Category: New Lost City Ramblers

I've been out of town the last few days — at a funeral, coincidentally — so you presumably knew before I did that Mike Seeger has died. 

I don't see a heck of a lot on the web that seems to capture Seeger's significance, and it may take a long time before his true importance is widely and well understood.  Maybe Bill C. Malone's rumored biography will advance that project.

I like quoting what Bob Dylan's autobiography, Chronicles, says about Mike — not only to borrow Dylan's clout, but because nobody else has expressed it so vividly, before or since.  Buy Chronicles and read it. 

Only in Dylan's writing about Mike do I really recognize the guy I encountered — maybe only Bob and I saw it, but I bet a lot of people have the same feeling.

Here's a small sample of the thirteen-page ode dramatizing the impact Mike Seeger had on the young Dylan's sense of himself as an artist:

Sometimes you know things have to change, are going to change, but you can only feel it … But then something immediate happens and you're in another world, you jump into the unknown, have an instinctive understanding of it — you're set free … Somebody holds the mirror up, unlocks the door — something jerks it open and you're shoved in and your head has to go into a different place. Sometimes it takes a certain somebody to make you realize it. Mike Seeger had that affect on me.

He was extraordinary, gave me an eerie feeling. Mike was unprecedented. He was like a duke, the knight errant. As for being a folk musician, he was the supreme archetype. He could push a stake through Dracula's black heart … It's not as if he just played everything well, he played these songs as good as it was possible to play them … it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns … the thought occurred to me that maybe I'd have to write my own songs, ones that Mike didn't know. That was a startling thought.

The main thing I want to add tonight (because it might otherwise go unsaid) is how much I admired Mike's ethics as an intellect. 

He understood that trying to understand and explain things is difficult, and carries an ethical burden.  You OUGHT to be careful and humble in drawing conclusions, and you SHOULD get your facts right.  Be mindful of what you know to be the case, and what you don't. 

When he spoke, and when he wrote his liner notes, you could hear his great care in selecting words that said exactly what he knew, nothing less and nothing more.  I respected that in him.

Here's a round-up of selected previous writings about Mike Seeger.

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Mike Seeger has entered hospice care and members of his family are gathering at his home in Virginia, according to media reports. 

Over the years, the Celestial Monochord has written about Mike often, sometimes obsessively, because he's a hero of mine.

Below are links to my most substantial essays dealing with Mike Seeger. They're mostly in order of writing quality and/or relevance to Mike.

• How the Folk Revival affected Dock Boggs (indebted to Seeger's liner notes and Invisible Republic by Greil Marcus):

Dock Boggs: Revival  

• On innocence and experience, in the context of Mike Seeger:

The Young Musicologist

• A two-part screed in which I realize that Bob Dylan (and his generation) were not directly influenced by Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music as much as they were second-hand, through the New Lost City Ramblers:

Harry Smith, Dylan, and "The Rambler's Step"

• How Mike turned a simple love song into a contemplation about the relationships between art, and death, and love:

Little Birdie

• Thoughts about Hollis Brown, mentioning the version Bob Dylan did with Mike:

Hollis Brown's South Dakota

• Mike's version of a song about Slick Willie:

Late Last Night When My Willie Come Home

• With my facts a little rumpled around the edges, the vast importance and tiny reputation of the New Lost City Ramblers:

Math and Memory in New Lost City

• "Suggested listening" for fans of the Harry Smith Anthology:

Beyond the Anthology

• About my favorite cut on Mike's brilliant collection of field recordings:

A Talk on the World

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According to NPR, Mike Seeger has entered hospice.  I hope they have this wrong, of course, but I know he's had health problems for some time. 

Here's a round-up of articles about Mike Seeger previously publish at The Monochord.

  

   

    

  

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In late July, I wrote a "fake news" item about Barack Obama trying to appeal to fans of Oldtime music.

Well … now Barack Obama really is, in fact, trying to appeal to fans of Oldtime music (my consulting fee is in the mail, I'm quite certain).  

To wit, Ralph Stanley — best known as the elderly "Oh Death" guy on the O Brother Where Art Thou soundtrack — has recorded a radio endorsement to run in southwestern Virginia.

