Confluence City

Chris King's "Medley of bad guys"

2012-01-27T20:52:00.001-06:00

So like I was saying, there will be a poetry performance at Mad Art (2727 South 21st St.) at 7:30 p.m. Monday, January 30 to close The Shape of a Man group art show. The event is free and open to the public. Mad Art will run a cash bar. The reading will last about an hour and be followed by a reception.

The performing poets will be K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey and Chris King (that's me), reading in the opposite order of that list. Leading up to the event, I plan to post a little more info about each of the poets, along with one of their more "manly" poems.
**

A MEDLEY OF BAD GUYS
By Chris King

He showed up drunk, a syringe
tattoo turned into a knife. Put out a lit
cigarette on his tongue, like
a guy hit by lightning strike left thirsty
the rest of his life, or wine
country scavengers left deaf by cannon bursts.
He carried cyanide in

his shoes, knew creepy people, figured creepy
people must want to blow up
other creepy people, so sold explosives.
In the joint, he rigged a bed
sheet and magazine, fanned himself by waving
one toe. You gave me a grave.
I made for myself a little open door.

*

Florida: she made me chase
a lizard from her house. I should have known right
there. Then, she married the worst
kind of bastard: the kind that can kick my ass

*

He was a Cajun screw from
Port Arthur, Texas. Got a blow job, didn’t
feel a God damned thing. Don’t think
you’re owed, now. Just because I got a lot of
shit don’t mean it ain’t all mine.
Kind of guy could never write the novel of
his own life. Why? Because he
doesn’t know how to laugh, cry, at the right parts.

from The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints) (c) 2012

**

Chris King is a multi-media creative worker and producer based in St. Louis, Missouri. He casts his poems as 7/11s, a form innovated by the St. Louis poet Quincy Troupe. The Shape of a Man group show was the occasion to publish his first collection of 7/11s, also called The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints, 2012). He has published one previous chapbook of poetry, A heart I carved for a girl I knew (Skuntry, 2006). He serves as creative director of Poetry Scores, which translates poetry into other media. Expected later in 2012: the second movie he directed for Poetry Scores, Go South for Animal Index, and a boxed set of Bascom Lamar Lunsford's Library of Congress recordings, to be released on our national record label, Smithsonian/Folkways.

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At the January 30 show-closer for The Shape of a Man, I will perform poems with Josh Weinstein on double bass.

And I will perform my poems through Noah Kirby's sculpture, With Solid Stance and Stable Sound.

**

Also in this series:
K. Curtis Lyle's freedom is the Monster Among Us.
Stefene Russell's manly love song
Nicky Rainey wants to tell us where Leo is now

Nicky Rainey wants to tell us where Leo is now

2012-01-26T08:51:00.000-06:00

Nicky Rainey makes zines, writes grants, stories and letters to her pen-pals. She represented St. Louis in the National Poetry Slam 2009. For a copy of her latest zine, "Let's Talk About People," send her an email at n.k.rainey@gmail.com.

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Lead photo of coated gull from TheDailyGreen.

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Also in this series:
K. Curtis Lyle's freedom is the Monster Among Us.
Stefene Russell's manly love song

Stefene Russell's manly love song

2012-01-24T19:51:00.001-06:00

K. Curtis Lyle's freedom is the Monster Among Us

2012-01-22T11:09:00.000-06:00

K. Curtis Lyle

So like I was saying, there will be a poetry performance at Mad Art (2727 South 21st St.) at 7:30 p.m. Monday, January 30 to close The Shape of a Man group art show. The event is free and open to the public. Mad Art will run a cash bar.

The performing poets will be K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey and Chris King (that's me), reading in the opposite order of that list. Leading up to the event, I plan to post a little more info about each of the poets, along with one of their more "manly" poems.

*

from THE MONSTER AMONG US
Excerpt from the Merovingian Erosnaut Told in Tongues
By K. Curts Lyle

My freedom is the monster among us
A chant is a form of madness
My freedom is a chant inverse tragedy
First animate song against suicide pause of
Color between love and death pre herald
Of what is coming my freedom is
A ten stage tongue rocket already decreed

My freedom is the monster among us
Not your freedom not our freedom but
My freedom is selfish like a billion
Year old gene undying walking in reverse
The new man posing as a retiree
My freedom cracks mirrors for a living
My freedom casts no shadow no where

My freedom is the monster among us
Has no border cannot adjoin is both
Light shield and gravity my freedom shuns
Length and depth and breadth and joy
And pain and does not respond to
The short version my freedom has met
All yogas and tasted all pending psyches

Of Bella Dona Datura Amanita Father Peyote
My freedom can pick out a warrior
From a cluster of pimps she can
Stop the world turn a warrior back
Into a pimp a hero into a
Bum cake the one thing you’ve loathed
All your life into a secret lover

(c) 2012 K. Curtis Lyle
All rights reserved

**

K. Curtis Lyle was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. He was a founding member of the Watts Writers Workshop, joining it in 1966 and becoming a prominent member of the Los Angeles renaissance that the group represented. He has taught, lectured and read his poetry in performance in the major intellectual and urban centers of North America.

Lyle has published widely over the years and been anthologized in the United States, Canada, Latin America and Europe. Lyle’s work has been widely adapted to music, especially to jazz. He built a performing and recording relationship with the late world renowned saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill (1938-1995). The text of Lyle’s poem, Drunk on God, was recorded for Julius Hemphill’s Big Band (Electra/Asylum).

In June 2003, Lyle published a work of selected poetry entitled, Electric Church. In February of 2008 he published a long prose poem, The Epileptic Camel Driver Speaks to a Refugee Death (Poetry Scores & Firecracker Press). In November 2008, Poetry Scores and Firecracker Press published a new work entitled Nailed Seraphim.

He currently lives in St. Louis, Missouri.

**

The Shape of a Man group art show, featuring Amy VanDonsel, was organized in conjunction with the publication of Chris King's new chapbook of poetry, The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints, 2012). The peformance Jan. 30 will include a reception and book signing.

Extra! Extra! Free Gerald Early essay on the great Joe Frazier!

2012-01-20T20:51:00.000-06:00

When the great heavyweight champion Joe Frazier died, I felt The St. Louis American should run a news obit. I suspected Michael Spinks or someone from the Spinks team would provide our local St. Louis hook, and I was right, but I also asked Gerald Early for a quote.

As author of The Culture of Bruising, one of the great brainiac books on prizefighting, Gerald would pass muster as an expert quote on boxing in any publication. As a black man who lives in St. Louis, he was the perfect quote for St. Louis' black newspaper. More than that, Gerald is a Philly guy, and Philadelphia is the city that defined Frazier as a fighter. I hit him up.

I never heard back before deadline. I didn't take it personally. Gerald is a busy man, and Frazier died on a Monday night, only giving me one full day before our deadline day to pull my story together. I'm the paper's managing editor, so I do any reporting by hook or crook between managing assignments and crunching copy. The time I'd like to spend nagging my sources for their quotes I actually spend nagging my reporters and photojournalists for their copy and photos.

More than two months after Frazier's tragic death, I heard back from Gerald. He said he needed more than a quote in someone else's newspaper piece, which is why he wrote the Belles Lettres piece. Belles Lettres is a publication of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University, which Gerald directs. Since I am one of his Community Advisory Board members, Gerald fairly assumed I'd read his piece, but for some reason I had not received my copy. I asked for one.

Yesterday I received in the mail the September/December 2001 issue of Belles Lettres, which ends with Gerald's essay "The Fire-Breather, the Gym, and the City: How Boxer Joe Frazier Defined Philadelphia." It's just exactly what I wanted from to hear from him when I asked for my quote: the perspective of a black man from Philadelphia who knows and loves prizefighting. It's an unforgettable, bravura piece of writing.

I see now you can find the essay online, but when I assumed there was only the print edition, I asked Gerald how my friends who love boxing and his prose (not a small number of people) can get a hold of a copy of Belles Lettres. He reminded me our magazine is a free publication with an open subscription. To request a copy of the issue with Gerald Early's classic Joe Frazier essay, and sign up for future issues of Belles Lettres, simply notify our adminiastrative assistant Barb Liebmann at liebmann@wustl.edu or 314-935-5576. This particular issue is a slick, handsome 36-pager; any fan of prizefighting will treasure it.

Here is what's funny, and I pointed this out to Gerald before I'm telling you. I'm sure Frazier died on the doorstep of his magazine deadline, just as he did on our newspaper deadline. In rushing this essay to print, Gerald dropped his byline from his essay. The essay appears without author credit. Gerald is the publisher and editor, so he only has himself to blame, and I'm sure he has forgiven himself. But Washington University can be a conservative and stuffy place, and like any high-profile institution it is very jumpy (and rightly so) on issues of race. I'm fairly certain that Gerald Early is the only person at Wash U who would sign his name to a piece of writing in a Wash U publication that drops both the F-bomb and the N-word. Yet the writer of this essay is a non-bylined phantom!

Strong language, Gerald explained his choice of words, for a strong man. Absofuckinglutely!

K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey, Chris King read manly poems

2012-01-20T06:52:00.000-06:00

The public will have a last chance to see the group show The Shape of a Man at Mad Art when we host a show-closing poetry performance there 7:30 p.m. Monday, January 30 at the gallery, 2727 South 21st St. in Soulard in the old Police station.

The event is free and open to the public. Mad Art will run a cash bar.

The poets for this farewell Shape of a Man reading are K. Curtis Lyle, Stefene Russell, Nicky Rainey and Chris King (that's me), and we will read in the opposite order of that list. I will perform with Josh Weinstein on double bass and through Noah Kirby's sculpture With Solid Stance and Stable Sound.

Each poet has been asked to perform for 15 minutes, so the whole reading should last about an hour, from 7:30 to 8:30. After the reading there will be a book signing and reception in the gallery, with a last chance to see the art show in the company of lead artist, Amy VanDonsel.

The art show and this reading are organized in conjuction with the publication of my chapbook of poetry The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints). All of the poets have been asked to read poems that are in some sense "manly".

In a review of the book by Missouri poet laureate David Clewell, Clewell writes, "Musician/poet/agent provocateur Chris King discovers some acutely painful sharp angles that contribute to The Shape of a Man. These are poems full of beer, bad guys, car rides, near-talismanic ears of corn, and a laundromat where the speaker’s determined to see his dirty laundry through, all the way to dry.”

In her review, Stefene Russell writes, "Though his poems are not the average lyrical domestic still life, that’s not to say they float in some ionosphere, or don’t sound like they were written on Earth. On the contrary, they are earthy, randy, often hilarious, disarming in their lack of sentimentality."

Yesterday at lunch, K. Curtis Lyle told me, "These new poems, they are not as scattered. They are much more incisive. I don't know if it's the influence of Leyla, or what. "

Leyla is my eight-year-old daughter. My old friends like Curtis have noticed a vast maturation process brought on by fatherhood. Just as important to my starting to improve as a poet, as I told Curtis, was my discovery of the Seven/Eleven poetic form innovated by our mutual friend Quincy Troupe. Here is my review of Quincy's new book Errancities where he introduces the form. All of my poems in my new book are cast as 7/11s.
I'll be back to blog more about each of these poets and to post some of their work in advance of the January 30 show. Hope to see you there!

*

The image is one of Amy VanDonsel's pieces from The Shape of a Man.

Before they set up the carnival (poem for a Bearded Lady)

2012-01-07T13:14:00.000-06:00

We had a great night last night with The Shape of a Man at Mad Art Gallery. Lots to say about it, and very few regrets.

One regret: too late to involve her, I learned about Brunhilda Beardsky, The Bearded Lady from The Beggars Carnivale.
As I told her, my chapbook The Shape of a Man has a Bearded Lady reference. It's in the poem that got Amy VanDonsel and me started on the concept of the show.

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BEFORE THEY SET UP THE CARNIVAL

I was at the carnival
before they set up the carnival. I saw
them setting it up. I saw
The Pirate when it was buck seats in the dirt,
The Tilt-a-Whirl before it
tilted or whirled, the tonsils of the plastic
clown fitted with balloon lips.

I saw The Bearded Lady
putting on his beard. I saw The Strong Man hit
up in the ass with human
growth hormone, administered by a midget
still in street clothes. The Midway
at the beginning, when there is no money,
only hungry drunken men
with disassembled games, paper tickets, and
candy for kids. I saw you
when no one saw the You in you that dazzles
everyone now, but not me.

-- Chris King

Another regret is we did not prepare a performance poetry component that would work with a smashing success of a Mad Art opening. That's okay, I like having to work around smashing successes!

It does, however, beg for a performance poetry event at Mad Art before the show comes down at the end of the month. I think I'll have to talk to The Bearded Lady about that.

Stefene Russell reviews my chapbook "The Shape of a Man"

2012-01-02T14:41:00.000-06:00

So like I was saying, Amy VanDonsel and I have co-curated a group art show where I'll release my new chapbook of poetry on Intagliata Imprints (printed by Firecracker Press): The Shape of a Man. The art show, also called The Shape of a Man, goes down 7-11 p.m. Friday, January 6 at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th St. in St. Louis. The event will be a potluck catered by men who cook.

To drum up a little publicity, I sent my manuscript out to some poets I admired and asked them for a blurb. I have already shared the review by Missouri poet laureate David Clewell; here is the response by my dear friend and colleague Stefene Russell.
*

Chris King’s Shape of a Man channels a multitude of voices, and describes a number of different places. But the poems are anything but reportage—Wounded Knee, Manhattan, and South St. Louis become places-beyond-places, a little bit mythic or haunted. Even corn, that grain that’s been reduced to a metaphor for all things small-town, wholesome and pedestrian, gets taken back to its magical roots: “Mother of bread, father of beer, common face/on the pyramid walls, corn/whiskey, corn pone, you could sustain us alone.”

Like the earliest poets, Chris King is both writer and musician, and builds his lines to ring inside a reader’s ear. He is also a teller of stories—ones that stun you with their sadness, beauty and strangeness, like the woman who uses her bed as ironing board and burns her lover, who wears his wound gladly, because it means she’s branded—claimed—him.

Though his poems are not the average lyrical domestic still life, that’s not to say they float in some ionosphere, or don’t sound like they were written on Earth. On the contrary, they are earthy, randy, often hilarious, disarming in their lack of sentimentality. They don’t let anyone off the hook easily, including the poet himself.

On the other hand, it is rare to find poems marked with such generosity, or such a largeness of spirit, where you feel that the poet is writing for all of us, even when he’s writing first-person.

—Stefene Russell

*

Stefene will join me on Friday when we do a brief (8-8:30 p.m.) poetry performance at Mad Art. I'll perform two short set sof duets with musicians — Fred Friction (spoons), Roy Gokenbach (electric guitar) and Josh Weinstein (double blass, clarinet) — with Stefene performing one manly poem in the middle. Hope to see you there!

**

The image is one of my paintings on vinyl records incorporating quotes from my poems that will be in the Shape of a Man art show.

David Clewell reviews my new poetry chapbook, "The Shape of a Man"

2011-12-23T10:56:00.000-06:00

Since even thirty minutes of me live as poet, even with musicians and a sculpture, is too much without a break, I'll do two micro sets and a real poet, St. Louis' and Salt Lake City's own Stefene Russell, will perform one manly poem in between.

To pump up the release of this chapbook, which someone else is paying for and I want him to get his money back!, I asked Missouri poet laureate and my old buddy David Clewell to advance-review my book. And here is what Clewell said:

*

On THE SHAPE OF A MAN

Musician/poet/agent provocateur Chris King discovers some acutely painful sharp angles that contribute to The Shape of a Man. These are poems full of beer, bad guys, car rides, near-talismanic ears of corn, and a laundromat where the speaker’s determined to see his dirty laundry through, all the way to dry—to “pay for / heat, finish something, for once.”

If there’s sadness and regret along the way, these voices manage to find their own kind of resolve in the tenacity of their singing—the distinctive music King makes of language that can’t help saying how, sometimes, it’s amazing we’re still here. In “I Love Taverns When They’re Empty,” the speaker insists that “…it takes courage to enter a bar / when it’s empty, that, or / desperation. I admire courage and find / the desperate quotable.”

I admire the honest desperation in this collection, and I find the courage nothing less than quotable.

—David Clewell

***

Image is the print "Re-in-cur-nation" by George D. Davidson III, which will be exhibited at The Shape of a Man.

JUMBOTRON HUMANITY COCKROACH POEM

2011-12-17T19:09:00.003-06:00

JUMBOTRON HUMANITY COCKROACH POEM

By Chris King

Once upon a time there was
a man, his beer, a ballgame, and a cockroach.
The man, so simply himself,
so fully inhabited in his ballcap,
his bleacher stadium seat.
This man owned the sun on this day on his face.
Slept. Cockroach climbed in his beer.

Was no press conference for cockroach climbing
into beer, but not back out,
nor zoom in on man resplendent after nap
in sold-out game of himself,
gulping down sun-warmed remnant of beer, the roach
slipping down open gullet,
we guessed, watching the man from our bleacher seats.
Blissfully self unobserved
vanished without us knowing, like that cockroach.
Jumbotron humanity
now watching self watch self do nothing on screen.

*

Photo borrowed from the Flickr of Raikyn. I have no commercial rights to it.

Free Beethoven (and your mind will follow)

2011-12-15T11:11:00.000-06:00

Henderson plays all Beethoven sonatas in 4 days of free shows

Peter Henderson, one of the finest pianists in the metropolitan area, will play all 32 of Beethoven’s sonatas over the course of four days in concert at St. Louis Community College at Forest Park’s Mildred E. Bastian Center for the Performing Arts, 5600 Oakland Ave.

Henderson, who teaches at Maryville University and is in the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, will play 105 movements, about half of them from memory. The house lights will be up, so musicians are encouraged to bring their Beethoven scores with them. The concerts are free and open to the public from Thursday, Dec. 15 through Sunday, Dec. 18.

“Please join us in hearing some of the greatest music ever written. Additionally, you’ll be helping to encourage Peter as he checks this item of his ‘Bucket List,'*” said Thomas Zirkle, associate professor and music coordinator at STLCC-Forest Park.

The schedule is as follows:

Concert 1: Piano Sonatas Nos. 1-4, at 7 p.m. on Thursday, Dec. 15

Concert 2: Piano Sonatas Nos. 5-8, at 7 p.m. on Friday, Dec. 16

Concert 3: Piano Sonatas Nos. 19-20, 9-11, at noon on Saturday, Dec. 17

Concert 4: Piano Sonatas Nos. 12-15, at 3 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 17

Concert 5: Piano Sonatas Nos. 16-18, and 21, at 7 p.m. on Saturday Dec. 17

Concert 6: Piano Sonatas Nos. 22-26, at noon on Sunday, Dec. 18

Concert 7: Piano Sonatas Nos. 27-29, at 3 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 18

Concert 8: Piano Sonatas Nos. 30-32, at 7 p.m. on Sunday, Dec. 18

For more information, contact Zirkle at: 314-644-9679 or tzirkle@stlcc.edu.

* Confluence City objects to use of cliched meme "Bucket List" in this SLCC press release.
**

Beethoven painting by Rhom.

Open Studio for The Shape of a Man this Wednesday at Amy VanDonsel's

2011-12-12T08:30:00.000-06:00

Like I was saying, Amy VanDonsel and I have an art show coming up on Friday, January 6 that also is the occasion for releasing my new chapbook of poetry. Both art show and chapbook are titled The Shape of a Man and tackle manly themes.

This Wednesday, from 7-10 p.m., Amy and I are co-hosting an open studio to get geared up for the show. We're meeting at Amy's place, 3419 Iowa in the Cherokee Street neighborhood. It's free, of course, and open to the public; but bring your own thing to drink.

Though this reminder goes out late, we're hoping to entice the other local artists joining us in the show to come out on Wednesday: that would be Kevin Belford, Ron Buechele, Jon Cournoyer, Dr. Andrew Dykeman, Fred Friction, Robert Goetz, Noah Kirby, Sandra Marchewa, Dana Smith and B.J. Vogt. We hope, if possible, that they bring the work they plan to put in the show.

We also hope to see Hap Phillips, who will be in the show, and I mean literally he will be in the show: we are exhibiting Hap himself as an exemplary man at The Shape of a Man.

The show also will include work by Oscar Alvarez, who is a small child and not to be invited out on a school night; George D. Davidson III, who lives and works in Athens, Georgia; and Matt Fuller, who lives and works in Los Angeles. We don't expect their physical presence on Wednesday night, but hopefully Oscar's parents, Anthony and Gina Alvarez, will bring him to the show on January 6.

We also are including work by the late Hunter Brumfield III. In most cases, someone's being dead would disqualify them from attending an open studio or art exhibit. However, Hunter's track record for haunting his friends is so impressive that I half-expect his presence in one manifestation or another.

Finally, at The Shape of a Man I will perform poems from my new chapbook, backed up by some old friends: Fred Friction (spoons), Roy Gokenbach (guitar) and Josh Weinstein (double blass, clarinet). I'm inviting them out on Wednesday, and if any of them can make it then we can also give our fellow artists and friends a taste of our performance for The Shape of a Man.

Should be fun!

Why it's clear The Pulitzer tonight was not me dead & gone to heaven

2011-12-08T23:35:00.000-06:00

It was one of those nights, the feet scarcely touched the ground.
A minimalist presentation of glorious Buddhist art, artifact, touchstone, in a building that is art on the street.

Tuneful, swinging, edgy, taking its sweet time live music.

Poets in corners and out in the main spaces, dropping poetry.

The music could get a little loud for the poets in their natural voices. So people stood around the poets, their heads bowed.

This was the best way to catch the poetry as it dropped. It happened to make living shrines of the poets.

The poets read poetry by others poets, all touched by Buddhism. This meant picking through the books of poetry in advance looking for the Buddhist-touched poems.

The poets had tagged all their Buddhist-touched poems, so the books all looked like they had sprouted dozens of little paper buds of leaves.

The people huddled around the poets like shrines, and the poets waved books that looked like they were coming to life, poetry books actively growing new pages of poetry before our eyes.

Uncle Bill, the great Soulard poet, sat watching the poets, his beard perfectly Confucian, his soul Buddhist.

K. Curtis Lyle enfolded his fellow poets in his gigantic conscious warm embrace.

Michael Castro loved Jack Kerouac's mother with Jack. Ann Haubrich loved with Kerouac the truly mad.

Allison Funk sat quietly in eternity with Kenneth Roxroth. Chris Parr fidgeted there with Gary Snyder.

Castro apologized, with Kerouac, to Charlie Parker, as Dave Stone played saxophone like Charlie Parker's godchild taking his confident time toward eternity.

Dave took a break, then it was Josh Weinstein playing the recorded music that was also, in its way, totally live. I had to talk to Dave and Josh, I consider them like my brothers, but talking with them up on the DJ balcony, somehow stupidly I missed Curtis' reading! My deepest biggest soul brother Curtis! I missed him!

That is the only way I knew I had not died and gone to heaven! In heaven I wouldn't miss Curtis' reading! And in heaven Uncle Bill would be allowed to place between the calm toes of The Buddha his little paper memorial to the dead John Lennon on the anniversary of the day the madman shot John Lennon dead!

*

The image is stock, not from The Pulitzer's great show.

The Shape of a Man: art exhibit and poetry chapbook release

2011-12-01T00:21:00.002-06:00

I am releasing a new poetry chapbook, The Shape of a Man, on Friday, January 6 at Mad Art in the context of an art show with Amy VanDonsel and friends, living and dead; also with a brief poetry performance backed up by Fred Friction, Roy Gokenbach and Josh Weinstein, performing through a sculpture by Noah Kirby.

Press release (updated Dec. 19)!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Media Contact:
Amy VanDonsel
avd@amyvandonsel.com
(314) 265-7836

“The Shape of a Man”
Art exhibit and chapbook release
Mad Art Gallery
2727 So. 12th Street, St. Louis

7-11 p.m. January 6, 2012

New work by Amy VanDonsel.
Poetry chapbook by Chris King.

Poetry performance with musical guests.

Additional manly art by:

Oscar Alvarez, Kevin Belford, Ron Buechele,
Jon Cournoyer, George D. Davidson III
Charles and Chalot Douglas-Book,
Dr. Andrew Dykeman, Fred Friction,
Matt Fuller, Robert Goetz,
Kim Humphries, Chris King,
Noah Kirby, David Langley,
Sandra Marchewa, Hap Phillips,
Stefene Russell, Dana Smith,
B.J. Vogt, Eric Woods
and the late Hunter Brumfield III.

Also, one exemplary man – Hap Phillips – will be exhibited.

Potluck provided by men who cook.

November 18, 2011, St. Louis, MO – Amy VanDonsel and Chris King collaborate on and co-curate a small group show, the first in a projected annual exhibit series exploring the shapes that men and women are in.

“The Shape of a Man” opens Friday, January 6, 2012, at Mad Art Gallery, 2727 So. 12th Street, with a reception from 7-11 p.m. “The Shape of a Man,” explores the shapes men are in through a creative conversation between a woman and a man working in a variety of media (with help from their man friends, living and dead).

Amy VanDonsel will show new mixed media, paintings and installation, and Chris King will release a chapbook, The Shape of a Man, and perform poems from it with Fred Friction (spoons), Roy Gokenbach (guitar) and Josh Weinstein (double bass, clarinet).

The exhibit also will feature visual art by Oscar Alvarez, Kevin Belford, Ron Buechele, Jon Cournoyer, George D. Davidson III, Charles and Chalot Douglas-Book, Dr. Andrew Dykeman, Fred Friction, Matt Fuller, Robert Goetz, Kim Humphries, Chris King, Noah Kirby, David Langley, Sandra Marchewa, Hap Phillips, Stefene Russell, Dana Smith, B.J. Vogt, Eric Woods and the late Hunter Brumfield III. Also, one exemplary man – one Hap Phillips – will be exhibited in his natural, fabricated habitat.

A potluck will be provided by the men artists and other men who cook.

Amy VanDonsel creates mixed media paintings on canvas or panels and installations with paper, tape, string and found items. Her work examines textual communication and the processing of information through abstracted and figurative imagery, and combines research interests in literature and technology with handmade visual representations. She is the Director of Marketing and Development for Saint Louis City Open Studio and Gallery; plans arts and charitable events; and serves on the board of directors for non-profit Poetry Scores. Examples of her previous work may be viewed at www.amyvandonsel.com.

Chris King has been recasting his old, bad poems into the 7/11 form innovated by Quincy Troupe, alternating lines with 7 and 11 syllables and alternating stanzas with 7 and 11 lines, with results he likes enough to publish. The Shape of a Man (Intagliata Imprints) compiles his more manly 7/11s. As an “artist,” he sketches people and then has the subject sign the sketch, or makes paintings on vinyl records based on his sketchbook. He will perform his poetry with musical guests through Noah Kirby’s sculpture With Solid Stance and Stable Sound.

VanDonsel and King have previously collaborated on projects for the non-profits Poetry Scores and Saint Louis City Open Studio and Gallery. They also happen to share a birthday. VanDonsel/King plan to continue the “Shape of a Wo/Man” project with a follow-up exhibit, “The Shape of a Woman,” in January 2013 at Mad Art Gallery, then continue the themed project with future group collaborations.

What: Visual Art Exhibit Opening and Chapbook Release, with accompanying performances

When: Friday, January 6, 2012, 7-11 p.m.

Where: Mad Art Gallery, 2727 S. 12th Street, St. Louis, MO 63118

Who: Presented by Amy VanDonsel and Chris King, also featuring Oscar Alvarez, Kevin Belford, Ron Buechele, Jon Cournoyer, George D. Davidson III, Charles and Chalot Douglas-Book, Dr. Andrew Dykeman, Fred Friction, Matt Fuller, Robert Goetz, Roy Gokenbach, Kim Humphries, Noah Kirby, David Langley, Sandra Marchewa, Hap Phillips, Stefene Russell, Dana Smith, B.J. Vogt, Josh Weinstein, Eric Woods and the late Hunter Brumfield III.

Cost: Free and open to the public with cash bar.

