celestialmonochord

Rocky Mountain Time

Time
(Watch photo from Watchismo.)

We begin with ringing, declarative chords as if introducing a rock anthem, but by the song’s first words the mood has already quieted:

Station’s empty
Trains were all gone
Reached in my pocket
Waited for dawn

It seems to be in waltz time, but it doesn’t feel like it — its rhythmic sense is more the ebb and flow of breathing or thinking. And gets that effect mostly from such changes in dynamics, loud here and soft there.

Those dynamics have a purpose, of course. They mirror the song’s emotional roller coaster, a volatility that rises in the narrator, but is unprovoked by the action in any plot. Literally, the song is just a description of the loneliness of a musician on the road. He even has to fantasize his own back-up band:

The clock played drums
And I hummed the sax
And the wind whistled down
The railroad tracks

In its own way, “Rocky Mountain Time” is a bit John Prine’s version of Langston Hughes’ famous poem, “A Dream Differed” — it’s a psychological study of what becomes of dreams and desires when they’re isolated, frustrated, and finally strangled. Emotionally, the song is as direct as anything else on Diamonds in the Rough. It almost seems to be Prine’s last chance on this album to look us right in the eye and connect with us directly — seeing as it’s the penultimate cut, and the album’s last Prine composition.

But in terms of its ideas, the song has always kept me slightly distracted by little logical puzzles, trivial calculations. Maybe it’s trying to keep me off guard while it prepares its punch. Consider the chorus:

Hey, three for a quarter
One for a dime
I’ll bet it’s tomorrow
By Rocky Mountain time

So … if it’s tomorrow according to Rocky Mountain Time, Prine’s narrator must be east of the Mountain Time Zone. Right? If you’re in New York and it’s 1:00 AM, it’s only 11:00 PM the day before in the Rockies. It’s tomorrow by Rocky Mountain Time. Unless he means tomorrow IN Rocky Mountain Time, in which case he’s WEST of the Rockies, in the narrow wedge of the planet from California to the International Dateline.

Time zone calculations — they’re the kind of thing your mind does when you’re far from home. Let’s see, three for a quarter and one for a dime, so if you get three, they knock a nickel off the price. You can see how it would get alienating after a while.

The waitress yelled at me
And so did the food
And the water tastes funny
When you’re far from your home
But it’s only the thirsty
That hunger to roam

In a way, these puzzles in logic alienate me from the direct emotional impact of the song. But that’s what the song itself is about — being stranded out there beyond your own emotions, trying to work out the logistics of getting along in a strange land. Again, it’s a traveling musician’s song.

Of the few cuts Henry Thomas recorded in his lifetime, a lot of them play this same magic trick on me, keeping me distracted with calculations while they prepare to hit me in the gut. Like most magic tricks, they use misdirection — Henry Thomas will sometimes keep me puzzling over celestial navigation until he’s got me in tears.

In Lovin’ Babe, a song that starts fast and accelerates, everything seems to be coming and going in every direction, while in the meantime, one of music’s most painful psychological portraits is taking shape:

Look where that evening sun has gone
Look where that evening sun gone
Look where that evening sun done gone
Gone, God knows where

The longest day, darlin, ever I seen
Yes, the longest day I ever seen
Well, the longest day ever I seen
The day Roberta died

That eastbound train come and gone
That eastbound train come and gone
That eastbound train come and gone
Gone to come no more

Got the blues, God I’m feeling bad
Yeah, I got the worried blues, feeling bad
Got the blues, I’m feeling bad
Feeling bad, God knows why

That eastbound sun come and gone
Now, the eastbound sun come and gone
Yeah, the eastbound sun come and gone
Now, babe I’m all out and down

Roberta, babe, gone away
Yeah, Robert has gone away
Roberta, babe, gone away
She’s gone to come no more

The most vexing question is “that eastbound sun,” given that the sun travels west every day. It would be a great name for a train, but I find no evidence of an Eastbound Sun. Besides a slip of the tongue, or bad information, the only explanation I have is that the sun DOES move eastward — through the constellations, slowly, from one season to another. It takes a bit of slightly arcane knowledge to know that it does, but it does.

I wouldn’t put such knowledge past Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas, as he must’ve been pretty experienced in navigation. Every song of his entire recorded career is about moving from place to place — the freedom and hazards of traveling through America as a black musician during Jim Crow. The Road plays the same role in his music that the Gospels play in Blind Willie Johnson’s. It’s his grand theme, the concept through which his music is in conversation with the previous 4000 years, and the subsequent 80.

Songs like “Lovin’ Babe” and “Red River Blues” are easiest for me to understand when I hear them in the context of the Underground Railroad — they are urgently, desperately focused on celestial navigation and the clock, the technical cornerstones of both freedom and imperialist empire. And while Prine is of a different time and race (this is a hillbilly blues, after all), “Rocky Mountain Time” is part of a long lineage that passes back through and before Henry Thomas.

