A songwriter, itinerant laborer, and union organizer, Joe Hill became famous around the world after a Utah court convicted him of murder. Even before the international campaign to have his conviction reversed, however, Joe Hill was well known in hobo jungles, on picket lines and at workers' rallies as the author of popular labor songs and as an Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) agitator. Thanks in large part to his songs and to his stirring, well-publicized call to his fellow workers on the eve of his execution—"Don't waste time mourning, organize!"—Hill became, and he has remained, the best-known IWW martyr and labor folk hero.

Born Joel Hägglund on Oct. 7, 1879, the future "troubadour of discontent" grew up the fourth of six surviving children in a devoutly religious Lutheran family in Gävle, Sweden, where his father, Olaf, worked as a railroad conductor. Both his parents enjoyed music and often led the family in song. As a young man, Hill composed songs about members of his family, attended concerts at the workers' association hall in Gävle and played piano in a local café.

In 1887, Hill's father died from an occupational injury and the children were forced to quit school to support themselves. The 9-year-old Hill worked in a rope factory and later as a fireman on a steam-powered crane. Stricken with skin and joint tuberculosis in 1900, Hill moved to Stockholm in search of a cure and worked odd jobs while receiving radiation treatment and enduring a series of disfiguring operations on his face and neck. Two years later, Hill's mother, Margareta Katarina Hägglund, died after also undergoing a series of operations to cure a persistent back ailment. With her death, the six surviving Hägglund children sold the family home and ventured out on their own. Four of them settled elsewhere in Sweden, but the future Joe Hill and his younger brother, Paul, booked passage to the United States in 1902.

Little is known of Hill's doings or whereabouts for the next 12 years. He reportedly worked at various odd jobs in New York before striking out for Chicago, where he worked in a machine shop, got fired and was blacklisted for trying to organize a union. The record finds him in Cleveland in 1905, in San Francisco during the April 1906 Great Earthquake and in San Pedro, Calif., in 1910. There he joined the IWW, served for several years as the secretary for the San Pedro local and wrote many of his most famous songs, including "The Preacher and the Slave" and "Casey Jones—A Union Scab." His songs, appearing in the IWW's "Little Red Song Book," addressed the experience of virtually every major IWW group, from immigrant factory workers to homeless migratory workers to railway shopcraft workers.

In 1911, he was in Tijuana, Mexico, part of an army of several hundred wandering hoboes and radicals who sought to overthrow the Mexican dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz, seize Baja California, emancipate the working class and declare industrial freedom. (The invasion lasted six months before internal dissension and a large detachment of better-trained Mexican troops drove the last 100 rebels back across the border.) In 1912, Hill apparently was active in a "Free Speech" coalition of Wobblies, socialists, single taxers, suffragists and AFL members in San Diego that protested a police decision to close the downtown area to street meetings. He also put in an appearance at a railroad construction crew strike in British Columbia, writing several songs before returning to San Pedro, where he lent musical support to a strike of Italian dockworkers.

The San Pedro dockworkers' strike led to Hill's first recorded encounter with the police, who arrested him in June 1913 and held him for 30 days on a charge of vagrancy because, he said later, he was "a little too active to suit the chief of the burg" during the strike.

SUNNY SONGS: LOW YO YO STUFF by Captain Beefheart (WB, 1972)

We do what we gotta do to survive. We’ve got to activate our low yo yo stuff. Don Van Vliet, aka Captain Beefheart knew that better than most. Frank Zappa’s high school buddy and inspiration blew in from the desert fully formed as a cubist blues man. He reordered our mitochondria by breaking the order of music apart, and lyrically accessing a deeper realm of abstraction. But, this was always done with tongue in cheek, slightly, or at least with a wink. And, later, when the public outcry died down, he went back to the desert to paint and write poetry. I’m turning off the noise, he seemed to say, but never abandoning the low yo yo stuff. That’s the essential ingredient for the spice of life.

Low Yo Yo Stuff is the opening track from the Clear Spot album - certainly his most accessible record, produced by Warner Brother’s maestro Ted Templeton. And, it was almost commercial! Someone said this is the album to initiate you to Don’s weirdness by inviting you to put your musical toe in the pool, before diving into the deep end of Trout Mask Replica. That’s how it worked for me, and I’m grateful for having had the experience. 

Today we feature two black female vocalists, born 66 years apart, both renown for their independent spirit, singing songs about trying to make love work -  despite clear signs to the contrary. 

