes' in which pretty much nothing happened. I never figured out the attraction myself, but the availability of video cameras that art students could afford must have had something to do with the phenomenon.

Now, of course, we have YouTube. Heck, we have video on YouTube of dead cows split in half and mounted in tanks of formaldehyde:



Still.

I have to admit my jaw dropped last month when I read Betsy Morais reporting on last month's Digital Book World. Her 22 January piece on The New Yorker's web site -- The Book of the Future, Sliced and Diced -- was brought to my attention by a FB friend. Here's how it starts:

At the Digital Book World conference, held in New York last week, one could hardly pass muster by holding up a stack of pages bound together. The crowd's sensibility was more conceptual; the word that filled the air was "content." This was a fairground for companies like Innodata, DigiServ, Biztegra, and Datamatics, with booths snaking through the hallways of the Hilton Hotel. They passed out business cards and flowcharts, decked out with spritely taglines: "Unleash your inner book ~ just $99." In a conference room, Linda Holliday, the C.E.O. of a digital publishing company called Semi-Linear, leaned against a presenter’s table, having just wrapped up a panel discussion on "Making Content Searchable, Findable, and Shareable." She spoke in an excited stream. "A book is an amount of knowledge that I feel good about finishing," she told me. "A book is a clump of knowledge that goes together."

"Look at a book as a bag of words," suggested Matt MacInnis, another panelist, who had been working on education projects at Apple before forming an interactive-book company called Inkling. "Bag of words," he pointed out, is a computer-science term: a model by which a machine represents natural language. "Computers are terrible at natural language," he said. "Humans are shitty at multiplication and division." For a reader searching the Internet for information, he explained, "the word rank is going to be terrible for a bag of words of book length." But a book that is broken up into component parts would show up higher in an online search result, because each discrete section coheres around a single idea, which can be tagged, indexed, and referenced by other sites. This is known in the business as "link juice."

"A book is a clump of knowledge that goes together"? Really?

"Look at a book as a bag of words"?

Books as "link juice"?

Not what I signed up for, either as a reader or a writer. Not how I read books now, or write them, or want to read or write in the future. (Cf. Hamlet as a bag of words in the image at left, courtesy of Wordle. Can we agree that's not nearly as interesting as the play Shakespeare wrote and published as a sequential set of lines spoken by characters?)

Now, to be fair, these folks at DBW were focused on non-fiction, says Betty Morais, and I mostly read and write fiction. Different kettles of fish.

Sort of.

"Sort of" because, when you think about it for seven seconds or so, you realize that the depth and breadth of understanding one gains by reading book-length non-fiction -- say C.G. Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections, to take a random example from my own bookshelves -- is of an entirely different order compared to the several factoids ingested by reading fifty or so words that make up the first paragraph of Wikipedia's article about "the Swiss psychotherapist and psychiatrist who founded analytical psychology." Even if you read those fifty or so words sequentially, I'm saying.

Is it hopelessly old-school to think this way?

Is current technology's influence on art a good thing? A bad thing? Indifferent?

Is its value irrelevant because its influence is inevitable?

Consider Mark Katz on the pervasive influence of recording technology on music, from classical to popular, from his book Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (2004):

Simply put, phonograph effects are the manifestations of sound recording's influence. Consider a straightforward example. When Igor Stravinsky composed his Serenade for Piano in 1925, he wrote the work so that each of the four movements would fit the roughly three-minute limit of a ten-inch, 78-rpm record side. "In America I had arranged with a gramophone firm to make records of some of my music," he explained in his autobiography. "This suggested the idea that I should compose something whose length should be determined by the capacity of the record. And that his how my Sérénade en A pour Piano came to be written." Stravinsky was not alone. Many composers of classical and especially popular music followed a similar compositional approach. (Today's three-minute pop song is a remnant of this practice.) Stravinsky's decision to tailor his Serenade to the length of the record side is a clear manifestation of recording's influence. It is just one of countless phonograph effects, ranging from the obvious -- jogging while listening to Wagner on  Walkman, a pop star harmonizing with herself on disc -- to the more subtle changes in the way we speak and think about music in an age of recording technology.

On the other hand, here's Camille Paglia in Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars, published in October of last year:

Looking at art requires stillness and receptivity, which realign our senses and produce a magical tranquility.

Me? I'd say Paglia is making an essential point. Here's more from her introduction to Glittering Images:

The creative energy of our era is flowing away from the fine arts and into new technology. Over the past century, industrial design, from streamlined automobiles and sleek home appliances to today's intricately customized personal gadgets, has supplied aesthetic satisfactions once mainly derived from painting and sculpture. In my experience as a teacher, industrial design students have acute powers of social observation and futuristic intuition, as well as independent and speculative minds, rarely found among today's overly ideological intellectuals. The industrial designer recognizes that commerce, for good or ill, has shaped modern culture, whose cardinal feature is not economic inequity but egalitarian mass communication. Indeed, American genius has always excelled in frankly commercial forms like advertising, modern architecture, Hollywood movies, jazz, and rock music.

