Thanks to some folks on the Dylan Pool web site, who’ve been discussing our show, I have two nice soundboard recordings: one of Mike Ford, of the great Canadian band Moxy Früvous, singing a beautiful version of Dylan’s “I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine” with Mike Skliar on dobro and me on harmonica, and my version of “Stupid Is the New Smart” with Mike Skliar on dobro.
Massive change…
TORONTO, Ontario, April 21 — Just got to Toronto, and had to get a bunch of stuff done for work (on which I am obviously procrastinating) but one thing strikes you the moment you walk out the door of your hotel room. The so-called “national newspaper” that’s dropped by default outside your door in the United States is the execrable USA Today*, with its dumbed down coverage and pretty-vacant graphics. (Although, USA Today did have “Benedict XVI” on the front page yesterday, rather than the “Benedict the 16th” on the front of the Daily News that justifiably outraged silvertide yesterday.)
In Canada, the newspaper you trip over outside your hotel room door is The Globe and Mail. Today’s paper had an article quoting several of the liberal theologians who’d suffered at the hands of the current pope when he was the past pope’s Karl Rove. Boff (quoted secondhand via an Argentine radio interview) called Benedict nee Ratzinger a “hard man with no compassion.”
In other notes, I don’t imagine many of you are planning to stop by the Renaissance Cafe for our gig tomorrow night, but in the meantime you can download another new song: “Cloud Of Ink” is now on the web site.
*I admit that I’m biased, but a better candidate for national newspaper would be The Wall Street Journal, which is not willing to discount as sharply as USA Today does to get distributed in hotels.
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| Johnnie Johnson at a free lunchtime concert at Metrotech in Downtown Brooklyn, July 5, 2001. |
Johnnie Johnson died on Wednesday. Chuck Berry had the suits, the big red guitar, the looks, and those brilliant lyrics. But it was Johnnie Johnson who gave Chuck his first big break and whose piano riffs, transcribed onto the guitar, helped Chuck found rock and roll.
(Not to digress or anything, but as great a singer as Elvis Presley was, he was the pretender King of rock&roll. Chuck Berry was the one. Along with a few others (especially Buddy Holly), he first started fusing “hillbilly” music and R&B to make rock and roll. Elvis had some great records, but mostly with other people’s songs, and they do not compare to Chuck’s own songs: “As I was motorvatin’ over the hill, I saw Maybellene in a Coupe de Ville…” )
Johnson was the inspiration for one of Chuck Berry’s greatest songs, “Johnny B. Goode,” and his piano drove almost all those great songs.
Later in life he sued Chuck for some royalties, saying he’d helped to write a lot of Chuck’s songs. It’s almost undoubtedly true, but the courts decided that forty years was too long to wait to make the claim. The saddest part was seeing two geniuses, neither of whom who had ever received half the recognition or even a tiny fraction of the financial reward they deserved for what they’d created, suing each other, while others continued to profit obscenely from their theft of the music. In a just world, every rock guitarist would be writing Chuck Berry a monthly royalty check, and Johnson would have gotten a fair share of a much larger pie. In any case, you can watch one of the great rock&roll movies, Hail Hail Rock and Roll, in which Chuck and Johnnie were reunited for the first time in years, and judge for yourself. Keith Richards, who was the driving force behind the reunion and the film, got Johnson a record deal in the 80s and they recorded an album together that actually got Johnnie on white-rock radio, singing “Tanqueray” with Richards. That laid-back voice and just-behind-the-beat piano right hand were just irresistable, and they still are. And reacting to his death yesterday, Chuck said, “We never lost our friendship.”
In the summer of 2003, I spent a week at the Augusta Heritage Festival in West Virginia, a musical orgy of lessons, jams, and concerts. Johnnie Johnson was teaching blues piano there, and I didn’t spend much time with him since I was in the guitar and harp classes. But he was quiet and gracious and when he showed up at a jam, whoever was sitting at the piano would hastily yield the keyboard. He moved slowly and took his time sitting down, but once he was settled and had the keyboard set up to his liking, there was no question who was in charge. And there was nothing like getting that solemn nod from him for a harp solo.
Open mics are scary; it’s one thing to play on stage in a band or even to do your own songs with a partner backing you up. But playing my own songs, all by myself, in front of an audience of complete strangers, is still pretty new to me. But it went well, and on top of that I discovered quite a nice musical scene in an unexpected place. It’s been a long time since I’ve been able to say “I grew up in Westerleigh” and have anyone know what I was talking about.
As a recovering Catholic (for better or for worse, one is never an “ex” Catholic any more than one is an “ex” alcoholic), I can’t let the Pope’s passing go without some comment.
