Nanci Griffith Catches Some Sweet Blackbird's Wings

Nanci Griffith & That Sweet Blue Bonnet Spring, Catch Some Blackbird’s Wing Down at the Five + Dime

A yellow dress covered in pink and red cabbage roses, mint and emerald green leaves seemingly holding them to the fabric. She had mousy brown hair, bangs that descended like staggered drapes around her elongated heart-shaped valentine of a face with eyes so sparkling and alive they glittered into the cameras/

Her speaking voice sounded like a small child’s, matching her diction. Her words bathed with wonder at it all – street light halos, Woolworth stores, trinkets and hope, she lit up as she shared what she knew or saw or felt.
Under the covers in a too cold house my much older fiancée didn’t own in Coral Gables, he’d left to go do errands. I could draw close to the oversized television on the table at the end of the bed, sheets pulled up around me as I stared at this anti-Barbie singing smart such smart songs. Miami’s PBS station ran “Austin City Limits” at an early hour, and in the black-out-curtained window, it felt like a Girl Scout meeting gone a little long.

“Austin City Limits” was once truly a Texas texture, as Guy Clark would sing in “Rita Ballou.” Every now and then, they’d pick a few local writer/artists or bands, given them a show. Nanci Griffith, whose name I didn’t know, had just released Once In A Very Blue Moon on small indie Philo Records – and this was a showcase for those brilliantly turned sketches, almost scrimshaw miniatures of small town life.

Her voice, when she sang, was deeper, throaty, had that Stevie Nicks’ vibrato – or a pure, soaring crystalline quality. It melted over the kind of acoustic music that exists in the fertile delta between country and folk, where the violin is more fluid, the steel guitar more diamonds sprinkled across still water. It didn’t straddle the genres, as much as float back and forth like sheets on a breeze when they’re hung outside to dry in the sun.

She was obviously older than me, but was so young seeming, she was the grown-up answer to my far older than my own 12 year old appearance while slinging bylines for The Miami Herald, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Tower Pulse and Southern Magazine. There was a place for us kid-looking people with hearts older and more erudite than our looks suggested. And, her melodies were sweet but salty; the loves and adventures were pure and sized for an actual life someone could inhabit.

By the time Jason returned, I was out of mind about this woman I’d seen in the yellow dress like Helen, my extra grandma by choice instead of blood, wore while playing a guitar almost as big as she herself was. She had an upright bass and a cellist and a licorice whip thin guy who sang, so minimal chic but with this hair, and and and...

Full grown, exfiancee #2 glazed over. But he knew when I got on a tear, it didn’t stop. We got in the car, drove down to Spec’s, the South Florida record chain, and walked in. Me blabbering, him trying to figure out how to decode this problem. Turns out one of the clerks had had “ACL” on, saw the same thing I did – and walked us back to the folk section.

Once In A Very Blue Moon was in a bin for the taking. We did.

Walking out pleased with the purchase, I excused myself from any further conjugal duties and went back to my dorm room. I sliced into the shrink wrap, drew out the disc and put on side one. “Ghosts In the Music,” indeed.

It all poured out, puddled on the cold linoleum tiled floor of a room mostly packed up towards semester’s end. Endearing, charming, unselfconscious, it was small stories, big truths, moments you might not notice – but that might just define you.

It had been recorded at something called the Cowboy Arms Hotel & Recording Spa with the same producer of John Prine’s Aimless Love. I couldn’t know so many of the players – Roy Huskey, Jr on upright bass, Mark O’Connor on fiddle, Phillip Donnelly on guitar – would become figures in my own story, nor that the background singer Lyle Lovett would be one of the singular voices of Nashville’s progressive traditionalist moment.

It was just magical, and perfect. Like a Truman Capote or Willa Cather novel, moments seemed pressed between pages and saved for the ages.

The obsession was such that I called Rounder, raved about this woman from Texas I’d never heard of – writing for The Herald enough I knew lots of record company people in those days before MTV, let alone internets and instant gratification – and asked them to please keep me posted. That I didn’t know what story or who for, but I wanted to write about her, absolutely.

My exfiancee thought I’d fallen into toxic shock from my obsession with Southern and Dust Bowl fiction. He just couldn’t... so we started taking separate cars as the candy-coated voice unfurled these sweet stories. Pulling up, banging what Griffith came to call “folkabilly,” on the cheap aftermarket cassette player attenuating the cassette I’d bought, her voice sounded a bit like a muppet gone tipsy.

Rounder didn’t forget my lunatic raving. They sent me an advance cassette of Last of the True Believers, an even more accomplished and confident album that still did the Currier & Ives meets Norman Rockwell vistas. Her sound had solidified; Rooney’s always tasteful production was at its greatest elevation. Each instrument was its own sparkling diamond around Griffith’s at times guttural, at others shimmering or tender velvet vocals.

Tower Records’ Pulse bit. My first conversation with Griffith via phone was delight; her Texas twang rolled down the line with girlish giggles for punctuation. She conjured a instant friend intimacy that suggested the same kind of friendship that made the innocence of “There’s A Light Beyond These Woods, Mary Margaret” such a covetous thing for a young woman starting to make her way in the real world.

We talked Larry McMurtry, O. Henry, steel guitar as a mood-setter, John Prine, dime store treasures, the journey. She’d had two albums I’d never heard of (again, it was world before the internet made everything instantly accessible), with dreams of having music take her around the world.

She was exotic as peacocks on the front lawn, as familiar as homemade bread or a well-washed linen shirt with a slightly frayed collar. Twee as some found it, she could bite into the world, too. Whether the reeling fiddle of “More Than A Whisper” was a grown-up love’s complicated nature and need for true manifestation, or the rushed and rushing bawdy declaration of life from a whore waiting on a trick “Lookin’ for the Time (Workin’ Girl)” with its profession “This sidewalk ice is cold as steel/ and I ain’t Dorothy, I can’t click my heels...” and the utterly business forward “If you ain’t got money, I ain’t got the time for you.”

Authoritative. Straight to the heart, the gut, the throat. It was a money shot, and she – the little folkabilly goddess in the white anklets and Hooverette house dress – didn’t flinch or waver. To say I loved it would be like saying Chanel is expensive.

Around that time, Tony Brown rolled into Florida to meet up with Steve Wariner, an artist he’d produced at RCA Records and had just signed to MCA Nashville. The Chet Atkins protégé was that same kind of wide-eyed kid as Griffith’s persona suggested. Driving Brown back to the Howard Johnson’s by the , urnpike after a night of hanging out and closing down a Palm Beach restaurant/boite, I pulled out my advance of the album – and threw it in my cassette player.

I’d made a speech about how I didn’t know whether it could work at country radio, if it made sense for a major Nashville record company, but this was special. He needed to listen. That voice poured out of the speakers of the little tin mosquito Nissan Pulsar I was driving, bounced around the car and lit the piano-playing A&R man up like a pinball machine.

“Can I keep it?” he asked. I let him have it, let him bounce out of my car into the mildew-scented hotel in the grove of sagging palm trees. The next day, his head most likely throbbing, he got in my car, so I could take him to where Wariner was sound-checking. He went on and on about how much he liked it, the writing, the voice, the person singing it.

Said in some ways, she reminded him of Wariner, who he was doing pre-production with. Someone who didn’t want to be more than they were, each sang about a life that was the right perspective for the room. Wariner – beyond the crushing guitar skills and sweet voice – truly was a small-town Indiana kid; Griffith, though, a product the local Texas songwriter rooms dreamed of larger worlds and other places.

The legend is Lyle Lovett turned Tony Brown onto Nanci Griffith. But that day in the sun-parched parking lot outside a strip mall honky tonk, the Elvis and Hot Band veteran witnessed like a new convert. We were two people talking over each other about how incredible this artist was; me saying I was so glad I hadn’t overstepped my bounds, Brown saying he needed to figure it out, but was going to..

At the same time, Steve Popovich, a rock & roll student of all music and the head of Polygram’s Nashville operation, heard “Love at the Five & Dime” – and told Kathy Mattea it was her next single. The West Virginia songstress with the dusky eiderdown voice that curried the folk out of mainstream country product smiled. She’d not followed up “Soft Place To Fall” with a hit, and she needed to breakthrough before it all fell apart.

Driving north on I-95 a few weeks later, “Love at the Five & Dime” came pouring out of the speakers – and it wasn’t Griffith’s version. It felt like a hit, slightly folkie, very homespun and charming in the way it told the story of Eddie and Rita, waltzing the aisles of a Woolworth store. Suddenly, Mattea’s sweet spot was colonized – and Nanci Griffith was a hit songwriter.

Momentum and dominos both move fast. Suddenly, Griffith’s record deal came through at MCA Nashville. She was touring Europe, becoming the queen of Ireland, a nascent then full-on friendship with dean of Nashville songwriters Harlan Howard.  “Letterman” and “The Tonight Show,” Rolling Stone, back when it was every two weeks and excruciatingly hard to get into. Was it Liz Thiels, the publicist? David Wild, the reviews editor, who adored roots music? Was it just how intriguing her special mix of elements was?

Did it matter? Even if country radio found her voice too bracing, Mattea had another #1 with “Going, Gone,” while the touring life saw Griffith become a full-on headliner around the world – and a theater-sized draw in the States, where she also headlined folk festivals.

Free to explore the lives of characters who intrigued her, able to make a good living making music she believed in, it was fluid. She moved to MCA Pop, then Elektras Records, worked with producers Glyn Johns, Pete Buck, Rod Argent, Don Gehman, Peter Collins, Ray Kennedy and served as a comrade and peer to Lyle Lovett, Steve Earle, Emmylou Harris, Guy Clark, Tom Russell, Townes Van Zandt.

Championing Julie Gold, Griffith’s “From A Distance” so transfixed anyone who heard it, it wasn’t long until Bette Midler recorded it. Midler’s version defined ubiquity for many years, reminding people we are all small and equal, that “God is watching us” not as an enjoinder, but a comfort in our hard times.

Like a good folkie, she lifted people up in song. A later album, The Loving Kind, boasted a title track inspired by the obituary of Mildred Loving, whose Supreme Court case overturned laws banning interracial marriage, and the capital punishment indicting “Not Innocent Enough.” Earlier, Storms’ “It’s A Hard Life Wherever You Go” considered kids without chances in Northern Ireland, impaled racists in Chicago and measured the hope of America’s ‘60s idealism with a chorus that implores, “It’s a hard life, a hard life, a very hard life/ and if we poison our children with hatred, then a hard life is all that they’ll know/ and there ain’t no place in this world for these kids to go...”

“Trouble in the Fields” from Lone Star State of Mind lamented the plight of family farmer, while the dobro-drenched, accordion-basted “Love Wore A Halo (Back Before the War)” from Little Love Affairs measured the outlaw lives of number runners, a Jersey hotel and perhaps some comfort paid for by the hour. Unlikely people, missed or stumbled over, they rose up under Griffith’s sense of detail and zeal.

She would do a pair of covers projects, this woman who’d generously covered everyone from Tom Russell to Robert Earl Keen to ex-husband Eric Taylor, that celebrated her influences. Other Voices, Other Rooms gathered up 17 songs from Bob Dylan, Kate Wolf, Gordon Lightfoot, Jerry Jeff Walker, Woody Guthrie, Janis Ian, Buddy Mondlock and Harry Belafonte with Carolyn Hester, Emmylou Harris, Iris Dement, Arlo Guthrie, longtime collaborator James Hooker and Linda Solomon’s “Wimoweh” boasting Odetta, the Indigo Girls, Kennedy Rose, Holly & Barry Tashian, John Gorka, David Mallett, her father and Jim Rooney.

A supple versatility, a fluid sense of folk made the project seamless – and earned her her first Grammy Award. Best Contemporary Folk Album, an honor that matched the present to the past and the future. Other Voices measured how much veneration she brought to the art of songwriting, the ones who came before. Raising a light for the generations to come, she shone on – and fans flocked to the light.

But Voices’ Wim Wenders’ “Wings of Desire”-evoking video for “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” duet featuring the song’s writer John Prine that nailed the way reverence, searching, kindness and the echo of emptiness converge. Black and white, grainy, urban, Griffith in white and Prine in black, they are angels living in our world as supernatural forces and mortal beings. Beyond the whimsy, there was a sense of truth matching the reality of being a star in the musical sense.

Just as important as her O. Henry character sketches and embrace of the postcards and polaroids that make up a life, the woman with a mouth like a bow conjured a tenderness that permeated her songs. Love was sometimes perfect and attained; occasionally flawed and wild. But as often, it was failed and someone – usually the woman – was leaving, frustrated, sad, but never beaten by what had transpired.

As a music critic carving a path when there weren’t really women covering music, as a female working her way through six engagements and many suitors always trying to be reasonable as I left, as a girl raised on books and dreams and hopes and songs, Griffith seemed a chimera before me, radiant and resplendent as Our Lady of Bookworms or the Patron Saint of Coffeehouse Angels. Could she really be real?

Any single woman with a career or a drive to find their place in the world – in those days before Mary Chapin Carpenter’s Rickenbacker-downstroked suburban tales – found a richly-colored construction paper fortunecatcher every time Griffith released an album. Those stories of old couples we hoped we’d turn into like True Believer’s “One of These Days,” but also the unflinching make it happen drive of “Ford Econoline” that allows for self-propulsion, for dreams that required some form of screw it.

There was the romance of it all. No matter which album you landed on, that romance of life, the sweet nectar of somebody’s smile or a flick of a wrist taking a cigarette to their lips, it was all spark and igniting properties. Wherever, however, drink it in, swallow it down – and let whatever it was rush to your head. Don’t lose your senses, but go ahead and enjoy every last tingle.

That was the thing about the bookish, kindergarten teacher-looking songwriter: she could smoke’em if you had ‘em and drink’em down with the best. She would show up half kewpie doll, half brainiac and leave the room in ashes, all hearts splayed. Who wouldn’t wanna do that?

Many, many years ago, dressed in a pink and white gingham dress with buttons down the front and pale pink Buster Brown shoes, I went to UCLA to see Nanci and Guy at some hushed concert hall. I made the decision to dress for her people out of respect, but also to honor the way she’d lit my way coming into my own as a writer.

After slipping backstage between their sets to say my hellos, I had to slink out halfway through Griffith’s performance, drive into West Hollywood and make my way to the Whiskey A-Go-Go where I looked beamed in from another galaxy. Security guards a 100 yards from the door couldn’t believe someone looking like this could be on the guest list, nor could the guy at the Will Call window where the show was about to go on. Of course, I didn’t care that at the height of spandex, slashed tshirts and Aquanet, I was a giant neon goody two shoes. I was on the list, and they were ushering me in.

As the Nasty Habits took their positions in the world’s smallest nurse uniforms, I made my way through the snickering throng. Sam Kinison bounded onstage to introduce Motley Crue, who were kicking off their Girls! Girls! Girls! album en fuego. Riling the crowd up, the band came on like a jet engine hitting prime thrust -- the crowd reacted accordingly.

“What the hell do you have on?” asked my surly comic friend when he got back to us. “God, Holly...”

I explained where I’d been, what I’d seen, screaming over Nikki Sixx’s throb and Mick Mars’ squealing guitar. He took me in, started to laugh, shook his head. Dressed like a pirate, with a rag tied diagonally across his overprocessed hair, he pulled me close and hugged me, whispering, “Well, okay, respect.”

Respect. More than anything that’s what Nanci brought the world: respect. She smoked. She drank. She recorded other people’s songs to make sure people heard them, shared duets with everyone from the BoDeans to Mac MacAnally, Tanita Tikaram to Darius Rucker.

She loved Loretta Lynn, could talk about her for hours long before Jack White made her a hipster madonna, and Carolyn Hester, a folk goddess almost nobody today remembers. She never played the ingenue, nor did she throw sex around like a hipcheck in ice hockey.

She may’ve veered towards country radio, or closer to adult alternative at times, but she was always utterly herself. She knew how to be true to her literary influences in her songwriting, yet never lose the thread of who she was most of all.

Now she isn’t. Slipped through a crack in time, just – POOF! – and gone.

A couple years ago, her manager sent me to the house to do some interviews for a possible memoir. She was so happy to see me, remembered times I’d interviewed her, places I’d seen her play and so many friends we had in common. It was sweet and fun, like running into an old friend in an unlikely airport.

She treasured her memories, the people she’d met, all the twists along the way. Talking she’d light up, clearly delighted by the memory. But somehow, she wasn’t ready to tack down her past. Yes, it had all happened. She’d had a miraculous life, done amazing things, seen the world many times over, shared stages with incredible musicians.

But to talk about it, you could feel it weighing her down. If she was measuring her past this way, what else was left? She wasn’t sure, and she didn’t know. Not that we ever talked about that in those terms. Sometimes you just know people who look back too much run the risk of turning to salt and blowing away.

Not Nanci Griffith. She was one who held her own course, made her own journey. Of course, she would quietly slip away while no one was looking, just like one of the girls in her songs. She knew where she was going, knew Guy and Townes and Prine and Cowboy Jack and Steve Popovich and Phillip Donnelly and so many more were waiting.

When you’re headed to that, why would you stay? Long ago, she wrote “Gulf Coast Highway” with two friends, a song about love and death and spring in Texas, parsing the way progress siphons off the delicious parts and places of life. The melody feels like steam rising from a blue line on an old map in that kind of swelter only Southern towns near water can muster, the chords moving slowly like a cloud of melancholy.

Yet, “Gulfstream Highway” is a song of triumph and a letting go. When I heard the news, it was the third or fourth thing I played, because the joy in life’s fading is perhaps the thing -- after all the cultural dissonance, all the lives lost -- we need most.

As she sings towards the song’s end:

“Highway 90, the jobs are gone
We tend our garden, we set the sun
This is the only place on Earth blue bonnets grow
And once a year they come and go
At this old house here by the road

And when we die we say we’ll catch some blackbird’s wing
And we will fly away to heaven
Come some sweet blue bonnet spring...”

www.hollygleason.com

Connie Bradley: The Best Friend A Dreamer Ever Had

Connie Bradley shone brighter than 4th of July fireworks. Part of it is simple: she was so dang pretty. Blond hair, eyes like a fox that twinkled, the turned-up nose, the mouth that was also always perfectly lipsticked.

And she knew how to put those outfits together. Bright colors. Mixed fabrics and textures. Sweatshirts and jeans. Cocktail clothes and ball gowns. All of it always set off with the most perfect accessories, just that one touch that made you look and made you smile.

But that really wasn’t the deal about why and how the woman who got her start as a receptionist at WLAC-TV mattered. Sure, she worked at a couple labels, spent more thirty years at ASCAP before rising to the head of the Nashville office. Really what stands out was Connie Bradley and her acute curiosity, which drew people, especially songwriters and artists, to her.

She was a magnet for the creative types, who could tell by the way she listened, she “got” it, she understood their gift and their humanity. And even when she didn’t, she knew who was vulnerable and who needed a little shove when it came time to respond.

Because what Connie Bradley wanted, more than anything, was for people to win. Nothing delighted her more than seeing a young artist or writer have that first #1. Few things excited her like hearing a great song; a demo, a kid with a guitar or a final master recording, she didn’t care. Bring it on: more music, more life, more heart, more emotion.

She wasn’t a snob, either. She loved great big gooey hits, as much as she loved the deepest songs from Rodney Crowell or Emmylou Harris. To her, every song was the writer’s child – and every record was the artist’s face to the world.