“Rocky Mountain Time” is Diamonds in the Rough’s way of beginning to say goodbye to us. With it, I find myself feeling a bit raw emotionally and alive intellectually. And I find Prine out there, fading, disappearing, puzzled and lost on the road, without a lot of hope of ever coming back.

Christ I’m so mixed up and lonely
I can’t even make friends with my brain
I’m too young to be where I’m going
But I’m too old to go back again

That’s yet another navigational paradox … the final cut on the album could easily be construed as resolving it, through Christ’s salvation. I haven’t written about that final cut yet, so I don’t know, but it’s never been in Prine’s character to offer an easy out. As he wrote about another song on Diamonds in the Rough, “I really love America. I just don’t know how to get there anymore.”

(This is part of my song-by-song series on John Prine’s second album, Diamonds in the Rough: Everybody * The Torch Singer * Souvenirs * The Late John Garfield Blues * Sour Grapes * Billy The Bum * The Frying Pan * Yes I Guess They Oughta Name a Drink After You * Take the Star Out of the Window * The Great Compromise * Clocks and Spoons * Rocky Mountain Time * Diamonds in the Rough)

Editor’s Note: This is the 15th installment of my 28-day marathon. The Celestial Monochord is trying to post something every day for the entire month of February.

Let’s Talk Dirty

(a member of Slipped A Mickey plays a jug
mounted on a microphone stand)

It’s funny. Pat Donahue has been playing guitar on A Prairie Home Companion for over 13 years. He’s a world-class fingerstyle player, to my ears, and Chet Atkins and Leo Kottke (whose ears are better educated on the subject) agree. Playing for Garrison Keillor must be a bear, as you have to be ready to … you know, whatever … play in almost any genre, or play as if you were a freezing-cold drunken cowboy, or make your guitar sound like it was broken in half or …

Despite all this, my impression is that Donahue has not been especially well known in Minnesota. At least given the fine, difficult, consistent, high-profile labor he’s performed for us over a long time, it doesn’t seem we’ve ever really focused on the guy and appreciated him. Well, that’s been my sense anyway.

Until that sushi song. Back in 2000, Donahue played a song he’d written — a stupid song, really, but very funny — about getting sick from sushi. It was called “Sushi Yucki.” The response was kind of huge, and it seems to be raising his profile.

Tickets to an upcoming concert by Donahue were used this past Saturday to draw memberships during Minnesota Publc Radio’s pledge drive — and “Sushi Yucki” was aired in its entirety, as if to remind us who the guy is and how great it would be to see him perform. He’ll have no choice but to play “Sushi Yuki” at his concert:

They think it sounds so yummy
But, hey, I ain’t no dummy
I knew no way
It would stay
Down in my tummy
I took a bite
And I was right
No likee icky yucky sushi

A moral of the story, of course, is you never know what’s going to draw an audience.

Now, the 25th Annual Battle of the Jug Bands was on Sunday (the day after I last heard “Sushi Yucki” on the radio). One of the contestants was a band called Slipped a Mickey, which I enjoyed very much even if they just couldn’t compete with the winners, The Hump Night Thumpers — THE FIGHTIN’ THUMPERS!

Slipped a Mickey played John Prine’s novelty song “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” as a kind raunchy, down-tempo, coffeehouse blues. Having heard the two songs so close together, I finally recognized their affinity.

Like “Sushi Yucki,” you want to listen to “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian” over and over until you feel like … well, like you’ve had too much sushi. Both songs begin in my stomping grounds, the Upper Midwest, and then travel to the islands of the Pacific, where the narrator’s bodily functions dominate the action:

I am from Minnesota
I went to Tokyo-ta
Visit the land
Of enchantment and quaint pagoda
I almost died
The night they tried
To make me eat that yucky sushi.

—

Well, I packed my bags and bought myself a ticket
For the land of the tall palm tree
Aloha Old Milwaukee, Hello Waikiki
I just stepped down from the airplane
When I heard her say
Waka waka nuka licka, waka waka nuka licka
Would you like a lei? Hey!

Both songs could be seen as racist, of course, depending as they do on faux-foreign gibberish. But like a lot of parody that traverses sensitive terrain, the songs are careful not to over-clarify the object of parody. Are we laughing at how funny the Japanese and Hawaiian languages sound? Or at Minnesotans — unable, as we are, to keep anything down but tuna casserole? Or at the jejune mating habits of Wisconsinites?

When I saw Prine last year in Minneapolis, he made a rather deliberate show of trudging resignedly through “Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian,” as if he had to do it whether he liked it or not. Three-quarters of the way through this surprisingly lengthy song, he vamped for a few seconds and warned us, “There’s more.”

Editor’s Note: I try to write these a day ahead, but given Valentine’s Day, I might be a little late with the February 15 post. Do I piss off my wife or the readers of my blog? Gentle reader, you just might lose that coin toss.

Anyway, this is the 14th installment of my 28-day attempt to post something every day in February. So, this entry is like Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra’s “Moonshiner’s Dance” — the mid-way point is marked by the silence immediately following. Be seated!

Land of Lincoln

I thought a lot about Abraham Lincoln while I was growing up, which I guess is not very unusual in Illinois.

