True East/Beat Reflections

We flew east from Pie Town, Magdelena, and El Paso. Taking Poppi back to the Swiss country. Stopped in New York City and met with George Kimball, who used my songs in his new boxing book: “The Fighter Still Remains,” a collection of songs and poems about boxing. The book also includes Paul Simon, Colum McCann, Jack Kerouac, Tom Paxton, Muhammad Ali, and more… George has another book coming soon called “Manly Art.” I painted the cover. There also his great collection of American writers on boxing titled: “At the Fights.”

The night we arrived we wandered down to the old village to my wife’s favorite pizza joint, Arturo’s on Houston Street. Arturo’s could be a chapter out of Kerouac’s “Desolation Angels.” There was a one-armed trumpet player blowing wild; with a jazz trio of bass, snare and piano. A chanteuse named Joni Paladin nailed a hip version of “Moonlight in Vermont.” The pizza arrived from the coal oven; the white wine was poured in carafes; and the naïve paintings on the wall rattled against the beat of the snare. The regulars at the bar sipped martinis, brandy, and red wine. The waiters looked as if they were born there, sixty years ago. In fact the whole joint was born in another time of muted jazz and cool and cocktails. I thought of Kerouac reciting “October in the Railroad Earth,” and Allen Ginsberg, twenty five years ago, signing his book of photos for me in a loft in Soho; taking the time to draw an alligator, because I told him I was into alligators. Gone, man. Gone.

I’m leading a little beat tour into San Francisco as part of our next train experience and hoping to touch base again with one of the last true Beat poets, my amigo Lawrence Ferlinghetti. He’s 92. One morning in San Francisco Lawrence and I were having breakfast with NPR radio host Maria Gilhardin, in a café in Japan Town, across from the Fillmore West. Lawrence loved the record, “The Man From God Knows Where." He was sketching me with a felt tip pen on the paper place mat. He dipped his finger in ice tea and made the picture run, like a water color. The little breakfast painting is framed next to my Ginsburg drawing. We have film footage of Lawrence reciting my song, “The Pugilist at 59,” in our upcoming documentary “Don’t Look Down.” And I can’t forget Lew Welch reciting “Ring of Bone,” in Santa Barbara forty years ago, before he left a note and walked off into the wilderness, never to be seen again. “I saw myself a ring of bone, floating in the clear stream of it all….” Our first recording, in ’76, was called Ring of Bone. Ah, the Beats!

On our train tour we plan to visit City Light Books and walk down Jack Kerouac Alley and commute with the Beat spirits…check the train experience out: www.rootsontherails.com or email us at trains@sover.net

Dispatches….On The Road.

True West

We left El Paso at sunup. My wife, guitarist Thad Beckman, and “Poppi,” my father-in-law. Poppi doesn’t speak English, except for the phrase: “F*** You, cowboy.” We were hoping he wouldn’t employ it in the wrong situation. We rolled down Highway 9 into the desert and Columbus, New Mexico, where Pancho Villa attacked the U.S. in 1916. Black Jack Pershing, with George Patton in toe, was sent after Pancho –never caught him. On through Hachita and Animas; past the monument where Geronimo surrendered; ate crackers and cut meat near Skull Valley; arrived in Douglas, Arizona. I showed them the Gadsden Hotel lobby, where Villa rode his horse up the stairway. There’s a stuffed puma, a cowboy watering hole – The Saddle and Spur Bar - and an old café. Next stop Bisbee. Show for Bill Carter, who wrote fine books on salmon fishing in Alaska and the war in Bosnia. On to Sahuarita: a church with a giant cross made of saguaro ribs and copper wire. Ross Knox, the last cowboy-muleteer, was in attendance. Ross is “the man who rode the mule around the world.” True west.

On to Flagstaff and the Orpheum theater. Snow on the road going out. A night off in Scottsdale. Visited Frank Lloyd Wright’s desert retreat. Frank Lloyd Wright, Georgia O’Keefe, Fritz Scholder, Ross Knox, and Geronimo color the true, raw West. Outsiders. Aboriginals. I bought a pawn shop Kachina in Scottsdale and wondered about its journey. Hawked for five dollars by a Navajo in 1969? Monday night show at the Rhythm Room in Phoenix. Then we gave Poppi the Western ride of his life – across the middle of Arizona and New Mexico. Through towns like Payson, Show Low, and Pie Town; stopped for the obligatory slice of Apple, Blueberry, and Boysenberry. One codger, around 90, ate a cafe dinner of cream of mushroom soup with two dozen crackers crushed inside; for bulk. He was “western” to the beard and bone.