So when you walked up the red carpet at the Nashville ASCAP Awards and Connie saw you, she’d light up, throw her arms around you, know everything about not just your song, but your journey to that moment. She had great writers’ reps, whom she empowered, so it wasn’t some kind of overcompensation. No, she just loved writers and their stories that much.

While Connie was the queen – head, or EVP feels too mundane – of the Nashville ASCAP office forever, trying to remember when that happened is fuzzy. To me, she had always been there, had always been that force of song, of magic, of propulsion for artists.

I can’t think of a time when Connie wasn’t there. Like the sun coming up, Connie Bradley – who married into a behemoth Music City music family when she married legendary producer Owen Bradley’s son Jerry, who would help Chet Atkins make RCA the home of country music’s first platinum album Wanted: The Outlaws – defined creative life for legends, newcomers, breakouts and superstars.

She came of age as an executive when women actually ran Nashville. Jo Walker-Meador at the Country Music Association. Frances Preston at BMI. Maggie Cavender at the Nashville Songwriters International Association. Helen Farmer, also at the CMA. Donna Hilley at Tree, which was purchased for huge dollars by Sony.

Not only did these women matter, these women broke ground for artists they believed in. They created opportunities, blazed trails and often fought behind the scenes to change fates and outcomes. They’d look at you if anything was said about what they’d done, as if they had no idea what you were talking about; but they did massive career-changing things. Over and over again.

To them, that was what mattered: music, artists, songwriters, people.

Though when I think of Connie, I think of the most amazing laugh, the flashing smile, the way her eyes lit up when she saw you – waved you over, patted the seat next to her, put her ear near your mouth for some delicious bit of news. Welcoming isn’t a strong enough word, nor is inviting. Perhaps, most plainly put, it was inspiring – you to be the best you, the most you, the Connie-est you you could be.

And the only thing richer than Connie was Connie with her best friend Donna Hilley, or Conna as they were collectively known. Together, they could warp speed, make gravity loosen and hard hearts melt. Always laughing, always up to some great adventure – even if it was just a trip to the Dollar General Store or lunch at some white table cloth restaurant or local dive joint.

They got each other, celebrated each other, lifted each other, amused each other. To morph Scarlett O’Hara and Aunt Mame, they lived to prove that if life were a banquet where most poor such’n’so’s were starving, they were never going to go hungry again.

Laughter was their currency. Brilliance and instinct were their blood. They knew publishing, creativity, reality. They could shuffle their decks, build people up, high five when the music mattered – or connected.

When Donna Hilley suddenly died, a pall fell over the myriad people who loved her. My first thought ran to Connie. What do you say? Do? Offer? I send cards all the time. But what good is a card when half your boisterous spirit has gone to heaven?
One day, a few weeks after the news settled and people had gone back to work, my assistant said, “Connie Bradley on 1.”

I couldn’t imagine. I was close to Donna, who I’d helped get on Entertainment Weekly’s Nashville Power List at either #2 or #4, having explained both the dollar amount of the publishing revenue she stewarded or the careers she touched, legacies she ensured. I mostly knew Connie through Donna. But maybe I’d said, “If you need to talk...” in my card; maybe she was curious about my relationship with her friend.

“Hello,” I said quietly, figuring I’d let her lead.

We had a twenty-minute conversation... about me. Of all things. “I just want you to know that I know this is a tough business for women, and I watch you. I know you always stand up for the right things, you speak up when it matters and when it’s hard. I see that, and it matters and makes a difference. Don’t stop.

“Donna really believed in you, what you do... and I do, too. If you ever need me, I’m here.”

If you ever need me, I’m here...

From a very powerful woman who I could do nothing for. Jaw-dropping.

But that was Connie Bradley.

When a young manager and a big dreamer were trying to get the artist broken, really broken – not just a cascade of stats about #1 hits and albums sold – Connie got out her phone book and made calls. She told people why the kid mattered, why the young manager who was giving it his all should be given a break, should be taken as someone good for “our business.”

She counseled. She schooled. She cajoled. But what she really did that was game-changing was believe.

When people laughed about Kenny Chesney -- hard to believe now, but as the ‘90s became the 21st century, they did -- Connie dug in. She told anyone who’d listen why the young man from East Tennessee mattered, why the young manager – and she believed in Clint Higham, not just Dale Morris the legend who’d broken Alabama – would color outside the lines to realize Chesney’s demi-traditional country take on heartland kids’ experience.

She wouldn’t say it like that, but that’s what she meant.

And when they’d hit a road block, a speed bump, Connie would have Higham to lunch or dinner or drinks, make him laugh, remind him what mattered, send him on his way. Nobody believed like Connie believed, and if she did, how dare you falter?

No one thrilled more seeing good things happen to the young songwriter with his will to rock the kids beyond the media centers than Connie Bradley! She would show up, drink it all in, laugh, clap, dance, have a cocktail, hug all the right people.

As his star collected, his meaning solidified, his vision focused – moving from a young traditionalist to someone drawing on the same essence of rock that grounded Springsteen, Mellencamp, Seeger and Petty in a way kids in rural America could locate themselves – she kept crowing, kept the heat on, kept the industry powers-that-be’s feet to the fire.

Suddenly the kid making music videos with dancing cockatoos, whirling girls from the salsa bottle and John Deere tractors quickened. He was heroic. He was honest. He was real. When the young people of the flyover, coming of age in towns and small cities, saw “Young,” “When the Sun Goes Down,” “Anything But Mine,” they saw themselves – and they saw a “star” who represented their dreams, desires, triumphs and heartaches.
Connie knew. Always.

Because Connie Bradley never let go, never moved on to an easier act with momentum, people paid attention. Sustained focused, faith that didn’t falter is a big witness in show biz. Connie Bradley understood that, and she brought it at 40,000 watts without flicker.

A few years ago, under the guise of interviewing her husband Jerry Bradley for the CMA Board, she was on a stage, doing what she does best: bringing the business piece of country music to life for people who had some idea, but not the essential nuance Connie had.

While she’s doing the glorious hostess thing, charming and enchanting the audience, leading her husband through his unbelievable history, a door to the side opened and a thin, muscular man emerged with his head down. Approaching the stage, the raw charisma pulled all eyes his way, and Connie turned.

Kenny Chesney was there to present the CMA’s highest honor for service, the Irving Waugh Award, to his friend. Shocked, Connie didn’t know what to say, but Chesney did.

“To the best friend a dreamer ever had...”

Connie cried some, laughed more, hugged hard, beamed mightily.

Not that she ever did it for awards, or for honors. She never did anything except make people more, give them chances, offer them help or a hand up.

When I think of Connie, I think of her laughing, telling some story about something that happened to some writer that tickled her to death... I think of her and her girl gang drinking a little too much wine and laughing a little bit too loud... I think of Clint Higham during rough patches coming back so fired up and happy after their lunches... I think of her blessing my desire to hire Michelle Goble when I needed a killer assistant, telling me, “She’s a good one, and she needs to grow” – and taking her back into the ASCAP fold when Goble’s health insurance needed to cover a husband’s pre-existing conditions... I think of her willingness to tell it like it is, even when the news wasn’t what someone wanted to hear; but it was always the clarity that most people never had, a clarity that came from years of watching, challenging, recognizing why things failed and how to make them fly.

I think of her always knowing just what to say, and when to say it. And I think of her complete happiness watching a song come to life, whether it was a stadium of 60,000 singing along or some boy or girl Ralph Murphy had brought into her office, a young person who didn’t even know where to begin.

Those things have nothing to do with the fabulous gowns, the joy she brought to every room she was in, the love she shared with her husband Jerry, even the incredible haircuts that always made you feel like somehow it was easy for her to look glorious. Truth is: it was Earl at Trumps.

They say when you die, you can measure the life by what you leave – not the things, but the moments. If that’s true, Connie Bradley will never truly be gone.

Too many moments with too many people that made too much of a difference makes them impossible to count – and every single one of us will keep her light burning brightly, will hopefully find ways to bring her joy with us where we go. Certainly, that’s what she would’ve wanted and hoped that she left in her wake.

Something tells me, too, she’s watching us. Once she and Donna got caught up on the state of creativity in heaven, they’re probably both lying on their stomachs, legs in the air behind them, laughing and trying to figure out how to help us from up above. No doubt they’re laughing, crying with joy for being back together – and wondering where the next great song is coming from.

Just Another Night In America: Michael Stanley + the Resonators Burn Right Where They Are

April 21, 2013

Choices and decisions. Roads taken, things that mighta, things that oughta, things that should…

Michael Stanley should have been a rock star. Like the “Almost Famous” not quite broken, eternal open act Stillwater, Stanley did everything but become  an arena-sized headliner.

Except in Cleveland, Ohio, the Rock & Roll Capital of the World, the watershed scene in Cameron Crowe’s coming of age as a baby rock critic film where Stillwater is confronted by the encroaching reality of business as survival for a little band tilting at the impossible notion of “making music, you know, and turning people on.”

In Cleveland,Ohio in the late ‘70s and early 80s, you didn’t get any bigger than the Michael Stanley Band. Two nights at the Coliseum sold out faster than Led Zeppelin. Five nights in a row at Blossom Music Center. It was a frenzy, and the city had their shot at the brass ring that regional heroes Tom Petty, Bob Seger, Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen manifested into national renowned for their hometowns.

But that was then, this is now. What happens to rock stars who fail to launch? The ones who don’t make it, who leave an entire city gasping for their moment to seen. Because if Michael Stanley did one thing for the psysche of a downtrodden city, he let them feel seen, recognized in th eslog and shove of surviving a rough Rust Belt reality. It wasn’t Springsteen heroic, but real to the streets of Cleveland, Akron and the other factory towns that were struggling across on Northern Ohio.

Make that kind of music, especially where people are used to digging in, they show up.

Give them dignity, some swagger, some reason to believe, they hang on.

And when it’s over, they don’t forget.

Rock stars get real jobs when it’s over, blend in, make due; but they don’t forget, either. Just everything changes.

The reasons, the drives, the motifs. Still, the ones who believe never falter.
Because even when life moves on; the power of what music means sustains.

The trick is to swerve beyond the trap of nostalgia, bypass the sodden machismo of “who we were.” Things may be larger in the rearview, but they’re gone. Hang onto what’s gone, you might as well lay down and die. Over and done, you’ll miss what’s ahead to be savored.

For Michael Stanley, and the fans who peopled the four capacity nights at the slightly shabby Tangiers, it’s not about merely remembering. Not any more. If in the two decades he’s been doing these intimate shows, there were years of marking time and fulfilling people’s desire to hear the canon of their truly golden years one more time; it happens. In some ways, it’s the gravitational force of the needing to return to something you knew without thinking that lets tedium set in.

Whatever the last several months have held, there was a moment where it all flipped over. What it was becomes what is. That which “never quite happened” suddenly matters, perhaps even more than when it first had its moment. Because now the need to believe, the need to celebrate is even more pressing.

Like the city of Cleveland itself, Michael Stanley is still here. Still writing songs, still brandishing that brand of heartland rock and roll that makes the people of the flyover know they’re not forgotten in the rush for newer, hipper, younger. A little weathered from the miles, it’s not about still standing, but being triumphant in the journey. Celebrating where you are for what it is and flying the defiant flag of “we don’t give a damn about you, either/we have each other-- and know how to hang on when it ain’t easy,” the now becomes imperative.

Throwing the gauntlet from the very first downstroke of “It’s All About Tonight,” a brakes-cut bit of bravado that is all carpe nocturnum, they don’t look back. Stanley, who’s earned the right to coast, hits the stage with purpose.  Sixty-five years old, he sings harder, digs deeper and drops his often stoic resolve more now than ever.

It is music that, when fully surrendered to, transforms, lift people up and drives them past the inertia of merely getting by. That is where Stanley is now. It is obvious from his attack and his intensity that he wants to take his people with him.

His old songs burn with an urgency. A whiplash sting to “In Between The Lines,” the song ofpersonal and cultural reckoning ignited by the murder of John Lennon, it's a brutal indictment and fierce reminder. In some ways, a napalm rage against the killing of our innocence, “Lines” serves as a call to investment, to engagement, to taking an active role in making the world a place beyond rage, avarice and nihilism.

That electricity echoes on the waves of Danny Powers’ slow burning lead guitar and Bob Pelander’s cascade of piano notes during the bridge of “I Am You.” Again, Stanley sees the power in identification, the embodiment of being in it together. For him, it’s a state of inclusion, the combined energy making everyone so much more… and also the unspoken declaration of the heroic position of enduring for others.

Rock and roll used to mean that. In Northern Ohio, it still does.

“I Am You” leads to the pensive “Winter,” a meandering Celtic-folk-leaning ballad that starts innocently enough. Equal parts reflection and regret, it’s also a knowing measure of where one is. To be willing to want to live, to hang onto what could be is the greatest fuel there is – especially knowing that one’s days are numbered.

The rush of that awareness fosters a force that fuels a colossal jam as the song shifts tempos, builds and lunges towards some exhaustive shudder. Harkening back to when AOR songs left room for excavation of melody and form, “Winter” bookends the much older “Lets Get The Show On The Road,” a bitter snapshot of the ennui of road life, the emptiness of the dream when it betrays you and the dead end that never seems to actually end.

Containing the line “the Lord uses the good ones, and the bad ones use the Lord,” “Let’s Get The Show On The Road” illuminates an insight not yet experienced. Yet strung across the free form jazz back section, all paper tigers and Trojan horses of the lies we’re sold, what we need to believe and the way the dream can draw and quarter you, Stanley's seething witness blisters.

It is not blind rage, but the ballast of knowing.

The revenge is to keep coming. No retreat, no surrender. Indeed, exult in what is, what’s left, what you know and what yougot, not what people try to sell you. This beer won’t make you sexier, that hair care product won’t make you young.

That unflinching staredown transforms a song of not nearly enough into a rallying cry. The kick inside may be the only shot you got. But it’s what you got, and that seems to be the resonant note this night in Akron.

With an encore of “Working Again,” from the aptly titled Heartland, there is the Rodney Psyka conga/Tommy Dobeck drum pastiche that works multiple rhythms into a frenzy that sets the urgency in motion. Ultimately, another song of making ends meet, borrowing against tomorrow because that’s all there is, the desperation is marked by a fierce commitment to getting by with one’s two hands and the strength of a very broad back. If there is a more joyous drummer to watch than Dobeck, who hits with as much finesse as punch, it is hard to imagine – and that euphoria feeds the performers as they dig in for the duration.

Like “It’s All About Tonight,” the immediacy is visceral. These fans know how these realities feel, they’re not American Express premium ticket holders buying the illusion of authentic blue collar exigency. These are their songs, cast as large as the room – and their souls – can contain. Packing a walloping Bo Didley beat, which Stanley tells them “is the beat your parents warned you about,” the crowd is on their feet, shaking what their mothers gave them for all its worth.

The Resonaters know the power of that primal pull. As the vamp builds, the “uhn, ahh” turns into the call and response of coitus. It is both metaphoric and literal – and the crowd surges towards their own sort of full-tilt musical climax. They want it, they’re gonna have it – and they shriek with abandon, spent but not quite exhausted.

In part, it’s a case of momentum being exponentiated via the ballads the fans are most invested in – “Falling In Love Again” sung more by the crowd than Stanley, a stately trek through the ’79 steamy slow dancer “Lover” – which allows regaining their collective breath to gather their fervor, then pushing further onto a pulsing forward tilt of these blue collar anthems that define the Midwest.

Being the last night of the stand doesn’t hurt. Stanley sung as hard on the fourth night as he’s ever sung, leaning into vocals, pushing phrases with a power that supercedes his normally smoky pensiveness or bitter bark. It’s as if he’s singing for his life; in many ways, though, his is.

These songs, culled from years in the trenches, are a litany of fighting back, of almost/not quite and try, try again. To get knocked down and denied so many times, and to get still back up and play, not for the record deal or the big tour or a Grammy, but because your soul requires it is the purest reason there is.

A holy pursuit, there is no gain beyond the moment, remembering how alive you can feel. That moment of putting the pedal down, pushing the night to its limits – and feeling the things that gave you such potency when you were young, realizing those emotions are still something you can feel, embrace, wrap yourself in offers an energy otherwise untapped.

It’s not buying a Corvette and driving too fast, looking like an old fool too deep into losing touch to know the difference. This is about the intersection of dignity and what you’re made of is. The simplicity of suiting up, showing up and throwing down to the point of all that there is. Not for the money or the glory or the fame, but because as Springsteen says, “it ain’t no sin to be glad you’re alive.”

Who we were, who we are, who we will be. It dangles in the humidity on one of Paul Christensen’s sax solos, sultry and ripe with the promise of desire; echoes of moors and Appalachia in Marc Lee Shannon’s mandolin turns. Beyond words, it's in the blood, pumping, throbbing, surrendering to how fierce it must be to be true to its point of origin.

No one else may ever see. No one beyond the moment will ever know. It doesn’t matter. For the assembled, this is all there is – and it fills the need in ways the superstar on his private jet, the high gloss fame monger or pampered starlet will never know.

Snookie be damned, this is real. Real is what matters once you know happily ever after is right where you stand if you wrap your arms around it, and take it for all its worth. Michael Stanley – and the people who love his music – have figured that out. It is all that they need to get by.

20 April 2013

I’m Gonna Catch Tomorrow Now: Billy Joe Shaver’s Rowdy Tonk for Believers

He was a little bit shy, and big. Great big, big big. Half standing when I walked up to the table at the old Longhorn just off West End, he was almost too big to extricate himself from the hard wooden booth. A shock of hair fell across his eyes as he reached out a man’s forearm clad in denim and smiled into my eyes, nodding a welcome.

I clenched the extended hand, forgetting... We’d never met, but the legend of Billy Joe Shaver losing most of three fingers in a saw-mill accident was known... and I clenched my fingers into a “man appropriate” grip.. A firm handshake, my Dad used to tell me, levels the playing field, says you’re strong, says you’re true.

Only when I closed my fingers, there was a whole lot of nothing there. He gripped with the fingers he had, closing his great big hand around mine. His palm had seen enough physical labor, you knew this wasn’t a pampered soul, who got rich and fancy when Waylon Jennings cut an entire album of his songs called Honky Tonk Heroes.

I tried not to react, show surprise or yelp. He’d seen it all; he’d’ve probably laughed, but I was there to do an interview for Tramp on Your Street, his first album in a decade. I wanted to maintain not just my cool, but a sense I could handle the story. The project was a pungent roots rock affair, long on muscular guitar that was a narcotic musk of twang, tone and jangle courtesy of his son Eddie.

That was why the album was Shaver, not Billy Joe Shaver. It had that thumping backbeat that made Waylon Jennings an outlaw of equal stripes biker and cowboy, as well as the acoustic-forward tilt that pulled you into Willie Nelson’s far friendlier Armadillo country orbit. As Garth Brooks exploded, Vince Gill’s sweetness reigned and Alan Jackson brought traditionalism back into fashion, Shaver struck a blow for the roughneck place in country music where men were men and the ladies were glad.
An almost primitive writer, capable of great poetry and earth-cracking truths, Shaver’s gift was an odd gentleness, a vulnerability that recognized the failings of our mortal coil matched with a hell-raising, take-no-shit kind reckless good-timing. Still sitting there in that packed chain restaurant all the songwriters and old guard business types congregated in for mid-price red meat, potato planks and cold beer, draft or bottle, he was mostly funny, charming, patient recounting the story of a life Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry and Tom McGuane couldn’t conjure as a team sport.