The area is hotly contested in the presidential race, and was also the home of many pioneers of the style today called "Oldtime" — Tommy Jarrell, Henry Whitter, The Carter Family, The Stonemans, and many, many, more.

I wrote that dorky fake news item because I kept doing double-takes at photos of Obama at a meeting of NCLR, which looks a hell of a lot like NLCR, which to Oldtime fans is as immediately recognizable as NASA or FBI. After a little slap-dash Photoshop work (above), I was in business.

Several years ago, I drove to Moorehead, Minnesota, and stayed at a Red Roof Inn just to see my first concert by Mike Seeger, cofounder of the NLCR.  At the end of the concert, Mike said he was going to go sit at the CD table and press the flesh. 

He'd just been touring with Ralph Stanley, you see, who stays at the CD table until the last dog dies — and Seeger saw that Stanley sells a lot of CDs that way.  After about 50 years in show business, Mike was apparently still learning from old Ralph Stanley. 

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It's been just over 2 years since the breaching of the New Orleans levies. August 28 will forever make me think, strangely, of both the flooding of New Orleans and Tom Paley.

On the night of Katrina's landfall, my wife and I were in Two Rivers, Wisconsin to see our first concert by Paley, one of the three original founders of The New Lost City Ramblers. After the show, we went back to our hotel to watch CNN and drink Manhattans, nervously discussing whether the levies would hold up.

Since then, I've seen Paley twice more — once at a "house concert" around the corner from my Minneapolis apartment, once in a little conference room at a suburban Marriott.

One great thing about concerts by the old folk masters is that they're usually pretty much right there, sitting in the chair next to you. A fair sense of what those concerts were like can be gotten from his new CD, Beware Young Ladies!

It's heartening to hear him singing in that same voice I recognize from the Ramblers recordings of the late 1950's and early 1960's — a voice that has always given the impression of straining for its height and sweetness. There's a faintly humorous creak in it — there always has been — and it hints, a bit, at the silly, avuncular, generous presence you meet so vividly in person.

In concert, Paley's introductions to his songs are lengthy shaggy dog stories, starting and ending nowhere, and are fantastic to hear (possibly not three times in a short time, as I have). Any hint of them are sadly missing from Beware Young Ladies!

For example, in concert Paley points out that "Croquet Habit" apparently started out as a song about a cocaine habit, but at some point, someone allowed the subject to drift.

The songs of Beware Young Ladies! are nearly all traditional murder ballads and rounder songs about dissolute youths and the women they exploit, as the title suggests. Paley makes them seem like great old lullabies whispered into your crib.

This generates that same friction that sparked the performances of The Ramblers, the original Carter Family, and so many others. The incongruity engages me in a way that's rare in much "contemporary folk," where the subject matter rules the mood like a petty dictator.

His version of the "The Lazy Farmer" is very close to that on the Harry Smith Anthology, except slowed down and played on solo fiddle, producing a more lonesome, back-woods sound. Paley also milks the song for its laughs, which I'd forgotten it has.

The CD also includes one song I know only from The New Lost City Ramblers, "Three Men Went A-Hunting" which portrays three ethnic stereotypes — a practical and dull Englishman, an argumentative contrarian Scotsman, and an Irish dreamer lost in his own stories.

I wish Paley had included at least one of his Swedish polskas, which he plays so beautifully on fiddle and which feel so at home among the American folk songs.

Beware Young Ladies! is a sampling of Paley's work on banjo, guitar, fiddle and harmonica, and while I'm not sure he's never been sharper, he can still mop the floor with most musicians a fraction of his age currently making a living as old weird Americans.

By now, his clawhammer banjo technique shows so much experience that it doesn't bother to prove anything. His rendition of "Sporting Life Blues" will make country blues guitarists sit up and wish he'd done a whole album this way. Like Mike Seeger, when I've seen Paley blow into his harmonica, I've literally heard gasps from concert audiences — people just aren't used to that vivid old-time technique.

The CD is a close collaboration with one Bert Deivert, with whom I'm not familiar at all. I'm cool on Deivert's singing style, which I find overwrought, and Paley gives him too many chances to take the lead. But he and Paley seem to have been playing together for quite some time, judging from how beautifully they accompany one another, and Dievert's playing puts some meat on Paley's bare bones.

