Music

THE BEST ADVICE AT ALL TIMES IS TO BE SQUARE:

When Heroin Hit Jazz: Fascination with a deadly drug ravaged a generation of great American musicians (Stephen Eide, City Journal)

Addiction, in any era, is attributed to many risk factors, one of which is having not much else going on in your life. “You become a narcotics addict because you do not have strong motivations in any other direction,” William S. Burroughs writes in Junkie (1953). That may describe the lives of many addicts in the contemporary American landscape. It did not characterize someone like Miles Davis in the late 1940s, who, before he got deeply into heroin, was in the artistic vanguard and knew it. Miles and his colleagues always had something to recover for. Weren’t they devoted to their art? Why did they jeopardize it?

The drug’s appeal came down to status. Using heroin was a way to prove that you belonged to an edgy set. The beboppers felt that desire especially keenly. Bebop (originally “modern jazz” ) is the jazz form most closely associated with heroin. Bebop combined both technical virtuosity and authenticity, qualities that stemmed from the late-night jam-session culture from which it arose. Bebop represented jazz’s high-modernist period, marking a great leap forward, eventually leading to the postmodernist abstractions of free jazz but without going all the way into tedium. Bebop did more than the swing and Dixieland sounds that it supplanted to give jazz its reputation as high culture. As appealing as big-band swing was (and still is), had jazz’s development stopped there, it is doubtful that its reputation as “America’s classical music” would be as secure as it is now.

That was all in the future, though. In their day, the members of the bebop generation liked to be regarded as outsiders. “Bebop was invented by the cats who did get out of the army,” says the protagonist of the film Round Midnight (1986), played by Dexter Gordon and based on Bud Powell and Lester Young. Beboppers drew a sharper distinction between the modes of entertainer and artist than did predecessors like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong.

Bebop musicians played at a fast tempo, often with wit and whimsy, but not much sentimentality. One appeal of bebop lies in its emotional restraint, which sets it against the romantic strains of certain varieties of nineteenth-century classical music and, certainly, saccharine pop songs. (The heroin addict nodding off, too, displays a limited emotional range.) But the main connection between playing bebop and taking heroin was that both were seen as the mark of an unconventional spirit. In critic Nat Hentoff’s view, “Heroin, in short, became the ‘in’ drug more because it was so defiantly anti-square than because of any relationship between the music as such and the effects of the drug.”

Jazz was city music, and all the cities associated with its rise—Kansas City, New Orleans, Chicago—had a reputation for being “wide open.” A working jazz musician maintained nighttime hours, traveled a lot, and was sporadically employed—all qualities associated with looser living. Long before heroin arrived on the jazz scene, alcoholism was rife and sent several jazz greats to an early grave. But boozing had far less status appeal than heroin.

One senses that white musicians experienced status concerns with particular acuteness. Insecurity seems evident on Evans’s face in almost every photograph of him. The Winick study reported that two-thirds of musicians who were “occasional or regular” heroin consumers were white. It was a white trumpeter, Red Rodney, who made the definitive statement about the drug’s status allure: “[Heroin] was our badge. It was the thing that made us different from the rest of the world. It was the thing that said, ‘We know, you don’t know.’ It was the thing that gave us membership in a unique club, and for this membership, we gave up everything else in the world. Every ambition. Every desire. Everything.”

One peer-pressure effect that crossed racial boundaries was the influence of alto saxophonist Charlie “Yardbird” or “Bird” Parker. Bird’s life offers strong evidence that such a thing as an “addictive personality” exists. Single-minded in his devotion to satisfying his various appetites, he was found to be psychopathic by at least one psychiatrist. What Bird’s family and colleagues saw as callous disregard for their well-being has been spun by some later commentators as reaction to racism’s trauma. Many also excused Parker because of his artistic abilities, the reputation of which has only grown over time. The combination in one man of Carnegie Hall and skid row created a potent attraction. The conventional wisdom, as quoted in Ross Russell’s biography Bird Lives! (1973), was: “To play like Bird, you have to do like Bird!”