Raised by his grandma, supplementing their social security singing on a pickle barrel in a general store, he was a bona fide Texas blue collar texture from a time forgotten. Though solid teachers’ pet stock, the brawling suited him better – a fact testified to in “Georgia on a Fast Train” that proclaimed, “I got a good Christian raisin’ and an 8th grade education/ Ain’t no reason for y’all to be treatin’ me this a way” – and manual labor for a big strong boy was an honest way to get life done.

As for his fingers, he shrugged, and said, “Yup, I was feeding planks on the line, reached back, got tangled up and next thing you know, my hand got pulled in.”

Matter of fact, matter of life. Maintaining eye contact, he half-shrugged assessing my limit for gore, then kept going, “I looked down, saw my fingers in the saw dust, scooped’em up and put’em in my pocket. They tried to reattach’em, but too much damage was done.”
No big deal. Keep on. Keep on keepin’ on.

Chiseled features, a head bent to dreaming and the music inside, he found his way in the nightlife rooms of honky tonks and bars. Wrote some songs, banged around with his guitar, decided to give Nashville a try.

The story of Jennings’ repeated brush-offs  after saying to bring the deep-voiced star some songs manifested into a threat to “kick your ass” if Waylon didn’t listen was as widely known as his the one about his mangled. He laughed telling the story sitting there, aw shucks and well, you knowin’ as if it was a just a little crappy on the line not the great big fish it was made out to be.

Funny thing is: Jennings cut a whole album of his songs. More than the legend, there was the music, earthy, real, splintered in places and consumed by whatever emotion was driving the writing.

Laughing at the table, he leaned over, wanting to share a secret.

 “You know that Madonna?” he asked, making sure I knew this wasn’t about some blessed virgin. When I nodded, his eyes gleamed and his chuckle tempered with something just to the left of lust. “Now there’s a gal, you know? I wrote ‘Hottest Thing In Town’ about her, the kinda gal that knows what to do no matter where you find her.”

“Well, well...” I replied.

“I mean, you don’t know her, do you?”
“Only by records...”
“Man,” he exhaled. “Just... man... I wouldn’t mind going a round or two with her...”
It wasn’t dirty, wasn’t nasty. Maybe the closest I’ve ever come to someone inhabiting that Hank Willilams’ notion of going “hawnkee tuhnkin’.” Though something told me if she wanted to use him as a human trampoline, he’d give at least as good as he got.

Lunch was savored, not rushed. He told stories, gossiped a little, talked about his past, his son, the future – and seemed not to notice the stolen glances from a pretty fast room. My mother’s mother, a salty gal who loved a character, would’ve pronounced him “darling.” My father, a former Marine, would’ve said, he was “A-OK.”

We stood up. He asked if he could give me a hug. It was like being swallowed by a mountain. He’d been off the rails for part of the previous decade, living rough and Tramp On Your Street was going to put him back on his feet. It gave him a reason to steal his son back from Dwight Yoakam – and to show rock crowds, college kids and old school country fans that there was still a spark of honest-to-goodness real men making stripped down, jacked up country-blues rock.

To hear something so unadorned, so almost turpentined then was a revelation. Today, it’s stark raving pure. Analog tape, real gear, musicians on the floor, throwing it down. You can almost hear the tracks sweat.

And so I went home to write up a story for Tower Records Pulse! I made some calls, talked to some people. Convinced my editor at The New York Times this record, this artist in this moment was important. Sometimes it’s the antecedents (the people he’d impacted) that make the difference, but in the end, the 550 words in America’s paper of record make a very different kind of difference.

Somewhere in the middle of that review, I wrote, “Ragged emotions are something Mr. Shaver earned through living, and that hard-won knowledge infuses "Tramp on Your Street," his first recording in 10 years. Whether it's the roughneck bump and shuffle of "Georgia on a Fast Train," with Mr. Shaver yowling the lyrics of bumpkin protest, or the meditational bluegrass of "Live Forever," these are songs of redemption. In his world, though, redemption takes many forms: unabashed -- and unreal -- lust ("The Hottest Thing in Town"), surrender to a higher power ("If I Give My Soul") and, somewhere between, yearning (the fragile "When Fallen Angels Fly," the eerie "I Want Some More").

Mr. Shaver once saw Hank Williams and sang of the experience: ‘His body was worn, but his spirit was free/And he sang every song, looking right straight at me,’ offering self-revelation in the process. With a gruff voice and awkward phrasing, he knows that truth isn't pretty. Still, he presents the tales and insights of a well-traveled soul wrapped in a buzzing barbed-wire guitar and a backbeat that crashes like a garden gate.”

I’d write thousands of words about Billy Joe Shaver over the years, witnessing to his stoic grit, his naughty sense of fun, his abiding Christian faith, his ability to transcend hard times. But maybe nothing captures it better than those few lines.

Moving around Nashville in those mid-90 days, in and out of camps and creative communities, I preached the gospel of Shaver’s core truths and rough-hewn, yet brutally exacting demolition country. So alive, so electric, you wanted to turn people on, shock them from the slickness.

Notes were written, CDs left between people’s storm doors and front doors. Phone calls, but especially delicious sessions of “ooooh”ing and “ahhhhhh”ing over the viscerality of the tracks and the wisdom of the words.

“Live Forever,” a quiet take on one’s spirit being eternal and a directive on kindness and the Christian way, seemed like a prayer the go-go ‘90s needed. With that kerosene rising melody, it deserved a torchy voice. Hummable; why not? It could bring sanctity to the radio.

When the phone rang, Patty Loveless, on the other end, was raving about the album. An Appalachian traditionalist seasoned by wild hare juke joints in North Carolina, she understood every syllable and note twist on the album. “I’m gonna cut it,” she announced.

“Live Forever?” I asked, gleeful

“When Fall Angels Fly,” she returned. “It’s broken, but it’s saved. Holly, people need that kind of promise and that kind of hope.”

It was never a single, never a focus track. But the ache in her voice, the break in that vowels when she confessed, “I have climbed so many mountains, just to see the other side/ I have almost drowned in freedom, just to feed my foolish pride” was a revelation. Not a soul saved by love trope, but a woman who’d been places, who owned the miles and the men in the arms of that one person can embrace her whole being.

While it didn’t earn seven figures, the song left a mark on history. When Patty Loveless became only the second woman to win the Country Music Association’s coveted Album of the Year, it was, “Patty Loveless... When Fallen Angels Fly” that got announced.
Not long after Loveless and her husband Emory Gordy, Jr, cut the song, I came home to voice mail I could barely make out. Cell phones were new, reception was bad. A couple late nights later, I picked up the phone to that same voice: Billy Joe Shaver.

“Holly, I will never forget what you did for me,” he said.

“Well, it was a great song, and look what it did for Patty! It gave her a name for her record...”

“I’m not kidding,” he said, being grave and serious. “When I heard her sing that song, I wept. It got down deep inside me. I can’t thank you enough.”

People in moments are grateful. Gratitude in any form is lovely. The irony: Billy Joe Shaver never forgot. Decades later when I would run into him, he’d always find a way in a random moment to lean over and whisper some variation of “I mean it... man, the way she sang my song” in my ear. Because singers and songs and truth were holy, and he took it hardcore serious.

And that was thing for all the sorrow and the pain... this is a man who lost his son to a heroin overdose on a New Year’s Day, and still showed up for his gig at Poodies later that night, who lost his mother and his wife in shortly thereafter, who just kept going, kept seeking to do the next right thing and help those who needed help.
Tucked into corners of the night, random multi-artist events or tv tapings, he was always glad to see you, always ready to sing his songs and tell his truth. He wasn’t detached, the songs showed that. “It’s Hard To Be An Outlaw,” flexing wicked double-entendres sung with Willie Nelson, from 2014’s Long In The Tooth has the same measured brio that made his early songs such unabashed articles of a certain kind of life.

“Jesus Was Our Saviour And Cotton Was Our King,” “Old Chunk of Coal (But I’m Gonna Be A Diamond One Day,” “Ride Me Down Easy,” “Devil Made Me Do It the First Time,” “Old Five and Dimers,” “You Can’t Beat Jesus Christ” spoke volumes of how the Outlaws lived – and breathed. Later he got more randy, howling bawdy hilarity like “That’s What She Said Last Night,” or the hilarious truth-tell “Wacko from Waco” that rose from Shaver actually shooting a man.

Another larger than life legend that paled compared to the actual tale. Sitting at a bar with his lady friend, who was attracting unwanted attention, there were words. When the offender wouldn’t stop, Shaver suggested he was going to the bathroom, when he got back, the guy should be gone, or there’d be consequences.

With a chorus that promises, “I don’t start fights, I finish fights/That’s the way I’ll be/ I‘m the Wacko from Waco/You best not mess with me...,” Shaver walked out of the bar, looked at the guy threatenng to blow him away, and shook his head. “Where do you want it?” he asked him, then pulled the trigger.

Cool as is he is smart, Shaver rolled right up to Wille Nelson’s house, and started negotiating his surrender. Indeed, the bonus finds the Red-Headed Stranger admonishing listeners, “The Wacko from Waco is still on the run, A writer, a singer,  a son of a gun/ Don’t cross him, don’t boss him/ Stay out of his way/ Don’t give him no trouble /Cause you’ll just make his day...”

So beloved by all, it was only a matter of time before justice was served. With Robert Duvall and Nelson sitting in the courthouse during the trial – and acting as character witnesses – Shaver was soon free again, exonerated by self-defense..

Free again! Some men are freeborn men, others live their lives in shackles. Maybe that’s what made Shaver so transfixing. Never wanting to be anything more than he was, simple and willing and seeking higher ground while good-timing like few could, he walked that line between damned and sublime.

The acapella “Star In My Heart,” a tender love song to someone gone who will always be loved and dedicated to his son Eddy, on 2012’s Live from Billy Bob’s, manifests a purity you can’t fake. Tumbling into “Live Forever,” the Bee Spears-evoking back and forth bass part and the few gut string notes scattered beneath that slightly bent vocal tone, he weighs the words he’s sung for a couple decades at that point.

You fathers and you mothers

Be good to one another

Please try to raise your children right

Don’t let the darkness take’em

Don’t make’em feel forsaken

Just lead ‘em safely to the light

When this whole world is blown asunder

And all the stars fall from the sky

Remember someone really loves you

We’ll live forever you and i

I’m gonna live forever
Im gonna cross that river

I’m gonna catch tomorrow now...

When the news arrived, via email from a mutual friend who moves through the same rooms of legends and songwriters, I shrieked. Literally, blinked twice and felt the blood curdling scream reflexively leaving my throat and through my lips.

How many more people are we going to lose? Are going to pass into the sky? Jerry Jeff Walker? Bobbi Cowan? JT Corenflos? Who next? It has been a cruel harvest, and a brutal year of too many unknowns.
In the vertigo and disorientation, it’s hard to know where the wall is, or why we should be believe it’s going to get any better. And yet, we have these songs, these recordings. From the ‘70s, the ‘90s, the ‘00s and the ‘10s.
Slightly slurred, swooping down and lifting up, the joy is a dissolving agent, the faith is a buttress against what we can’t know. Typing this, another one, yet another one, I feel my heart lurch from shock to rage to sorrow to confusion and ultimately to being glad. In a world where all is temporal, Billy Joe Shaver was – all the contradictions, the swagger, the kindness, the hilarity. And there are so many memories to sustain.

Even more, there is the music and the songs. Listening, absorbing it, I feel the corners of my mouth rising, my heart easing just a little. There are more tears to be shed, no doubt, but right now, it’s a little bit of Dixieland in “The Good Ole USA” and knowing he lived in glory, not in vain. Not a bad truth to tell.

For further reading: https://lonestarmusicmagazine.com/qa-billy-joe-shaver/

And The Cradle Will Rock: Eddie Van Halen Broke Ground, Birthed Joy + Flew To Heaven

You couldn’t trust the Record Revolution near the Parmatown Mall. At least, not if you frequented the one on Coventry with the day glow punk rock window displays and surly clerks. Yet, there I was in front of a peg board display of “New Music,” weighing an offer from a way older than me golf pro to buy me a record.

The normal signals weren’t there. No interesting posters, stand-ups or displays to point the way. Just a bunch of shrink-wrapped albums, which I kept removing, turning over, assessing. How I got there, I don’t know. But I remember balancing my fear of his annoyance with my own desire to not squander a free record. Or in this case, 8-track, because that’s what his car played.

Pursing my lips, I made my decision. Van Halen. Definitely.

I had no idea what it actually sounded like, but two burnt-out caddies had been raving about it earlier in the week. If it was good enough for them -- and they liked their rock – then it was exactly what I wanted.

The golf pro was non-plussed. “You sure?” he asked dubiously, flipping the album cover over and perusing the titles. Was it “Ice Cream Man” that gave him pause? “Atomic Punk”? “Little Dreamer”? I didn’t know, didn’t care. His pique made me want it more. There was no way this was going to be the Archies or the Partridge Family, so there was no shame in my game.

“Positive,” I said. Marched towards the door of the little strip mall store, paused and waited. He took the bag, his change and headed for me. Passing through and onto the sidewalk, he looked over his shoulder, “This is gonna suck.”
“Awesome,” I said, refusing to cower. “Can’t wait.”

That sound like an oncoming train turning into a space ship, the creeping bass throb made the opening 20 seconds feel like a lifetime. A cymbal strike, then another, and then... then... that guitar tone, swiping, slicing at the space inside that maroon muscle car. It was unlike anything I’d ever heard – and I’d heard a lot. T. Rex, Uriah Heap, Deep Purple, Les Dudek, Led Zeppelin, Aerosmith, the Stones.
The singer, wide open, vamping, rafting diving, wailing, was like a stripper on a pole. Swinging around the melody, yowling for effect, flexing what he had. It wasn’t power singing, slightly nasal, slightly throwing it out there. Like a javelin thrower, it was all about the moves.

And then the guitar solo started – notes, surges, circles, a definite sense of progression. Whatever the singer was doing, and it seemed to be about howling over a big hook-filled chorus of multiple voices intoning “Running With The Devil,” it didn’t matter: the show was the guitar, and the guy playing it knew no fear.

Proof was in the second track. A tumble of notes, tons of notes, spinning and circling at a ridiculous pace. Like someone had taken a Gregorian organ piece, speeded it up, played it on an electric guitar. It was thrilling, no other word for it. Whomever this was, the dexterity was death-defying. And it wasn’t just fast notes, but someone chiseling a real piece of music out of thin air.
I could feel the smirk crossing my face. Lips pressed together, the corners were repelling against each other, my eyes squinting as I tried not to be a poor winner. I’d been looking straight ahead, not making eye contact, just letting the music move through the car, me, the windows. When the notes were swallowed by something that felt like industrial noise, I exhaled. Turning towards my companion, the stabbing thrash that felt so familiar, that “when the whip comes down” flagellating the melody slapped across the bucket seats – and I realized the familiarity was... the Kinks!

Holy crap! One, two, three. This Van Halen album, bought because two stoners, who were the best kind of bad news, had been talking about them, was yielding in ways that reinforced my authority about music and rock bonafides.

“Well...” I leveraged, letting the smirk turn into a smile. “Well, well, well.”

“Yeah,” he said. It was so good, he couldn’t disparage the record. And good in a way that suggested a brighter, cleaner kind of rock. This wasn’t the heavy metal or hard rock that was so onerous or dark. It almost felt like pop music, something that in another universe reconciled that serious playing of the guitar and a drummer who kept sweeping things along with the idea that big shiny chorus were what it was all about.

“Ain’t Talkin’ ‘Bout Love” seemed to be the poon hound’s national anthem. Raised around golf pros always on the prowl for something quick’n’easy, I got the rub. This was hormones and want to, the idea that it’s just sex – and why not?

For all the macho posturing,  damn that guitar player could play. And it just got better. “I’m The One” was a tangle that was blistering. Sure, there was an a capella “oh, wah, shooby doo wah” section that recalled the Doobie Brothers’ “Black Water,” but it was the guitar that just kept coming.

By “Jamie’s Crying,” Eddie Van Halen was playing with a wanton tone that slithered and swung from side-to-side like the hot chick who knows everyone’s watching her walk. The counter melody, counter vocal part spoke volumes about the intention, the aggression and the control he had over his instrument.

We were still sitting in the parking lot, letting the music pummel us. Looking at the clock, I flinched. Dinner-time! Oh, damn...

 “We gotta go.”

But having sat there, consumed by the playing, the swagger, the gusto for something big, loud and hip-shaking, there was something more to it than the guitar riffs, solos and weird ways of attacking the instrument. It was... FUN.

They played hard. But somehow – and not just the over-emoting, over-pouting singer – they didn’t take it all so serious. Yeah, virtuosity seemed to be an anchor, but they got the joke about how torqued up and testosterone-lacquered this was. Indeed, they leaned into with zeal. Who sings “I’m on fire” over and over in falsetto? Just a smokescreen for the spiraling runs, the punch punch pow of certain lines.
Over the bridge, up Carnegie, up Cedar Hill and peeling off to the Fernway School district. The tape kept clicking into the next quadrant, and nobody was saying much of anything. Pulling into the drive, I was a little bit late. I’d have to explain, but the damage could be undone.

“Can I keep it for now?” the golf pro asked, hoping to feel the grooves punch up whatever nocturnal adventures were ahead.

“No,” I replied. “You said it was for me.”

Pulling it from its place in the dash, I smiled. Clearly victorious, I tucked my trophy on one hand, opened the door and hit the driveway. “I had a really good time, and I love this. Thank you so so much.”
The much older golf pro scowled. Thwarted from annexing the tape, the gap was between 20-something and 14 was becoming bigger by the nano-moment. Kid sister, mascot, pain in the butt, I was big fun – and I extracted a big price for my time.

“You’re late,” my mother brayed. “Where’ve you been?”
I slid the tape under the cushion of a living room chair, smoothed my clothes and said, “Oh, I went over to the West Side and played golf with a couple of the pros.”

Knowing to start putting food on my plate and commit to dinner, I lowered myself into the seat that trapped me between the table and the wall. It was a basic dinner, no big deal, but dinner was always a big deal.

“How’d you play?” my Dad asked.

“Okay... Greens were slow, made a lot of putts.”

“Anything good happen?”

“Nope, just another day hustling golf with the hustlers.”

What a lie!

Up to the attic I stole after dinner, breathing in dust bunnies in the airless upstairs. Listening to “Eruption” over and over, trying to figure out how many notes, where they were going, how he was doing that. Finally, hitting the “Back” button over and over, I just let it wash over me like a rush of blasting water. Sinking into it, I drifted to a place beyond words or physical location – just rhythms, twists and tone.

Van Halen, the band that split the difference between rock and pop, had exploded inside a mid’70s muscle car – and taken me away. If Aerosmith felt like the Stones seedy US underbelly, this was something else. For a girl who liked the guitars out front, the rhythms propulsive, so began a love affair and guilty pleasure that would sustain me throughout college.

The next day I saw the two stoners, went, “Van Halen... YEAH.” They looked at each other, then back me and smiled. We all just nodded and smiled.

Springing for the album, looking at the pictures, they were dangerous without being menacing. Carnal, sure, but more the kind looking for volunteers than hostages. And if you were just there for the music – wallflower that I sort of was – that was okay, too. Come, rock, be. Throw your hands in the air, shake your butt, jump up and down. Leave your frustration, put the accelerator down.

Bad days, Sad days. There was Van Halen. It could pick you up, spin you around.