I should mention that I love the design of the CD's packaging, which my mp3-downloading readers will miss out on. It's cleanly modern and simple and European — ugly Americans will think of Ikea (I know I did) — but it feels rustic and hand-fashioned at the same time.

The photography is wonderful, and I thank the record company for their kind permission to use a bit of that.

Back in August 2005, I registered the domains NewLostCityRamblers dot com and dot net.

Remembering why I did this foolish thing causes me conflicted emotions, to the point that they cancel each other out. Today, I very rarely think of it, except to puzzle over why I did it and what to do next.

That summer, I was kicking around the idea of starting a blog devoted to the members of the New Lost City Ramblers. The band is the best-kept secret in America — their influence is truly incalculable, their musical output seemingly endless and of supreme quality, and almost nobody under the age of 50 seems to know who they are.

When I’ve asked baby-boomer folk and blues enthusiasts how they got into the music (hoping to hear a story about the Harry Smith Anthology), they’ve almost always said they were roped in by the New Lost City Ramblers. After a while, I started to take that message to heart.

The individual members of Ramblers are still out there performing, mostly on their own and often in mind-bogglingly small and informal settings. So starting a blog to trace their comings and goings — and what hot young bands were being compared to them, who was crediting them with starting their careers, and so forth — seemed both a fun project and a useful public service.

But it turned out to be something a good deal more. Once I started the blog, I found my own understanding of the band growing exponentially. I also became much more familiar with a wider community I’d have known nothing about had I not maintained that blog. It was a door to a considerably wider world than I had known.

It is now inactive, though I haven’t given up on it completely. I never received one comment from a reader, and the site statistics remained virtually non-existent — it was as thankless as hell. When I started my full-time pursuit of the Anthology’s Frank Cloutier and the Victoria Cafe, something had to give, and it was the Ramblers blog. Still, I very much miss what I got out of it, and I hope it will somehow live again some day soon.

ANYWAY, point is, I was kicking around ideas for a name, so I went to a domain registration service and started plugging in ideas — BattleshipMaine.gov, BlackBottomStrut.net, LongPlayingShortSelling.com, and so forth. Soon, I thought to try the obvious thing — NewLostCityRamblers dot com and dot net. I was very surprised — startled — that the domains were just sitting there, waiting for anybody at all to just pay a few bucks for them.

So I puzzled over that. I had long been a fan of Tom Waits, so I knew TomWaits.com had been held for years by a cyber squatter. Going to the domain yielded a come-on for a flat-out porn site, plus a lot of pop-up windows. I hear Waits had to pay a lot of lawyers to finally get his name back. Although I’m not absolutely sure, it appears Mike Seeger’s name is already being squatted on in an analogous, if slightly more clever way — perhaps the reason for the real Mikes’s odd URL.

For several days in a row, I returned to the registration site. I thought about alerting the Ramblers that the domains were available, but figured they must already know. I wondered if there might be such acrimony among the members that none wanted to be seen as grabbing the band’s name. Mostly, I foresaw the day that a cyber squatter grabbed the domains and set up his scam, at which point they would become much more expensive property.

After several days of watching and thinking, a normal person would have concluded that the domains were worthless, that nobody wanted them, and they would remain available forever. But not me! I started wringing my hands a bit over the issue, especially since knowing they were available made me feel partly responsible for any bad outcomes. I thought about seeking advice at certain discussion lists I follow, but going public might have resulted in a self-fulfilling prophesy.

So … one day, without really having thought it out very deeply — on a whim — I whipped out a credit card and nabbed them. (It’s ssssooo easy to do, almost like “one-click” buying at Amazon.) Of course, this multiplied my involvement exponentially. Instead of resolving a puzzle, it turned the puzzle into a problem, and one that was decisively MINE. Maybe that’s what I wanted — I’m not sure.

And so there it is. It’s embarrassing, because it’s ethically ambiguous and something only an obsessive “fan” would get himself into. It’s a bit like Iraq — too costly to hold onto, especially since it was none of my business in the first place, but it’s uncomfortable imagining what might happen if I walked away.