CATHARSIS:

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Wild God review – this masterpiece will make you fall back in love with life
(Alexis Petridis, 22 Aug 2024, The Guardian)

Joy feels like Wild God’s mood in miniature. The album’s songs don’t stint on darkness – pain, suffering and death all feature, including the passing of Cave’s former collaborator and partner Anita Lane – but suggest that life can still provide transcendent euphoria despite it all. The song about Lane is called O Wow O Wow (How Wonderful She Is): it’s gorgeously melodic, decorated with abstract smears of vocoder and a telephone recording of Lane giggling as she recalls their dissolute past, and deals in reverie rather than mourning. On Frogs, Cave walks home from church, pausing to look at a frog in the gutter: “leaping to God, amazed of love, amazed of pain, amazed to be back in the water again.” Even if it doesn’t get far, the song seems to suggest, that’s not the point: the point is to keep leaping.

The music follows suit. Cave has reconvened the Bad Seeds – who seemed a little surplus to requirements among Ghosteen’s beatless drifts and who didn’t appear at all on Carnage, an album credited to Cave and Ellis alone. Wild God deftly melds the meditative, flowing sound of its immediate predecessors with the band’s trademark muscularity (one of the enduring mysteries of Cave’s career is how a band that’s seen something like 23 different musicians pass through its ranks over the years, always sounds like the Bad Seeds regardless). The result is a set of songs that feel simultaneously airy and teeming, not least with a preponderance of glowing melodies. They frequently surge into vast, ecstatic exhalations – there’s a fantastic moment near the end of Song of the Lake, where Thomas Wydler’s drums, which have previously moved things along at a stately, measured pace, suddenly burst into a series of gleeful, clattering rolls. Or the mood flips completely: Conversion initially sounds haunted and stark, before exploding into life midway through in a mass of voices singing and chanting, Cave’s extemporised vocal sounding increasingly rapturous over the top.

The title track, meanwhile, is similarly joyful, although lyrically oblique. One way you could read it is as a sardonic self-portrait, rock’s former Prince of Darkness in his late 60s (“It was rape and pillage in the retirement village”), grappling with the dramatic shift in perception that Cave has undergone over the last decade as it builds to an explosive, cathartic climax, bolstered by choir and orchestra. Said climax seems to reaffirm his faith in the transformative power of music and communality: “If you’re feeling lonely and if you’re feeling blue, and if you just don’t know what to do,” he cries, “bring your spirit down!”

AUDIO INTERVIEW: Nick Cave wrestles with a ‘Wild God’: The rock icon on why true art is always a struggle, why his music has always been religious and why his new album required the full power of The Bad Seeds. (Ann Powers, 8/20/24, NPR)

NEVERMIND (profanity alert):

Kinky Friedman, Charles Manson and Fruit of the Tune Records Are Dead (Chris King, July 1, 2024, Common Reader)

This is an obituary, not of Kinky Friedman, but of the record label that he and we shared with Charles Manson.

Fruit of the Tune Records is not robustly documented for posterity. I am assured I did not dream up the matter by two citations on the discography of Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys: Old Testaments and New Revelations (Fruit of the Tune, 1992) and From One Good American to Another (Fruit of the Tune, 1995). Those release dates align with the release date of the Enormous Richard record that Fruit of the Tune distributed, Warm Milk on the Porch, which was 1992. Obituaries tend to begin with the ending, and the end of Fruit of the Tune goes some way toward explaining why the label has left few traces for music historians.

I got a call one day from Bello, one of the two men (the other was Mango) who ran Fruit of the Tune in Montclair, New Jersey. Bello was calling with bad news—perhaps the worst news you can get from your record label. We no longer had a record label. It had ceased to exist. Bello, of the charming smartass type ubiquitous in the indie rock business, explained how after Nirvana exploded with Nevermind in the last quarter of 1991, every label like Fruit of the Tune snapped up a bunch of sketchy bands like Enormous Richard, thinking there was now major money in what had been classified as indie music. The market had since spoken in the form of an historic flood of returns— returns are records returned, unsold, to distributors and labels that had optimistically accounted them as sold. The unprecedented volume of returned product was driving indie distributors and labels out of business, and Fruit of the Tune had sunk in that torrent.

Bello explained to me that our records would be auctioned off at some point along with all of the label’s inventory left from their bankruptcy proceedings. An outlaw for real, Bello had broken into their now former warehouse and stolen some of our CDs—he felt sorry for us—that he said he would mail to us. As for himself, he had chosen the route of tax exile. He named a certain island and said that if I ever wanted to see him, I should go to that island, ask around for the biggest waves, and find a fish taco stand on the beach near the best surf. If he was not riding a wave, he would sell me a fish taco. For Bello was a surfer—yes, a surfer in New Jersey like the young Bruce Springsteen, though the young Bello had surfed in southern California with Dick Dale, when Dale was more or less singlehandedly creating the genre of surf rock.