But mass media are a bewitching wilderness in which it is easy to get lost. My postwar generation could play with pop because we had a solid primary-school education, geared to the fundamentals of history and humanities. The young now deftly negotiate a dense whirl of relativism and synchronicity: self-cannibalizaing pop, with its signature sampling and retro fads, has become a stupendous superabundance, impossible to absorb and often distanced through a protective pose of nervous irony. The rise of social media has blurred the borderline between private and public and filled the air with telegraphic trivialities, crowding out sequential discourse that invites rereading.

[...]

In an age of alluring, magical machines, a society that forgets art risks losing its soul.

No bag of words those. Thoughts worth mulling-over, I'd say.




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Thanks a third time to Evan Bench for the image of a stack of books at Shakespeare and Co. in Paris.

Everywhere that I'm not

On Thursday evening I was listening to the radio while making dinner, like most everybody has, for hundreds or thousands of dinner times each. Then a song came on, like they do. You know, the song you haven't heard in thirty years, and haven't thought of either, but that just nails a particular time in your life.

On Thursday evening that song was Translator's Everywhere That I'm Not. I swear it's been running on continuous loop in my head ever since it came on at 7:24 p.m.

Never heard of Translator? Have a listen.

'Cause you're in New York, but I'm not
You're in Tokyo, but I'm not
You're in Nova Scotia, but I'm not
Yeah, you're everywhere that I'm not
Yeah, you're everywhere that I'm not

It's your basic longing-for-lost-lover tune, you've heard the trope before, you'll hear it again: everybody's been there, everybody imagines nobody's ever been there the way they have.

The video? It's so early MTV (the channel launched the year before the song's release), so band-that-barely-made-it-past-College-radio ... but for me it perfectly evokes a time when I spent every weekend night at San Francisco's legendary Stud -- the old Stud, pre-1987, on Folsom Street. I can smell the cheap gin-and-tonics well before the first refrain ends.

Here's a guidebook-style description of the dance bar, but only because I found it in Google Books, taken from San Francisco Bizarro: A Guide to Notorious Sights, Lusty Pursuits, and Downright Freakiness in the City by the Bay, by Jack Boulware:

If not the oldest continuous gay bar in the city, The Stud is right up there, opening in the late 1960s at 1535 Folsom between 11th and 12th [...]. A popular gay stoner hangout, The Stud gained a reputation as San Francisco's quintessential alternative gay bar. Patrons o f the era speak of it with almost spiritual reverence, and with good reason. The business operated for a time as an ordained chapel of the Universal Life Church, holding "services" after the 2 a.m. closing time so that the bar could remain open into the early morning hours.

The other song that does that for me, evokes that same bar in the same era, is The Clash's Should I Stay or Should I Go, a song of the same vintage, but one that made it into the Canon: anybody who has listened to more than a miniscule corner of late 20th century British music has listened to The Clash.

If you're under 30 in 2013, and knew Translator's Everywhere that I'm not before you pointed a web browser my way, please leave a comment. I salute you.



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Bubblegum: an affliction in every generation

It won't be my childhood friends who get this wrong, but lest anyone else imagine I was consistently cool from the moment in 1968 when I 'discovered' rock and roll (described on this very blog a couple of months ago) I need to make a confession. The first LP I bought might have been Hey Jude -- leaning toward cool if you consider I was eleven in 1970 (and I still want to be a paperback writer); but not long after that I became a teenager, and my musical tastes lurched all over the place. They were keeping pace, I suppose, with my hormones.

So was there a period when even bubblegum spoke to me? Yes, there was.

According to Wikipedia, Bubblegum's classic period ran from 1967 to 1972. Justin Bieber's mom wasn't even born yet, but I was there, thank you very much.

I'm sure I've self-protectively blocked out the worst of the worst songs that made me weak in the knees. Which leaves me wondering, because the songs I do remember swooning over are, um, pretty embarrassing. Take Lally Stott's Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep, for example. The video's kind of hilarious looking back on it -- hilarious in the sweetest and corniest way -- but imagine taking this song seriously with nothing more than radio play and a 45 rpm disc to garner a following:



This was a period in which Ali MacGraw and Ryan O'Neal were pulling major heartstrings with Love Story, 99 minutes of pure cinematic schmaltz. I will not admit over the public intertubes how many times I (a) sat through the film -- in a theatre, people -- and, (b) wept at the end. This as a tween. The fact that I was mad about Tin Tin's Toast and Marmalade for Tea at about the same time is confession enough:




I bought these and other 45s at a memorable record store about a mile from where I lived in the early seventies. The name of the place was Banana Records, and it sat like a gigantic fruit crate across the street from the local McDonalds.