CONTACT:

Amy VanDonsel
avd@amyvandonsel.com
(314) 265-7836
www.amyvandonsel.com

Fred Friction to join me & Roy Gokenbach at Chance Operations reading

2011-11-27T20:14:00.001-06:00

Fred Friction exhibit, in The Skuntry Museum, Library & Beer Cellar (i.e., my basement).

I'm excited to perform some poetry tomorrow night (Nov. 28) in St. Louis at Duff's, 392 N. Euclid, on a Chance Operations bill that also includes Drucilla Wall and Julia Gordon-Bramer. Doors are at 7:30, there is a $3 cover and an open mic follows the three scheduled readings of 20 minutes each.

Like I was saying the other day, I am performing my poems with my friend Roy Gokenbach on guitar. Roy is a big deal, though you wouldn't know it. He was a founding member of a jazz trio that launched the best vocalist of this generation in St. Louis -- Erin Bode Group -- and has a feature role (Leroy) as an actor in St. Louis' greatest independent movie, A: Anonymous.

Today on an impulse I called my old buddy Fred Friction and successfully added him to the bill on spoons. Like Roy, Fred already had agreed to back me up when I release my new chapbook of poems, The Shape of a Man, at Mad Art on Friday, January 6; and this morning I suddenly couldn't figured out why I had not asked Fred to do the Duff's gig as well. So now Fred is in.

Fred is going to back me up on the spoons. We go way back in that regard. Fred used to sit in on spoons with the band of my youth, Enormous Richard. He was on the gig with us at our first-ever road gig at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago the night Operation Desert Storm broke out (January 17, 1991).

Today I decided I'll read three poems I found, by chance, in a box as I was sorting my archive (otherwise known as cleaning the basement) this weekend. I'll read a poem with Roy on guitar, then a poem with Fred on spoons, then come back to Roy on guitar; and then if I have time left in my 20 minutes I'll invite Fred to lead one on spoons. He is one of my very favorite writers in any medium.

Here is a highly poetic song from Fred's debut solo record, Jesus Drank Wine, as good as anything ever released in this rock music scene.

mp3
"La Morte D'Amour"

(Fred Friction)
Fred Friction

My set list for Chance Operations, Nov. 28, 2011
1. Object: your desire
(with Roy Gokenbach)

2. What did she do
(with Fred Friction)

3. One of the most mysterious of all the intangibles in life
(with Roy Gokenbach)

I'll be performing my poems with Roy Gokenbach on guitar at Duff's

2011-11-22T02:58:00.000-06:00

Roy Gokenbach at the Poetry Scores prop shop, borrowing the WPA Guide to Missouri, which was used as a prop in our movie Go South for Animal Index.

Self-promotion is the curse of the independent, and I should be starting to tell anyone who'll listen that on Friday, January 6 I'll release a new chapbook of poems, The Shape of a Man, at Mad Art Gallery as part of an art exhibit of the same name (initially organized by Amy VanDonsel).

But before then -- like, next Monday, November 28 -- I'm part of a Chance Operations reading and should tell the people about that first.

I've company at the Chance Operations event, to be held Monday at Duff's, 392 N. Euclid, with doors opening at 7:30 p.m. and it costing you $3. The other poets are Drucilla Wall and Julia Gordon-Bramer; their names link you to Chance Operations posts about them (my man Tony Renner understands this self-promotion curse). I take it this becomes an open mic night after the scheduled poets do our things.

Even when I'm performing, I'll have company. I've invited my friend Roy Gokenbach to play guitar as I recite my poems. Roy is kind of a trip. He was the founding guitarist in the Erin Bode Group and also has a choice small role (Leroy) in Daniel Bowers' A: Anonymous, which I take to be the best independent movie that will ever be made in St. Louis.

Roy also used to be my barber at Wyoming Barber Shop when I lived on South Grand, inevitably just before South Grand became hip (I know, now it's not really hip anymore, again). He can really play that guitar. I really enjoyed rehearsing my poems with him at the Poetry Scores prop shop last week. I didn't record that rehearsal, and though I borrowed Roy's only copy of the Erin Bode Group CD with the intention of excerpting some of his playing to post here, I've not done that either.

So you'll just have to come down to Duff's next Monday and hear us for yourself. We'll be performing selections from my chapbook The Shape of a Man, which Intagliata Imprints will release Friday, January 6 at Mad Art in Soulard.

Occupy St Louis responds to Mayor Slay's eviction notice

2011-11-11T09:34:00.001-06:00

Official Press Statement
Contact: media@occupystl.org

Hey Hey, Ho, Ho: The Occupiers Will Not Go!

On November 10, 2011 Occupy St Louis received notification from the city of St Louis that we have 24 hours to remove all structures and obey the city curfew laws before they would forcibly remove our non-violent occupation from Freedom Square (formerly known as Kiener Plaza). Since October 1st, we have maintained a peaceful occupation in this public space, founded on the principle that large corporations have too much influence in the actions of our government. Mayor Slay and his Senior Staff have once again validated this by bowing to pressure from the Downtown Partnership of St Louis to restrict our First Amendment Rights to peaceably assemble.

Since its inception, Occupy St Louis has been a model of cooperation and non violence, and has made Freedom Square a safer, cleaner place. The city claims that in addition to violation of curfew that the tents and supplies we have in Freedom Square are a direct violation of city ordinance and provides a safety concern. We strongly disagree and believe that our encampment is a valid form of political speech justified by the First Amendment. Additionally this precedent has been set in other occupied cities across the nation.

On November 10, 2011 Mayor Slay stated in his personal blog that the city would be creating a space for a 24/7 public demonstration. On November 9th, senior members of the Mayor’s staff attended our General Assembly to propose this space to us as a possible alternative to Freedom Square. This was not a proposal, but rather an ultimatum to Occupy St Louis. The City had already made up its mind on the course of action that it would be taking. This new space would not allow for tents or occupation, which we feel are a valid forms of political speech. This proposal was blocked by a consensus of our General Assembly. The General Assembly uses consensus as our decision making process. It allows for all participants to have an equal voice. Occupy St Louis maintains that just because one states they are using the consensus process, does not mean that they are actually using it.

Occupy St Louis hopes that Mayor Slay realizes that our freedom to assemble is not limited to one space, but guaranteed to all people, in any public space, at any time. We believe that we are engaged in a vital attempt to restore the cornerstone of American ideals: equality, unity, and social mobility. St Louis City must recognize that Occupy St Louis is not mutually exclusive with public safety and the common good, but an ally in promoting social justice and in preserving order downtown. The medium is the message and our medium is occupation.

**

Image from Annapolis Political Science.

Evidence of penpal relationship with Natalie Merchant (for Michael R. Allen)

2011-11-06T09:07:00.000-06:00

My friend Michael R. Allen and I don't talk nearly as much as I like, but when we do, even in evanescent social media banter, it's often about Natalie Merchant, the great songwriter, singer, bandleader, and poetry scorer.

And I never banter about Natalie Merchant without bragging about being her penpal before everybody knew her name and threatening to produce evidence, which I never produce.

Well, I am sorting the archive, which is indistinguishable from cleaning my basement, and in the laying on of hands on everything that I have not thrown away or lost already, I laid hands on my archive of manuscripts, autographs and letters yesterday. And there was this from Natalie Merchant, the first letter received in 1986, which survived the ravages of time and between-home-lessness.

The penpal relationship never got much deeper than this, though I prized having the back channel of her mother's home address. Now I approach the great woman through her publisher, and have not heard back lately. Oh well, we'll always have the autograph with the quirky "private private private" coda.

Painting Enrico Caruso on records with the dead Hunter Brumfield

2011-10-29T12:04:00.000-05:00

I curate an annual Art Invitational for the arts organization I co-founded, Poetry Scores. As a habitual sketch artist and doodler, I sometimes sneak one of my drawings into the show.

Since our Invitationals call for work inspired by the poem we are scoring and titled with a quote from it, I tend to sketch someone named in the poem: Che Guevarra (K. Curtis Lyle's Nailed Seraphim), Dante (Les Murray's Sydney Highrise Variations) McKinley's assassin Leo Czolgosz (David Clewell's Jack Ruby's America).

This year we commissioned Barbara Harbach to score Paul Muldoon's Incantata, which is really a name-dropper of a poem. From a vast array of name-checked options -- everyone from Airey Neave to Andre Derain, from Samuel Beckett to Van Morrison -- I have settled on Enrico Caruso.

Caruso is especially tempting, because he was a sketch artist himself and once took offense that the author Samuel Clemens hosted a party for cartoonists that did not include Caruso. My first attempt at a sketch of Caruso, in fact, was a sketch of Caruso sketching a caricature.

Poetry Scores now has a prop shop -- just a humble South City garage, but for whatever reason it whispers potential to the sorts of oddballs who do the work we do. It's prompted us to initiate a Writer In Residence program and makes me feel like we also have an artist's studio at our disposal.

It greatly helps in this regard that my buddy (and new Po Sco board member) Amy Broadway donated a jar of paint amongst her prop-shop-warming gifts. As I started to muse about painting Caruso, I thought it would be cool to paint him on a vinyl record, since he was one of the first international stars of recorded music released on records.

I posted on social media that I was looking for old records I could paint on, and my friend Tony Renner, a veteran Poetry Scores contributing artist, said he would put some aside for me at Vintage Vinyl, where he works.

I stopped by the record store other day. Tony put two boxes of vinyl records on the counter. I picked up one box. He said, "When you come back for the other box, I have something to show you about painting on records." I lugged one box to my car, then came back for the other. Tony was holding up a record with a portrait painted on it.

"Did you do that?" I asked.

"No," Tony said. "Hunter Brumfield did."

I turned around and walked out of the store onto Delmar without thinking about it -- if this were a novel and not a report of fact, I would have kept walking down the street into a tavern and drank alone for half the day. But in fact, I went back into the store to get my other box of records to paint on.

Tony was smiling. I am pretty sure he knows the deal.

Hunter killed himself when we were in a band together; killed himself on the day he was supposed to help me move into my new house. His drumkit is still in the basement of my house. He has haunted me there several times. He has haunted a number of other people, often in similar ways -- in sudden, inexplicable infestations of insects with associated weird artistic shit going on.

As I picked up my other box of records, cursing about being haunted by the little prick again, I was just a week past a previous lightweight haunting by Hunter, during a visit to an art show at The Sheldon Art Galleries with Amy Broadway. Come to think of it, this was not long after I returned Hunter's painting of Mississippi blues legend Charlie Patton to its rightful owner. As always, Hunter was painting his way back into the picture.

I packed my records to paint on and drove north on Hanley to a North County church, where our conductor Jim Richards was directing the eight-piece chamber ensemble that will premiere Barbara Harbach's poetry score to Paul Muldoon's Incantata on Sunday at UMSL.

A weirdly out-of-season wasp, big as a hockey puck, got into the sanctuary, somehow, and flew around the musicians throughout the rehearsal, as if enjoying the music. It was such a nuisance that the conductor, at one point, actually conducted the wasp by shooing it away, turning the ensemble into a nine-piece. According to a certain demented way of thinking, Hunter had joined the chamber ensemble.

So, now I paint Enrico Caruso's face on vinyl records, and I keep something of Hunter's spirit alive, like "some kind of ghost," as Muldoon writes in Incantata, "who might still roam the earth in search of an earthly delight".

Three poems too big to fail for Occupy St Louis

2011-10-21T11:29:00.001-05:00

Occupy St. Louis' leaderless poetry organizers Kristin Sharp and Susan Spit-Fire Lively tell me they need poets to perform at Occupy St. Louis tonight and Sunday from 3 to 5pm. Don't be shy, just go down to Kiener Plaza and do it.

A third-grader has my dance card on the weekends, so I may not make it. I am posting some poems that Kristin or Spit-Fire can read to the people in the event of a shortage of live poets.

The last time I posted poems for Occupy St. Louis, I poked fun at the leftist critique of Occupy Wall Street as incoherent. As I continue to think about the movement (admittedly, with little participation beyond thinking, writing and editing), I want to emphasize something different now.

The 1% of the wealthiest people with the most invested in the financial sector convinced most of us that their institutions were too big to fail. Fine. Well, I think the Occupy movement is reminding people of something as true or more true: that the 99% also is too big to fail. To put it less tendentiously, the middle class is too big to fail. If the banks are worth saving, moreso the people and our future.

**

OVERHEARD AT THE DISASTER
PREPAREDNESS CONFERENCE

There was a lot of concern
in Coffeyville. The hospital got destroyed.
Took them awhile to get death
out of the basement. It gets hard to measure
your performance when the best
outcome is nothing unusual happens.
If I was in the business

of counting dry goods shipped by truck, it would be
quite simpler. Say, disposal
of carcasses of cattle killed by the storm.
Or, how to bury bodies
in the middle of the night. Or, burn pits, which
I’ll get to, in a minute.
As we burn and bury, people are getting
married, still, toasting fluted
glasses circling necks of ice flamingoes. Mass
fatality planning must
go on. Worst case corpse scenario? Ice rink.

-- Chris King

*

RUMORS ON THE OUTSKIRTS
OF CHEYENNE, WYOMING

Singing quiets the cattle.
Dog eat dog, dog shit dog out. I did cut it
off. Not too good a feeling
and I had to walk away. It was a flop
of a Gold Rush. Chinaman
got out of Dodge. Let the cattle rustle for
the cattle and old Tom Gin.

Now you might be bread in old Kentucky but
you’re just a crumb around here.
People said iron from the rails would bring rain.
I didn’t buy it. Even
gold was just a flash in the pan, duck feathers
for soldiers’ beds. He gave up
a few old knives, kept back pails of kitchen fat
for soap and bombs, if need be.
Some uranium craze in Pumpkin Butte.

-- Chris King

*

BEST ASSESSMENT OF OUR PRESENT SITUATION
AT FREDERICK’S MUSIC LOUNGE

Greed above, dreams from below,
the first known photo of the moon, earth quakes, buds
fall from trees, bums directing
traffic, all this activity, hives, stars and
ladders, a room of Spaniards
and a guitar with a broken G string. She
gets upset, cassettes topple

and apples, Furry Lewis, leave your muddy
shoes by the back door. Shadow
puppets stuffed under her bed. MY HAIR FEELS LIKE
A FUCKING WIG! A friend of
fond jugglers, a faithful wife of poverty.
Maybe what we need right now
lead sleepy lives for awhile. These here pieces
I accumulated in
the cremation grounds, you can have your own if
you sleep in the cremation
grounds. When all the trees are gone and the birds stand

on the sturdy heads of men,
they celebrated their unwillingness to
sing in a forgotten tongue.

-- Chris King

**

These poems are cast in the 7/11 poetic form innovated by the poet Quincy Troupe. The form calls for alternating lines of 7 and 11 syllables, starting with 7. I have added the rule of alternating stanzas of 7 and 11 lines, starting with 7, or at least limiting stanza lengths to 7 and 11 lines (though I cheat as needed).

**

Image from Boilr.

Four birds killed & a dead friend revived

2011-10-18T22:44:00.002-05:00

Working in the media, you get buried in information. On the arts tip, this is good because you see how much is actually going on, and in St. Louis, that's way more than most people imagine. It is bad because you see how much you are missing, which is way more than I can stomach.

As a committed parent of a third grader with very few nights to myself, I stake out things that happen during the day, so I was delighted to get a press release at work announcing a gallery lecture for noon today by Daniel McGrath, curator of a show at one of the Sheldon Art Galleries titled I'll Be Your Mirror.

By attending, I was killing two birds, the getting out to actually see local arts programming and building on a new connection. Daniel and I were in the group of sculptors and poets invited to collaborate recently on the Poetry in Place: The Platforms events at Laumeier Sculpture Park. I thoroughly enjoyed that experience and met a number of smart, talented new people I promised myself to keep track of.

I killed a third bird as well. One of my best friends these days works next door to the Sheldon at The Pulitzer. Amy agreed to spend her lunch with me listening to Daniel spiel, so it was off to the lecture with my buddy.

We got there early enough to look at the show first, which was cool. I appreciated the mix of local, national and international artists, treated (I hope obviously) as equals; can't get too much of that in this town. I also gather that some of these artists from elsewhere are sort of "it" artists in the art world now, something of a coup for Daniel and the gallery, and I understand the value and appeal of that sort of thing without being compelled by it personally.

Daniel wrote a really eloquent essay that tied the show together and made connections that it would not be possible to make just looking at the work, which seems just the right way to go with a curator's essay. Reading his notes definitely enriched my experience of the show, though I also had a positive sensual experience of many of the works without having the contextual overlay. A painting of a mouse looking down into a mirror really did it for me, as did a video by Slater Bradley of a man in a moon suit playing a music box to stuffed animals in their diorama habitats.

Not surprisingly, given the premise of the show, I spent the most time looking at the piece that most closely resembles the kinds of things I try to do. Local artist Robert Goetz took a series of photographs of traffic passing (or not) the same four roadside smokestacks. He then did prints to accompany each photograph where the bands of color in the print related to how the smokestacks were intersected in the photograph. Photograph and print were then conjoined. As a final touch, he scored his own images musically, though the music pod for his piece wasn't working when I was there, so I didn't get the entire effect. Robert and I used to do similar work together in Poetry Scores, and though we have lost touch it was a pleasure to see he has continued in the project of scoring texts and translating between media.

Amy and I went to the Tap Room to talk about the show, which made for some interesting, mirroring connections. I tried to explain my prior working relationship with Robert, making the connection that he and I had played in a band together with Hunter Brumfield. Amy and I also had Hunter in common as a friend, until Hunter killed himself. When I made the connection, Amy blurted, "Hunter and I sang 'I'll Be Your Mirror' together!"

The coincidence with the Velvet Underground song that themed the show we had just seen was interesting. So was this. One of the pieces in the show was a sculpture by Hannah Greely made to resemble a bottle of beer crusted in dirt. I thought of Hunter when I looked at this piece, because I have the last bottle of beer he drank before he killed himself, given to me by his girlfriend at the time who knew I'd probably appreciate it.

This left me with the pleasant feeling that a fourth bird had been killed today, that the spirit of our dead friend who died too young had been recycled in our coming together to experience art today. The dead are only as dead as we allow them to be. We can be their mirror.

Why I love St Louis & baseball but not the Cardinals

2011-10-17T23:20:00.004-05:00

Left-handed batting stance on the rock & roll road, ca. 1993.

I love St. Louis to death and love the game of baseball almost as much; yet the St. Louis Cardinals just battled through a Cinderella August worthy of the record books to win the National League penant and advance to the 2011 World Series, and I really don't care. Don't give a hoot. Didn't watch one single out of the National League Championship Series. I'd probably even silently root against the Redbirds in the Series, were it not for the fact that their American League opponent, the Texas Rangers, previously were owned by George W. Bush.

What gives? How the hell could all of these things be true?

Let me start with my baseball bona fides. I may be an oddball by many measures -- I read Turkish poetry for fun and make zombie movies based on Turkish poems -- yet I am a fully acculterated American boy when it comes to baseball. Not only did I memorize the backs of baseball cards, I have held onto my entire childhood baseball collection over an itinerant life that has included periods of being "between homes." Not only did I grow up playing the game, it was the one game I was good at. Most sports, I played precisely well enough to earn a starting position, wear a jersey on game days, attract the girlfriends who could be won in no other way. In baseball, I played third base, picked a mean hot corner, and always batted in the heart of the lineup, a line-drive hitter with longball power. I even played competitive baseball as recently as this century, when I co-founded a vintage baseball team that played barehanded ball by 19th century rules in New York City's Central Park. I played third base and batted in the heart of the lineup.

Baseball; okay. But St. Louis Cardinals baseball, and me?

Sure. I grew up on Jack Buck and Mike Shannon. I knew, like everybody knew, that we were sitting at the heels of genius there. I grew up on Ozzie Smith and Al Hrabosky -- magical, mystical, supernatural ballplayers and characters. Visual evidence exists of this: a photograph of me from a Granite City Halloween party in the early 1980s, when our entire friendship clique came in costume as St. Louis Cardinals players: a portrait of the artist (in my case) as a mediocre second baseman (Tommy Herr).

What happened? A whole lot of things happened.

I'm slightly phobic about filling out forms. I was really good at high school, but not good at all about applying to any colleges. So a guidance counselor sent a U.S. Navy recruiter to me. He filled out all of my forms, and suddenly I was a Navy Midshipman studying biomedical engineering at Boston University with a full-time job as a NROTC Cadet. I was also a fanatic for rock music suddenly thrown into one of the great rock music cities, Boston, with indie rock exploding all around me. I looked at my course schedule, my Navy billets, the gig calendars at Boston rock clubs, and I realized something had to go. My baseball fanatacism had to go, if I was going to make it through this NROTC university thing. And so the boy who used to interview himself as an imaginary famous baseball player while stocking shelves at Cohen's Market went pretty close to cold turkey on Major League Baseball. It amazes me to remember this, but I lived a year in Boston, able to replay in memory any number of Freddy Lynn catches in its center field, in the shadow of the Green Monster, and stepped inside Fenway Park exactly once.

I lived in Boston one year only. Me and the Navy didn't work out. That's another story. I ended up back home, though not in Granite City; now I was in St. Louis proper, at Washington University. There might have been time to take up baseball again, but not in the poring-over-box-scores-every-morning manner I was accustomed to -- especially not with this rock music thing taking me over, more and more completely. In fact, I ended up running away from the academy (where I was doing fine, at least on paper, the only place that really matters in the academy) to play rock music myself.

When I got off the rock & roll road towards the end of the 1990s, there was a window there when the St. Louis Cardinals might have won me back. This was exactly when Cardinal Nation, as Cardinals fans style themselves, lost its damn mind. The owners brought this big ugly redheaded guy with bloated muscles here from Oakland. His specialty was what I emphatically consider to be the single dullest play in the game of baseball, from the standpoint of a spectator: the homerun. It's the only play that ends with the swing of the bat. In every other play, even a foul ball or wild pitch, someone else has a chance of being drawn into the play, to make an even better play or perhaps some catastrophic mistake. In the quintessential team sport, however, the homerun is the most solitary play, the solipsist's play. Yet it ascended to dominate the game. Bloated muscles and a shallow, cowlike response to big stats from fair-weather fans turned the chess of team sports into a meat-musclehead strongman dinging a bell.

Remember: I was a third baseman. I like infield defense, not infielders watching a speeding white blip sail over a distant fence while the constipated strongman touches four.

Then I met a lady on a plane and ended up living with her in New York. I did the thing you have to do when you're living with a lady, I got my own job. I ended up editing the travel section of a magazine. Let's face it, that's not the most demanding job in the world. To a guy who had scraped and hustled for the Navy, studied at world-class research universities, figured out how to run a touring rock band from scratch, and eked out a living writing freelance journalism at a dime a word, it was kind of like being paid to do nothing. But suddenly I had to be at the same place all the time, with the same people (when I wasn't traveling to write a travel story). Like millions of office workers before and after me, I found myself with a little time on my hands to discuss athletic contests. I crept back into baseball.

I was in New York, okay? And the hometown team, the Cardinals, had fallen for the bloated strongman who dings the bell. What was I going to do? Go over to the Yankees? I went over to the Yankees. I got some good haiku out of my first visit to Yankee Stadium. Yeah, Yankee Stadium. I started to feel some of the old magic come back. But we are talking about the Yankees here, or much more disastrously, the Yankees' fans. Though they play their games in the Bronx, this was Manhattan's team, and Manhattan had become the rich man's island. This was the rich fan's team. I went over to the Mets.

I know, the Muts, I know, the Pond Scum. But the Cardinals had fallen for the ugly bloated redheaded strongman who dings the bell. I owed them nothing. The Mets were my hometown team now. I could even walk to the stadium, and I did just that many times. My best friend in New York lived right along the way, Rosco Gordon, the jump blues legend who recorded with Sam Phillips before Sun Studios, when Elvis was still strumming a tennis racket as a guitar and interviewing himself as an imaginary famous musician. I'd walk through Jackson Heights, pick up three snacks from three different ethnic kitchens, pick up the jump bluesman, and we'd watch the Mets at Shea.

Remember, I was a third baseman. The third baseman for the Mets in those days was Robin Ventura. That is, first of all, one of history's great names. Robin Ventura. It's ridiculous. And then I met the man, an incredibly nice man, and all those Mets, by coming up with feature stories for the (now defunct) Connecticut page of The New York Times. Robin Ventura lived in Connecticut, as did Todd Zeile, the kooky Mets manager Bobby Valentine (another immortal baseball name) and a number of other guys on the field and in the front office. My editor at The Times was a Connecticut guy and a baseball nut, always looking for a reason to green-light a Connecticut baseball feature. Connecticut and baseball have been very, very good to me.

My sketch of a cameraman made from the press box at the old Shea Stadium.

This next part is very important. The people who most need to hear it, Cardinals fans, will never hear it. I have tried to tell many Cardinals fans this, and they would not hear it. They never hear it. But it is true. Shea Stadium has the sharpest baseball critics in the world. When I say this to Cardinals fans, they say in a chorus, "No, Cardinals fans are the best fans in baseball!" And then I say, while that may or may not be true, in terms of cow-eyed adoration of the home team, it's not what I said. I said: best baseball critics. In Shea, they love baseball, but love or hate the Mets precisely according to how well or badly they measure up to the great game of baseball. I am not talking about see-sawing manic-depressively from cow-eyed adoration to drunken despondency that my team is out of the Wild Card race. I am talking pitch by pitch, infield adjustment by infield adjustment, pitching change by pitching change criticism of the game as the game is being played.

I moved back home. That's another another story. And I saw St. Louis sports through new eyes. It's really very simple. New York is a two-team town. It's a competitive democracy for sports fandom. Nowhere in New York can you say "the game," as in "can you turn on the game?" as if there is only one game in town. The game. In New York, there is always at least two games in town. Now don't get me wrong, I don't love New York. I vastly prefer St. Louis. But what I like about St. Louis least is what so many people from St. Louis thinks makes them so special: how much they love their sports teams. In fact, this is the most typical, bush league thing about this great city. Ever been to a college town on a game day? That's St. Louis, 162 days of the year, or more, if the Cardinals make it into the post-season. If New York is a competitive sports democracy, St. Louis is a rigid, inflexible, one-party system. It's the Soviet Russia of sports cities.

And lo and behold, these Cardinal fans now have embraced another California import who totally rubs me the wrong way. I never liked the cocky look of this manager. Eventually, he would take his upturned nostrils and self-infatuation to a conservative rally against President Obama organized by a cheap shot of a conservative talk show hack, but long before that he violated my sense of humanity once and for eternity when he threatened a press conference full of reporters with a fungo bat he was holding in his hands. Tough guy. Sorry, Charlie. I was done with you and your team, whichever that team might be and wherever it might be getting its taxpayer subsidies, then and forever.

There is that political point to be considered there, the paying for these owners to make money off us, but I won't whine about the "pay for my new stadium" game, which everybody plays, everywhere. Hey, I'd take some help refinancing my mortgage too, if I could get away with it, but I can't.

But then I also can't fathom how the chump hometown fan is exactly the last person suited up for this game with an iota of geographic loyalty. The owner of the team may not live in the team's town (the Cardinals' owner doesn't). The players play for the highest bidder, wherever that bid may be paid. That's the way the fans want it, presumably, because they holler pretty fast for the owner to let any player go who's fading in exchange for the next better thing. Everybody is always looking for the next team, or the next player. Everybody is in it for the money or the glory, except Joe Chump Hometown Fan. Joe is supposed to root robotically for whoever happens to be playing for whoever happens to be owning the team that happens to be situated in his town -- until, of course, the owner moves his hometown team to another hometown. And then they wait for another owner to move another team to their town so they can love that team and only that team with that same cowlike look in their eyes.

I don't get it. I grew up in the Free Agency Era, which started right here in St. Louis, by the way, in 1969. I was a boy of three probably chasing a baseball across the carpet when Curt Flood said hell no, I don't want to go. I want to stay. And by wanting to stay in St. Louis instead of submitting to a trade to another city's team, ironically, he paved the way for a game of baseball where nobody stays in one place anymore. Except the chump hometown fan, who even when he or she moves, is still supposed to remain nostalgically loyal to the team that happens to be situated in their hometown, until it isn't.

