Buy the book! Eddie Huffman, Doc Watson: https://uncpress.org/9781469680354/doc-watson/
Pilgrimage stories, from people of various famousness:
https://www.fretboardjournal.com/features/imposing-doc-watson-hitchhikers-musical-memoir/
https://gardenandgun.com/remembering-doc-watson
The soundtrack: https://docwatson.bandcamp.com/album/live-at-club-47-2
How to be a great adult rock star? Rock and roll being primarily an art of and for the young. Just showing up at all as a grown-up with any credibility seems like it’s most of the battle.
What to wear? Youth and volume + leather and swagger are the the original classic thing, from Elvis to The Ramones to Bono to The Strokes. But that gets tougher to pull off as you either soften or get stringy. If you somehow manage to survive your 27th birthday, and fail to die before you get old, what will you wear to your 50th birthday party, or your 60th, or 70th–or beyond?
You could retread the Johnny Depp pirate look you invented, like Keith Richards. Or go for jumpsuited Devo-core, like D. Byrne. Basic black with good kicks works for Jack White more often than not.
Or will you look sharp?
And holy cow: what to play?
Reanimated roots rock is always respectable (with or without AI de-aging, like the Stones in their new video). So is furthering the genre you invented, like David Byrne again, with sidepeople and stage crew not yet born when you made your bones. Or like Jack White, you can remain the daemon you have always been, and slay with another surprise record of noise and edge coming out this summer.
Or you can push on into…something quite else.
Hello cruel world, I’m not going away
So I might as well have my say
For all the damns that I never gave
And for every damn whale that I failed to save
For every little fad I didn’t chase
And every little fool who just didn’t like my face
I know that you like it
I know that you want it
I know that you need it
Leave it alone because I’m not gonna say it
I’m not sorry
I’m not sorry at all
I found Joe Jackson’s new album Hope and Fury almost unlistenable the first time through. Then I read the words and listened again, and again. I learned from it how to hear it.
And now it is my favorite release of the year. It is a sign of life in a dead time: a blast of grownup-ness in an age of deliberate puerility, especially from our supposed betters. And it is therefore more precious than ever.
You remember Joe Jackson, if only casually, o Gen X American former radio listener. You do! The angry young man who got signed in the wake of Elvis Costello’s late 70s fame, and broke through on the radio with smartypants songs like “Is She Really Going Out With Him” and “Sunday Papers” from his first album.
His second record I’m the Man was rushed out within the year, same formula; the title track was joyfully covered by Silversun Pickups in the season three opener of The Lincoln Lawyer, which cover put him back on my own personal screen. The song there does the work his early music always does: cue intelligent mania, cue passionate people who put the stick in their own spokes. He’s the patron saint on these records of the guy who yearns and hustles and is denied but gets back up again.
Then wow, do things get interesting: he makes two records that mostly amuse himself, one full of British reggae dub (featuring bassist-for-life Graham Maby) and one of Louis Jordan jump blues stuff–but not much attention results. He repairs to NYC in the early 80s and soaks in the Latin vibe of the street music he finds there, metabolizing it with the composition training he had gained at the Royal Academy of Music. And the resulting album, Night and Day, gives him his biggest hit (thanks to nascent MTV, which spins it heavy in the absence of much else on offer).
He is among the masters of English songwriting that yearn for connection, from the juvenalia of “Happy Loving Couples” through the early-midlife trainwreck of “My House” and “Stranger Than Fiction.”
And no-one since Eddie Palmieri understands better the sting of a lit montuno (well, guajeo, strictly, I think). Those piano figures burn through his fiercest work, from Night and Day’s “Cancer” to Body and Soul‘s “Cha Cha Loco” to Hope and Fury’s acid cancel-diss “I’m Not Sorry.”
He could be done, is my point. After so much music, he has certainly earned it. He is 71 years old. Those who love him have plenty to keep loving.
But he isn’t done. So here’s Hope and Fury.
Maybe he needed a reason to get back to touring. He has been a tireless road warrior throughout, and that’s the only place for any musician to really earn in the age of essentially-free streaming. These songs seem like they took time–at least one references Covid–but who can tell? Someone this prolific must have another hundred tunes shored up for future releases.
Though he is not superhuman, and admits to a multi-year creative block after the commercial underperformance of 1991’s impeccable Laughter and Lust, which still seems to perplex him. He worked so hard on it, even did market research with the new tunes live to see what the kids liked…and it wails, even now, thirty-five years on. But it didn’t sell. Heartbreaking.