Back then its solid cubical surface was unpainted, unfinished wood, in harmonious tune with '70s aesthetics. The sales floor was set a few stairs down from street level, and the interior of the cube was empty space, a perfect venue for whatever promotional displays the record companies sent along to help sell the vinyl.

As you can see in the photo at right, the cube is now (or was, in March 2011, when Google last did a street view drive-by) painted a dull industrial grey, and houses a computer repair shop.

The times, they've been a changin' ...



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Rock and roll awakening: my first songs, circa 1968

I went to sleep-away summer camp for the first time in 1968, in the Wisconsin Dells.

It was one hell of a year. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated in the spring, and yes, third graders had our worlds rocked along with the older folk -- certainly on the south side of Chicago. Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June. Later that summer, after I returned from camp,the Democratic National Convention of that year ripped up downtown, a few miles north of where we lived.

Back home, my musical range was defined by what Mom and Dad played on the stereo, mostly meaty symphonies -- Beethoven and Tchaikovsky -- seasoned with a dash of Herb Alpert and Tijuana Brass. And Up With People recordings, natch. Who would have considered raising nice, liberal children in the 1960s without slotting Up With People into the mix?

I was nine years old that first time at summer camp. Despite the flood of political upheaval on my nascent cultural radar, I had no clue what was happening in radioland.

But our camp counselors did.

We were too far out in the boonies to pick up radio stations, but one enterprising counselor had brought a small stereo to camp, along with two (count 'em, two) 45 RPM singles. What's a "45," you ask? Think of it as a single song extracted from the inside of an iPod, and flattened onto a black, vinyl disc. Rather than magnetic ones and zeros, ridges pressed into a spiral groove that winds around the disc encodes the music.

Oh, never mind.


The whole time I was at camp, this counselor -- I don't recall his name -- blasted those two (2) singles over and over and over and over again into the hot Wisconsin afternoons. These were, in a nutshell, my introduction to popular music.

I did not get tired of the two (2) songs. I was smitten. Captivated. Fascinated. I couldn't get enough.

One of the singles was The Troggs performing Wild Thing, which may be the easiest song to play on a guitar of all the songs ever written, though I only figured that out much later. It was brilliant back then, it made my nine year old heart sing. In fact, it's still brilliant. If you don't know the tune, here's your chance: check out the embedded video. If you do know it, you don't need to be invited twice.



The other single was The Doors, Light My Fire. Another classic. This nameless counselor knew how to pick 'em.



(Seeing a theme here? Think about it. Our camp counselors must have been seventeen or eighteen year old boys. What are they supposed to be thinking about? The draft? Well. Yeah, maybe that too.)

I came home from camp and immediately began saving my allowance for a small transistor radio. Once I hit my fundraising goal, I fell asleep each night with the radio tucked underneath my pillow, the volume turned super low so it wouldn't wake my little brother sleeping on the other side of the room. We didn't have earbuds then.

WCFL. WLS ...

Mom would tiptoe in after I'd fallen asleep, and reach underneath the pillow to switch the radio off.

What songs are the totems of your musical awakening?



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Who was that masked man: Mr. Trololo leaves our earthly plane

When a writer in my critique group called our collective attention to trololololololololololo.com -- a video clip of a strange Russian baritone singing ... who knew what -- I was the only one to respond. Steven Long wrote "Seriously. I am obsessed with this. I believe it holds the meaning to all things." I responded: "Undead. Hands down." From the rest of our eight or nine then-members? Not a peep.

Eduard Khil, the seemingly strange Russian baritone, shuffled off this mortal coil a week ago today.

In case you missed the Russian pop singer when his 1976 performance of, as Wikipedia puts it, a non-lexical vocable version of the song "I Am Glad, 'Cause I'm Finally Returning Back Home" went viral on the intertubes 34 years later, in 2010, here's the Russian TeleRadio Worldwide posting of the clip on YouTube:



To be sure there's more to Khil's life and story than a fewer-than-three minutes video ... but with nothing else to go on in 2010 I thought simply that the guy beat any scary clown I'd ever seen or heard of, hands down. The patently forced facial expressions, the vampire teeth, the stiff body-language attempting to convey some creepily inexplicable happiness, the nonsense syllables (a.k.a. non-lexical vocals), that awful brown suit......

And yet. There was something seriously compelling about the video. I watched it many times, an embarrassing number I suspect, luckily I didn't count. I wouldn't say I wholly bought into Mr. Long's tongue-in-cheek belief that the Trololololo clip held the meaning to all things ... but it sure held my attention for a few weeks there in early 2010.