There was nothing profound here, just a cymbal crash, the jackhammer beats. And that guitar – doing things that just kept you moving forward. But always, always with melody.

And if David Lee Roth was that loudmouth guy who couldn’t shut his trap, hair like a lion, peacock strut and an arrogance that was laughable, Eddie Van Halen was cute. There, I said it. That smile, those impish eyes: he was a guitar god, but he was also really adorable.

Having grown up around the nerds for whom girls barely scanned – even their girlfriends seemed like an afterthought – the notion of a guitar hero who was darling was perfect. One more thing he did better than everyone else, yet that wasn’t even the point.

By the time Van Halen II dropped, they were massive. What had been my private stash, my jump around in my tshirt and jeans proposition had injected a Top 40 sort of hard rock sheen into Album Oriented Rock. The pulsing beats, the room on the tracks, the ear worm hooks – more often from the guitar as the lyrics – creating a new ubiquity.

Suddenly, all boys played air guitar. Junior high school dances saw the wall-flowers spill onto the floor, lurching and churning to Alex Van Halen’s “stomp” here crashes. Even the cool Moms were down, turning up the car sound system and bouncing their head in time. It was primal, but polished into a light saber gleam.

They found a way to reinvent “You’re No Good,” a steamy soul song that my friends all knew from Linda Ronstadt’s exhortative version, as a dank sort of trepidation, then emergence. Whatever, whoever she was, the guitar’s ramble spoke more than Roth’s vocal. It was half self-salve, but more the confession of a man felled by love.

Much to unpack from a song all the little girls thought – via Ronstadt’s backbone – they understood. To stare at the block disc turning ‘round was to hypnotize oneself with the turning and the tone. Not that II was a journey to the center of your psyche.

No, they perfected the party on, lust’n’libido notion of rock and roll. Out front, shameless, yet not so threatening for their unabashed celebration of “Dance The Night Away,” “Beautiful Girls” and “Women In Love.”

There was ZZ Top/Tejas kinda boogie with “Bottoms Up,” an acoustic almost flamenco excavation called “Spanish Fly” that dropped into straight into the slice’n’spin “DOA.” Every flavor, every color of rock and roll, it was here. Narcotically infectious, even the rock based upon classical music geeks had to give propers to Eddie Van Halen and his crew.

Van Halen merged being a party band with groundbreaking musicality. So much fun, you could miss the virtuosity – until that one riff corkscrewed by you, took hold, dropped your jaw. Whether you played an instrument or not, there was that moment when you stopped, went “What the...” or “How the...”

Make no mistake, it was always the brothers Van Halen. Diamond Dave may’ve been the sideshow carny and Sammy Hagar the hardcore metal singer, but it was the propulsion of Alex’s drums and the igniting factor of Eddie’s playing.

If “Oh, Pretty Woman” put them squarely on Top 40 radio, “Jump” made them lords of MTV. Even more startling about “Jump,” it was the columns of synthesizer that architected the equally driving single that was feeding on the post-disco new wavery of Men Without Hats and the Thompson Twins with an authority that would one day ooze from Prince’s rock-taut funk.

Yes, the solo – hammer-ons and arpeggios --  was like a jungle gym you could climb all over, but the vision transcended mastery of the guitar. Suddenly, we were all one big musical gumbo, one big party where all elements cooked up hot.
“Panama,” back squarely in the rock lane, worked just as well. Good times, good hooks, good grooves. They conviviality of the band of the band in the video made Van Halen a club you’d want to be part of: the thump bomping you forward, the red guitar with the white tape taking on another level of iconography.
It was all so thrilling, then the tempo dropped. If Roth’s recitation was a little creepy, Van Halen’s guitar – the tossed back and forth downstrokes, slithering licks  – was a novella unto itself. A dark and stormy night, a misty roads end, a little bit of musk and misadventure.

And “Hot For Teacher”? After school special took on a whole other, prurient realization.

Diver Down and 1984 suggested a musical omniverse. A place where it all rocked together. But perhaps the greatest unifier had nothing to do with Van Halen at all.

MTV was a bastion of blinding Caucasian whiteness. Like AOR radio, it was filled with the Camara and Trans Am friendly bands. For every wacky Cindy Lauper, boytoy Madonna or British new waver from Banarama to the Clash, there was no Hendrix, no Tina Turner, no soon-to-be-minted Prince of Pop or just Prince.

Eddie Van Halen, whose parents moved to America because of his prejudice his Indonesian mother faced living in Holland with his traveling musician father, understood. Without ever flexing his own family’s experience with racism, he showed up, put up and laid a solo down on “Beat It” that made Miichael Jackson a citizen in full of MTV’s rock hard jungle.
No one doubted Jackson’s talents, that wasn’t the fact. Without words, though, there was a segregation in place that no one wanted to address. With six strings and a whirlwind of dexterity, Eddie Van Halen showed it was all music. Bring the intensity, the creativity and let the best song win.

Like a lot of rock stars, he struggled. Booze, primarily, but drugs. Late nights, party down. But always sweet to the core and chasing a dragon of what could he make the music do, where could his fingers go, his ability to drive deeper into his instruments, his vision, his curiosity.

Hanging with Sam Kinison, the comic/preacher/surprisingly facile musician, they could go for hours, for seemingly days. Talk, laughter, jamming, pressing into all the places people who fly so close to the sun see that elude the rest of us.

Always, always, seeking something more, walking a blade of music and shock, Where could it go? What unspeakable truth could you find?
If Diamond Dave was a flamboyant sideshow barker, Eddie Van Halen was seeking something more. If the party was what drew the masses, it was the playing that fed his soul and galvanized his band as more than one more hair metal act with momentum and a moment.
Three patents. Licks every pimply faced kid who wanted to rock locked himself in his bedroom to learn. A currency of the road is communicated by his solos without ever calling a title.

Having risen from backyard parties and Hollywood’s Starwood/Gazarri’s scene, he understood the commerce of hot girls, good times and loud music. But Eddie Van Halen knew how much more it could contain.

If Roth wanted to fly solo, Sammy Hagar provided a way to take things more seriously. Sure, they’d still pack some leer factor, some brio, some of that rafter-diving vocalese. But “Right Now” suggested a band that could make you think, too.

It was a new day, a new way of rocking hard. Once again, in a whole other way, Van Halen had redefined their singularity. If the exploding reality of another discovery didn’t have the same seismic force, they broke ground wielding awareness with the same “check this out” as Roth twirling some girl’s g-string on his finger.

Eddie F’ing Van Halen.

Like the Michael Jackson solo, heck like the solo on Nicolette Larson’s “Can’t Get Away From You” billed to “?,” he sought to keep his cancer struggle on the downlow. People knew, but had no idea. Word would spread, then be calmed.

It was as if he didn’t want people to lose site of the music in the struggle. He was a vessel of the Gods sent to pour the music out over us. The rest was just a matter of his mortal coil being mortal. Don’t look there, look here! See the sparks fly! Watch me ignite this 18 bar section of song! Hear the twists, swirls, corkscrews – and smile, or jawdrop, or marvel, or scream.

Scream! With delight, pleasure, rapture, awe. He didn’t care. He just wanted to play.

Standing in the grocery store, the text came.  Just the TMZ announcement, nothing more. Butt the sender: Kenny Chesney, a kid who had those songs pumped into his veins almost before he was double digits.

Having become real stadium-sized ticket-selling artist, Eddie  Van Halen’s represented the blurring of lines in the name of music to the kid from East Tennessee. If Keith Whitley gave him heart, Van Halen was the blood pumping through his heart and his approach to music. The notion country could have real songs, could punch hard, could burn guitar solos into the night as 60,000 people screamed was born turning up Diver Down in his best friend David Farmer’s stereo.

He, who’d made friends with his hero, had shared at least one blistering night with the Van Halens. Not quite a “Wayne’s World” moment, but the pictures show a road band, clearly influenced by the brothers, beaming about the merging of worlds, the kindness they were shown and the moment to share a stadium stage with icons who’d seen and done it all.

The spice aisle blurred. Somehow the heavy whipping cream didn’t seem so important. These moments – so ordinary and uneventful – can knock the legs out from under you, take your breath away. Tears ran down my face, not because I knew him – beyond seeing that smile under those thick dark bangs falling across his face with Sam – but because Eddie Van Halen’s guitar set me free, let me jump into the brink and believe could fly.

Texts flew all night. Emails came and were sent. Back and forth, back and forth. An art director friend passed me a couple of the Gene Simmons-produced demos, bursting with the inevitable.

A couple calls, a lot of tears. For me, Van Halen  -- where it all began – played way too loud, but exactly the same volume was when a barely teen found a record in the West Side Record Revolution.

And that’s the thing about Eddie Van Halen: he -- seemingly -- knew no fear. Just higher, faster, squigglier, fuzzier, cleaner. He didn’t care about changing the world, he wanted to press the music as far as it could go. And he did. And we are all the more in so many ways for it.

As Long As I’m Making Music, I Can’t Do Nobody Wrong: Mac Davis’ Sweet Songs Sail Into Paradise

He was cool. Not Steve McQueen cool, but good guy who’d do the right thing, help somebody out because he could cool. Indeed, he was the kind of cool that even before I knew what cool was, or really understood what the man with the curly dark hair and the bright smile did, I knew he was cool.

People think the social upheaval happened in the ‘60s, then the ‘70s were one long disco inferno. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Cleveland, Ohio alone, the lake died, the river burned, four kids were shot to death protesting the Viet Nam war at Kent State, race riots saw America’s first Black mayor elected and nice girls from good families ran off with the Children of God, Mexico to get busted coming back with a lid of grass or New York because Roe V. Wade wasn’t a reality, but their pregnancy was.

Into or against all that, Mac Davis emerged the unruffled songwriter who’d created hits that synthesized these moments. Elvis Presley’s “A Little More Talk” may be the musky brio that defines the King’s charisma, but “In The Ghetto” alone crystalized the stark pain of the inner city with a quiet conviction that matched Marvin Gaye’s own social awakening. But there was more, the tender “Watching Scotty Grow,” the heart-tugging “Memories” and the life-affirming “I Believe In Music” to temper the awareness you couldn’t turn away from.

Suddenly, the kid from Lubbock who moved to Atlanta, then crossed the country seeking a toehold in music was a songwriter the famous artists clamored for. Nancy Sinatra had invested wisely when she signed him to a publishing deal. He wrote hits for Glen Campbell, Dolly Parton, Tom Jones, Johnny Cash, Bobby Blue Bland, Tammy Wynette, Frank Sinatra and Merle Haggard, plus Aviici and Bruno Mars of recent vintage.

People who believe in music are the happiest people

Clap your hands, stomp your feet, shake your tambourines

Raise your voices to the sky, God loves you when you sing

The son of a religious man, gospel permeated his music. Whether the slow burning carnality of “One Hell Of A Woman,” or the overt church-feel of “I Believe In Music,” the soul of his raising was evident. So was the innocence of dreaming when you’re small-town bred, but believing there’s something more: “Texas In My Rearview Mirror” spoke volumes about chasing what you don’t truly understand with enough passion to possibly catch it.

That hope in the face of impossible odds, that smile and sense of “why not?” embodied an optimism people needed. But this wasn’t a hoaky sap who didn’t know better, this was an actual man intent on embracing the best in people.

Growing up, my atonal Dad loved to sing along with the radio. Some songs got even more gusto than others, and Davis’ songs – whether he sung them or not – swung in a pocket perfect for Midwestern males content in the suburban realities. He found “It’s Hard To Be Humble,” wryly iconic with its confession “I’m perfect in every way.” He delighted in the real life reminder “Stop & Smell the Roses” with its gospel tinge.

And as a golfer, he had a temperament that when we watched as a family, his deportment was  that of an excellent athlete. But more than a cocky jock, he came off like the definition of “a sportsman,” the kind of gentleman who’d be nice to your daughter, respect your wife and wisecrack his way around the course. But also, the kind of guy who’d press on the last three holes, and pay his bet even if he didn’t think he should’ve missed that putt.

Honor comes in many forms. Mac Davis seemed to embody it.

“Lucus Was A Redneck” a swampy, bluesy funk, painted a pretty unapologetic picture of white trash. The wah-wah guitat’n’harmonica track was a corner of the mouth kinda special, where the narrator called out a bad seed for using the N word, beating up hippies – and just kept going, railing about racism and bullying without ever flinching.

That’s the kinda stuff my Daddy liked. No show, no big deal, just a solid cut to the gut, call it as it was and don’t look back. Other than that rearview mirror filled with Texas, neither did Davis. Between “In The Ghetto” and “Lucus,” Davis did as much for racial equality in a turbulent time as anyone – and he wasn’t looking for any credit, he was just showing the simple truth to a world that needed it.

Needed it. Never chiding, never holding it over someone’s head. Even “Baby Don’t Get Hooked On Me” stood as a warning to a girl who was a good hang about being a guy she didn’t wanna think about as a long term prospect. In someone else’s hands, the song would’ve been an arrogant brush-off, but for Davis with those Raphael-like curls, it was a gentle landing from a tall summit being prescribed. 

Music is the universal language, and love is the key
To peace hope and understanding, and living in harmony
So take your brother by the hand and come along with me

Lift your voices to the sky, tell me what you see

And then – after a couple years of music man tv variety show a la Campbell, John Denver, Andy Williiams, even Sonny & Cher – came “North Dallas Forty.” Playing a seasoned quarterback who was resolute and philosophical about the game, privileges and realities of being a sports hero, the songwriter/pop music star’s cool quotient went through the roof. Somewhere between DGAF and Ferris Bueller, Seth Maxwell was low to the ground and never one to let anyone see him sweat. With just enough drugs, booze, profanity and women, it was a pretty unflinching look into big time sports that candy-coated nothing.

Just as tellingly, the earthy part of who a man is at his most venal permeated Davis’ performance. Opposite Nick Nolte, Dabney Coleman and Charles Durning, the bar was set pretty high. 
Playing a flawed character, but one of modern heroics, the smiling guy from the variety show and so many PGA golf tournaments imbued Seth Maxwell, the peacock quarterback who knew the deeper aspects of his sport, with both swagger and a humanity bolstered by conflict.

It’s just a football movie, one could argue. But back when storyline, conflict and tension were key to film-making, “North Dallas Forty” sought to illuminate larger truths about a flashy game America was making its new religion. Like his songwriting, where there was often gritty truth beneath the indelible hooks, the performance showed how much of the world Davis had absorbed. Right down to knowing sometimes getting by can be an awful place to be.

The complexity is part of what fascinated Davis.

More than anything about the Songwriters Hall of Fame member, a Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame member, a 1974 Academy of Country Music Entertainer of the Year, Georgia Music Hall of Fame, Texas Country Music Hall of Fame and BMI Icon Award winner, it was the humanity that mattered. Well into his seventh decade, Davis was still collaborating with young artists on the rise. Just as Bruno Mars about “Young Girls,” or Avicii on the international hit “Addicted To You.”

Once upon a time, a young kid from East Tennessee at the beginning of his career was in Hollywood for business. A mutual friend introduced him to Davis, and it wasn’t long before he was invited to stay at their house when he was in California. It was a place he would visit, a home in the storm of chasing the fame – and an opportunity to talk songwriting, inspiration and what it all means.

A small town kid, Davis found the highest reaches of what music can give. Rather than swelling up with selfishness, he opened his home to young artists coming up, reveling in new waves of creativity and the love of the game. 

He had a beautiful wife of 38 years, children, grandchildren, joy and generosity. Family was something that didn’t just endure, but sustained – and the fertilizer that made “Stop and Smell The Roses” so sweet. 

That sense of humor, the curiosity informed a willingness to come out and be seen, but never overshadow the others in the room. 

Sometimes my life is measured by watching others, seeing how they move through the crowded halls or talk to people I’ll never know. Mac Davis was one of those: seen from the distance or up close in the conversation next to mine. He had a laugh you’d like to shower in, and a smile – all these years later – that said, “Amen! Thisis the place to be...”

He appeared a little late at that small town kid’s 40thbirthday party, slipping in so as to keep the focus on my friend. By then, Kenny Chesney was selling out stadiums by the handful, had won a few Entertainers of the Year Awards and was well on his way to a second greatest hits... But that wasn’t the point of his showing up. Mac Davis came to see his old friend, a kid who’d done well, but someone who’d become part of his family on a threshold where he could celebrate a life-marker because life is what mattered.
The hug they shared was profound. Friend*family*force of love.

More than money, more than fame, more than hit movies, tv shows or songs, the delight of seeing a buddy in the middle of a celebration made his light shine. Having spent more time in Nashville, co-writing and seeing friends, sometimes you’d see him coming out of a restaurant or event, often with Lise, his equally beautiful, equally in love with life companion.
The irony of Davis, with the smoky voice that could be seductive, droll or friendly, was that if you looked at his songs, it was always about bringing people together, giving them love and helping them find the joy that defined his life. Simple stuff, and yet, that’s where it gets tricky. Still, the man who wrote “I Believe In Music” pretty much lived it every single day of his life.

And who knows maybe I'll come up with a song
To make people want to stop all this fussing and fighting
Long enough to sing along

Justin Townes Earle: Godspeed, Saints of Lost Causes + Little Rock & Rollers

I know there's an angel just for rock 'n rollers
Watching over you and your daddy tonight

            -- Steve Earle, “Little Rock & Roller”

Justin Earle never seemed to be afraid of anything. A lanky little boy, he’d turn up sometimes caught on fire and ready to take on the world. By the time, his dad had some success, the dark-headed child with the hubcap eyes that took in everything was immortalized on the second side of the iconic debut Guitar Town.

Caught between Earle’s self-defining declaration “Fearless Heart” and the a capella bluegrass of “On Down The Road,” “Little Rock & Roller” was an aching phone call home. From a payphone somewhere near the Arkansas line. A tiny bit of chanson verité, the erstwhile lullaby – a father stunned his child can answer the phone stumbles into the reality of “I guess I didn’t know you could do that/ Lord help me, have I been gone that long?” – in some ways set Justin Townes Earle’s destiny in motion.

Telling the child not to get his mama, savoring the few stolen minutes before getting back on the bus, Earle absorbs all he can – and tells his son not to be afraid, to get some sleep, to dream and know he’s always loved. Funny how what was once literal can be metaphoric and then literal again.

Justin, with the middle name invoking his father’s mentor and friend Townes Van Zandt, was destined for songs. Even more than the drug addiction he battled from puberty, there were pains in his heart, a joy inside, too, that needed to live in songs. And so, after a few local bands, the inevitable rose – and Justin Townes Earle started carving out a place for himself in the Americana world.

In 2008, The Good Life appeared on Chicago’s insurrective Bloodshot, home to Robbie Fulks, the Mekons, Alejandro Escovedo, the. Bottle Rockets and Neko Case. Stark, it featured Dustin Welch, Chris Scuggs and a very young Amanda Shires on the cover. But just as his father reset Nashville with his bulked-up blue collar rock-country, JTE turpentined everything down to the essence – and wrote a record that. was lonely, broken, hopeful and a bit brash.

That old school charm –chartered in part by Mississippi roots master R.S. Field --  offered an almost time warping trip into ‘50s/’60s taverns where Wurlitzer jukeboxes reigned and the Opry was something people waited for on Saturday night radio’s across the Midwest and Southeast.

A charming record, it introduced a young man with a lot of baggage, two big names to carry around and a musicologist’s sense of what he wanted to embrace – and. where he wanted to go. There was a Dickensian (Charles, but also Jim) innocence to the young man who’d already. OD’d five times – and. had lived to tell, not brag.  