Today (as I write this) is Lincoln’s birthday, and though his life is getting more important to me now, it was his death that mattered to me as a boy. It was by thinking about Abraham Lincoln that I first began to wrap my mind around the idea of death.

My dad spent decades working his way to the top of the hierarchy of the Knights of Columbus in Illinois, so our family criss-crossed the state constantly. Belleville, Peoria, Beardstown, Carbondale, Mattoon. It is a BIG state.

Around 1973, we saw the Dickson Mounds, a prehistoric earthworks containing a lot of Native American burials. They had the side of one of the mounds carved out to expose the bones, and they’d built a vast visitor’s center where you could stand behind a railing and look at the skeletons. It was dark and dramatically lit, and there’s a photo of a 9-year-old me standing at the railing, looking rather green in more ways than one.

Someone in our family also took some photos of the bones, and we came across them whenever we’d pull out the family slide projector. The last time we saw those slides, my mother talked about wrapping them up and sending them to the tribal government for proper disposal. She probably did, if I know her.

Anyway, it was on that same trip that we visited Lincoln’s tomb in Springfield, and I half expected to see his bones, too. Of course, someone had stolen his body long ago and, when they got it back, it had to be locked firmly away so they’d stay put. But I remember imagining what his skeleton looked like.

Around that age, I read “The Death of Lincoln: A Picture History of the Assassination” by Leroy Hayman, from Scholastic. I still have it. One night, with that book at my side, I woke up around 3 AM thinking of Lincoln’s recurring dream, the one where he was traveling toward some “indefinite shore” in a “singular, indescribable vessel.” I freaked myself out, and couldn’t stop my limbs from shaking in my bed.

And then I thought the little bust of Lincoln on the shelf above my headboard was moving. It was made of white wax — my mother had given me a quarter to get it made by a machine in the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.

That’s when I woke up one of my brothers and told him what was happening. It was the night my child’s mind seized on death, finally understanding it was real, something truly in the world, a pervasive thing. He told me not to worry about it, rolled over, and went back to sleep. In retrospect, that was pretty much the right answer.

The night culminated when I heard a terrible groan that seemed to come from everywhere at the same time. It was undeniably a ghost — I can still hear it in my head, it was awful. Now that I’m older and things are starting to come back to me, I realize it was exactly the same sound my dad — who was a champion snorer — would make down the hall when he rolled over in his sleep.

Obviously, that was a long time ago and I’ve very much moved on. But I do occasionally feel a bit like spitting at the mention of John Wilkes Booth.

Editor’s Note: This is the 13th installment of my fool-hardy attempt to write something every day for the entire month of February.

Battle of the Jug Bands, 2007 Results

Gizmo
(Gizmo, a member of The Hump Night Thumpers)

The votes are tallied and authorized, and the winners of the 25th Annual Battle of the Jug Bands has been announced!

This year’s winners — the jug band honored with one year’s possession of the traveling trophy, a 1936 Holliwood-brand waffle iron — are The Hump Night Thumpers!

I’m proud to say that the Thumpers are from my sweet home, Chicago. The members of the band are the students of the Hump Night Thumpers class at the Old Town School of Folk Music — the band’s membership rotates, with the lineup at any given moment depending on who has enrolled in the class.

The fearless leader of this band — and indeed, the leader of the large expedition that has traveled two years in a row from Chicago to Minneapolis to compete in the Battle — is one Arlo Leach, guitar instructor at the Old Town.

Unfortunately, they performed near the end of the evening, by which time I had pretty much abandoned note-taking in favor of photography. I would love to give a song-by-song analysis, but I was frankly spacing out. They certainly were a compelling jug band, I remember that.

The Thumpers were dressed in fine evening formal wear, circa 1930, bringing a bit of class to the Cabooze. In this, they joined the long tradition of elevating the reputation of marginalized musical forms through sartorial elegance and dignified personal conduct (recall Bascom Lamar Lunsford in his tux, for example).

I also remember that Arlo impressed both the judges and The Celestial Monochord by introducing their last song with this:

This next song was recorded in 1934 in Chicago, where we’re from. A lot of you know the song “Jug Band Quartet” — well, this was the B-side of that record, and it’s called “Little Green Slippers.” [approximate quote]

See, after you’ve heard the evening’s fifth rendition of that “Hey lordy momma momma, hey lordy poppa poppa” thing, you start to get the general idea. It was worth several extra points to hear some indication that the band knew jug band music had a life before the CD. And the LP. And the 45.

Congratulations to our jug-playing cousins to the south!

Saggy
(The feller and one of five grandmas
comprising Grandma’s Saggy Jug Band)

Now, I know you’re wondering how last year’s winners, Grandma’s Saggy Jug Band, performed this year. Grandma’s Saggy, as you know, was given the honor of choosing this year’s judging panel. Because they — no doubt unlike THIS year’s wise and talented winners! — never contacted me about serving as a member of the judging panel, I had no choice but to JUDGE THEM ANYWAY. And believe me, I was very judgy!

