Wednesday, December 9, 2009
The Tambourine Man's Christmas
You're inside the bar scene in the old film: "It's a Wonderful Life," that part where Jimmy Stewart is drinking himself into Christmas oblivion cause Uncle Charley lost the deposit money and Scrooge (Mr. Potter) is foreclosing on the family bank. Next stop for Jimmy...jumping off the bridge. Merry Christmas! Through the bar window, outside on the frozen snow bank - lit in a shadow of faded red neon is an old man...a wastrel...a fallen away choir-boy with the terminal shakes; the town drunk. The old man is singing "Adeste Fideles" from a tattered choir book. The bar goes silent; not a dry eye in the house. Every drunk in town remembers a Christmas past when Ma was still alive and it was all mulled wine, roast goose and hot mince pie. Then the old man sings: "Here Comes Santa Claus," and everybody cheers. Much slapping of backs and toasts to a new year. Maybe Jimmy won't jump off the bridge and Tiny Tim will be cured of polio. Maybe everything rotten in the world will turn to gold. Maybe there will TRULLY be Peace on Earth and Good Will Toward Men...if only for the few moments it takes to drink another holiday round. Now the old man is invited in for a pint of hot rum and they lift him up on a bar stool and he sings: "Chestnuts roasting on an open fire...." His voice is half-gone; his pitch is a little shaky; but his heart is true. He is the voice of Father Christmas. He is the shattered remnant of every besotted Uncle and third cousin who ever sang too soused and loud at Midnight mass...he is an outcast from a Dickens novel...and he's my father circa 1956. In reality that's Bob Dylan on his new Christmas album: "Christmas in the Heart." You can have your Sting and his poetic evocations of a Winter Solstice (whatever that is - means nothing to an American)...you can shove all your negative reviews concerning every wierd and exotic new curve Dylan has gone down in his incredible journey...you can boo like they used to do back in the sixties when he strapped on the Stratocaster...and go ahead a listen to the Norma Luboff Choir. This is Bob Dylan backed by what sounds like the Andrews sisters...it works as well as Egg Nog and 100 proof rum and those nay-sayers and Scrooges can laugh...but I dig it and the money goes to feed some homeless folk. True Christmas spirit...Heh, Mr. Tambourine Man...sing a song for me, I'm not sleepy and there ain't no place I'm going to......" On Dasher, On Dancer, on Prancer....
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Shook Up
“Don’t Be Cruel, to a heart that’s true.”
Otis Blackwell
In 1985 I was living in a closed-up storefront in Brooklyn I called: “The Bunker;” an idea stolen from Williams S. Burroughs and songwriter Pat Garvey. I thought I was living in a bohemian garret – Paris in the 30’s and all that. The rent was $150 a month and the landlord was an old Italian lady named Vera who made rot gut, bathtub wine. She bottled it in plastic half-gallon coca cola containers. I’m still picking the grape skins out of my teeth. She sat on the sidewalk in the late afternoons, reading Botticelli from an old beat-up paperback; when she finished a page she tore it out and let the wind carry it into the gutter. “You shoulda’ try an read this, Mr. Rosseli,” she laughed. “It’s feelthy stuff. Ha ha!” Her teeth were purple from the homemade wine. Her cackle of a laugh was charmingly evil. Before Vera died (and all of it died)…before the new money moved in, and the Italians moved out…Otis Blackwell showed up one day at my Bunker. He was half-blind from working years as a dry cleaner, and the toxic solutions had destroyed his eyes. His wife led him around. Otis, you might know, wrote “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Return to Sender,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Fever,” and dozens of other rock classics. The early book of rock n roll. The Old Testament. (Dylan wrote the New Testament.) Otis was born in East New York, a section they call Bedford Stuyvesant. The Badlands. There’s a street there named Malcolm X Boulevard, and all retail business in Bed-Stuy is conducted through bullet-proof Plexiglas. As a young kid, Otis went to the Saturday afternoon Cowboy matinees at the local theater; he was always first in line so he could get a free cowboy plate. The first 20 kids inside got gifts. His favorite actor-singer was Tex Ritter. “Man I loved that cat’s voice,” Otis said, “so dark and groovy.”