Long legs demi-tucked up and sprawling out under the table of the funky sports bar in East Nashville, on the verge of leaving for the first tour for his first album, we laughed about the déjà vu and the inevitability of it all. Hard to believe the child I’d first met during the sessions for his father’s Exit Zero, the follow-up to Guitar Town, was embarking on the same dream.

Harder still to believe, in a true Ecclesiastes manner, I profiling Justin for The Los Angeles Times, the same way I’d written his father’s first national piece for Tower Pulse all those years ago. We laughed about that, about feeling old, sometimes lost and out of place, but knowing that fate understands what we all merely tilt at.

We talked about the life he’d led, the drugs, the street running, the bad company, the broken heart, the lost child and always the hope. Music and addiction give that to you, but the talent – that’s something you have to home. There’s no genius pass when you’re a songwriter, no “just let it fly” when you were raised around the kinds of artists and music JTE was.

He won the Americana Music Association’s 2009 Best New/Emerging Artist. He showed up in Billy Reid, looking every bit the dapper young artist on the rise in a red velvet suit, closely tailored and retro enough to mirror his sound.
His manager Tracy Thomas, who’d worked for E-Squared when Steve and Jack Emerson founded a small label, looked every bit the proud mama. Known for her tenacity and ability to soothe troubled souls, the woman who’s gone on to manage Jason Isbell and was a force in the Drive-By Truckers’ world, Thomas was midwifing a tender heart who wrote with empathy and the cracked determination of an empty generation seeking their place.

Midnight at the Movies and the gospel-flecked Harlem River Blues continued the walk-about through roots, influences and old school aesthetics. Like Gillian Welch and David Rawlings, Justin understood how to make the antique contemporary, to create a vital sense of now out of something that was so lovingly out of time.
He struggled, too. Yes, he won at 2011 Americana Music Award for Best Song for “Harlem River Blues,” hair parted down the middle like Alfalfa from “The Little Rascals,” round glasses and that scarecrow body. Looking as much Dust Bowl chic as hipster nerd, it seemed Justin was finding a way to be his own man. even if the white-knuckle whispers suggested his demons were always close by.

Still, Justin had that angel quality that made people root for him. Calling from Denmark for a story about Children of the Credibility Revolution, he was thoughtful, disarmingly honest, willing – perhaps too willing -- to talk about the misadventures that were as Earlean as the prodigious gifts of writing and culling music at the source.

When Nothing’s Gonna Change The Way You Feel About Me Now, an album he’d been flirting with when we’d talked, arrived, it was a naked sort of wrestle that reckoned and buckled under the truth of how we mess our lives up. That was Justin’s native ground: loneliness, broken hearts, abandonment, yearning, alienation and always the way shadows inevitably creep up on you.

That sadness and the shuddered off sense of “I’m okay” permeated so much of the music, the kid whose looks were as much Hank Williams Senior as they suggested his own parents offered a refuge for anyone battling disappointment. Listening to Justin Earle, you didn’t feel so alone in your alone. Someone else had been there, his songs suggested, and knew the pain; but also lived to tell, to conjure these soft melodies, these words to let you know you’d make it.

Only somehow, Justin never quite got to the other side. Always slip-ups, backslides, missing chunks. Ultimately, a man’s choices are his own. Justin knew that, too

“Look, I was 20 years old, a junkie on the street,” he said all those years ago. “If you don’t think that’s a dose of reality...I. figured out pretty quick that nothing’s owed me cause of the name I carry.

“Sure, it may get the door open, but then it’s a pretty heavy door, cause it comes with expectations. I’m not intimidated by [the name]... And I’ve always been a fighter – I’ve got the. two fake front teeth to prove it --  so I’m not worried about it.”

Single Mothers and Absent Fathers followed four albums for Bloodshot. Recorded for emo/punk powerhouse indie Vagrant, the two-album song cycle explored that legacy, the wounding and also the marks left. Like everything, there was room on the tracks to let the light come in and the pain out. 

By the time Justin landed on New West, Kids In The Street had a joie du something. Always one to find the bright in the dark, Earle seemed to be seeking a new kind of joy. On the verge of parenthood, perhaps there was a turn. As much a love letter to the scrappy Nashville where he grew up, one of the first razed areas in Nashville’s gentrification, its sweetness outstripped everything. Fatherhood can do that for you.

Still, for all the crossed fingers and held breath, all the second chances and nine lives lived, there was a fragility to Justin that underscored everything. Not quite Jeff Buckley, he understood that the brittle places are the ones that made us precious – and in that, in those songs, perhaps he forged the thing that had gone unstated. His art was not washed in brio, even when he brought bravado to the table – and that allowed the disaffected, the uncertain, the depressed and rejected a comfort and even a bit of dignity.

That his last project was The Saint of Lost Causes seems prescient in the rearview. Evocative, vibey, it pulled you in, twisted his sense of historic, all those influences, he invoked a white working class blues with guitar tones that buzzed and churned inside. He took on truths for the losers, the poor, the cast off, pulled songs out of disparate genres and always put his own sad-eyed self out there.

A gamut run, The Saint of Lost Causes surveyed all the things he’d explored. “Appalachia Nightmare” was raw knuckled Winters Bone kinda stuff, while the acoustic juke of “Don’t Drink the Water” impaled the toxic waters of Flint, Michigan balanced by the must live euphoria of the rockabilly “Flint City Shake It.” There was the atmospheric of “Memphis in the Morning,” a shuffling minimal blues street corner invitation “Say Baby” and the steel-guitar’n’cocktail drum kit self-reckoner “Talking To Myself” to offer the phases and stages of one man trying to move through the world.

Tragedy, triumph, torment. At 38, Justin Earle was too young to be gone. Yet at 38, it’s almost a miracle there were this many years, this many records and songs. Still...
When the social media posts went up, because that’s what we do, someone drew on what was perhaps the best unintended elegy from his catalogue for. his official platforms. Always restless, always seeking, he summed his life up perfectly.

“I've crossed oceans

Fought freezing rain and blowing sand

I've crossed lines and roads and wondering rivers

Just looking for a place to land...”

No cause of death was given, maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe all that matters is that he lived...

Today, tears and songs are all that’s left. For all the people who loved him, the ones closest and two rings out, it’s unthinkable – and for those of us, even those who were the occasional beneficiaries of his conversations and his smiles, there’s the jarring notion of how temporal all this is. 

You're All I've Got Tonight - Ric Ocasek's Gone, Brush Your Rock & Roll Hair

It was cold, steely but not metal. It swirled and encircled you like a cartoon vine, only it was staccato – and the beat was so evident. A tension to it, a tautness that put you on edge, even as you leaned into it. And that sangfroid vocalist, slightly whiny, absolutely penetrating, higher register than Lou Reed, yet just as disaffected.
When “Let the Good Times Roll” poured out of the crappy school car station wagon’s speakers, it still grabbed you by the ears, or the throat, or the heart. Nothing sounded like it. Punk was more fractious. Rock was more bloated. Pop was more hyper. Disco was, well, more shiny.

Like Goldie Locks, this – whatever it was – was just right. Terse, hip, cool – and yes, romantic even its alienation. As a kid raised on Holden Caulfield, this singer was new wave perfection.

And, as Kid Leo throatily told us, he and his partner in the Cars Benjamin Orr, were from Cleveland. Cleveland, Ohio, the rock & roll capitol of the world, where Alan Freed coined the phrase, Chrissie Hynde got that famed “Precious”-invoked abortion, Joe Walsh and the Raspberries and Pere Ubu and the Dead Boys had come from, had done it again. Only maybe better.

Ric Ocasek (oh-KASS-eck) was the praying mantis of rock: tall, thin, long limbs, hidden behind dark glasses with the most amazing structured hair cut. Never menacing or cruel, only wickedly cool and somehow removed from all the trivial things that hung up so many other odd balls and weirdos.

Weirdos, yes, the mainstream preppy kids didn’t get them in their primary colors that suggested Stephen Sprouse, their downtown GQ chic that took the notion of tailoring to a minimalist sense of liquid movement.
Maybe it was because Richard Otcasek was one more too thin ethnic kid in a city born and built on Italians, Irish, Polish, Croatian, Hungarian, German, Lithuanian and more. While it was a melting pot, and getting over was king, you never truly forgot who or what you were – and that awareness gave all of us an outsider status. Whether you were aggressively identified with your country of origin or not, you knew on a cellular level, you were something more/different/other.

But like Andy Warhol, who came from the next town over in the steel corridor, Ocasek and Orr knew there was more. Dreaming could lead to reinvention, the road could take them to a new kind of self. So off to Boston they went, and germinated, sprouted and brought the alienation and hormonal foment—by way of local Boston rock airplay on WBCN -- to a Roy Thomas Baker synth gilded, minimal but slamming rock project

And it slammed. Maybe it was the space on their records – room between instruments on the tracks, space between the words, the whip crack beats, the notes unfurled – that left a place for the thrust to get in.

The Cars – now in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame – were the ones who changed everything. Suddenly, I wasn’t an outlying little girl in a plaid skirt and knee socks being sneered at by the brutal hard punk clerks at Record Revolution on Coventry – the high temple I went to trying to find the latest Stiff release, asking which Akron band was maybe next, or whether Elvis Costello was the Jackson Browne of punk to the spiky haired checkout guy.

No, the Cars made new wave safe, but also tough enough for the boys who thought Blondie and the Ramones were trolling the singles of the ‘50s and ‘60s and the Plasmatics were just shock rock for a new generation. This well-played, well-written, brutally well-recorded music hit the Bad Company/Journey/REO people right between the eyes, and gave the Springsteen/Seger folks enough loser ascending narrative and momentum lift to climb onboard.

Suddenly the playlists at the 7th and 8th grade dances were populated by “My Best Friend’s Girl,” “You’re All I’ve Got Tonight,” “Moving In Stereo,” “Just What I Needed.” The herky jerky dancing giving license to even the most awkward, the clear beat a lighthouse blink of exactly when to step, bounce or lean back. Even the dorky kids could have a moment where their awkward looked like an aesthetic decision.
Who didn’t wanna be the girl with “the suede blue eyes”? Didn’t wanna have nuclear boots and drip-dry gloves? Or be bouncing down the street or dancing neath the starry skies with that sort of unselfconscious abandon? And if it had an impact, well, really?

Before there were John Hughes movies, there was The Cars. Then Candy O, with that fuzzy through a vacuum cleaner hose wah-wah tone on “Let’s Go,” that synth undertow farfisa curling “Lust for Kicks” and the AOR living title track. Not as cataclysmic, perhaps, in terms of a discovery that toppled musical cliques, but solidified their place as a rock band that worked for everyone in a way the Electric Light Orchestra, the Sex Pistols and Tavares never would.
They had a big slot on the World Series of Rock one summer... Was it the Fleetwood Mac headlining one where Stevie Nicks came out to sing on “Ebony Eyes” with Bob Welch? Where Todd Rundgren’s modern interpretative dancer during “Can We Still Be Friends” prompted mockery from the guys I was with, as I tried to explain he was A Wizard, A True Star? Where street corner rocker Eddie Money opened the day?

Sandwiched in the middle, it was the one act everyone could agree on. Even the guys who were just there to see hot Stevie were all about the planed and highly constructed new wave of the Cars. Local heros, sure. But even more importantly, they stripped things down in what they played, came right for the thorax and worked an art school deep freeze as they did it.

If Benjamin Orr, with the softer voice, blue eyes and razor cut blond hair, was “the dreamboat,” Ocasek was the dangerboy. He would stand and watch and wait. He knew things, things he might or might not share. Might or might not lift those ever-present wrap-around shades. Might or might not acknowledge a desire to be loved, even though it was all over the songs.

I left Cleveland, moved to Florida. Lived out by Military Trail, where nobody ever ventured. Played golf on some of the second tier clubs and resort courses as a “prep golfer,” as high school teams were then called. I was lost in an unrelatable world of stupid jock boys, feathered hair girls and an anti-intellectualism that choked me. They didn’t even have real record stores!

Peaches in Fort Lauderdale, a county and a half away, was a high temple I was not allowed to drive to, and the weird record store that smelled of mildew, rotting cardboard and really tired weed nearby was all there was. In a dying strip mall with a grocery store designed for those just above the poverty line, the “record store” catered to those folks and sold white label, generic black type 8-tracks and cassettes.

Panorama came in, and didn’t move in the redneck town where we lived. I picked it up for 99 cents, and lived by the creeping synths of “Touch and Go.” That attenuated “All I need is what you’ve got/ All I tell is what you’re not... All you know is what you need, dear/ I get this way when you get near...”

My knees would go weak, my pulse would quicken. Then the spaghetti Western beat/melody would pick up, sweep the redneck awfulness into a neat dust whirl that made me laugh about where I’d been exiled. There was no new wave antihero coming to save me, no John Cusak type who’d recognize that beyond the monogrammed sweater and sharkskin green golf shorts was an alienated heart looking for an outcast dream.

But the promise of “Misfit Kid,” “Down Boys,” and even “You Wear Those Eyes” reminded me I just had to survive two seasons of high school golf, get to college and believe. There was a tribe out there, waiting for me... waiting for every other disaffected hipster kid who looked around the rah-rah high school shenanigans, and rolled their eyes.

College radio set me free. If the Cars seemed to be rutted up, assigned a lesser role in what was current or perhaps a moment of salvation in the rearview mirror, Ocasek’s heart stayed true. He produced the Bad Brains. He made more experimental records. He merged with Romeo Void for the incendiary “Never Say Never,” as Deborah Iyall hissed a whole other acid rain of diss at a judging and rejecting guy. Sizzling with menace, she chorused, “I might like you better if we slept together/Something in your eyes says never... Baby, NEVER... say... never...”

Ocasek took the rejection of the too tall, too thin, too nerdy, too introverted boy and turned it inside out for a nurse uniform-sporting, tossled explosion of mahogany curls, buoyantly built Iyall. Suddenly the girl nobody picked was a spider monkey of acrimony and sexual vengeance, morphing every slight into a slow burning, white hot melt you to the core vocal napalmist.

And that was the deal: Ocasek took your pain, your frozen inability to respond, the humiliations dealt and sometimes received without the other person even knowing and transformed it a liberation that was aggressive euphoria.

When Phoebe Cates, the “it” girl of the moment, flashed her billion watt smile on the diving board in “Fast Times At Ridgemont High,” then bounced on the end – no subtle metaphor there – only one song could play. And play “Living In Stereo” did, as she took off her bikini top and plunged into the icy blue pool. No telling how many moments of masculine self-abuse were launched by the short clip of Amy Heckerling’s directorial debut, but Cameron Crowe, who wrote the book and script, more than understood.

Acts so vitally aligned to cosmic zeitgeist should never, ever be counted out. When MTV launched, the angular front man – who seemingly had as much in common the David Byrne as Lou Reed’s downtown aesthetics – was uniquely poised to stand out in the new visual realm.
Shake It Up preceded MTV by just a skosh, but not enough to miss the nascent days of a medium blowing up. The video for the title track won the first MTV Video of the Year Award, and the band’s lean morph suited a channel that usurped terrestrial radio in its ability to light flashfires.

Suddenly, the Cars – my Cars – were back, bigger than ever. The post-art school rock/popists lassoed hooks, used churning grooves, employed those flat vocals against plates of synthesizers, tumbling drums gated for that odd crispness of each beat, the guitars that never ever went away.

Even when Ocasek, clearly the leader, wasn’t the focal point, somehow he rose into a new realm of “wow.” When Orr’s yearning “Drive,” from Heartbeat City, became ubiquitous – and the blue-toned black & white video was airing seemingly hourly, the band tefloned themselves from burn-out by hiring the model of the moment Paulina Porzikova.
The video, capturing those singular moments of inconsolability, isolation even from oneself, worry for the beloved in such a state, was packed with S-O-S signals of universal recognition. Yes, she was beautiful, but she was each of our doppelgangers with her dark structured bangs, massive cheekbones and lips swollen but not cartoonish. She made out of control pain and anguish somehow okay – and Ocasek, locked in a supporting role, as well as a chair in his own sequences, somehow got the girl.

Mantis and the model, even more than beauty and the beast. Beyond a shared Eastern European lineage, though, they were quiet artists, thinkers, seekers, recognizers of how much more pop culture contained. If we failed to recognize that – and most did – there were always the pictures of them at events smiling, showing the joy of being seen and celebrated.

Smiling was another mantle of hope. After being a witness to the kind of pain that paralyzes, after distilling the rage inside, the frustration of spite in a culture of jocko cool, look who got the ultimate girl?! See them laughing! Grinning! Living life, seeking higher ground, finding the kind of connection, inspiration, stimulation we all crave.

And if Ocasek faded a bit from view – his solo albums never had the massive success of his band, though 1986’s This Side of Paradise still occasionally finds its way into the lost hours especially “Emotion In Motion” – his creative light never dimmed. As a producer, he helmed albums for Bad Religion, Weezer, Jonathan Richman, Nada Surf, the Cribs, Pink Spiders, Suicide and part of No Doubt’s equally ubiquitous. Rock Steady.
It was always about the quest – seeking things through music that perhaps could not be realized in normal interaction. In a world that judges by looks – no matter what your Mama tells you – Ocasek figured another plane to move the discussion to. It was a place of deeper value, more raw truth and confession, the willingness to put the cards on the table because vulnerability was couched in a tempest of rock/punk/new wave plumes. It made you dance. It set you free, fist punching the night as sweat rolled down your body. It worked.

I was sitting in “Raising Hell,” the wonderful documentary about Texas political columnist Molly Ivins. The unlikely writer used wit to punch holes in hypocritical ballast, pompous assery and a general lack of common sense also tore through what was to bind us together through our “other” status. That’s when my cell phone started vibrating in my pocket in a theater with a strict no texting policy. They’re serious: they’ll pull your well-rounded bottom out of your seat.

How important could be it at 7 pm on a Sunday? Right? Emerging from the theater, I looked. Fourteen texts. From friends across America. All rock & roll true believers. All faithful acolytes of the way music moves you through the worst and heightens the best.
Still exhausted from eulogizing Eddie Money, with two assignments due, a sore throat most likely from a red eye two nights before, I sat in my car frozen. Who’s gonna drive you home, indeed. Exhaling more than inhaling, I texted my movie squad, getting a one word response from Hayes Carll that started with “F.” My thoughts exactly.

Coming out of a movie about someone who transmuted cultural norms and expectations to move through the clogged arteries of “how it’s done” to forge communities of people who thought they were alone, how does this happen? And yet, it does.

Jon Pareles, an early champion of the band at Rolling Stoneand now lead critic at The New York Times wrote, “In the Cars, Mr. Ocasek’s lead vocals mixed a gawky, yelping deadpan with hints of suppressed emotion, while his songs drew hooks from basic three-chord rockabilly and punk, from surf-rock, from emerging synth-pop, from echoes of the Beatles and glam-rock and from hints of the 1970s art-rock avant-garde.”
Technically, that pretty much nails it. But listening to Live from the Agora from 1978, tears spill down my cheeks. It’s amazing how knowing innocence can be. I was in many ways a 35-year old cocktail waitress at 12, yet my heart beat for cleaner, simpler things – and raged against how crummy and selfish the world around me seemed. No one’s fault, just the momentum of how it is, what’s expected and the pre-ordained realm of the golden ones who we would never be.