After seven hours we hit old Magdalena and the adobe home of Steve Bodio and his wife Libby. In the front room were seven Russian coursing hounds, called “Tazi’s” from the old Turkin territory, and one Peregrine Falcon, which Steven fed from his hand. Frozen quail. Steve has many fine books out, including one on hunting with Eagles in Mongolia: Eagle Dreams. We ate Libby’s homemade posole and drank Mongol vodka; imbibing in a few bottles of God’s grape juice. Bukowski once wrote me: the Greeks didn’t call wine the blood of the gods for no reason at all. In the morning we drove home down the Jornado del Muerto, the long “journey of death” the Spanish rode five hundred years back.

There is still a west. It exists on desert back roads and in odd, fragmented glimpses: Saguaros against Sonoran sunsets; pawn shop Kachinas; crosses made of Saguaro ribs and copper; the lingo of the muleteer, a blueberry pie slice in Pie Town; frozen quail on the hand of the Falconer. God’s footnotes.

The Ballad of Little Dougie

He’s sitting on stage somewhere in the night. Clutching a Bajo Sexto. One of those deep throated Mexican instruments; a sonic cross between a 12 string guitar and a broken steel cable whacking beats against a wooden thunder drum. A tuba with strings. Doug Sahm is poised. Historically posed. Leather jacket, black cowboy hat, pointy toe black boots. Long Hair and shades. The real/true beat king of Americana long before it was deadened into a recycle bin for old rockers and hat acts and tired folkies. My friend Peter from England gave me this picture. Doug is probably one of the only gabacho/gringos who could play the bajo sexto; he also played guitar, steel guitar, bass, drums, and all of it. They say he played once with Hank Williams. He used to call me in the middle of the night and whisper arcane warnings: “Man you gonna get fat on Mexican food down in El Paso. Watch out.” He said he’d drive out to see me, but “them Mexican banditos out there would steal my Cadillac.” He called me “St Olav’s,” because he loved that song of mine. He even recorded it once. Doug wanted us to tour Norway together and take it all back. The fame, the glory, the Norwegian Kroners. It never transpired.

He was called “Little Dougie,” in those 1950’s photos. A ten year old kid behind a steel guitar. Then he was the young dude with Beatle bangs and flamenco boots who hit ‘em hard with “Mendocino” and “She’s About a Mover.” He sang with Dylan. He was American music in the raw/real sense; music drawn from the border, Mexico, accordions, steel guitars, East Texas blues, girls tight red dresses, white boy rock, and British Invasion boomerang POP. Doug Sahm. Crooning, moaning, and wailing his way through his own Great American Songbook.

I hung out with him in a New York deli once. He spent twenty minutes telling the waitress how to make real corn beef hash. Then we went back to his hotel room where he chastised me for tossing my cowboy hat on the bed: “No hat on the bed, dude, its bad luck!” Then he showed me his bag of vitamins, mineral water, and the special coffee machine he travelled with. The road warrior in his final season; with medicines for the ritual.

A year later he died, in a Motel, in Taos, New Mexico. Gone, but never gone. Little Dougie.

The other night I watched the Texas Tornados. Augie Meyers and Flaco Jimenez and Doug’s son, Sean. On fire. Doug looked down and whispered to “Boogie,” (which is what he called Augie) – “Heh, Boogie, keep your eye on St. Olav’s, don’t let him get fat on that El Paso Mexican food. And don’t let him throw his hat on the bed, boogie.”

Roll on, Little Dougie, roll on.

(I’ll send this one out to the regulars in “Bar Mendocino,” Helsinki, Finland.)

Bob Dylan in America

Half way through Sean Willentz’s wise and complex, Bob Dylan in America, I thought of Simon Rodia and the Watts Towers. Rodia was an Italian immigrant from Naples who created folk art towers in the Watts area of Los Angles in the 1930’s. The towers are tall iron cones: ornamented with soda bottle glass, tile, shells, and other found fragments. Yesterday I was in the yard, hands deep in tile and concrete; hoping to make an old Mexican fountain echo the feel of the Watts Towers, or at least summon the mosaic work of Antoni Gaudi in Barcelona. I was thinking of Sean Willentz’s Dylan book, which details how Dylan fashioned his complex song catalogue out of the bits and pieces of American musical history: minstrel shows, vaudeville, blues, jazz, gospel, folk, early rock, sacred harp shape-note singing…inventing, reinventing, borrowing, and stealing, now and then. Building his unique, masterful folk-art towers from poetic fragments. The Watts Towers of Song.