Grandma’s Saggy Jug Band mounted the stage looking quite well-fed and self-satisfied from an entire year of eating waffles made with their trophy waffle iron. Audience members were universally honored that they had even bothered to wipe the syrup from the sides of their mouths!

Now, I suppose a few of the drunker audience members were dazzled by their fancy musicianship — “Cigarettes and Whisky and Wild Wild Women,” especially, highlighted the rhythm section’s slick ability to maintain a driving, danceable momentum while also filling each measure with dense, intricate polyrhythms. It was breathtaking … to some.

And the less observant might have seen their finale — the band’s signature piece, “Cock-A-Doodle, I’m Off My Noodle,” originally by Harry Reser’s Six Jumping Jacks — as decisive proof that the band deeply understands and appreciates the “madcap” tradition in American dance music. Personal charisma and precise musical timing were the hallmark of great novelty bands like Spike Jones and his City Slickers and Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra. In the unlikeliest of venues, Grandma’s Saggy Jug Band resurrects this tradition with intelligence, respect, skill, and genuinely funny showmanship. Or so some might think.

But I saw through that. Their rendition of “Don’t Get Trouble in Your Mind” was an extremely close recreation of the New Lost City Rambler’s version — to the extent it deviated from the Ramblers’ recording, it was more danceable, more compelling, more fun. What a garish display — the Rambler’s version was plenty danceable, compelling, and fun to begin with, I assure you.

Most damning of all, their … over-determined ethnomimesis … failed to resolve the very contradictions inherent in the semiotics of the, uh, signs they were … signifying. Their very Bernoulli Effect elutriated their own mycotoxicosis!

One year can make a world of difference, of course, so we’ll see how this year’s winners fair next year. We’ll see if the fledgling Old Town School of Folk Music can withstand the treatment The Hump Night Thumpers might — or might not — receive from the Minneapolis blogging community.

Editor’s Note: This is installment 12 of our attempt to post something or other every day during the entire month of February. That’s about 28 times the posting rate usually maintained around these parts.

Your Wife As Krakatoa, 1883

For today’s entry of The Celestial Monochord, my heartfelt thanks to Minneapolis poet Jennifer L. Willoughby. Her first book of poems, Beautiful Zero, was published by Milkweed Editions in 2015.

The Monochord has also published her poem “Thank You Mr. Sagan.”

This is the eleventh installment in my mission to post one entry to The Celestial Monochord every day for the month of February.

—–

YOUR WIFE AS KRAKATOA, 1883

Did you hear that ravishing blast?
That was your wife.
Her explosion shocked even the smallest Australian sheep
eating green turf over 3000 miles away.

At Western festivities
languid relatives patted her head,
thinking she was pretty and backwards,
thinking she was alcoholic and strange.

Did you see wings of independence bobbing in her shoals,
did you see infants listening while she sang about England?

She being tame as cocoa,
a little armchair nation stationed next to Java.
Gentlemen whispered, inferred frigidity.

She being a slow colonial outpost
of the spice islands, shanghaied and traded,
her pepper and cloves seasoning putrefying meat.

Your wife was the kind of woman
who wore silk and went bare foot,
plumes of juniper spiking her hair.
Pye-dogs, the wandering mutts of Asia,
followed her whistles, lapped her salty knees.

She could tell time with a shadow & a pin.
She was good at falling in love with the peacock generation.

She had a fling with the Wallace Line,
raising eyebrows over glasses of gin.
They got down to business
with the poison flowers,
the strangling weeds,
the scavenging avians.

Your wife was either a shrew or a shrewd captive of nature.

In one day,
your wife destroyed life as she knew it,
went cackling madwoman, breaking the stone gates
of her oceanic laboratory, boiling down your horded annual capital
to a glutinous stew of paper boats, torn orchids and molten bones.

No one could hold her.
The shock wave of your wife traveled the earth seven times.
Her ashes sat in the lungs of merchants in Singapore like black milk.
She hotwired barometers from Bogota to DC and flung her aerosol spray
of sapphire and emerald suns to tango with the equator.

Your wife killed 36,417 people.
Your wife sent corpses sailing to Africa on pyres of steaming pumice.
Your wife was 10,000 times as strong as Hiroshima’s atomic bomb.
Your wife was the mother of it all.

Some future tourist scouring the beach
for chambered shells or shiny tiki treasures
might know nothing about your wife.

Scientists have added your wife to their alphabetical jars
of formaldehyde, saline and amber. Etched her face on a fossil.

She fooled honest men in New York and New Haven.
They drove fire trucks to quench hallucinatory afterglows
as she rouged the sedate evening with mirrors of flame.

Forget your wife.
She was not beloved.
Her unusual sunsets continued for years.

The Young Musicologist

Today is the 39-year anniversary of Mike Seeger’s recording of Dock Boggs singing “Careless Love.” Last February 10, I marked the 38-year anniversary with a good entry about the song. That entry is one of the most-visited pages at The Celestial Monochord, and I won’t try to rewrite it today.