I'm not like that. Take me and the Mets. It's over. They've moved on, and I've moved on. The Mets I cared about are gone from New York. Robin Ventura is now managing up in Chicago (I'll have to find a reason to go and say hello). Todd Zeile is producing movies (I'll have to find a reason to go ask him for money). Bobby Valentine talks about the game on TV and has a city job in his Connecticut hometown. They might be somebody's Mets, but they're not mine anymore.

I now live in a house with two females, and one TV. I think you know what that means. I haven't seen a television in years, at least not the one I co-own. I could listen to baseball on the radio, but I still prefer music, if I have to pick one or the other. In fact, I would say it's time for me finally to retire as a journeyman freelance baseball fan. I quit. I'm out of here. If the game ever decides to remember me for my contributions to the game, not that I expect it will, and I have to pick a jersey to wear when I enter the Cooperstown of freelance baseball fans, it won't be the Cardinals jersey. It won't be the Red Sox jersey. It won't even be my most recently Mets. It will be the Sans Souci Poeteasters, my imaginary dice baseball team composed of nothing but poets. But that's another another another story.

Three incoherent poems to be read at Occupy St. Louis

2011-10-15T13:43:00.000-05:00

Kristin Sharp does a lot of good work organizing and promoting performance poetry in St. Louis. I see that she is organizing poets for tomorrow (Sunday, October 16) at Occupy St. Louis in Kiener Plaza. At that time I will be managing an aspiring child actor with a non-profit gig, but I wanted to post a few of my poems and invite Kristin or anyone else to read one of them there.

**

ON DEADLINE

We came out of the mud, out
of the dark, out of the heat. Here today, I
empower you to screw up
something (I’ll give you the real answer, later).
Take an overweight person
eating chicken-fried steak, smoking cigarettes,
It makes a lot of sense, yeah,

for Alaska. The monkey in the middle.
Fly in low, the ambulance
outside your door (if you even have access
to ambulance services).
That’s a lot of dead people. Money came here.
In Mexico, I’m sure, there are seminars
going on, right now, asking
what happened to all the jobs they "stole" from the
American South. We are
all, always, on deadline, not Acme Widgets.

-- Chris King

*

THIS IS NOT AN INDICTMENT

The apple is the sweetest,
the closest to the core. The sweetest and most
difficult to eat. Guilt is
a Calvinist virus that makes your cue ball
incident look like punk stuff,
soul insurance, Boddishatva of the porn,
a store called Experience.

The people who bid this shit up never have
put anything on the line
because they don’t even know where the line is.
Throw their money around like
a cudgel. It’s not an indictment, I’m just
talking about what’s really
going on, with my twin pistol butts showing.
It’s just a poisoned Old World
predatorial system. Sneeze! Scat! (Devil!)
Dude, you can’t eat soul, yours or
mine. You’re falling far afield again tonight.

-- Chris King

*

VOCABULARY LESSON
FOR THE LAST PERSON
OF THE TRIBE TO SPEAK
THE LANGUAGE
OF OUR PEOPLE

For arrow poison, we boiled
gall down. The hair was plastered with clay a full
day, to impart gloss and keep it from splitting.
Now, the exterminating
influence of missions was discouraging,
sure, but courage, for us,
was really a curse. A is for Absence,
B is for Bayonet in
the Back of C, or Crazy Horse, D is for
Don’t You Speak Your Mother Tongue,
E is for Entrails Emptying Out Our Soul.

-- Chris King

**

These poems are cast in the 7/11 form innovated by St. Louis poet Quincy Troupe, which calls for alternating 7-syllable lines with 11-syllable lines. I add to that rule an attempt to alternate 7-line stanzas with 11-line stanzas, or at least to use only 7-line and 11-line stanzas.

The Occupy Wall Street movement, which includes Occupy St. Louis (as I understand it), has been criticized from the left for being incoherent. So I have chosen some poems that are indeed somewhat incoherent, yet all say something important (I'd like to think) if you are patient with complexity and polyvalence.

As for Occupy Wall Street, or what I have heard about the movement from the distance of a busy parent and working artist with a demanding day job, it reminds me of what I loved about the intentional community movement when I first encountered it. I really liked the communal approach to resources and the consensual approach to decision-making. It's my impression that these approaches have worked for the human being for many more centuries than the approaches concentrated on Wall Street. It always seems possible that the time will come when they will be widely practiced again, either out of choice or, more likely, grim necessity.

***

Image borrowed from Peter.

One more Saturday for "Poetry in Place: The Platforms"

2011-10-02T23:51:00.000-05:00

On Saturday I was part of something new, for me certainly, and maybe for anyone anywhere. Dana Turkovic, curator of exhibitions at the mighty Laumeier Sculpture Park, put it together. It was titled Poetry in Place: The Platforms. "The Platforms" were six constructed sites to read poetry (or, for that matter, to spout rants). Five poets were then invited to read poetry on these platforms and encourage others read or speak. I was one of the five invited poets.

I liked the idea very much, once I fully grasped it, which didn't happen until we were actually doing it. I do not fault Dana for this. In fact, I liked very much the way she organized the event. It was all very familiar to me, from my own efforts with Poetry Scores -- coming up with a group project that no one had ever quite thought of before, and then pulling together the group to pull it off knowing full well they can't imagine it in advance because it's a totally new thing.

The good news -- and another clever part of the design -- is we are going to do it again, next Saturday, October 8, from 1 to 3 p.m. I'll do my best to get more people out to Laumeier this time to experience this unique approach to public poetry and sculpture.

Here is how it works. There is a circular trail of platforms crafted around a small section of the vast sculpture park. (Signs point the way.) If you follow the trail, you come upon platforms with poets.

Coming down from the parking lots, you first encounter Douglis Beck's platform. Its main features are a wheel you spin and a cone that acts as a megaphone, like a carnival barker.

Next you see Daniel McGrath's platform, a faux stone, like something an ancient philosopher would stand upon to declaim.

Then you see Sarrita Hunn's platform, a glittery box that also has a multimedia component that was described to me. Since my phone is a dumb phone, I didn't quite get it, but if your phone is smart your phone can play with this platform too.

Then you come upon Noah Kirby's platform, which is more like a rusted old phone booth, since you step into rather than up on it. You can kind of hide in this one, while projecting your voice out of another megaphone-type construction.

From there you take a turn into the woods, where you soon come across the platform designed by Axi: Ome (Sung Ho Kim and Heather Woofter). This one is basically a bridge.

Finally, at the end of the woodlands trail is B.J. Vogt's piece, kind of a simulated forest of white trees with stepping stones.

It's an enormous park, there were six platforms for simultaneous poetry, poetry is a tough draw in any event, and (as I've said) this event was intrinsically difficult to promote in advance. So even with six local artists and five local poets -- I was joined by Julie Dill, Chris Parr, Stefene Russell and Buzz Spector -- the turnout, or walk-by traffic, wasn't quite equal to the ambition of the project or the quality of the work.

Still, it was a magical experience for those of us who did experience it. My favorite moment as a performer was hiding Noah Kirby's rusted metal structure and reading almost my entire chapbook of painful lost love poetry, A heart I carved for a girl I knew. It was the perfect environment for that poetry.

As a listener, my favorite experience was watching Buzz Spector read in B.J. Vogt's faux forest nestled in the actual woods. The poetry Buzz read was full of artifice and contrivance, very self-consciously so, and it was neat to see him read these poems while standing in a little artificial forest.

Now that we have a better sense of what to expect, I think all of the artists and poets involved will be able to bring more people out next Saturday. I certainly hope so. A lot of working artists in St. Louis (me included) tend to grouse that our major arts institutions don't do enough to partner with and co-promote with local working artists. I know we all enjoyed the rush of collaborating with a major international institution like Laumeier, but I feel we owe the institution a better return on its investment in us -- namely, local visitors who would not be at the park that particular day were there not these particular local artists included in the day's exhibitions.

Of course, this being St. Louis, that depends entirely on the St. Louis Cardinals being knocked out of the post-season between now and then.

British Red Cross pumps me up to read at The Platforms

2011-09-30T22:59:00.000-05:00

So tomorrow (Saturday, October 1) and the next Saturday (October 8), I'll be a performing poet at Laumeier Sculpture Park as part of its Poetry in Place: The Platforms project, organized by Dana Turkovic. The St. Louis poets Julie Dill, Christopher Parr, Stefene Russell, Buzz Spector and I will be reading poetry on platforms invented and constructed by local artists Axi:Ome (Sung Ho Kim and Heather Woofter), Douglis Beck, Sarrita Hunn, Noah Kirby, Daniel McGrath and B.J. Vogt.

I was very happy to be asked to participate, if for no othe reason than to make two trips to Laumeier in this beautiful Fall weather we're having. At the same time, I have plenty of doubts about myself as a "real poet"; I've always written poetry and even published a bit, without ever thinking of myself as a poet. But I was certainly willing to play one at Laumeier Sculpture Park!

Then this morning, the day before the first of the Platforms gigs, I woke to some remarkable good news for me as a poet, of all things. It came from, of all unlikely places for poetic confirmation, the British Red Cross.

It is our pleasure to inform you on behalf of the British Red Cross that your entry "Recipe for Hallelujah" has been highly commended by our judges. You are one of only twelve entrants to receive this commendation. We received more than 750 entries from all over the world but yours was marked out to be above and beyond the others. On behalf of the judges and organisers we would like to wholeheartedly congratulate and thank you. We hope to have the commended entries published in a Red Cross publication, and will keep you informed of progress.

This relates to a competition the British Red Cross organized around The International Day of the Disappeared. I read about the competition on Twitter, though I'm not sure I even would have remembered entering it or with what poem had I not received this good news. Here is the poem that their judges "highly commended":

RECIPE FOR HALLELUJAH

Take Mississippi after
its native peoples have all been disappeared,
lynch the intelligent men
of color, form the women into a choir,
add the Bible, translated,
assassinated African idioms
disguised in murky backbeats
no white man in Mississippi could fathom
(let’s leave Elvis Presley out
of this …) and make it sweat its ass in the sun
until it ripens, or explodes.

It's not like I started chewing on a pencil when I heard about the competition until I spit this out. I did what I always do when entering a writing competition (as I do more and more nowadays, thanks to Twitter alerts) -- I looked for something I'd already written but not published that fits the theme.

This is a poem about the American South, a place better known for very public terrorist murders (lynchings) than for the stealth terrorism associated with the disappeared (abducting someone secretly and then trying to make sure no one ever sees them again). In my experience as a writer, reader and activist, this is the American South contrasted to anti-Communist Central America. But there are shared themes, so I made one small revision to the poem to bring it closer to "the disappeared" and sent it to London.

The poem is a holdover from my days on the road, when the Mississippi Hill Country was a beloved place to hide away with friends. I wrote a baggier version of the poem back then, in the 1990s, but never did anything with it; I was too far out there on the road, too busy hiding away with new friends in obscure place.

I revisited this, along with many of my older poems, earlier this year after hearing the poet Quincy Troupe read here in his hometown of St. Louis. Quincy introduced a poem by saying it was a 7/11, a poetic form he had invented where seven-syllable lines alternate with eleven-syllable lines. That sounded just right to me, just exactly as uneven and off-kilter as me. I literally ran home that night and started pulling out old poems and counting syllables on my fingers. In my 7/11s, I try to alternate seven-line stanzas with eleven-line stanzas, or at least to break stanzas at seven or eleven lines. This poem is one eleven-line stanza.

This 7/11 thing has really been working out for me, it's really been helping me to shape up underthought or unfinished poems. In fact, I will be reading only 7/11s at Laumeier tomorrow and the next Saturday. Hope to see you there!

*

Image from pag-kilos ng kultura.

My acting debut opposite Bill Streeter in George Malich's brain surgery series

2011-08-28T10:35:00.003-05:00

My friend George Malich is producing and directing Life is Meant for Living, a series of improvised sketch comedy pieces based on the amazing experience he currently is undergoing with brain cancer and brain surgery.

In his new episode, "Day 9: The Conspiracy," George retells a remarkable experience from his brain surgery earlier this month. The expert brain surgeons at Barnes-Jewish Hospital kept him awake and talking for much of the surgery, to monitor what parts of his brain he was using so as to avoid cutting into any of his functional tissue while removing as much of the tumor as they could.

By all accounts, George was good, loquacious company while his brain was under the knife, as he depicts (with a fetching comic overlay) in the previous episode "Day 8: Awake Surgery." But when his surgeons woke George up, he pitched into a three-hour rage.

Curiously, the targets of George's rage were two local directors, Bill Streeter and me, Chris King. Bill is far more accomplished than me as a director, so I was flattered to be somehow sequestered in the directors' corner of George's brain with Bill.

With Poetry Scores, I have directed only one movie, though George has a prominent role in our second movie, currently in production, Go South for Animal Index. As I described in a recent post, "You Never Know What is Going to Happen, George Malich," we really had to rush and work George hard to get in his last scenes before his brain surgery. If there is a rational reason for such things, that's probably why George came out of a brain surgery in a three-hour rage at me.

But, as Rachel Cosic's character muses in this sketch, "Why Bill Streeter?" Bill -- who has never directed George -- asked himself the same thing. "Maybe George subconsciously wants me to direct him," Bill suggested.

That sounds good to me! I'm standing by to help that future project in any way. Given my highlight reel from this episode, my screen acting debut, I suspect it won't be as an actor.

"The Big Dipper" by Rick Hawkins & eleanor roosevelt (picture, song)

2011-08-13T12:07:00.000-05:00

My friend and colleague Rick Hawkins posted this photograph he took of the Big Dipper on his typepad.

He snapped it at a summer camp (in central Tennessee, I'd guess, where he lives). Rick has a deep personal connection to the camp, he said. Also, as an artist, he appreciates "the absence of ambient light pollution. The sky is bright with stars."

His post reminded me of the song my band eleanor roosevelt wrote and recorded titled "The Big Dipper". I sent it to Rick and will post it here.

mp3
"The Big Dipper"
(eleanor roosevelt)
eleanor roosevelt

It's not our greatest work. It didn't make the cut for the next batch of songs we intend to release, Water Bread & Beer. But I like it enough as an excuse for a blogpost with Rick's picture.

I stumbled on "the absence of ambient light pollution" far from central Tennessee. I was on the wide plains of Western Canada, coming back from Edmonton, Alberta, when I saw the sky bright with the stars of the Big Dipper and wrote the words and melody to the song. When I saw the Big Dipper, it looked like "a heavenly trickle". I took it from there, attempting an extended metaphor for what I consider to be one of life's greatest pleasures.

Not only a visual artist, Rick is a musician and singer I really want to work with in Poetry Scores. His projects Jackson Pollock Microphone and Magna Man Remembered are close in spirit to what we do. It's almost embarassing that we haven't incorporated Rick's work into one of our poetry scores by now.

Rick did host a successful event at his home in Murphreesboro for Poetry Scores' one and only (thus far) Southern Poetry Tour, and we have every intention to screen our first movie Blind Cat Black at his place.

Going back to the beginning, Rick was a cofounder of Hoobellatoo, the field recording collective that spawned Poetry Scores. Rick was with Lij and me when we met and first recorded the late Leo Connellan, the first poet we scored. Rick's striking portrait of Leo, standing on the foyer at his publisher, Curbstone Press, graces the back of our first poetry score CD, Crossing America.

Bootblogging #22: Five by Bob Reuter

2011-08-10T22:51:00.001-05:00

St. Louis songwriter and bandleader Bob Reuter is turning 60 and celebrating this Saturday, August 13 at The Tap Room (2100 Locust) with a really excellent lineup: The Union Electric, Wormwood Country and Bob's band Alley Ghost.

I have multiple, deeply rooted connections to the leaders of all these bands: Tim Rakel (of The Union Electric), Lindy Woracheck (of Wormwood Country) and Bob himself. It would tire the patience of most blog readers to rehearse it all, so I'll just say a few words about our birthday boy and then bootblog a handful of his songs.

Bob was already a veteran of the St. Louis music scene when I sprang up in the late 1980s. His band then was Kamikaze Cowboy, and they rocked hard on Bob's country-tinged songs, which more or less describes all of Bob's bands I've heard since. He had the reputation then, which he's maintained for twenty years, of being one of the best songwriters in town. He's still that.

Like most frontmen, Bob is a fairly self-absorbed guy -- a rap that has followed him, alongside the master craftsman songwriter reputation. That makes it somewhat paradoxical that he also is and has always been a highly encouraging enthusiast for other bands and songwriters. It's this generosity and passion towards other musicians, matched with those eloquent and catchy songs, that has ensured Bob always has an ace band populated by some of the best players in the scene.

Speaking from experience, my band Enormous Richard was slightly controversial among other musicians when we burst on the scene in the late 1980s. I was a terrible singer, and I recruited talented musicians by inviting them to learn new instruments onstage. I stayed with these same guys until today, so twenty years later I make music with talented multi-instrumentalists, but in the early days we could be pretty hard on the ears.

But I think we had some good songs, and we played them with abandon -- a guitar player who joined the band called it "messy hilarity". Among serious musicians in town, Bob was absolutely the first to look past our surface imperfections enough to enjoy the songs and appreciate the gusto we brought to the experience of playing in a band. To this day, twenty years ago, I still remember Bob calling me out of the blue to talk about an Enormous Richard song that he liked. He carried on like a goofy fan, rather than one of the best songwriters in town.

Having had that experience, having been touched by Bob's passion for music in that way, it does not surprise me that he has enticed gifted musicians like Robin Allen, Michael Martin and John Horton to play in his bands and serve as his sort of de facto musical directors. Since Enormous Richard were one of the kids on the scene, then, and he was the veteran, it also does not surprise me that Bob has been able to renew his band and songs in recent years by attracting some of the best musicians in St. Louis who are literally half his age to back him up.

That band, which we will see on Saturday, is Bob Reuter's Alley Ghost. They are terrific, and I have one of their CDs (which I like); but when Bob gave me the go-ahead to bootblog some of his songs for the occasion, I had to pull out what I consider to be his finest work: the Michael-Martin produced this much I know (1994).

Here are five of its sixteen songs. I'm not sure I can name a single better record recorded in St. Louis in the twenty years I have been on the scene.

mp3s

"Outside Your Class"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

"It Don't Matter"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

"Other Shoe"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

"Second Hand Smoke"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

"10% of Nothing"
(Bob Reuter)
Bob Reuter

More in this series
Bootblogging #1: Three by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #2: Three elegies for local musicians
Bootblogging #3: Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #4: Three more by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #5: Chuck Reinhart's guitar circle hits
Bootblogging #6: The silly side of The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #7: Songs for "Divorcing God"
Bootblogging #8: More songs for "Divorcing God
Bootblogging #9: Adam Long presents The Imps!
Bootblogging #10: More Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #11: The Adversary Workers
Bootblogging #12: The May Day Orchestra
Bootblogging #13: Solo Career live in Santa Monica
Bootblogging #14: Four from The Funhouse (Seattle punk)
Bootblogging #15: Four more from The Funhouse (Seattle punk rock)
Bootblogging #16: I will be your volunteer! (for Bob Slate)
Bootblogging #17: Yet more The Lettuce Heads Bootblogging #18: Four by Russell Hoke
Bootblogging #19: Krakersy (is Crackers in Polish)
Bootblogging #20- Four by Grandpa's Ghost
Bootblogging #21: Eight by Jaime Gartelos

The history of rock & roll, country music and me

2011-07-03T10:13:00.001-05:00

Bascom Lamar Lunsford

Yesterday began with the news that my friend Dan Durchholz has landed a new gig teaching the early history of rock & roll at a university in St. Louis County. My roots as a musician and music writer are all tangled up in his.

The next thing I did yesterday, after read my social media news, was to visit The Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. Its first display was a reel of three films of primitive rural music that pre-dated country music. One of those films showed Bascom Lamar Lunsford playing "Doggett's Gap" with a small group of musicians. I'm co-producing a boxed set of Bascom's recordings that will make his performance of this song available to the public for the first time.

With all this history of music stuff touching so personally upon me, on a weekend when our nation looks back to celebrate its own birth, perhaps I can be forgiven for continuing to experiences exhibits at the Country Music Hall of Fame and events of the day in Nashville from the Forrest Gumpesque perspective of my tiny cameos in them.

Uncle Elvis

In the center of the third floor of the museum, where the tour starts, is parked "Elvis Presley's Solid Gold Cadillac." The love of my eldest sister's life, Lori King, was a man named Mark Presley. Mark's grandfather was first cousins with Vernon Presley, Elvis' dad. I have in my personal museum a photograph of Mark as a child, standing on the steps of Graceland, when Elvis was alive, during a family visit to his Uncle Elvis.

I told this story to the group visiting the museum with me, which included by 8-year-old daughter. Leyla was very struck by this information. "You mean I'm related to Elvis?!" she exclaimed. "Yes, by marriage," I said. Technically, my sister never married Mark, though he never left her side during the long illness and death that interrupted their loving relationship.

Hank and Chicken Truck

Speaking of Cadillacs and premature death, I thought often about my early days as a musician, in the formative days of alternative country. Hank Williams is all over The Country Music Hall of Fame, as well he should be. I was writing about music when I was first starting scruffy country rock bands in St. Louis, and I was the first scribe to write about Brian Henneman, who has gone on to have a strong career with The Bottle Rockets.

Brian was fronting Chicken Truck when I stumbled into Cicero's Basement Bar to hear them. That band's memorable early tape LOUD MUSIC included a twisted homage to Hank Williams in which Brian growls, "I want to be drunk, stoned and famous and dead in the back of my own Cadillac." This refrain cycled helplessly through my brain my entire time in the museum.

Dizzy's big toe

I thought of Brian's songwriting partner and former high school basketball coach Scott Taylor at an adjacent exhibit, where you can listen to rare recordings at listening pods. One such rare recording was "Wabash Cannonball" recorded by baseball legend Dizzy Dean. The Chicken Truck guys backed Scott in an early side project that recorded a song called "Dizzy Dean". I remember Scott sharing that song with me, observing all sorts of protocols of co-conspirators, which I didn't understand.

"You know," Scott had said, "Dizzy Dean? Big Toe? I always liked how you referenced that." I had no idea what he was talking about. My first band had been Big Toe, but the name didn't reference anything but a big toe.

"The big toe is essential to balance," Scott had explained. "A line drive shattered Dizzy Dean's big toe. He kept pitching with his balance all disrupted, and it ruined his pitching arm." I think that was when I realized how songwriters learn to take credit for being much smarter than they really are.

Slim, svelte Garth

If there is an antithesis to Hank Williams and Chicken Truck, it would be the gerbil of country music stardom, Garth Brooks. Garth is featured in the museum on a highlight reel documenting country music on television. His career in music got started exactly at the same time as mine. He became an international star while my nose was buried in obscure comic books on the road to obscure gigs.

After one Enormous Richard gig in New York City, the pretty barmaid after-partying with us described our drummer, Matt Fuller, as looking like "a slim, svelte Garth Brooks". I remember this 20 years later because of her outrage and amazement that Garth Brooks had the No. 1 hit in the world yet not one member of our band had any idea who he was!

Maybelle's Gospel Ship

On the walls that sheltered the little theater where the country music on TV reel was playing they had hung historic musical instruments on pegs. There was Maybelle Carter's Gibson L-5. It was our own "slim, svelte Garth Brooks," Matt Fuller, who learned Maybelle's licks and brought some of that old-time feeling into our bands Enormous Richard and Eleanor Roosevelt. We were playing the Carter Family song "Gospel Ship" at Cicero's in those early St. Louis years when Uncle Tupelo was playing their song "No Depression." In the case of Uncle Tupelo, the rest is history.

Jimmie's guitar at the depot

Next to Maybelle's Gibson hangs Jimmie Rodgers' Martin 00-18 guitar. I was strolling the exhibit with Elijah "Lij" Shaw, a partner in all of my bands and musical projects. After Eleanor Roosevelt burned out, we had stayed on the road as a field recording collective, Hoobellatoo. Hoobellatoo did some old-time music recordings at an old train depot in Marshall, North Carolina. Jimmie Rodgers had once left one of his other guitars behind at the depot, we were told, and it remained in a local private collection.

No credit

At that time in the exhibit, I received a call from a musician named Frank Heyer. Frank called to thank me for sending him the most recent Poetry Scores record which includes a piece of his music, Jack Ruby's America by David Clewell. However, he said (without being a jerk in any way), I made a mistake on his credits; he was playing keyboard, not fretless guitar. I told him we would "fix it in the reprint," the label's version of "fix it in the mix."

I told Lij how ironic it was, just as I was basking in my tiny roles in the history of music, to have pointed out a mistake I made on the last piece of music I produced. Lij said that was nothing. He reminded me of the come-back record he and I had produced for the jump blues legend Rosco Gordon. "My buddy Hags played bass on that record," Lij said." He was more excited than anybody. I forgot to credit him!"

Hotel California in Nashville
After a hotel pool swim, we finished our day at Lij's home in East Nashville. Out back he has built a commercial recording studio, The Toy Box. Lij throws opens its doors to Poetry Scores, the project that our bands and Hoobellatoo has evolved into. He also rents it out to other producers.

He called me down to the studio to hear some mixes a producer just did in his studio. The Toy Box is getting a name as a mix studio, in part, because Lij bought and installed the mother board on which many iconic Southern Californian recordings, including The Eagles' Hotel California, were mixed.

Paul Westerberg's Deer Tick

This project is the new record by the band Deer Tick. Lij wanted me to hear it because they are one of Paul Westerberg's favorite bands. Westerberg, of course, led The Replacements, which influenced all the rock musicians of our generation. Westerberg had even written a song for Deer Tick that appears on this album, "Mr. Cigarette," sung to the tune of "I've Been Working on the Railroad". It's not the best song on what sounds like a great album.

"On this board, the brights can sound too bright," Lij remarked critically. "Listen to that high-hat. It's just like on Hotel California -- a little too hot."

Ghost World garage

I pulled a comic book off the shelf while we were listening. It was Ghost World, by Daniel Clowes, which the publisher had affixed with the sticker "Now a Major Motion Picture". That major motion picture was filmed, in large part, in a strip mall in Hollywood. That strip mall sits right across the street from a home owned by the sister of Matt Fuller, the "slim, svelte Garth Brooks" of our songwriting partnership. For many years, Matt has used his sister's garage to write songs and record worktapes. The records we have made for many years started in a garage that looks out over onto the strip mall where Ghost World was filmed.

Emmylou's giant poodle

I guess if you get old enough and stubbornly keep doing the same thing -- make music -- it gets to be like this, where everything you pick up bears a trace of something you have been a part of. Since this could go on forever, I'll end with an anecdote that ranks as unforgettable.

After the Deer Tick listening session, we went up the house and listened to Lij's mixes from Bonnaroo. Bonnaroo is a mjor music festival in Tennessee where Lij has been getting the contract to do live backstage recordings of the acts. The great producer Daniel Lanois was one of the acts this year. As we listened to Lij's recording and watched the video of Lij recording Lanois, I remembered a story Lij had told just that morning at breakfast.

We had breakfast in East Nashville, at a French-styled cafe called Marche that sits right across the street from Woodland Studios. Some twenty years ago, in his earliest days in Nashville, Lij had interned at Woodland. He was forbid to enter the studio recording rooms during sessions and assigned busywork instead.

Lanois brought in Emmylou Harris to make the Wrecking Ball record while Lij was there, and one piece of busywork he was assigned was to stop Emmylou's giant black poodle from escaping. Unfortunately, the dog did escape on Lij's watch.

Lij fled out the studio door and followed the giant poodle across Gallatin Road. The dog ran around Oprah Winfrey's former high school and darted into what was then a section of low-slung housing projects.