(The shadow of Tex Ritter is very long. I later met a Japanese Countess in the Alps of Switzerland whose favorite singer was Tex Ritter. She was the widow of the painter Count Balthus.) Back to Brooklyn…Otis began to form his early songs from comic books and cartoons and “those weird little funny things I saw at the cowboy matinees.” Otis, like Leiber and Stoller, worked that cartoon-cowboy-street-lingo styled humor into early rock and roll history. Otis graduated to the Brill Building, helping to create the foundations of Tin Pan Alley rock. One day a record producer came into Otis’s cubicle and shook up a bottle of Coca Cola, which sprayed all over the wall. He challenged Otis to write a song about that in ten minutes….Otis wrote “All Shook Up.”Elvis Presley heard the demo and recorded it. Elvis not only copped half the song publishing, he copped Otis’s burping-chugging vocal style. Trust me. Otis was not offended; he was honored. When Elvis died, Otis gave me an LP Called “Otis Blackwell Sings His Hits”….he took a marking pen off my desk and re-titled if “The King Is Not Dead!” and signed it to me. “I was too shy to ever meet Elvis, “he told me, “I had the chance in Vegas once, but I was too shy. “
And there you have it; a little touch of rock n roll history from my bunker days.
“I wrote my songs, I got my money, and I boogied.” Otis Blackwell
Otis Blackwell
In 1985 I was living in a closed-up storefront in Brooklyn I called: “The Bunker;” an idea stolen from Williams S. Burroughs and songwriter Pat Garvey. I thought I was living in a bohemian garret – Paris in the 30’s and all that. The rent was $150 a month and the landlord was an old Italian lady named Vera who made rot gut, bathtub wine. She bottled it in plastic half-gallon coca cola containers. I’m still picking the grape skins out of my teeth. She sat on the sidewalk in the late afternoons, reading Botticelli from an old beat-up paperback; when she finished a page she tore it out and let the wind carry it into the gutter. “You shoulda’ try an read this, Mr. Rosseli,” she laughed. “It’s feelthy stuff. Ha ha!” Her teeth were purple from the homemade wine. Her cackle of a laugh was charmingly evil. Before Vera died (and all of it died)…before the new money moved in, and the Italians moved out…Otis Blackwell showed up one day at my Bunker. He was half-blind from working years as a dry cleaner, and the toxic solutions had destroyed his eyes. His wife led him around. Otis, you might know, wrote “All Shook Up,” “Don’t Be Cruel,” “Return to Sender,” “Great Balls of Fire,” “Fever,” and dozens of other rock classics. The early book of rock n roll. The Old Testament. (Dylan wrote the New Testament.) Otis was born in East New York, a section they call Bedford Stuyvesant. The Badlands. There’s a street there named Malcolm X Boulevard, and all retail business in Bed-Stuy is conducted through bullet-proof Plexiglas. As a young kid, Otis went to the Saturday afternoon Cowboy matinees at the local theater; he was always first in line so he could get a free cowboy plate. The first 20 kids inside got gifts. His favorite actor-singer was Tex Ritter. “Man I loved that cat’s voice,” Otis said, “so dark and groovy.”
(The shadow of Tex Ritter is very long. I later met a Japanese Countess in the Alps of Switzerland whose favorite singer was Tex Ritter. She was the widow of the painter Count Balthus.) Back to Brooklyn…Otis began to form his early songs from comic books and cartoons and “those weird little funny things I saw at the cowboy matinees.” Otis, like Leiber and Stoller, worked that cartoon-cowboy-street-lingo styled humor into early rock and roll history. Otis graduated to the Brill Building, helping to create the foundations of Tin Pan Alley rock. One day a record producer came into Otis’s cubicle and shook up a bottle of Coca Cola, which sprayed all over the wall. He challenged Otis to write a song about that in ten minutes….Otis wrote “All Shook Up.”Elvis Presley heard the demo and recorded it. Elvis not only copped half the song publishing, he copped Otis’s burping-chugging vocal style. Trust me. Otis was not offended; he was honored. When Elvis died, Otis gave me an LP Called “Otis Blackwell Sings His Hits”….he took a marking pen off my desk and re-titled if “The King Is Not Dead!” and signed it to me. “I was too shy to ever meet Elvis, “he told me, “I had the chance in Vegas once, but I was too shy. “
And there you have it; a little touch of rock n roll history from my bunker days.
“I wrote my songs, I got my money, and I boogied.” Otis Blackwell
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Acrawl With Nerves
I have a police mug shot of Johnny Cash being busted, near here, for crossing the Juarez bridge into the U.S. with a thousand uppers and downers. Pills. His mug is lean and haunted; “acrawl with nerves.” I feel close to the man in that photo. I’ve crossed that bridge one hundred times. Wired and lost, thinking of Johnny Cash. In the late ‘50’s my brother had that first Sun L.P. record: “The Hot and Blue Guitars of Johnny Cash,” and to me that was, and still is, IT. As punk as it is folk; savage blue country; gut-level Southern soul. American music. An Arkansas cotton farmer’s heart, pounding to Luther Perkins’ ragged, comb-toothed, boom-chick-a bass line. Thunder road music.