FALLING FOREVER (profanity alert):

Dua Lipa, like Pope Benedict, Strives to Give Eros Dignity (Mark Judge, 6/03/24, Chronicles)

The Guardian agreed: “Lipa’s refusal to engage with the more soul-bearing aspects of 21st-century celebrity has made her the kind of pop star one suspects Andy Warhol might have had a lot of time for: a slightly remote, visually arresting space into which fans can project whatever they want.” The Los Angeles Times lamented that Radical Optimism lacks “the kind of detailed celebrity meta-narrative that’s come to define—and to propel—the superstar pop LP in music’s parasocial age.”

Instead of focusing on fame, Lipa had taken on something much grander—the search for authentic love in the modern world. The album opens with “End of an Era,” a song that marks the transition girls make from clubbing to becoming wives.

The sweetest pleasure
I feel like we’re gonna be together
This could be the end of an era
Who knows, baby? This could be forever and ever

In the clouds, there she goes, butterflies let them flow (end of an era)
Another girl falls in love, another girl leaves the club
Send a big kiss goodbye to all of the pretty eyes (end of an era)
Another girl falls in love, another girl leaves the club.

This is lovely poetry, rich with meaning. Critics complain because Lipa does not spend her time bitching about fame and her public image, but perhaps she is better off leaving that kind of thing to Taylor Swift. Love is still the greatest human challenge and the greatest adventure. In Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict explores “that love between man and woman which is neither planned nor willed, but somehow imposes itself upon human beings, [which] was called eros by the ancient Greeks.”

FORGIVENESS (profanity alert):

On the Music of John Prine (Erich J. Prince, 06/02/2024, Merion West)

For me, though, there is one Prine song I find the most philosophical, though many of his songs do indeed have that bent. (Being born in the 1990s, I often—and I’m told this is to my great detriment—think of artists in terms of their songs rather than their albums, but maybe this will one day change.) The song is “Fish and Whistle,” the first track on his 1978 album Bruised Orange:

“Father forgive us
For what we must do
You forgive us
We’ll forgive you
We’ll forgive each other
Till we both turn blue
Then we’ll whistle and go fishing
In heaven.”

Along with Leonard Cohen’s “Suzanne,” “Dona, Dona,” and Simon & Garfunkel’s “America,” I consider “Fish and Whistle” to be among the most lyrically profound songs of the second half of the 20th century, as stiff of competition as there might be. Prine, the amateur theologian of the Heartland, wonders aloud: Our faith tells us we must constantly ask God for forgiveness, including often for our peccadilloes, but might He apologize to us for the cancer that takes a child, the car accident that destroys a family, or the wars that bring continents to their knees?

ALIVE?:

‘My songs spread like herpes’: why did satirical genius Tom Lehrer swap worldwide fame for obscurity?: In the 1950s and 60s, his songs stunned and delighted listeners with their irreverence, wit and nihilism. Then he gave it all up to teach mathematics. Lehrer is still alive at 96 – so I went in search of answers (Francis Beckett, 22 May 2024, The Guardian)

I didn’t know then that Lehrer had started out, six years earlier, by paying to have his own record cut because the record companies were shocked by his songs, and selling the LP to fellow students at Harvard. This early samizdat recording was the underground success of the decade with almost no publicity effort from Lehrer – “My songs spread slowly, like herpes, rather than Ebola,” he later recalled.

At that time, Lehrer’s principal accomplishment was that he was a mathematics prodigy who had entered Harvard aged 15, in 1943, taken a first class degree aged 18 and a master’s a year later. Born into a New York Jewish family in 1928, Lehrer had, he has said, every advantage: piano lessons, an expensive school that could get him into Harvard, and “the Broadway of Danny Kaye and Cole Porter”.

In the next year or two, Ed Monaghan introduced me to other comedians who were turning the complacent world of American comedy on its head: Mort Sahl, Shelley Berman, Dick Gregory, Lenny Bruce. “What these so-called ‘sickniks’ dispense,” wrote Time magazine in July 1959, “is partly social criticism liberally laced with cyanide, partly a Charles Addams kind of jolly ghoulishness, and partly a personal and highly disturbing hostility toward all the world.”

But in 1960, the year after I discovered him, Lehrer stopped writing and performing, although he briefly re-emerged in 1965 to write new songs for the US version of the satirical British show That Was the Week That Was.

