IT'S ONLY ROCK AND ROLL BUT I LIKE IT

Hearing the Psychedelic Furs. I've not listened to enough music lately. The Psychedelic Furs is a band that has satisfied my ear for a long time. Having 2 of their cds, often when I want to hear some music and don't know what, the Psychedelic Furs is the answer. I see they have a website and they're still touring. They played in Charlotte 5 nights ago. I'd have gone to that concert if I'd known about it ahead of time. That would have been a good one to drive a hundred miles to. They're grown up now, 2 decades after, but I imagine their musicianship is that much better and their performance of the music is too. I don't usually listen to music when I write, because the music takes me over completely and all I can do is listen. The reason I've not been listening to music much is it takes me over completely. Before I put on a Patti Smith album or Bob Dylan, Bryan Ferry, Jane's Addiction, The Clash, Generation X, Black Uhuru, Burning Spear, Angelique Kidjo, SE Rogie, Alternate Roots, Aerosmith, Skeeter & the Skidmarks, Ralph Stanley, Whitetop Mountain Band, to name a few that take me over unmercifully, allowing no wandering of mind, before I put them on I have to have enough time to listen to the album all the way through. SE Rogie coming to mind makes me want to hear him. Beautiful lilting palm wine music with acoustic guitar and singing from Sierra Leone.

s e rogie

The world has so much beautiful music in it, it's hopeless to want to hear it all. I've tried to hear it all, at least a general sampling, but it can't be done. I start listening to North African Rai and can't go on from there for a long time. Or start listening to Islamic sitar music from India. That's it. And then there is what happens when the Rolling Stones come on. I'm all ears. No matter what song by them, it has my full attention. On cd, the only Stones albums I have are the one live at very small clubs, Stripped, where they play almost unplugged greatest hits, blues songs, Dylan's Like a Rolling Stone, and their first album that has I'm a King Bee on it. I tend to like everything by the Stones. Their first album continues, after all the great ones like Black & Blue, Exile on Main St, to be the one I return to. Just now found a website that plays the entire album, youtube, so it is playing now as I write. Didn't intend to do that, but am in a Stones bluesy mood. Velvet Underground had a similar groove as early Stones. Stones went to the big auditorium sound, not hardly by choice. There was no auditorium on earth big enough not to sell out immediately for Stones tickets. I never saw a Stones concert. It seemed too much to me like going to Woodstock to go to a place so big the band is the size of vertical ants on the stage, like seeing them from a plane. I like to be able to see that it is human beings on the stage. I don't like to be so close that I see how dirty they are. Too close, they're just people, like us, not big stars, not a fantasy of what a rock star oughta be. It's just dirty, sweaty, stoned American and English young'uns looking to meet some chicks and make some money.

rolling stones

Jagger is singing I'm a King Bee. It takes me back to the Fifties, high school, hearing Slim Harpo singing it on the black stations in Kansas City and Wichita, stations I listened to as much as the white stations. That's where I heard Bo Diddley, Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, Etta James, Jimmy Reed, Little Richard, Chuck Berry. Some of them were played on the white station, but when I listened to both, I heard the best of the new music twice as much. The white station would be where I'd hear Marty Robbins' Singin the Blues. Ray Charles singing Lonely Avenue was incredible. What'd I Say was stellar, like the Stones' Satisfaction a few years later. This Rolling Stones blues and r&b album takes me back to the music like this I heard on the black stations in the Fifties. That's where the music was played that I loved. Didn't have to listen to Paul Anka on that station. They played Mickey and Sylvia. Everything they played was something I wanted to hear. I'm hearing why the great blues guitar pickers, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Chuck Berry were impressed by what they heard when Keith Richards was making music with them. On the Stones concert video Martin Scorsese made, Shine A Light, Richards and Buddy Guy get to going on a guitar duet, whatever they call it when they play in perfect sync. They tore the place up. In an interview clip shown in the film, somebody was interviewing Richards and Ron Wood together. Asked which of them was the best guitar player, Richards said (I paraphrase), We're both just ordinary guitar players, but together, nobody can beat us.

dionysius and the satyr

 

 