As artists, they’ve both shunned the spotlight, maintaining the mystery of their magic: 

Sippie Wallace quit show business for 30 years, preferring to express herself through her church organ, and LGBTQ icon Tracy Chapman staunchly separates her private life from her public one. 

Sippie returned to the spotlight by way of the blues festivals of the 60s, and was celebrated and covered by Bonnie Raitt, among others, and although Tracy appears regularly to perform for political causes she champions, only recently did she resurface in a big way in the mind the general public, by way of an emotional re-appearance at the 2023 Grammy’s to perform her song “Fast Car” in a duet with Luke Combs, who made it a Country hit almost 40 years after its original release. 

SIPPIE WALLACE

On this 1926 Okeh recording of “Special Delivery Blues”, we first hear the whistle of the approaching mail train, then the crescendoing piano rolls building up suspense musically. This wave of energy is capped by the immortal cornet of Louis Armstrong and the yearning phrases of Sippie Wallace begging for news of her man’s return. She wishes and hopes that the guy who left her will come back soon, but it doesn’t look good. Despite this, Sippie makes it clear she’ll keep up the vigil as long as it takes.

“The Texas Nightingale” built up her reputation playing tent shows, and releasing a spate of recordings that put her up there with Ma Rainy and Bessie Smith, but she decided to chuck it all and dedicate her musical talents to the Church, where she played organ for 30 plus years. During the folk/blues revival of the mid-1960s, she was rediscovered and enjoyed immense appreciation for another 20 years, until her death at age 88. 

TRACY CHAPMAN

I love GIVE ME ONE REASON because it’s so simple and direct. Tracy is drawing a line: “I’m telling you that I love you, but you have to reciprocate, or I’m gone”. It’s clearly stated without equivocation, but as the verses add up, you can just picture her, standing in the doorframe, giving her object of desire just one more chance, then another, then another…. Drawing one line, then moving it back a bit. She doesn’t want to go, but it looks like she’s going to have to.

Tracy Chapman catapulted out of the Boston coffeehouse scene in 1986, 25 years after Joan Baez had accomplished the same feat, and her first single, “Fast Car,” a song which alluded to economic inequality, was ubiquitous - a definite anomaly during the MTV era, which shows that the public can respond to bare-boned honesty, (without bells and whistles), when they hear it.  And, she has maintained her integrity as a socially conscious artist throughout the intervening decades.  

Gossip, Tittle Tattle, rumors, hearsay, dishing the dirt, idle talk, back stabbing…. It’s not one of the seven deadly sins, but maybe it should be. How many friendships, how many marriages, and how many jobs have been lost through spiteful blather? In this episode of Double Trouble Howlin’ Wolf and Gene Pitney testify to the adverse effects of pitiless small town talk. 

Mind your own business, “they” say; “discretion is the better part of valor,”, “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones,” etc. I’m sure you’ve heard them all, but how’s your ratio of disciplined restraint? That’s a lesson I had to learn the hard way. Gossip may feel like a way of getting closer to someone by sharing intimacies. But, the next thing you know that person tells the other person, and YOU’RE the odd one out. Best to maintain a lock-jawed policy of trust. 

HOWLIN’ WOLF

Who’s Been Talking, from 1960, swings it’s savage message with a Calypso beat. Chester Burnett, the blues master trained by Charlie Patton and Sonny Boy Williamson; the discovery by a 19 year old Ike Turner for Sam Phillips and Sun Records; the neck and neck competition with Muddy Waters, and inductee into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame delivers his self-penned diatribe against the effect of cheap talk with his usual lupine swagger. “Who’s been talking?” Wolf wants to know, and when he finds out, whoa, the owner of those loose lips better hide, or they might get their jaw broken. 

GENE PITNEY

Town Without Pity was a 1961 Kirk Douglas film with an uncredited, re-written screenplay by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, featuring a score by Dimitri Tiomkin, who also composed the theme for High Noon, among others. Town Without Pity was crooned by Gene Pitney, the heartthrob with the 3 octave range - and became Pitney’s first top 40 single. He garnered many accolades in a career which also boasted bull’s eyes as a songwriter, composing hits for Ricky Nelson with Hello Marylou, and Bobby Vee’s Rubber Ball. 

In this bluesy lament in a minor key, Pitney tugs at our heart strings as he bemoans the besmirching of his purest love by the wagging tongues of spite.

In the summer of 2019, in the halcyon days before the Pandemic, Chemayne and I got to share a 25th anniversary celebration experience that we had put off for 5 years: an Alaskan cruise.

