DIG THIS WITH BILL MESNIK AND RICH BUCKLAND- THE SPLENDID BOHEMIANS

DT: STAYING HYDRATED WITH MARTY ROBBINS AND REV. AL GREEN

H2O - we can’t live without it. As the temperatures rise, physically and spiritually, you better keep plenty of the life giving elixir handy. The human body contains over 50% of the stuff, the earth- about 70 percent. It’s all around; within and without us. 

From the book of symbols: 

“River is vital fluidity: the rivers move through both the upper world and the lower world, over ground and underground, inside and outside: rivers of fertility and prosperity, rivers of forgetting, rivers of binding oath, rivers of commerce, rivers of blood and rivers of water, rivers of rebirth, rivers of death, rivers of sorrow…”

Two streams of much needed refreshment will be  delivered by Marty Robbins and the Rev. Al Green today; dip in and be baptized.

MARTY ROBBINS  / COOL WATER

Cool Water had been around for about 20 years when Marty Robbins included the song in his 1959 album Gunfighter Ballads and Trail Songs, which also featured the hit “El Paso”. It was written by Bob Nolan, founding member of The Sons of the Pioneers, and had been covered many many times. But, nestled here, among the other songs that comprise this formidable concept album, it takes on a mythic resonance. As Marty urges his parched mule, Dan forward through the unending desert,  his emotion choked voice cries out for an oasis of redemption. 

REVEREND AL GREEN / TAKE ME TO THE RIVER

The Reverend Al Green became fully ordained in 1976, two years after he wrote and recorded this soul classic. In 1974, with the assistance of production wizard Willie Mitchell, he created this toe tapping ode to spirituality and lust.  Al must have had an premonition of the rebirth that was about to occur, because’74 was also the year that his peccadillos came home to roost: when he was scalded by hot grits, wielded by suicidal, ex-lover, Mary Woodson.

And, this cut contains both the sacred and the profane in equal measure - not explicitly, but in the hip chugging funk juxtaposed with the call for baptismal relief.  Rock n Roll has been called “The Devil’s Music:” Al may have strayed, but has since devoted himself to the gospel of rehabilitation.

ANCHORS AWEIGH!

This episode comes from diary entries written from March to August, 2018 - and, involve labyrinthian efforts to get my nephew into the Navy.  My dreams were plentiful and disturbing, but nothing compared to the bureaucratic nightmares that lay before us.  Enjoy!

The story of one of the sunniest and funniest personalities to emerge in the world of rock, the Turtles‘ Mark Volman, is being told in a  book whose title is a play on the name of his biggest hit, “Happy Together”. However, unlike many memoirs, Volman’s own words comprise less than five percent of the text. Instead, this is a third-person oral history, much like Legs McNeil’s wonderful punk rock history opus from 2016, Please Kill Me.

Mark Volman’s Happy Forever is told almost entirely by 100 of his famous collaborators, rock scenesters, friends, and family, with the occasional sidebar from Mark himself. This six-decade-long narrative includes his rise to fame with the Turtles alongside his singing partner Howard Kaylan, their brilliant stint with Frank Zappa’s the Mothers of Invention, their solo career as Flo & Eddie, and their role as backup singers on mega-hits by Marc Bolan, Bruce Springsteen, Alice Cooper, the Ramones, Steely Dan and more.

Long ago and far away, around 1970, there was a smoldering rage that permeated through every strata of American society. Following a flurry of assassinations in the mid sixties, the Manson murders in ‘69, riots in Detroit, the Motor City in ’67, and in Chicago at the 1968 Democratic Convention, at Kent State in ‘70 with the murder of four protesting students - it seemed that the whole fabric of society was coming apart due to the country being mired in the Viet Nam war and the never ending specter of racism.  

Step up to the mic Gil Scott-Heron and the MC5. In “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” Mr. Scott-Heron, in a performance that has earned him the title “The Godfather of Rap” in some quarters - eviscerates those couch potatoes who are watching it all unfold on tv, and that expect things to right themselves between commercial interruptions. And he does it with jazzy flair that made the absurdity of the whole situation crystal clear.. And, then there was the  Motor City 5, those scruffy provocateurs whose manager, John Sinclair was jailed for two joints, who fought the good fight the only way they knew how: by “Kicking out the Jams, Motherfucker!”

GIL SCOTT-HERON

Scott-Heron’s combination of spoken word poetry with soul-jazz is a style which has made him influential throughout the decades. So much so that he was inducted as an influence in the Rock and roll Hall of Fame. In “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” he melds the two strains  - one melodic, one verbal - together to deliver an unassailable message: there will be no change without intentional activism. It’s word play may be humorous, but it’s deadly serious. Now we have the internet and social media and people are less inclined to believe what they see, or even commit to any action because their attention is being relentlessly consumed. In 1970, despite the horrendous condition of the political scene, Gil Scott-Heron still believed that societal change was possible.

MC5

The same optimism resounds in Kick out the Jams by the MC5. These were kids who saw the wrong headed direction of their government, and tried, by assuming the outlaw stance of revolutionaries, to influence the youth. However, the enterprise was hobbled from the start by drugs, their association with White Panther Party founder, John Sinclair, - and, the radio censorship by their label of their most famous song because of the introduction’s unacceptable word “motherfucker!” They were a great live band of proto-punks, home-town heroes in Detroit, who never achieved the national prominence they deserved. It’s not the lyrics of Kick out the jams that are dangerous - it’s the exuberant energy of the offending word - that, ironically, created history.

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.