Hope and Fury is an album about efforts and plans going wrong, sure. But the scars are sublimated, so familiar they are not mentioned so much as whiffed ambiently as the songs hurtle by.
JJ songs have always taught tough lessons–even as they didn’t care whether or not you learned them–about the ease and impossibility of connection between and among the sexes especially. His didactic bent is funny and sad in his first decade. “It’s Different For Girls” is a swirling gender studies disquisition ten years before we start laboring through Judith Butler in grad school.
But “Made God Laugh” isn’t about a lesson learned, so much as a reporting of the reality of the weather in your head when your head has been pushing you to succeed your whole life. If you don’t already know that you “made God laugh when you told him your plans,” you are not going to learn it here. But if life has taught you that truest truth, well, here’s your affirmation, and company for the daily commute to the latest site where it’s happening to you.
It’s also a record about coming home after fleeing home for most of your life. JJ is an ambivalent Englishman, and says as much. He started as a pub rocker, but his long time in NYC softened both his accent and his tolerance for the gray and the old. This record is about how he both hates and loves it back home. Now he leans into the Portsmouth accent sometimes, for effect–but he lives in Berlin now, mostly.
And I think the offputting chorus of distorted growling groaning voices that appears intermittently on the record is Britannia, that mother, that minx. It performs an important libretto role on the album as the voice of tradition, both the stuffy and terrifying bits and the comforting bits. His most complex feelings are given to it: the monster-rap opener, about how hideous and beautiful “Burning-by-Sea” is; the self-doubt and self-criticism in “The Face”; the chorus of “The End of the Pier” turns into a comforting pub singalong.
What’s more grown-up than accepting you’ll always feel some kind of way about your origins, and letting all the conflicting feelings stay conflicted?
“Fabulous People” slyly returns to the distinctive glockenspiel voicings of his biggest hit, 1982’s “Stepping Out” (pun intended) for a complicated take on queer identity. It’s a bracing Pride month listen, for sure. He weaves a tale of a shlubby straight guy who has tried “being himself, but no one cared.” And so decides to embrace the “fabulous” LGBTQ ways promised by the “rainbow” he sees everywhere: on “the shopping mall / city hall / glitter ball.”
Turns out it’s not for him. He is going to have to find his own way to be “always fun, and never scared”…which of course no one can ever be.
So much cascades through this song! It makes me remember the dryest New Yorker cartoon ever, about how Pride is supposed to invite all ways to be while honoring mostly one. This June has had more than its share of thinkpieces about queer identity in a season of erasure and violence. In this moment, the song lands as an insistence on complexity and iconoclasm, even now, forever.
(Remember he gave us “Real Men” in 1982 as well, a song in the darkest days of AIDS that swung for more than even that pathos. In any decade, his message is clear: you are going to have to go your own way.)
You know what a grown-up rock star does? He delivers exactly what he has to give, as blunt and abrasive and contradictory as it may be. He’s not here to settle your hash about who he is–or much less, who you are.
He’s not demo-ing new songs anymore to see if you like them. He’s putting out what he’s got, and if you don’t like it, then sod off.
He’s straining for some notes; the cracks in his voice are part of the landscape now, and why would he fix them in post?
And he’s got a grown-up band too, it goes without saying. Doug Yowell’s supple feel on “After All This Time” is nearly everything I hope my drums sound like, Keith Carlock without the metronome. And trading fours on piano with Teddy Kumpel’s guitar on “The Face” is just enough to remind you he’s got the chops…but he doesn’t need to impress you anymore, so back to the bridge he goes. The song’s the thing.
His tour plays Charlotte tomorrow night. I feel too old and tired to make the two-hour drive down the mountain that late, frankly–a sentiment I fancy he would support.
But I hope my small celebration here sends him the sentiment I have always wished him. Gratitude for his wicked craft, and fellow-feeling for his insistence on being utterly himself.
Don’t listen to the dopey critics, who begrudge him growing up. Just listen to the record.
Then came the smoke, then came the flames
And no more jokes, no video games
Who’s left to cry, who’s left to cheer
For the end of the pier
I don’t speak Latin. I am putting on airs. But this phrase has been rattling in my mind since I first read it.