Willentz begins with a link between Dylan and Aaron Copland (composer of the opera Billy the Kid ), then discusses Brecht and Weill, the Beat generation, Blind Willie McTell, Shape Note singing, Bing Crosby, Blonde of Blonde and onward….Willentz doesn’t adopt the usual tact of over-interpreting Dylan. Impossible. He places Dylan’s work into the larger, ever-evolving context of American music. He’s a history professor at Princeton, and the research and footnoted-detail is sometimes tough slogging. But worth the journey. Bring water, wine, and a walking stick. You’ll know more about our musical tradition when you arrive at the end.

In the final chapter Willentz discusses the issue of whether Dylan stole or plagiarized lyrics and melodies throughout the long ride. Willentz alludes to the unspoken rules of the folk process and the working methods of TS Eliot, Woody Guthrie and others. He backs up Dylan. People have been trying to dissect, heave charges, boo, criticize, condemn and lob cheap shots at Dylan and his work since 1962. Current detractors should choke on the toxic fumes of the search engines they’ve employed to prove plagiarism. When I was a kid, the City of L.A. wanted to tear down the Watts Towers as unsafe. They brought in army helicopters to try and lift the towers. The towers wouldn’t move. They stand. So too… Dylan’s towering catalogue.

Today we stare into the musico-cultural abyss of what is now call “singer-songwriting;” or the the catch-all swamp referred to as Americana music. Dylan and Leonard Cohen, and a few others, soar like endangered eagles above the polluted waters. Sean Willentz has fashioned an important book which provides a key to young writers, as well as all of us who might wish to learn what “homework” the Bard, Dylan, might have done as he moved through his changes and absorbed the wonders of our diverse musical heritage.

Ondale! Back to work on my own Watts Towers. Praise the Lord and pass me a shard of glass, a sea shell, a splinter of tile… a broken rhyme.

Cante Moderna

Now the music divides us into tribes.

Arcade Fire

My horse “Modern Song” came in 20 to 1 at Del Mar. I had sixty bucks to spend back on art and song. In a West Coast coffee joint I bought three records: Arcade Fire, “The Suburbs;” then a re-mastered version of the Beatles’ “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” and finally, Jimmy Webb’s new one: “Just Across the River.” Three explorations into modern song. Arcade Fire, an indie band from Canada, sings up life and death in suburbia. The songs are decent. There’s the usual wispy, indie vocal sound – and the hand-printed lyric book which implies “ah, gee whiz, here’s our poetry.” That’s ok. It works as a soundtrack for this “indie age.” Tolerable good.

Then I put on Sergeant Peppers’. Luckily I put it on second. My God. Have not listened to this in 20 years. I assumed it would sound like a dated psychedelic artifact. Naw. This is a record about loneliness, depression, age, death, suicide…masked in a circus-musico format. The end of the world at Coney Island, with raunch guitars, superb vocal arrangements, and gut wrenching singing. It’s the Beatles, of course. Unfair to compare them with anyone else. This was like finding a forgotten Van Gogh in the closet. The record was recorded on a four track tape machine 33 years ago. Where has our technology taken us? I would borrow from William S. Burroughs in inferring that modern digital technology may be leading us toward boredom and oblivion… much like the Burroughs’ character who taught his anus to talk as a circus trick. Pretty soon the anus talked by itself and the man’s mouth and brain atrophied. But, ah, this Peppers record! Bob Dylan is pictured on the cover next to Simon Rodia, the man who built the Watts Towers. It’s modern carny folk art. Dig.

Then I put on Jimmy Webb. Only Webb could have written pop standards about a Wichita telephone Lineman; a lovesick guy cleaning his gun and dreaming of Galveston (recorded here with Lucinda Williams), and a man who leaves his girl on the West Coast and drives across the Southwest, singing up the lonely landscape - like songline-walking aboriginals. Webb is able to compose short odes to the common man; with a “pop” feel. His songs manifest the lyrical and melodic qualities of intelligent, hip Broadway show songs. It’s hard to pull off. They’re built to last forever. Like 1959 Cadillacs.

The three records rotated around the truck radio. Finally, to clean the palette, I put in an old record by flamenco singer Camaron de La Isla. Camaron was junkie who died twenty years ago in Spain. 100,000 people attended the funeral. He is sainted.This is guttural, throat bleeding gypsy soul, to the rhythm of hand claps and hammer on anvil. Primal. Not for the faint of heart. Subterranean. Moorish. Ole! Cante hondo! Modern Song.