Thanks to Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus, I bet Mike Seeger is almost constantly asked about Boggs these days. His “rediscovery” of Boggs in 1963 and the short time they spent working together have taken on the qualities of myth in a lot of people’s minds, including mine. I always think of Mike and Dock alongside the story of Johannes Kepler at Tycho Brahe’s death bed. I’ve tried to interest a show-biz relative of mine in the idea of a movie about Seeger and Boggs (maybe with Kevin McDonald as Seeger and John C. Reilly as Doc Watson? Any ideas about Boggs?).

Anyway, in the few, very brief exchanges I’ve had with Seeger, I’ve tried to avoid the obvious topics like Boggs — I asked him about Maybelle Carter’s playing of melodic autoharp, for example. But I made an exception back in 2004, when I told him a story about Boggs. It seemed to go well — maybe it was good to be told something new about Boggs for a change.

Mike had just completed a workshop on picking styles and a few people hung around afterwards to talk to him. Someone mentioned Boggs, and I launched into the “conversion experience” story I tell now and then:

The first CD I got after The Harry Smith Anthology was the Folkways stuff you did with Dock in the 1960’s. I put it on the stereo for the first time, and when “New Prisoner’s Song” came on, I just burst into tears. I sobbed openly for a while. And then I collected myself and thought … “My musical tastes have CHANGED.”

And with that, Mike let out a big belly laugh. It seemed to me that he appreciated how bizarre and potentially intolerable Boggs’ music could sound to someone in their 30’s, as I was then, and understood my surprise at myself.

Among the other people in the room was a kid around 20 years old, I guess. He had the coolest, silliest haircut — sort of a cross between a mohawk and the coxcomb of a chicken. This young banjoist — who reminded me of a very young Bob Carlin — mentioned that he had an original Brunswick 78 of Dock’s “Sugar Baby.”

Mike was surprised. He said his “friend Greil Marcus,” who “loves to write about Dock Boggs,” had asked him to see if he could get him some of those 78s, but Seeger was unable to locate any at a reasonable price. The youngster said he’d payed less than a hundred dollars for his. About a half an hour later, during lunch, Mike and this mohawk kid were sitting together, engaged in some kind of intense discussion.

I’m finding that it matters, this getting up close to the people you write about.

Over the course of the long weekend of the “Black Banjo: Then and Now” conference, Mike slowly painted a portrait of himself as a young, inexperienced folklorist in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Around 1953, he briefly met a black banjoist named Sam (the one he describes in the liner notes to “Tie Your Dog Sally Gal” on Close to Home). Days later, he asked a shopkeeper in a black section of Kensington, Maryland where he might find Sam. Mike explained, with obvious regret in his voice, “I was green, and looking for Sam, and he thought it may not be good for Sam.” He never did find the banjoist.

That same weekend, Mike told a remarkable story about visiting Sewanee, TN, where he met the dean, Red Lancaster. Hearing that Mike was into the banjo, he invited Mike back to his house. This was OK, Lancaster said, because his wife was away. Young Mike wondered nervously what what this might mean, exactly. That night, Lancaster brought out some whiskey and began to drink it. Mike didn’t feel he had much of an option except to drink it too, although Mike was definitely not a drinker of hard liquor. His memory of the evening is very cloudy, but he was able to record the session, and the tape is now at Chapel Hill.

What Mike does remember is that Lancaster consistently stroked the fifth string of his banjo with his thumbnail, flicking UP (not down, as everybody else does, regardless of style). He also remembers that Lancaster’s thumb was clearly bloody after an evening of banjo playing.

This is the tension that would be great to get into a film — the young folksinger/folklorist, green and nervous, suddenly immersed in the universe of men and women very much older than himself, people who had seen a lot and who had many decades worth of demons, resentments, desires, and regrets to contend with. It reverses the old myth still so emblematic of anthropology — the picture of a worldly, sophisticated representative of the wider planet who comes to study an innocent product of a tiny, insular culture. When Mike met Dock in 1963, who was like a lamb, and who represented a big, complex world?

Editor’s Note: This is installment #10 of The Celestial Monochord’s great and stress-inducing adventure in cutting-edge bloggery — we are attempting to post one entry every day during the month of February.

If You Can Blog A Better Post …

Still thinking, from yesterday, about Tom Waits and his adaptation of old folksongs …

He doesn’t really adapt them or arrange them to suit his style — as many a folksinger does — he strips them down to their “idea” and their “feel” and then writes an entirely new piece, beginning there, with the song’s essence.

During the years in which I followed and contributed heavily to a Tom Waits discussion list, I was always finding examples — ad nauseum, as was occasionally pointed out to me. Often, the connection was interesting but flimsy.

Among the more convincing examples I found was “Swordfishtrombones.” It’s the title song of the 1982 album in which Waits finally left behind the drunken beatnik routine (which he’d grown to dislike), and began to reach for something more explicitly artful. I think he and his wife Kathleen Brennan sought direction the way everybody else does — by digging up the roots.