I’m pretty sure — assuming no other intervention — I’ll hang onto the domains for a time and keep wondering about them. If the Ramblers want them, they can sure as hell have them for nothing. When I do let them go, I’ll try to give their management plenty of advance warning.

In the meantime, the domains sit there as something for me to think about, a touch stone. The very situation itself is an episode in the screwy history of the band’s under-appreciation … and in the strange career this kind of music is enjoying in cyberspace … and in my own obsessive, expensive relationship with both.

 

Editor’s Note: This is installment 22 in my 28-part attempt to post one entry of The Celestial Monochord every day during the month of February 2007. And boy howdy, am I running out of ideas … but I’m still standing! I’m gunna make it!

 

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.

 

Tom Paley in 2005
(Detail from photo courtesy Woodland Dunes Concert Series)

Editor’s Note (6 September 2007): For my review of Paley’s new CD, see Beware Young Ladies!

Tom Paley, a founder of The New Lost City Ramblers, will perform in the Twin Cities on Sunday, November 5. This is a rare opportunity that no fan of old American music should miss. Strangely enough, the concert is from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. at the Marriott Minneapolis West located at 9960 Wayzata Blvd. Admission is $15.00 at the door. Please help spread the word.

The Minneapolis concert is part of a small national tour, although few details seem to be available about it. Perhaps check with your local acoustic instrument shop or concert venue, or see if there’s a local folk, oldtime, or bluegrass music association. Here’s the remaining dates, as published in early October on a fiddle-player’s discussion list:

Fri: Nov 3: Duluth, MN
Sun: Nov 5: Minneapolis, MN
Sat: Nov 11: Evanston, IL
Thu: Nov 16: Columbia, MO
Mon: Nov 20: Reeds Spring, MO
Wed: Nov 22: Eureka Springs, AR
Sun: Nov 26: Tampa, FL
Thu: (?)Nov 30: Workshop, Tallahassee, FL(?)
Fri: Dec 1: House-Concert, Tallahassee, FL
Sat: Dec 2: House-Concert, Gainesville, FL
Sun: Dec 3: Workshop, Gainesville, FL

There may also be something coming up in the
Washington, DC area, sometime between Dec 4 and Dec 18.

The Ramblers and Tom Paley
The better I understand the importance of The New Lost City Ramblers, the harder it gets to explain. The band formed in 1958, when folk music had a massive audience in the USA. Unlike other folk groups, the Ramblers didn’t make the music slick and simple, but instead focused on getting the sound “right” — on knowing how to play, sing and arrange in the real traditional styles of the Appalachians.

They also understood that playing in an “authentic” and “traditional” way meant constantly experimenting, sometimes “making do,” and always having the biggest laughs and the best party you could manage.

The Ramblers were never a commercial hit, really, but they inspired armies of young people to take up the fiddle, banjo, mandolin, autoharp, and guitar, and learn to play them in a dizzying array of formerly obsolete styles. I’ve heard many stories of people starting out on banjo or fiddle, under the Rambler’s influence, and then realizing that their own ethnic heritage — Scottish, Native American, Polish, Jewish from various places, Senegalese, Gambian, whatever — was worth reviving as well. There is no meaningful way to calculate the influence the Ramblers have had on almost every form of traditional music worldwide.

Today, Harry Smith’s 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music is usually credited with inspiring the various waves of revivalists to come — and it did deeply inspire the Ramblers themselves. But I find that the Ramblers usually “came first” for people. For many listeners, it was the Ramblers who taught the lessons that the Anthology had to teach. For many, it was the Ramblers who disseminated the varied techniques and rich shades of expression that make the old pre-war Southern recordings such a revelation to people who were familiar with the Anthology.

As just one example, it seems that the Harry Smith Anthology was an important influence on Bob Dylan, as Greil Marcus has famously pointed out. But as I’ve discussed before (at tedious, bone-crushing length) Dylan heard the Anthology’s message mostly second-hand — in translation — most significantly through the Ramblers. Maybe we can think of the Ramblers as a thick pipeline for messages running between Dylan and the Anthology.