(Jimmy Webb and Jesse Winchester will be on our January train: see: www.rootsontherails.com)

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

On the fourth of July we went to the Swiss circus. The lions and tigers were gone. The elephants are next. Animal rights. Nobody took time to ask the animals how they wished to vote. The final act was the wire walker Freddy Knock. We were slapped in the heart by the performance. We were pulled into it; lifted up. Federico Garcia Lorca called it Duende: “dancing on the rim of the well.” Freddy Knock danced on the rim of the ancient well and he took the crowd with him. Freddy Knock walked up the diagonal wire, from the ground to the high wire; backwards. Over the crowd. Lorca sat up in his grave. Lorca declared Duende is experienced only in music, dance, spoken poetry, and bullfighting. Those were his original words. The word “bullfighting” has now been expunged from his internet profile. Our world is being edited down and out by and political correctors and terrorists of the modern soul. Guardians in the watch tower. The truth has gone the way of elephants and tigers. Gone south with the side shows. My summer vacation in the box. Stifling tho' it was becoming.

Dear Teacher: My summer reading included “Furious Love” about Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. The tale is one long passionate song of the Welsh coal miner’s kid and a grown up child actress, drinking their way across the Shakespearean stages of modern history. Ah! Virginia Wolf! This ain’t Brad and Angelina, kids. This ain’t no paper moon under a cardboard sky. Burton drank because: “life is big and it blinds you.” Taylor drank because she could. They married twice; the flunkies at Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum in London had to keep moving the Burton’s wax figures in and out of the display to follow the romantic changes. Two art lives. Burning. Blood in the water.

I kept thinking about the circus. And our moral watchdogs. Left Wing. Right Wing. Up Wing. Down Wing. We live in a box, and point fingers at the other box. We are protected by flimsy bullet proof vests of moral and political superiority. We save animals and recycle our wine bottles; or we praise our white God as we curse Obama as a Muslim. We watch MSNBC or Fox News, we take sides. The fake spit of outrage runs down the pancake-painted chins of our puppet-faced talk show hosts and newscasters. We create new forms of faux-concern at floods, earthquakes and cartel wars. We are good, and our goodness is slipped into an envelope addressed to a benefit funding. Tax deductible. But we can’t find our pulse or heartbeat, and soul is something that died with James Brown and Otis Redding. We can no longer paint or write songs or novels. The emotions of our artists and writers are cartoonish; fleeting. Politically corrected. We whine; therefore we are. Our blood is kool aid.

And Freddy Knock, Liz Taylor and Richard Burton danced up the diagonal wire. Backwards. On my summer vacation.

Where Is Holden Caulfield When We Need Him?

An airport. Somewhere. Leafing through an April 29 copy of Rolling Stone, which is bleating about “40 Reasons to be Excited About Music.” “The future is here and it rocks.” Spare me. The present is here and it limps. Their reason #9 was the only cool one: “You can still see Chuck Berry play once a month.” This is all we have left for a music mag, whilst England, with 1/6^th the population of the U.S., swings with about ten major and well writ music publications; plus the BBC programming of shows designed to seek out the wide history and world fronts of great music: rock, jazz, classical, blues, folk, world… what have you. But wait, next time I pick up a "Rolling Stone" they’re featuring the 500 best rock songs ever written. Desperate now. The lists roll out with there’s nothing else to write about. I might agree with some of their song choices…here’s the kicker. Over 90% of their 500 best songs ever written were written before 1970. The summation is there ain’t been much to be excited about in the last forty years - with all our bleating, digital gadgetry, conferences, alliances, SXSW, “how to write songs” cartoon books, posturing circus rap, and lack of human artistic character. The chaos has led us, with our little IPOD head phones on, into the death throes of popular song. We’ve pulled the carpet out from under the original voice. We’ve lost our ability to speak in passionate musical tongue. Mostly. Sorta. Is it waxing nostalgic to go back and re- dig “Exile on Main Street,” or “Highway 61 Revisited?” It’s raw necessity. Nostalgia you say? Is there anything nostalgic about digging some of those Van Gogh paintings? They look like they were painted this morning. They drip blood. Like Highway 61 and Exile. We are a bloodless nation now. Where are the painters, writers, songwriters, novelists and good plumbers? Why don’t dentists use laughing gas anymore? Huh? My job is to shut up and write a song. I know that. I shall try, amigos. Every morning. Meanwhile “Rolling Stone,” struggling for something to write about, centers less on real music and more on throwing spitballs, sliders, curves and head dusters at the current president, whom they helped elect - and the were the first to turn against. We’ve got “freelance” journalists sucker punching American Generals over free drinks in Paris whiskey bars in the name of cheap shot, rummy journalism and sensationalism. And, aw, those interminable lists they throw out. Ah, hell. Where is Holden Caulfield when we need him? Old Holden would tell us what’s phony and what ain’t. It’s Barnum and Bailey time. There’s a paper moon hanging over a cardboard sea. But its happy hour, friends. I promise to write that song in the morning. I’ll open up and vein and see what drips down on paper then I’ll go paint something while blasting “Exile on Main Street (the re-issue) from my ghetto blaster.