A decade later I snuck backstage at the Hollywood bowl and stood beside Cash as he waited for Bob Dylan to finish “Desolation Row,” that incredible beast of a song unfolding for the first time on stage. Cash and Dylan were defining nova-beat American folk music. Spin around a few more years and I was onstage singing with Johnny Cash in Switzerland; he whispered the lyrics to “Peace in the Valley” into my ear in front of 10,000 people… Christ, those Old Testament words about the “lion lying down with the lamb.” Chilling. Life changing. I’d had breakfast with him that morning and he promised me he would record my songs “Veteran’s Day,” and “Blue Wing.” He kept his promise.
“Blue Wing,” is still in the archives of those Rick Rubins' sessions, and it was those Rubin sessions which later brought Cash back to a younger, “alternative-country” audience, after Nashville had turned him out. How important is Johnny Cash to our culture? His face should be carved in granite next to Mount Rushmore, along with Hank Williams and Crazy Horse. He is our Black Moses. His voice defines an honesty which cuts to the heart of how human beings love and hate and hurt. That voice was not so much “beautiful,” as it was raw and truth-filled and in your face, with real poetic news that needed to be heard, swallowed, spit out and heard again.
I am honored to have known him, if just in a few passing hours on a two or three far distant stages. I still think of him when I cross that bridge, from Juarez to El Paso; walking that line between hell and heaven; dancing across the that tightrope between truth and oblivion –high above a river gone up in flames. Acrawl with nerves.
A decade later I snuck backstage at the Hollywood bowl and stood beside Cash as he waited for Bob Dylan to finish “Desolation Row,” that incredible beast of a song unfolding for the first time on stage. Cash and Dylan were defining nova-beat American folk music. Spin around a few more years and I was onstage singing with Johnny Cash in Switzerland; he whispered the lyrics to “Peace in the Valley” into my ear in front of 10,000 people… Christ, those Old Testament words about the “lion lying down with the lamb.” Chilling. Life changing. I’d had breakfast with him that morning and he promised me he would record my songs “Veteran’s Day,” and “Blue Wing.” He kept his promise.
“Blue Wing,” is still in the archives of those Rick Rubins' sessions, and it was those Rubin sessions which later brought Cash back to a younger, “alternative-country” audience, after Nashville had turned him out. How important is Johnny Cash to our culture? His face should be carved in granite next to Mount Rushmore, along with Hank Williams and Crazy Horse. He is our Black Moses. His voice defines an honesty which cuts to the heart of how human beings love and hate and hurt. That voice was not so much “beautiful,” as it was raw and truth-filled and in your face, with real poetic news that needed to be heard, swallowed, spit out and heard again.
I am honored to have known him, if just in a few passing hours on a two or three far distant stages. I still think of him when I cross that bridge, from Juarez to El Paso; walking that line between hell and heaven; dancing across the that tightrope between truth and oblivion –high above a river gone up in flames. Acrawl with nerves.
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Peter Bucking Horse
He died from an overdose of cobra venom. That was one story. Or he killed himself with seconal or speed or alcohol or a savage overdose of the ragged-edge doldrums that subverted and sunk his erratic, artistic struggle. He walked across the 60’s Greenwich Village scene like a proud and displaced Indian; slant-six Stetson and beat up Justin boots click-clacking past the dives and basket houses. Around his gut was a hand-tooled belt hitched with a trophy buckle from the bronc riding in a small town Indian rodeo. He carried fragments of a deep invisible scar at the bottom of his spine, a psychological wound from spying on drug-smuggling soldier mules during the Korean War. He was a man who rode a saddle bronc one afternoon at Madison Square Garden and then played King Lear in an off Broadway production that same evening. He was a pro boxer, poet, and playwright. One of the first of our “topical” song-writers to be signed to Columbia records; and the first to die.
On an overcast, bleak New York afternoon his Danish wife walked into their second-rate hotel room up in the east 50’s of New York City and found the body and the empty vile of cobra venom which was supposed to fight off his depression. He was the son of Oliver La Farge, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Laughing Boy,” and this boy inherited that passionate, driving ache to write about Native people, though he was not a full-blooded native person. He had a little Narragansett blood in him. His name was Peter La Farge, or “Peter Bucking Horse” as the Indians called him, and he wrote one of our finest American songs: “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” His sister lives right up the road from me here in these Chihuahuan badlands. One afternoon I took her the original 8 by 10” signed photo I found of Peter riding the great bronc “War Paint” and winning Denver in ’58. It was signed “To Woody.” I would imagine Peter had planned to deliver it to Woody Guthrie in the hospital, but Woody out-lived Peter by two years. La Farge died in 1965.