A year and a half later, the world was in chaos and Chemayne was gone, but these images and moments, preserved in the diary, live on.

Let's go north to Alaska together, accompanied by some amusingly connected travel dreams.

APOCALYPSE NOW! 

JACKSON BROWNE AND CHUMBAWAMBA

Have T***p derangement syndrome? Don’t worry; be happy! Go with the flow. Things can always get worse, right?

The dual apocalyptic visions featured today may derive from decades past, when anxiety within the zeitgeist was running hot, but they look positively edenic in retrospect. “All Things Must Pass,” as George Harrison prophetically wrote, and if that includes our entire civilization, we best make our peace with it. No bomb shelter can save us.

Chumbawamba’s 1997 hit “Tubthumping” had that ear worm: I Get Knocked Down, but I get up again,” which signified a contagious resiliency.  However, in this, their eerie cover of The BeeGees NY Mining Disaster 1941, the protagonists portrayed will probably never see daylight, or their families again. Jackson Browne’s elegant metaphor of the approaching deluge that will sweep everything under its power has always brought tears to my eyes, even back when I first heard it in college. Now, as an elder, the hopeful innocence of the doomed weighs like an anchor on my heart. 

CHUMBAWAMBA

This group of anarchist-artists from Leeds, U.K., has been hard to pin down because their musicality encompassed so many different genres. Maybe that’s the source of the Trump campaign’s confusion when they tried to use the group’s one hit TubThumping as their campaign rallying cry before Chumbawamba put a stop to that. (Reminiscent of Reagan and his attempted coopting of Springsteen’s Born in the USA). 

Ironic because they are known for having crooned such leftist provocations as “So long, so long, Margaret Thatcher,” and “The Day the Nazi Died,” in their long career of social protest.  Their choice to cover the mid-60s BeeGees hit about a fictional mass grave in the making is intriguing. It sounds like a church hymn sung by an angelic choir. 

JACKSON BROWNE

Before the Deluge, the last song on the 1974, Late For The Sky record - (a perfect album, in my opinion) - is Jackson Browne at his best: with a heart wrenching melody (aided by David Lindley’s keening violin), and a solid poetic metaphor that, in its specificity, encompasses worlds. 

As we follow the travails of the pilgrims who just want to live freely and honestly, apart from the excesses and corruption of the modern world, we watch with trepidation as their annihilation through compromise approaches. The “deluge” may be interpreted widely as a metaphor for whatever impending disaster one chooses. When Jackson sings: “let the music keep our spirits high, let the buildings keep our children dry, Let creation reveal it’s secrets by and by, when the light that’s lost within us reaches the sky,” its a prayer… a prayer that the dark forces within us and surrounding us may somehow be quelled and quieted. 

IT’S A CHOICE TO BE HAPPY 

(Music and lyrics by Bill Mesnik)

What makes me happy?

Cause when I feel happy

I feel like shit

I can’t define it

I thought I was happy

But was I really happy?

I don’t know

I just can’t show it

Each soggy birthday cake makes me quiver and quake

A jog around the lake?

I can’t fake it.

What makes you happy?

Cause you always seem happy

Are you free from pain?

Oh please explain it

You say, “just be happy,

It’s a choice to be happy,”

It starts with me

I just don’t see it

You’re gracious and sweet with my air of defeat

When we pass on the street

You just greet me.

I’m gonna be happy

I’ve gotta be happy

Before I’m dead I’ll get out of my head

I’ll live and be happy

I’ll love and be happy

A smile comes first

For better or worse

I’ll dance in the sun

I’ll laugh and have fun

I’ll help everyone

(Maybe someday)….

ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY SEA

PAUL REVERE AND THE RAIDERS GREATEST HITS by Paul Revere and the Raiders (Columbia, 1967)

This group, this record: they were fundamental elements in the experience of the 13 year old Captain Billy. My band, The Full House, played a smokin’ cover of “Steppin’ Out”; Dick Clark’s WHERE THE ACTION IS tv show was a can’t miss, daily after-middle school check in; I coveted those Vox amps and Mark Lindsay’s ponytail. And, re-listening to this setlist 56 years later verifies that this band kicked hard and tight. Just ask Quentin Tarantino, who included two of the cuts for the soundtrack of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. 

America’s answer to the British Invasion actually started earlier, in 1958, in Boise Idaho, when keyboardist Paul Revere and sax player Mark Lindsay met and collaborated in the instrumental group The Downbeats. Revere was the organist’s actual name, so the subsequent donning of Revolutionary outfits was a natural, if cringey gimmick. The fact that Mark Lindsay was also one of America’s best rock singers was a secret weapon.