I've let the Stones album play again, and again. It takes me to my very own foundation in music. The beginnings of rock n roll occurred with the Penguins' Earth Angel, the Coasters' Searchin, Bill Haley & the Comets' Shake Rattle and Roll, Little Richard's Tutti Frutti, Chuck Berry's Maybelline, Bo Diddley's Bo Diddley, Elvis's Heartbreak Hotel, Jerry Lee's Whole Lotta Shakin Goin On, then the whole body of work by Chuck Berry and Little Richard throughout my Jr Hi and High School, the years when a kid really needs his own music. I had the super good fortune to see both Alan Freed Rock N Roll Shows. I think the years were 58 and 59. They were fabulous for a high school kid who by then had a head totally involved in rock n roll. Rock n roll was my escape fantasy. At one of the shows, Fats Domino played his set and filled out the time of two players who'd missed the show, Jerry Lee one of them, Screamin Jay Hawkins the other, from probably being too drunk and whatever else. Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and the girl group I loved the very most, the Chantels, were there. I heard the Chantels sing their two hits, Maybe and Every Night, from twenty or so feet away in adoration. I was like a Catholic boy kneeling before statues of saints aching his heart out to be a real boy. Chuck Berry played at both the shows. After work, walking to the bus stop to go home from work the day of the second Rock N Roll Show, a gold 57 Cadillac with venetian blinds in the back window, mudflaps and a license tag that said, C BERRY, passed by so close I could have reached out and touched it if I'd seen it in time. Flipped me out. I had all his 45s to that date. The show was that night. Larry Williams fell off his upright piano attempting to dance on top of it drunk. I loved seeing Mickey and Sylvia sing Love Is Strange.

 

 

chuck berry

 

This music from the Rolling Stones' first album brought that period of music back to life for me. I was a hung-up Fifties lonely teenager listening to Dion and the Belmonts sing about it. Oh Susie Q, baby I love you. Ronnie Hawkins' Mary Lou I loved as much as any Little Richard song. Little Richard stood out for me way beyond everybody else. Bob Dylan took care of that zone for me next. I'm goin to tell you a story 'bout Mary Lou, she's the kind of a woman make a fool of you...She took the keys to my Cadillac car, she jumped in my kitty and she drove a-far. Learned many years later, his band, The Hawks, evolved into Dylan's band, The Band. I guess it's all right to call Elvis the king of rock and roll, but for that title, I'd have to go with Bo Diddley. I'd give it to Little Richard if he hadn't had so many facelifts. He's the undisputed queen of rock and roll. I say Bo Diddley because the Sixties bands leaned more toward the Little Richard and Chuck Berry sound, except the Velvet Underground that came after the Bo Diddley and the Buddy Holly sound. Punk that started in 75 went with the Bo Diddley and Buddy Holly sound funneled through the Velvet Underground. A very large portion of the rock ever since has been of the Bo Diddley sound, a tight, quick beat. His influence in rock is every bit as direct as Chuck Berrry's and Little Richard's. I had the good fortune to see Bo Diddley at Ziggy's ten or more years ago, when he was 74. He gave an all-out concert, and it was, indeed, Bo Diddley his very self. It was thrilling for me, loving his music my entire music-listening life, Bo Diddley playing all those songs that are standards in the jukebox of my mind. The Bo Diddley beat is in me as much as Carlos Santana's guitar. Ron Wood made a live album with Bo Diddley in concert at a small New York venue in 1988, Live At The Ritz, dynamite rock and roll.   

 

 

ron wood and bo diddley

 

 

 

*

 

HERE COME COWBOYS

australian aboriginal paintings

I heard a sentence on the radio news this afternoon that started, "How can the richest country in the world...?" I was so struck by that opening I missed the subject. It struck me so naïve I wondered where it came from. The richest country in the world? I've heard that all my life. In London a few different people referred to me a rich American. I said I'm not rich. I could afford to fly to London; they can't afford to fly to Disneyworld. Therefore, I'm rich. Therefore, Americans are rich. I saw on the telly one evening a commercial that pictured a boat and its big V wake on a lake in England. The visual zoomed onto the boat to Mrs So&So, "a rich American" who appreciates the English lake country, refinement, taste and so on. Being a rich American, she uses butter. No oleo margarine for the rich American. None of the people I was watching the telly with understood why I was laughing. It was too much to explain. Besides, it had to do with irony, and I really didn't dare attempt explaining irony. I'd been there long enough to have good understanding that my status as an American was way far below the lowest British subjects. I was regarded with an arrogance similar to what American black people get from white Americans. I realized that racism is only one of many varieties of outsider. Nationalism is about another kind of outsider us-them thinking. Be-true-to-your-school is another group for identity where outsiders go to another school.