Fortunately for LIj and Emmylou Harris, the dog stopped to pinch a turd, and Lij tackled the giant poodle while it was taking a shit in the projects behind Oprah Winfrey's former high school. My carried and dragged that giant poodle out of the projects, past Oprah Winfrey's former high school, across across Gallatin Road and into Woodland Studio, where musical history was being made.

There is a mirror that has seen us for the last time

2011-06-30T00:36:00.001-05:00

St. Louis is home to one of the world's great small museums, The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts, which hangs a show for a long time, then constantly cycles community programs through its doors. This method has a way of bleeding Pulitzer shows into St. Louis' bloodstream. The current show is Dreamscapes, and today I noticed St. Louis had taken on the quality of a dream.

My friend Ray is being evicted. It happens. I have sympathy for the transient, been there for years, and I'd do anything for Ray. We go back to the rock band road trips of my transient youth. So I borrowed a truck from our friend Michael and helped to evict Ray tonight.

Driving into Ray's Carondolet neighborhood in Michael's hot-wired Sonoma, I was also driving into my dead friend Paul's neighborhood. Paul was shot dead in his backyard on Idaho back in May. Ray lives right around the corner from where Paul lived and died. Ray dropped everything and helped me clean out Paul's garage and basement. He even mowed the dead man's yard before the bank took it back.

So there we were again, Ray and me, cleaning out another South City garage. This time it was Ray's stuff we had to pack up and move out. Not a dead man this time, only bounced a man, homeless between couches until something else works out.

I kept picking up stuff and asking Ray if I should pack it. Ray never had a ready answer. He wasn't really ready to leave this house on Alaska Street. It was as if part of him hadn't accepted that he had to move all of his stuff out of there.

I picked up a nice leather artist's portfolio. "Should I pack this?"

"That's hers," Ray said. A girlfriend had moved out abruptly, and that was one reason why Ray couldn't afford to stay here anymore.

"She was an artist?"

"That's what she said. Then she left and left that behind. So I looked at her portfolio. It's all empty pages."

When I needed something to protect Ray's mirror I was packing in the truckbed, Ray handed me a bedspread that had once been Paul's. The Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges had strong feelings about mirrors and the dead. There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time.

Paul's bedspread protected Ray's mirror as I drove it down Grand to Meramec, up Meramec to Morganford, across Morganford to Juniata, and then around the block to Hartford and the house where Ray would be storing his stuff for awhile.

We were helped by Doug Golden and Andee. Andee was driving one of those minivans that look like every other minivan. We lugged Ray's stuff out of our trucks and Andee's minivan into another man's big, cool, bungalowy house and basement.
"I felt so good in that house," Andee said between trips in and out of the house. "It feels like a big bungalow. I feel at peace in that house."

When I went to back Michael's hotwired truck up into the driveway, it stalled; and once it had stalled, its hotwire was no longer hot. Michael had showed me to start his truck by grasping a knob from the guts of the ignition with a pair of plyers and pulling it toward me. This trick was no longer working. The dead truck was now blocking Hartford. We endeavored to unload it in a hurry while no traffic was coming down the one-way street.

Ray called to me as I was coming back down from the big, cool, comfortable house. We had to move the truck out of the street, he said; he would push, if I would steer. I got behind the wheel. Then the man whose way we had been blocking on the street got out of his minivan, I would have thought to holler at us and complain. Instead, he put a shoulder to the truck and helped Ray push Michael's truck as I steered it to the curb.

"Oh, hi, Riley," Ray said to the guy who left the minivan to help us push Michael's truck out of his way.

Riley looked as if he had stepped out of a comic strip, or a dream. His arms were floridly tattooed. Both ears had rings. He had this cute little hat tilted on his head. He had the cleanest shave I have ever seen and his nostrils appeared to have been tended to, immaculately. He had a hole in the ass pocket of his Levis almost exactly the shape and size of his wallet, yet his wallet was not falling out through it.

Riley was Ray's friend. He lived down the street. He wanted to help. Ray told Riley we were done for the night and he needed a whiskey. Riley said he needed a whiskey too. Riley said he lived a block away and would help tomorrow, so let's go get a whiskey tonight. Riley and Doug Golden disappeared into the night, bound for a tavern named Riley's.

Or, no. They had piled into Andee's minivan, which looks like every other minivan. Riley and Doug Golden sheepishly stepped back out of Andee's minivan, shuffled over to Riley's minivan, and disappeared into the night, bound for Riley's tavern.

The it was just Ray, Andee and me. The streetlights had come on in South City. Ray and I make movies together. The yellow light of the streetlight on Ray made him look like an actor in a movie, or a dreamer in a dream.

He wanted to tell Andee about an ex he had called tonight and who had been nice to him. I really didn't want to hear this right now. It was an evil ex Ray had fallen for again who was responsible for his eviction.

Andee suddenly doubled over as Ray started the story. "I swallowed a gnat!" she gasped.

"You don't want to hear it, I know," Ray said.

"No, I swallowed a gnat!" Andee gasped.

Andee was my ride back to Michael's house, where I had left my car when I had picked up his truck. We talked about transience along the way. We had both been transients. We talked about dislocation, sickness and death. There were a lot of dislocated and sick people in our lives, a lot of death in our lives.

That reminded me. My friend Amy was waiting at a different tavern that was sort of on our way to Michael's house. She had with her at the tavern the work of art she had bought for me as my proxy bidder at the silent art auction benefit for Bunny. Bunny was sick.

We picked up the art from Amy and put it in the minivan. It was a really nice piece. Andee vaguely remembered the benefit, though she didn't know Bunny. "There have been a lot of benefits lately," Andee said.

There really had. The last time I had borrowed Michael's truck, in fact, was to move the art collection of my dead friend, Paul. We auctioned off his art as a benefit and gave the money to his son. I told Andee about that and how Ray had helped with the benefits for Paul.

While helping me with a benefit for a dead man with one 20-year-old son, I told Andee, Ray quietly dropped a reference to a benefit he was doing for a friend of his with three small children who was dying of testicular cancer.

Ray is a funny man. I thought he was trying to be funny. I told Ray that was funny, as if he were joking about how worse it could be. Ray said there was nothing funny about it. He really did have a friend who was dying of testicular cancer and would leave three small children behind.

"When is that benefit?" Andee asked. I said it already had passed, about a month ago. They keep coming and going.

We drove through South City. Andee is this really neat, slim, quiet, sincere, thoughtful, attractive woman. She said, "I grew up right around here." I had never met anyone who grew up around South Grand. I was curious about that. I tried to imagine her childhood on these streets familiar to me only as an adult artist type. I asked about her parents.

She said her mother was a secretary and her second father was a city cop. Just then we saw a city cop we both know, another Michael. I like this guy. He was walking his tough guy little dog. I called his name, and Michael came over.

"What do you have against the Brentwood firemen?" he asked me.

I took a break from work this afternoon to deliver a DVD of our movie Blind Cat Black to Susan Story in Brentwood. I never go to Brentwood. I took the opportunity of being on strange streets to drive local roads back to work. I passed a Sno Cone stand. I saw two Brentwood Fire Department fire trucks parked there. The Brentwood city manager was just busted for embezzling. So I posted in social media a wisecrack about the idle Brentwood firemen and maybe not all the bums being off the Brentwood city payroll.

"They do 24-hour shifts," Michael said. "What are you going to do for 24 hours?"

Maybe you'd go to the Sno Cone stand for a few hours. "I'll delete that," I said.

We got going again and passed a house where Andee had lived as a child. "No wonder," she said. "No wonder I felt so good in that house on Hartford, where we dropped off all of Ray's stuff. It felt like a bungalow. That house I grew up in was a little bungalow."

Andee had said "second father". I asked her about that. She explained it to me. Her reproductive father had not played a parental role in her life. She didn't sound at all bitter about that, though. It sounded like the man her father married next had been good for her.

She told me how her mother had met him. Her mother was a secretary in a business downtown. A disgruntled former employee came in one day with a gun. The person he took hostage while acting out with the gun happened to be her mother. The city cops were called in. One cop shot dead the disgruntled gunman holding Andee's mom hostage. One thing led to another after that, between her mom and the cop.

"How old were you at the time?" I wanted to know.

"I was seven," Andee said, "but I only learned about it much later. My mom is a quiet woman."

By now, we were at Michael's house. I pointed out my car on the street. "Oh, that little car," Andee said, pulling up beside it. She said, "I was born on this street." It was a dead end street.

*

Image is The Village of the Mermaids by Paul Delvaux (1942), presently hanging at The Pulitzer in St. Louis as part of Dreamscapes.

Blinded by brilliant colors carefully wrought: New Paintings from Michael Hoffman

2011-06-11T09:43:00.001-05:00

Michael Hoffman is a consistent and consistently brilliant presence on the St. Louis visual art scene. His consistency and brilliance definitely affect the way one relates to his work. In the many shows I have visited or curated that included work by Michael, I knew his pieces instantly and instantly knew what to expect: consummate artistry that is both uncanny (how does he DO that?) and totally pleasing to the senses. As a matter of fact, it would look nice next to your couch, or table, or desk, or executive corridor.

As a result, over the years, I have probably spent less time deeply absorbed in Michael's work than I do with work that is less accomplished but more demanding-of-attention. Michael's art is exactly like the prettiest person in the room: Well, there is THAT. Okay. Now, let's go contend with something more our slower speed. This situation is amped up a little by the fact that Michael himself is personally always one of the most attractive and pleasant people in any room he is in. Last night I looked closely at his one-man show at Hoffman LaChance while Sunyatta Marshall also was in the gallery, and I reflected that there wasn't a small room anywhere in the world that had the bases of male and female physical beauty covered any better.

So I wanted to look at Michael's new one-man show, New Paintings from Michael Hoffman (June 10th - July 2, 2011 at Hoffman LaChance, 2713 Sutton in Maplewood) because I wanted to encounter his paintings when I couldn't take the easy out and spend all my time on work that is less brilliant and pleasing to the senses. As I result, I spent an hour or so circling a small square room, pleased and illuminated.

I think there are 17 numbered pieces, and a few others hanging unnumbered in passage spaces (it is, after all, Michael's gallery). I started by jotting the numbers of the pieces I thought I had the most to think about, and then going back and thinking about them.

The 5th numbered piece uses a motif I have seen Michael use before. It reads like a brilliantly colorful concentric target (or shield, an icon he shares with his buddy Jon Cournoyer). Like so much of Michael's work, this piece has that amazingly composed surface that is the main thing that makes people shake their heads and wonder how he does that: how do you make a highly wrought object that looks like God just smoothed it out by hand?

This highly wrought but seamless circular figure is then engrained with another Michael Hoffman obsession, the 3-D grid of a globe. That's another gift he has: he makes paintings that take on some characteristics of sculpture without breaking the plane. He has taken that work all the way out to a logical extension in paintings that almost become ceramics sculptures without ever ceasing to be a painting.

Next to this new take on old favorites in the show are two pieces (numbered 6 and 7) in a Michael mode I have not seen. This is where I would have been spending my money, if I had any money to spend and wall space for art. They are vertical pieces that look like Jasper Johns flags reimagined as envelopes, though with patriotism to nothing but color, shape and design.

These pieces relate to the design idea that dominates the postcard Hoffman LaChance made for the show: thin, bright lines running tightly parallel with no other ornamentation. When Michael paints (or hangs) pieces in this mode vertically (13), it strikes me as an homage to a certain style of candy-striped shirt or necktie. Painted or presented vertically (11, 17), it suggests a visual pun. The pattern evokes window blinds, so it's as if you are being blinded by brilliant colors carefully wrought, which takes us right back to the core phenomenon of Michael Hoffman: being blinded by brilliant colors carefully wrought.

Speaking of core Michael, the show concludes (except for the bookend of the second brilliant blinds painting) with a trology of Michael Hoffman horizons. It is really interesting to see three of these horizon paintings on a wall next to each other. It gives you a chance to pay more attention to variation and its tonal effects. He makes small variations in landscape (all drawn, Cournoyer reports, from beloved islands near Seattle) and more sweeping changes in color to tell quite different stories (a rare appearance of the narrative element suggested in his work). Big dark reds in the sky and sea that dominate the landscape (14) tell of a blood red sunset with blood in the water. More blues and greens in the sea (15) whisper of a peaceful harbor at dusk. A stronger emphasis on the landscape elements and more control on the red pedal (16) warn of smoldering island volcanoes.

I picked up the one-sheet for the show, and learned something genuinely new about Michael: he has a gift for titles. Here are the titles for the pieces that caught my eye and notebook:

5) Catalan Spring
7) Playa Cadaques
11) Spanish Candy
13) Confluences
14) Rosario Strait
15) Way Out West
16) December Islands.

That just gave me some more things to think about, so I walked back through the show, then walked out onto the city street still thinking about it.

She guarded my donuts for me: Like Hale for Water Music, Part I

2011-03-26T09:57:00.002-05:00

The lobby at Powell Hall was mobbed Friday morning. I remember talking to Fred Bronstein at dinner when he was the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra president-elect, and Fred saying what remains a theme: Powell should be a destination.

On this cold, wet morning, it was more like a way station. I mean, it was bad out there. Snow, sleet, hale. The ticket handed me by the box office person identified the concert as Water Music. I took that around as a witticism to my fellow concert-goers mobbed in the lobby. "Hale for Water Music," I would say. Wasn't getting the laughs. Tried adding, "Hale is a form of water." Realized people understood that part; the problem was, I was not funny.

I like these Friday morning shows, because I am more awake at 10:30 a.m. on a Friday morning than I am when the band strikes up at 8 p.m. on a Saturday night. I kept saying to the other people, "Weather like this would have kept us home on a Saturday night," and there was consensus on that point. Matter of fact, had I started a petition drive -- right then and there in the Powell lobby -- to move the Symphony's subscription series to Friday morning concerts with free coffee and donuts, then I think Fred would have been met with a major new programming challenge.

Krispy Kreme was the donut vendor. God bless those good people. I picked up as many glazed as I could carry on my thumbs and moved in for the java.

I'm going to go ahead and say the Symphony could use a feng shei consultant, or a traffic engineer, for how it dispenses free coffee and donuts in the same, fairly narrow space, cut in half by a bar, that connects the front door and the concert seats.

It was rush hour, Highway 40 in there, but with no pavement markings, no traffic cops, and (let me come right out and say it) almost only elderly drivers. I am not young and I drive like a little old man, so I include myself in the indicted group. We were not moving fast, not responding to traffic puzzles with speed or dexterity. We were clogging up the arteries of Powell like three glazed donuts.

Yes, three. I know I have only accounted for two, having carried one on each thumb, having only two thumbs. But I was hankering for a third glazed.

By now, I had navigated the badly snarled coffee pot gridlock and found the one single place remaining to stand with a place to perch your coffee cup. It was, of course, the corner of a bar. There was a nice-looking old lady (age, maybe, seventy) beside me at the bar. She seemed to be at the concert alone. She was all dolled up, looking sharp. There was straight away a neighborly vibe, the place being so packed, us smashed against the bar. We were kind of in this thing together.

I thought my wheels and reflexes for incoming traffic might be in better shape than hers, so I offered to spring for another donut.

"You mean you can do that?" she asked, in a really cool European accent. She'd been keeping to just one donut, observing some limit.

I walked over like I owned the place, dodging through the tangles of concert-goers and donut-eaters, and came back with two more glazed on my thumbs, one for her and one for me. This was when I realized I had picked the right ally. When I say she had the path blocked to my spot at the bar, I mean physically. This was like a seventy-year-old lady, but she had flung herself around my notebook and coffee cup and thrown out arms. If you were moving in on my space, you were going to have to break one of her arms to get there.

I reflected on something I think a lot, as a married parent. How much easier life is with somebody to hold up half of it, whatever it is.

My little old lady's coffee looked like it needed freshening. I came back with one Styrofoam cup of coffee that I split between us, to freshen up both. Again, she made a physical barricade of herself, in protection of my turf, until I got back. I loved this lady.

We got to talking over coffee and Krispy Kremes. Turns out she had driven over from the Illinois side, Bunker Hill. I grew up on the East Side and had a boyhood girlfriend whose folks had a place in Bunker Hill, kind of a country home for steel mill townies. I was taken back almost thirty years to an anguished boyhood crush (the girl with the country home in Bunker Hill was the kind of girl who really sticks to the ribs of the mind) when my new ally took her own flight into the past: to Vienna, where she grew up.

Holy shit. All I know about classical music is what I read in those slick, smart little program Symphony magazines. They always have a little box that says where the composer was born and died. I have noticed many of the great composers seem to croak in Vienna. People die where they live, where they work, where they want to be remembered. Vienna, clearly, was the top-shelf hang for this symphony orchestra thing.

When I gushed to my new buddy that I had never seen a better orchestra than the one in St. Louis, she said, with no boast to herself, nor insult to the house, that she had seen many better. That, in fact, was when she let drop with the Vienna name magic.

They started to ding those bells that send people to their seats. I have a lot of friends who work for the Symphony, and they don't get shook up like the rest of us do when the bells ding to start the show. From Symphony staffers, I have learned you have plenty of time to finish your wine, or donut. But the older folks move slower and don't want to hold anybody up, so my friend from Vienna was off as at the pop of a gun.

There was a moment there. I think we both felt like we had something new we wanted to hold onto. Maybe it was a form of ageism in not just asking for her number. I am going to go ahead and say it was. A man is just a lot more likely to collect a phone number from a pretty woman who is near him in age, at least within two decades, give or take.

But we did define that corner of the bar at Powells as ours, and agree to meet again. "Next coffee concert," the little old lady said, as we parted ways -- and she pointed to the turf she had so fearlessly defended.

To be continued ....

*

Donut shot from the Flickr site of Scott Ableman; it belongs to him, not me.

Bedhead and the beauty from around the corner of the bar

2011-03-25T20:23:00.000-05:00

This is Part II of a report on the St. Louis Symphony's recent Bloggers Night. Make sure you starty with Part I, St. Louis 2011: An adventurous music urban odyssey.

Sex is the only thing that is better than music. And the love of a child is the only thing that is better than sex.

The blogger and his friend both knew the love of a child. But Paul’s son was grown, and the blogger’s daughter (herself a pint-sized blogger) was at home, watching bad TV with her mom. There was no prospecting for sex going on this Bloggers Night by these two guys, but one does enjoy the opportunity to observe other human beings moving about and how splendid so many of them look.

Men are doomed to discuss these observations, as we know. The blogger’s friend Paul – shorn hairless, in the vicinity of fifty years of age; a wiry, aging hipster and Navy veteran – remarked on the splendid appearance of the young woman who happened to be sitting around the corner of the oak bar. The blogger had come to the same conclusion. The woman around the corner of the bar had good color, with a mix of southern European or Mesoamerican. She was on a date with a young man that seemed to be going well. They were scrunched next to each other, thick as thieves. When her date stepped away from his barstool and left the room, presumably to pee, the blogger asked across the corner of the bar about the young woman’s wheat-colored beer, served in a tall, fluted glass. She said her boyfriend was teaching her all about beer, and she was enjoying the education. She and the blogger were still talking about beer when her date reappeared.

The thing to do, at that point, was to include the boyfriend in the conversation as quickly and completely as possible. One needed to dispel any hint of moving in on the other man’s date when he was away from the field of battle. The boyfriend was more than happy to talk about himself. He said he was living just around the corner in the downtown loft district, though he worked 20 miles away in North St. Louis County and grew up 20 miles the other way in South St. Louis County.

The blogger and his friend were veteran newspaper men. They were up to date on the developing trends and demographic shifts in their metropolitan area, which straddled the Mississippi River, two counties in Illinois, and several counties in Missouri, not to mention the city of St. Louis itself, a tiny political entity the shape of a scrawny porkchop, segregated from St. Louis County for political motives that stopped making sense half a century ago. The blogger and his friend blinked across the bar at this young new urbanite, with his thin brown hair cut into a bedhead, the bangs flipped up at their very ends. He was that very rare thing: a statistic made flesh.

“Millions and millions of dollars of public money have been spent to produce people exactly like you,” the blogger said to the young new urbanite with the bedhead haircut, who nodded along right away, he got the point instantly – he too followed the local news. “Millions and millions of dollars of public money have been spent precisely to produce the young white male from South County who works in the County but lives in the city downtown in a loft on Washington Avenue,” the blogger continued, and Bedhead kept nodding along. “Pretty much,” he agreed.

The blogger’s friend delivered newspapers for a living. He worked on the streets all over the metropolitan area and had unusually few illusions about St. Louis. He said to the young new urbanite from the suburbs, “How do you like living down here where people get shot sometimes?”

Bedhead admitted that he did not like that aspect of city living. He said he really couldn't blame anyone from a safe suburban neighborhood who chose not to move into the city – closer to the neighborhoods where the region's poverty and crime had been segregated for half a century. But he was making a go of it, and so was his new girlfriend – the beauty from around the corner of the bar, a part-Cherokee girl from central Missouri who worked in restaurant supply.

The boy and girl had met recently at the wedding of mutual friends, presumably been swept up in the festive atmosphere of love and alcohol, and would now be turning a long-distance love affair into a relationship shared at the extremely close distance of a cohabitated loft apartment. She was bubbly at the prospects of moving to the city. But then, she seemed to be of a positive disposition – probably she would have been bubbly about staying in Missouri’s largest university town, Columbia, which she described as “a young town, a liberal town.”

She had partnered up with a man who was young in every way, but not liberal. When the blogger’s friend told the young couple they worked for a newspaper, the young new urbanite knew enough to ask (in a fumbling, stumbling, incoherent fashion) about the paper’s political direction; and Paul said, bluntly, “Liberal.”

“Well,” the young new urbanite said, “I am conservative.” This, emphatically, did not come as a shock. South St. Louis County, where he grew up, had many of the County’s most conservative zip codes. This young man managed contracts for a major corporate employer that mostly made its money off the military. These were yet more ways in which this young new urbanite with the bedhead haircut and the iron-flipped bangs was a walking statistic.

There had been much media chatter in St. Louis about the young new conservative urbanites. This was a staggeringly sexy demographic for the big Republican money that propped up the nominally Democratic, but in practice entirely opportunistic, political leadership of the city. These guys were middle-aged conservative white men who had become experts at manipulating the city’s divided and demoralized electorate, at least on election day, and an influx of young, conservative, white men like Bedhead was nothing but good news to them.

Politics had been standing on its head lately, in St. Louis and Missouri and the rest of the country, so it was not difficult to see why this young conservative new urbanite represented a sexy demographic. Now, what the effortlessly beautiful Cherokee lass saw in this guy as a sexual partner was harder to figure. Her clock was probably starting to tick, two years out of college, living in a university town where everyone around her stayed frozen in youth as her girlfriends began to grow up and get married. Whatever the source of the urging, clearly it was there. She stayed clenched closely to her date throughout their conversation and was holding onto him pretty tight as they left the tavern and walked out into the city.

“You know what they are going to go do,” the blogger’s friend muttered into his dry-hopped ale.

“The only thing that is better than music,” the blogger muttered into his dry-hopped lager.

**

This is Part II of a report on the St. Louis Symphony's recent Bloggers Night. Make sure you start with Part I, St. Louis 2011: An adventurous music urban odyssey.

Image from Thom Fletcher's Flickr. It was the best I could do. I seem to know no one who takes pictures of guys like Bedhead.

St. Louis 2011: An adventurous music urban odyssey

2011-03-20T10:03:00.002-05:00

Image borrowed from the Flickr of Matt Scutt; it belongs to him, not me.

It was a disappointing beer list. The blogger handed the menu back to the man behind the counter at the City Diner and said to his friend, “Let’s go.”

Walking back to Powell Hall, they passed a couple of familiar faces from the concert, walking the other way, toward the diner. “There go two of the other bloggers,” his friend said. “Are you sure you don’t want to go back and talk to everybody?”

“The beer list sucks. I’d just drink coffee and get all wired out and talk too much,” the blogger said. “I don’t really have anything to say about the music anyway. I can write music criticism if you pay me, and I’ll come up with a blog post, like I promised the guys at the Symphony, but all I really have to say about a concert like that is: Sex is the only thing better than music. And the love of a child is the only thing better than sex. And that show was as great as music can be. So only sex or the love of a child could be better than that.”

They passed a stout black woman in a police uniform, struggling herself into a rain slicker. It was a rainy night in St. Louis. The blogger loved a rainy night in St. Louis.

“And after music,” the blogger continued, with the felt need to complete a list, once he had started one, “comes booze – beer and wine – and after that, food. Those are the very greatest things.”

They turned the corner on Grand Boulevard at Powell Hall, where they had just sat rapt at the concert for Bloggers Night. They strode down Delmar, on the north boundary of the grand old movie theater turned concert hall. Concert-goers in St. Louis tended to fear parking to the north of events at night. North is perceived as the general direction of poverty and danger in St. Louis (explained by patterns of investment and neglect). The blogger noticed two empty police cruisers were now parked down Delmar where the less fearful concert-goers looked for parking. He and his friend agreed that was a good idea for discouraging street crime and boosting the comfort level of the nighttime concert-goers.

The talk of booze and food had put them back in the mood for those fine things, so the blogger’s friend drove them toward The Tap Room, a nearby brewpub on the outskirts of downtown St. Louis with a long list of delicious homemade beers.

“That was just about as great as music can be,” the blogger said again, repeating himself, as the white van moved through the dark, rain-slickened city streets. “Hearing that entire, gigantic orchestra – I have never seen that many pieces play in this orchestra! – break into that music from Space Odyssey, out of nowhere! My God!”

The concert program had concluded with Also Sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. Its swelling, dramatic, brassy opening theme is now famous from its prominent use in the soundtrack to Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. (The blogger reflected that 2001, which had seemed a futuristic date to audiences when Kubrick premiered his film in 1968, was now a decade in the past. Strauss premiered his symphony in 1896, composed in response to Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophical treatise written in the first half of the 1880s.)

This night, the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra had managed to make some of the most familiar music in the symphonic canon new again by breaking into Also Sprach Zarathustra without a pause following the previous piece on the program, a modern tone poem by Gyorgy Ligeti titled Atmospheres. It was an unexpected and stunning move.

“I know,” the blogger’s friend, Paul, said. “I kept closing my eyes, because I wanted the full effect. I wanted nothing but the music. But then I kept having to open my eyes to figure out where the music was coming from.”

*

They were not the only people in town with the bright idea of finishing an evening of sublime music with delicious homemade beer and good food. Inside the Tap Room, there was a gaggle of people holding instrument cases, waiting to be seated at a table. The blogger and his friend moved past them to take seats at the old bar. One young, tall, frizzy-headed man holding a smaller instrument case (it held a trumpet) was standing there, waiting for his beer.

After establishing that the trumpet player had just performed with the Symphony, the blogger asked him the one thing he really wanted to know about that program – the one reason he regretted not joining the other bloggers and Symphony staffers at the diner: “So, whose idea was it to bust right into the Strauss, without a pause for applause and letting everyone get settled in again for the next piece?”

The trumpet player smiled brightly above his blonde beer. “I don’t know,” he said, in the tone of someone who appreciated a great idea without worrying too much where it came from.

“Was it David’s idea?” the blogger asked. David Robertson was the Symphony’s musical director, though the guest conductor that night had been Carlos Kalmar.

“It was probably David’s idea,” the trumpet player said, “but Carlos pulled it off!” Then he joined one of two large groups of musicians being led across the tavern to adjacent tables. The blogger liked that the two groups of musicians were being seated at adjacent tables. This was their work, and more than 40 musicians had been on stage to play just Also Sprach Zarathustra; it was nice to think they wanted to extend a group experience, rather than take a break from coworkers after many tiring hours of rehearsal and performance. He also liked the easy affirmation of, “But Carlos pulled it off!” – one musician sticking up for another.

The blogger had watched Carlos Kalmar with interest throughout the concert. Conductors are kind of a trip as a human category. Even the most sedate of them jump up and down and have a fit and make the most outlandish and individual gestures with their hands and faces. Carlos Kalmar did not disappoint in this regard, though he left no suggestion of a vapid showman. He just lived the music from the inside-out, like a conductor is supposed to do – he ripped the symphony out of himself and then distributed it around the orchestra, one section, one player at a time.