The initial bombshell was dropped in April, 1963, in Portland, Oregon, when the group recorded the seminal rock standard “Louie Louie” in the same year and the same studio as the Kingsmen (the version everybody remembers): The Northwestern Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings, Inc. studio. But, that didn’t matter. Yes, The Kingsmen’s recording was a one hit mega-wonder, but, the Raiders became a national institution with a string of 12 top 30 hits. 

The first incarnation of the Raiders dissolved around the same time that this collection came out, but they kept reforming in various line ups until Revere’s death from cancer in 2014. Like their contemporaries, The Monkees, there was a media hyped, manufactured quality (Producer Terry Melcher fattened their sound with the help of The Wrecking Crew), but the Raider’s street cred as musicians was impeccable, and very few could wail like Mark Lindsay. 

HANK WILLIAMS, JR. / WHISKEY BENT AND HELL BOUND / ELEKTRA, 1979

I have a good story about Hank Williams, Jr., aka “Bocephus:” 

My late wife, Chemayne grew up in the backstages and dressing rooms of the biggest rock n roll arenas in the Southeast. Her mom worked for a couple of regional mega promoters, and Chemayne had many encounters with such 70’s luminaries as Willy Nelson, James Taylor, Roger Daltry, Mick Jagger, Elton John, etc.  One memorable meeting involved the son of “The Hillbilly Shakespeare.” I guess she was about eight, and Hank decided to take out and display his glass eye in order to tease her. Freaked her out so bad the memory was burned into her brain for all time. 

Hank worked hard to cultivate his Outlaw image, and to both embrace, and out run the weight of his father’s immense legacy, and along the way he kicked the shit out of himself, but made some damn fine records. This album was created during his high point of the late 70s-early 80s when his combination of Country, blues, and Rock went main stream -  between his monster hits Family Tradition, and All My Rowdy Friends Have Settled Down. He was so big that in the early 90s he became the identifiable voice of Monday Night Football. Not only did he embody his own “Family Tradition”, but America’s as well, it seems.

It’s worth noting also that the disc was produced by Jimmy Bowen, who also produced Frank Sinatra’s Strangers in the Night - which demonstrates some cross over wizardry in service of one of Country music’s arguably biggest cross over artists.

We got a couple of world-class curmudgeons here - who share more than might meet the ear initially: two native Californians renown for their curdled opinion of the world they inhabit, and the populace with whom they share the space; We’re talking Hollywood, specifically, but their bile was generous enough to accommodate the whole of humanity - in all its corrupt, hypocritical manifestations; both lost too early - victims of cancer’s cruelty; both musical geniuses with solid classical training and rock n roll credentials; and, funny? Goddamn right, they were!

Frank Zappa and Warren Zevon, two outlaws who could not be silenced or ignored are being celebrated here today. It should be noted that Frank was inducted posthumously into the Rock n Roll Hall of Fame; Warren is still owed his due. 

FRANK ZAPPA

The man loved freaks, and had to create his own label to promote them. From the time he appeared on the Steve Allen show in the early 60’s, playing the bicycle, to the early 90’s, when he visited Czech Republic as an honored guest to the President, playwright-turned politician, Vaclav Havel after their Velvet Revolution, and throughout his vociferous fight against censorship in the halls of our Congress, Frank always stood strong for freedom of expression, and against hypocrisy.

In “Plastic People” from his second album ABSOLUTELY FREE, you can hear so many elements mixed together that have become tropes: the abrupt changes in tempo and mood, the stinging social satire, the weird orchestration, the rock n roll name checks…. Good stuff!

WARREN ZEVON

We always knew that Warren was tortured by demons. He struggled with his alcoholism for a long time and was subject to depression. But, despite it all he kept his unique humorous perspective. And, with a prodigious gift for melody, he wrote some of pop’s most haunting ballads. He was, to borrow the words of Kris Kristofferson, a “walking contradiction” who could go to the darkest of dark sides, like in his rockers about serial killers, such as Excitable Boy and Werewolves of London - then, swing 180 degrees to express wrenching heartbreak in such timeless elegies as Hasten Down the Wind and Carmelita.

In Splendid Isolation you get both - the swinging of the hips, and the stinging of the poisoned barb. It has an autobiographical persuasion which illuminates the soul of a man who longs to be left alone - the world is just too fucked up to navigate. There’s a bitter sadness articulated, but its flavored with that ever-present Zevon wit.