Of the three original New Lost City Ramblers, Tom Paley seems to have had the best-developed music career at the time the group formed. Still, he wanted the group to be a part-time pursuit while he held down other positions — teaching mathematics at Rutgers, for example. Paley left for Europe in 1962, ending his work with The New Lost City Ramblers. Tracy Schwarz joined the group shortly thereafter.

After leaving the Ramblers, Paley lived in Sweden until 1965 and has lived in England ever since. From what I can tell, I think he’s had a “real life,” making good use of his technical training to pursue a career. But he’s also continued to work as a musician, making a record with Peggy Seeger, and then working with the Old Reliable String Band, the New Deal String Band, and with probably with masters of the Swedish music Paley loves so well.

What is a Tom Paley concert like today?
The only Tom Paley concert I’ve seen was on the night Katrina made landfall, August 28th, 2005. It was part of a folk concert series held at a Nature Center outside of Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The concert series features world-class acts playing concerts as intimate as you’re ever likely to experience. I drove 350 miles to see Paley and was very glad I did.

The concert venue could seat about 120, I suppose, but was about two-thirds empty. Not far from Paley was the Nature Center’s poster about proper tree pruning. Next to that was a stuffed tundra swan shot in 1906. To get from the Center’s front door to the concert venue, you walk down the stairs, through the kitchen, and past fish tanks occupied by live turtles. Really, it’s a wonderful atmosphere for a concert, but it’s truly a pity that any Tom Paley concert could have such a small audience. On the other hand, American culture’s loss was definitely the audience’s gain — I even got to exchange a few words with him during intermission.

The most recent Tom Paley recordings I’d heard came from his New Lost City Ramblers days. They were nearly 45 years old. But the voice at Woodland Dunes was that same familiar voice — high, tight, unpretentious and capable of surprising changes of expression. One moment, he was singing the oldtime country murder ballad “Down in the Willow Garden (Rose Connelly)” in waltz time, and the next moment, he gave an extremely compelling blues vocal performance of “Sportin’ Life Blues.” Even with a head cold, Paley was really nailing the high notes.

He played guitar, fiddle, and banjo with all the versatility and power you’d expect from a founder of the New Lost City Ramblers. In “Sportin’ Life,” he showed himself to be a very sweet, effortless blues guitarist. On “Virginia Girls” (which you may know as “West Virginia Gals” by Al Hopkins) he played dazzlingly, in an oldtime raggy waltz style, in a menacing key, on a small borrowed guitar.

What attention Paley has gotten lately has mostly been for his fiddling. He surprised me deeply by playing a very touching fiddle instrumental solo of — of all things — “Fishing Blues” by Henry Thomas. My notes from that night read:

makes you realize that it really is a blues. Feels to me, now, like a white hillbilly blues. LOVELY as an instrumental

Other fiddle highlights were Paley’s playing of Swedish polskas — waltz-time dances with a curious little hopping double accent. He reworked, as a vispolska or a song polska, “The Lazy Farmer” or “The Man Who Wouldn’t Hoe Corn,” which you may know from Harry Smith’s Anthology. After singing one particularly lovely vispolska, Paley translated the lyrics from their original Swedish:

There’s not much booze that I can give to you
My bottle’s nearly empty
If you drink too much
You’ll end up on the floor and so will I
Along with all the pastor’s servants

Paley’s word-play and goofy sense of humor have not let up since the days they enlivened concerts by the New Lost City Ramblers. At Woodland Dunes, he apologized for his relentless retuning, and claimed that:

Back in the Ramblers days, we would get on stage and then tune for the first 20 minutes. Then when we began playing, a lot of the audience would get up and leave.  So we figured they must’ve showed up just for the tuning.  But of course, the joke was on them — there was going to be plenty more tuning later! [quoted from memory]

(John Cohen — photo by Howard Christopherson)

 

Last night, John Cohen was at the opening of a new exhibition of his photographs in Minneapolis (at the Icebox until November 4). The lines to have Cohen sign his books for you were short and occasionally non-existant, so you could sit down with him for a minute or two and chat before somebody started hovering nearby.

When I sat down at his little table in the corner, the Icebox’s Howard Christopherson was making sure Cohen had a fresh round of hor d’oeuvres. Cohen seemed in good spirits — although I fired questions at him like a drunken Jack Webb, he was very patient and performed, like an actor, the emotional content of his answers.