Naw, he wasn’t really a full blooded Indian. Nor was he a truly great bronc rider.
But these predilections and passions, along with the ravages of too much pain jammed into too few years, carved him up and into a Rimbaud-tinged, Cow kid-Indian poet and writer of grand power. From this western knowledge and a dose of truth-serum Peter composed “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” If God has made a better “protest” song, the Great Father has kept it to himself. The Pima Indian Ira Hayes served in WW II and helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima. He returned home to die drunk in an Arizona water ditch on barren Pima land; tribal land raped and gutted by the white man’s greed. Ira’s final departure is painted in tough, ironic lyrics:
“Then Ira started drinkin’ hard,
Jail was often his home
They let him raise the flag and lower it,
Like you’d throw a dog a bone.”
American poetry. Pure. Truth-filled. Here lies your cowboy song, amigos. This ain’t nothin' off of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Johnny Cash recorded a group of La Farge songs, but radio refused to play the single “Ira Hayes” Cash payed for a full page ad in Billboard: “radio programmers where are you guts?” Can you imagine this happening now? These were serious characters, friend. These were the times when our folk-writers: La Farge, Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, Johnny Cash and others - had done time in the Army, Navy, Marines, jail, and divorce court…had been exposed to all forms of powerful hard drugs and violence; the quicksand of catastrophic romantic relationships. Who were they? Where did they go? Married; divorced; addicted; disappeared; forgotten; dead; found Jesus, Buddha; day jobs; lost…. gone to Florida or Potter’s field, or crazy in hotel rooms, back streets, and bars. Many sank to the bottom - terminally depressed when Bob Dylan weaved and danced through it all like a blacksnake with wizened biblical poet knowledge; then went on to prosper with his Picasso-esque confidence. The rest of the generation (to mimic William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsburg) went all crazy and died, some of ‘em, as the purest minds of our culture are want to do.
Peter La Farge was a “seldom man,” to steal a concept from his father. A man whose character and mettle we’ll seldom see again. His poetry still crackles and sizzles high up in the eternal folk musical air; in my gut, and in the grooves of those collections, like Cash’s “Bitter Tears.” Let us now praise little known men and half-cocked bronc riders. His ghost is lying thirsty, in that hotel room near 50th street, where the cowboy-poet died, and where, years later, Tennessee Williams would choke to death in the middle of trying to write one final dramatic line; one last American truth. Come gather round me, people, a story I will tell….
“I always love like a high jack rabbit going through a bramble.
Or a hawk up there twining the world around him just before he
falls to get the jack. Like and eight wheeler going through a Kansas
town at midnight, with only a little boy watching from his bedroom
window and riding every non-stop car out. I love like an act of nature…
but I am alone now and filled with lonely pain…pain always send me home to write.”
Peter La Farge
On an overcast, bleak New York afternoon his Danish wife walked into their second-rate hotel room up in the east 50’s of New York City and found the body and the empty vile of cobra venom which was supposed to fight off his depression. He was the son of Oliver La Farge, who wrote the Pulitzer Prize winning novel “Laughing Boy,” and this boy inherited that passionate, driving ache to write about Native people, though he was not a full-blooded native person. He had a little Narragansett blood in him. His name was Peter La Farge, or “Peter Bucking Horse” as the Indians called him, and he wrote one of our finest American songs: “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” His sister lives right up the road from me here in these Chihuahuan badlands. One afternoon I took her the original 8 by 10” signed photo I found of Peter riding the great bronc “War Paint” and winning Denver in ’58. It was signed “To Woody.” I would imagine Peter had planned to deliver it to Woody Guthrie in the hospital, but Woody out-lived Peter by two years. La Farge died in 1965.
Naw, he wasn’t really a full blooded Indian. Nor was he a truly great bronc rider.
But these predilections and passions, along with the ravages of too much pain jammed into too few years, carved him up and into a Rimbaud-tinged, Cow kid-Indian poet and writer of grand power. From this western knowledge and a dose of truth-serum Peter composed “The Ballad of Ira Hayes.” If God has made a better “protest” song, the Great Father has kept it to himself. The Pima Indian Ira Hayes served in WW II and helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima. He returned home to die drunk in an Arizona water ditch on barren Pima land; tribal land raped and gutted by the white man’s greed. Ira’s final departure is painted in tough, ironic lyrics:
“Then Ira started drinkin’ hard,
Jail was often his home
They let him raise the flag and lower it,
Like you’d throw a dog a bone.”
