Howlin’ Wolf on Shindig!

Howlin’ Wolf performs “How Many More Years,” May 26, 1965. The pianist is Billy Preston, a member of the Shindig! house band. Two young English gentlemen, identified only as “Mick” and “Brian,” are speaking with host Jack Good.

My post about John Milward’s book Crossroads mentions this performance, which I’ve watched again and again over the past few days.

Book review: John Milward, Crossroads

John Milward. Crossroads: How the Blues Shaped Rock ’n’ Roll (and Rock Saved the Blues) . Illustrated by Margie Greve. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2013. $29.95 hardcover. $28.99 e-book. ix + 259 pages.

Music history sometimes gets reduced to evolutionary theory: Roy Eldridge as the (not-missing) link between Louis Armstrong and Dizzy Gillespie. Or instrument-specific chemistry: Coleman Hawkins + Lester Young = Sonny Rollins. Or as Muddy Waters posited, reproduction, with the blues having a baby and naming it rock ’n’ roll. Reality is always more complex, a matter of countless influences, overtones, ancestors. In this book, music critic John Milward does justice to the complexities. As the title metaphor suggests, Crossroads is indeed “a history of connections” — delightful, improbable, and rewarding, as rock musicians drew deep inspiration from blues, and blues musicians gained new (young, white) audiences for their work.

The story begins with white eccentrics of the 1940s and ’50s: record collectors who sought out the most arcane, obscure pre-war 78s. The collector James McKune played a major role in shaping the tastes of later listeners, as did Harry Smith, whose records became the stuff of what must be the most influential bootleg ever released, Folkways’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952). The more popular blues musicians of the recent past were of little interest to these men: they leaned to Skip James and Charlie Patton, not Lonnie Johnson and Tampa Red. It is astonishing to think, now, of how little time separated these collectors from the musicians of their recordings: one might think of listening to James or Patton in the ’50s as comparable to listening to some ’80s band today. Milward reminds us though just how inaccessible the world of pre-war blues was (or at least seemed to be), with more obscure 78s known from one or two surviving copies, and the musicians little more than names. Even Robert Johnson, now almost a household word, was for many years known only from the material on a single 1961 Columbia LP.

The 1960s brought new developments. When folk music boomed, electric musicians with dwindling audiences put away their amps and became, at least briefly, folk performers (witness Muddy Waters’s 1964 album Folk Singer). “Rediscovered” or newly noticed older acoustic musicians — the Reverend Gary Davis, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Skip James — influenced a generation of young fingerpicking guitarists. Young electric musicians, American and British — Mike Bloomfield, John Mayall, the Yardbirds, the Rolling Stones — took up the Chicago blues idiom, or, in the case of Canned Heat, that idiom’s Mississippi Delta origins. Guitar heroes — Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page — flourished. And thus veteran electric musicians found new audiences, with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf playing the Fillmores West and East and other hippie ballrooms and recording with their musical descendants. The dynamics of authority and influence must have been at times awkward, what with Waters opening for Clapton or serving as the entertainment at a record-company party for the Stones. But for a working musician, good gigs are good gigs. Consider this exchange between B. B. King and Buddy Guy, crossing paths at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, as recounted by Guy:

“Wasn’t for these English cats, I’d be playing a bar in Three Mule, Mississippi,” said King. “Here I am on my way to Fillmore East in New York City. I think Bill Graham got me booked with the Byrds. Where you off to, Buddy?”

“A traveling hippie festival in Canada. We going by train to four or five different cities. They say it’s gonna be bigger than Woodstock.”

“Hendrix on it?”

“Don’t think so,” I said. “But Janis Joplin is.”

Crossroads abounds in such moments of connection: B. B. King meeting Charlie Parker; Mississippi John Hurt watching a double bill of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! ; Muddy Waters receiving a key to the town of Woodstock, New York; Keith Richards learning open-G tuning from Ry Cooder and passing it on to Ike Turner; Jimi Hendrix turning Robert Petway’s “Catfish Blues” into “Voodoo Chile”; Duane Allman turning a seven-note vocal phrase from Albert King’s “As the Years Go Passing By” into the signature guitar phrase of “Layla”; John Lee Hooker playing with Miles Davis. The commerce of the old and the new was sometimes a little too easy, to be sure: details of sheer ripping-off abound, as in the light-fingered musical borrowings of Led Zeppelin and the shameless exploiting of Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James. “I bought Skip James for $200,” John Fahey is quoted as saying. Music, we must remember, is a business.

John Milward has done his homework: he seems to have read every relevant autobiography, biography, and work of musical history, and his book abounds in choice anecdotes and surprising details, drawn from published sources and his own interviews. He offers memorable phrases and wry observations, characterizing John Lee Hooker’s music as an “urbane Delta trance,” noting that Willie Dixon switched from boxing to music without realizing that they shared “the same business ethics,” pointing out that blues (in the forms of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf) has become the music of Viagra commercials. O tempora o mores.

Crossroads is in need of small repairs. The jazz festival is Montreux, not Montreaux. The record label is Revenant Records, not Reverent. The Scotch is Johnnie Walker, not Johnny. Canned Heat and John Lee Hooker recorded Hooker ’n Heat in 1970, not 1971. There are typos here and there, and a paragraph that ends with a comma. The narrative sometimes loses its way in a welter of detail: on one page, I counted the names of nineteen musicians or bands, six songs, and four record labels. But as a knowledgeable introduction to musical currents in the 1960s and beyond, Crossroads serves very well. It makes the pleasure of music a greater pleasure.