The blogger also had imagined that he and Carlos Kalmar – born in Uruguay, of Austrian descent – were together with the thoughts on one point. The program had opened with Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1, which the orchestra ripped right through without so much as a glance at the conductor’s stand. It even seemed like the guest conductor was feeling and calling for slightly different beats and emphases than the orchestra was feeling and playing. On the Liszt, the guest conductor seemed (pleasantly) beside the point of the tightly rehearsed collective of musicians performing together from the page a sharply constructed piece of music. The blogger imagined that Carlos Kalmar recognized this himself, after the band stopped and the audience erupted into applause, when the conductor instantly whipped his hands around the orchestra and had all of the musicians take the first bow – all of them – as a collective.

The blogger was squarely in Carlos Kalmar’s corner just from reading the program notes, where we were told he “resides in Portland, Oregon, and Vienna.” How cooler could you possibly be? To direct a symphony orchestra in a town like Portland, Oregon, while keeping a foot on the Earth in the European city with more collective memory of symphonic music than any other.

Portland! The blogger’s globe-trotting friend Scott Intagliata, itinerant merchant of the temperature control systems of the future, once described Portland as “hipster fantasy camp.” Hipster fantasy camp! But they were in a gritty old river city, home to an orchestra that makes music as well as music can be made, and there is nothing better than that except sex or the love of a child. They were in a river city where it is remembered how to make very good beer. The blogger knew the barman, who poured them delicious homemade ales.

The barman had given some thought to the symphony’s program that night himself. He said, “Ligeti’s son is coming to St. Louis.” Ligeti was the composer of Atmospheres, the piece that had bled into Zarathustra in that night’s concert. Talk about hipster fantasy camp, or fantasy camp for serious enthusiasts of adventurous music, as St. Louis always is. The barman came back with scrap of paper, scrawled with, “Ligeti’s son, April 29th @ FoPoCoCo.” That’s Forest Park Community College. The barman tipped the blogger to consult his own blog for more information.

So it had turned into a Symphony Bloggers Night out, after all.

St. Louis is a magic city. Many people have felt this, and there is no need to defend the feeling against those who disbelieve in enchantment or disregard St. Louis (by comparison to Portland, or Vienna). St. Louis is a city where you can leave the brassy heights of Also Sprach Zarathustra and walk into a bar where you end up talking to one of the trumpet players (four, total, in this score!) who just scaled its heights. Then, turn from the beer-sipping Symphony trumpet player to a poetry-slinging bartender who just got done looking out a Southern-exposure window in St. Louis, listening to the Ligeti composition that bled into Zarathustra that night. And he has the drop on Ligeti’s son coming to town that spring.

The blogger turned to his friend and said, “Isn’t tonight something special with the moon? Isn’t the moon closer to Earth tonight than it’s been in, like, 18 years?”

“Yeah,” Paul said, “but, the clouds. You can’t see the moon.” And then he drove them home through the nighttime city in the rain.

His to begin with ... [Fiction Circus Translation Nexus submission]

2011-02-20T14:57:00.002-06:00

His to begin with

By Chris King

It began in a river valley that was deliberately flooded by men. The boy’s grandmother was bought out by a regional authority, formed to acquire land and administer the new power gathered from the river. It was “more money than any of us ever thought we’d ever see in our lives,” as the boy’s father bitterly told the story in prison.

The grandmother took the money from the buyout and bought land in another river valley far away. This valley was getting built up, and one of the builders-up of the valley – remembered as Eldon the Cement Truck Driver – was the man who stole the money. He courted the wealthy widow, at bowling alleys and smoky taverns, and got her to marry him and his big belly like a bowling ball. Not long after that, the grandmother suddenly “crapped out,” as the little boy learned to tell the story, being purposefully disgusting; but, she did die on the crapper.

The big change came from the terrible efficiency with which Eldon made away with the money. Eldon the Cement Truck Driver was a slow man – he waddled when he walked and seemed to be stupid, mispronouncing familiar words and thoughtlessly belittling other people in petty ways. But before the old lady was a cold bump on the hill up the ridge, Eldon was gone from the valley and all the money went with him. He was never tracked or trailed. He stayed gone.

The perfection of his hustle was what ate away at the old lady’s son and what changed things so much for them. It began to gnaw at him, nights on the road. The son was a traveling salesman – had been since back before the buyout. He got up and out of that valley as fast as he could. He could tinker at things and make them run better. Fixing trucks, he took to carrying parts; and soon he was trading in what gets called “junk” by those who don’t share a sense of its value. Then, just as he got interested in selling parts by hauling parts around, by hauling around and selling parts he got interested in the act of hauling around and selling. So he took to running Bibles for a Christian outfit in town that was aiming to expand its distribution. It was good, clean money for a man who liked to drive, and this man, Larry Lane, loved to drive. Packing books all around him and driving up and down the country finding readers for them seemed like a dream come true. Because Larry Lane was a devilish reader.

His mom getting the big money from the buyout was no big deal to him. She just had more money she could keep to herself. When she moved unexpectedly far to the west, that was no big change for him. He just shifted his Bible route slightly thataway. Probably he would have just let his mother go, but there was some concern for his boy. His son had no mother, so the grandmother should have been important to him. There had been stories about all of that back in the old river valley, when “that runt Lane boy” came home with a baby of his own after one of his Bible runs. The story that would be taken as truth in that valley up until today, had the valley not been deliberately flooded and emptied of people, was that the Lane boy had taken a little problem off some perverted preacher’s hands and should not have been surprised when his own mother didn’t much care. So that is why the orphan boy grew up on the road alone with that strange man.

The facts of the matter are different, but to make it plain might confuse things. It might confuse just how amazing it was to Larry Lane that Eldon had put together such a perfect hustle. That he had tied up all that old lady’s money in places where he could get his hands on it the instant she died – a tragic fate of which Eldon must have had foreknowledge, which suggested the very worst evil. When Eldon had his mother killed and made away with the money, Larry Lane was already familiar with pimps and whores, because it was from their world that he had conjured a boy of his own. But he was not one of them, then.

His best friend in the city, Encyclopedic Bob Lovejoy, owner of No Dirty Books or Ephemera, was Larry’s connection. Larry told Bob he was looking for a woman who would stay put just long enough to have his baby, and then hand him the boy and leave him alone. Bob loved to listen to people’s problems, that’s why Larry was telling him his, and that is how Bob knew a man who knew a whore who wanted out and just might try this trick. She did try it, and a boy was born. Larry Lane brushed shoulders with some pretty rough people seeing her through the pregnancy, one visit a month along his Bible route, which had become a trade in rare books, as well. But drugs never touched them. That was a stipulation for the mother of his boy: no booze, no drugs, no smoking. Larry Lane fanatically hated drugs, then and always, even after he came to traffic in them.

Something snapped in Larry, when Eldon made off with the money. The boy was old enough by then to hold up his end of a conversation with his father. So the boy would be reading a book to his old man on the road, just like he always did, exactly as he had been raised up to do, but he’d notice, looking up for his dad’s reaction to a really good part, that the old man’s mind had wandered away from the story. That was not like him. So the boy would ask, “What’s eating at you, Daddy?” and out would come this anguished speculation about what Eldon had planned and when he had planned it, and where he had landed and who knew, and what he was doing now with all that money that wasn’t his to begin with.

At first, the boy tried to tell his dad his own stories back to him. He said things like, “But it wasn’t ever anybody’s money to begin with, Daddy. Who ever heard of flooding a river valley on purpose and making the people on the river trade in their land for paper money?” But the old man did not listen. He stayed trapped in speculation.

Encyclopedic Bob was the one to ask Larry what he aimed to do about it, other than mope around and get freaked out. The old man shot back, “I am glad you asked me that question, for I am putting together a hustle of my own that will put to shame Eldon the Cement Truck Driver.” Bob kept his bookstore on a sliver of crowded street in a big city along the sea. He traded in rare books with people like Larry Lane, on the high end, and in ephemera with guys like Gary McCorkle, on the low. It was Gary McCorkle who strayed deeper into the dark that sometimes crept into Bob’s shop. It was Gary McCorkle who once had said, when a scary man hailed him by name on the street, “Hey, scumbags know scumbags.” It was to Gary McCorkle that the old man went when he decided he had business to do with scumbags.

From that point on, the facts are mostly known. Court records will show that one Larry Lane was contracted to transport by vehicle various contraband articles that assorted interested parties wanted moved from one city by the sea to another, and felt they could not trust to a passenger on an airline. This business ended badly, as it always does. The perfect hustle for Larry Lane would have been to tie up all the money of his clients, described in aggregate in open court as The Jamaican Mob, and leave them only with a puzzle and a mess. But his collaboration with law enforcement officials came too little, too late, and there was nothing anybody could have done to get him off the hook for his one murder on the run, a blow to the head of a gas station attendant, delivered with a hurled hand ax, vividly captured on a surveillance videotape. It would have been said the old man grew old in prison reading the Bible and a few rare books he remembered in the voice of his son, but there remained no one to ask for stories of him or to hear them. For the boy who loved him best went to sleep forever, long before the father, at the bottom of a flooded river valley, which, he said to himself, as he swam out in the night, was his to begin with.

*

This story is copyright 2011 by Chris King, who reserves all rights.

It has 1,500 words exactly, title included, and was written for Fiction Circus' Translation Nexus.

The photo is borrowed from the Flickr of Jacob Whittaker and belongs to him, or the river, not to me.

*

Looking for, and at, Grover

2011-02-13T08:21:00.001-06:00

Last night many of my friends celebrated a Presidential Beard Party at The Royale. I stayed home, as a family man (sigh).

Part of the night, I piddled around in my archive. One item that passed before my eyes was an unfinished poem I had started writng about Grover Cleveland. Grover was not a notably bearded president, but it was close enough to the spirit of the event I was missing, so I spent some time shaping up the poem.

Then I got into the mood to sketch the dead president from the image of him that was printed on the $1,000 bill until it was taken out of circulation.

LOOKING FOR GROVER

By Chris King

In grimy Center City,
I passed porn shops, thrift
stores, hot dog stands, looking
for you, in part, jaw tumor in
a jar at the medical college.
The company you keep.
A tybia with syphillis
and the arm of good John
Gallagher, age sixteen,
a machinist whose tattooist
spit to mix his pigments
then smooth out his ink: good
John’s girl, and crucifix.
With that spit, syphilis seeped
into good John’s veins. Widow
Sunday with her ten inch human
horn. Forty five years of New
Jersey gall stones. Bust of Adam
Horn, heartless killer of two
wives, fragment of a minor
industry in murder mementos.

The tumor they cut from your jaw
that Silver summer of money
panic looks like tops of
chrysanthemums bedded
on angel white tripe now.
Your cancer kept secret twenty
years. You feared fodder
for your amibitous VP,
Adilai, a pro-Silver hopeful.
It’s no secret now, plain
as pickled eggs in a tavern
jar. Adjacent to collected
chunks of assassins: notch of
Wilkes-Booth neck, sliver of brain
of Guiteau who gunned Garfield
looking like a rag doll hugged
too long and hard in a jug.
You were the $1,000 dollar man
till you went out of circulation.
Now you’re doing time, Grover,
with the dime museum kind.

Most of what is left of you was
left in the ground in Princeton,
at Witherspoon and Wiggins,
where Wiggins turns into Paul
Robeson Place. I walked the graves
looking for you, and was surprised
by low-slung brick row shacks.
Your next-door neighbors
in the grave are Rosewag,
“a bonnie lassie, mother
and friend,” and Ruth, your baby
you buried, dead at thirteen,
and Francis, wife. There was a scrap
of candy paper by your monument,
a pepperment ingredient, so
no Baby Ruth. Your grave
is kept pretty clean, Grover.
They keep a small, cheap flag flying.
I’m not sure why I felt like crying.
A tumor, a stone, a president
of the veto, vetoed for good.

*

Since photographing and posting the sketch, I added some lines to suggest the part of his head Grover seemed to be missing.

A live celebrity competitive literary reality TV show ... from Canada!

2011-02-10T22:15:00.003-06:00

I have never watched anyone voted off of an island. Never seen a whole season of contestants sing their hearts out under Simon Callow's withering smirk. Competitive chefs and wannabe fashion moguls, televised spouse and house swappers: I missed all that.

But for the past few days, my idle hours have been spent under the spell of a competitive reality TV show -- produced in Canada, of all places. In fact, it is all about Canada, and more particularly, Canada's novels. To be very precise, it was a competitive reality TV show to select "the most essential Canadian novel" published in the last decade. Welcome to Canada Reads.

This was not a show with random people voting each other off an exotic island; it was five of Canada's most recognizable celebrities voting each other's books off the table -- called a "shelf" on the show, which ran for an hour a day on three successive days, concluding yesterday.

These five very different celebrities -- a CNN anchor, an actor, a designer, a former NHL enforcer and an indie rock star -- did not vote for and against books they had written themselves. This is what starts to set this show far apart from the narcissistic, self-promotional cultural trend in which it has emerged.

For each of the five celebrities had chosen to represent a novel written by a fellow Canadian within the past ten years. The five novels were chosen from a list of forty that had evolved from a collective curatorial process that included public input and (apparently; this was before I came along) involved its own spats and controversies.

The CNN business anchor selected a political novel about an outsider who ends up serving in Parliament, almost by accident. The actor represented an introspective novel about an introspective novelist. The designer defended an historical novel about a midwife. The former NHL enforcer advocated for a jock novel about two Olympians training for the Summer Games. The indie rocker did her best to get the other panelists to admit that a graphic novel about life in rural Ontario was, in fact, a novel, and not a comic book.

The celebrities were as diverse as the books they chose, and in equally fascinating ways. The CNN anchor, Ali Velshi, is a Canadian of Indian descent who was born in Kenya. The actor, Lorne Cardinal, is Sucker Creek Cree, a First Nations (i.e., Native Canadian) people. The designer, Debbie Travis, is a ravishing blonde from the British Midlands. The former NHL enforcer, Georges Laraque, is a hulking vegan of Haitian descent. The indie rocker, Sara Quin, is a pixiesh young white woman with bangs in her eyes like a kid.

As their jockeying to get the other four books voted out of the competition played out over three days on live radio and streaming video, each of these five celebrities evolved as genuine, compelling and eloquent human beings. An especially magical touch was added by the fact that they were being passionate and eloquent about that least telegenic undertaking: the act of reading.

The Indian-Canadian CNN anchor -- practiced at making a case before the camera -- had even his fellow celebrity panelists wanting to run away and join a political campaign. The First Nations actor described his author's eloquence in pearls of language equal to the very best literary criticism. The ravishing blonde Brit designer made an unforgettable case for the kitchen table as the most important stage in history. The hulking black hockey jock casually described weeping while reading his book. The pixiesh indie rock chick delivered perhaps the most compelling and extended defense of the legitimacy of the graphic novel as a genre ever before presented in the mass media.

Yet there were dramas; even scandals.

Indie hipster Sara Quin could not get her older, more traditional colleagues -- not one single one of them -- to accept the graphic novel she supported, Essex County by Jeff Lemire, as an example of a novel, let alone an "essential" one.

Hulking enforcer Georges Laraque abruptly revealed that he and the designer had cut a mutual support deal that she had betrayed by voting against his novel, The Bone Cage by Angie Abdou, and that he was exacting revenge by throwing his support behind a rival novel.

The beautiful blonde designer, Debbie Travis, shocked everyone at the table and in the studio by admitting that she had not been able to finish one of the five books under consideration -- though this had not stopped her from twice keeping it on the table as she helped to vote out two other books she had been able to finish.

The Cree actor, Lorne Cardinal, in a roundtable discussion of the lack of diversity among the authors whose books made the final five, said plainly that they were all white, yes; but then confidently defended his choice of Unless by Carol Shields over a book by a First Nations writer on the long list by arguing that her prose and sense of form were better.

The CNN anchor, Ali Velshi, maintained a Machiavellian vibe throughout the competition and was the guy most obviously casting his votes in each round with political calculation, successfully building the coalition that eventually led his novel, The Best Laid Plans by Terry Fallis, to vanquish The Birth House by Ami McKay, defended by Debbie Travis.

The evolving political intrigues lent yet another mesmerizing dimension to this crazy and adorable show. Here you had famous people passionately defending the art of novels while cutting secret deals and rather openly playing tricks on each other. It was high-minded and low-minded, high-brow and low-brow, highfalutin and crassly pop -- and utterly, unforgettably absorbing.

Making the trains run on time and keeping all the contestants on their toes was host Jian Ghomeshi. A former rocker born in England of Iranian descent, he has quirky good looks, a razor wit, and as much star power as the most famous person sitting around his roundtable. It would be very difficult to imagine this bizarre conception of a live celebrity literary competition coming off quite right without him conducting it.

St. Louis Reads St. Louis?

Therein lies a major problem in trying to figure out how to adapt this concept to St. Louis, as I immediately wanted to do. If the host were slightly pompous or pretentious, overly deferential to the celebrities and/or anything other than funny, the whole thing would fall flat.

And then, there is the problem of finding a genre where a significant number of St. Louisians produced really good books every year. That becomes a lot easier if you broaden the category to include St. Louis-connected writers who no longer live in St. Louis, but that becomes too soupy for me. I instantly lose interest with the depressing image of Jonathan Franzen winning every year, or any year.

The project becomes instantly doable if you permit books of any genre written by a person living in St. Louis, rather than just novels, but for the obvious problem of comparing apples to oranges and pears -- poems to novels to plays and histories. The comparisons would become meaningless, though the show could still be fun if we could round up the right roster of celebrities who were not writers (very important, this idea of having people who are not primarily writers defending the books).

If I brainstorm about five St. Louis celebrities I would try to empanel for St. Louis Reads St. Louis, I come up with Loop developer Joe Edwards, burlesque star Lola Van Ella, maestro David Robertson, radio anchor Carol Daniel and an eloquent black or Hispanic athlete (I don't know our local star jocks). This list makes me want to cast an Asian (subarhar and sitar legend Imrat Khan?) and a Jew (Rabbi Susan Talve?).

More and more interesting local celebrities come to mind, now that I think of it: former state Senator Jeff Smith, Police Chief Daniel Isom, former Fire Chief Sherman George, the Rev. Larry Rice, state Senator Maria Chappelle-Nadal, Emily Rauh Pulitzer, Supreme Court Justice Mike Wolff, indie rocker Jay Farrar, Mayor Francis G. Slay (not a personal favorite, but certainly a literate celebrity), activist Jamala Rogers ...

Who knows?

I'm not an artist, but I'll play one at the Art Benefit for the Moms Project

2011-01-24T21:15:00.001-06:00

I'm not an artist, but I'm playing one at a fundraiser for Tim Meehan. Tim is raising money to pay an editor for his video installation project on moms. It's Art Benefit for the Moms Project 7:30-11 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11 at Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest Ave.

The artists contributing to his benefit (so far) are Deb Douglas, Sara Hale, Karen Jones, Kelene Karetski, Kit Keith, William LaChance, Sandra Marchewa, Tim Meehan, Jeremy Rabus, Melissa Schmidt. Some great artists, the ones I know! Then I am also contributing.

I think it's a real good idea and Tim is a real good guy, and if he thinks he can make some coin selling something I have drawn -- even if it is a round of Schlafly or OFallon beer for the editor -- then bully for Timmy, he can call me an artist.

I thought I would post up three options for what I can contribute to Tim's show and see if one of them gets more attention than the others; maybe even an advance bid for the man's project? Here is what I came up with after ten minutes in the basement, interrupted by two mischievious girls who were then pressed into duty as models and human scale for the bigger drawing.

Here is the bigger drawing, about that much bigger than a little girl's hands holding it: "Your Republican Leadership Team Needs You" (portrait of John McCain and Sarah Palin) (2008). My daughter Leyla Fern, who is holding this up, gets a co-credit for the coloring job and the "scribble scrabble".

Here is the less big one, drawn on a page from one of the common sketchbooks you see: "Dad's mermaids were my first naked ladies" (after some ex-con from central Kentucky I met through my former brother-in-law; these are in fact copies of his jailbird doodles of imaginary tattoo flash) (ca. 1992).

And then, something altogether different. Rather than clutter for the imagined buyer's wall, this is performance art or a party favor. These fingerpuppets (modeled here by family friend Promise) all go onto the fingers of one of my hands for a solo performance of -- the title is ironic, given the nature of Tim's project -- Goodnight, Mother (selected scenes from Hamlet).

I would come to the buyer's house or party and perform the piece. It takes about twenty minutes or so. I get to keep the puppets.

*

Art Benefit for the Moms Project will be held 7:30-11 p.m. Friday, Feb. 11 at Schlafly Bottleworks, 7260 Southwest Ave. I take it Tim will screen video from the 42 moms interviews he has done.

The Middle East meets Spain half-way at Marc Thayer

2011-01-22T23:13:00.001-06:00

Photo is borrowed from the Flickr of abudoma and belongs to him, not me.

Marc Thayer has been to all of these important and obscure places, absorbed their musical genius, and worked hard to spread it around, with no apparent aim other than enlarging his own sense of possibility and then sharing that with anyone willing to sit still for a minute and listen.

That's what makes it such a pleasure to be around Marc when he is making music possible. He sits still and listens.

Last Wednesday evening Adam Long and I watched Marc Thayer sit still and listen, when he wasn't playing violin. He sat still and listened to young musicians from the city of Suleimanya in Kurdistan (northern Iraq), whom he had helped come to St. Louis to study. Marc put together a program of Spanish and Middle Eastern music and encouraged these international conservatory students to play some of their local music on a mix of traditional and European instruments.

"They play lots of Beethoven, Brahms and Mozart," Marc said; "but not tonight!"

In their music school back in Kurdistan, Marc pointed out, they studied both European art music and their own local traditions, playing both symphony instruments and traditional ones. "I'd have a lot more fun playing music if I had learned jazz when I was a music student, and I encourage it," Marc said.

Marc Thayer is vice president for Education and Community Partnerships at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. It's one key reason the symphony in St. Louis is so great, this entrusting to very senior positions -- like vice president or musical director -- people with a genuine passion for music and extreme nerve for testing the limits of what was previously thought possible.

In his remarks between performances, we got a glimpse into what shaped Marc. He talked about being a teenager in Cordoba (in Andalusia), which he described as "the capital of Spain when it was a Muslim country". Why he was there, he did not say -- he sounds of American stock -- but he spoke with unabashed admiration for the city, especially its one surviving mosque. It was spared by the Catholics, but had a cathedral inserted inside it.

"A few blocks from this mosque is where Ferdinand and Isabella gave Christopher Columbus the permission to come look for India, and he ended up here instead," Marc said.

He sat still and listened intently when Alan Salih, Reben Ali and Honar Ali played Kurdish, then Arabic, then Persian music on violin, oud, cello and sharba (a hand drum much like a tabla). "The more I listen to Middle Eastern music, the more I realize I have to learn," Marc said, during one break. Then quipped: "When I play a quartertone, it's by accident."

Yet, the most musically satisfying event of the program, Adam Long and I decided, was the Spanish music performed by Marc Thayer on violin and Maryse Carlin on piano -- and especially the final piece, a trio for piano, violin and cello in B minor (Opus 76) by Joaquin Turina, when they were joined on cello by Ranya Iqbal, who brought an exotic look to the European musical grouping.

Ranya Iqbal visually completed Marc's argument that the music of the Middle East is intimately connected to the music of Spain.

*

Photo of the mosque/cathedral at Cordoba is borrowed from the Flickr of abudoma and belongs to him, not me.

The mountain, the sea, and that fragile relationship that is life

2011-01-16T20:05:00.002-06:00

"Never seen no mountain. Never swam in no sea."

This complaint from Paul Westerberg of The Replacements (in "Within Your Reach") always spoke to me. I grew up in a small Midwestern steel town in the Mississippi River Valley. It was a long time before I saw a mountain or swam in a sea.

I have always considered this a net benefit, because it left me easy to impress and open to new experiences. It was not possible, starting where I started, to think you had seen it all, because you knew there were mountains and oceans, yet had seen and swam in none.

In a similar vein, St. Louis was always the big city across the river to me. Coming across the river from Granite City, I was always embarassed for the locals who copped a snoot on St. Louis because they had been to New York or Chicago and thought the lights a little too small for them here. I just saw big lights, and giant experiences, in St. Louis.

I keep seeing it that way. Last Wednesday I took Adam Long to see a performance in the stylus Concert Series at the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts. This is where David Robertson, musical director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, puts together concerts around the installation at the Pulitzer. I just keep shaking my head (that's SMH, to the text message generation) at the level of creative genius being programmed in and for St. Louis.

The show Wednesday, Adam and I agreed, started at its peak, musically and conceptually, and then descended steadily, but not very far, throughout the sequence of three compositions. In fact, the third (and still wholly wonderful) piece on the program is structured around the ascent and descent of a mountain approached, and then departed, by sail on the sea.

Now I've seen a mountain. Now I have swam in a sea.

The show opened with La Souris sans sourire, performed by a string quartet with David Robertson admiring from a front-row seat. This is a 1988 composition by Franco Donatoni, and please don't feel like you're behind the game if you have never heard of it. My concert guest Adam Long is a cellist with a yen for modern composers and it was all new to him (and me).

I have found a YouTube posting of a good performance of the piece, though it doesn't specify the performers; a friend at the symphony asked David Robertson to suggest the best recording for me, and David could think of none.

The performers at the Pulitzer were Emily Ho (violin), Jooyeon Kong (violin), Shannon Farrell Williams (viola) and Melissa Brooks (cello). They succeeded completely in casting the spell of this music. David Robertson talked at some length about the title of the piece, which you might translate as The Mouse without a Smile, and Donatoni's many plays on words. David prepared us to hear the composition as playing on music the way the title plays on words; and though Donatoni's mouse may have been sans smile, Adam Long and I grinned all the way through it.

We had an aerial view of the action. The physical space of the Pulitzer has the feeling of being carved out of the corners of other spaces. The main seating for the basement floor concert stage are the wide steps walking down to it, which had filled up before we arrived. We stepped past the folding chairs at the top of the steps to stand along the railing looking down at the musicians. The view from there was good, but with Adam standing in front of me I had to thump him to get his attention and share smiles.

"I have recorded the cello player, Melissa Brooks," Adam whispered, after one time I thumped him. Adam records, mixes and masters music for a living.

Between compositions, as the string quartet was replaced on the basement floor concert stage by a solo horn player (Roger Kaza), Adam and I quickly shared geeky delight in the fact that we were seeing one of the greatest shows on Earth tonight, right at home in St. Louis. Adam is from Minneapolis, same city as Paul Westerberg; he also knows what it's like to have never seen a mountain, never swam in no sea.

This feeling of astonishing uniqueness went for a long, pleasant stroll during the performance of the next piece on the program, In Freundschaft by Karlheinz Stockhausen. This is a long, slow, solo piece, most often performed on clarinet, though I adored Roger Kaza's performance on horn. It included a lengthy interruption where Kaza very deliberately cleaned the saliva out of the bell of his horn before stuffing one fist in there to act as a mute.

Before the performance, David Robertson told us how long the piece lasts, I think so that no one made the mistake of applauding the apparent completion of the piece when Kaza stopped playing to dry the spit in his horn, which happened early in the composition. "Here is the place where you let the instrument use the restroom," David described this moment, after Kaza had finished his performance.

David described Stockhausen himself - controversial, as modern composers go - as "a wacko, but a sweet wacko". He expanded in this mood when introducing the final piece on the program, Groundswell by Steven Mackey. "Steven is a native Californian, and we are always the wacky ones," said David, a son of Santa Monica. He free-associated the names of other wacky Californians, thinking of John Cage and Gertrude Stein - a fascinating short list of native Californians perhaps no one else would have assembled.

I would rather listen to David Robertson talk about music than hear most people perform it; and Adam and I agreed that David's remarks on Groundswell were even more entertaining than Mackey's composition and the performance of it - by a superb ad hoc chamber group comprised of the string quartet from The Mouse without a Smile, joined by Weijing Wang (viola), Philip Ross (oboe), Thomas Jostlein (horn), Linda Phipps (clarinet/bass clarinet) and Peter Henderson (piano). David Robertson stayed out of his front-row seat and conducted this one.