Americans have been spoiled for a century or so by the people of the rest of the world looking at us in awe because we're rich. American tourists go anywhere in the world and we're welcomed happily, open-handed, Americans have money. I wondered how welcome I would be if I were black, or Malaysian, or from Pakistan. That was in the last years of America being held in respect. Nixon was the president lying to us at the time. Riding the Orient Express, the train, I went through what was then Yugoslavia, now Croatia and Serbia. It was a very different world from the part of Europe we think of as Europe. This southeastern extension of Europe was part of the Ottoman Empire until about half a century before I passed through it. The air smelled of Turkish tobacco. In this time, it was "behind the Iron Curtain," part of the Soviet Union. Signs were in probably Serbo-Croation and Russian. I saw how people lived in police state. Quietly. On the train I passed a group of people of my age, mid to late 20s, and they knew on sight I was American. They seemed slightly threatening. One of them said, "President Nixon," in a derisive tone of voice. They all laughed. I thought: I dislike him more than you do. This was the time of Brezhnev. They probably disliked Brezhnev more than I did. Americans were less appreciated internationally. Young Americans backpacking different places in the world would often fix a Canadian red maple leaf emblem onto the backpack. Less chance of trouble that way. They don't have to answer to American issues we have nothing to do with and can do nothing about.

In Athens, staying in a pension, having meals there, good Greek cooking, several college students from Chile appeared at the table one day. Most of them spoke English. I mentioned Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, who was given the Nobel Prize that year. His picture was on the cover of Time the week before. One said, "He's a communist," and they all shut me out at that moment. From then on, I did not exist. It had not entered my mind to note that going to college in Chile with parents able to fly you to Athens could only be of politically right wing families. The communists were the working people. I had no experience with a Latin American country where communism was legal and politically active. Communism has been so eliminated in USA there's not a trace of it that can be taken seriously. In Chile, they keep the local Indians down. One of the odd aspects of racism is white Brits invade the new world colonies, kill out the Indian people, bring in black people for slaves. In the Spanish colonies, they swept away the civilizations, Mayan, Aztec, Toltec, Olmec, etc, an extended civilization, for gold. Too bad for the Indians that they were naïve about the value of gold. A song by the Psychedelic Furs plays in my head, "It gets so hard sometimes, to take it serious. It really gets to be a drag when, all we really need is love. Here come cowboys, here to save the world, here come cowboys, they're so inside the law, here come cowboys, they're no fun at all."

It's bizarre to me how white people took over the lands they discovered, killed the population and moved in. The survivors and descendants of the aboriginal people are regarded by the occupier as the lowest of the social order. In Australia, the white people are even more arrogant to the Aborigines of the continent than white Americans are to the Indians here. We name cities, rivers, mountains and so on after them, but they don't even figure. To the racist mind that looks down on them, the Indians are lower than black. It's the same in New Zealand with the Maoris. The Chinese occupied Tibet, and moved in a new population that regards the native Tibetans as low as Australians regard the Aboriginal people. Israel and the Palestinians. Somebody I knew years ago told me Indians are not human. I said, What? Right, they're not human. That was the first time I'd heard that one. I was maybe 22. From my first memories I identified with the Indian people that lived on this land originally. They were the people of my heart. I didn't know why. I'd never met one. They had a good way of life that kept the water and air clean for quite a number of centuries. Superior white man has turned the rivers to muck, and the air too, with superior knowledge. It's all ego. As long as we have ego, we'll have racism, nationalism, religionism and the other exclusive clubs to differentiate us from them, ultimately self from others.

 

 

 

*