Not in its original source, Rudolf Otto apparently–but in Parker Palmer’s sublime Let Your Life Speak, a little book on finding your purpose in life and letting yourself be exactly who you are on the journey. And also 20 years ago, when I was a goat among sheep at a school of medicine, when Rachel Naomi Remen checked it in an essay about what might lie beyond the edge of our understanding of healing.
Funny how I am doing the defensive academic flex: citing how other people have already thought about this thing so I get to think about it too. It is the simplest idea in the world, really, and it doesn’t need a pedigree.
It is just acknowledging the “awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery” that lies around and within the stuff that matters most to us.
I have long been drawn to thinkers and writers and teachers who work to make the case for the irreducible reality and precious value of mystery. Especially in a world that only values certainty and deductive proof more each day. I collect them–these fellow travelers–like marbles in my pocket. Look, here’s someone who thinks so too. Here’s someone else.
We who love the mystery need a posse. We do! It’s a lonely place to live, in the mystery. Lonelier and lonelier.
Lonely–because of the rampant conviction that competent people doing life-impacting work like education and healing need to eliminate the mystery. Need to get down to what is always true. What always happens when you do this or that.
Because it’s important work, right? Being rigorous about finding out and tracking what always works is how we get “best practices,” and we love to be told by scientific types what the right answer is. It makes us feel like serious people.
Not goofing around anymore, not us. “Best practices” tell us THAT our work can be serious–because “best practices” say, “this can be science,” and the people with the science are the most serious people. Serious people do the “best” things, the most important things. (They are the sheep, not the goats…)
God, I love it when someone refers to “serious people.” I love how immediately everyone at the table sits up a little straighter. Whatever else happens, let’s NOT be mistaken for unserious people. I sit up straighter too.
But I also suddenly want to spill Kool-Aid on everyone’s papers. Serious people? LOL.
Because what if the most serious people working on important stuff like education and healing were also brave enough to acknowledge that they DON’T know everything?
That they don’t know what will happen THIS time when they try something out?
Would your doctor, or your teacher, admitting that they don’t know the best answer to a mystery yet–but they want to keep finding out, so much–make you feel more secure with them, or less?
More secure, for me, by a country mile.
One of the most impactful ideas I learned in education school was that most of the stuff we most care about in life is more like art than like science. Not because it is beautiful, or gives us pleasure, though it sometimes does.
But because most of what we care most about doing is a mystery while we are doing it. And surprises us with what it ends up being, when we decide it is done.
You can do a paint-by-numbers painting, or a jigsaw puzzle, or make a cake from a box for that matter. Those endeavors are entertaining, and they are great for relaxing and passing the time (or getting a task done quick, with the cake mix).
But no one would say jigsaw-puzzle-assembling is the same as artmaking…because you have the picture it will end up looking like right there, on the box.
Real artmaking is real because you never know exactly what you will end up with when you start. You might have an idea, a destination–or even better, an intention. “I want to paint this day lily.” And it helps to have an intention when you get started, sometimes. It gets you to put brush to paint to canvas. To do it instead of merely intending it.
But the painting will unfold before you, brushstroke by brushstroke. And–unless you are completing an art class assignment to “paint a day lily”–if your accumulating brushstrokes end up looking more like a Studebaker than a day lily, maybe you decide mid-course that you are actually painting a Studebaker.
You discover what you are painting WHILE you are painting it. And BECAUSE you are painting at all.
Have you ever heard the idea that a sculptor’s task is simply to take away everything that is NOT the statue? That the work is already in there, and they just need to let it out?
Maybe! That’s a kind of mystery to consider too. What if what you find in that block of clay isn’t what you thought it would be? Wouldn’t it be great if blocks of clay came labelled with what was inside them?
No, that would be a nightmare. That would take all the fun out of it. That would eliminate the mystery.
Here’s a humdinger: Where’s the mystery in the thing you care about most? In the thing you have spent the longest time doing? Painting, or running, or gardening…or teaching?
Does the mystery get solved, the longer you spend caring about it and doing it?
Or does the mystery change and shift? If you are doing the same thing now that you did at the beginning of your career, are you trying to understand the same mysteries, or different ones?
Or is it a combination of solved and not-so-solved–always depending on the day, the light, what you had for breakfast, what was in the paper this morning?
These are the questions of serious people! Of people who love the world and the magnificent mysteries in it, exactly on their own terms and exactly as they present themselves to those of us who try to pay attention.