Groundswell is a fine musical expression of climbing and descending a mountain, and was performed with expression and unity; but after the surreal mysticism of the Donatoni and the profound inwardness of the Stockhausen, it fell just slightly flat. On a different program, with lesser compositions and performances surrounding it, it would have had much more of an impact, I am certain, because I was thrilled throughout.

And, then, I was more than thrilled.

After such a striking night of original music, in such a unique and rarified space, the last thing the musical director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra needed to do was make a closing reference to a stunning public tragedy. But this is David Robertson we are talking about, and he is the kind of person who makes his own rules and sets his own standards.

Such music as what we had just experienced, David said - making explicit reference to the recent massacre in Tucson, and tearing up without affectation - reminds us "how lucky we are and how important it is to maintain that fragile relationship that is life."

*

The photo is mine - a sunset in Santa Monica.

The giant roommate who paid the bills, cleaned the place, & nearly killed me

2010-12-31T09:13:00.001-06:00

Darryl, the former roommate, is the hulking giant to the far right.

Next week, I will be seeing a former roommate I haven't set eyes on since Ronald Reagan was a president with a prostate problem. Thinking about this guy again has been good for my heart. Let me tell you the story.

Ayatollah Joe and I put up a notice for a third roommate. It was Darryl who answered. He was very tall and broad, bright and smiling, a beaming giant. Freshly sprung from the U.S. Navy, a veteran of special forces.

He needed a place to put his air mattress and his pile of clothes while he was working one of his two jobs or sleeping over at his girlfriend's house. We would have taken anybody with a pulse and a paycheck, but Darryl went out of his way to explain that he would be a light burden on us. We took him on.

More than half my life later, I still remember so much about those days. It was an unforgettable roommate experience.

Toward the end of every month, Darryl would pop up suddenly, after weeks of toal absence. It was not often we would see him when he popped in, but certainly we could see that he had been there after he was gone again.

He would have cleaned the entire apartment, down to the dust bunnies and the ring around the toilet water. He would have left his portion of the rent on the counter. The payment would be pinned to a note apologizing that he was such a poor roommate because he was never there to hang around with "the guys".

Ayatollah Joe and I had a very different understanding of the value of "the guys". Our previous third wheel in the apartment had been an unemployed chainsmoker with a threadbare trust fund that paid for his cigarettes, condoms, wine and rent - barely.

These were his only apparent needs. This guy never left the apartment, certainly not to launder his clothes, and he never cleaned the apartment, not even his own room, not even after he abdicated it. When Ayatollah Joe and I cleaned up after this dirty man following his disappearance from our lives, he had left a perimeter of used condoms in a circle on the floor around where his mattress had been.

So it was not a problem at all to Ayatollah Joe and me that Darryl was was never there to hang around with "the guys".

From time to time, there would be a sighting at the apartment. Darryl would just be getting finished mopping the entire place, or maybe he would simply have forced himself to stay on premise until he actually saw one of his roommates. He would always be full of stories when we did see him.

Sometimes, he would talk about the past. He had been a major college football player who partied away the academic opportunity and ended up in the U.S. Navy, where he went into special forces. Like almost all people who really have been there, in the dark heart of it, he didn't feel any great need to talk about what he had seen and done.

He would say, "We were the first ones in and the last ones out, and no one could know we had been there. We were trained to kill by hand. Sometimes, somebody noticed we had been there. We had to handle that."

He was tall, thick and strong, but not scary or boastful. This, simply, had been his life.

He scared me one time, though. I had been out drinking at Cicero's Basemen Bar, just around the corner from our apartment. I had lost my keys. So I went around to the back of the apartment, noisily popped out a screen, noisily worked up a window pane, and then crawled drunkenly into the window.

I am alive today because I flipped on the light switch to the kitchen that night before staggering across it. The second the light went on, I heard this deep groan. Then, a loud thud. The thud was Darryl dropping from a position of assassin's vigilance, flat smack chest-first onto the floor he had just mopped.

I knew the deal when his head and then the rest of him appeared gradually above the counter that separated the kitchen from the hallway. He was shaking his head, deeply disturbed. He was saying, "Chris, I was ready to break your neck. The very next thing I was going to do was break the neck of the burglar. Then, you turned on the light -- and it was YOU!"

I believe he was in the doghouse that night with his girlfriend, who was an heiress. Or maybe she had company in town and he was needing to prove actual independent residence. He wasn't supposed to be shacking up with the heiress, which helped to explain this apartment he paid for, cleaned up, but didn't actually sleep in.

Darryl's nearly having killed me woke both of us up. We talked as much that night as we ever did before -- or since, not counting the new days, now that we are back in touch as middle-aged parents.

Darryl talked about tripping on acid in the middle of the sea on a helo carrier, between operations. He talked about the daily challenges of adjusting to civilian life.

It was hard not to be a little nervous out there, knowing what he knew and having seen what he had seen. And it was hard to pay attention to the little things when you knew so much about real life and real death.

The other day, for example, he had driven off from the gas standard with the nozzle still fit into his gas tank. This was before the introduction of gas hoses that snapped off easily, and he had driven away so fast that he actually had done some damage to the gas hose and standard - probably thousands of dollars of damage.

Darryl so forcefully explained his predicament that the owner forgave him the cost of fixing his equipment, and then went on to offer Darryl a job, which Darryl declined.

Then one day, he was gone from Ayatollah Joe and me, as fast as he pulled away from that gas standard, though he left no damage behind. He just moved on with his life. And now, he is back -- and I will be sleeping in his house in a few short days!

Mashing up Chaplin, the Symphony, Lola, Kyla & Captain Beefheart

2010-12-26T18:56:00.000-06:00

At the risk of being pelted with rotten produce and sharp objects, I have to admit I have enjoyed 2010 and it has been a really good year for me, personally, perhaps my best year ever (personally); though out of respect for the frustration and pain felt by so many at this time, I'll not prattle on about that.

I would like to say that this upcoming Wednesday, December 29th, promises to be one of the best days - or, rather, nights - of a great year (for me, personally). Check it out!

Charles Chaplin's City Lights (1931) - my favorite movie, ever, on every favorite movie list I ever fill out - will be screened at Powell Symphony Hall (maybe my favorite venue in town), with Chaplin's own score for his silent film performed live by the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (my favorite local band) under the direction of SLSO musical director David Robertson (my pick for best working artist in St. Louis [*SEE FOOTNOTE*]).

And then, by golly, I have plans to take to the concert maybe my two best new friends from good old 2010, Lola van Ella and Kyla Webb, better known onstage as Sammich the Tramp. I pulled every trick in my book to get Sammich up on the Powell stage to do some funny business before or after David strikes up the band; but was denied. This leaves room for improvement in 2011!

After the show, I (perhaps, we) will hightail it over to The Royale (one of my favorite public houses in St. Louis [**SEE FOOTNOTE**] to join in progress the Captain Beefheart Tribute Spin. I am co-hosting this spin with Natalie Partenheimer and Dale Ashauer, who will get started, with or without me, at 10 p.m.

Anyone who loved Beefheart's music can bring a record, or just a request. For those who associate Captain Beefheart with irritating, atonal, arhythmic nonsense, be there by 11 p.m. when I plan to give Clear Spot a complete spin. Any fan of rock music would love that record.

***

[FOOTNOTES]
*
Close second for best working artist in St. Louis: the burlesque aerial duo Gravity Plays Favorites. If I have to go three-deep, third place goes to the poet K. Curtis Lyle.
**
My favorite public houses in St. Louis: 1) The Tap Room 2) The Royale 3) The Tap Room.

Russell Hoke SELECTED POEMS on vinyl for Christmas

2010-12-25T13:16:00.001-06:00

I am a grown man who has procreated, which in my view exempts me from considerations about receiving Christmas gifts of my own; but it so happens this beautiful artifact arrived in the mail for me on Christmas Eve. It is the vinyl LP of Russell Hoke reading selections from his COLLECTED POEMS.

Russell was the inaugural artist in residence at The Skuntry Museum, more recognizable to the naked eye as my cluttered basement; and as such he is more vulerable than most to accepting it seriously as an actual facility, a proper destination for important poetic vinyl LPs.

Though a prodigiously gifted poet and musician - both songster and Highlands piper - Russell also is a very simple man. Among many other humble ways he puts a life together for himself, he scavenges objects of value from urban trash in San Antonio, Tex., where he lives. No surprise to me, then, that the mailer that protected his precious vinyl was fashioned from a couple of (used) Pizza Hut pizza pie cartons.

Russell did a good job of making the back of the record look like a classic, with the spare design, the mid-century font on the liner notes, and the exquisitely square and stuffy author photograph of the poet in his suit and tie in his study, with the obligatory work of art hanging on the wall over his shoulder.

Those liner notes, penned by our mutual friend the poet Stefene Russell, are themselves a finely wrought work of verbal art. I reprint them in full.

On the title page of Russell Hoke's Collected Poems, you'll see that the book was published by a mysterious entity called The Alchemical Guild. That's not just meaningless whimsy; though he doesn't write while surrounded by volatile gases and Buchner flasks, his is an alchemical process.

I saw Russell's manuscript before it was translated into book form, and it filled an entire suitcase. This was the prima materia that, after months of being reworked, rearranged, marked up in pen and pencil, and transported from San Antonio to St. Louis and back again, was distilled into a mighty, Blakean document pressed between blue cloth covers.

Now these poems, after all that careful microsurgery, come to life on this recording. Russell is also a musician, and his lines never stumble, never fall victim to that inelegant clunking so common to modern poets (even those who submit themselves to working with rhyme and meter). Though these poems have an inherent elegance arising from their classical poetic form and use of mythology, there is also an element among them that I can describe only as "Hokean." As the narrator in "Trickster" tells us, "Our egg has chicken physics on the run."

It's difficult to know how to read poetry properly without apprenticing one's ear to poets like Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, Sylvia Plath and T.S. Eliot. Russell, who is a careful archivist, owns more poetry on vinyl than anyone I have ever known. He has thrown himself into making poems that please the ear, as poetry was originally engineered to do.

STEFENE RUSSELL

SELECTED POEMS, we are told, was recorded in that same poet's study. The vinyl was pressed by United Pressing, Nashville, Tenn. The cover art of the record that fronts this post is by James Cobb of San Antonio.

I look forward to that day when John Eiler and I are in St. Louis at the same time, and in his garage, and jamming on this vinyl record.

Bootblogging #21: Eight by Jaime Gartelos

2010-12-22T00:05:00.000-06:00

Jaime Gartelos!

Let's get some music out there.

This was 1999. The band name was Jaime Gartelos y l'a Orquestra Buena (got that?) and the name of the record is El Perfecto.

14 songs. It's all good. Perfecto? Close enough! Here is the best by me.

"Eyes to the Future"

"Emily Please"

"Resist"

"A Perfect Fool"

"Reason"

"Hands Make the Man"

"Sometimes My Head Keeps Me Up"

"I Dont Know"

All songs by Jaime Gartelos copyrightb 1999.

Produced and enginerred and mixed by Jaime Gartelos and Drew Haase.

Forgive me for musician credits for now.

*

Image is Jaime Gartelos' painting Grey Cups from his Flikcr site.

More in this series

Bootblogging #1: Three by The Lettuce Heads

Bootblogging #2: Three elegies for local musicians
Bootblogging #3: Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #4: Three more by The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #5: Chuck Reinhart's guitar circle hits
Bootblogging #6: The silly side of The Lettuce Heads
Bootblogging #7: Songs for "Divorcing God"
Bootblogging #8: More songs for "Divorcing God
Bootblogging #9: Adam Long presents The Imps!
Bootblogging #10: More Michael Shannon Friedman
Bootblogging #11: The Adversary Workers
Bootblogging #12: The May Day Orchestra
Bootblogging #13: Solo Career live in Santa Monica
Bootblogging #14: Four from The Funhouse (Seattle punk)
Bootblogging #15: Four more from The Funhouse (Seattle punk rock)
Bootblogging #16: I will be your volunteer! (for Bob Slate)
Bootblogging #17: Yet more The Lettuce Heads

Bootblogging #18: Four by Russell Hoke
Bootblogging #19: Krakersy (is Crackers in Polish)
Bootblogging #20- Four by Grandpa's Ghost

Bootblogging #20: Four by Grandpa's Ghost

2010-12-19T21:11:00.000-06:00

This is big news for old heads in the St. Louis music scene: Grandpa's Ghost has an actual live gig in town 8:30 p.m. Wednesday, Dec 22 at the Lemp Neighborhood Art Center, 3301 Lemp Ave.

The band for this gig is Ben Hanna, William Emerson and Jack Petracek, with special guest Tim Garrigan on guitar.

Notably absent from this lineup is Eric Hall, though he is also on the bill as a solo artist.

Ben writes from New York that this will be the first live show in St. Louis featuring him in the flesh since 2005. Garrigan also is visiting from New York. The holidays are good for reunion gigs (not that Grandpa's Ghost was ever technically disbanded, as far as I know).

In an email to friends, Ben promises a "laid-back acoustic-based performance featuring all new original material". That is good to note, for in a recorded output that now spans fifteen years (1995-2010), Grandpa's Ghost has sounded like wispy folk, tortured folk, grain-belt rock, grain-belt punk, textural noise, end of the universe noise, and lots of other things that would be difficult to describe.

Ben and I have been trading recordings through the mail since he moved to New York, so I have just about everything they have released, which doesn't mean I could find it all in the basement when I looked just now. I did find a few favorites, which I have Ben's permission to post from here; and he also sent an unreleased track that falls into that "all new original material" he is talking about.

See you at the Lemp on Wednesday. After the show, Eric Hall is hosting a Captain Beefheart spin (by another Ben) at Mangia. See ya there, too.

mp3s

"Flowerland (Across the Universe Version)"
(Hanna)
Grandpa's Ghost
Unreleased
From The Executioner (forthcoming)

"Like the Sky in Reverse"
(Hanna)
Grandpa's Ghost
From Music from the Fotopoulos Projects (2005)

"Crooked Mouth"
(Hanna)
Grandpa's Ghost
From Stardust & Smog/Early Autumn Waltz (2001)

"Spit on a Stamp"
(Hanna)
Grandpa's Ghost
From Gun Shy & Trigger Happy (1996)

*

More in this series

Bootblogging #1: Three by The Lettuce Heads

Bootblogging #18: Four by Russell Hoke
Bootblogging #19: Krakersy (is Crackers in Polish)

*

Photograph of Ben Hanna (with Grandpa's Ghost album art in the background) by Dana Smith from his Asbestos Sister site.

Pops Farrar, the son of the speakeasy songster

2010-12-19T08:20:00.000-06:00

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 120, which follows immediately upon my previous post, "The way the music dies" and concludes the book.

The son of the speakeasy songster
By Chris King

One night that spring, 1997, I went to see a local folk rock band, One Fell Swoop, at Focal Point. The venue, with its wooden school chairs bolted to the floor, had a claustrophobic atmosphere. During a break between sets, I stepped outside to feel the evening and have a smoke on the sidewalk. I was greeted there by the wife of the drummer, who pointed me toward an old man smoking a homerolled cigarette.

“This is Pops Farrar,” she said to me. And to him: “Chris is really into folklore-type stuff.”

“Well, I got considerable of that dern folklore,” Pops bust right out the gate and said, and it certainly looked like that was true. He was wearing a soiled fishing hat on which he had pasted a Route 66 sticker. His long face had all the cracks of a well-traveled road. Actually, this face was too animated for that comparison – it had all the twists and eddies of a river.

“Yeah, my old bandmate Chris Bess told me about you,” I said. “You know, Chris plays accordion.”

“I know it!” Pops enthused.

“He said you play Cajun accordion.”

Like the rest of us, Chris Bess always looked up to Jay Farrar of Uncle Tupelo. More than most of us, Chris made actual inroads into befriending him. Chris had at least learned that the whole Farrar family was musical, starting with the old man, Pops. One of Jay’s older brothers, Dade, played stand-up bass in One Fell Swoop, the band on the bill tonight, which explained Pops’ presence at the show.

“Oh, I guess I stagger around on the accordion,” Pops said. “But not only that Cajun stuff. I do a little bit of everything. And I got my old concertina I picked up in France, while I was out with the Merchant Marine. I do chainsaw sculptures, too, of Civil War generals and old Geronimo. I got lots of interests.”

Pops’ face bloomed with smoke, and a big smile. Folklore was opening another new trail for us, one that circled around to where we began. I asked for the old man’s phone number, saying I wanted to come over to his house and record his accordion and concertina, and maybe take a look at those chainsaw sculptures.

“Don’t just talk about it, old Chris,” Pops practically shouted, gesturing with his homerolled cigarette. “Do it!”

We did it. Elijah took a break from his work in the Nashville power pop underground, packed up a portable studio, drove to St. Louis, and we trekked across the Mississippi River to record Pops Farrar.

Pops lived on the outskirts of Belleville, Illinois, a town Uncle Tupelo put on the map, in what he called “the Belleville rainforest”. The jungle image was conjured by the ravine next door, which was overgrown and noisy with the calls of birds and frogs. Pops lived just above the bluffs separating the American Bottom, where Granite City sprawled, from towns like Belleville nestled in the hills that smoothed out gradually into corrupted prairie and plains.

Pops’ house was built into the side of a hill. He stepped out from the basement at the bottom of the hill to greet us. I could see chainsaw sculptures of Civil War generals and Indians standing woodenly around the bushy yard, but Pops steered us inside so he could hook up his laser karaoke.

“I like the sound I get out of this,” he said.

His karaoke rig sat at the foot of a recliner, which was bent almost completely out of shape by God knows how many years of Pops at rest. Tobacco smoke formed a solid brown smog in the room.

Pops plopped down on a saggy couch. He had to clear off a flattened foam pillow and threadbare sheet for us to join him – it looked like this little couch was serving as his improvised bed. “Stag beer’s in the garage,” he announced, gesturing toward a door between the recliner and a dingy bathroom.

I sprang for a round, admiring his set-up. This old guy was completely cocooned in his basement studio, cooled by the Earth of the hill and shade trees, with walk-out access to his own rainforest sculpture garden.

“I'm like a crawdad down in here,” Pops said, jiggling the input jack on his karaoke rig, which made the echoey sounds of space junk. “Now that I’m alone, I just crawdad down in here, and snap up a claw.”

I popped a Stag into his snapped-up claw, and said, “Pops, let’s not with the karaoke machine.” I implored Elijah for help with my eyes.

“Let’s just put you on the couch with the accordion,” Lij said. “Let’s try everything raw first. We can add effects later, if you like that echo.”

“That cocksucker,” Pops said, turning his back on the karaoke rig. “Crapped out on me, anyway.”

Elijah set up the equipment, and I joined Pops on the couch. I had to tense my legs to keep from sliding toward him in the middle, which was hollowed down from the nightly weight of his sleeping body. We bantered as he wheezed dust off his accordion and finagled a coat hanger, which clasped a harmonica, around his scrawny neck. On his head was a filthy fishing hat, pasted with a label from a bottle of Jaegermeister.

“I first picked up music from my dad down in Salem, Missouri, in the Ozarks,” Pops said. “He played a pretty good guitar, and would sing. The Farrars had been influential down around there, because they had the contract franchise for the freight delivery. My dad had these trucks, and he would pick up goods at the train station and distribute them around town. But then with him being a musician during Prohibition, he used to play those speakeasies, the little places outside of town with the big jug of whiskey. My dad was an alcoholic, and that cut into his business. Then he lost that contract with the railroad, and we started to go down. I remember living down in my grandma’s basement in zero weather. Then we just had my dad’s music – that guitar was the only thing between us and starving to death.”

I thought of my jug of white whiskey in the trunk of the Birthplace, and sipped Stag. Pops had hardly touched his beer.

“See, we didn’t have no radio then, and we didn't have no TV. So in this little town, why all the people would gather of a Friday or Saturday night, and my dad would play. One song I always remembered and always liked the best was ‘Railroad Bum’.”

Pops pulled big chords on his baggy accordion, and opened up in a sad hobo voice. The song is the soliloquy of a cold and hungry man a thousand miles from home. I heard the ghosts of Jimmie Rodgers, Bascom Lamar Lunsford (“Railroad Bum,” in fact, was in his Memory Collection), and the brother of Marvin Faulkner, his hobo fiddle tune cut short by the wheels of a train. I guessed Pops was remembering his alcoholic dad, and lying down cold and hungry as a boy, and feeling a thousand miles away from home in the middle of the sea as a Merchant Marine.

“So, here’s another one he played,” Pops said, as he shut down the “Railroad Bum” with a flourish. “This one's about a slave situation down in Kentucky. The singer lost his old Nellie Gray. She’s been sold off to the slave trade. They been together on one plantation, but things have changed, and they didn’t need help around the big house no more. So they sold her off. And he’s real mournful.”

With his long, lined face, finished with a scraggly gray goatee, Pops was the man for mournful. I waited for the corn pone, the minstrel shtick, to accompany the slave song, but it never came. Pops had one voice for sadness of whatever sort, but it was an enormous one. There was room inside it for any kind of mourning.

I thought, again, of Bascom Lamar Lunsford, who not only sang this song (without a hint of condescension), he also wrote a parody of it. Spurred by the unexpected celebrity of “Mountain Dew”, Bascom had adapted “Darling Nellie Gray” into “Nos Pros Nellie”, mountain lawyer slang for “No Prosecution Nellie”; Nellie was getting off easy because she brewed a potent mountain dew that was fancied by the judge.

Now I did need a nip of my Mississippi moonshine, which Pops also accepted, though barely a thimble full, and he insisted on coffee afterwards. He poured his coffee from a thermos that looked scorched from wars. Then his accordion roamed off in search of other sadnesses.

Pops’ dad would have been Bascom Lamar Lunsford’s exact contemporary, so it’s no accident the old man’s songs overlapped so much with the Memory Collection. When their repertoires diverged, Bascom looked toward old England and its ballads, and Pops looked south to the Civil War and west to cowboys and Indians.

In his songs, Pops was a Union man and friend to the Indian. Besides “Darling Nellie Gray”, he sang “Red Wing”, about an Indian maid mourning her brave, who died at the Little Bighorn. But he didn’t disguise his admiration for the flinty Southern generals, some of whom I had glimpsed outside in the rainforest, or the gutsy footmen of the U.S. Cavalry.

Pops came up with a transition that connects the laments “Red Wing” and “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” (a symbol a Cavalry widow wore to remember her fallen soldier). By making them a medley, he made the sorrows of an Indian maid and a Cavalry widow bleed together. Maybe it was my Mississippi moonshine, maybe that mournful Ozark voice, but Pops seemed to speak up for every heartbreak in American history.

Pops must have seen the mooniness in my eyes.

“You bringing that dern illicit liquor into my house,” Pops said. “Sinner! You make me look like my dad down there, playing in them speakeasies. And that was real church people country, let me tell you. He’d be at some Friday night sing-out doing his honky tonk songs, and people would be drinking their homebrews, and he’d go into this little routine. He’d say:

You know, I was coming into town tonight, and there was a revival outside of town, with this big tent. They were inside singing all this beautiful church music. I thought I’d walk up and listen awhile.

So I walked in, and this old fire and brimstone preacher was preaching one of the most godawful sermons against whiskey and drinking and sinning and doping.

And he said, “Now I tell you tonight, if I had it to do here tonight, I’d take all the wine, and I’d take all the whiskey, and I’d take all the beer, and I’d take it down to the river, and I would dump it in, amen.”

Now, shall we sing,

“Shall we gather at the river ...”

Pops jumped up at the punch line, and took a fresh smoke out to the rainforest. He smoked, and stretched his neck, freed from his homemade harmonica harness, and showed us hulks of old sports cars, rusting in the grass. “My boys say I need to clear them out of here,” Pops said. “They say I got too many interests. That I’m all over the place.”

“It’s because of a car that we know your boy Jay,” I said, “or a van, mostly. Our band bought their old van, the old Uncle Tupelo van.”

“That old blue van?”

“Old Blue,” I said. “Good van.”

“Did you know that was my old van?” Pops asked.

I sized him up with a funny feeling. I won’t pass this one off on white whiskey. I think everyone, with whatever patience for religion or tendency toward superstition, at some time feels a tingle, and knows the hand of fate just goosed them on the ass.

Uncle Tupelo and then their old blue van had put me out on the rock & roll road for years of adventures, which we only left behind for different adventures in music, pursuing the older ways. And now the pursuit of the old ways had brought me to the home where one of the Uncle Tupelo guys grew up, and I was swapping songs and moonshine with his father – with the source of that old blue van. I couldn’t have known it at the time, though I might have guessed, that Pops and I were just starting down a new road together that day while we smoked homerolled cigarettes surrounded by chainsaw sculptures of Indians and generals.

That road would take us up and down the Great River Road, down to a hippie commune in the Ozarks with a stone age African clown, to Georgia to reclaim my possessions from a previous life. Eventually it would bring remnants of my old rock & roll band back here to the Belleville rainforest to record our skuntry mishmash of world folklore and American folk music in Pops’ living room.

I couldn’t have known it at the time, though I might have guessed, that just like Enormous Richard took Old Blue out for one last set of wild rides after Uncle Tupelo had put the van to pasture, I would be taking Pops Farrar out for an unexpected journey near the end of the road – the last great adventures for this son of a hobo songster who had set foot on every continent on Earth as a Merchant Marine, keeping the music of the Missouri Ozarks and the world alive on a harmonica he kept in his pants pocket.

Pops was staring off into the thickets of the Belleville rainforest with his pale eyes. Maybe his intuition was also telling him we were onto something here. Something new. Something old. He breathed in some smoke from his homerolled. “You know, I maintained that van for those little guys in Uncle Tupelo – they beat it to hell! – until the day they give it away,” Pops said. “Or sold it, I guess. Sold it to you. You ended up with it. And now here you are, come to me. Well, I’ll be.”

*

mp3s

Railroad Bum
Darling Nellie Gray
Red Wing
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon
Shall We Gather at the River?

All songs traditional.
All performances by Pops Farrar.
Produced by Chris King
Released on Pops Farrar, Memory Music: Songs and Stories from the Merchant Marine (1999).

*

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue
Trading horses
No Chris Bess
Jamming with the dead
Fruits of the tunes
Picking and grinning
Math problems and cluck tracks
The way the music dies

*

Image is of Lij and Pops.

Pops Farrar, the son of the speakeasy songster

2010-12-19T08:14:00.001-06:00

You know, I was coming into town tonight, and there was a revival outside of town, with this big tent. They were inside singing all this beautiful church music. I thought I’d walk up and listen awhile.

So I walked in, and this old fire and brimstone preacher was preaching one of the most godawful sermons against whiskey and drinking and sinning and doping.

And he said, “Now I tell you tonight, if I had it to do here tonight, I’d take all the wine, and I’d take all the whiskey, and I’d take all the beer, and I’d take it down to the river, and I would dump it in, amen.”

Now, shall we sing,

“Shall we gather at the river ...”

The way the music dies

2010-12-18T06:31:00.001-06:00

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 119, which follows immediately upon my previous post, "Math problems and cluck tracks".

The way the music dies
By Chris King

Our rock & roll road had turned into a trail. It was gradual, the drift from grinding concrete connecting gigs in cities, where we asked people to pay attention to us, toward a lazy path winding between interesting old guys in obscure places, who let us pay attention to them. For most post-punk bands, the road ends much more abruptly, with screeching wheels, screaming, and years of seething after the wheels come off the van.

It’s hard to believe, but my buddies in Judge Nothing had been on the road, on and off, since the night I first saw them wearing upturned buckets of chicken on their heads a decade ago. They had been putting together scratchy tours since the birth of Cicero’s Basement Bar. Judge Nothing had cranked out four cassettes on their own dime and two CDs with an indie label in Chicago. No one toured or tried harder than these guys. And their crowd did grow, though not on the scale of their former friends and college classmates in Uncle Tupelo – let alone Wilco, the only band with roots in the Cicero’s scene that left the smelly van for a plush tour bus.