Before the Dylan Era, the song “Swordfishtrombones” might have been called a play-party nonsense song, while today it’s impressionistic. It relates the wildly shifting fortunes and apparently supernatural misadventures of a soldier just back from a war:

He went to sleep at the bottom of Tenkiller Lake
And he said, “Gee, but it’ great to be home.”
. . .
He packed up all his expectations
He lit out for California
With a flyswatter banjo on his knee
A lucky tiger in his angel hair
And benzedrine for getting there
They found him in a eucalyptus tree

Now, I’ve witnessed people coming home from wars, and this sort of behavior looks sorta familiar. Certainly, half a pint of Ballentine’s each day is on the moderate side.

Anyway, in the end, the song acknowledges the far-fetched character of some of its claims by drawing attention to itself as a piece of writing. It’s just a tall tale:

Now, some say he’s doing the obituary mambo
Some say that he’s hanging on the wall
Perhaps this yarn is the only thing
That holds this man together
Some say that he was never here at all

Some say they saw him down in Birmingham
Sleeping in a boxcar going by
And if you think that you can tell a bigger tale
I swear to God you’d have to tell a lie.

When I first heard the woundrous Bascom Lamar Lunsford sing “On a Bright and Summer’s Morning,” I decided I knew where “Swordfishtombones” had come from. It turns out Waits’ soldier was once a hunter, and is now imbibing in some sex and alcohol, but the song is essentially the same sort of travelogue. Some stanzas from Lunsford, the guy who wrote “Mountain Dew”:

The money that I got for the venison and skin
I hauled it to my daddy’s barn
It wouldn’t half go —
It wouldn’t half go in

I went upon the mountain
Beyond the peak so high
The moon come round with lightning speed
“I’ll take a ride,” says —
“I’ll take a ride,” says I.

The moon come around the mountain
It took a sudden whirl
My feet slipped and I fell out
And landed in this —
And landed in this world

The clincher, of course, is the last stanza, which Waits has changed only slightly:

The man that made this song and tune
His name was Benny Young
If you can tell a bigger lie
I’ll swear you oughta be —
I’ll swear you oughta be hung

There are a lot of versions of this song, under a lot of names, so I can’t say what Waits was listening to — but he got it from one of em. I can come up with boat loads of these, given some time, but if my fellow Waits fans quickly got their fill, I’d imagine you would too.

Maybe, if you wanted a moral to this story, we could remember all the hand-wringing that went on about Bob Dylan’s supposed plagiarism of Junichi Saga and Henry Timrod, and wonder aloud whether there’s anybody left who hasn’t decided all that kurfluffle was a lot of horseradish.

Editor’s Note: This is the ninth installment of my attempt to post something half-way Monochordy every day for the whole month of February.

How’s it going? Am I slowing down here? … well, the important thing is that I’m still standing! Boo-ya! As T-Model Ford said, “I been shot! And I been cut! I been kicked in the head! I been hit with a chair! Nobody gets me down!”

I’m a Stern Old Bachelor

Stern Old Bachelor

Over the past few months, I’ve bought nine inexpensive 78 rpm records — the first 78’s in my music collection.

Most of my 78’s relate to my research into Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra, although I don’t yet have “Moonshiners Dance” (Gennett 6305) — if you own it, please contact me. One of the “extracurricular” records is by Chubby Parker, which I bought just because he’s a denizen of Harry Smith’s Anthology.

It’s an odd buy, since the label is the same on both sides. It claims to be two helpings of the B-side, “I’m a Stern Old Bachelor,” although playing the record reveals it actually has the correct A-side, “Oh Suzanna.” And in fact, the “Oh Suzanna” side is considerably more worn than the “Bachelor” side, so I guess Gennett chose their A’s and B’s correctly. Presumably, somewhere in the world, there’s a Chubby Parker 78 claiming to have two sides of “Oh Suzanna.”

“I’m a Stern Old Bachelor” is a comic novelty song, which celebrates the delights of being unbound by holy wedlock. (I wish I could make an MP3 for you, but I don’t have the technology.) Parker recorded it for Gennett on February 26, 1927 … in a couple weeks from now, it will be the 80th anniversary of that recording, but I need something to write about TODAY.

It seems to have been one of Chubby’s signatures on the WLS Barn Dance radio show, although “Nickety Nackety Now Now Now” was really his theme. (You may remember “Nickety Nackety” better from Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds). Both were later reissued on Slivertone, the record label of Sears Roebuck (the worlds largest store, hence the WLS call letters).

Next, “Bachelor” showed up in John Lomax’s 1934 book, “American Ballads and Folk Songs.” In June 1938, the original Carter Family recorded the song on their last recording session before taking off for Texas and Mexico to be on border radio with XERA. Because the Lomax and Carter texts share a couple extra verses not found on Parker’s recording, I assume the Carters got the song primarily from Lomax. In any case, it’s an uncharacteristically silly performance by Sara and Maybelle.

Here are the lyrics to “Stern Old Bachelor”. The lines in italics are sung by the Carters, but not by Chubby Parker.