I have been serious about playing drums longer than I have been serious about nearly anything. It’s true! Longer than I have been a father or a husband, longer than I have been a teacher…even longer than I have owned a drum set.
I listened this morning on the way in to work to one of the first records that made me fall in love with playing drums. One of the first records that told me, you have to do this in your life, with your life. This is for you.
How differently I hear that record than I did when I was thirteen! I am working on different mysteries now than I was forty-plus years ago.
And how completely the same mystery of that drummer’s feel and time, that drummer’s sense of what could be in this song, in this take, is waiting there as well.
Some mysteries solved and transcended on the way to others: I know full well what to do with this foot and hand, this stick and this cymbal.
And some: as mysterious as ever. Even more so, knowing what I know now.
I almost had to pull over to collect myself, meeting that mystery again today. To reintroduce myself to an old, astonishing, tantalizing friend, and wipe my eyes, and listen again, and then again, and again. As seriously as I can.
God save us from a world where the serious people know everything they know for sure, and are no longer baffled, mesmerized, by what is bigger and older and wiser than they are.
Long live the awe-inspiring and fascinating mysteries–in our eyes and ears, in our work, in our hearts. In our classrooms. What a privilege to spend our lives with them.
However serious we may become: may we never pretend to have them solved.
Image borrowed gratefully from this retrospective on the album art of Hugh Syme, and if you know you know. Retconned to represent confrontation with awe-inspiring and fascinating mystery! We have assumed control!
This week I am listening to one song on repeat in the car, every day: “Way Back Home,” featuring Ronnie Cuber on baritone saxophone, from Steve Gadd and Friends’ 2010 album Live at Voce.
Saxophone is, I guess, a hard thing to love now? Two NYT pieces in the last week say sax is suss: a hot take on the current preponderance of the instrument at weddings, and “5 Minutes That Will Make You Love Alto Saxophone” (because if it can’t be done in 5 minutes, it can’t be worth doing). It is certainly the instrument that never sounds like anything else. You can mute a trumpet, you can prepare a piano, and if you amplify anything you can run it through yards of effects—but sax is sax.
I have been on a guided saxophone tour for the last few weeks, led by my youngest son. I was spinning Getz / Giberto in the car at pickup one afternoon, and he had questions. So I explained the three primary sax variants one finds in the wild. The alto: the intellectual’s horn, that of our first alchemist Charlie Parker and later technicians like Paul Desmond. The tenor: the alto’s soulful uncle, who can’t hold down a job but is out wailing on the bridge every night. Sonny Rollins, Wayne Shorter, Coltrane and of course Mt. Getz. (The fraught history of the soprano is excused for another day.)
And the baritone…well, no bari player came to mind. So I asked Spotify for one, and it coughed up this record. Thanks, algorithm! What a gem! (Also a favorite of Donald Fagen, according to the YouTube link above: my excellent taste is affirmed.)
Against its better-pedigreed colleagues, the bari sax always sounds like your sketchy friend leaning across the table to tell a dirty joke. The bari knows it is here for its personality, and leans into it. Perhaps the bari is the trombone of the woodwinds: it eludes its reputation only by occasionally embracing it.
I do not know anything about Ronnie Cuber other than his long long resume on Wikipedia, and the fact that he played in the SNL band. I think I recognize his tone from bumper music in the years when you had to be up at midnight to hear it. He would probably be considered a very accessible player. “Way Back Home” has no arch bebop changes, is not “out” in the slightest. It is boogie music, feel-good music. A two-chord vamp that only goes to the third when you cannot take the pressure anymore; puts me in mind of Joe Zawinul’s “Mercy Mercy Mercy”, which despite Cannonball Adderley’s intro about persevering through adversity has always been a joyous song to me. Here to move your booty, not push you through the doorways of perception.
And that tone! The growl and the hum and the whine. I have seen one photo of this hulking man and am put in mind of Mingus with his double bass: parity between player and instrument, clash of the heavyweights. I am pretending I know everything I need to know about him from that Wikipedia page, and I like every single bit of it. I am not looking up any more: I do not want to know if he treated his collaborators like garbage or sold his horn for smack. I want to just climb inside that tone and spend a long, lazy weekend sliding down the surface. He enjoys the lowest honks of the horn and is not afraid to let you love them too. He knows his instrument is ridiculous on the way to being sublime: that the two are inseparable.