THE DOOR IS WIDE OPEN:

Lost Angel: The Genius of Judee Sill (Pat Padua, 4/17/24, Spectrum Culture)

With her sordid life and angelic voice, Sill is a fantastic subject, and as suits a figure who, with the evidence of her lyrics and her life, regularly conversed with angels and demons both, her muse was to some degree developed in juvenile court. She played church organ while she was in reform school, and that developed her taste for Bach which informed her songwriting and orchestral imagination. Among the interviews with peers like David Crosby and Jackson Browne, critic Tim Page plays something like the role Jonathan Richman played in Todd Haynes’ The Velvet Underground. He joyfully demonstrates the musicality behind his favorite track, “The Lamb Ran Away with the Crown,” and Page is mystified over why it wasn’t a huge hit. Even if you’re new to her music, you will be too.

Yet as Crosby notes, Sill had a reputation for being “fierce”; she knew what she wanted in the studio and, in fact, conducted her own orchestrations. Linda Ronstadt explains that the only other musician during that era with similar musical chops was Brian Wilson. In a marriage of the scared and the profane, Sill informed her folk music with classical structure and beer-barrel boogie, with lyrics that were searching and religious. This outlaw was repentant; she reveled in her transgressions but was just as fervent about the possibility of redemption. She battled demons as deeply as she embraced them and considered it more courageous to fight them. She could play like the devil, and as Natalie Mering, aka Weyes Blood, candidly points out, Sill was not conventionally attractive, but her music seemed to come out of some gorgeous fount.

CROSSING OVER:

Harry Burleigh’s “Deep River” of Common Humanity on NPR (Joe Horowitz, 4/13/24, Unanswered Questions)

If you’ve ever heard Marian Anderson sing “Deep River,” you’ve heard an immortal concert spiritual by Harry Burleigh. His name won’t appear on the youtube captions – and yet Burleigh’s “Deep River” isn’t a mere arrangement.

I unpack the genesis of “Deep River” – its surprising origins as an obscure “church militant” spiritual, its indebtedness to Antonin Dvorak, its subsidiary theme composed by Burleigh himself – on the most recent “More than Music” feature on NPR: “’Deep River’: The Art of Harry Burleigh.” The performances (other than Marian Anderson’s) were recorded in concert by the exceptional African-American baritone Sidney Outlaw. It was my pleasure to be the pianist.

The show argues that Burleigh was a major creative force – more than the pivotal transcriber of spirituals as concert songs. In particular, we present his final art song – “Lovely, Dark, and Lonely One”(1935) – as his valedictory: not merely one of the supreme concert songs by an American, but an encapsulation of Burleigh’s life philosophy. It takes an eloquently impatient Langston Hughes poem, and turns it into an expression of hope and faith. “Burleigh consistently refused to participate in movements he considered separatist or chauvinistic,” writes Jean Snyder in her Burleigh biography. He believed that artists, not politicians, would most effect progressive change. “They are the true physicians who heal the ills of mankind,” he wrote. “They are the trailblazers. They find new worlds.” Our performance of this song, at Princeton University last year, is a little slower than other versions; its interior life (the climax is a pregnant silence) felt deep and true.

Burleigh’s own life story is a parable of faith: his patience was rewarded.

THE CULTURE WARS ARE A ROUT:

Classic Songs: “The Mercy Seat”: Nick Cave, art, and the presence of death. (Loren Kantor, 3/21/24, Splice Today)

In his 2020 book Stranger Than Kindness, Cave reflects on how he came to write the song. “In the early 80s I was fully engaged in the writing of my novel And the Ass Saw the Angel. I sat in a small room in Berlin, typing away, day and night, sleeping little. When I reached an impasse with the novel, I would scroll the odd lyric line on a scrap of paper beside me, ostensibly a song about a man going to the electric chair. The song was at best a distraction, a doodle, a song I never looked fully in the eye. But songs have their own journeys and in time assert their sovereignty. ‘The Mercy Seat’ was such a song.”

In the Bible, atonement for the tribes of Israel is possible only when a rabbi adorns the Ark’s lid (“the mercy seat”) with sacrificial blood. When Cave sings the story of the doomed inmate, he sings of death in this life and God’s judgment in the next. Cave juxtaposes the eye for an eye retribution of the Old Testament against the forgiveness offered in the New Testament. The inmate knows his hours are numbered and his thoughts turn to God.