I am a stern old bachelor
My age is forty-four
I do declare, I’ll never live
With women anymore

I have a stove that’s worth ten cents
A table worth fifteen
I cook my gruel in oyster cans
And keep my things so clean

[chorus]
Oh little sod shanty
Little sod shanty give to me
For I’m a stern old bachelor
From matrimony free

When I come home at night I have no fear
I smile and walk right in
I never hear a voice yell out
Or say where have you been

On a cold and stormy night
In a cozy little shack
I sing my songs and think my thoughts
With no one to talk back

I go to bed when ever I please
And get up just the same
I change my socks three times a year
With no one to complain

At night when I’m on peaceful sleep
My snores can do no harm
I never have to walk the floor
With an infant [a baby] in my arms

And when I die and go to heaven
As all good bachelors do
I will not have to grieve for fear
My wife will get there too

When I first heard Parker’s recording — despite his high nasal voice and crisp banjo picking — I immediately thought of the Tom Waits song, “Better Off Without a Wife.” You know the one:

I like to sleep until the crack of noon
Midnight howling at the moon
Going out when I want to
Coming home when I please
Don’t have to ask permission
If I want to go out fishing
Never have to ask for the keys

They’re more or less the same song … well, I should say that “Better Off Without a Wife” could easily be a thorough re-imagining of “I’m a Stern Old Bachelor.” I believe Waits used to do this often — take a good old folksong, boil it down to the essence of whatever makes it good, and then build an entirely new song around that same essence. See my post on “Cold Cold Ground.”

Now, you may ask whether, in 1973, Tom Waits was listening to Chubby Parker or Sara and Maybelle Carter, or reading song books by John Lomax. It’s a little-known fact that Waits started out at California folk clubs like the Troubadour and the Heritage. Apparently, Waits and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott would occasionally hang out together in the 1970’s (one suspects a nightcap or two may have been involved).

In any case, although my evidence for a direct link between the two songs is slim — and there must be dozens of other comic bachelor songs for Waits to take some cues from — there’s no reason to doubt that Waits and the music of the Carters or Chubby Parker could easily have crossed paths in the early 1970’s.

Editor’s Note: This is the 8th day of my 28-day experiment. I’m trying to post something every day for the whole month of February. If it’s something worth reading, well … all the better.

Drone! Drone! Drone! Pilotless Airplane!

Astronaut diaper
Get it?

When I founded this journal in March 2005, I got a little purple notebook in which to keep ideas for future entries. On the first page, between two ideas I never used — “Skin, Gut, Wood, Bone, & Metal in Banjos” and “Chemistry of Red Clay Halos” — is the following idea, also unused: “Astronauts in Diapers”.

So, before moving on to more recent news, let me recap where my head was at — what I would have written — 22 months ago.

Nobody loves the space program more than I do, I would have written. I grew up with my room wallpapered with galaxy posters and, at one point, I listened to little else but Vangelis. Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, as I wrote more recently, was an early cornerstone of what you might call my spiritual life. Every solid body in the solar system should be crawling with Spirits and Opportunities, I would have argued.

And this would’ve been a bargain, if we would only shut down the “manned” space program, which I found increasingly pointless and grotesque.

It’s true that if the Galileo spacecraft had carried a crew, they could have climbed out and shook loose that stuck umbrella antenna, giving us orders of magnitude more data from that mission. On the other hand, for what it would cost to feed the mission’s astronauts, supply them with air, give them a way to crap and pee and take a shower, entertain them, satisfy their sex drives, keep them from killing each other — I would have written — we could have had a flotilla of 500 Galileo spacecraft, of varying design, that would have swarmed around Jupiter like bees around a nest.

And nobody would have died. The main reason for maintaining the Shuttle Program is to finish the wildly over-budget, useless Space Station Freedom, my argument would have gone. The claim that we need the station for scientific purposes would have been called a lie — the only thing we could learn from that station that we couldn’t learn more easily, cheaply, and safely in other ways would be how to keep people floating around in space.

Why do we keep hurling these brave, bright, strong, idealistic people up on these monsters designed in 1970 to play nurse maid to billion-dollar junior-high-school science-fair ant farms? Just to have them die painful, fiery, long, terrifying, lonely deaths? Or for a massive welfare program for defense contractors? Have we no shame? Is nothing sacred? … I would have asked, had I written that post 22 months ago.

The argument is often made that “the young people of today” need heros to look up to and to stimulate their imaginations. Again, a concept from 1970. (Aaaahhh, remember when “disposable” was synonymous with “expensive”?) Young people today find it wildly stimulating to sit behind a computer, issuing commands to robots. They may well find it irrational and regressive — backward and idiotic, even — to risk death just to fly around in circles in the dark. Or so I might have speculated, had I written that post.

And the emblem for all these ideas would have been The Diaper. Yes, those brave explorers spacewalking in the new frontier are wearing DIAPERS (which really inspires the teenagers, in my experience.)

Well, I could go on … I mean, I could have gone on … like this forever, oh so long ago. I think you can see why I never wrote that entry — hysterical rants are simply against the editorial standards of The Celestial Monochord, which attempts to put forth a rational, contemplative exploration of ideas. When one of our writing staff submits such a screed, the Editorial Board politely rejects it.