It was all so black and white like the checkered flag on the Panorama cover, so cherry red high sheen lip gloss and massive white teeth the debut cover promised, so Vargas girl in repose on the Candy-Ocover: tropes co-opted for rest of us, storming the walls of Versailles, looking for cake or at least a few songs we can dance to.

Don’t Go To Strangers - Russell Smith: An Ace, An Old Friend + An Echo of a Moment

Thirty thousand or so feet above everything, late and tired. With the ear buds in, the demos – all top shelf kind of awesome – go rolling by. Heady stuff, and the kind of songs mere mortals never get to hear, because they’re saved for artists whose singles can generate the kind of money that pays more than mortgages, expensive cars and college tuition.

And then that voice. That voice. The kind of voice that can get on top of a basic rock drum kit with a clean, solid beat and a guitar that coils and swaggers as it works the melody like a hooker in a pair of expensive heels, just let those vowels ride it like the wave they’ve all been waiting for. Six foot nine and glassy, he best waves are all sheen and crash – and the steam coming off that humid tenor, not quite smoky, not quite earthy clay, was undeniable.

I could feel the blood draining from my face. A chorus, everything falls away – except the beat, which finds the voice weighing the reality of the situation as a rush of the tempo picks up and the song builds again. The velocity of the arrangement displays the urgency, the singer stacks the truths, knowing “If I leave right now...,” he can change everything.

But the singer knows, she’s leaving. Not just leaving him, but leaving for somewhere. California, a dream, a life, some other than what she’s had with the hero. Russell Smith, a son of Lafeyette, Tennessee, had always been able to twist the complexities of life and wring them into fecund songs.

The demo says Tom Shapiro, no slouch of a songwriter. Obviously, one of – if not the only – writer on “If I Leave Right Now,” with the boast, “I could reach around and clip. Those pretty wings/ Before she flies to her California dreams/ She could never say no to me/ I know she won’t go...”
Sit there and drink, chase the girl and bring her back. Is it ambivalence? One more toxic male who won’t bother? Or some hard-boiled cowboy who knows some women aren’t meant to be held down, held back, held.
Mouth dry, my stomach lurched. What do you say? Who do you tell?

In life, there are those moments that seem so significant, then mean seemingly nothing at all. But you’re tagged, by the charge, the laughter, the whispered long distance, coiling and uncoiling the telephone chord in those hours when normal people are asleep. You talk about literature, rock & roll tours, missing the Grammys the year you win “beating Dolly & Porter, and that just shouldn’t happen.” You discuss theories of sobriety, people you know, people you don’t, people you’ve heard of, as well as the holes that open between people, caverns that swallow the good things and leave jagged shores of anger, misunderstanding, frustration.

Oh, and an album called This Little Town.

See, Russell Smith had been the big shot lead singer of the Amazing Rhythm Aces, known for the tawdry unapologetic cheap hook-up “Third Rate Romance,” the cheating lament “Amazing Grace (Used To Be Her Favorite Song)” and the Grammy-winning almost. gospel “The End Is Not In Sight.” He’d also written big ‘80s hits for John Conlee (“Old School”), Randy Travis (“Look Heart No Hands”) and T Graham Brown (“Don’t Go To Strangers”), later Texas guitarist/vocalist Lee Roy Parnell (“The Rock”).

Leave it to an L.A transplant to Sony Nashville’s A&R. Department named Larry Hamby, who also signed Blaster Dave Alvin as a solo and DC folkie Mary Chapin Carpenter, believed the post-Urban Cowboythrall had room for a sultry Music Row meets Muscle Shoals rocker with roots in gospel, country, bluegrass. The downstroke firm, the ability to hit the note head-on, but also to slither in was a best of both worlds proposition – and the writing was personal, detailed, yet you could see all kinds of people in the laments, the shuffles, the midtempo. ruminations.

It wasn’t an album destined to change the face of anything, but in a lounge lizard Nashville framed by men with back-combed chest-fur pillowing gold nugget medallions, bolo ties and girls with rooster spiked hair, it felt worn and honest. The songwriting was solid – the title track captured small town communication with the wistful truth “Mrs. White tells Mrs. Brown/Before you know it’s all over town,” the faded kid making do “Jenny Hold On,” the dobro-bending, Louvin-feeling harmonies on “Anger & Tears,” the big city girl “riding through the concrete canyons of New York” haunting him on “The Colorado Side” – and that voice, equal parts good bourbon, dried tobacco leaves and very old brandy.
More than anything, Smith wrote of loss, compromised dreams, the hard piece of heartache. Even more profoundly, he didn’t write master tragedies, but squalid truths that existed behind bad neon that flickered and buzzed, cheap motels with chipped linoleum, a dank smell and sheets that didn’t feel good. It wasn’t that people weren’t faithful, it’s that life made it so hard to be true; Smith – unblinking – wrote what he saw.
“When The Night Comes To Call,” like Joe Cocker’s “When The Night Falls,” was a grown-up consideration of congress. But for Cocker, it was the known, the consumed by a fidelity of the soul. Smith wasn’t that holy; he recognized the raw desire and the need to feel another, especially one who evoked what was already lost. There was a stateliness to hanker, the right hand on the piano rising and the left kneading bottom chords, a Bob Seger-feeling acoustic guitar. sweeping up any stray bits of emotion.

No regrets here, no judgement. Sometimes being lost in the flesh is all you can do. Why look back? Why look down? Burn the moment ‘til it’s gone, embrace what is – and feel that delivery by. raging fire.
Country music used to be for adults. There was a sexual knowing, frankness even, and acceptance. True love isn’t always, but the need for release, for connection, the illusion of kindness is relentless. And so, This Little Town.

Liz Thiels, a publicist with unwavering taste and a strong sense of narrative, understood why an artist like this, one more tangential than straight WSM Country would move me. Not just the Eagles tours, or Don Kirschner’s “Rock Concert” appearances. Opening acts were once as strong as the headliners, often – like Little Feat or NRBQ, even the Replacements – more adventurous.
The interview – by phone, the first of so many ponderous phone calls – was vast: how songs formed, truths pulled away from the obvious, hooks done properly held them down. Was it for Country Song Round Up? Tune-In? Tower Pulse? Doubtful The LA Times, or Rolling Stone.
Doesn’t matter, like so many of the publications above, Russell Smith is gone.

Just saw the news, somewhere. Russell Smith, RIP. Basic facts, a few song titles, the request – in lieu of flowers – to donate to the Macon County High School Band. Internment in the Testament Primitive Baptist Cemetery says that, finally, the man who sang, “my soul cries out for rest, but the end is not in sight...” has found his final reward.

Funny the things you remember about first meetings. He wasn’t much taller than me, and his hair was like soft, dark brillo. Wearing all black, slimming, lengthening. Not auspicious for a man seeking to be a country star – something he laughed about, appreciating the irony; later skewering fame jockeying with “Jerry Fontaine (& His Screaming Guitar).” Somehow, with eyes that sparkled with life, it felt right for the songs.

Like a captured animal, he was killing time in a holding banquet room in the Stouffers Hotel, where he would soon sing in a ballroom for people he needed. Was it Country Radio Seminar? A NACA Convention? IBMA? IEBA? I do not remember, nor did it matter. He’d written hits; he’d won a Grammy. He didn’t need, just wanted a reason to get out there and play.

And for all the Southern soul to his soft rock-tempered country, he really liked the hard stuff. Loved Tammy, as well as Conway, and Jones. He would talk about obscure tracks, laugh about the way vowels got stretched, notes tumbled or suspended, then smack his lips about how good it was.

A member of MENSA, a kid who watched Tennessee find its way, a seeker or maybe a wonderer, he was mostly a father of two boys, a recent divorcee with a wife who left for the one thing a man can’t give her. He was bitter, trying to cope, seeking higher ground, hoping for more, harder than he ever intended. He was funny, and he liked to talk.
And so we did. Politics. Religion. Broken hearts. Promises that unraveled. Hopes that you steer by. Al Green. Foster & Lloyd. Movies no one saw. Faulkner. Twain. Laughter. Outrage. Sam Kinison. What was going to happen to country music. Would it matter? And why are existentialist wells such a pain to fall into?

You fall into confessions and communion with people. Never planned, rarely sacramental. Just there you are, profane and seeking. In this case, I was California – and he was Tennessee. He told me he thought I looked like a kid, couldn’t believe I was the music critic Holly Gleason. I replied something about sounding taller on records. We laughed.
For a period of time, we would meet up. David Kidd, when it was two stories. Hide and seek in a book store, or more “find me.” But you could park yourself somewhere interesting, and when the other showed didn’t matter. And when they did, always plenty to talk about.
And as intriguing as his singing voice was, there was something about his speaking voice. Warm, with a real strength to it. And softness. A voice you could sink into, feel welcome and reassured. Everything we’re looking for in life, only it’s a mirage. You could hear them when he talked.

Funny thing, though, about being friends with grown-ups, real life takes them away. You can twist for days in someone’s life, run your fingers over their books, marvel at their heavy wooden furniture, or family photos, but it’s not the same as being there day in and out. It’s not like pitching a tent, claiming your ground and dropping an anchor.
No, you drift and the line breaks. What you love about the other person, it doesn’t go away. Occasionally, you’ll have a random encounter, a run-in or an overlap. You smile the smile of one who roots for the other, asks all the right questions, look all the way to the. Back of their eyes – and watch the soul shine.

One latte spring night we sat outside the Bluebird, on the curb, talking about nothing. Just because. The night bugs weren’t swarming, but had to occasionally be wiped out of our mouths, and still we sat, talking and laughing. It was easy like that, elusive in ways the sex he often sang of wasn’t.

Not quite that last bit before daybreak, he made some joke about being old and hoping he could get up. Then confessed he had the boys coming over early, reached out, offered me his hand and said, “We both probably oughta be getting home.”
And that was that, melting into the steel grey of a new day fixing to happen.
It’s been years now since whenever the last time I saw him. There were incredible songs – the heartbreaking post-divorce “The Home for Unwed Fathers” comes to mind – and Amazing Rhythm Aces reunions; collaborations as the hilarious soulgrass Run CnW, with his friends Jim Photoglo, Bernie Leadon and Vince Melamud.

What you have with people can be so vivid, so incandescent, it always shines when you close your eyes. You can hear the voice, and that butterscotch thread melts inside you. It’s easy to keep moving, working, being – and get pulled away.
Until you’re sitting on a plane, slicing through those same lost hours, hearing a voice without introduction and everything gives way. Even when you hold your poker face, your inner dam collapses. But after so much time, what do you say?

Tonight, nothing. Russell Smith is gone. But really, he’d been gone, just a hint of scent on the humidity here and there. Maybe someone who knew we knew each other, carrying news. Or a random bit of music. And it’s okay, or as okay as it can be.

Having had that life intersect mine for however many months, it was glorious. As glorious as the music, as alive and flickering as a flame. I could rue the time lost, or I could be amazed at what was. Me, I’ll choose the music, and the memories, be thankful for what I had – and maybe remember to embrace the ones who’ve moved beyond a little more.

15 July 2019

Ooooh, Child: Valerie Carter's Stone's Throw To Heaven

It was the cutest hat. Slouchy and short brimmed, close to the head like a cloche, but limper. There was a ribbon band, rumpled and all the way around the crown, with some antique-looking flowers – possibly pansies, possibly posies -- pinned just above the temple behind the eye that was cast in shadow.

It was ragamuffin chic, slightly waifish, slightly bohemian, definitely post-hippie. The mousey brown hair hung straight – and the eyes, knowing a bit too much, looked straight into me. Or possibly straight out, as the poster hung above the racks of 8-tracks, that were hung behind locked glass sliders in the suburban strip mall record store.

7 March 2017

Rickie Lee Jones may or may not have happened yet, but there was a sense that with Linda Ronstadt ascending – and Emmylou Harris also rising as the hippie princess of hillbilly music by way of Laurel Canyon – eclectic girls were about to be “in favor.” Bonnie Raitt, who’d captured my imagination with “Angel from Montgomery,” was her own continent, one draped in the blues, just as Joni Mitchell was an émigré from folk and Carole King had moved beyond the tundra of Tin Pan Ally,

Valerie Carter was cute as bug. Like an earthier, yet more worldly and sophisticated version of the groovy babysitters I idolized. She seemed beyond running off with the Children of God religious sect, or getting busted bringing a lid of grass back from Mexico, or even just having the misfortune of a bad acid trip at the Rapid Transit platform under the Terminal Tower. This was a sophisticated kind of squalor for sure.

I pinched that ten dollar bill from Christmas or the Honor Roll or whatever my grandmother had pressed it upon me, and looked up. I didn’t know what sepia was then, only thought it was an old black and white from long ago that somehow held the image of a modern girl who’d distilled flapper ennui, free love innocence and Willa Cather and John Steinbeck’s post-Dust Bowl starkly gaunt forbearance.

I’d had my heart set on something else, but the hat got me. As did her utterly guileless knowing. Whatever it was, I wanted in. I just hoped it didn’t suck.

***

Fender Rhodes, literally electric keyboards in cases the size of writing desks, have this velvety bell tone to them. A few descending chords, passing notes littered between, a rising brass section, and a voice caressing the words, “Oooh, child, things are gonna get easier…” I melted right into the dust and shellac’ed  hardwood floor of our airless attic.

How did this woman I’d never met, never heard of get it so completely. A family rife with strife, we were anything but a Norman Rockwell portrait – and I was anything but the classic bright shiny high achiever that I’d learned to show the world. Though I achieved and shone, what roiled beneath the surface – doubt, anxiety, concern for and about those around me – was a powerful churning.

And in one verse of a song made popular by The Five Stairsteps, I felt like things could get better. A weightless seemed to lift up from my carcass, drifting soft and without gravity. No imperative or directive, no empiric evidence given, just the caress of that voice promising that this, too, shall pass was the agency of my condition.

Valerie Carter had that gift: she could make you believe impossible things with a tone that was somewhere between ridiculously expensive satin and the lushest sink-into-it velvet. Her soprano, like the embodiment of afternoon or first morning sunlight, glistened in your ears, somehow moved beneath your neural centers like a glider on a balmy, still night.

Even more wondrous were all the phases Just A Stone’s Throw passed through. Aural pictures painted against economical playing – the almost Tom Waits’ free noir of the well-past closing time’s wash-out “Back to Blue Some More,” the churning gospel soul of the title track, the faltering reggae undertow of “Ringing Doorbells in the Rain,” the raw hillbilly yearn of “Face of Appalachia,” not to mention the Earth, Wind + Fire-backed blue-eyed funk of “City Lights.”

Rumor had it – cause once I knew, I started hoovering up any scrap of information I could find – she was Lowell George’s girl. Little Feat’s “Fat Man in the Bath Tub,” with a proclivity for overalls and a musical gumbo that could sweat the Crescent City’s grisgris with the fringe of country and the undulation of rhythm & blues understood hybrid vigor. Carter’s rare instrument, her tone but also her ability to turn emotions inside out, was suited to it all.

Before I was a music critic, I didn’t bother with the delineations, just the way the music made me feel. Stone’s Throw made me real in a hopeful way, my hunger for knowing, tasting, feeling many things more rational than merely the product lacking focus from my dyslexia. The songs dipped into so many veins and wells of emotions, it suited my not-quite-teenage hormonal swings like a second skin.

And that girl on the cover? That was the me I’d be in a perfect world… without a uniform, expectations, a limited budget, my mother harping, the ghosts behind my eyes. She was cool, and funky, and hip, and somehow just shabby enough to not be an uptight rich girl at Beachwood Place, the expensive mall with a real Saks Fifth Avenue in a suburb near our modest brick home.

She had cooler friends, too. Linda Ronstadt, Little Feat’s Lowell George and Billy Payne, James Taylor. Earth, Wind & Fire! Lots of names I knew from the back of the records, people I spent hours with – and felt like I had relationships with based on the songs they wrote or sang. They scraped at what my mundane existence was made of, and somehow made my heart flicker with a desire that seemed more.

Even the boy she loved – that damned “Cowboy Angel” – seemed like the kinda romantic foil I could understand. As a harmonica bled out and her voice opened up on the long syllables, the note struck wide and full, strong without overpowering, she was a real girl wanting an actual, if elusive, boy.

Frustrated by the prep school boys who just seemed dumb, caught up in things that just didn’t  seem important, this “Cowboy Angel” was the accessible answer to the guy Bonnie Raitt was pining for in “Angel To Montgomery.” What I didn’t understand in the moment: Carter’s angel was in close proximity, Raitt’s cowboy had grown mythic – and smaller than a horizon spec -- over time.

It’s all perspective, but you don’t know that when you’re young, on fire and waiting for your destiny to begin. Instead, you sigh into your pillow, listen to your records on eternal repeat and mainline all those emotions you can only access by listening to the words smeared across rock, pop, r&b and even new wave melodies.

 My ultimate genuflection to Valerie Carter came later that summer. On Running on Empty, Jackson Browne’s paean to roadlife – something as a competitive golfer I knew a little more about than the garden variety middle schooler – she co-wrote “Love Needs A Heart.” A secret handshake of a song, it spoke volumes to the states of self-inflicted human bondage that come with always being gone, never being around people you can truly trust and, especially, being shattered by those you do.

Rather than one more rootless rolling stone song, the high messiah of the way long gone countenance, this was a song of reckoning and the price paid – or even extracted – for the life, but also the damage already incurred. That’s what nobody tells you when you’re acting brave, sucking it up, shaking it off, pretending it’s for the best: all of that face saving for one’s dignity comes with a cost.

And you know that it’s Carter who tempers Browne and George. Only a woman would profess,
“Proud and alone, cold as a stone
I’m afraid to believe the things I feel
I can cry with the best, I can laugh with the rest
But I’m never sure when it’s real…”

That’s some powerful vertigo. But also exactly how it happens. You pave over your embarrassment, your hurt, your anger at the disbelief of what just happened -- and you stop trusting what you know, being able to honor those emotions that are right there.

With a piano part any serviceable seventh grader could play, Jackson Browne rues and confesses his personal treason. It’s the tale of leaving when he confesses he’s broken this woman’s heart, and in that first verse, it feels like what a thousand other guilt douching songs sound like.

But then it turns, the stakes add up. Maybe a man could’ve written what comes next, but quite possibly not. As the second verse bottoms out, the revelation dawns.

“Love won’t come near me, she don’t even hear me

She walks by my vacancy sign
Love needs a heart, trusting and blind
I wish that heart was mine…”

By the time Valerie Carter – opening Browne’s tour to good notices and obvious fertile creative winds (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZxBAYr9p4kI) – co-wrote “Love Needs A Heart,” plenty must have happened. The sylph urchin had been banged around a bit by life, or “the life,” and now was counting up her scrapes and bruises, weighing the risks and considering the damage. Not to mention the ultimate truth: once you know, you can’t not know.

And so, Valerie Carter put her heart in a song she didn’t sing. She carried on, like singers do, the music too potent a force to let go.  Once you make your way in or through songs, there rarely is another path to travel.

Wild Child, the next record, bore witness to it. A tight cropped head shot – echoing Diana Ross’ Diana­ – was sleek, slick, technically gorgeous, somehow clinically detached. This gamine was haute everything, Scavullo-esque in her high forehead and higher cheekbones, but her eyes had enough of the dilation, you had to wonder what other highs she might be sailing, what numbing strategies she’d devised.