My favorite moment of connection in the book: Son House, Howlin’ Wolf, and the Stones all in Los Angeles; House for a folk festival, Wolf and the Stones for Shindig! It was 1965, and truly a time of wonders.

Thanks to the publisher for a review copy of the book.

[“The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll” is a song by Muddy Waters. A second Robert Johnson LP appeared in 1970; the Complete Recordings, in 1990. “An easy commerce of the old and the new”: from T. S. Eliot’s “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets.]

Music, old and new

I’ve gone to two concerts in as many days, and here, as they say, is the thing:

The recent music that I heard — not so-called “new music” but music just a handful of years old — had nothing interesting about it. It was banal, relentlessly diatonic, with every effect a special one, a gimmick. It was the older music, by Maurice Ravel and a handful of pre-Baroque composers, that sounded utterly new, with nothing stale or contrived about it. I intend no generalization here: there’s much recent music of all sorts that I love, and orchestral warhorses often leave me cold. My point is that what’s good stays good, and, in some way, new. I’ll quote Emerson: “perpetual modernness is the measure of merit in any work of art.”

From the local news

In a feature about aging, the anchor exclaimed, “Man, there are a lot of people getting older!” And: they’re not just Baby Boomers. Imagine that. Thank you, local news.

Also from the local news, an unnecessary clarification.

Ashbery at criticism

In the latest Poetry Project Newsletter (no. 236), John Ashbery writes about a new book from Robert Elstein, Helen Arms (Green Zone Editions, 2013). Ashbery zooms in on a line from an earlier poem, “Hermes Holding an Orange”: “I’d shake hands, but I left my mittens in the cafeteria”:

The ambiguities are multifarious. Why would forgetting mittens preclude a handshake? Surely, it would be rude to shake someone’s hand with a scratchy mitten on yours. And why were they left in the cafeteria? It sounds like they were left on purpose, but if so, what could that be? Is it part of some anarchist plot or meant, perhaps, to ease things for the next customer? But one mustn’t break butterflies on wheels. The butterflies will do just fine for themselves.

That’s lovely, and it’s a reminder that the line between literary criticism and parody can be a fine one, very fine, the kind drawn with a 0.38 mm Uni-ball Signo gel pen, or an erasable ballpoint.

And if you’re wondering, Ashbery writes as an admirer: “I’ve been waiting six years for a sequel to Robert Elstein’s slim volume, The Hollandaise, whose manic vocabulary knocked me out of my chair the first time I read it.”

Related reading
All John Ashbery posts (Pinboard)
The Poetry Project

The worst sentences in Salinger so far

From David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger, “the official book of the acclaimed documentary film.” These sentences, from Salerno, appear on page 244:

This narrative — Salinger’s only novel — is told in the first-person voice of Holden Caulfield. That voice is Salinger, direct and unfiltered by the artifice of third-person camouflage. It’s his life, his thoughts, his feelings, his rage, his big beautiful middle finger to the phonies of the world.

Ten years of agony to get it all down on paper.

Oh, the drama. This passage sounds to me like very bad student writing. And its misunderstanding of the ways in which fiction works — no matter what Salinger said about “being” Holden Caulfield — suggests a failure of imagination. Salinger knows more than his character, just as Twain knows more than Huck Finn, Joyce more than Stephen Dedalus. It’s called irony.

Related reading
The worst sentence in Salinger so far
All J. D. Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Domestic comedy

“Her voice is instantly recognizable, even without looking at the screen.”

“Whose voice?”

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All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[Whose voice? Elizabeth Ashley’s.]

Words I can live without

I could not have expressed it half so well.

Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey
Through France and Italy (1768)

Two words I can live without, when they fall together: expressed that , where that introduces a subordinate clause. I am surprised to see that Garner’s Modern American Usage makes no mention of expressed that , an awkward construction that turns up again and again in the context of “school.” Try a Google search for the likely phrasing. Or consider these sentences from an imaginary board meeting:

Ms. Krabappel expressed that she has concerns about the textbook. Principal Skinner expressed that he caught Bart Simpson cheating.

In each sentence, said that would do the job. But for speakers and writers of educationese, expressed that has a clear advantage: more letters, more syllables. (Yes, Latinate v. Germanic.) Perhaps expressed also serves to invest whatever was said with a claim to sincerity and truth: she didn’t just say that she was concerned; she expressed that , &c.

One might express approval, bewilderment, concern, doubt, eagerness, fear, glee — in each case, an it, a plain old direct object, follows the verb, with the speaker or writer representing a feeling or point of view in words. The oddness of express that becomes more obvious when one uses it in the present tense:

Ms. Krabappel expresses that she has concerns about the textbook. Principal Skinner expresses that he caught Bart Simpson cheating.

Google search returns far fewer results for the present-tense construction. Hmm.

For say that to replace express that in the world of education would require a larger rethinking of what to value in speaking and writing. If it’s to be plainness and clarity, say that wins.

The evil twin of expressed that : It is felt that , which erases human agency. By whom? By whom?

More words I can live without
Bluesy , craft , &c.
Delve , -flecked , &c.
Pedagogy
That said
Three words never to use in a poem

Dear House Republicans

Dear House Republicans:

A pox on you and all your ancestors.

Sincerely,

Me

[This curse courtesy of Edward L. Norton. As famously uttered in “The Bensonhurst Bomber,” The Honeymooners, September 8, 1956.]

Trail and Rhodes

[Mark Trail, October 1, 2013.]

Dusty Rhodes! I too am meeting this gentleman for the first time. Who will show up next? Lois Lane? Della Street? Hi Way?

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All Mark Trail posts (Pinboard)