And he knows he can do anything he wants on it, and a big part of the joy of listening to him is the physical feat he is pulling off. Because that is the other thing about bari sax that can’t be ignored: its size. Its weight. I am finding curiously variable numbers online, and do not have one handy to check. Does it weigh twenty pounds? The neck strap introduces a whole new problem in the long term I bet. Posture implications. More than the weight, though, is the distance your air column has to traverse. All the way down to those lower notes, with the big clanging pads, is four feet at least. Bari is a physical commitment.
I played bari for a couple of years in my high school jazz band. I was a competent clarinetist, and my indulgent band director told me I was welcome to audition if I could learn the bari. If I could hang, maybe there would be a clarinet feature in the future. Jazz band practiced at 7:15 in the morning twice a week, is my memory: you had to want to be there. I had to muscle that metal into submission almost before I was awake.
I learned it well enough to honk along with the real saxophonists. Sax is nominally simpler than clarinet, thanks to Adolphe’s ingenious design that makes the same fingerings work for the same notes all up and down its range, vs. the clarinet, which puts you off a fifth in between octaves. And I did hang! True to his word, we did “Woodchopper’s Ball” passably, and I made an absolute wreck of Jobim’s “Wave” at a festival once.
But the real long-term benefit for me was getting to spend hours up close and personal with a horn that big. Cuber does not seem to notice the heft of the thing. His dexterity and speed is improbable, unimaginable. Especially when you have also tried to wrestle with it and been bested. I love his playing because I know how much work it is.
I got out my alto* this week, inspired by Cuber’s deftness and tone, and was immediately reminded how you either are married to your instrument or struggle with it.
And I struggle on sax! Twenty years ago, I joined a band in Chapel Hill for a few months on that alto. They were named, gloriously, “The Guns of Navarone.” A serious montunos-for-miles cubop piano player, an upright bassist, a traps drummer, and a conga player. And somehow me. I knew by the second rehearsal that I was way outclassed by this project, but they kept me on, so I stayed. We worked up two sets–“Caravan,” some Horace Silver maybe?–and I played one gig in a dim weeknight room on Rosemary Street. I remember the piano player glaring at my honking, keening tone all night, waiting for my to materialize into the player of his dreams but remaining the same mess I had been in rehearsal. I quit the next day, and went back to being a well-satisfied drummer ever since.
But I am going to keep up my honking and keening regardless. My saxophone-remembering has every place on this blog, because music-making will always be a physical act. Most of the music I love comes from real people and objects working at each other and finding harmony, or at least detente.
And computers can now emulate nearly any sound with alarming fidelity. In my last DC band we would haul an actual Rhodes stage piano up and down stairs into second-floor clubs, cursing its weight and size all the way. Now my friend who played that Rhodes gets all its sounds and more (Hammond organ!) out of a tiny Nord that weighs less than my cymbal bag, and I am sure his back thanks him for it.
The music I most love lets you hear a person and an instrument working it out together. I love John Bonham’s drumming because I can hear his right foot on that (squeaky) Ludwig Speed-King, can hear the lightness and the thunder exactly where he put it before you could quantize a tempo. I love Wynton Marsalis on “Jig’s Jig” because I can hear his breath easing over the top of his figures, his conservatory nimbleness trying to ooze into something looser. I love Steve Williams’ (oops, Billy Hart’s) quarter-note ride behind Shirley Horn because his swing is implied, is in the air around the notes. I love music that is people with things in the world.
And I love Ronnie Cuber’s peace with his horn and the world he makes in it. Check it out–and then go play some yourself today, how about? Go ahead: get out your horn from high school, if it has survived the moves and yard sales, and see what you got today. I bet you’ll care less about getting it right, about being “good,” than you once did—because those are the concerns of children, aren’t they? Whether you sound “good enough”?
Well, the concerns of children and pros like Cuber, and thank god for them. But the rest of us just get to play today, if we want. Go play in the world; go be part of it. It is still there–both the music, and the world–and it is yours for the making.
*My alto sax was a gift from my band director, a saxophonist himself. It was his marching horn when he was a student at the University of Georgia. A splendid Noblet “Serie Maville,” it is in great shape, no leaky pads. If I could just get my embouchure in step with my horn, I would be flying high! So grateful to have his horn here, and so grateful to that man—and his co-director, and their extraordinary public school band program–that made my musical life so satisfying and durable. Go Dawgs, B.C.!
Photo from Wikipedia, above.