American poetry. Pure. Truth-filled. Here lies your cowboy song, amigos. This ain’t nothin' off of “A Prairie Home Companion.” Johnny Cash recorded a group of La Farge songs, but radio refused to play the single “Ira Hayes” Cash payed for a full page ad in Billboard: “radio programmers where are you guts?” Can you imagine this happening now? These were serious characters, friend. These were the times when our folk-writers: La Farge, Tim Hardin, Fred Neil, Johnny Cash and others - had done time in the Army, Navy, Marines, jail, and divorce court…had been exposed to all forms of powerful hard drugs and violence; the quicksand of catastrophic romantic relationships. Who were they? Where did they go? Married; divorced; addicted; disappeared; forgotten; dead; found Jesus, Buddha; day jobs; lost…. gone to Florida or Potter’s field, or crazy in hotel rooms, back streets, and bars. Many sank to the bottom - terminally depressed when Bob Dylan weaved and danced through it all like a blacksnake with wizened biblical poet knowledge; then went on to prosper with his Picasso-esque confidence. The rest of the generation (to mimic William Carlos Williams and Allen Ginsburg) went all crazy and died, some of ‘em, as the purest minds of our culture are want to do.
Peter La Farge was a “seldom man,” to steal a concept from his father. A man whose character and mettle we’ll seldom see again. His poetry still crackles and sizzles high up in the eternal folk musical air; in my gut, and in the grooves of those collections, like Cash’s “Bitter Tears.” Let us now praise little known men and half-cocked bronc riders. His ghost is lying thirsty, in that hotel room near 50th street, where the cowboy-poet died, and where, years later, Tennessee Williams would choke to death in the middle of trying to write one final dramatic line; one last American truth. Come gather round me, people, a story I will tell….
“I always love like a high jack rabbit going through a bramble.
Or a hawk up there twining the world around him just before he
falls to get the jack. Like and eight wheeler going through a Kansas
town at midnight, with only a little boy watching from his bedroom
window and riding every non-stop car out. I love like an act of nature…
but I am alone now and filled with lonely pain…pain always send me home to write.”
Peter La Farge
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
The Lovin' of the Game
Who's gonna throw that Minstrel boy a coin?
Who's gonna let it roll?
Bob Dylan
The treasure’s not the takin’. It’s the lovin’ of the game. Winter chill hits Columbia Missouri. Rivers soon frozen. Marking the Twain; ten shows in; fifty to go. Blood and Candle Smoke. From sold out show in Boston to midnight run on old interstate 95; here we are on this broke down, rutted highway and three in the morning and worried about making the Letterman show. We make NYC in the afternoon and walk head on into the “controversy.” Letterman tapes two shows on that Thursday, and he tells of the extortion plot against him. Dave handled it a lot better than those boneless politicians with their faux shame. Ratings climbed 50% higher and we began to chart on Amazon. More gigs: Joe's Pub, Turning Point, World Café with Gene Shay, who says he puts "Blood" into the top 25 of his 11,000 plus record collection. Told me he had dated Nina Simone. Vienna Virginia, XM Radio with Bob Edwards which will air soon; Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Ann Arbor, Fairfield - Iowa…home of the Transcendental Meditation tribe. Blueberry pie and Vedic houses and down the road to Columbia. Then K.C., St Louis and Mt.Olive. There is still an America out there, but it's a house of mirrors. You don’t know what you're actually seeing; or eating. Much illusion. But the bridges and the rivers are still there, carrying coal, and shrimp and broken bottles through the night. Old America still exists inside used book stores and on the faces of Amish women.
People want to know what this life feels like, asking: "don’t you get tired of traveling?" Naw. What baffles me is what OTHER people have to do for a living. Just give me that fruit platter and two bottles of water in the dressing room. A towel and decent hotel. We follow an ancient path of old wagon ruts left by guitar toting muleskinners who carry the word from town to town. An honest trade in a tired land. And I dream back to that old Ed Sullivan theater dressing room where they tape the Letterman show; thinking about that tray of fresh cookies and those wonderful old photos on the wall; people who have shared the dressing room: James Brown, The Beatles, Bob Dylan (with his upside down Gibson guitar - the photo must have been backwards.) It's all worth it, if you can stay inside the song and sing it honestly.
Why do we do it? How? I quote the song lines:
But beside the lookin' for…
The findin's always tame.
There's nothin' drives a gambler,
Like the lovin of the game.
"The Lovin' of the Game"
PatGarvey
Letterman link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIDCYjvj5XU
(Southwest tour coming….and Texas….check www.tomrussell.com)
Who's gonna let it roll?