In the early months of 1997, just after Elijah and I tracked Ken Coomer of Wilco to the jerky Rosco rhythm, Judge Nothing hit the road, yet again.

A January or February tour of the Midwest is a miserable thing. You could have asked Buddy Holly. Heat on his tour bus gave out during one wintry Midwestern road swing, his “Winter Dance Party” package tour of 1959, inflicting a drummer with frostbite and inspiring the bandleader to charter a plane after a gig in Iowa. At the end of that flight – which went only five miles and ended nose-down in a corn field — they all had frostbite, or rather their corpses did, since they spent a cold winter night crushed in the wreckage. That was “the day the music died,” as Don Mclean sang in a song everyone raised on ‘70s radio has permanently grooved into their brains.

Nearly forty years later, touring indie rockers had it no better on the winter road. In January and February and most of March, show-goers remain suspended in after-Christmas hibernation. Crowds are thin, roads are icy if not actively battered by a blizzard. Sleeping in the van is not an option, so it’s literally do or die at the end of the night when it comes to begging for a crashpad.

Why bother? For the dream, of course, which needs to be fed. If a struggling rock band took a break for two cold months, they might never crawl back into the van again. Gigdom looks insane viewed from anywhere except inside gigdom.

It’s one reason why indie rockers wear their bluejeans into rags. You get used to scruffy pants, and they help you get cozy in rancid vans and shithole rock clubs. The instant you launder your clothes, they feel wrong, and so does your life. Buddy Holly was no penniless indie rocker, but the urge to arrive early enough in the next town to do some laundry was one of the reasons he chartered that plane. The dream must have died in him, if laundry was on his mind. The death of the music itself was only a tragic afterthought.

The Enormous Richards and Judge Nothings of the road book our tours in January and February because the weak won’t and the superfamous don’t. Gigs in plum venues open up during these months, places that wouldn’t take your call if you were touring during any other time of the year.

Judge Nothing booked a gig for the first days of February, 1997, at 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis. The isolation of that fair city makes for a long, exhausting haul, and a dangerous one during the winter. A blizzard can hit at any time during the endless grind of I-35, and fill the van with uneasy thoughts of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper, scattered as corpses across an Iowa corn field, quietly collecting snow in the night.

But 7th Street Entry was a CBGB for post-punk bands. This was where The Replacements and Husker Du cut their gig teeth. Every band wanted to earn that sticker on their amplifier cabinets. I know I gave myself serious gig neck calling 7th Street a thousand times, to no avail. An opening slot there was a damn good anchor date for a tour. So Andy Dykeman, Judge Nothing’s drummer and de-facto manager, put together a frozen 10-city tour around it that winter.

The gig gods were against them from the get-go. On the way to Kansas City, they wrecked the van – the first time they had so much as dented a fender in a decade of road gigs. If you change your pants even once a week and never sleep on a stranger’s floor, you might be thinking OMEN. Get your butts back home. But no, they soldiered on. Down the road, they wrecked again. They hit a patch of black ice and slid onto the grassy knoll of the median. GRASSY KNOLL. Assassination. Death. Go back home! But, no. The dream. They had a gig at a cradle of post-punk. Onward to the gig. To the dream.

When loading their gear into 7th Street Entry, they encountered what should have been a pleasant surprise: Wilco was playing at First Avenue, a much bigger room next door. Judge Nothing and Uncle Tupelo grew up together on the east side – the wrong side – of the Mississippi River, where we all got our start as kids. Judge Nothing introduced live sound to the basement bar where Uncle Tupelo made its name. Andy Dykeman and Jeff Tweedy (the honcho of Wilco) had doodled in the backs of college lectures and swapped gigs. Andy unloaded his drum kit at 7th Street Entry, then went next door to First Avenue to say hey to Tweedy.

“Jeff’s bodyguard, or something, stated that Jeff did not want to see us,” Andy remembers today. “We sent him a note, saying hello, and another one of his many roadcrew said he was not to be bothered. Oh, well. Fuck him. We played our gig and headed home.”

Driving south on I-35 through north central Iowa, Judge Nothing hit the end of the road. The van did not so much crash as its reasons for being evaporated. Maybe it was the cold shoulder from a former friend who had upgraded his gig to plush tour bus and handler status. Maybe it was just how long the highway through Iowa looks in the dead of the winter. Certainly, it was ten years of doing this, a decade of gigdom, without it ever getting any easier.

First, the bassist, Flea Bodine, cracked. Right there in the van, on the road home, he quit. And then the dream died in Andy, too, just like that. Andy quit. That left the frontman, Doug Rafferty, who said everyone only needed a little sleep, they could talk it out later.

Doug pulled into a diner for a bite to eat. They must have made an impression climbing out of the battered van, in their filthy, raggedy gig pants. As a waitress turned their coffee cups right-side up, she said, “You must be part of the Buddy Holly band.”

“Huh?”

“The Buddy Holly tribute band! You know this is the day they found his plane? Right over there. And I mean, right over there, in that corn field right across the road. The ballroom where they all played their last concert is just up the road. They do a concert over there every year. The Winter Dance Party. The Day the Music Died. I would have sworn you was a part of that.”

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

*

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue
Trading horses
No Chris Bess
Jamming with the dead
Fruits of the tunes
Picking and grinning
Math problems and cluck tracks

Math problems and cluck tracks

2010-12-16T21:42:00.001-06:00

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 118, twelve chapters along from my previous post, "Picking and grinning". The band Enormous Richard became the band Eleanor Roosevelt, which evolved into a field recording collective. Uncle Tupelo pops back into this account of some of our folklore projects.

Math problems
By Chris King

Anthony Seeger must have taken a break from dancing with the Indians in the Amazon, because Smithsonian/Folkways finally got around to releasing its Bascom Lamar Lunsford CD I instigated. The release was announced that summer at the festival in Asheville Bascom had founded.

I was unable to attend, though Jo Lunsford Herron later played me a video of the event, and sure enough, “a young man in a rock band from St. Louis” was thanked from the grandstand and in the liner notes. I puffed up at my first folklore credit.

LIj and I put out a cassette for the Grebo elder Nymah Kumah. His Grebo archive deserved a 10-disc boxed set, not a 90-minute cassette, but we were penniless. Seeger wouldn’t release it on Folkways, and our usual lack of business sense and patience with tedium kept us from working the marketplace to find Nymah a deal. Never mind its chintzy aspect, our tape made the old Grebo clown more proud than anyone who ever unfolded a thank-you note at a Grammy podium.

We staged a release party for Nymah at Focal Point in St. Louis. It was well-attended, since word had spread among drum connoisseurs — the one type of person I have ever seen Nymah Kumah disappoint. These guys came in talking math. They were interested in learning new time signatures and syncopations. It was a little like the people who descend on distant corners of the earth just to check one bird off their career list of species sighted.

Nymah Kumah wanted to talk humanity, not math. The drum was just another voice to him, not an instrument for technical display. He refused to pull a drum pattern out of the context of a story and teach a rhythm in isolation. A lot of drummers showed up buggy-eyed with anticipation, but went home grumpy that night. That was fine with me. They all bought cassettes, which they could pause and rewind as often as needed to nail down the latest exotic rhythm pattern.

Nymah’s local girlfriend, the Goddess of Illusion at fifty, showed up at the gig with a warm smile, and went home with a warm smile, taking a grinning Grebo songster with her. I let them sleep late the next morning, since we had no pressing travel plans. When I went to retrieve him in the afternoon, Nymah answered her door naked. The image of that old man’s bare bum busting back up the steps will accompany me to the grave.

We mailed the hippie commune East Wind copies of Nymah’s cassette, but paid no visit this time around, as I was needed elsewhere. Lij’s ambitions for the Rosco Gordon record were outgrowing the field of folklore. He thought the old man had another hit record in him.

Lij wanted to build a band around Rosco through overdubs in Nashville, but he couldn’t work with those rotten piano tracks. So I put Nymah on a plane to Boston and drove Lij in the equipment-crammed Birthplace (my battered 1987 Cavalier) back to New York, where we borrowed time on a family Baby Grand that lived in Lij’s brother’s Brooklyn apartment.

Rosco, we learned, had diabetes. He took a break from our session to jab a needle of insulin into his little belly.

At least he didn’t sing his ulcers into aggravation during this session, though there was nothing we could do to stop him from playing ferociously enough to rip himself apart.

“I’m running out of chances,” Rosco said. “At my age, one day is two weeks. One month is two years.” He worked out this confusing math on a scrap of paper and left it with Lij, as a reminder of urgency.

Lij jumped right on those overdubs. He was trained to build a recording from the drum tracks up. For the Rosco record, we already had piano, guitar, and lead vocal tracks, so Lij’s instinct was to get the drums next. He called me down to Nashville, and we built our studio in the basement of a local drummer named Ken Coomer.

Uncle Tupelo had crept into our life once again, we would have thought for the last time. When Tupelo’s drummer, Mike Heidorn, left the band to raise a family, they replaced him with Ken Coomer, who then joined Jeff Tweedy in his new band Wilco after the Jay-Jeff split. Wilco was exploding in ways unknown to Uncle Tupelo or any of our peers, and had given Coomer a taste of life in a plush tour bus with beds, a fridge, a mini recording studio, and a professional driver behind the wheel.

But Coomer still knew the root, the real deal, when he came across it. “Come on!” he said, as Lij set up microphones, and I stir-fried cactus in Ken's kitchen. “Let’s get one with Rosco!”

Getting one with Rosco was no simple task. No amount of drummer’s math would prepare you for it. The Rosco rhythm had a logic all its own. It was not a question of keeping time, but rather following the unpredictable rhythmic instincts of an unusual old man. You had to learn his mood for changes.

Rosco’s beats changed in ways they don’t teach you in music school or in a pop band like Wilco. I thought of the chicken Rosco used to get drunk and set atop his piano. Maybe we should have got a chicken drunk, let it dance, and had Coomer play to that. We had no use for a click track. Maybe what we needed was a cluck track.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

*

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue
Trading horses
No Chris Bess
Jamming with the dead
Fruits of the tunes
Picking and grinning

*
The record Lij and I produced for Rosco Gordon was released by Dualtone Music Group in Nashville as No Dark in America (2005). The cover art, above, is by my friend George Davidson of Athens, Ga.

Picking and grinning at the insurgent country hoedown

2010-12-15T23:14:00.002-06:00

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 106, six chapters along from my previous post, "Fruits of the tunes". In the interim, Enormous Richard changed its band name to Eleanor Roosevelt, I got lost in the quirky folklore thickets, and we had to settle for a new bassist, Jim, best known for licking the ends of his hair when he played.

Picking and grinning
By Chris King

Roy Francis Kasten began to open my eyes to a surreal afterlife of the Uncle Tupelo phenomenon. Some guys in Seattle (the source of so many things that confused me) had created something called an internet forum named after an Uncle Tupelo song, “Postcard”. The internet was a mystery to me, but in 1995, new media tried on the duds of old media and this thing stumbled out into the world as a magazine, named after an Uncle Tupelo record, No Depression, with all the departments of the magazine named after Uncle Tupelo songs.

I didn’t really know what to say. It was like someone in a foreign country naming something after your cousin – cool in its own way, but kind of puzzling and unwarranted.

Speaking of unwarranted, puzzling afterlives, our song from Meriwether Lewis’ lyrics was snapped up by a label in Chicago called Bloodshot Records. They wanted “Espoontoon” for a compilation of something they were calling “insurgent country” music. I sort of liked that phrase – more than “alternative country,” which the No Depression crowd was using – and we never said no to exposure. So in the fall of 1995, Eleanor Roosevelt packed up from our various locations and headed to Chicago to play an insurgent country showcase.

The one memory of the country music revival I still can’t shed is of a tall, husky man wearing a cowboy hat inside a Chicago nightclub, swaggering over to our band, where we sat at a side table going over songs (we needed the rehearsal), and saying, in a Chicago stockyards accent, “I see some of the pickers are here.”

It was one of the Bloodshot Records guys. We looked at him like we were mutes. That’s the way I would like to remember it, anyway. Jim Who Licked the Ends of His Hair must have said something off-point, and I probably schmoozed this urban cowboy, since I knew he was with the record label. It’s a fact, though, that we all looked at each other after he walked away, and said, “Pickers?”

I could get my ass kicked for saying this too loud at taverns in every single state of this union, and all up and down Mexico, but the cowboy hat as an indoors, after-dark ornament has always irritated me. It’s my impression that such a flagrant, space-hogging style of headgear evolved to protect men exposed to long days of direct sunlight out on the open range. When the sun went down on the Brazos, the funny hat came off the head. It wasn’t put on at night over carefully coiffed hair during a primping session at one’s city apartment, to be worn inside a dark nightclub.

I would even argue that the cowboy hat has no place whatsoever in the entire city of Chicago, at any time of day or night, indoors or out. Don’t those tall buildings shade the sun, son? Why, howdy, ain’t the sun done gone down, anyways? Just a picker a-thinking out loud, now. No use in a-gittin’ all riled up about it.

I don’t suppose there is any point in trying to disguise my pompous sense that we were present at the creation of this animal, insurgent or alternative country, and had since moved on to more interesting things. We had moved onto stuff like African proverb collages jacked up with Rolling Stones riffs, or Mayan creation myths adapted for slacker rock potheads.

I am sure we didn’t disguise this pompous feeling the night of the Bloodshot Records showcase. Guitar Johnny, who has an especially sharp aversion to cant and pretension, kept slipping out of the club to get away from the guys wearing cowboy hats to ward off the burning rays of the stagelights, singing about white trash cowboys and honky-tonk has-beens in iffy accents.

It’s bullshit, this pompous feeling of ours. We weren’t really present at the invention of anything. I don’t know about “insurgent” or “alternative” country. I prefer the term Brian Henneman used when I first interviewed Chicken Truck, before anyone outside of Cicero’s or Belleville had ever heard of Uncle Tupelo: “this suped-up country shit”. (Brian’s new band, the Bottle Rockets, appeared on that Bloodshot Records compilation with us, by the way, though they were not present at the Chicago showcase with the rest of us pickers.)

Suped-up country shit was certainly older than Uncle Tupelo or Chicken Truck, older than Hasil Adkins, older than the Byrds or Neil Young. Rockabilly and early rock & roll were just suped-up country shit and blues, and if you go all the way back to the banjo shouts Bascom Lamar Lunsford collected in what he called “mud-dauber happy homes,” that original country shit was pretty suped-up all by itself, even if the only available electricity were traces of lightning in the sky.

I doubt anyone at Bloodshot Records or No Depression magazine would dispute this today, or even care to poke the dead cow of this discussion. Both the label and the magazine went onto explore and spread the deeper roots of this music in ways that deepened all of our understanding about this music we all love. Though it must have been an impolite attitude for us to adopt when we were all young and they were first trying to peddle their awareness that there was something new going on, and they had named it.

One thing is beyond doubt: by the fall of 1995, right when the time was ripe to play suped-up country shit, we no longer played suped-up country shit, and didn’t get out our old clothes just to walk down the insurgent country showcase runway. Without steady practice, Elijah had lost his chops on fiddle and banjo, so now he played soaring electric guitar, very much under the spell of Alex Chilton and Big Star.

I sang Sioux Indian totem chants about elks and African proverbs about banana stalks as the boys played power pop on electric guitars, Jim licked the ends of his hair, and the country music revival quietly waited for us misfit city pickers to leave the stage so they could get on with the hoedown.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

*

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue
Trading horses
No Chris Bess
Jamming with the dead
Fruits of the tunes

*

mp3

“Espoontoon” (Matt Fuller, Chris King, Meriwether Lewis, John Minkoff) was eventually released on the Eleanor Roosevelt record Walker with his head down, availible on iTunes, etc.

Fruits of the tunes

2010-12-14T20:11:00.001-06:00

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 100, a good long stretch of twenty chapters down from my previous post, "Jamming with the dead". We have skipped a lot – Enormous Richard has a distribution deal now with the label that distributes Charles Manson, and I have begun to document an African elder named Nymah Kumah – but I think you can follow the storyline.

Fruits of the tunes
By Chris King

Not long after I returned to St. Louis with a shoebox full of Nymah Kumah’s memory collection on cassettes, Kurt Cobain of Nirvana was found in the room above his garage with a junky kit in a cigar box, a triple overdose of heroin in his veins, and a shotgun shell in his head. He was twenty seven years old.

I thought of some things he had sung.

“Married. Buried.”

“In the pines, in the pines, where the sun, it never shines.”

He left a confusing letter, not quite a suicide note, about quitting the music business.

“The worst crime I can think of would be to rip people off by faking it and pretending as if I'm having 100 % fun. Sometimes I feel as if I should have a punch in time clock before I walk out on stage.”

I thought of Nymah Kumah, singing to himself, alone, for forty years.

“All the warnings from the punk rock 101 courses over the years. Since my first introduction to the, shall we say, ethics involved with independence and the embracement of our community has proven to be very true.”

I thought of something Nymah Kumah said about selling music. “When you're a baby and can hear sound, walking and talking – can you sell that? Man stole music from the birds anyway.”

I got stoned that night and went to see a rock show. Our buddies the Boorays had a gig. They had outgrown Cicero’s now and were headlining a more upscale club across town. Same four guys, same post-punk surf rock approach, except they sounded strangely clean and a little soft. The place was packed with nicely dressed people in slacks and Docksiders.

“Pointe zombies,” Mark Stephens, the frontman, said to me after the show, at the afterhours party. The Pointe was the local “commercial alternative” radio station of the type that blanketed the country in the wake of Nirvana’s success. I guessed the Pointe had been playing the Boorays.

“More people come to the shows now,” Mark said, “but they listen less. Fucking Pointe zombies. Remember the old Cicero’s? It was only us, but at least we listened to each other.”

Mark still looked like a thrift store mannequin sprung to life. He fidgeted his way through a pack of cigarettes and twelve beers between last call and dawn, crashing through Nirvana songs on a battered, tuneless guitar.

The next month, Uncle Tupelo was dead. The inscrutable frontman Jay Farrar split. He and Jeff Tweedy were picking up the pieces in separate projects, Son Volt and Wilco. The band that had ignited our basement bar was history. The old Cicero’s was gone for good.

The next month, Bello called me, the guy from Fruit of the Tune, Enormous Richard’s new distributor in New Jersey – the ones who distributed Kinky Friedman and Charles Manson.

“Bad news, man, bad, bad news.”

“Kurt Cobain is dead,” I said. “Uncle Tupelo broke up.”

“You know? I heard that. But guess what? Indie distribution is in the toilet. Have you heard? We just got slammed with returns. We’ve been banking on records we thought were sold, and they all just came back in the mail unpaid. It’s over.”

“What’s over?”

“The bubble, man, the boom. Everybody snapped up every band in sight, and now all their records are coming back unsold. I’m sorry. We’re busted. Fruit of the Tune is flying the coop.”

“Man stole music from the birds anyway,” I said.

“Listen,” Bello continued, “I’m only calling you because I like you guys. You’re real people. You’re a college professor. You’re not just some horny kid with his first distortion pedal. You’re not some sick goof rock fuck. You’re not Charlie Manson, for Christ’s sake. I want to do something for you. I can’t get it all back. But I want to get you something.”

“Little birdy, little birdy,” I sang, “come and sing me your song.”

“You sent me, what? Nine hundred units? I’m going to get you back a box. Two hundred count. I’ll make Mango cut you a check – no promises for what. It won’t be what you’re owed. Cash it the second you get it, or you can bounce it on over to the trashcan. If you want the rest of your records, watch the auction notices. Highest bid wins. If you want the rest of your money, sue Mango. But you’ll have to get in line behind Mojo Nixon and the Manson Family.”

I sang, “Such a short time, to be staying here. But a long time, to be gone.”

“Exactly. I am out of here. I’ve got tax ... issues. I’m telling you and my grandmother where I’m going – Puerto Rico – and that’s it. The surf is great. I hate the music. I’m thinking of wearing ear plugs so I never hear another note. I’ll open a fish taco stand and surf the sun up every morning for the rest of my life.”

I thought it was all bullshit, except for the news that we were getting screwed out of our records. But in fact, mail soon arrived at the Marconi house, precisely along the lines Bello had described. First, we got a box of our CDs back, each with a little faded Tower Records sticker affixed to it. Our record Warm Milk on the Porch had curdled at last. Then a Fruit of the Tune check came for $150, which actually cleared the bank. And then a postcard from Puerto Rico.

Surf's great.
Visit sometime.
I’m on the beach.
Look for the little fish taco stand.
I’m the guy with the false front tooth.

He had drawn a little cartoon of the scene. He wasn’t a bad cartoonist. That kind of looked like Bello on the beach, hawking a fish taco as a curling wave crested, all the way down to the hole in his mouth.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

*

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue
Trading horses
No Chris Bess
Jamming with the dead

Jamming with the dead in Athens, Georgia

2010-12-13T20:52:00.001-06:00

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 80, so it follows immediately upon my previous post, "No Chris Bess".

Jamming with the dead
By Chris King

Toward the end of that summer, Uncle Tupelo finally released the record they made with Peter Buck of REM. I didn’t rush right out and buy it. I was broke, thanks to my broken foot, and I wasn’t keeping up with post-punk bands as I once had. I was too busy casting my musical glance backward through the folklore stacks. Rampant buzz about the new Uncle Tupelo record began to draw me in, though. From the sound of it, I was hardly the only Cicero’s songster who had caught the folklore bug.

I eventually broke down and bought the record, which was titled after the session dates, March 16-20, 1992. It did require some breaking down on my part, because acute gig envy had set in by then. Everything I had heard about this record made me wish that it was our record. In the wake of a pop album, Still Feel Gone, and on the verge of a major label signing, Uncle Tupelo had gone to Athens, Georgia, holed up with the guitar player of REM, and recorded an acoustic batch of mostly traditional music. Brian Henneman from Chicken Truck went down with them to play on it, everything from slide guitar to mandolin. All of this sounded like a perfect description of the right thing to do.

I could hardly believe my ears when I finally dropped needle on vinyl. Not only were these guys digging in the same folkloric dirt I was digging in, they had even struck the same gold – and staked the first claim.

I had been dumping hundreds of folklore records onto cassettes in the basement of the Wash. U. music library. Nothing – other than Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music – got deeper under my skin than a collection of Appalachian field recordings called High Atmosphere. This was bare-knuckle, gutbucket stuff. Mostly spare, sparkling banjo miniatures, with shivery unaccompanied ballad singing and truly strange story songs.

My favorite of the songs – “Rolling Mills are Burning Down” by a guy from Marshall, North Carolina named George Landers – had the wildest vocal I had ever heard. The vocal staggered around a wobbly banjo figure with slurry recklessness, like a wild-eyed drunk that couldn’t stay on his feet. The garbling of the words felt like part of the emotion of the song, as if the guy could hardly bear to spit out his story, an incoherent tale about torched mills on fire, a girl gone wrong, and a longing for the cold grave.

Some guy named John Cohen made these field recordings back in 1965. He got such good material, he suggested in his liner notes, because he went around asking for banjo tunings. A technical opening question about their instrument seemed to put the mountain men at ease. The result were these intense, unguarded, almost unbearably intimate performances. Part of the record’s addictive quality, for an amateur folklorist like me, was the running thread of conversation between John Cohen and his mountain sources. At the head and tail of the tunes, you could hear Cohen’s calm, likable voice encouraging the musicians, whose speech had grit and character equal in fascination to their rustic instruments and songs.

I was all on my own in the folklore stacks. I had never seen a copy of High Atmosphere (issued by Rounder on LP in 1974) anywhere outside of the Wash. U. music library basement. No one I knew seemed to even know it existed. Now, spinning on my turntable, was unmistakable evidence that Uncle Tupelo had gone down to Athens, sat around with Peter Buck of REM, and recorded some of these songs!

Three of their old time covers – “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down”, “Warfare,” and “I Wish My Baby Was Born” – all appeared on High Atmosphere. It was obvious from the Uncle Tupelo recordings in Athens that the High Atmosphere versions were the sources of their songs. The coincidence pretty much knocked me out. As I blabbed about this discovery at Cicero’s, one of the basement bar’s beautiful bartenders, Heather Crist, confirmed that Jeff Tweedy had become fixated on one particular tape of Appalachian field recordings. “He was playing it constantly when we were driving around,” Heather said, as she poured me a beer. So Tweedy was even turning Cicero’s barmaids onto this shit. My gig envy got far worse.

That Uncle Tupelo’s versions of these songs were thin and unconvincing compared to the High Atmosphere originals was no consolation. Nobody my age – perhaps no American alive – could touch the voices of those old mountain men and women. Worlds have disappeared since they sang. Something in their singing was one of the things that went away. No contemporary cover version could recapture it. At least Uncle Tupelo had the sense and guts to grasp this forgotten document of that lost world, learn the material word for word and note for note, and put these fabulous songs into play once again.

Of course, reviving mountain music was as old as the hills in 1992. I didn’t know it at the time, but John Cohen had played with Mike Seeger in the folk revival combo New Lost City Ramblers. Cohen was right in the heart of the folk revival of the ‘50s and ‘60s, which would turn back into rock & roll when Bob Dylan plugged in. But I had skipped over the folk revival of the previous generation, bypassing the middlemen. I stumbled from post-punk right into the ancients themselves, face to face in the folklore stacks.

And now, some guys my age – who grew up in the same basement bar as me – were waking up the ancients, the very same ghosts I had claimed for my own. Uncle Tupelo wasn’t content to enshrine the dead, however: they poured them a shot of moonshine and jammed with them in Georgia.

I felt the same urgency as when I first heard Butt of Jokes bust out songs in the spirit of the Meat Puppets at a campus battle of the bands, when I was a lonely college transfer student, alone with all of this new music and nobody to share it with me. My sacred text wasn’t my secret, after all. It was still sacred, but it wasn’t a secret. It was out in the open, walking around, looking for gigs.

And what do you know? The guys from Butt of Jokes were my buddies now. They were my bandmates. So was a pretty good banjo player in the hills of Tennessee, who happened to be learning the art of capturing sound on tape.

Folklore wasn’t a basement in a university music library. It was a wide open road.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

*

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue
Trading horses
No Chris Bess

No Chris Bess

2010-12-12T21:21:00.002-06:00

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 79, nine chapters on from my previous post, "Trading horses".

No Chris Bess
By Chris King

The front and back of gigbooks from our years on the road always have hand-drawn calendars, crowded with tour itineraries, details for court appearances (I had a parking ticket problem), and other bits of crucial dated information. “Pay doctor! Pay hospital!” starts popping up in the summer of 1992, after I broke my foot playing football on tour, and stretches longer into my future than I care to remember. And another phrase becomes common as that summer faded into fall: “NO CHRIS BESS”.

Scheduling around Chris Bess’ absence when he drove to Massachusetts to play on the second Uncle Tupelo record, Still Feel Gone, became a pattern. It got more and more convoluted as Chris’ services became more widely known through our travels across the country. Now I was trying to schedule a traveling band around a traveling accordion player.

In a way, we made things harder on ourselves. If there was a place on your stage for a charismatic sideman with comic gifts and virtuoso chops on accordion, then we were a mobile showroom for what you needed. As we slid into the category of goof rock, we were constantly paired with bands that drooled over Chris Bess. Quite a few of them got over their shy crush and asked him out, and quickly learned that he was an approachable guy who truly loved to play – and was starting to look for an escape hatch.

It’s human nature, and a law of the marketplace: don’t quit one job until you have found another one. In fact, take full advantage of the resources at the job you want to leave to land the job you want to have. Chris Bess never phoned it in with Enormous Richard – he played his butt off, every night – but he was certainly mailing out resumes from the stage.