Anyway, that’s where I was before this week. Then, two news items caught my eye.

First, the pilotless drone story. Recently, the San Francisco Chronicle started using messages that readers leave on the paper’s voice mail for the Chronicle’s podcast. The first such experiment became a huge internet phenomenon. It was a guy enraged by the Chronicle’s use of the phrase “pilotless drone” — a drone, you see, already implies the lack of a pilot. The caller’s off-the-rails tirade (“DRONE! DRONE! DRONE! Pilotless airplane! GET IT?”) is hilarious, as is the attention it has received.

Mostly, I like the way the caller’s hysterical chanting roughly reflects my actual position on an important public policy issue.

And then there’s Lisa Nowak. Yes indeed. As I write this, I haven’t yet seen what fun the late-night comics will make of her. The woman is clearly having what used be called, in the old days, a “nervous breakdown” and I don’t want to exploit her mental health crisis. Leave the exploitation to the cable news networks and the Florida prosecutors.

But I can’t help pointing out that I was right — and what’s a blog for, except to point out the rare occasions on which you were right — about astronauts and diapers. Something needs a second look here. Maybe we need to go focus on real knowledge, on missions like the Voyager Spacecraft, which to my generation were so inspiring, so beautiful, and so dignified.

Editor’s Note: This is installment seven of my increasingly bizarre attempt to post one entry every day for a whole month. THIS month, as a matter of fact.

My Dodo

Dodo
(photo from Wikipedia)

The January 22 issue of The New Yorker featured an article on the dodo, the large bird that became extinct around 1690. Its only habitat was the island of Mauritius, on which no human beings ever lived until the Dutch landed in 1590. It therefore took just one century of carelessness, and wee bit of malice, to wipe the species out. “Nor were they afraid of us,” a contemporary wrote, “but just remained sitting, allowing us to beat them to death.”

The New Yorker article mostly concerns the history of dodo skeletons and the men who love them. But just as with most pieces in that magazine, other stories come rushing in once the door is left open. Well-meaning scientists are caught up in post-colonial cultural politics. Local politicians argue that the dodo’s extinction was the best thing to ever happen to the Mauritius tourist trade. A lone, obsessive amateur tries to redirect the wide world’s attention toward his curious little plot of ground.

Naturally, it was this last story with which I identified most:

Alan Grihault, a retired teacher … was surprised to learn that there was no standard glossy dodo book … He began to gather material for one. He, too, found his way to the Mare aux Songes [a site with many underground dodo skeletons] and, in his mind, became the site’s unofficial caretaker. “It was my place, a tranquil place,” Grihault said … [His wife] told me that her husband’s dodo interest “sometimes gets to be a bit too much. Only two of us at home, so I hear everything, and sometimes twice, when he explains it to friends. Luckily I have the ability to switch off.”

And believe me, my wife identifies with this story, too. She and I both immediately recognized that Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe Orchestra are like this for me — they are my dodo.

After my hundreds of research hours and all the conclusions I’ve drawn, my most pressing conclusion that almost nothing is known about virtually everything — certainly these old musicians remain almost wholly ignored. I would have guessed, for example, that there would be several people in the United States working on each and every performer on Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music. There isn’t.

When I bought the Anthology in 1997, the authoritative heft of the thing left me with the sense that there was little more to say. Surely, the Smithsonian must be delivering to us the limits of what is knowable, particularly given all those citations to scholarly journals. That’s really why it took me nine years to finally try a little research on my own. But when I did, I was stunned to realize that nobody had bothered to do even the laziest, most casual investigation. Even after discovering a second researcher interested in Cloutier and the Victoria, I still find that … well, I’m it. I’m the world’s leading expert.

Mountains of undiscovered material are waiting to be unearthed about an infinite variety of the past’s important people and events. One reason for all this ignorance may be we’ve been tricked into thinking it’s been researched. We picture Sherlock Holmes, with the hat and the pipe, or we Google up all sorts of interesing sites, and we think everything’s been sorted out already. Well, it hasn’t.

Maybe this sad, universal forgetfulness is due to everybody trying to make a living and reproduce themselves. Who’s got the time? More likely, I think it’s just a rare personality trait, to want to know everything that is knowable about one thing.

Minnesota Public Radio recently broadcast an interview with the author of an illustrated biography of Django Reinhardt. You can almost hear MPR reporter Tom Crann struggling to understand how someone can focus on one idea — one story — for most of his life. He seems to ask Michael Dregni the same sort of question, over and over, again and again, finding new ways to ask it until he finally blurts out, “Why do you care about him so much?”

It could easily be my imagination, but what I hear is a reporter — someone who tells at least one new story every day — struggling to come to terms with why someone would choose to know everything about one subject. Dregni is very gracious in his response, but I want him to just say, “Look, Crann. Django’s my dodo, OK?”

Editor’s Note: Today was the coldest day in three years here in Minnesota. And you wonder why I chose February to sit behind my computer and try to write one post every stinking day all month long. This is the sixth installment. Do you hear those helicopters?