Bob Dylan
The treasure’s not the takin’. It’s the lovin’ of the game. Winter chill hits Columbia Missouri. Rivers soon frozen. Marking the Twain; ten shows in; fifty to go. Blood and Candle Smoke. From sold out show in Boston to midnight run on old interstate 95; here we are on this broke down, rutted highway and three in the morning and worried about making the Letterman show. We make NYC in the afternoon and walk head on into the “controversy.” Letterman tapes two shows on that Thursday, and he tells of the extortion plot against him. Dave handled it a lot better than those boneless politicians with their faux shame. Ratings climbed 50% higher and we began to chart on Amazon. More gigs: Joe's Pub, Turning Point, World Café with Gene Shay, who says he puts "Blood" into the top 25 of his 11,000 plus record collection. Told me he had dated Nina Simone. Vienna Virginia, XM Radio with Bob Edwards which will air soon; Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Columbus, Ann Arbor, Fairfield - Iowa…home of the Transcendental Meditation tribe. Blueberry pie and Vedic houses and down the road to Columbia. Then K.C., St Louis and Mt.Olive. There is still an America out there, but it's a house of mirrors. You don’t know what you're actually seeing; or eating. Much illusion. But the bridges and the rivers are still there, carrying coal, and shrimp and broken bottles through the night. Old America still exists inside used book stores and on the faces of Amish women.
People want to know what this life feels like, asking: "don’t you get tired of traveling?" Naw. What baffles me is what OTHER people have to do for a living. Just give me that fruit platter and two bottles of water in the dressing room. A towel and decent hotel. We follow an ancient path of old wagon ruts left by guitar toting muleskinners who carry the word from town to town. An honest trade in a tired land. And I dream back to that old Ed Sullivan theater dressing room where they tape the Letterman show; thinking about that tray of fresh cookies and those wonderful old photos on the wall; people who have shared the dressing room: James Brown, The Beatles, Bob Dylan (with his upside down Gibson guitar - the photo must have been backwards.) It's all worth it, if you can stay inside the song and sing it honestly.
Why do we do it? How? I quote the song lines:
But beside the lookin' for…
The findin's always tame.
There's nothin' drives a gambler,
Like the lovin of the game.
"The Lovin' of the Game"
PatGarvey
Letterman link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EIDCYjvj5XU
(Southwest tour coming….and Texas….check www.tomrussell.com)
Wednesday, September 30, 2009
Where God and The Devil Wheel Like Vultures
“Down below El Paso lies Juarez,
Mexico is different, like the travel poster says….”
-Burt Bacharach and Bob Hilliard, “Mexican Divorce”
I. Touch Of Evil
That was the summer of “birds falling out of trees,” as the Apaches might say. Looming weirdness. I’m in a beat-up Juarez taxi cab, inching slowly away from the Plaza Monumental bullring. A masked character in the truck across from us begins firing an automatic weapon over the top of the cab. Across the street at the Geronimo bar, three bodies fall into the gutter. My cab driver pulls his head down and shrieks: Cristo! Cristo! against the racket of trumpets and accordions from a narco-corrido song on the radio. Cristo, Jesu Cristo! Ayuda me! The cab lurches forward with each string of Jesus curses. I’m riding inside a pinball machine set up next to a shooting gallery. Bodies are falling outside. Bodies are falling in the drug song on the radio. My shirt sleeve is stuck on the handle of the door and I can’t seem to twist and duck my head down below the dashboard. This is not the way I want to die. I try to grab hold of the wheel but the driver pulls himself together, makes the sign of the cross, then turns down back streets and alleys that lead to the border bridge. The rat-a-tat-tat of a weapon fades into the distance. The cabbie wheels to a stop and lights a cigarette. Sangre de Cristo. Fifty pesos, por favor.
It’s another Sunday evening in Ciudad Juarez.
Back then, twelve years ago, it cost fifteen cents to enter Mexico. Fifteen cents to wheel through the turnstile and cross the river bridge into the carnal trap. The Lawless Roads. I used to think of Orson Welles’ noir classic: “Touch of Evil,” when I walked down the bridge into Ciudad Juarez. That sinister feeling which draws the gringo-rube into web of rat-ass bars and neon caves; the nerve tingling possibility of cheap drink, violence, and sex; sex steeped in sham clichés about dark-eyed senoritas and donkey shows. It’s that heady, raw – anything goes, all is permitted, death is to be scorned- routine which informed and carved out the rank borderline personalities of John Wesley Hardin, Billy the Kid, Pancho Villa, and hundreds of Mexican drug lords. Western myth now grim reality. You craved the real west, didn’t you?
The late British writer, Graham Greene, knew the border terrain. He crossed over at Laredo in 1939, noting: “The border means more than a custom’s house, a passport office, a man with a gun. Over there everything is going to be different. Life is never going to be quite the same again after your passport is stamped and you find yourself speechless among the money changers.”