Below is a pretty close transcript of what we said, furiously scribbled down immediately after the conversation. My apologies for any serious misquotes, and note that I did not identify myself as a blogger. Some clarifications follow the “interview.”

 

The Celestial Monochord: I think the photos I’m noticing most are the ones I’ve never seen before — the one with Dylan and the chicken, and especially the one with [ Rambling Jack ] Elliott and … and …

John Cohen: And Woody [ Guthrie ]. Can you believe I missed that? I didn’t see it until this show, and I’m so glad that I …

Monochord: YOU’RE KIDDING! I thought you held it back until now. It’s very intense, hard for me to look at … I couldn’t really, um … I got very …

Cohen: Yes, it is a very emotional picture. I just didn’t know it existed until I got ready for this show. It’s way over-exposed so I must have passed over it on the contact sheets until now.

Monochord: Oh, I see. I figured it was too personal so you didn’t use it until now.

Cohen: Well, there was a lot of emotion then about Woody and what was happening with him, but on the other hand, I did use that one on the cover of “There is No Eye”. [ he points at the book nearby on the table ]

Monochord: Yeah, that’s true. Hey, who are these two guys here and here. [ pointing at the two musicians playing for Woody Guthrie on the cover of the book ]

Cohen: They’re from The Tarriers — it’s Bob Carey and Erik Darling [ more pointing — and I’m not 100% sure I remember this info correctly. ]

Monochord: Ok, I have a question, and I wouldn’t ask you this question if I wasn’t somewhat eppifficated. In the DVD that came with Dark Holler — the Dillard Chandler documentary — was that a drag queen? Was that a guy in a dress? What was that about?

Cohen: That was the same guy who was in the cafe before — Dillard’s friend. Same guy. They knew I’d be filming at this party and they were putting one over on me. When I saw them coming through the door and he was wearing women’s clothes, I thought, MY GOD, what joke are they pulling on me? So I just thought, well …

Monochord: But he seems to be really into the clothes — he’s so meticulous, he keeps adjusting himself, he’s very into how he looks and making sure he’s … [ here, I’m pantomiming the guy in the film ]

Cohen: Yes, well, his wife is right there and his kids are there …

Monochord: Ok, I’ll leave you alone here, I’m taking up your time. I want to thank you for coming to Minneapolis and for everything you do. There are certain heroes of mine that I never got the chance to thank for what they did for me in my life, and I’m just glad I got to … like Carl Sagan … Oh I know — hey, just one more question! What was it like when you got that phone call saying, “Mr. Cohen, we want to send your recording of a Peruvian wedding song on a rocket ship into outer space.” What did you think?

Cohen: [ before answering, he squeezes his eyes closed, turns his head to one side, and presses the tip of his index finger to his right temple for a good four seconds ] No, it wasn’t like that. I found out about it in the New York Times.

Monochord: What, afterwards? When it was a done deal?

Cohen: Yes, I only read it … I found out about it reading the New York Times.

Monochord: Ok, thank you. Please sign my book. My name is Kay You Are Tee — Kurt.

Cohen: [writes “To Kurt, John Cohen” on the title page of “Young Bob: John Cohen’s Early Photographs of Bob Dylan”] Thanks.

Monochord: Thank you again. Nice to meet you.

 

Editor’s Notes: As of this writing, the Icebox has posted the three photos we discussed — the one with Dylan and the chicken and the one with Jack Elliott and Woody Guthrie, who was suffering from Parkinson’s Huntington’s Disease (thanks Bill B.!). Here’s the one with Woody and who I think are the Tarriers.

You get a free DVD of the documentary about Dillard Chandler, “The End of an Old Song” — with a cameo by a guy in drag — when you buy the Dark Holler CD.

For more on Cohen and Carl Sagan’s Voyager record (“a Peruvian wedding song on a rocket ship”), see my previous post at the Celestial Monochord. Among the best moments in the book about the Voyager Record are those in which the team assembling the photos and music for the record seek permission from puzzled copyright holders.

I had him sign “Young Bob: John Cohen’s Early Photographs of Bob Dylan” but unfortunately forgot to bring my copy of There is No Eye.