I remember hearing Wild Child on the stereo at Record Theater, played – as all in-store play was – to entice the customers to lay down their hard-earned dollars. It was shapeless soft rock/jazz lite stuff, perfect for chilled Chablis and Virginia Slims’ uber thin cigarettes crowd. Perfect for the richer Mommies. Technically perfect, more than a little cold, the fire and raw passion that dripped from her notes was gone – much like the disco precision that was rising all around the suburbs, chasing a thrill and a high that was never truly there, even with your nose stuffed with cocaine.

I didn’t buy that record, didn’t hide my disappointment. Didn’t know what to say, or even why it mattered. I doubled down on Stone’s Throw, knowing sometimes one record that holds so much is worth more than a wheelbarrow of careers from the REO Speedwagons, Styxs, Rushs and Deep Purples.

And I got on with living, with trying to figure out why and how. Not just to survive, but what happens next, where shall the road take me when it’s finally time to take me away. Sometimes we make deals with ourselves to make the best of where we are. Sometimes we get vertigo or just lose our way. Sometimes our hearts break in ways we can’t even explain, don’t always know or understand -- and the world doesn’t care – so you soldier on.

Valerie Carter was a brave soldier in the realm of song and reason, romance and how it goes. She’d paid her money, took the ride, shimmered so brightly, she’d still turn up on records like Don Henley’s The End of the Innocence, and remained James Taylor’s favorite female back-up vocalist.

Mostly, though, she disappeared. To Florida. To relative obscurity, occasionally circling back for the music, but mostly, staying out of harm’s way.

When the news hit that she’d passed from this world, Taylor’s socials carried in part this remembrance, “…Valerie was an old soul and as deep as a well. Her voice came from her life and her life was a steep, rocky road. I believe that we can hear it, whenever the music is that crucial, when the song is saving someone’s life….”

Saving someone’s life. Oooh, child. Never mind the latter day scrapes with law enforcement, with courts of law, with Taylor himself paying for your out-of-state in-patient treatment and coming to your drug court graduation. Forget all the disappointments and promises made along the way nobody bothered to fulfill.

We can’t know the things that go unspoken or unseen. We can only hope that free, she is a shaft of light as pretty as those high notes she’d twirl around on, sparkle like the naughty twinkle in her eye. Sometimes freedom isn’t until the next life – and sad as we all are, maybe that’s the truth to hang onto.

George Michael: I Want Your Sex... & Faith; Another Passes As Christmas Dawns

They were adorable. George Michael with the greatest hair since Farrah Fawcett Major’s backswept wave of honey gold, and cheek bones that crested as plateaus of desire on a face of pure Dionysus. Andrew Ridgeley, his by no means slouch of a wing man, more plausible for the average girls sighing and screaming, reduced to swampy panties and utter hysteria at the waft of the Brit duo known as Wham! UK.

Squeaky clean, perfectly PG. “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” was pure bubble gum with a whole milk chaser. “Careless Whisper,” the angsty whispered ballad, suggested betrayal, but how? Who could be so reckless with either of these boys with the gilded tans, the pearly white teeth, the seemingly perfect manners.

As MTV was establishing dominance, Wham! was a panacea that worked for everyone – the little girls who understood the rush of hormones, the women who breathed in the young buck musk and pined for that youthful erotica, the parents who felt they were safe quarry for their daughters and the concert promoters, who made the pair’s first – and ultimately only American tour – a stadium-sized proposition.

Heck, George Michael even dated that paragon of chastity Brooke Shields, a woman whose virtue – in spite of supermodel status and controversial films roles – rivaled iconic ‘50s good girl Sandra Dee. You don’t get much more wholesome, and yet…

For all the “good boy” patina of Wham!, there was an undercurrent of erogenous intent that was palpable. Too good looking, too breathless, too somehow unsettled; the bruised heart of “Careless Whisper” with the swelling sax and churning melody was a bit too fraught to be more boy band fodder.

Originally coming from the realm of rap, I remember talking with the guys from Whodini on the first Swatch Watch Fresh Fest about the UK darlings that merged pop and soul. The Thomas Dolby-produced “Magic’s Wand” trio knew all about the “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” duo; they had toured together and talked collaboration. There was some real and some street on the cute boys from England, no matter how many day-glo t-shirts, perfect blow drys and shapeless linen blazers they sported. 

And then it was over. Rumbles and stray shards of gossip. Egos and credit-grabbing, conflicting notions of who, what and why; like so many ragingly successful acts before, the tension and outside influences won. Seemingly tragic, yet ultimately, the notion that perhaps the glorious looking Michael did have a musical bent a la Michael Jackson and Prince, something steeped in deep soul, filled with melody that wrapped around your ears and hung on.

When “Faith” dropped, the quick beats and the sweep you up vocal that brought a taut line between desire and fidelity, Michael was undeniable. If the new romantic wave that brought Duran Duran, ABC, Culture Club and the Thompson Twins in on a tide of videogenics and synthesizers – and the accompanying “Faith” clip absolutely beef-caked the dark haired songwriting – Faith was a testament to swooping soul, revved up rhythms and languishing desire stretched across ballads with candle wax poured for emphasis.

That slow burn permeated the steamy “Father Figure,” a noir sort of dance song as much “West Side Story” dramatics as it was breathy come on/fidelity pledge. Slightly anonymous, slightly driven by the rhythm of a beating heart, Michael played a cab driver in the accompanying video without ever prissying it up for the camera. Just a regular working stiff with a 5 o’clock shadow and hours to go until he sleeps; but oh when he gets there…

All of this to sift through the rubble of what was. The news that George Michael was dead crashed our Christmas dinner via friends dropping by for thick slices of bouche du Noel, one more pop culture depth charge with unintended consequences. Because with all the loss this year – Bowie, Prince, Leon Russell, Guy Clark amongst many – enough is enough, and at 53, George Michael is way too young.

George Michael, the beautiful amatory, had passed into ether. After a series of stumbles and falls from grace – the Beverly Hills’ men’s room arrest for soliciting sex, the confession to being gay on CNN, the several arrests for drug use, the notorious law suit with Sony US that may’ve stunted his career – it’s hard to remember the price of trying to follow one’s muse and integrity.

Instead we have that hunk who knew how to thread iconics, to balance the come on and the reassurance with his quarry. When Michael was still ambiguous about his own preferences, “I Want Your Sex” was lobbed on pop radio with a force that made it ubiquitous. The horn’n’guitar slashed middle chunk was Bootsy Collins/George Clinton light, as the lyric empowered the listener to give in to their hedonistic desires.

For a guy who once made desire an innocent commodity, he was no decriminalizing whatever got you through the night. Never afraid to be the beefcake, he raised the stakes for everyone listening out in radioland or watching on MTV: find your passion, feed your bliss, let your freak flag fly.

Like Madonna, George Michael was working the boundaries of what was acceptable. So damned good looking, he could get away with unthinkable things – girls in merry widows’n’garters shot strictly for their bottom – and make most people crave more. One had to wonder what all the seemingly polite songwriter craved, too, because that kind of hungry isn’t something conjured as a matter of exercise.

 Somewhere in the flyover, I smiled while I watched the deliciousness. The gorgeous on display, the throb that slowed down rhythms elicited, the blatant, almost voyeuristic way the camera moved across this body, that beautiful face. If hot girls had been flaunting their charm for years, Michael decriminalized a non-muscle-bound swagger that was confident, but looking for satiation.

Whether he was or wasn’t, who cared? He brought it – no matter who you were. Omnisexual in terms of his draw, everyone with sight would have to want him. Like Tom Ford, when he took over Gucci, Michael understood the sex-positive nature of lush, body scraping designs – second skins that melt and move with you.

 It seemed, in the late ‘80s, like another galaxy had exploded with the brooding Greek songwriter. If he understood major chords and bright melodies, how to make a beat pop, rush or lean in, swirl desire like ice in a drink, the world – not just America – was guzzling it down. Faith was inescapable; the title track giving way to “Father Figure,” “I Want Your Sex” becoming the raison d’etre for a world crawling from the first wave of AIDS sobriety to reclaim their joy.

 If “One More Try” suggested an elegiac Elton John ballad and “Kissing A Fool” felt like a torch ballad that was equal parts Dean Martin and  Sara Vaughan, the album was a carnival of beats and grooves that suggested the phases of a lycra bound aerobics class sweating to utter perfection. “Hand To Mouth” percolated, “Look at Your Hands” swagger with sweltering sax punctuations and “Monkey” took its staccato dance punch from bits of the Beatles’ “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road,” Bowie’s most brazen Let’s Dance pieces and a bit of Cameo funk whiplash.

 The foment and churn took all the excess of Studio 54 and distilled it into a post new wave gasp and release. Who didn’t wanna get laid? And suddenly this caramel colored beauty with the great butt – which he had no compunction about shaking for the camera – and great mind – these were smart songs about the greatest frontier since Eve handed Adam that apple – emerged unapologetic and wide-open celebrating not just coupling, but being coupled.

Whatever may happen later, in this moment, George Michael made sex almost safe, something you, me, everyone must have. The collective panting could be heard any time his videos were on MTV. Staid ladies would whisper, rent boys would wink and the pretty girls would throw their hands up as they howled along with the songs on the radio or in the club.

Then came the high concept, grainy black and white “Freedom! ‘90” video. Exhausted by being the beefcake bulls eye of the new decade, Michael tapped David Fincher to vamp on the celebrated British Vogue cover that featured the five definitive supermodels of the era: Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista, Tatjana Patitz, Christy Turlington.

The result was even more libidinous and pulse quickening than Michael’s previous work. As the women mouthed lyrics to the verses, strutting, rolling in the sheets, soaking in a large enough for two bath, coming in and out of the frames, the implicit fantasy was overpowering – and the underlying convergence of sex*music*fashion was intoxicating, all were one, one was all. 

And if Michael was pushing away from being objectified, the man wasn’t eschewing sex, want or coital bliss in any way, shape or form. With a snake-hipped rhythm, as much Brazil as Nile Rodgers’ Chic, the song suggested the ultimate erotic thrust was freedom – to go, but also to stay.

At least, on the surface. But the man who tagged his “I Want Your Sex” video with a lipstick fuschia “Explore Monogamy” was always working three layers beneath the surface. If you plugged into the lyric or the iconography, “Freedom” suggested a man still looking for the climax, but unwilling to be the donkey to pin your fantasies to.

Between setting fire to the “Faith” leather jacket – hung deep in an almost empty closet – that cheekily proclaimed “Rocker’s Revenge,” or blowing up the “Faith” jukebox and signature guitar, Michael was serving notice. Listen closer – but why? with those glorious women and the rock steady dancefloor beat – you would hear the declaration of “clothes don’t make the man” in the chorus, the protestation of “living the fantasy/we won the race, got out of the place/ went home and got a brand new face/ for the boys at MTV” were clearer than anyone might have plugged into.

In the moment, many assumed the song addressed the dissolution of his musical partnership with Ridgley. But maybe it ran far deeper. The rest of Listen Without Prejudice, Volume 1 was very much a work focused on betrayals, the empty nature of fame, the bankruptcy of hooking up. Did we know that at the time? Or were we all so punchdrunk on the fizzy goodness of the endorphins this music gave us?

 Certainly there were other hits. “Cowboys & Angels” was a more sophistipop, humid and sweeping, something for Ibizia or the Riviera. “Soul Free” suggested Digable Planets, but with that sweeping pop still near the surface, the falsetto utter surrender to carnal pleasure. Even the big orchestral pop of Prejudice’s opening “Praying for Time” – ripe with social commentary to temper whatever follow -- suggested Michael needed more.

 Maybe we should’ve known there was trouble in paradise. Maybe in the growing media invasiveness, it was only a matter of time before the cage match of fame crashed into the increasing gotcha reality of the way we consume our heroes. Or maybe the quickening cycle of obsess and cast off was to blame.

Beyond that lung busting duet with Elton John on the elder’s “Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me,” or the Aretha Franklin-teaming “I Knew You Were Waiting,” Michael’s star faded. Still huge in the Far East, still a dance floor king in South America and Europe, America was more intrigued by that bathroom bust – and barely registering the ongoing drug problems in the UK.

 Perhaps it was the battle with Sony. While malfeasance happens (and there are those who allege Michael was right), they are also the distribution system; ultimately the ones defining and driving the marketing when you’re on a global juggernaut. Turn them against you, watch your star grow cold and fall from the sky.

In some ways, being arrested for soliciting sex gave him the freedom he’d sung for. Out and free to live the life he wanted, Michael also reached towards the sun of music that was more evolved, more adult. If Older wasn’t a blockbuster, he sampled Patrice Rushen’s “Forget Me Nots” on “Fastlove, Pt. 1” and offered a velvety pulp fiction flare to the title track, boite-tempered trumpet bleating in the recesses, cocktail piano rising and brushes hitting the cymbals and high hat with a raindrop plop of perfection.

 Michael’s voice, which always conveyed a whiff of ache, somehow smoothed, strengthened. If the winsome young man had reluctance and a slight bruising, this was something settled and confident. The invitation, once fraught with urgency, was now seductive. But most of us – myself included – missed it. 

And that’s the shame of fame. When it’s at its apex, inescapable to the point of nausea, often no one recovers. Rare is the Madonna or Elton John, who navigate the turns and manage to maintain some form of intrigue. But they are both creature of design, image, dare I say marketing? And they’ve both had an uncanny knack for aligning with strong business people – Guy Oseary for Madge, David Geffen for Elton – at the critical juncture where their expiration date should have been passed.

 When fame burns out, there is the lifestyle that one has become used to. Can you afford it? Or must that fall away? And if you can negotiate the fiscal reality, what about the mocking of media, who delight in your foibles? the lack of the raving cheers that have met your various endeavors?

 Yes, there was James Corden’s original “Carpool Karaoke.” A riff to set-up his piece of “Comic Relief” that poked a sharp stick in the eye of the obvious, talking about the whole gay reality of which Michael was so much a face for. Beyond the all-out sing-along moments that would become a design key for Madonna, Michelle Obama, Gwen Stefani and so many others, there was that twinge of the unspoken – and the notion that perhaps it’s never truly okay in some rooms.

For George Michael, who actually served time for his last pot bust, he met every moment like a gentleman. Telling the British press there was a karmic reality to the short jail term, he never lost his dignity, always – in public – maintained that higher elevation.

 But what or who he was when he was alone remains – for most of us – a mystery. No doubt, he had great times, lived a life that made sense for who he was: a gay man of certain beauty, aging and facing a changing world, a world where his music is more nostalgia, but indelible in ways most never achieve.

 Having lost Prince, Lou Reed, Leonard Cohen, Guy Clark, songwriter Andrew Dorff most recently, this is another unthinkable loss in a year of too much and too many.

 Fifty-three is so young. No doubt in the coming days, every miniscule detail of his last several months will be combed over, will be sorted and read like tea leaves. Was it drugs? A broken heart? A heart that malfunctioned? His own hand? Some other misadventure?

 The statement said he passed peacefully, no signs of trouble is all we have. No doubt there is more. But in this TMZ world in which we live, does it matter? He’s gone. Maybe that’s all we need to know. Maybe that, and the freedom that comes from turning the music up way too loud, screaming along at the top of our lungs, wiggling like a noodle or hotstepping like the catwalk is our natural domain is all that we need to remember this life that for a few years burned so bright and so hot.

 Today, Boxing Day as I finish writing, I think that I shall turn the music up, find the beats that move my bottom, bounce around and laugh. If there is a lesson from this wretched year, we never know when our time is coming. It’s a given, but somehow it is more urgent than ever – and I want to feel all the ecstasy I can.

 It doesn’t mean being stupid, overindulging or putting myself at risk. It means, as Aunt Mame proclaimed, “Life is a banquet, and most of poor-sons-of-bitches are starving to death,” and as Scarlett O’Hara declared, “I shall never go hungry again!”

Go find someone you love, call up a friend you’ve not spoken to, have the small indulgence, go for a run and feel the energy, strength and life pumping through your body, flirt wit that guy or that girl, your wife or your boyfriend just ‘cause. And absolutely, turn up the music and dance – George Michael’s music was absolutely like that, just like it developed into something more ruminative so you could take that rapture even deeper.

Leon Russell: Song for You... and Me... and Gone

I was wearing brand new Prada velvet maryjanes, with saddle leather straps, and a big velvet men’s cut shirt from back in the late ‘80s when I was first in LA, trying to be a baby rock critic of merit. The shirt was one of the few nice things I owned, and Icherished it; sliding into it with banged up jeans and forest green cowboy boots, a little bit of luxe boheme splendor for a girl living on a lotta ramen.

Seems somehow right to be dressed like that to get a text that read, “Is Leon Russell someone you can write one of your passionate tributes to?” Reading it, figuring this was a pro-active editor, looking to stay ahead of the bodystack the last couple years has turned into, I replied, “Yes, why? He hasn’t died?”

But, of course, he had. Hand in the air, I asked for and paid the check, purse flying to my shoulder, soles to the sidewalk. Leon Russell, always sort of fragile, always incandescent like a candle flame. He was never quite a hippie, nor a gypsy, nor a field preacher, yet somehow he embodied all, and so much more. 

Men like Leon don’t really die, maybe shimmer a bit and fade a touch. But dead? C’est impossible. Except the Google Seach confirms – even Fox News says so. And once again, here I am, dizzy from the loss, torn from the moments and music surrendered to the sky.

I can’t even remember the first time I saw him, probably on the great equalizer of humanity, music and social consciousness – and my father’s favorite – “The Johnny Cash Show.” All I know is my mother snarled, as only she could, “He looks high…” at the tv set in their bedroom – and I truly thought Santa Claus had truly made good on that summer of love promise to “Tune in, Turn On & Drop Out.” 

There he was at a shiny black grand piano, silvery cascades of hair pouring down like white waters, eyes behind mirrored aviator shades as his hands kept rolling and pumping over the keys like some kind of baker making kolaches or other kneaded and twisted delight. He had a voice like an old dog lifted in protest, though there was a zestiness to it, too: you wanted to taste what he knew. And I was far too young to even imagine.

But I wanted; oh yes, I wanted to know.

Leon Russell invaded my school car, too. The disembodied voice, wrung out and twisting, floated over the vinyl bench seats. The jaunty “Tight Rope,” all carny and “hey, y’all, watch this” and the arpeggiated “For You,” which pledged of loving someone “beyond this space and time” – and because it was Cleveland, the rock & roll capitol of the world, yes, Russell’s version spun on the rock station in defense of the man who wrote the Carpenters’ inescapable rendition on every pop, ac and elevator music station on the dial.

There was “This Masquerade” for George Benson, “Delta Lady” for Joe Cocker, “Superstar” for the Carpenters. And there were the conversations my hippie babies would have about Mad Dogs & Englishmen, miscegenation (I couldn’t spell it, so I couldn’t look it up back then) and Mary Russell, about Concerts for Bangladesh, records with Willie Nelson and being a genius.

I still thought he looked like Naughty Santa, too much fun and treats and music. I didn’t know about the years in Los Angeles, working with Phil Spector or producing Bob Dylan’s “When I Paint My Masterpiece.” Nor was I aware that it was Russell’s Shelter Records, partnered with the producer Denny Cordell, that was soon to toss the terse raw rock/punk Tom Petty and the fist-in-your-face “Refugee” into my world. And I didn’t care. Just knowing someone like him existed was plenty.

It was during my tenure as a freelancer in the mid-80s working the country and black music beats for The Miami Herald that the competitive paper’s Jon Marlowe called me to meet him in the stairwell. Stringy white hair, motocross jacket when no one wore such things, The Miami News’ sole critic’d cackle and tell me what I was missing; treating me like a colleague, though I was mostly starry-eyed kid.