Let me start with one point. People are joking in various ways about the loss of the “infallible” Pope. No one in modern times has ever claimed the Pope was “infallible” except under a very narrow set of circumstances. Basically it is only when he speaks as the head of the Church (rather than as a private person, or a theologian, or a diplomat), to define a point of doctrine once and for all in a way that will be binding for the entire Church. This was more or less settled at the First Vatican Council in 1870, although a significant schism resulted (dissenters became known as “Old Catholics“).
Speaking under these circumstances, the Pope is said to be speaking Ex Cathedra (literally, “from the chair”) and it happens only rarely. The last time was in 1950 when Pius XII issued Munificentissimus Deus, declaring that Mary had been assumed into Heaven without dying. It has been argued that Paul VI’s encyclical affirming the ban on contraception (Humanae Vitae, 1968) was issued ex-cathedra, but this is not commonly accepted. (In fact, it was probably one of the single stupidest things the Catholic Church has done in modern times.)
Thomas Cahill wrote about “infallibility” in the Times yesterday, perhaps one of the only worthwhile bits of reading in the sea of imbecilic coverage since Saturday. Regretfully but sternly, he says what almost no one has been saying: that whatever his gifts as a diplomat and spokesperson, John Paul II damaged the Catholic Church perhaps beyond repair. Preaching against the use of condoms as millions died of AIDS, undercutting his own statements about Third World debt and treatment of the poor by aggressively supporting rapacious dictators in the name of anti-Communism, and systematically purging the Church of any shred of independent thought (in Cahill’s words, “the ranks of the episcopate are filled with mindless sycophants and intellectual incompetents”), he has driven millions away from the Church.
Furthermore, his blind insistence on celibacy and his misogynistic refusal to consider any role for women in the Church has thinned the ranks of the priesthood in the U.S. even as the number of Catholics has increased. (Lots of interesting statistics at Future Church.) And his successors are likely to think exactly as he did, given that only three of the cardinals voting for his replacement were not appointed by John Paul II.
I doubt I’d be part of the Catholic Church no matter what direction it had taken, but one really has to wonder what would have happened in the world over the past quarter-century had John Paul II, who spoke with perhaps the most moral authority of anyone on the planet (someone pointed out that he had been seen live by more people than any other human in history) had spoken out against bigotry, rather than in favor of it; had encouraged a rational approach to sexual health and practices in the Church rather than covering up for child abusers and promulgating nonsensical and dangerous doctrine; or had evinced even the slightest support for the priests and nuns who worked so hard, and in some cases died, for the poor of Latin America and other places.
One should not allow the misbehaviors of its hierarchies to disguise the good that Catholic organizations do or the many Catholics who work hard for social justice. But it is a shame that the most genuinely Christian people in the Church are doing their work in spite of, rather than with the support of, the hierarchy.
In case anyone was planning a trip to Red Hook next week, the Second Saturday at Sunny’s with Kate and Lou has been cancelled for this month. Hopefully we’ll be back in May.
However, as promised, I’ve got a new song available for download on the web site: “Stupid Is the New Smart,” an addition to what I realize is a growing corpus of sarcastic songs. And I’ve gotten started on recording “Cloud Of Ink,” which I hope to have finished before we leave for Toronto.
rosefox pointed me to the strangest community: reformat_songs. It’s a place to post, well, reformatted songs. It’s hard to explain, but see this version of They Might Be Giants’ “Istanbul (Not Constantinople)” as an example. Or two of Rose’s contributions today: “Life During Wartime” rendered as a LiveJournal dramapost, or “Jabberwocky” rendered in HTML and JavaScript.
Fearing a possibly catastrophic time sink, I have resisted the impulse to try this myself.
(This door is on the main deck of the Andrew J. Barberi, one of the super-sized generation of boats that were introduced in the 80s. On October 15, 2003, it smashed into a Staten Island bulkhead at full speed, killing ten and injuring more than 70. The accident was caused by the collapse of one pilot and the absence of the other from the pilothouse, contrary to regulations. So far as it can be determined, intrusions into the Music Entertainment Room were not a factor in the accident.)
Although the songs are traditional, they are quite complex, very jazzy, and extraordinarily beautiful. Andy Cotton (who played bass with us and the Radio Band on Saturday night) will be accompanying, and I’ll be playing harp and taking breaks on a few songs. They’re all sung in Norwegian, which when it’s sung sounds like German, only softer, and Tone has a beautiful voice.
It’s a short set (40 minutes at most) on the late side for a weeknight (10pm) and not very convenient to get to, so I’m not promoting this as a gig, just really pleased to be playing on such a beautiful collection of tunes.