Manson H. Whitlock is a ninety-four-year-old typewriter repairman in New Haven, Connecticut. He has noticed business picking up:
“It’s been the last few years. I guess they’re listed on computers. I don’t know what you call it when they’re listed on computers, and I haven’t seen it — but they buy them that way and then come in and have them repaired here.”A related post
The oldest typewriter repairman in New Haven (Yale Daily News)
[“20. Four great musicians. Left to right, Fahey, Rev. Rube Lacy (P.M. 12696), Blind Aouhl Krishnawhilsan, David (etc.) Evans, in front of Rev. Lacy’s church in Ridgecrest, California.”]
Singer, guitarist, harmonica player Alan Wilson of Canned Heat, third from the left in the above photograph, died forty years ago today. Like Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin (both of whom soon followed), he was twenty-seven.
Alan Wilson, or the Blind Owl, as he was called, was a brilliant musician. His Skip James-influenced singing is immediately recognizable (you may know it from “Going Up the Country”), and his reedy timbre is a reminder that blues voices come in many sizes. As a guitarist, Wilson brought the fingerpicking idioms of pre-WWII acoustic blues to electric music. (Who else could take a rhythmic motif from Garfield Akers and a melody from Blind Willie Johnson and turn them into a song of lunar devastation?) Listen to any number of Canned Heat recordings, and you can hear how Wilson’s creativity as a rhythm guitarist shapes and reshapes a tune. As a blues harmonica player, Wilson is unsurpassed. The strongest evidence: his duets with John Lee Hooker on the double-album Hooker ’n Heat, masterworks of musical empathy. (Try “Burning Hell.”) Hooker called Wilson “the greatest harmonica player ever.” Hooker was right.
I remember as a much younger person thinking of Alan Wilson as a kindred spirit. He was a geeky guy: awkward-looking, glasses-wearing, obviously quite shy. I still think of Alan Wilson as a kindred spirit. How I wish he had had many more years in which to grow as a man and musician.
I chose the above photograph for (what I think is) its obscurity. It appears in the liner notes of guitarist John Fahey’s 1967 LP The Voice of the Turtle (Takoma). Also in the photograph: ex-blues guitarist and singer Reverend Rubin “Rube” Lacy and musicologist David Evans. P.M. refers to the Paramount master-number for Lacy’s only released blues recording, the 1928 “Mississippi Jail House Groan” and “Ham Hound Crave.” The photograph is most likely from 1966, the year that Evans located Lacy in California. Evans, Fahey, and the Blind Owl all recorded with Lacy that year.
Related posts
Canned Heat
Hooker ’n Heat
Mel Tormé on the vagaries of performance:
“Performing is very tricky,” Tormé said after the set. “It is a good idea to allow some small piece of unhappiness from your life to be a part of your work every night. It gives your singing depth. Standing ovations don’t impress me. I can sing badly and get one. When that happens, I can walk offstage in a deep depression that may last several days. Other times, I get apathetic reactions when I know I have been great. Once in a while, though, that strange silver cord that goes between me and the audience grows taut, and it’s — well, exhilarating. You learn in time that each performance is not the end of the world, that things can go awry because of — what? A faulty digestive tract, a moon tide, a drunk in the house.”(Thanks for the book, Susan!)
Quoted in Whitney Balliett’s American Singers: Twenty-Seven Portraits in Song (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).
Roger Ebert, telling it like it is (Ebert clarifies his meaning in a coda)
Old and unimproved (on life online)
Rogert Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times:
Our political immune system has only one antibody, and that is the truth.Update, September 2, 2010: Ebert has appended a brief coda, to leave no question about his meaning:
The time is here for responsible Americans to put up or shut up. I refer specifically to those who have credibility among the guileless and credulous citizens who have been infected with notions so carefully nurtured. We cannot afford to allow the next election to proceed under a cloud of falsehood and delusion.
We know, because they’ve said so publicly, that George W. Bush, his father and Sen. John McCain do not believe Obama is a Muslim. This is the time — now, not later — for them to repeat that belief in a joint statement. Other prominent Republicans such as Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul also certainly do not believe it. They have a responsibility to make that clear by subscribing to the statement. Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh must join, or let their silence indict them. Limbaugh in particular must cease his innuendos and say, flat out, whether he believes the President is a Muslim or not. Yes or no. Does he have evidence, or does he have none? Yes or no.
To do anything less at this troubled time in our history would be a crime against America.
Many readers have made the same point: What if Obama were a Muslim? What would be wrong with that? There would be nothing wrong. There is no religious test in this nation for holders of office. This is not a “Christian nation,” although you often hear that, because of what is specified in the Constitution. America was founded by refugees from religious persecution, and the Founding Fathers deliberately wrote in safeguards to prevent an Established Religion.Related posts
The Lonely Phone Booth is a book by Peter Ackerman, with illustrations by Max Dalton (Boston: David R. Godine, 2010). The Phone Booth (yes, a proper name) stands at the corner of West End Avenue and 100th Street. It is one of the last outdoor phone booths in Manhattan. From Peter Ackerman’s website:
Kept clean and polished, the Phone Booth was proud and happy . . . until, the day a businessman strode by and shouted into a shiny silver object, “I’ll be there in ten minutes!” Soon everyone was talking into these shiny silver things, and the Phone Booth stood alone and empty, unused and dejected.The intended audience is four- to eight-year-olds, preternaturally wistful four- to eight-year-olds perhaps. In truth, I think the intended audience is me.
Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin (Disney Pearl Series, 2010)
Rhapsody In Blue / Intro : The Like In I Love You : Medley: Summertime / I Loves You Porgy / I Got Plenty O’ Nuttin’ / It Ain’t Necessarily So : ’S Wonderful : They Can’t Take That Away From Me : Love Is Here To Stay : I’ve Got A Crush On You : I Got Rhythm : Someone To Watch Over Me : Nothing But Love : Rhapsody In Blue / Reprise
Playing time 39:11
The Great American Songbook is in need of all the reinterpretation it can get: one tires of the earnest, closely-miked voices and soft — no, softer — no, even softer — accompanists of the cabaret world. Brian Wilson has reinterpreted the music of George Gershwin with energy, wit, and moments of considerable beauty. He is in fine voice on this recording and, it would seem, fine spirits.
The most-hyped performances here seem to me the weakest. The two fragments of Rhapsody in Blue, for Wilson’s stacked vocals and strings, feel oddly truncated — not even all of the Rhapsody’s most familiar theme is here. On Orange Crate Art, stacked Wilsons sounded loopily beautiful. Here, they sound like someone singing in a hall of mirrors. The effect is unnerving.
The two Gershwin–Wilson collaborations (written with Scott Bennett) are a mixed bag. “The Like in I Love You” has a good melody, but its lyrics (by Wilson and Bennett) disappoint. A sample (my transcription):
Gliding in a starless sky,On “Nothing But Love,” which seems to me a slighter song, Wilson’s voice is swamped by an overly busy arrangement.
’Til we found the inner light,
Now we can duplicate the universe.
The OED may become an online-only resouce:
Publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary have confirmed that the third edition may never appear in print. . . . In comments to a Sunday newspaper, Nigel Portwood, chief executive of Oxford University Press, which owns the dictionary, said: “The print dictionary market is just disappearing. It is falling away by tens of percent a year.” Asked if he thought the third edition would appear in printed format, he said: “I don't think so.”
Third edition of OED unlikely to appear in print format (Guardian)