Speechless among the money changers. I like that. I can’t imagine what Hunter Thompson would have come up with if he’d written a version of Fear and Loathingabout the current state of affairs in Juarez. Cristo, Cristo, Cristo. Thompson once said that if you want to know where the edge is, you’ve got to go over it. Juarez is big time over the edge. Amen....
(This is the first page to a Tom Russell essay published in full on a radical new blog called The Rumpus....here's the link to the full story with art.)
http://therumpus.net/2009/09/where-god-and-the-devil-wheel- like-vultures-rep
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
The Locusts Sang
"It was not a luxury for me to write, it was a necessity. These times are very difficult to write in because the slogans are really jamming the airwaves - it's something that goes beyond what has been called political correctness. It's a kind of tyranny of posture. Those ideas are swarming through the air like locusts. And it's difficult for a writer to determine what he really thinks about things. " Leonard Cohen
The novel appears to be dead. Dissolving like a rotting cadaver in the quick-lime of post modernist droning. Authors are boring. Thus their characters. The radio air waves are filled with posturing; swarming with locusts full of the poison and "the tyranny of posture." New folk. Bad folk. Weak folk. Poetry's coming back, after Bob Dylan virtually killed and overpowered it as a relevant genre in the 60's. Every hack college lit professor knew it was doomed back then. Poetry is coming back because of the huge gap out there; for anything resembling literature or lyrics or scribed emotion. The yen for something which imbues lyrical passion. We are a nation of old junkies going cold turkey on very bad drugs. Word drugs cut with borax, false bravado, and insincerity. Tattoed babble. Watered down love and greeting card rhymes. At least Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison and Merle Haggard are playing to full houses and selling records. As the maestros should. People are hungry for anything vaguely real….but there are few new songs. No "new generation" of folk writers. As Kerouac said: "There is nothing new under the sun. All is vanity. Pass me the chalice, wifey, and there better be wine in it….."
I was leafing through two great books of letters: those of Martha Gellhorn, and another collection from William S. Burroughs. I realized there's not gonna BE anymore of these collections, because no one WRITES letters now. Just cryptic emails and cell phone messages. Slogans again. A nation of housewives in SUV's ranting on the cell phones as their drive toward nail appointments. The word "love" has become a slogan. The last good song I heard was probably: "I Don't Want To Go To Rehab," by Amy Winehouse. Dig it. Or maybe it was a John Trudell recitation called "Happy Fell Down." ("Love is blind; when it opens it's eyes it can disappear.") Or maybe it was Gretchen Peters' "This Used to Be My Town," inspired by a young girl who was abducted and raped. Jesus. And Nanci Griffith's new record is pretty damn good. Simple truths. Well told. With passion. Rolling Stone dismissed it with two stars. We don’t expect anything anymore. Running scared. My friend; London Observer journalist Peter Culshaw, stated, regarding journalism: …"the age of the drunken hack with a heart of gold buried under a cynical exterior is gone and the papers are run by terrified bureaucrats and guys who never leave their non-smoking, non-drinking offices where if you flirt with the secretary they haul you up for harassment..." Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Leibling and Hunter Thompson are rolling over in their graves. Little Stephen addressed the masses at South By Southwest music conference this year; told the audience that young musicians are not doing their homework, paying dues; not learning to write good songs. (My friend Alec asked me if I wrote the speech.) I'm sure 10,000 thumb-sucking networkers from around the world stood there and smiled; nervously fingering their access badges; twittering like parakeets at the Place of Dead Roads.
What's left, to cite Flannery O'Conner, is to "push hard against the age that pushes against you." And so, under the guise of taking out the trash at night, I sneak into my painting studio and blast out old Dylan and Ian and Sylvia records (like Fritz Scholder and T.C. Cannon before me.) I need that fix. Bad. And I paint Indians and plot new lyrical ways to push against this culture.
Well, hell, into all this great void; this fear driven mess; I toss my record. Blood and the Candle Smoke. 12 songs. Missives from this agave-choked wilderness. And I stand behind it. And you, dear reader? What can you do? Listen. Or not. Maybe buy two or three for your friends and get on the internet and invade a dozen chat sites and let 'em know. Call radio. Toss one off the Empire State building. Go out and create that internet tsunami…or don't. But I'll stand behind it. If you don’t think the record is 100% there for you or honest or "good," or if there's any false passion or bad lines, then bring it to a gig and I'll trade you two different cds back for it. Or give you 20 bucks. That's what I can guarantee you within the so-called music culture of today. It's all I have at present. I believe in this record, and I don't believe in much else.
And now it's time to shut up and tour. I hope the carnival is coming to your town…all the dates are up, and the ponies are being saddled. Amen.