In Heaven His throne is made of gold
And the Ark of His Testament is stowed
A throne from which I’m told all history does unfold
Down here, it’s made of wood and wire
And my body is on fire
And God is never far away.

ROOTS MUSIC:

How Prince Introduced Us to the “Minneapolis Sound” (Rashad Shabazz, Sep. 7th, 2017, Zocalo Public Square)

Minneapolis’s polka love provided a perfect entry point for wildly creative black musicians like Prince in another way, too: by forcing them to mix with white culture in ways their brethren in other cities never had to. Black people have lived in Minnesota since before the state was founded. Blacks from Canada traded with Native Americans in the 19th century, and slaves (both slaves and escaped former slaves) also were a presence in the state. The first free black settlement in Minnesota was founded along the banks of the Mississippi in 1857, and in the years after abolition, migration increased. Minnesota’s growing liberalism and the state’s willingness to enfranchise black men sent a signal to many that they would be treated fairly in the northern metropolis.

Still, there were never very many black people in the area. Between 1880 and 1930, the black population in Minnesota grew from a negligible 362 to a still tiny 4,276. African Americans made up just 1 percent of the population in 1930; even when Prince was born, in 1958, the percentage of the state’s black population remained in the single digits. (It’s no wonder that the comedian Chris Rock joked in the 1990s that only two black people lived in Minnesota: Prince and Hall of Fame baseball player Kirby Puckett.)

But their small numbers didn’t diminish the impact that blacks had on the music scene—rather, it may have amplified it. While white Minnesotans played their polkas, black music migrated up the Mississippi, with minstrel shows, ragtime, jazz, and the blues all gaining enthusiastic, if small, followings in Minneapolis. Black musicians started thinking of the city as a place where they could live and thrive. Early black musical migrants included Lester “Pres” Young, the talented tenor saxophonist, and the jazz pianist James Samuel “Cornbread” Harris, II (whose son, Jimmy “Jam” Harris, became a well-known R&B songwriter and producer and an important figure in the popularization of the Minneapolis Sound).

Others followed. The parents of producer Terry Lewis (Jimmy “Jam”s’ musical partner), and those of guitarist Dez Dickerson (who played with Prince’s band, the Revolution), migrated to the Twin Cities during this same period. Prince’s parents made the journey too: Mattie Shaw, a singer, and John R. Nelson, a composer and pianist, both moved up from Louisiana in the 1940s. They met through Minneapolis’s small but vibrant black music scene, also known as the “chitterling circuit,” in the 1950s. Like many black migrants, they landed in North Minneapolis, a formerly Jewish area, where Prince was born and raised.

Because the black music scene in Minneapolis was so tiny, black musicians who hoped to make a living by performing played for white audiences whenever possible. Segregation reinforced the musical color line, with most white audiences wanting to hear classical music, jazz standards, polka, or pop music. Black musicians learned to accommodate them, and developed a vast musical range. Cornbread Harris, for example, learned to play “polkas, mambas, salsas, and calypsos,” says Prince biographer Dave Hill. Black musicians’ virtuosity expanded their own community’s musical vocabulary, melding a new family of sounds into the jazz, blues, and R&B they played for black listeners.

Prince’s generation followed the pattern. In the early 1970s, when Prince was a teenager, the numbers of black people in Minneapolis were still “small enough to be ignored,” according to Hill, and white pop music continued to dominate. Prince was schooled in black musical forms like R&B, funk, and soul, but there was still only one small, low-frequency black radio station, so he and his contemporaries also listened to rock and folk artists such as Crosby, Stills & Nash, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, fellow Minnesotan Bob Dylan, and Joni Mitchell.

Prince’s unique virtuosity made it possible for him to forge a new style from the wide variety of white and black genres that he and his city loved. Even as a high school student, he could hear a song in his head and translate it to sound. He played several instruments by ear, including guitar, piano, drums, and bass guitar. He coolly mimicked masters like Carlos Santana note for note. Folk influences like Dylan and Mitchell course through Prince’s work with his first band, Grand Central, which played rock-tinged funk and soul. By the mid-’70s, punk, indie rock, and New Wave—the music that floated around the “vanilla market” in the city at the time—had filtered into his recordings, too. This musical collage is apparent on Prince’s first album, For You, which was less a commercial release and more a statement of what the young musician could do: Minneapolis Sound lite, with flares of the sexually provocative lyrics for which he would become famous.