What was that song about, anyway? From the Washington Post's obituary last week:

The music was written by well-known Soviet composer Arkady Ostrovsky, but the original lyrics were about a cowboy riding across a prairie while his sweetheart knitted stockings for him, a sentimental view of America that didn’t sit well with Soviet censors during the Cold War.

The NY Times explained the suppression of the song's lyrics this way:

In an interview with state news media in 2010, Mr. Khil said he and the song’s composer, Arkady Ostrovsky, pulled its original lyrics out of fear that the Soviet authorities would consider it pro-American and ban it. The lyrics described "John on his mustang traveling across the expanses of the prairie to his beloved Mary, who lives in Kentucky, waiting for him and knitting wool socks."

When the two could not find suitable replacement lyrics, he said, Mr. Ostrovsky exclaimed, "If that’s how it is, let it be a vocalization!"

All things must pass, as George Harrison once sang. Eduard, we never really knew you. R.I.P.



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Melancholy popular music: Lana Del Rey and her antecedents

A week and a half ago I stumbled on a phenomenon that pretty much every music insider has been over and over again lately: Lana Del Rey, whose image and story will grace the cover of Billboard magazine's upcoming issue (21 Jan 2012), and who performed on Saturday Night Live this past weekend.

I stumbled on Del Rey's single Video Games ten days ago, when a DJ queued it up on the radio station I had playing on a drive north from Santa Cruz. I'd just gotten off the freeway in Oakland, I was nearly home.

The song first went viral as a YouTube video (embedded below) before its strong release as a single in October. That first time I heard it, in the car, I was blown away by the plaintive melancholy of the artist's vocals set against the swells and ebbs of a partly-synthesized wall of sound, all in the service of some serious romantic longing -- for a fellow she had? had and lost? had and feared losing? never really had at all? (I've made no secret of the fact that I'm a lyrics person, so, yes, I was listening to the words). In any case, I couldn't get the song out of my head. When I got home I found it on YouTube and watched, more than a few times.



I'm not convinced that Video Games is about a whole lot more than adolescent mood swing (Del Rey is 25 years old, FWIW). But even though my adolescence is long past (chronologically speaking, anyway), the song is just cryptic enough to encourage even an actively curious listener. Meanwhile the music insists one put aside curiosity and just ... listen.

The Billboard cover story (or maybe that's just an on-line story about the cover story? dunno) is all about stuff that doesn't move me much: authenticity, the artist's identity, what recordings she released when and where, the label that signed her, how well or poorly she performs live, blah blah blah.

Bottom line, the song pulled me right in when I heard it. As Kathy Iandoli, a contributor to the Village Voice blogs, wrote last month, "The comment-board fights and blog posts don't detract from the fact that she can actually sing."

(And neither, I would add, am I put off by her much-criticized and, honestly, well-below-expectations performance on SNL the night before last. I saw the performance on video the morning after. Del Rey was clearly nervous as all get out, but ... so what? She can still sing, even if not in a live television performance on the eve of an album debut, her first.)

Listening to Video Games has me thinking about melancholy popular music in general. One song that's more-or-less recent and falls into this melancholy category, as I categorize anyway, is Lost in My Mind, written and performed by The Head and the Heart.



It's another song whose topic and meaning is a bit opaque. It moves from a clearly melancholic mood at the start to something almost rolicking at the finish, but it stays grounded in a mournful emotional key (I love the burning piano at the end of the video).

Thinking about songs I would categorize with these two, the ones that come to mind are mostly from way-back-when, but share a quality with both Video Games and Lost in My Mind: they sound sad, no doubt of that ... but they also express deep and muscular passion. They're not depressed. Depressed is something different, and not what I mean by melancholy music in the sense I find compelling.

I'm thinking of songs from yesteryear like Who Knows Where the Time Goes (Sandy Denny, performed with Fairport Convention, 1969); Don't Let It Bring You Down (Neil Young, 1970); Everything I Own (Bread, 1972); Angel from Mongomery (John Prine, performed by Bonnie Rait, 1974); Sara (Bob Dylan, 1976); Fast Car (Tracy Chapman, 1988); She Talks to Angels (The Black Crowes, 1990); Guess I'm Doing Fine (Beck, 2002). The list could be endless, of course, but each of these qualifies for my iPod's "Melancholia" playlist.

One of the first songs of this type to which I was drawn was Crystal Blue Persuasion, performed by Tommy James and the Shondells. I must have been nine or ten when I first heard it on the radio. Ah, bubble gum... From the same band, an even better example of passion wrapped in mournful sound is Crimson and Clover:



When I listened to Crimson and Clover the other day on YouTube it was hard to stay in a teary mood. Why, you ask? Well, look at the ad Google decided to serve alongside it:



Is it Christianity? Or is it a porn site? I didn't click to find out....



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