"Words lead to deeds…they prepare the soul,
Make it ready, and move it to tenderness."
St Theresa
To order the record: http://www.villagerecords.com/product_info.php?products_id=5902
Tour dates: www.tomrussell.com
"It was not a luxury for me to write, it was a necessity. These times are very difficult to write in because the slogans are really jamming the airwaves - it's something that goes beyond what has been called political correctness. It's a kind of tyranny of posture. Those ideas are swarming through the air like locusts. And it's difficult for a writer to determine what he really thinks about things. " Leonard Cohen
The novel appears to be dead. Dissolving like a rotting cadaver in the quick-lime of post modernist droning. Authors are boring. Thus their characters. The radio air waves are filled with posturing; swarming with locusts full of the poison and "the tyranny of posture." New folk. Bad folk. Weak folk. Poetry's coming back, after Bob Dylan virtually killed and overpowered it as a relevant genre in the 60's. Every hack college lit professor knew it was doomed back then. Poetry is coming back because of the huge gap out there; for anything resembling literature or lyrics or scribed emotion. The yen for something which imbues lyrical passion. We are a nation of old junkies going cold turkey on very bad drugs. Word drugs cut with borax, false bravado, and insincerity. Tattoed babble. Watered down love and greeting card rhymes. At least Dylan, Leonard Cohen, Van Morrison and Merle Haggard are playing to full houses and selling records. As the maestros should. People are hungry for anything vaguely real….but there are few new songs. No "new generation" of folk writers. As Kerouac said: "There is nothing new under the sun. All is vanity. Pass me the chalice, wifey, and there better be wine in it….."
I was leafing through two great books of letters: those of Martha Gellhorn, and another collection from William S. Burroughs. I realized there's not gonna BE anymore of these collections, because no one WRITES letters now. Just cryptic emails and cell phone messages. Slogans again. A nation of housewives in SUV's ranting on the cell phones as their drive toward nail appointments. The word "love" has become a slogan. The last good song I heard was probably: "I Don't Want To Go To Rehab," by Amy Winehouse. Dig it. Or maybe it was a John Trudell recitation called "Happy Fell Down." ("Love is blind; when it opens it's eyes it can disappear.") Or maybe it was Gretchen Peters' "This Used to Be My Town," inspired by a young girl who was abducted and raped. Jesus. And Nanci Griffith's new record is pretty damn good. Simple truths. Well told. With passion. Rolling Stone dismissed it with two stars. We don’t expect anything anymore. Running scared. My friend; London Observer journalist Peter Culshaw, stated, regarding journalism: …"the age of the drunken hack with a heart of gold buried under a cynical exterior is gone and the papers are run by terrified bureaucrats and guys who never leave their non-smoking, non-drinking offices where if you flirt with the secretary they haul you up for harassment..." Joseph Mitchell, A.J. Leibling and Hunter Thompson are rolling over in their graves. Little Stephen addressed the masses at South By Southwest music conference this year; told the audience that young musicians are not doing their homework, paying dues; not learning to write good songs. (My friend Alec asked me if I wrote the speech.) I'm sure 10,000 thumb-sucking networkers from around the world stood there and smiled; nervously fingering their access badges; twittering like parakeets at the Place of Dead Roads.
What's left, to cite Flannery O'Conner, is to "push hard against the age that pushes against you." And so, under the guise of taking out the trash at night, I sneak into my painting studio and blast out old Dylan and Ian and Sylvia records (like Fritz Scholder and T.C. Cannon before me.) I need that fix. Bad. And I paint Indians and plot new lyrical ways to push against this culture.
Well, hell, into all this great void; this fear driven mess; I toss my record. Blood and the Candle Smoke. 12 songs. Missives from this agave-choked wilderness. And I stand behind it. And you, dear reader? What can you do? Listen. Or not. Maybe buy two or three for your friends and get on the internet and invade a dozen chat sites and let 'em know. Call radio. Toss one off the Empire State building. Go out and create that internet tsunami…or don't. But I'll stand behind it. If you don’t think the record is 100% there for you or honest or "good," or if there's any false passion or bad lines, then bring it to a gig and I'll trade you two different cds back for it. Or give you 20 bucks. That's what I can guarantee you within the so-called music culture of today. It's all I have at present. I believe in this record, and I don't believe in much else.
And now it's time to shut up and tour. I hope the carnival is coming to your town…all the dates are up, and the ponies are being saddled. Amen.
"Words lead to deeds…they prepare the soul,
Make it ready, and move it to tenderness."
St Theresa
To order the record: http://www.villagerecords.com/product_info.php?products_id=5902
Tour dates: www.tomrussell.com
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