“You have to pay attention to Leon Russell,” he advised. “As important as Dr. John for mainstreaming that New Orleans shuffle, but a much wider hoop – he’s gospel, and rock and roll, and soul. And he doesn’t flinch or pander. They can’t make him commit to a box, so they act like he’s some bit of fringe of an Indian jacket. You dig in, you’ll see.”

So out to the Hialeah swapmeet I went. Nickels and quarters and dimes. A few bucks could fill in the gaps back then, bad cassettes and slightly blemished vinyl. But the content was there, and man, “Stranger In A Strange Land” was an existential question that suited my own no-man’s-land existence; “Roll Away The Stone” took the metaphysical promises of my Catholic Easter and sowed them with a fiery promise, the spongy striphouse piano “Roller Derby” rubbed the undercarriage of the seemingly innocent enough – all of them bolstered by a peacock feather fan of brash female background singers, equal parts streetwalking working girl and street smart seraph. Divine and dirty, glorious and porous all at once.

If I got The Band – and the power of “Cripple Creek” and Music From Big Pink… If I thought I was figuring out C&W’s bastard Byrds/Burrito’s children Sweetheart of the Rodeo and The Gilded Palace of Sin… If I believed in the mellifluous tone of the steel guitar rising off those Poco records… Then this was the grittier, funk on the roots cornerstone to whatever those other acts were scratching away it.

It’s the reason Eric Clapton, the Stones, Dylan embraced his musical touch – and Jerry Lee Lewis took a young Russell and his pals out as his back-up band on a two month tour. To have the kinetic charge to serve as the Killer’s band, you gotta know the inside out from the ground up.

And so, I had my own kinda sphinx: behind mirror’ed shades, in crisp white suits, playing hillbilly music under the nom du chanson Hank Thompson and wearing a top hat or Stetson like some kind of real world crown. When I felt down, his records were like tapping a vein; Leon Russell & the Shelter People offered a soundtrack for a dreamer’s diaspora. Promises of home and redemption, songs of raw ache and utter brio, guitar notes twisting and piano thump-thumping like a strong heart taking pleasure, it wrung out my own young angst and hung it on the line to dry in the bright light of the sun.

But Leon Russell, like so many of the ones who came before, seemed elusive. Like the scent of Nag Champa, it is in the air, but impossible to touch: sweet, spicy, sense-piquing, yet ever ephemeral. Leon Russell always in the back hallways and fire escapes of my life and times in LA, when FAX machines were super-high tech and Tower Records was almost a city block of sheer heaven.

You don’t meet men like Leon Russell. Tulsa-born and Tulsa-tied, visionaries don’t exist among mere mortals, so just the notion is plenty as life whips by – and stacks up at your door like so much chord wood for the winter.

Until ex-fiancee #4 said “Let’s go to dinner, let’s go to 12^th & Porter…”

He had that naughty twinkle in his eyes, the one that always promised too much fun and plain adventure. I probably put on something velvet with my banged up Levis, probably pulled on cowboy boots of some sort, wiping my mouth with whatever bright pink lipstick I was favoring then.

At a table on the black and white squared linoleum floor, with a perfect view through the giant fishbowl front window, I saw the biggest old school Cadillac pull up. It took up the whole view, the rumble of the Detroit muscle almost rattling the glass… It was obviously old school hillbilly royalty pulling up, but here?

 From out of nowhere Sherman Halsey, the scion of the country booking Halsey Co. dynasty, whirled from out of nowhere, silky caramel hair tumbling down his shoulders like some sharp dressed Jesus. Opening the car door, he reached in and helped a gorgeous black clad arm emerge…

 My jaw was by now slack, not even completely knowing what was happening. But by now I understood, it was something – and my thrilled at the secret boyfriend looked like he’d swallowed a 100 watt bulb.

Blinking twice, I saw a large, sturdy yet frail man emerge. Sherman helping, taking his weight, the gentleman moved slowly, his fingers circling Halsey’s elbow. There was a halo of serious and a cloud of “holy shit” all around him.

Looking at Little Steve, as Stephen Charles Hurst was known at our house, I couldn’t find the words. Finally, an “OH… MY… God…” sorta tumbled out, knowing my ability to talk like a cloud of syllables was evaporating. “That’s, that’s…”

“Yup, Toots! It sure is,” said my very-satisfied beau. “I thought you’d get a kick out of this…”

 And then they were upon us, and my face flushed, and I felt my hand being held by a papery set of fingers, the sinews and pads very apparent. His face was so carved, so lined by life – it felt like a gypsy reading your palm in reverse. You could see the world’s wisdom in the crags and watch its best parts sparkle in his sharp as a hawk’s pupils. 

It is rare that I lose conversation, especially when it’s important. I remember the oxygen leaving the room, the temperature feeling hot, myself perhaps a little dizzy. I smiled, perhaps beamed – and I think I spoke a little bit, but am not sure. I just remember how warm and welcoming, kind and familial the elegant gentleman was. He was happy to be out, even on a cane – or was it a walker? – and knew he’d have to get his hips replaced sooner than later.

 He was recording some, trying to figure out the next moves for a creative man who might have been passed by by lesser musical beings. He spoke of Bruce Hornsby, who I knew from the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band’s Will The Circle Be Unbroken, Vol. 2 and I believe I spoke the Virginia-based keyboardist ability to smear genres without losing the musicality. Russell seemed heartened. Men like him, you see, are meant to play.

Working with Sherman Halsey, my fiancée saw Russell quite a bit. He’d come with reports that the rock legend none of my friends would’ve cared about had asked about me. I’d see stardust for days; far more impressed by that than many of the more famous people I worked with. Because those who practice magic get inside you in deeper ways.

 Russell didn’t have the comeback with Hornsby that he deserved. Didn’t get the flex that found Levon Helm or Bonnie Raitt, but he just kept moving forward. No doubt a good musicians union pension – for recording with Sinatra on “Strangers In the Night,” Bing Crosby, Johnny Mathis, the Ronnettes, Delaney + Bonnie, Joe Cocker, the Beach Boys and beyond had added – and songwriting royalties kept his bills paid, but there was more fire to him than that.

 The Hank Thompson country albums were staunch Texas/Oklahoma honky tonk issue. The genuflecting Willie Nelson offering up a partner in crime for one slice of who he was. It didn’t matter; he kept playing. Got the hip operation, kept playing. Had other health issues, would take a break – and keep playing.

Yes, there was a high profile reclamation of the man who knew no other way by Elton John. For a duet record, produced by T-Bone Burnett, called The Union. A debt for the flamboyant Brit rocker/pianist, John intended to see his exalted influence into the Rock & Roll of Fame – and to have Russell’s contributions to the genre recognized. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pT5aYRgmgyM)

 And so it came to pass. Inducted in 2011, Russell spoke of John rescuing him from a ditch along the side of life’s highway. But he also had bought a new tour bus, and was about to embark on making a new album with Tommy LiPuma. As I said, music men keep on playing always.

Little Steve and I drifted apart. He found an incredible woman named Shaye, and they’re so much in love, I was glad I could be a way station on his journey to her. We still talk, for what it’s worth, sharing news of Leon or Sherman, ‘til Sherman died somewhere in the blur of the last several years. Love that “exists beyond place and time,” you see, isn’t bound by things like rings or marriages – or even death.

 Lately, between the election and Leonard Cohen and the death of my own uncle, it feels like life is coming faster and faster, sadder and darker, too. I’ve not had time to pause and reflect, collect and consider – all that has been lost, all that I’ve been blessed to know, to touch, to embrace as part of my life.

Leonard Cohen, truly the ultimate ladies man. Dapper suits, hat cocked just so – and songs redolent of musk and evocation, enough to make a kid’s knees quiver. Like Russell, his gifts transcend the basics of language: he holds much in a few words, scrapes away the sludgy build-up and finds the essential emotion in melodies and imagery.

 Walking around a corner too fast, returning after lunch with Don Was, I bounced into a recording studio just a bit too fast and slightly off balance. The crease in the pewter sharkskin pants could’ve slashed my jugular – only the hand that extended, steadied me and dark cocoa irises bore into my own.

 Set right, the steadying hand extended and a low voice announced, “I’m Leonard.” I gulped. And stared. “And you are?” Again, stammering, I managed to get my name out, as Was laughed and Sweet Pea Atkinson took it in with a guttural chuckle.

That’s the thing about the Towers of Song, they don’t have to flex. They just need to be. The poetry of who they are permeates everything, ignites songs with the right amounts of reserve and tension or raw desire and hell-raising. For each, the way they walked or looked into your eyes was as profound as the songs they wrote.

And whether people realize who these non-attention seekers were, their songs live on. “Hallelujah” has been recorded – like Russell’s “Song for You” – well over a hundred times. Each has their cannon, each has their own special stew; but both created an image, a sonic template, even a place within the times that solidly maintained their reality.

“Shoot Out On The Plantation” is playing as I type this. As the nation is torn in half by what they think is unthinkable, it’s all here in this song. With the chunky funky beat, the sticks moving across the high hats and clanging on cymbals with the pace that says, “We mean business,” Russell suggests the upside down reality of it all --
“Yeah, the last one to kiss is the first to shoot/ And stabbing your friends is such a drag to boot…”

 That’s the thing about these lives, whether spotlight or not, they’re often long gone. Chasing the dream, the song, the money to pay the rent or the rush to keep on going, there is a restlessness inside creative that never truly goes out.

 If Ray Charles won a Grammy in 1993 for his version of “Song for You,” this could be anyone’s refrain who plays the game of plying music for other people to find their truth.

            I've been so many places in my life and time
            I've sung a lot of songs, I've made some bad rhymes
            I've acted out my life in stages, with ten thousand people watching
            But we're alone now and I'm singing this song for you

As a woman who’s chased the road and gently blown on the kindling fire of dreams built on stages and studios, the fragility and need is something I’ve witnessed and felt my own damn self. When it’s late and lonely, you wonder about the cost… and you hum a song, and hope that the price is worth what you’ve paid.

You know, you never know. You really can’t. The rush of when it’s working is so intense, and the emptiness of doubt and all alone can’t truly be measured. Somewhere in between, there’s a lot of boredom and the baseball cards of dreams. You flip’em over and remember how sweet it was, waiting on the next song to come up on random rotation that takes you back

The editor told me Russell, who’s already survived a massive cardiac event and major brain surgery, went in his sleep. He was 74, at home in Nashville. A man who loved and kept it funky, whose humanity was pervasive and reached far beyond those who knew about the Tulsa Scene, who warmed their haunted places with Carney or Americana or Leon Live.

 Somewhere, Leon’s looking down, fingers spread like sunrays as he surveys all he left behind. The grisgris and the juju is our’s to keep alive, and the songs, well, the songs are here for all to love and live inside. Funny, too, how a man who can find the magic in “He Stopped Lovin’ Her Today” and “Rollin’ In My Sweet Baby’s Arms,” as well as “I Put A Spell on You” and the live combust of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” merged with “Youngblood,” would write his own elegy almost half a century ago.

 For all its need and ache, the larger truth in “Song for You” comes now. As the piano rises and falls, the lyrics open wide to hold us in their embrace now that he’s gone. Gentle catch and benediction, it seems Russell had already spelled it out… it’s just we were all too pinwheel-eye’d to believe this moment would ever come.

            I love you in a place where there's no space or time
            I love you for my life, because you're a friend of mine
            And when my life is over, remember when we were together
            We were alone and I was singing my song for you

Like all the real hippies, he didn’t fear death – or heaven. He shook his songs, plied his guitars and piano, mined the chutes of Dixie, swamp, Appalachia, Tulsa and tumbleweeds to conjure that sound that shook its tail and balmed the wild night. When America stood at a crossroad, Russell emerged saying “Why not merge it all?”

Uptopian. Idyllic. Hopeful. Impossible. It was who he was, and all that existed in his music from the very beginning. For a young man who started out Claude Russell Bridges and morphed into Leon Russell by virtue of a fake ID to play in LA clubs, it doesn’t matter… only the music, and how it lifts us up.

 For me, trying to make sense of everything, I’m gonna try to let it do that. And it’s funny, I’ve not been around Mr. Russell – except random airport gates on flights in and out of 6-1-5 – in years, but the idea that he’s gone still guts me somehow, lays me open wide. Maybe it’s for those days when I was young, and he was some kind of earthy paternal presence of us all; or maybe just like Leonard Cohen and David Gleason, there are some who seem as if their inextinguishable no matter what.

With the candles lit and day still blazing, I think I need to walk it off. Find a park or trail, touch the bark and hum just a little bit. He ain’t coming back, but perhaps in the songs, I can hold that smile and white-white hand with the knuckles protruding just a little in my soul again.

www.HollyGleason.com

Poscards From Bonnaroo, Four: Field Day Friday

How much music can you stand? Or rather how long can you stand?

Because from noon on… and on, and on…There is more than too much of just about anything you could want. Floating through the air, wafting down the grass; and no matter where you go, people are into it.

Trixie Whitley (Postcard Two) gave way to Jason Isbell, a serious sort of songwriter with a bit of blue collar efff ewe and a lot of existential angst, dignity and faith in love (of all things). With his Southeastern landing to critical landslide last week, sales looking to top 20,000 and emerging from a “storied” in the exactly the sense one would expect from a man suggested he exit the Drive-By Truckers, the timeless featured man with the basic rock band hit a nerve from the gate.

Songs from his new album, plus songs the crowd knew drew equal response. He churned through “Super 8,” found the tentative tenderness in “Flying Over Water.” Creating intimacy with 20-30,000 people, some of whom were hardcore fans, others waiting for Of Monsters & Men, it was a reminder that the literate doesn’t have to be lost to the loops, the hooks or the glossy flossy production tricks that make so much of pop radio glisten.

Over at The Other Tent, Big K.R.I.T. proved that for hip-hop, too. Taking it back to tbe bare knuckle basics of a turntable and a sense of rhymes, the Meridian, Mississippian worked the mic and the largely white crowd in a way that engaged them. Not just in the jumping up and down, arm-waving way, but actually listening and chanting along.

Indeed, production here isn’t the deal – though obviously ZZ Top hitting it without their videos, etc, would be like leaving the house with a clean shave. Instead, it’s about a deeper connection hitting the music people where they feel. Drawing people to another place or the realm of accessing emotions that might not be part of their basic life.

Jim James, dressed in a school boy blazer and tie, was every bit the sleek chic eleganza with a silky looking cloud of hair, but beyond a basic backdrop of lights emanating in lines from a central point, it was his charisma that matched his music. With moves like the snake charming the tamer, he knew how to focus on the crowd – whether spinning like a sheepdog sufi dervish or strumming and leaning into a guitar poised on a stand.

James’ melodicism is hypnotic, with myriad influences beneath the surface – from surf to classical, pure pop to a lurching kind of rock – and musicianship from an equally GQ-attired band that is so effortless, it would easy to miss its quality. But make no mistake, these players are the sort whose excellence eludes casual listening.

With his soundscapes floating of This Tent, Wu Tang was taking Which Stage with the velocity the hardest core rappers could be expected to unleash. Jagged beats hammering into the assembled, as an apt counterpoint to Wilco over at What Stage delivered an overtly jubilant set that found Jeff Tweedy beaming.

All these years later, it’s not the survival that brings these acts back together. While often it’s about the money, there emerges a sense of how good the music really was, something that might have been lost in the moment, the egos, the addictions, the cross-agendas and beyond. For both Wu Tang and Wilco, acts who’ve weathered plenty and made albums that endured far beyond what either would’ve expected, the triumph of being onstage isn’t so much as how good the music feels all these years later.

For Wilco, who moved from “Heavy Metal Drummer” to “I’m The Man Who Loves You” to “Dawned on Me” and “A Shot in the Arm,” the patron saints of alt-country showed themselves to be more a classic American rock band a la Bonnaroo closers Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, bending pop melodicism into an organic sense of roots that was supple and fluid. That rapture is often what marks those who’re grateful for what the music gives – beyond the houses, pretty girls and fast cars – and that was evident.

Even deeper diving were England’s Foals, at the far end of an American tour. Though facing an mid-afternoon set, they drew their faithful well beyond the edges of This Tent and what at first felt like fairly rote crowd surfing from Yannis Philippakis with the expected hand-over-hand over the fans demi-turns mid-set culminated in an almost audience circuit during the set climaxing “Two Steps, Twice.”

A boy who sings a math-rock, precision-driven kind of music surrenders to the momentum of the moment, which carries the band sonic release well beyond their records. Singing with his heart out of his body, “Inhaler” and “Late Night” had an urgency that never drowned how hard and to the point the playing was, yet found the tumult of emotions thrown harder than control would suggest.

That’s the deal with Foals: go beyond where you should be. As “Two Steps, Twice” built and receded and built, the forelocked Philippakis leaned so far into the song, it was obvious he intended – and did – leave it all on that stage.

The day’s other story was the massive blanket of bodies for Of Monsters and Men, swelling beyond not just the grounds in front of Which Stage, but spreading down towards the Comedy Theater and well into the food area between Which and What!
Yesterday’s great surprise, and yet, the Icelandic five-piece delivered a set that more than delivered on the numbers who’d converged to hear their acoustic-tinged music.

Not folk, not even in the Mumford/Avett ilk, there’s an exoticism to Nanna Bryndís Hilmarsdóttir’s band that merges the female lead singer/male musical energy to create something that evokes slightly more magical arrangements rather than the more rustic classicism of the post modern folk boomers.

With 13 songs deliver mid-afternoon, they built an enthusiasm that never bordered on manic, yet was every bit as passionate as Foals’ response. In the appreciation, if not shrieking and fist-pumping, the music was heard, consumed and responded to.

Even the humble stages, like Miller Lite’s New Music on Tap “lean to,” plopped in the middle of the field, and the decidedly hippie Solar Stage, which anchored the activism booths, there were treasures to be found. It’s a matter of when you wander up, and whether you get lucky.

Rayland Baxter, whose Feathers & Fishhooks, had 6 people onstage with decidedly minimal gear, and his strong polaroid form of singer/songwriter is bulked up by his lashing guitarwork. Carving into what turns out to be a loud sound with that guitar, he exudes a likeability as he sings songs that offer the imagery of 20-somethings finding fun, friendship and amour along the margins.

Not meant to be profound, the commitment he and his band – especially a drummer who works the high hat hard, only to punch the tom for staggering rhythmic effect – shows that small doesn’t have to mean flaccid or lacking in song development.

Coming back for an encore, just young man and his guitar, he offers an aw shucks intimacy that offers a peephole into the attitudes and familiarities of an generation coming of age making a decision to commit to each other rather than merely strive and jockey for fame and money.

At the other end of the spectrum, John Oates takes Rock & Roll Hall of Fame status and returns to his roots. With an upcoming turn at the Rock & Soul Superjam, he explained he would only play new songs – and took songs about new methodology in the record business, meeting partner Darryl Hall and yes, activism.

If it was a rich rock legend slumming, he brought a great deal of wonder to the table, talking about coming of age when festivals reigned – and singing his raspy deep soul’n’hard wood lead parts while playing an acoustic guitar.

And so it goes, and so it continues.

Though Paul McCartney was the evening’s big play, it’s hard to muster enthuisiasm for someone surfing the “wow, is this for me?” reality-break that so often comes with the removed from the rest of us realm (see Postcard Five), and so I passed. If I have failed you, know some are born Stones People, others are Loyal to the Beatles’ Realm. Being the former, I was fine… and figured better to rest up for today.
Today, another day and even more, more, more music.