And who would blame him? The guy liked a smooth, assured sound with a big, accessible shtick. Our ass pop period, which he had ushered in, had suited him just fine. Then Matt and I dumped the band upside down the second Elijah got back from Hong Kong and Johnny got bit by the Hasil Adkins gig bug. What was smooth and assured in our sound suddenly became nervy and unpredictable. Skuntry was a chaos that could be transcendent or godawful, from gig to gig, song to song, even moment to moment. It began to cut the big, accessible shtick that Chris Bess loved back to our old, problematic, messy hilarity.

If Enormous Richard actually held gagmen sessions, where we all sat down at a table and tore the act apart, perhaps we could have salvaged the Chris Bess version of the band, or at least ended it as adults. Instead, we were headed straight for the schoolyard.

Imagine Elijah, abandoning a dopey blues band in Hong Kong and settling down in middle Tennessee, where he knew no one. Then, on select weekends, he gets to join his buddies on the road to play songs with the flavor of his creativity all over them. He knows that Chris Bess now sprawls all over these songs, but Elijah has heard the grumbling, and he knows his old parts are more than welcome with us. He is back from Hong Kong and sprung for the weekend from the hills of Tennessee, and he is going to get his licks in, regardless.

I’m in a band! is what he’s thinking. He stretches out his long legs, encased in stretchy hippy pants. He takes that banjo solo, just like he always did, back when Chris was just a charming stranger who joined us in my sister’s basement to record one song for The Almanac. I’m in a skuntry band! Elijah thinks, as he takes that next banjo solo, too.

The song ends. Elijah wiggles his butt. He’s in a band! His banjo chops are coming back. This is cool! What’s the next song?

Elijah sees Chris Bess motioning to him. It’s the age-old come-hither gesture. Elijah watches the knob of his banjo so he doesn’t hit anybody in the head, and leans back toward Chris to hear what he has to say.

Chris Bess delivers a stinging slap to Elijah’s cheek.

“Let me take a solo once in awhile!” Chris Bess says, in his crabby-old-man voice.

To Chris Bess’ credit, he did convene something of a gagmen session, just before he quit. It was in the kitchen of the Marconi house. That dim, vermin-infested room was the only place where we ever sat together and looked each other in the face, and never for more than a few minutes.

On this night, Chris Bess surprised us with an ultimatum: he would stay in the band, but only if we added a new song to our set list. He produced a ukulele – Chris’ size is such that he really can produce a ukulele, as if from thin air – and sang his new song, “Funny Band from Hell”. I can't say any of the words come back to me now, but I’m sure you get the gist from just the title. This was his I Hate Enormous Richard song.

The songwriting was on the wall.

Chris quit abruptly that fall. He stepped to the mike as we were finishing a gig and announced that he had just played his last show with Enormous Richard, and that was that.

I haven’t set foot onstage with Chris Bess in going on twenty years, and I never see him anymore. But I can always hear his playing, no matter what I’m listening to, if I so desire. It’s an interesting consequence of playing a lot of music with someone, particularly if the musician in question is forceful and original in his playing, as Chris Bess always was.

It’s like I have a Chris Bess track burned into my brain. No matter what is on my stereo, I can mix him in, if I wish. All I have to do is ask my imagination to turn up the accordion, and all of the sudden I hear Chris Bess, his characteristic swelling and surging, his bold and subtle flourishes, his solos that always add to the momentum of the song. It’s the greatest gift one musician can leave with another at the end of the gig.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

*

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue
Trading horses

*

This stage shot of us pulling our Pale Richard stunt when opening for Pale Divine is one of the few surviving shots of Chris Bess onstage with us.

Trading horses between skuntry and ass pop

2010-12-11T17:54:00.004-06:00

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 70, just around the corner from my previous post, "A farewell to Old Blue".

Trading horses
By Chris King

When we finally recorded a follow-up to (Why It's) Enormous Richard's Almanac in February of 1992, it was a compromise between ass pop and skuntry. The record straddled a line that divided the band into two camps, the accordionist Chris Bess vs. the drummer Matt and me.

Junior, the former child clown, was never quite accepted as possessing an adult vote. Skoob was always a silent partner. Prop him up with a pitcher of beer and a borrowed cigarette and he would chop chords all night long without asking any questions, other than for directions to the bathroom. As for Guitar Karl, he was gone.

The return of Lij had evaporated him. They both occupied roughly the same spot on the gig spectrum: the unpredictable, trippy guy with a natural musical gift. Having them in the same band was like having two guys in the same room at the same party wearing the same bizarre hat. One guy has to leave — or knock off the other guy's hat and beat the shit out of him. Karl left.

There was something of a parting fight — in Louisville, of course. Drunk at an afterhours party, Karl picked up Skoob's acoustic guitar and broke into "Whiskey Bottle", an Uncle Tupelo dirge. I have never liked that song. It strikes me as so ponderous that it verges on a parody of world-weariness.

Whiskey bottle
Over Jesus
Not forever
But just
For now

The symbolism is just kind of beating me over the head with a whiskey bottle here. But it spoke to Guitar Karl in the dark hours of the rock & roll night. It became the only song he wanted to play when he was desperately drunk at the end of a night on the road.

That night in Louisville, as he started to belt out the Tupelo dirge once again — not forever, but just for the fifth night in a row — I impolitely suggested that he stop. "This station is really overplaying this song," I said. Which touched Karl off to remark that he had been forced to sit through a fuck lot more of my singing than I would ever be subjected to his. "And, frankly, your singing sucks!" he said. "You contribute nothing melodically to this band!"

"I might suck as a singer," I came back at him, "but I wrote almost every melody we play. I'm still waiting for you to write an actual guitar part. The only actual guitar parts you play, you copped from Guitar Johnny. Everything else is just acid head doodle."

To bounce back from heartless attacks like these, you have to both really want to be together again. That wasn't the case for either one of us. So Guitar Karl was gone.

Lij still had no urge to occupy our guitar chair. He was itching to reclaim and further his fiddle and banjo chops. Chris Bess urgently did not want this to happen in the context of our upcoming recording sessions. I can seldom quote Chris Bess from memory, because he was not very verbal when it came to confrontations. His method was to throw up his arms, say something abrupt and scornful, and walk away, leaving the rest of us to sort it out. "I guess Chris Bess doesn't want Elijah in on this thing," for example.

Chris' wishes seemed fair on that point. We had a well-honed set list of ass pop that really didn't cry out for jagged banjo or scratchy fiddle. So we set Elijah to work on the next batch of songs, mostly mail-order collaborations with Guitar Johnny, and began negotiations toward finalizing the electric guitar and studio choices for the recording.

Of course, there were no actual negotiations. Junior soaked it all up, Skoob soaked in beer, Matt and I confided in each other, and Chris Bess threw up his arms in scorn and walked away. In this manner, we arrived at a guitar player, Ayatollah Joe, and a new engineer, good old Meghan Gohil, our Wash. U. chum who set up and then slumbered through the Almanac sessions.

It occurs to me, now, listening to the recordings we made that winter, that if Ayatollah Joe and Guitar Karl had ever taken a road trip together, they could have easily agreed on a selection of road tapes. Karl was a classic rocker, but Joe was also formed by the 70s — particularly Neil Young and the early, brutal Aerosmith. The best Joe could do in the context of ass pop were spidery lines that sounded a little like Robbie Krueger of The Doors. Guitar Karl could have envisioned and played those parts, if only one of us had thought to say, "Treat it like a Doors song."

Ayatollah Joe's approach failed on us in the studio twice — on one song from each camp. For our skuntry contingent, Joe couldn't get the right grungy sound on a goofy piece of country post-punk called "Freezer Full of Meat". So I enlisted Brian Henneman, of Chicken Truck and the Uncle Tupelo crew. Brian came over to the Marconi house one biting cold day and laid down the original Chicken Truck shit tone for us.

For Chris Bess' ass pop song, his only composition on the record, he wanted no part of Ayatollah Joe (or Elijah, God knows). Chris called in his friend Scott Roever from the Tree Weasels and EJ Quit, who played slick and precise and went along with Chris' preference for reverb-drenching. These watery guitar tones surrounded a funny, gutsy Chris Bess song about the Marconi neighborhood, "The Hill".

"We are Italian in every way," Chris Bess sang, "except on St. Patrick's Day".

Horse trading continued between the ass pop and skuntry camps in the band as I raised money to release our record. This was my one successful piece of fundraising in a life of mostly making do without dollars.

As I borrowed money from Cicero's — $500 interest-free against future earnings garnished at the door — Ayatollah Joe asked us to contribute to a compilation he was producing, St. Louis Schoolhouse, a bunch of local bands coverings songs from Schoolhouse Rock, the educational television snippets we all grew up watching. Matt and I chose "Interjections" — and gave Chris Bess a leading role in the recording. Chris got to spit out all of the interjections (hooray! aww! eek! drats! wow! hey!) and did so with maximum hilarity and spirit. Of course, Ayatollah Joe — the skuntry pick — played guitar on our song.

As I borrowed money from Joe Edwards at Blueberry Hill — $500 interest-free against future earnings garnished at the door — those shitkicker yo-yo friends of ours, The New Duncan Imperials, asked Chris Bess if Enormous Richard could contribute a track to a compilation they were producing: rock bands coverings songs released by K-Tel on their cheesy "Classic Hits from the 70s" series. Chris Bess chose "Music Box Dancer" by Frank Mills — and let me sing the lead vocal. His friend Scott Roever, of course, played guitar on Chris Bess' project. (Uncle Tupelo also did a cheezy cover for the occasion, "Movin' On".)

So we had achieved an uneasy truce.

Lij appeared on none of these winter recordings. But there he was in the hills of Tennessee, practicing his banjo and fiddle when he wasn't learning how to capture music on tape. Guitar Johnny kept dragging his roadhouse guitar out of the closet every time a songwriting tape appeared in the mail. The old, original, skuntry Enormous Richard was stirring to life, like a drunk who had slept through the best hours of the party.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

*

mp3s

"Freezer Full of Meat"
(King, Minkoff)
Enormous Richard
with Brian Henneman
From Answers All Your Questions (1992)

"The Hill"
(Bess)
Enormous Richard
with Scott Roever
From Answers All Your Questions (1992)

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion
A farewell to Old Blue

*

The image is Lij (in Skeletor mask) jamming with Guitar Johnny in the van that replaced Old Blue. I tried to name it "Big Orange Guy," but the name never took.

A Farewell to Old Blue, the old Uncle Tupelo Van

2010-12-11T08:01:00.000-06:00

Sparked by the recent inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 67, just a few stops down the road from my previous post, "Managing your religion".

A Farewell to Old Blue
By Chris King

Old Blue died. It was East Coast Tour II that ushered in his final decline. He never really came back after that breakdown in Worcester. We lied to ourselves, and told lies for his sake, trying to explain away his failing health. When his death could no longer be patched over with new car parts and alibis, it was like losing a member of the band.

I told Tony Margherita, Uncle Tupelo's manager. Chris Bess told Jeff Tweedy from the band. No one was happy about it, but there were things to celebrate. Uncle Tupelo had basically put Old Blue out to pasture when they ran that ad in Cicero's zine. So all his adventures on the road with Enormous Richard were like an unexpected second adolescence. We had to admit that we had given him a good run.

Survivors are left with stories. A lot of exciting music was circulated around that old van. People heard the Meat Puppets, the Hang Ups, and Soda for the first time in there. Chris Bess kept us awake at the wheel with gags and serenades. Old Blue was the coach that escorted Theo away from the job she quit. We slept in there on a few friendless nights.

Old Blue was the setting for Skoob's famous work stoppage at the wheel, when his repeated requests for a napkin, which went unheeded, resulted in Skoob finally shouldering Old Blue and declaring he was not driving another inch toward the gig until somebody handed him a fucking napkin! Barbecue sauce from the chicken nuggets he had been dipping while driving had become smeared onto the steering wheel -- it was too dangerous to proceed.

This may have been the first time in the history of rock & roll that a tour was stopped dead by a condiment. Finally, Junior dug in his knapsack and handed up a pair of his skivvies, which did the trick.

I am left with only one regret. Tweedy had taken pains to show me the dent in Old Blue's left rear panel inflicted by the Replacements. Uncle Tupelo had done some shows with them. One night, Paul Westerberg of the Replacements backed right into Old Blue. Now I can't imagine why we didn't take a blowtorch to that rear panel. Today we would have a Paul Westerberg sculpture of sorts, and right now I could still lay my hands on a piece of Old Blue.

Maybe nobody could bear to start cutting apart the old guy we had worked so hard to keep intact, and who had kept us together.

Richard Byrne, Uncle Tupelo's old advocate from The Riverfront Times, had the last word on this one. I must have been crying in my beer at Cicero's about the loss of Old Blue, when Rich, a scrapper from Philadelphia, cut me off. "Hey. How sentimental can you get about a vehicle in which Brian Henneman has taken off his shoes?"

One moves on. We had no choice but to buy a new van. Since we were making more money in a few towns now, we decided to go for adequacy of physical plant over anecdote value and buy a stronger van.

After that major purchase, we were broke again, just when we were supposed to be saving to put out a record. Indulgences, like splurging on meals from the band fund, came to a halt. One of the things we unloaded from the casket of Old Blue was a box of damaged canned goods that a friend had given to Chris Bess for East Coast Tour II. Most of us went back to the box for our road meals. Matt Fuller -- author of the tour observation, "Snacks are good" -- found even cold SpaghettiOs to be surprisingly not bad.

One night, before a packed show at the Elbo Room in Chicago, Chris and Matt snacked from the canned food box. It was, perhaps, not the most flattering self-image we could have presented in front of two hundred people who had just paid ten bucks to see us perform. But it paid off richly.

One of our well-wishers after the show was a woman named Madeline. She looked like an older sister type. "I couldn't help but see what you guys were eating for dinner," she said, shaking her head. "Here is my phone number. Please. Call me before your next Chicago show. Let me cook for you."

We did, and she did. I forget that particular meal only because more remarkable ones followed. The next edition of our zine Popular Dickhead announced a new membership program, "Feed the Needy", which proved especially popular in Chicago. (These were Cubs fans, remember, loyal to a fault.) The dented tin can box was history, at least in Chicago. We never paid for food in that town again.

The meal to remember was Lori Malatesta's grandmother's ravioli, delivered to us before a big show at the Cabaret Metro. Everything about that was right. The handmade pasta, the involvement of the grandmother, the flavors of the food, the name Malatesta, the fact of Lori Malatesta herself, a clear, prim, evidently stable young woman of startling beauty.

The name kept whispering in my ear, Lori Malatesta, Lori Malatesta, until I looked it up, and found a prominent Italian anarchist of that name, Errico Malatesta. Lori Malatesta (no relation) was the furthest from anarchy a being could be. Without question, she could have taken home any member of Enormous Richard and shaped him into a mild, obedient husband who never looked back at the road, except to make sure it wasn't gaining on him.

Lori Malatesta seemed far more interested in feeding us than assuming the more carnal duties associated with domestic life. She did, of course, develop a certain affection for Skoob. Skoob was a changing man, though. Becky the diver was just starting to come out of her tuck. She was just starting to open up to him, and Skoob was looking more and more ready to receive her. Unless I missed something, Lori Malatesta was his last kiss before wedlock, and it was only a kiss.

First we lost Old Blue. Now the Goddess of Illusion was starting to shimmer and fade. If you shook your head hard, and blinked a few times, you could still see her, beckoning toward the road. But if you weren't careful, if you weren't living insistently for the dream, then you were looking at a quiet wife who wasn't even yours. She was carrying a tray of her grandma's ravioli, and she didn't know anything about anarchy.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village
Managing your religion

*

That is indeed Old Blue lurking in the background of this snapshot found in the archives of Echota, a band friend. I am the homeless-looking person on the far right. Before me: producer Meghan Gohil, guest guitarist Joe Z. Armin, bassist Jay "Junior" Lauterwasser, drummer Matt Fuller, accordionist Chris Bess.

Managing your religion

2010-12-09T20:45:00.001-06:00

Sparked by the inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis on Saturday, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 62, quite a few jumps down the road from my previous post, "Strangers in the village".

Managing your religion
By Chris King

Uncle Tupelo’s next boost into rock star orbit came that winter, 1991, when Peter Buck of REM expressed interest in producing their next record. The news spread fast around Cicero’s, stoking envy and admiration.

It was the best possible time for a band to be associated with REM. Their current record was Out of Time, which yielded their first mammoth radio hit, “Losing My Religion”. No post-punk memoir would be complete without some attempt to make sense of a Michael Stipe lyric, so let it be recorded that I thought the guy was pretty smart for becoming famous with a song about losing your cult status.

And I submit that my credentials for understanding Michael Stipe and "Losing My Religion" were impeccable in 1991, when I was running around the country singing “We’re not REM” and “I’m Not Religious”.

A year later would have been too late to benefit by association with REM and still look cool while doing it. Remember that 1992 would bring the world Automatic for the People. That record, damn it to hell, brought even into my local supermarket the treacly, Sting-esque “Everybody Hurts”, proof that everybody writes a crappy, sappy song sometimes. Everybody shits. Everybody shaves. Sometimes.

So Uncle Tupelo was going to make it. There was no doubt about it. But their success wasn’t turning into a magic beanstalk that kept feeding other bands opportunities for rock star climbing. It was looking more like a rocket ship, and it seated only four – the three guys in Uncle Tupelo and the man in the cockpit, Tony Margherita.

As a guy who wanted to be a singer but got stuck managing a band to do it, I was thinking a lot about Tony Margherita and the role of a manager in the trajectory of a rock band.

For all the musicians stunted by stupid deals, a savvy manager usually separates a worthy but unknown local from a band that breaks out. A band needs a manager, above all, because a manager gets almost nothing out of their music except a cut of the money. Musicians will leap at an arrangement that seems to further their dream but doesn't do them economic justice. A smart manager, rightly mindful of that take-home fifteen percent, and more learned in the art of the contract, will tighten the screws and sweeten the deal.

Uncle Tupelo had what it takes, all of it -- songs, looks, hooks, harmonies, chemistry, charisma, urgency, the absence of other options -- which is why a smart guy like Tony subjected himself to telephone neck on their behalf. But one of the very best things they had going for them was Tony on the phone.

For every Tony Margherita, there are a hundred knuckleheads with a Rolodex. Bookstore shelves sag under the weight of band biographies that feature a sleazy or fatally stupid manager. I can’t resist relating the one story I saw with my own two eyes.

I was hired to write band blurbs for the guide to a new music festival The Riverfront Times was producing. (With the success of South by Southwest in Austin, everybody got into the music festival business for a minute there.) My blurb chores were mostly an exercise in saying something nice when I had nothing nice to say, with one amazing exception. One tape -- a four song demo simply labeled SODA -- invaded the deepest reaches of my memory for the rest of my life.

I wanted to know everything about them, so I called the number on the tape. Their manager answered. Soda! Soda! What can you tell me about Soda?

He said there really wasn’t much to tell. They were four quiet guys from Milwaukee. They had been in other bands. You have never heard of their other bands. That’s about it.

I demanded some kind of a bio so I could write my blurb. In a few days, he faxed me a band bio. It said that they were four quiet guys from Milwaukee, they had been in other bands, no one outside of Milwaukee has ever heard of their other bands, and they like to fish.

I called the manager again. Soda! Soda! I need more Soda! Send more songs! He said they had recorded some other songs, but they weren’t as good as the songs on the demo. I insisted on hearing everything anyway. Send me Soda!

In about a week, I received a tape of some more songs. They weren’t as good as the songs on the demo. This manager had the capacity for hype of those eyeless fish that live at the very bottom of the ocean, but at least he wasn’t a bullshitter.

I went to see Soda at the RFT's music festival. Not a great live show. The lead guitarist, Charlie, had a way of closing one eye and popping the other hideously wide open when he sang a harmony. But it wasn’t bad enough to ruin my adoration for the four-song demo. I introduced myself to the band as the guy who wrote their festival bio, said I played music, too, and suggested a gig swap.

I had written (and they had read) the sort of hagiographic band blurb that tends to make you friends for life, but these guys shared their manager’s sub-oceanic level of enthusiasm for themselves. In fact, they looked like they would rather be fishing.

Nevertheless, a gig swap was orchestrated. Soda would open for us in Chicago on a Friday, and we would open for them in Milwaukee the following night. All the way to Chicago, we burned up that four-song demo.

At the gig in Chicago, there was no Soda. Just a bunch of guys we had never seen before, along with popeye Charlie, Soda's lead guitar player. His mood was in the dumps. “Soda is calling it quits,” Charlie said. “This is my new band. But come on up to Milwaukee tomorrow. That show is still on. It’s Soda's farewell gig.”

I can’t claim any connections to big rock stars with boldface names, but I can say that I was there in Milwaukee the last time Soda took the stage. I almost wept to see the drummer, Alan Weatherhead, positioned nowhere near a microphone, singing along to every single lyric. He was living it, every syllable of it, for the last time.

The afterhours party was a low-key affair familiar to anyone who has seen footage of the losing locker room after a crushing post-season defeat. I didn’t want to disrespect the dead by prying into the casket. But still, I wanted to know everything. Why? Why are you doing this to me?

The lead singer, Mike DeVogel, quietly outlined the story. Their manager – my low-energy friend from the phone – signed them to a development deal with some industry lawyer. I would say this manager was more of a fishing buddy than a businessman, because he stuck them with a stupid contract, but in fact, the guys in Soda were not notable fishermen.

"That was all for the bio," Mike explained, meaning the bio I had begged for. "He was looking for an angle. He knew me and Charles had gone fishing one time. He thought it was something the label scouts could latch onto. Soda. You know, the fishing band. The band that fishes.” Mike shrugged. “We don't have anything against fishing. But we're not avid anglers."

This manager, it turns out, was a nephew of the man who owned the Milwaukee Brewers. His uncle's ballclub had been mediocre, at best, since our Cardinals beat them in the 1982 World Series. The manager's attention to detail was perhaps a bit mediocre as well. He seemed to have missed the fine print that said Mr. Big the lawyer could write off to the band’s account his every expense associated with any travel on behalf of Soda. Once the ink was dry on that deal, Mr. Big went out and saw the world, one music festival at a time.

Let’s hope he had a good time, because his travels were a total loss as far as Soda was concerned. The closest they got was a meeting with a major label scout, who (my hand to God) presented them with an outline of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the Nirvana hit. Write songs more like this, he told them -- in the same breath that he urged them to write more coherent, less cryptic lyrics! For once, I wished they weren’t four quiet guys from Milwaukee, because never was a smart-ass retort more justified. “Write less cryptic lyrics? Like what? Like ‘a mosquito, my libido’?”

Then Mr. Big submitted his expenses. It was far more money than the band could make in a year. The lawyer threatened collection. Apparently, arrangements were even made to start garnishing their paydays every time they played a show – this bastard was going after them, one cut of the door at a time.

In despair, Soda laid down their guitars. The authors of the greatest four song demo of their day had to hang a “Gone Fishing” sign on their music career for lack of a savvy manager.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue
Strangers in the village

Strangers in the village, still feeling gone

2010-12-08T23:21:00.001-06:00

Sparked by the inaugural Uncle Tupelo tribute show in St. Louis on Saturday, I am posting some chapters from my unpublished musical memoir that deal with those guys. This is Chapter 53, a few stops down the road from my previous post, "A meeting in Old Blue".

Strangers in the Village
By Chris King

Local bands become traveling bands because they want to outgrow their hometown. Then the first paradox of becoming a traveling band is you aren’t a local band anymore. You aren’t even local beings.

In the fall of 1991, I saw Jeff Tweedy at Cicero’s. He invited me to his car to hear some mixes from the new Uncle Tupelo record. I heard more pop, less twang, and was amazed by one of Tweedy’s own songs, an urgent rock ballad with a chorus adapted from Emily Dickinson.

My heart, it was a gun
It’s unloaded now
So don’t bother

Tweedy always manages to be a little smarter than you give him credit for.

Sue at the Lounge Axe was firmly his sweetheart now, I knew. That uneasiness was over. We were just two band guys flipping through some very promising rough mixes. “What will you call the record?” I asked.

“I’m thinking about calling it Still Feel Gone,” he said. “We’re on the road so much now that even when I’m home, I still feel gone.” That’s a pretty good synopsis of the twilight condition of the no longer local band.

Home, for the traveling band, becomes a place to do laundry and make money, at your day job and at local gigs. My day job was strange for a white guy who spent his nights jumping up and down on stage, singing about AIDS and not being REM, and whose houseguests casually unpacked eight balls of cocaine on the kitchen table.

I was teaching mostly college students about the identity of blackness as revealed in literature. We started with slave narratives, dwelled on Jimmy Baldwin as long as I could, and ended with Sula, which I taught as a novel about two disturbing truths: you were once a part of your mother’s body, and now you are not. The students looked at me like I was a crazy white man. If only you knew the whole of it, I would think to myself, most of my mind already gone on the road.

Our hometown gigs were becoming mob scenes. One of a band's jobs is to sell beer -- to draw a crowd and keep it there, spending money on rounds -- and we excelled at this, for awhile. We had our hometown of Granite City to thank for that. Led by my older sisters, Planet Granite teleported itself across the river en masse when we had a gig. This was a rowdy, unreserved crowd that liked to roar and bend at the elbows to get the liquor into the mouth. Skoob and I, cut from the same crazy cloth, had the same approach to alcohol. We stood front and center, swigging beer for all to see. The Granite City contingent, on stage and in the crowd, set the pace for epic drinking.

A highlight for the Granite City hooligans was a homesick song, "Planet Granite," I wrote from the road.

I want to go where I was young
Feel the steel mill smoke in my lungs
I want to see the coke ovens glow
On some faces that I know
Beam me down to the Planet Granite

It was an underdog song, given Granite City’s reputation as a scary domain, home to drunken rednecks and airborne pollution, a place to be avoided. The national press Uncle Tupelo was receiving about coming from a rugged, working-class town was amusing to me. Belleville was mild and suburban compared to the Planet.

Of course, Skoob and I were not permanent residents of Planet Granite anymore. When we came home from the road, we came home to Marconi Street, as two of the only non-Italians living on the Hill. This contributed to that feeling of dislocation that Tweedy described, the still feeling gone. We had a crumbling house to ourselves for almost no money, but we were very much strangers in the village.

We did our best to make ourselves feel at home, though. For guys in a rock band, this consists of putting up traveling bands and hosting afterhours parties. When the bouncer at Cicero’s made his rounds at 1:15 a.m., hollering, “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here!” the Marconi house was often where the stragglers went.

On one such night, a very bad thing happened. A game of midnight stickball broke out across the street. Across the street, of course, was St. Ambrose Roman Catholic Church. By an act of God, or perhaps the Goddess of Illusion, no church window was shattered. But apparently the monsignor’s sleep was disturbed.

I saw Sonny -- the gruff, neighborhood meet-and-greet guy -- very early in the morning.

The hour was hard on a hangover. No amount of ignoring the pounding on the door would make it go away. Finally, I crawled into consciousness and answered the knock.

“Sonny,” I said. “It’s early. On a Sunday.”

“Sunday is a work day across the street, you know,” he said, thumbing toward the Catholic church.

I have screwed up a lot. I tend to catch on pretty quick when someone is hinting at an error of my own.

“Sonny,” I said. “I’m sorry. We went a little late last night. Please extend our apologies –”

“I grew up playing basketball across the street,” Sonny cut me off. “I’ll play you any day” – emphasis on day, as opposed to night – “that’s not a church day. And I’ll run your ass right into the asphalt. But I don’t see a strike zone spray painted on the monsignor’s bedroom wall. And we didn’t put up those lights for night games. The party’s over, fuckface.”

That seemed to be his sayonara. I started to shut the door. But he turned back before he left for good.

“This is the last time you see me,” Sonny said. “Next time, the call goes straight to Sal.”

Dressed in his Sunday best, Sonny crossed the street to St. Ambrose, where the church bells had begun calling the righteous to mass.

*

From And Let Him Ply His Music: Adventures in Post-Punk and Amateur Folklore (unpublished).

Previous posts in this series

In the hothouse basement
The allure of the ever-elusive exposure gig
Opening for Uncle Tupelo
A meeting in Old Blue